Pacific Standard Magazine Nov/Dec 2016 by James Darnborough

PACIFIC STANDARD

PLUS:

OUR ELECTIONSEASON GUIDE TO DISABILITY IN AMERICA. P.14

STORIES THAT MATTER NOV/DEC 2016 PSMAG.COM

•••

“CRUELTY AND COMPASSION COME WITH THE CHROMOSOMES.” —ALDOUS HUXLEY

Featuring exclusive photos of Sandra, a “non-human person” and bearer of legal rights, inside the now-closed Buenos Aires Zoo.

A P E S

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 PSMAG.COM

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VOLUME 09, NUMBER 06

MONTH AFTER MONTH, SITTING ON AN ARMY CAMP STOOL IN IRAQ, HE CAME TO REALIZE THAT THE QUESTION WAS NO LONGER WHETHER HE WOULD TRANSITION, BUT HOW. P.46 Photo by Bryan Anton

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Nicholas Jackson CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Taylor Le

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Jennifer Sahn

EDITORIAL SENIOR EDITORS

Michael Fitzgerald, Ted Scheinman SENIOR STAFF WRITER

DEPUTY EDITOR

Ryan Jacobs

PUBLISHING FOUNDING PUBLISHER & EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN

Sara Miller McCune PRESIDENT

Tom Jacobs

Geane deLima gdelima@psmag.com

STAFF WRITERS

Francie Diep, Madeleine Thomas

PUBLISHING DIRECTOR

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Katie Kilkenny, Max Ufberg, Kate Wheeling

Robert Wallace rwallace@psmag.com PROGRAM DIRECTOR

EDITORIAL FELLOWS

Ariele Andrakin aandrakin@psmag.com

Elena Gooray, Julie Morse COPY EDITOR

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING & SALES

Tim Heffernan

James Darnborough jdarnborough@psmag.com

FACT CHECKER

Ewa Beaujon

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Peter C. Baker, Toby Lester, Beejoli Shah

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Pacific Standard (ISSN 21655197) is published bimonthly by the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media, and Public Policy, 801 Garden Street, Suite 101, Santa Barbara, CA 93101. Periodicals Preferred postage paid at Santa Barbara, California, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Pacific Standard, P.O. Box 16026, North Hollywood, CA 91615. Subscriptions available at psmag@pubservice.com or mail to: P.O. Box 16026, North Hollywood, CA 91615. One year (six issues) $24.95. Please add $12 for subscriptions outside the U.S. and Canada. Printed by QuadGraphics. Pacific Standard™ is a trademark of the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media, and Public Policy. All contents copyright © 2016 Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media, and Public Policy.

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. Pacific Standard 2. (ISSN: 2165-5197) 3. Filing date: 10/1/16. 4. Issue frequency: bi-monthly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 6. 6. The annual subscription price is $24.95. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: 801 Garden Street, Suite 1, Santa Barbara, CA 93101. Contact person: Kolin Rankin. Telephone: 305-441-7155 ext. 225 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: 801 Garden Street, Suite 1, Santa Barbara, CA 93101. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher and editor. Publisher, Sara Miller McCune, 801 Garden Street, Suite 1, Santa Barbara, CA 93101; Editor, Nicholas Jackson, 801 Garden Street, Suite 1, Santa Barbara, CA 93101. 10. Owner: Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media, and Public Policy, 801 Garden Street, Suite 1, Santa Barbara, CA 93101. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None. 12. Tax status: Has not changed during preceding 12 months. 13. Publisher title: Pacific Standard. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: September/October 2016. 15. The extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (net press run). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 36,294. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 31,819. B. Paid circulation. 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 16,744. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 11,206. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, and counter sales. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 82. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 79. 4. Paid distribution through other classes mailed through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 179. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 167. C. Total paid distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 17,005. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 11,452. D. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside mail). 1. Free or nominal outside-county. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 1,823. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 1,917. 2. Free or nominal rate in-county copies. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 4. Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 8,513. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,283. E. Total free or nominal rate distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 10,336. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 10,200. F. Total distribution (sum of 15c and 15e). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 27,341. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 21,652. G. Copies not distributed. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 8,953. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 10,167. H. Total (sum of 15f and 15g). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 36,294. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing: 31,819. I. Percent paid. Average percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 62.2 percent. Actual percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 52.9 percent. 16. Total circulation includes electronic copies: Report circulation on PS Form 3526-X worksheet. 17. Publication of statement of ownership will be printed in the November/December 2016 issue of the publication. 18. Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Geane deLima. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanction and civil actions.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

CONTENTS

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

FEATURES

VOLUME 09, NUMBER 06

STEPHENS CREEK, WYOMING Yellowstone National Park biologist Doug Blanton takes a blood sample from a bison for brucellosis testing. Photo by Michelle McCarron

THE PS INTERVIEW: CINEMATIC JUSTICE Ava DuVernay took an unconventional road from indie upstart to Hollywood powerhouse—aiming not only to change Hollywood but the culture at large. By Kathleen Sharp

PHOTO ESSAY: THE BUFFALO’S BURDEN Earlier this year, the bison was named our national mammal, but due to a conflict with Western ranchers, the beasts are anything but wild and free. By Christopher Ketcham Photographs by Michelle McCarron

BORN IDENTITY One soldier’s story of transition. By Deni Ellis Béchard

THE BATTLE FOR THE GREAT APES With several incremental victories behind them, animal-rights advocates are making their biggest push yet: to expand the definition of a person. By George Johnson

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

NATURE HYDR ATES

Did you know that each person needs

20-50 liters of fresh water a day to meet their basic needs for drinking, cooking and cleaning? *

By preserving and restoring essential lands upstream, we help strengthen the natural flow, filtration and regulation of watersheds that supply drinking water to people across Latin America, North America and Africa. How can you help meet natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needs? Learn by visiting nature.org/water. * World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP)

CONTENTS

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

DEPARTMENTS

VOLUME 09, NUMBER 06

PRIMER 06 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR The End of Captivity

THE FIX

26 RETURN TO MALHEUR Months after the Bundy insurrection rocked Harney County, Oregon, a group of local residents is trying to heal the community and overcome the American West’s long history of land- use conflict.

07 THE CONVERSATION 09 SINCE WE LAST SPOKE 11 THE SMALL STUFF

SUBCULTURE BY ALEX BOERNER; CULTURE FEATURES BY TOMAS KARMELO; SCENES BY ALEJANDRO ARAVENA / ELEMENTAL

14 KNOW IT ALL Disability Heads to the Polls

28 THE MINISTERS OF MINIMALISM How a small group of optimists is revolutionizing consumer choice.

17 SUBCULTURE Street Ambassador 18 IN THE PICTURE More Cowbell

FIELD NOTES

THE CULTURE PAGES 64 CULTURE FEATURES The Miseducation of Frank Waln

21 PERMANENT DISPLACEMENT 23 DEATH FROM ABOVE

66 PACIFIC STANDARD PICKS Loving

24 THE NIGHT MINISTER

67 SCENES Mapping People Back Into History

SCENES A High-Concept Architect Takes on Low-Income Housing

69 GUEST PROGRAMMER Alexander Chee 70 SHELF HELP Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans

ON THE COVER Sandra the orangutan photographed by Yadid Levy at the now-closed Buenos Aires Zoo.

70 BOOK REVIEWS Back in the Hole 71 SHELF HELP Future Sex 72 ONE LAST THING Hostile Architecture NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

The End of Captivity Lions, tigers, and bears. You can find them all—and about 450 other species—just 45 minutes west of downtown Chicago at the Brookfield Zoo, not far from where I grew up. While there’s some debate over whether zoos actually educate visitors—an oft-cited 2014 study in Conservation Biology found that unguided tours only result in conservation-related learning for about one out of every three school-age visitors—I can’t recall picking up on the difference between the dromedary and the Bactrian camel anywhere else. Growing up in the Midwest, the only wild animals I had any exposure to fell into one of two categories: birds or bugs. Vacations involved visits to theme parks, not national parks; to see distant family, not flora and fauna. Without the Brookfield Zoo, I might not have learned how to separate crocodiles from alligators. But zoos may be in more danger of extinction than the animals they display. Animal-rights advocates have clinched several recent high-profile victories. In May, the company responsible for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus retired its traveling elephants to a conservation center it maintains in Florida. Later the same month, SeaWorld ended its orca-breeding program. In 2013, the National Institutes of Health began phasing out chimpanzee research. And now, activists are focusing on what could be the most meaningful battle yet. In this issue, as part of a collection of stories concerning our treatment of others, we detail the efforts that led to the closure of the Buenos Aires Zoo and the declaration of Sandra, one of the zoo’s resident orangutans, as a “non-human person,” a legal entity entitled to certain rights. Her case could serve as a blueprint for many more to come. The pressure for reform has been especially strong with regard to great apes like Sandra, the charismatic megafauna we feel—and are, at least genetically— closest to. Consider the case of Harambe. This past May, when Cincinnati zookeepers shot and killed the gorilla to save a three-year-old boy who fell into its exhibit, outrage was directed primarily at the mother and the marksman. The news of Harambe’s death reminded me of Binti Jua, the western lowland gorilla I grew up visiting. The year that I turned nine years old, and Binti eight, a small child tumbled into the Tropic World exhibit at Brookfield Zoo and was knocked unconscious. Binti became something of a local celebrity after rescuing the boy and carrying him to her handlers. Primatologist Frans de Waal and others have used her story as an example of animals’ ability to demonstrate what we consider human-like empathy. Harambe may have shared that empathy. We’ll never know how he would have treated the boy who fell into his exhibit had the two been given more time to interact. But we can imagine a world where all gorillas live in the wild, far from human development.

Seven Things You Would Have Learned If You Read PSmag.com 1

In 2015, parents in the United States owed over $115 billion in child support.

The number of low-income homes powered by solar nationwide is expected to increase tenfold in less than five years.

Self-promotion and boasting are far more prominent in pop music today than a quartercentury ago.

Nearly 400 black men and women have been fatally shot by U.S. police since 2015.

The U.S. government spent one-fourth of its budget, or $938 billion, on health-care subsidies in 2015.

Gorillas can be deeply affected by the death of a member of their group.

Nicholas Jackson Editor-in-Chief

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

Bumblebees and rats can form false memories.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR BY TERENCE PATRICK

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

TALK TO US LETTERS@PSMAG.COM

THE CONVERSATION

PRIMER

Our Favorite Tweets @rachelranamok: @PacificStand thanks for your commitment to covering stories [Women and All Their Fake Free Time, PSmag. com, June 29] on #unpaidwork! #onward

The Addicted Generation

THE ADDICTED GENERATION BY CHRISTOPHER LEAMAN

(JULY/AUGUST 2016)

Without medication, as someone who went undiagnosed for 25 years with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what I am able to now. In large part thanks to Vyvanse, I’ve gotten my academic career on track, and my professional career has also taken off because I am able to learn and retain more things quickly and often than I was before. While I understand people’s fears and worries about overmedication, it is really unfortunate that we are so quick with extremes. Only the doctor who ran studies where they used therapy first, then medication second, and looked at it as a holistic system, gets that it is part of an overall solution. —SCOTT KEITH

First of all, I just need to address how ridiculous it is to conflate ADHD symptom relapse after medication cessation with dependency and addiction. [ADHD medications] are an aid, like insulin is for diabetics or glasses are for people with

myopia. If you quit taking a medication that controls symptoms caused by inefficient biological processes, those symptoms will return, which is what is happening in the anecdotes mentioned in this article. This has nothing to do with dependency. Research shows that ADHD medication is not habit-forming when taken as directed. Can you imagine someone complaining about the dependency and addiction potential of insulin because high blood sugar resumes with cessation in diabetic patients? —HEATHER (WITHHELD)

@D_Shariatmadari: “Basically we have millions of people in a society-wide experiment”— on the adults who’ve grown up with Ritalin [The Addicted Generation, July/August 2016] @KatLizWil: Love @PacificStand for stories like this about a suburbanite who testifies about gangsta rap [The Hip-Hop Professor, July/August 2016] #themoreyouknow

•••

PS Sighting

America’s Latest 500Year Rainstorm Is Underway Right Now in Louisiana (PSMAG.COM, AUGUST 12)

Is climate change partly to blame? I am pretty sure it is, but over-development in floodplains is also a major problem, not just in Louisiana. In 1993, they had historic flooding in the Midwest along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Two years later, the same areas flooded. I moved to Missouri in 1996 and stayed until 2004. By the time I left to return to Louisiana, many

Creative director Taylor Le discusses the Pacific Standard re-design with ADC (adcglobal.org).

businesses and subdivisions had returned to the vulnerable floodplains expecting levees that failed in 1993 to hold in the future, or FEMA (the taxpayers) to bail them out once more. Human ignorance knows few boundaries, whether it comes to denying climate change or living in and returning to flood-prone areas. —FREDDIE TREY MCNABB

Is the Oil Industry Dying? (PSMAG.COM, AUGUST 10)

Whichever side [of the climate debate] you are on, the fact remains: Oil is a finite resource. There is no free lunch when it comes to other energy sources either. The elephant in the room is population growth and the skyrocketing demand for power in the developing world. Conservation will not be successful by way of light bulb upgrades alone. One possible bright spot mentioned in the article is localization—cutting down on the need for the transporting of goods and resources. This is difficult to accomplish right now because centralization has been the accepted model for power generation and goods production throughout the Industrial Age. Making as many buildings as possible net-zero consumers of electricity will help. Capturing and using waste energy from industrial processes will help. Using methane from sewage-treatment plants and feedlots as fuel onsite will help. Unfortunately there is no single magic-bullet solution. Out of necessity, oil will be around for a long time to come no matter what its price, but hopefully less and less as a fuel and more for its other uses. —RICK O’BRIEN

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

Because we need Robert’s

more places where we can dream

We all need places to get outside—to explore, exercise, and recharge. But with America’s open spaces disappearing at a rate of 6,000 acres each day, we’re at risk of losing our most cherished outdoor escapes. Together, we can change that. Join The Trust for Public Land to save the lands we all love—from urban parks to vast wilderness. Since 1972, we’ve worked with communities to protect more than 3 million acres and create more than 5,000 parks and natural places for people to enjoy. Help to keep this land our land.

Share why nature matters to you: tpl.org/ourland

#ourland

THE TRUST FOR PUBLIC LAND

PRIMER

SINCE WE LAST SPOKE

NEW TWISTS ON PAST STORIES

of drowning deaths among high-risk groups, including African Americans, told the New York Times that Manuel’s victory could help reverse “a cultural fear of swimming in that group.” —FRANCIE DIEP

PHOTO BY CHUCK ESPINOZA; MODEL: ELAINE RENSING; STYLING BY MARK STARR; MAKE-UP BY GABY RAMOS TORELL

Dangerous Waters

In Pacific Standard’s May/June 2016 issue, James McWilliams reported on America’s struggle to prevent accidental drowning, which is the fifth-leading cause of “unintentional injury death” in the United States and the second-leading cause of death for American children under the age of 15 (“A Brief History of Drowning”). He pointed out that African-American kids and young adults are more likely than whites to drown, a disparity that’s especially pronounced in swimming pools, due, in part, to a legacy of segregation at public pools. In August, the Texas native Simone Manuel made global headlines by becoming the first female African-American swimmer to win an individual Olympic gold medal, potentially encouraging a generation of minority youth into the water. Miriam Lynch of Diversity in Aquatics, a non-profit organization focused on curbing the high numbers

Fighting Terrorism For Pacific Standard’s March/April 2016 issue, the University of Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse investigated the role that social bonds played in mobilizing revolutionaries to commit rebel violence in Libya: “Simply being on the same side ideologically (sharing the same beliefs and goals) doesn’t predict fusion,” he wrote (“What Motivates Extreme Self-Sacrifice?”). More important, Whitehouse has found in his research, is that rebel group members have violent, tumultuous, or otherwise intense shared life experiences. Counterterrorism efforts, though, continue to emphasize the assassina-

tion or prosecution of extremist groups’ most vocal political leadership — an approach known as “cutting off the head of the snake”—instead of undermining social bonds within terrorist networks: In June, the United Kingdom brought to trial two preachers accused of encouraging support for the Islamic State. University of Pittsburgh political scientist Michael Kenney echoed Whitehouse’s findings in a blog post arguing that taking down influential individuals would do little to prevent new leadership from emerging. —ELENA GOORAY

Killer Mosquitoes In a 2012 article for Pacific Standard (“Weaponizing Mosquitoes to Fight Tropical Diseases”), Linda Marsa chronicled the revolutionary role that biologically modified mosquitoes played in combating Australia’s 2009 dengue fever outbreak. Officials in the U.S. are now considering the release of genetically modified bloodsuckers into the wild to combat a new infective threat: the Zika virus. The Food and Drug Administration advised in early August that a proposed field trial in Key Haven, Florida, “will not have significant impacts on the environment,” setting the stage for a controlled release of mosquitoes bioengineered so that 95 percent of their offspring will die before reaching adulthood. Oxitec, a pioneering U.K.-based biotech firm featured in Marsa’s story for its role in developing the modified insects, would conduct the trial. Residents will vote on the matter this month. —MADELEINE THOMAS

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

SHANE PARSONS, WOUNDED VETERAN

SOMETIMES THE HARDEST FIGHT COMES AFTER THE BATTLE. Wounded Warrior Project® long-term support programs provide these brave men and women whatever they need to continue their fight for independence. At no cost. For life. Help us help more of these warriors in their new life-long battle. Find out what you can do at findWWP.org. ©2015 WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

NEWS & NOTES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR

THE SMALL STUFF

PRIMER

QUICK STUDY

The Downside of an ADHD Diagnosis

THERE’S A NAME FOR THAT

PROTEUS EFFECT

EVERY DAY, millions of people log into virtual worlds like Second Life or World

of Warcraft, where they choose or design their own avatars, customizing everything from their height and clothing to their gender and skin tone. According to researchers, these choices are more than aesthetic: Picking how you look can also mean choosing how you’ll behave. In a study by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson, published in Human Communication Research, participants who were assigned conventionally attractive avatars quickly began acting more self-assured. They got closer to other avatars, and talked more about themselves. Participants who were assigned taller avatars expressed more confidence and negotiated more aggressively over money. Yee and Bailenson dubbed these transformations the Proteus effect, after the shape-shifting Greek god. A follow-up study suggested the effect might carry over from the virtual world to face-to-face interactions. Intrigued by this possibility, a colleague of Yee’s named Grace Ahn investigated how in-game experiences altered the way college students behaved long after they’d logged out. The results are tantalizing: People who guide their avatars to grow or cut down virtual trees are more likely to reduce their paper consumption for at least a week after their virtual experience. Likewise, people who watch their avatars suffer health consequences from drinking soda become more receptive to anti-soda public-health messaging. The more common avatars become—venture capitalists dumped nearly $1.2 billion into virtual- and augmented-reality start-ups in the first quarter of 2016 alone—the more influential the Proteus effect is likely to become. The old saying holds that where the mind leads, the body will follow. When we’re using new, virtual bodies, the opposite might prove equally true. So choose your avatar carefully.

An astounding number of American children—11 percent of all four-to-17year-olds, according to one estimate—have been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. For those with a severe form, pinpointing the problem is a good thing, opening access to medication and special programs. But the label has a negative impact on the performance of those with milder forms. A study that followed a nationally representative sample of American children from kindergarten through eighth grade found that such kids, on average, scored lower in reading and math than their undiagnosed peers—children who were “cognitively, behaviorally, and demographically similar,” Jayanti Owens and Heide Jackson write in Social Science Research. They report this “diagnostic labeling effect,” found even when the youngsters were receiving treatment, is the result of “dampened selfesteem and academic expectations.” For mild ADHD cases, the diagnosis may be worse than the disorder. —TOM JACOBS

—PETER C. BAKER ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SOLO

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

DISCOVER A FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON GREEN TEA

In 1706, Twinings of London® began with one man’s vision to try something new. Today, we still believe in keeping things fresh. That’s why our nine Master Blenders travel from mountaintop to riverside to find the finest ingredients to make our teas unique. Delightfully fresh and flavourful, Twinings® Green Teas are filled with delicious new tastes for you to enjoy.

Available in 8 great-tasting varieties

PRIMER

RESEARCH GONE WILD

STEM CELL THERAPIES: HOPE OR HYPE?

NEWS & NOTES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR

THE SMALL STUFF

•What They’re Saying

Peyton Manning. Usain Bolt. Cristiano Ronaldo. What do they have in common besides worldclass athletic abilities? They’ve all reportedly visited doctors who practice unproven stemcell treatments for disease and injury. Dozens of other high-profile jocks, including the Olympic swimmer Jason Lezak and the tennis great Boris Becker, made news this year for attending or promoting stem-cell therapy facilities.

•Who Else Is Promoting

Stem Cells? Not just injured professional athletes and the journalists who credulously cover their exotic recovery regimes. According to a study in the August issue of the peer-reviewed research journal Cell Stem Cell, online marketing of stem-cell interventions is exploding in developed countries including the United States, Germany, and Australia. Hundreds of websites offering anti-aging, diabetes, and sportsinjury treatments are

making “broad, imprecise therapeutic claims and frequently [failing] to detail procedures,” write the authors. Global revenue from treatments is expected to hit $4.5 billion by 2020, according to a 2015 report from the market-research firm Grand View Research, and more than a hundred stem-cell clinics have opened across America in recent years.

•The Problem With That

Most American facilities are offering a therapy that uses “stromal vascular fraction,” because these fat cells are relatively easy to acquire. The technique is being used to treat everything from hair loss to heart failure to Parkinson’s disease— even though the Food and Drug Administration has not determined that the method is safe or effective for treating any ailment. Stem-cell medicine is barely over a decade old, and the FDA regulates it under a less stringent set of rules than the typical pillencapsulated synthetic medicine. Buyer beware.

—MICHAEL FITZGERALD

OVERHEARD

“THEY’VE BEEN COMPLETELY BRAINWASHED BY THEIR PIMPS.”

QUICK STUDY

No Sodas at School? Mom to the Rescue Teenagers’ consumption of soft drinks has decreased since 2007, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While it’s tempting to credit the banning of these beverages from many schools, evidence suggests otherwise. Israeli economist Shirlee LichtmanSadot looked at household purchasing data from 2002 to 2009, and reports when “schools ban the sale of carbonated beverages,” households with affected kids “increase their consumption of non-diet soda by roughly the equivalent of 3.4 cans per month.” She estimates the average student drinks 4.5 to five cans per month at school, so increased home consumption is largely offsetting any reduction due to the on-campus ban. In the Journal of Public Economics, she suggests tackling the issue from the demand side rather than attempting to restrict supply. Our obesity problem is likely to continue as long as candied carbonation is considered cool—and as long as parents keep the beverage of choice chilling in the family fridge. —TOM JACOBS

POSTIGO, Hollywood screenwriter and president of Los Angeles’ Commission on the Status of Women, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in August, describing the sex workers that she watched city police question in a swanky hotel room during a sex-trafficking raid that resulted in 286 arrests, mostly for prostitution. A 2009 survey of law enforcement officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and sex workers conducted by the Urban Justice Center, the New York-based legal-services non-profit, found that, “for the most part, such raids have not led to the identification of trafficked persons,” and have “alienated women from law enforcement ... making them less likely to come forward and identify themselves as trafficked.” —JESSICA

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SOLO

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

PRIMER

KNOW IT ALL

Disability Heads to the Polls

As tens of millions of people who care about disability issues prepare to vote, and new movements emerge to help get them organized, here are some of their major concerns. BY DAVID PERRY

56 million Americans with disabilities and tens of millions more who are family members of or caregivers to them. People with disabilities are America’s biggest minority, but those demographics have never translated into much political power. In 2016, online movements like #CripTheVote have pushed disability closer to the center of our political debate while encouraging people with disabilities to get to the polls. Meanwhile, disability-rights organizations around the country are working to improve accessibility in polling places and to educate voters on the issues—and on their rights. ¶ Disability rights are fundamental human rights, but each of us also has a personal stake. If you’re not disabled now, you likely will be some day, and here’s what you’re going to need to know. THERE ARE AT LEAST

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUR MOST IMPORTANT STORIES

Earned Benefit Programs: Funding Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

Many people with disabilities depend on federal and state governments to help them meet basic needs. For many of these voters—more than nine million of them—Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income provide much, if not all their income, while Medicare and Medicaid cover health care and long-term support. But the population is aging, and SSDI programs nearly ran out of money this year. In 2015, SSDI spending exceeded $146 billion, while payroll taxes brought in just over $115 billion. According to Sharon Lewis, former senior disability policy adviser to the Department of Health and Human Services, the solution isn’t just about revenue; it’s also about flexibility. Right now, in order to qualify for Medicaid, you have to prove, first, that you can’t work enough to make a basic living and, second, that you’re seriously poor. If you need the long-term support of Medicaid, you might be afraid to seek adaptive work and risk your eligibility. Lewis argues that we need “a unified and comprehensive approach to long-term services and supports” that doesn’t require staying in perpetual poverty. Unemployment and the “Poverty Trap”

Disability experts call this conundrum the “poverty trap”: If you rely on government benefits, you have to be poor. In order to stop being poor, you need a job, but if you get a job, you might lose your benefits without making enough money to pay for them yourself. In 2006, researchers from Cornell University advocated dismantling policies that effectively exclude people with disabilities from the workforce; 10 years later, one of the paper’s authors, Andrew Imparato, now executive director of the Association of University Centers on Disabilities, says we haven’t yet solved this trap. Instead of requiring proof that a person can’t

work, Imparato says, we should try to figure out what’s keeping that person from working. It might be partly a medical issue, but it’s also likely to be a workplace configured only for people with certain types of bodies or minds. One solution is to shift policy focus from a “medical model” of disability—in which we focus on what people’s bodies or minds can’t do—to a social one, in which we focus on how society erects barriers. Then we attack those barriers. Meanwhile, people with disabilities need jobs. The unemployment rate for disabled workers in 2015 was 10.7 percent, more than twice the overall unemployment rate. Institutionalization vs. Integration

Without financial means, too many people with disabilities waver between institutionalization and homelessness, trapped in shelters, hospitals, prisons, or on the streets. Those institutions play a crucial role in seeing that fewer people starve, but they siphon away resources that could go toward integrated, community-based living options that offer better long-term outcomes. One tool for integration is the Olmstead decision, a 1999 Supreme Court ruling that strengthened the requirement for public agencies to provide the “most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of qualified individuals with disabilities.” After Olmstead, agencies legally must make “reasonable modifications” to avoid discrimination. “Olmstead helps people with disabilities advocate for their rights to be able to live in the community with the supports they need,” says Tia Nelis, president of Self Advocates Becoming Empowered, a disabilityrights organization. Under the law, “states need to come up with a plan to help make this possible,” Nelis says, but those plans are not consistent across the country. In fact, eight states have been forced to sign agreements with the

Olmstead helps people with disabilities advocate for their rights to be able to live in the community with the supports they need.” federal government to start complying with the law. This is just the start of a new battle for disability rights. State Violence

One-third to one-half of all people killed by law enforcement have disabilities, as I found last year in a report I co-authored for the Ruderman Family Foundation. Deaf people have been killed or beaten for not following verbal commands. Autistic people have died or been injured following confrontations with police, some stemming merely from not making eye contact or responding negatively to physical touch. As for the criminal justice system, 30 to 40 percent of all prisoners are known to have at least one disability. This figure is likely low, because some people are either undiagnosed or don’t disclose their diagnoses. At least 20 percent of all prisoners have some form of mental illness—this figure is conservative—and prisons have become the “new asylums” of our era. Thousands of deaf prisoners are held, often illegally, without access to signlanguage interpretation. Finally, far too many children with disabilities are being harmed in their schools. The latest national data suggests that around 70,000 students with disabilities are restrained every year, some 4,000 of them in handcuffs and shackles, others pressed prone to the ground. Claudia Center, a senior staff attorney

at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Disability Rights Program, told me that students with disabilities are more than 20 times more likely to be subjected to physical restraint at school, with children of color especially at risk. In all of these cases, violence falls disproportionately on disabled students of color. Voting Access

To get involved on any of these issues, disabled people need to vote. There are two major impediments. First, a lot of voting sites aren’t accessible. In a study of the 2012 elections in the United States, researchers from Syracuse University found that nearly one-third of all voters with disabilities had trouble getting to a polling place or accessing the ballot. Everyone should have the right to vote in private. Having a helper pull the lever or push the button for those with physical disabilities, or read the ballot for people who are blind, erodes that right. Moreover, the authors noted that, when voting is more difficult, it depresses turnout. Technology can potentially make voting more and more accessible, but only if states make the proper investments. Second, people with disabilities haven’t historically identified as a voting bloc with political influence. That’s where movements like #CripTheVote, #RevUp from the American Association of People With Disabilities, and direct action groups such as ADAPT come in. They’re taking advantage of the relatively accessible nature of online communications, especially social media, to help mobilize disabled voters. Going forward, every polling place needs ballots that are equipped with screen-reader technology and accessible via every conceivable interface: touch, eye movement, or even just breathing faster or slower. The technology exists; what’s been missing is the political will to disseminate it to all American voters who need it.

•DAVID PERRY is a writer and historian based in Chicago. @LOLLARDFISH

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

PRIMER

BEHAVIORS, RITES & RITUALS

SUBCULTURE

crime is committed—trying to create that atmosphere so that it won’t happen. We’ve been called vigilantes, which I guess is fine. Being a vigilante is being proactive. And in that case, I’d give examples like the Guardian Angels and the Black Panther Party, who were considered vigilantes. The glamorization, the misrepresentation, is that you can just go into a community and break up fights and everybody’s going to be glad to see you. It took me six months to actually get to know these people so they would talk to me. In Durham, a lot of the politicians and the police, their only ideology on stopping crime is policecentric. It begins and ends with the police department. A rookie [police officer] has pulled up, wondering what we’re doing, asking questions, but, for the most part, it’s live and let live. I don’t deal with the police, good, bad, or indifferent. What we do is keep the police department totally out of the conversation, totally out of the equation. When we first started, a young person came up to us—probably about 15 years old—and said, “I got to look out for you all, because y’all fed my mama.” And that’s the type of relationship you have to build with people. Very few people are gonna be mad at you for giving them a bag of potato chips.

Street Ambassador

Paul Scott, 49, church minister, Durham, North Carolina (as told to Elena Gooray) PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

VIGILANTISM HAS A dark history in America: From the mutual-protection agencies of the 19th-century frontier to street patrols by armed white-nationalist groups, the term has been synonymous with racial discrimination and violence. But in some communities, another form of vigilantism exists—one focused on preventive outreach to stem violence before it happens.

About 10 years ago, we adopted one block in our community. We encouraged others to adopt one block if they want to stop crime. We started going through our blocks giving out information, positive CDs, giving snacks to the children.

We had a record rate of murders last year. And something had to be done. To me the police should only show up when a crime has been committed. So I said, why don’t we take that same energy that we have been using to politicize the gangs, politicize the young people. We started giving out black history books.

When somebody gets shot, everybody jumps up, wants to do something, and then a week later nobody’s talking about it. We’re trying to get there five seconds before the

My job is to put the police department out of business, whereby the police will be no longer necessary and the school-to-prison pipeline is completely shut down.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

IN THE PICTURE

PRIMER

More Cowbell Athens, Ohio

MEMBERSHIP in

the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, which funds the highestpaying rodeos, peaked in 1999 18

at around 7,400, and dropped to just below 5,000 in 2014. •••

BETWEEN 1981

and 2005, one study found the

injury rate for rodeo cowboys was around 32 per 1,000 bullrides—just under the rate another study found for college football over a similar time period. •••

DURING the

Revolutionary War, “cowboys” were colonial traitors—British loyalists who lured George

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

Washington’s soldiers into ambushes by ringing cowbells from the brush.

railway stops, to help feed the Northeast’s exploding population.

cowboy Edward “Teddy Blue” Abbott. Most cowboys quit after one journey.

COWBOYS

“IT WAS riding

“COWBOY” be-

•••

became heroic figures a hundred years later when young black, Mexican, Native American, and white European immigrant men drove millions of cattle from south Texas to Kansas

•••

at a dead run in the dark, with cut banks and prairie dog holes all around you, not knowing if the next jump would land you in a shallow grave,” wrote the England-born

•••

came a term of derision in the first half of the 20th century, a taunt for young, marijuana-smoking “drugstore cowboys” loitering outside pharmacies, or urban men who adopted

AN ANNOTATED GUIDE TO SCENES FROM DAILY LIFE

the Stetson-andboots look. •••

ACCORDING to

the folklorist Archie Green, Nashville country musicians like Waylon Jennings in the 1970s and Hollywood films like 1969’s Midnight Cowboy helped popularize the melancholic, outlaw panache of contemporary

cowboy portrayals. Simultaneously, blue-jean sales exploded across Asia, Europe, and North America. •••

IN SAN Francisco,

London, Seoul, and Istanbul, the anthropologists Sophie Woodward and Daniel Miller observed that between one- and twothirds of pass-

ersby on crowded streets were clad in denim, suggesting that, at any given moment, about half the urbanized world is wearing this single textile. •••

“BLUE JEANS

are the most beautiful things since the gondola,” wrote the iconic fashion columnist Diana Vreeland.

THE PBS-broad-

casted documentary China Blue profiled Jasmine, a 17-yearold denim-factory worker in China’s Guangdong Province, who worked 18-hour days and received six cents an hour to remove lint and snip loose threads from the seams of denim jeans to be sold

by retailers like Walmart. •••

OVER A thousand

years ago, Chinese alchemists experimenting with honey, sulfur, and potassium nitrate discovered that heating the concoction made it erupt into a bouquet of flames, creating the earliest known fireworks.

AN AVERAGE of

seven people die in fireworks accidents in the United States every year. A Consumer Product Safety Commission report estimated that 9,600 firework-related injuries were treated in 2011; 65 percent took place within 30 days of July 4th. PHOTO BY DUSTIN FRANZ

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

FIELD NOTES DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY

SUTHERLAND, CHILE

A group of cowboys, known as bagualeros, takes a break from capturing feral bulls in a remote stretch near Last Hope Fjord. PHOTO BY TOMÁS MUNITA

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

Permanent Displacement

The road to Kakuma, in the northwestern corner of Kenya, is long and full of potholes. Occasionally, young boys spot our car approaching and quickly begin pouring dirt into these potholes, pretending to repair them— hoping we’ll give them some loose change for the favor. “Do they ever actually fix it?” I ask our driver, John. “No, not really.” But for the occasional four-wheel-drive vehicle belonging to one international agency or another, the road is empty. The only time the road does fill up is when a convoy of trucks— sometimes 20 or even 30 of them—rumble toward Kakuma to deliver food to one of the world’s oldest refugee camps. On this day, all we pass is one broken-down bus, its passengers wilting beside it in the hot sun. The landscape that surrounds them is unforgiving. “You see, this place is very dry,” John says. “You cannot farm, you cannot grow anything.” “What, then, is the main business here?” I ask. “NGOs.” Kakuma camp and the non-governmental organizations that operate within it are overseen by Kenya’s government and by the United Nations Refugee Agency. When we reach the U.N. compound at Kakuma’s western edge, we’re greeted by the head of refugee protection. It’s a blisteringly hot day in October, and she offers me and the photographer I’m traveling with some warnings as we head into the camp. “Be careful of scorpions when you put

on your shoes,” she says. She asks us if we brought flashlights. “Be careful because at night when you go out there are a lot of snakes. They call this Snake Valley.” She apologizes that she can’t accompany us as we wander the camp’s dirt roads and alleyways. Maintenance asked her to spend the weekend organizing her office. The rainy season is coming, and water will soon flood in, soaking any boxes of files that remain scattered about her office floor. In 1991, 20,000 boys and some girls settled here after walking hundreds of miles of unforgiving desert to escape Sudan’s civil war and turmoil in neighboring Ethiopia. They were later referred to as the “Lost Boys of Sudan.” Many died, some from fatigue, dehydration, or starvation. Others were attacked by lions. In 1992, the U.N. formally recognized Kakuma as a refugee camp—a temporary shelter. A quarter-century later, Kakuma hosts more than 150,000 refugees—victims of all manner of East African calamities, from Ugandan homophobia to political unrest in Burundi. Presently, it is filling up once again with people fleeing civil war in South Sudan. Last May, Kenya announced that it would shut down Kakuma as well as the country’s other main refugee camp, Dadaab, sending inhabitants back to their home countries. It’s a threat Kenyan officials have made before. Refugees are a convenient distraction, a scapegoat in Kenya’s ill-designed war against terrorists. Officials later backed down from closing Kakuma, but still insist on emptying Dadaab.

Long before the Syrian civil war, before millions of people began fleeing to camps in Turkey, Jordan, and elsewhere in search of safety, Kakuma was something of an icon in the global refugee crisis. Today, it stands as a solemn reminder of the permanence of humanity’s displaced masses. “It’s bloody hot,” a Ugandan refugee tells me one afternoon. So hot that donkeys lie down in the middle of the dusty road that winds through the camp. On their sides, they rest motionless, surrendering themselves to the unrelenting sun. During the dry season, temperatures regularly reach 110 degrees. The rainy season can be worse. Huts flood; clothes and personal items mildew. The ground turns so muddy it weighs down your shoes, making it difficult to walk. Rainy or dry, most days in Kakuma are uneventful. There are few formal jobs except for “volunteer” positions with the U.N., its partner agencies, and NGOs. Often, stipends are just $60 a month. At mealtimes, which is usually just once a day, refugees cook using sticks and charcoal. Meat is expensive, so they mostly eat vegetarian—corn, flour, beans. If they can afford them, sometimes they throw in goat intestines for flavor. Most live in huts made of mud and rusting metal roofs. To maintain them, one must scrounge for scraps and nails. These are not the homes of people who expect to be here only fleetingly. Some have built fences around their plots. Others have constructed small restaurants or bodegas. Indeed, most of Kakuma looks

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

FIELD NOTES

more like a developing city than a tent camp. What few material possessions people have, they hoard. Inside one hut, a pair of large suitcases explodes with unfolded clothes and sheets. A clothesline crowded with towels, blankets, and shirts hangs obtrusively through the middle. Outside, a small solar panel sits atop the hot roof, collecting sunlight. At night, people who own cell phones use the stored power to charge them. Behind the hut there’s a metal bar, the ends of which have been cemented into large tin cans filled with concrete—a makeshift barbell, for exercise. “We don’t do much here,” the barbell’s owner, Odonga, explains. “Wait, eat, cook. For water, you wait in lines. The lines are huge.” The only time the pace of life quickens here is when food distribution takes place. Once a month, masses of people line up to receive their rations. Just behind the U.N. distribution center, a pop-up market forms, where vendors crowd together between bags of foodstuffs to buy, barter, and sell. Odonga, who fled Uganda and asked to go by a pseudonym to protect his identity, hopes to get a job teaching at a school funded by the U.N., as many of his friends have. “The parents prefer their kids to be handled by Ugandans,” he says. “The kids think our English is better, and they understand us more.” “People don’t even know we exist here,” Odonga says, reflecting on the indefinite nature of his predicament as a Ugandan laid up in Kenya. Although most refugees tend to hang out only

with people from their own clan or country, to better persuade NGOs and agencies to meet their respective needs, privately Odonga admits that everyone here faces the same hardships. “If I were a Somali, I would say the same thing.” ONE AFTERNOON a Kenyan

U.N. protection officer sits in the shade of a tree surrounded by about 60 refugees. Young and old, Somali and Sudanese, they voice their concerns to him. Some say the water tap keeps running dry. Others complain that strangers have been allowed into the fenced-in protection area where they live. One woman complains that a security guard refuses to let her out of the protection area. Darkness sets quickly in Kakuma. I board a motorcycle taxi out of the camp, but the back tire gets a flat. There’s a warm breeze blowing across the barren landscape, which, apart from the stars, is completely dark. Somehow we manage to make out the gate of a primary school in the distance. The driver struggles to push his bike toward it, a couple hundred meters through the thick, sandy dirt. A sign next to the gate reads angelina jolie girls primary school. While we wait and hope for some sort of vehicle to pass, the school’s security guard explains that Jolie visited in 2002. Fourteen years later, its classrooms are occupied not only by children who fled their home countries, but also by a whole generation of children born in the camp. Most likely, they will never leave. —JACOB KUSHNER

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

“

Be careful because at night when you go out there are a lot of snakes. They call this Snake Valley.

”

CHAMPASAK PROVINCE, LAOS

A fisherman’s son rests on the Mekong River. Nearby, workers are building the Don Sahong dam, which threatens the river’s fish population. PHOTO BY DAVID GUTTENFELDER

DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY

Death From Above

Ian Moffitt stood behind the wheel of the RV Poge, a 24-foot Boston Whaler. It was the end of June—winter in American Samoa—and only mid-morning, but the temperature was already in the mid-80s. Moffitt’s dark hair was cropped short, and his stubble framed a slightly sunburnt nose. His shirt read alamea slayer. death from above. With Moffitt were Ari Halperin, Kersten Schnurle, Karen Bryan, and Paolo Marra-Biggs.

All five divers were working for the National Park of American Samoa, the second-smallest in the 59park National Park Service. They rushed to dump small bags of fine brown ox-bile powder into containers filled with water. The week before, the crew had taken turns towing each other face down behind the Poge on a rope. (They tow the entire north shore of Tutuila, the park’s main island, every month.) They found a giant scar stretching for hundreds of yards: white on top, green a dozen meters deeper,

and a sickly brown near the bottom. The scar was caused by hundreds, maybe thousands, of crowns-ofthorns starfish (alamea in Samoan), a carnivorous predator that feeds on coral. The animals cover the coral’s calcium carbonate skeleton with their everted stomachs, digesting the living polyps before sucking the resulting slurry back in. The starfish decimate reef ecosystems, and it can take 30 to 40 years for reefs to recover from a bad outbreak. A park ecologist first spotted crowns-ofthorns in American Samoa five years ago. Moffitt and the crew had come back to the tip of Fagasa Bay on the edge of the national park to wipe the animals out. Killing crowns-of-thorns is trickier than it sounds. Their 20 arms are covered in venomous spines, and they won’t die even if cut in half. The divers wear needleproof gloves to protect their hands and use an injector gun designed for cattle to inject them with the ox bile. On deck, Halperin and Schnurle prepped their dive equipment. Carly Rae Jepson’s “Call Me Maybe” played on a set of waterproof speakers. The fringing reef meant the boat was only about 100 yards away from shore. There was hardly any swell. Bryan and Marra-Biggs were already in the water, 60 feet down. Bryan wore a black hood, black goggles, and a long black rash guard. “She looks like Batman,” Moffitt said before she dove in. Underwater, Bryan was injecting each starfish with 10 milliliters of ox bile. Each one got a needle in

one of its arms. The bile causes blisters to form on the animals. Their skin becomes discolored; their spines fall out; and, within 24 hours, they disintegrate. Bryan had four liters of the ox-bile mixture. It should have been plenty. A dive lasts about an hour, and Moffitt’s highest kill total, 203, was still the record. But Bryan was moving fast, injecting one crownof-thorns nearly every 10 seconds. Everywhere she turned, there were more and more. “See you in hell,” she said to herself. She kept injecting. After 53 minutes, she kicked to the surface. She had run out of poison. Once back onboard the boat, she tallied her kills. “I just got 302,” she said. “Holy shit,” Moffitt said, leaving his post at the wheel. “I want to see. I’m going down.” He threw on a pair of fins and a mask, jumped in the water, and swam down with slow deliberate strokes. Crowns-of-thorns were stacked on each other like flapjacks. One table coral was covered in a mound of more than a dozen. It was the worst outbreak Moffitt or any of the crewmembers had ever seen. From a depth of 60 feet all the way to the seven-foot shallows, the coral was ghost white. “It’s like the White Death down there,” Moffitt said when he re-surfaced. Schnurle and Halperin dipped into the water. Over the course of three hours, the four divers killed 952 crowns-of-thorns. Moffitt spent the morning monitoring the divers’ progress, and didn’t get a chance to win his record back. —MATT SKENAZY

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

FIELD NOTES

The Night Minister

He calls them the desperate hours, and, most nights, that’s an apt description for this stretch of downtown San Francisco. It’s not yet midnight but already a prostitute weaves down the street in exaggerated slow motion, her face candied by the neon backwash of signs advertising pizza and booze. Men’s silhouettes watch her from hotel doorways and blow smoke out from the darkness. On the corner, in front of Glide Memorial Church,

homeless people have improvised bedrooms on the sidewalk, but they don’t sleep—they stare into the night the way you stare into a bonfire. The desperate hours are 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., when Reverend Lyle Beckman makes his route through the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods and a haven for the dispossessed. Beckman is the city’s night minister, the fourth man to hold the job since 1964. He’s out here almost every night, no matter the weather, to hear confes-

sions and offer prayers to those who need them. “As the night goes on, the situations that we hear, the circumstances that people find themselves in, are much more dire,” Beckman says as we edge past Jonell’s Cocktail Lounge, a corner dive bar. In front of the building, two men stand in dazed meditation. The hot-plastic char of crack smoke clings to them like radiation. Beckman has seen and smelled it all during his 11 years walking these streets. His vocation demands that he play a combination of

father, confessor, therapist, and minesweeper. He’s disarmed strangers of guns, knives, and baseball bats; he’s been threatened with a screwdriver. Still, his biggest fear isn’t other people. “I’m not concerned about catching any diseases, or violence, or about not being able to help folks,” he says. “I’m concerned about the rats. That sounds kind of foolish, but that’s my confession.” There are no rats tonight. Or if there are, they’re less visible than the people camped in doorways, swaddled in

SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR

An anti-gang intervention police unit stops and searches a group of young men for weapons in a neighborhood infamous for its gang violence. PHOTO BY TOMÁS MUNITA

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY

wool blankets or crusts of broken cardboard. Faces seem to hover inside hoods. Craggy voices mutter “Hello, Father” as Beckman passes. His clerical collar is as vivid in the darkness as his meringue of white hair. Halfway down otherwise empty Ellis Street, a man leans on a disheveled push broom. He smiles with such fixed enormity that I wonder if something is wrong with his mouth. It’s a smile of no particular pleasure—it’s just there, open as a wound. Beckman walks with a practiced saunter that’s calculated to invite eye contact. His expression, like that of a seasoned bartender, is attentive but noncommittal. It seems to welcome every kind of grievance and confession, every one-liner and interrogation. If someone answers his salutation—a curt smile and a nod—odds are Beckman will stop to chat, which is what he does now. Behind the smiling man is a jumble of possessions: a wheelchair, luggage, plastic crates, shopping bags stuffed with other shopping bags, sheets and pillows, tarps, and remnants of out-of-season clothes. It looks like someone’s apartment exploded onto the street. Which, in a way, is what happened. Hendricks, the smiling man, tells us he was evicted from the Drake Hotel, a residential hotel a block south. Worse, Hendricks says cops confiscated his buckets to stop him from drumming, although apparently he managed to salvage a few: Amid the clutter behind him are plastic buckets nested in-

side each other. “You can’t take somebody’s gift,” he says. “God gave me this. I’m 56 years old. Let me do what I do best.” What Hendricks does best is drum. Jazz, reggae, funk—he does it all. He gestures behind him, where four or five snare drums are stacked on a jury-rigged dolly, and says the set is for his son, now six years old and also named Hendricks. He hasn’t seen the boy in a while but plans to teach him how to drum someday. Tonight, Hendricks Sr. is on Ellis Street because his girlfriend of 11 years lives about 50 feet away, inside the Coronado Hotel. He lived with her too until he couldn’t stomach the bed bugs anymore. “I told her I’m gonna marry her,” Hendricks says. “She’s going through a lot of things. She’s been beat up, and I’m kicking her off the heroin. She believes in me. I just bought her a diamond ring.” Beckman smiles the way you might smile at an old photograph. “If she believes in you, and you believe in her, and you know you’re going to be together forever,” he says, “then a few more years just to make sure it’s the right time is nothing, right?” Across the street is what looks like a crime scene but is really only the epilogue to another night in the Tenderloin: a body asleep beneath a white sheet, dreamless under an awning’s hard floodlight, sleeping off whatever damage the day has wrought. A man nearby nurses his tallboy of Olde English and

“

I’m not concerned about catching any diseases, or violence, or about not being able to help folks. I’m concerned about the rats.

”

pretends not to listen to us. “I’m proud of her,” Hendricks says of his girlfriend. “She’s very smart. I’m just trying to get her out of that snake pit.” We all turn toward the Coronado, an anonymous place with a gated entrance and five floors of murky yellow-lit windows. I wonder which window is hers. “She says there’s a whole family of mice in the closet,” Hendricks says, still smiling. “She opens the door and they go...”—he pantomimes skittering mice, which could also be the gesture of a man scattering ashes. Hendricks says he was eighty-sixed from the Coronado for unspecified reasons and can only talk to his girlfriend outside. When they’re married, and she finally has his name, perhaps he’ll reconcile with the manager and go back into the building. Perhaps they’ll live happily ever after. “Keep encouraging her,” Beckman says, his own voice now featherweight. “The worst thing that can happen is she thinks she’s stuck there forever and there’s no hope.” Hendricks smiles. It seems he has no choice not to. As we say our goodbyes, it occurs to me that cities are more honest at night, and more eloquent. It’s at night, after all, when our loneliness feels most naked and our fears most relentless. We vow that we will do better tomorrow, that the morning will surely bring some comfort. For most of us, darkness is the closest we’ll come to mercy. —JEREMY LYBARGER

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

THE FIX

•JIMMY TOBIAS is a Pacific Standard contributing writer

and freelance journalist covering extinction, extraction, and environmental justice. @JAMESCTOBIAS

SOLUTIONS, AND THE PEOPLE WORKING TOWARD THEM

Return to Malheur

Months after the Bundy insurrection rocked Harney County, Oregon, a group of local residents is trying to heal the community and overcome the American West’s long history of land-use conflict. Their secret: Bring cowboys and conservationists together. BY JIMMY TOBIAS

LINDA SUE BECK, her rosy cheeks matching her red fleece,

reclines on a couch in the Hotel Diamond, a weather-beaten edifice in a remote valley in southeastern Oregon. Snow flurries and staunch wind torment the trees outside. “I’m exhausted,” Beck says, looking both content and emotionally spent on this early April afternoon. And who can blame her? Beck was a principal target of the gun-toting militants who stormed the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge last winter. She’s been a fisheries biologist with the refuge for seven years, and, for 41 days, Ammon Bundy and his buddies commandeered her office and rifled through her desk. They ridiculed her, calling her “the carp lady” and claiming people like her are “destroying America.”

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Militiamen, she says, prowled outside her family’s ranch. Like other federal employees here, Beck was forced to flee her home for the upheaval’s duration. “The ripple effects of the harm that the occupation did to this community are huge,” she says. “But we lived through it and we came out and we are doing good things.” Like the armadas of migratory birds that pass through this region each spring, Beck is back in Burns, Oregon, after a brutal winter. Alongside leading Harney County citizens and collaborators from across the Pacific Northwest, she’s involved in a years-long experiment to overcome the land-use conflicts that so often plague small communities in the American West. That’s why she’s at Hotel Diamond: for a marathon meeting with those who might not otherwise spend time together—local ranchers and conservationists, county politicians, state officials, and federal land managers. They are all members or allies of a group called the High Desert Partnership, and together they are planning its most ambitious project yet. With millions in funding from state coffers, this unlikely group is using collaborative tools like facilitated discussion and old-fashioned neighborliness to move past entrenched animosities. It seeks to tackle landscape-scale problems, like the region’s invasive carp infestation and its crumbling irrigation infrastructure. In contrast to those who use weapons to get their way, the Hotel Diamond crowd wants to heal Harney County. And its communitarian methods, developed “with blood, sweat and tears,” as Beck puts it, could help solve simmering tensions elsewhere on this side of the 100th meridian. THE HARNEY BASIN is a massive bath-

tub, a miles-wide receptacle surrounded by snow-crowned mountains in which all waterways lead to a series of lakes that rise and fall with the weather. The rich floodplains of this particular bathtub have always enticed a wide array of residents. A Paiute tribe has occupied the land for millennia. White

ILLUSTRATION BY CHAD HAGEN

migrants arrived in the 19th century, founding Burns and other communities. And then there are the birds. Thanks to Malheur Lake and others like it, the basin is a prime stop along the all-important avian migration corridor known as the Pacific Flyway. Birds have come from their wintering grounds to replenish their resources here for thousands of years, says Chris Colson, a Ducks Unlimited biologist and HDP collaborator. “If they don’t get what they need, if they can’t come here and feed like heck, it doesn’t matter how much good habitat they have on their breeding grounds.” Colson is in town for both the Hotel Diamond meeting and the annual Harney County Migratory Bird Festival, during which hundreds of visitors arrive to watch geese and cranes, ducks and shorebirds, descend from the southern skies. Presently, he and Brenda Smith, the HDP’s executive director, are leading festival-goers on a tour of their Harney Basin wetlands work. Outside Burns, among vast ranches, the tour bus stops. A tornado of shimmering Ross’s geese circles in the distance as Colson describes the flood-irrigation system that keeps both ranching and bird habitat healthy here. Ditches crisscross the landscape like a circulatory system, he says, carrying water from rivers to fields where ranchers raise winter hay. The system roughly reproduces the spring floods that once inundated the region’s lowlands. And it’s not just crucial for cattle, the mainstay of the county’s robust agricultural economy. Flood irrigation also maintains the seasonal marshes where migratory species feed, and it replenishes groundwater to boot. The irrigation infrastructure, however, is old and inefficient, and ranchers are increasingly using sprinklerbased systems that draw water from aquifers rather than streams. This transition can diminish bird habitat and deplete groundwater, an ominous problem in the county. If flood irrigation is to maintain its position here, it will need a major makeover. That’s where the partnership and its wetlands project come in. With a multi-year, $6 million grant from Ore-

gon, the initiative is refurbishing irrigation structures that, in some cases, are more than a half-century old. “The beautiful thing about the initiative is that we’ve been able to take the load off landowners,” says Ed Sparks, a young biologist and HDP ally. He mentions a Farm Bill-funded project, for instance, that helped a rancher increase the land he had under production while also boosting migratory bird habitat: “The landowner is ecstatic, just happy, happy, happy, with what’s going in the ground.” MAKING LANDOWNERS happy while

keeping conservationists content is the partnership’s method of choice for overcoming the not-so-happy history of conflict here. When Chad Karges, Malheur’s current manager, arrived in Harney in the late 1990s, the relationship between federal officials and ranchers was rotten. Malheur is one of many refuges in the country that allows cattle grazing on its premises, and spats about water rights, fencing issues, and permits were regular affairs. “Back then, the relationship with the community was strained,” Karges says. “Everything you did, there was a lot of tension over it.” He and his team decided there was a better way to do business. Through house calls and conversations, Karges made allies in the community. Along with one of those allies, Gary Marshall, a rancher who runs cattle on the refuge, Karges studied collaborative projects around the West, traveling as far as Montana to gather ideas. Then the pair toured the county and state in the 2000s to recruit local leaders, conservationists, and government officials to their cause. Their first true victory saw the adoption of a new refuge conservation plan without the usual legal squabbling. They officially launched in 2005 and began identifying other projects locals could rally around. Many say the partnership is a model for other conflict-ridden communities. Marshall agrees, but collaboration, he warns, doesn’t come easy. This work, he says, “has been done over a long period of time and it’s been done with a lot of effort and it has built this trust and these relationships.”

FOR AN EXTENDED VERSION OF THIS STORY, VISIT PSMAG.COM.

IN THE EARLY 20th century, someone

made the epic mistake of introducing carp into Harney Basin. Since then the fecund bottom-feeding fish have wreaked havoc on the ecosystem, destroying aquatic vegetation, slurping down calorie-rich insects, and muddying once-pristine lakes. The disruption has devastated bird populations. Malheur Lake, for instance, once produced as many as 100,000 ducklings each year, according to former refuge biologist Gary Ivey. Now, it barely produces a tenth of that number. Besides irrigation infrastructure, carp eradication is the priority for the HDP’s wetlands initiative. For decades, the Malheur refuge has trapped, electroshocked, and even poisoned the intruders. But it hasn’t been enough. Now the partners want to re-double the carp campaign, and Beck is leading the charge. In one of its first and ongoing projects, the wetlands initiative contracted commercial fishermen to harvest as many carp as possible from the region. The initiative will also hire scientists to study carp behavior and develop a strategy to destroy the fish. The occupation, of course, set the effort back. Toward the end of the HDP’s birding tour, the bus rumbles down a road near the still-closed refuge headquarters. Next to a slow-moving stream sits a towering metal structure: a trap to capture carp before they escape into the broader watershed. But, as a result of the Bundys’ arrival, it has been left unused this year. “Look over there!” hollers one of the birders. The group turns. Bobbing in the dark water are two log-like shapes— carp that have evaded the disabled trap. After the tour ends, hundreds arrive at the county fairground for the bird festival’s final dinner. Brooke Nyman takes the stage. She introduces herself as a proud “ranch wife.” The militants, she says, never should have come here. “What I want you to know is that 90 percent of the tried and true ranchers in this community ... were not for that [occupation],” she declares to loud applause. “We do not need anyone from Bunkerville, Nevada, or Emmett, Idaho, or Kanab, Utah, to tell us what to do.” Harney County has its own plans.

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THE FIX

•JAMES MCWILLIAMS is a Pacific Standard contributing writer and historian based in Austin, Texas. He has written for The American Scholar, the New York Times, Harper’s, and others. @THE_PITCHFORK

The Ministers of Minimalism

How a small group of optimists is revolutionizing consumer choice. BY JAMES MCWILLIAMS

YO IS A POPULAR

smartphone application that enables users to send the word yo— just yo—to another user of Yo. The moment the urge hits—and for folks of a certain generation this is not infrequently—one simply taps a screen and ... “Yo”! Yo’s designer, who released the app on April 1st, 2014, reportedly made the thing in eight hours. Soon after it was launched, not incidentally, it was hacked by three college students lazing around a dorm room. But by July, as reported in Business Insider, Yo was valued somewhere between $5 million and $10 million. Strange times, here we are. Except that, in an era when the nation’s prime brainpower is increasingly invested in designing the next glitzy techno-fix, Yo isn’t that strange at all. Ask any Millennial if she thinks there’s a problem when an app that does nothing but deliver a shout-out turns technology geeks into mushroom millionaires and you’ll likely get a response along the lines of, Yo, what’s your problem, Luddite? Yo, after all, epitomizes a generational ambition—Zuckerbergian in focus—to convince millions of smartphone owners that they need something that a decade ago would have been mocked as absurd. Resisting this trend—should you have the inclination to do so—is tricky business. The app craze is just an obvious example of consumer behavior stuck on what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the hedonic treadmill.

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This idea, rooted in the faulty hypothesis that more stuff equals more happiness, observes how our desires, once fulfilled, are immediately recalibrated to acquire something new and more ambitious. When these aspirations center on material goods, consumers easily go after the next new thing despite research finding no reliable connection between increased consumption and personal well-being. So the treadmill turns. “The hedonic treadmill is an easy one to get on,” writes University of Texas–Austin psychology professor Art Markman on PsychologyToday.com. “It is easy to begin to take your current life for granted and to seek the next level of fulfillment. But the hedonic treadmill is not a necessary part of human experience. At some point, it is fine to just enjoy what you have.” Or, at some point, you could also decide that you’ve had enough and, instead of resting easy with what you possess, you could conclude that, in fact, most of it stinks and, for the sake of one’s better self, should be turned into jetsam (or given to Goodwill). This is exactly what one of the most quietly

ILLUSTRATION BY CHAD HAGEN

SOLUTIONS, AND THE PEOPLE WORKING TOWARD THEM

rebellious social movements to come around in a long time is starting to do. And people are listening. “RIGHT NOW, society is deeply

steeped in a consumeristic culture,” Ryan Nicodemus says as he prepares to attend a documentary screening in Somerville, Massachusetts. “We’ve been sold the American dream, one that requires accoutrements to fulfill our lives.” His voice gathers steam as his rhetoric intensifies: “The message is constantly shoved in our face. Soon we come to believe that if we buy all this stuff then we’ll be happy.” Lecture delivered, he sighs. But Nicodemus is neither angry nor resigned. In fact, he and Joshua Fields Millburn, known together as the Minimalists, are an upbeat twosome (and best friends since the fifth grade) who comprise a kind of awshucks Ohio-based phenomenon for millions of followers seeking to lead less-cluttered lives. Granted, such an endeavor—simplify and find meaning!—might sound twee, even Hallmark-ish in ambition. But do note that the sold-out screening Nicodemus was waiting to attend was called Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (it was released to 400 theaters nationwide starting in May) and that Nicodemus and Millburn, the stars, had just come from New York to Somerville, where a crowd snaked around the theater, in the rain, hoping for a chance to see their favor-

ite lifestyle gurus on the big screen. Nicodemus and Millburn, both in their early 30s, are made for the exposure. They are fit, boyishly handsome, and strategically active on social media. Finely packaged as they are, their message disrupts the inner spirit of the American Dream, a myth they viscerally lament. They work from the radicalized premise that consumer culture “is not where we want to live our lives.” While Nicodemus acknowledges that “this is an old idea”—critics of consumption have been ranting as long as humans have been consuming—the Minimalists aim not merely to challenge America’s glorified consumer ethos. They want to replace it altogether. To that end, they work hard, assiduously disseminating their message through a steady output of books, podcasts, interviews, and lectures, all stressing the value of having “more time, more passion, more experiences, more growth, more contribution, more contentment” through the pivotal act of “clearing the clutter from life’s path.” “We are focused,” Nicodemus says, “but not busy.” Busy is bad; focused is intentional. Blending psychology, self-help, charisma, and compelling personal narratives (both defected from wellpaying corporate jobs), the Minimalists come off as neo-Thoreauvian life coaches for the smart set. And while they aren’t terribly keen to characterize their message as one of sacrifice—

“Minimalists don’t focus on having less, less, less”—Millburn occasionally wanders into his own private Walden, making a point of noting, for instance, that he owns only 228 items (a bragging right achieved, in part, by parting ways with, gulp, over 2,000 books). The average American household has about 300,000 items. When I mention to Nicodemus that the Minimalists’ sharp critique of consumer behavior—punctuated by their aggressively pared down material existence—strikes me as a firebomb to the status quo, he laughs and jokingly shouts into the phone, “Down with the Man!” And when I comment that I could never, ever part with my books, he says, affirming the joy they give me, “Keep your books!” He’s funny that way. And pragmatic. It’s as if he’s bending over backwards to confirm that he and Millburn are just a couple of regular, flexible dudes (a term Nicodemus used a lot during our interview) trying to live the dream without getting in anyone’s face—all the while delivering a message that shakes consumerism to its core. And, to a plausible extent, it’s true. They are regular and flexible guys. And they are, it seems, living the minimalist dream. And they do appear to grate against no one in particular. Aspiration, for these fortunate young men, appears to have met reality. But don’t be fooled by all their smiles. These guys, at the end of the day, think most of your stuff sucks.

THE THINGS THEY KEPT

While the Minimalists insist that there is “absolutely nothing” they would have any difficulty parting with, other members of the movement to reject consumer culture aren’t as extreme. Here are the five personal items Christopher Wharton wouldn’t go without.

BICYCLE

LAPTOP

SMARTPHONE

GUITAR

RUNNING SHOES

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THE FIX

IT SHOULD BE mentioned that the

Minimalists are experts in the art of intentional drifting. Nicodemus and Millburn relocate with little angst (in 2012 they moved from separate apartments in Dayton, Ohio, to a shared cabin in Montana) so long as it “adds value” to their lives. Notably, neither familial duties nor conventional job routines interrupt their itinerancy, which presumably makes their goals more achievable. Plus, it’s obviously easier to move when your life possessions practically fit into a backpack. But for Christopher Wharton, an associate professor of nutrition and a senior sustainability scientist at Arizona State University, these factors— the job, the family, the rootedness— have proven to be of little hindrance in his quest to accomplish minimalist objectives. To the contrary, the spouse, the two young kids, and the considerable professorial duties of a tenured academic, provide the essential inspiration for pursuing a different version of minimalism, one that Wharton calls “voluntary simplicity.” The term, coined by the social philosopher Richard Gregg in 1936, reflects, according to the Simplicity Collective, a “way of life that rejects the high-consumption, materialistic lifestyles of consumer cultures.” In this respect, voluntary simplicity is every bit an attack on Americanized consumer behavior as minimalism. Perhaps, given its accessibility, even more so. What distinguishes Wharton’s perspective is that “it expands the idea of minimalism to show how it bears on finances, health, sustainability, and happiness.” It is, in other words, minimalism for those who can’t afford to make a living from minimalism; or, maybe more so, minimalism for those with maximal responsibilities. Like Nicodemus and Millburn, Wharton isn’t cut in the revolutionary mold. When we met last year in Phoenix, he was, at least temperamentally, more Wall Street than Occupy Wall Street. But his message, as with that of the Minimalists, is nothing if not subversive to everything we’ve long thought enhances our sense of well-being.

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The Power of Possessions DOES BEING SURROUNDED BY STUFF MAKE US HAPPY? HERE’S WHAT THE SCIENCE SAYS. BY ELENA GOORAY SPEND—WISELY We often hear that “money can’t buy happiness.” But a 2011 review in The Journal of Consumer Psychology suggests spending does buy satisfaction, if we do it right. In surveys and controlled experiments, people reported increased happiness levels when following eight principles: spending on others rather than on themselves; choosing a few small treats (say, a bag of donut holes) over a single big option (like one huge donut); not focusing on comparisons between options while shopping; buying decisively rather than trying to build in safety nets, such as insurance or warranties; considering the everyday experience that would come with a purchase, such as the chores of homeownership; paying immediately for a delayed reward, like buying concert tickets weeks in

advance; following crowd approval (hello Yelp!); and choosing experiences over objects. ENJOY THE WAIT Many studies have confirmed that we get more pleasure from experiences than from things. In a 2014 paper for Psychological Science, researchers had independent judges rate newspaper accounts of crowds lined up to shop. Their analysis found that crowds waiting for an experience were more cheerful and “better behaved” than those waiting for a material possession. And while nearly 100 college students in one study and more than 2,000 adults in another drew pleasure from both kinds of waiting, they were happier and more excited while waiting for an experience. We seem to heed this instinctually: Many of us will settle for an

inferior item now over a better one later—like an iPhone 6 now over a future iPhone 7—but will wait patiently for a superior experience. DON’T PIT MEANING AGAINST MONEY It’s tempting to interpret this apparent experience advantage as proof that material wealth itself doesn’t matter—it’s just a way to access situations that give life meaning. But wealth, and the stuff it buys, does promote a specific kind of well-being. Polling 132 countries that contained 96 percent of the world’s population, a Gallup survey found that both societal and individual wealth strongly influenced people’s evaluations of their quality of life. Where income had a much weaker impact was on feelings. Positive emotions in particular were more strongly predicted by social-psychological factors, such as feeling respected, having loved ones to count on, and getting to choose how we spend our time. Since life evaluations and feelings can be separated, countries might score high for one while falling short on the other. That’s the case in the United States: Despite a high income and strong life satisfaction, residents reported an above-average share of negative feelings. Maybe we aren’t spending our money the right way.

SOLUTIONS, AND THE PEOPLE WORKING TOWARD THEM

When Wharton and his wife, Kelsey, started a family three years ago, Wharton worked to connect classroom lessons on health and sustainability with emerging patterns of domestic responsibility. The couple re-evaluated how they allocated their resources and found the results to be jarring. They saw too much waste—of time, money, health, happiness, and opportunities to help the Earth. And they saw a warped consumer ethic accounting for every whit of it. “Those of us in the middle class on up have been sold a message that we have fewer choices than we really have,” he says, echoing Nicodemus. “We need to rebel against this idea, and we can do so by attacking basic consumer behavior.” Thus followed the slow burn of a purge, starting with the family’s second car, an already paid-off Chevy Colorado. Wharton, who estimates that he saves several thousand dollars a year without it, admits “there are occasional hassles” that come with only having one car (a Prius) to negotiate the sprawl of Phoenix. But he adds that, in addition to the financial savings, he has since put 2,000 miles on his commuter bike, reduced his carbon emissions, spent more time outdoors with his family, and discovered that “Phoenix is flat, the weather is tolerable, and there are networks of trails.” Wharton’s mechanism for reaching the masses—one that he articulates as much for himself as for others—is a site he calls Practically Awesome. In a sense, Wharton’s how-to writings are a scattered panoply of self-help titles: “How to Create a Creative Kid,” “How to Have a Life Philosophy,” “Save $1,000 a Year With This Packed Lunch Toolkit,” “How to Have a ZeroWaste Day,” “How Much Should I Worry About My Weight,” and so on. He has much to say about toilet paper (no need for it), television (get rid of it), and food choices (recommended: sweet-potato quesadillas). In the end, Practically Awesome adds up to something more holistic and ambitious than a series of life hacks. As reflected in the family’s choice to forgo

the second car, Wharton argues that the ripple effects of our most basic consumer decisions (at one point he gives advice on what kind of underpants to buy—and how many pairs) directly shape everything that matters in life— health, happiness, financial security, sustainability, spirituality. “Look at this as a social movement,” he says, as I scroll through a Practically Awesome post about how to give yourself a haircut. THE TRICK for these ministers of

minimalism is to get us past a lot of excellent cost-cutting advice to reach the larger conclusion that simplicity works best as a complete lifestyle makeover. It may help—and perhaps it’s even essential—that minimalists and voluntary simplifiers tend to be unusually thoughtful people who consider their own interests inseparable from those of their families and communities. Indeed, these guys put ideals into action with such a tender spirit of optimism you wouldn’t guess that real sacrifices were being made. Never, in fact, have such subversive ideas—reduce, end, or even reverse consumption—been expressed with so much unfailing decency and hopefulness. It’s an odd, even historically unprecedented, style of rebellion. But Wharton vows, as he sheds his possessions, “to be deliberate about focusing on, and participating in, the good in the world.” And Millburn writes about Nicodemus that he “is the best person I know: he is habitually honest, caring, and loving.” It’s as if giving up material goods cleared space in the heart for a love fest. But this sweet disposition leavening the minimalist message raises a question: Does kindness ever win the culture war? The most famous advocate for minimalism—a man named Peter Adeney, who goes by the moniker Mr. Money Mustache—suggests that it might not. Adeney cultivates a more aggressive tone rooted more in the quest for personal pleasure than the ambition to do “good in the world.” Insisting that one should retire at 30, and back-

ing up the claim with hard numbers on his own finances, he calls himself as “a freaky financial magician.” Adeney, according to his own assessment, counsels his followers in the art of “badassity.” Badasses don’t play the Man’s game. A life of honest hard work for a corporation is, according to badassity logic, “nonsense.” Mustachianism sneers at “your middle class life” as “an Exploding Volcano of Wastefulness.” If Adeney’s media exposure— he outed himself with his full name in a New Yorker profile—is any measure of his success, this kind of aggression has widespread appeal. But given the nature of our increasing discontent with consumer culture, Adeney’s attitude may be little more than entertainingly idiosyncratic. There may, in other words, be genuine hope for the more civicminded ministers of minimalism to take a more community-centered lead in fundamentally shifting how we think about the place of material goods in our lives. Art Markman, the University of Texas–Austin psychologist, seems to think so. He notes that “there are people who recognize that acquiring new things has not made them happier,” adding that the motivation to re-focus attention “on experiences rather than things” is important. He continues: “There is a lot of research suggesting that when you focus on experiences, you engage in activities that create positive memories and stronger connections to your friends and community.” Likewise, Amy Cox Hall, who researches neo-monastic communities as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Amherst College, sees the rejection of consumer culture as more of a communityminded effort centered on social justice than achieving a “personal gospel of prosperity.” As for Wharton, who just started doing long bike rides with his threeyear-old son alongside him, nothing could be more to the point. Optimism will always prevail as his guiding light into the brave new world of voluntary simplicity.

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I N

T H E

E R V I

Ava DuVernay took an unconventional road from indie upstart to Hollywood powerhouseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;aiming not just to change Hollywood but the culture at large.

KATHLEEN SHARP

CINEMATIC JUSTICE INTERVIEW BY

PRODUCED BY PACIFIC STANDARD EDITOR JENNIFER SAHN DESIGN BY TAYLOR LE FACT CHECKER KATE WHEELING COPY EDITOR TIM HEFFERNAN

It’s a fine May day in Louisiana, with chalk clouds scuttling across an opal sky. I’m an hour west of New Orleans, driving along old River Road and following the lazy Mississippi. I pass several plantations that were tilled by black slaves, their dilapidated cabins still standing in the fields. Although it’s 84 degrees today, a chill passes through me. I come upon a museum dedicated exclusively to black slavery, where visitors can view life-sized statues of slave children and tiny iron shackles. The air is thick with ghosts and recrimination. ¶ My destination, St. Joseph Plantation, is hard to miss. A Creole-style manor spreads like a 12,000-square-foot hoop skirt across an upper lawn. Below, a dirt lot is packed with a dozen 40-foot-long tractor-trailers and 100 or so cars. Workers mill around a giant white frame tent; several honey wagons serve as restrooms, and a huge generator hums like a thousand insects. We’re on the set of Queen Sugar, the first television drama from the acclaimed writer, director, and executive producer Ava DuVernay. ¶ DuVernay’s career is full of firsts. She is the first African-American woman to win the Best Director Award at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival (2012), the first black American female director to DuVernay embraces her role feel very activist in creating be nominated for a Golden Globe as a changemaker. With long, an image of a whole-bodied braided locks, kohl-rimmed eyes, character, with complexities Award (2015), and the first black and ruby-painted lips, she’s a and frailties and triumphs stylish presence, but also emiand tragedies, in the body female director to have a film nomnently practical, wearing jeans, of a woman or a person of inated for Best Motion Picture at a light hoodie, and canvas shoes color. To me, there is justice for tromping through the sugin the very rendering of the Academy Awards (2015). In arcane fields. Toward the end of that image. To present a the day, we sat down together on black family that is not a addition, the 44-year-old is a highthe porch of a 170-year-old slave caricature, but is very fully cabin and discussed her projdrawn in their humanity, is profile activist and the founder of ects, her activism, and her plans radical, unfortunately. for the future. I think, oftentimes, for ARRAY, a film collective that helps people who live in a place of privilege, it’s a challenge other women and people of colto strip away the notion of You’ve done films about justice to the very simple or distribute their films. ¶ Queen our prison system, the civilidea that this life matters rights movement, and the just like any other life. That’s Sugar, which premiered in early devastation of New Orleans what the Black Lives Matter after Hurricane Katrina. movement is about. It’s September on the Oprah Winfrey How does Queen Sugar a very core truth, and so Network, marks yet another milebuild on the issues you’ve much of what we are doing addressed in these works? here as women filmmakers stone, because DuVernay, as execuWith this project, I’m getting is to try to portray that truth into issues of representation cinematically. tive producer, hired an overwhelmand misrepresentation. We have a formerly When you think about the incarcerated individual as ingly diverse cast and crew and cinematic injustice that’s one of our main characters, been done to people of and we try to really pull only female directors for the 13color and women since the back the veil on him in dawn of the medium—look terms of what the lives part TV series. You wouldn’t think at a film like Birth of a of formerly incarcerated Nation of 1915 [D.W. Griffith’s people and their families are it’d take nearly a century for proracist epic] and the ways like. There’s a journalist who that images are used to writes about social-justice gressive Hollywood to make these disparage and misrepresent issues in the show, and she’s kinds of advances. But it has. ¶ the humanity of people. I following a case about plea PHOTO BY DANIELLE LEVITT / AUGUST

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bargaining, and pulling back the veil on the really, really unjust systemic patterns around plea bargains and people of color, people from low economic backgrounds. But all of that is secondary to the complete rendering of black people. That for me is the biggest political statement, if there is one. I heard that you showed a rough cut of the film last night to the actors, and it was very emotional. Some of them even broke down crying. Why do you think that happened? It think it goes back to the answer before. You have black actors watching images of black characters fully rendered. Not shadows of themselves, not caricatures, but fully rendered human beings with shades of dark and light, sinister, sincere, sympathetic, sociopathic—all of the things that we are as human beings. To see that presented in a way that is meaningful and purposeful and intentional—that is what the whole thing is about. The characters are not tangential to someone else’s main action. They are the center. I think it was emotional for the actors to take that in. And, also, it’s a little shocking that those kinds of characterizations are so rare.

The Queen Sugar crew is a varied group of around 125 men and women—young and old, Latinos, blacks, whites, and Asian Americans. During my visit many seemed aware of the importance of this production. One of the directors, Neema Barnette, walked around the set

smiling all day. The first black woman to direct a sitcom and the first to land a three-picture studio deal, she said to me, with a faintly incredulous look on her face, “Who does this, hiring all women?” She lowered her voice and added: “I thought I’d never live to see this day.” Even though blacks and other ethnic minorities make up 40 percent of the United States population, America’s stories are still told overwhelmingly by straight white men. DuVernay is dedicated to changing this. She believes that we cannot create a healthy and equitable society if the experiences of more than half of all Americans are excluded from the country’s most popular form of entertainment, the $130 billion film and TV industry.

I’ve heard about other producers, such as Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story) and J.J. Abrams (Lost, Roadies), who have pledged to double the number of women on their staffs, or more. Do you think that will happen? I think it’s going to take men who are feminists and who are in positions of power to say: “There’s more than my point of view. Let’s bring in a Latino, a Native, an Asian American, a Pacific Islander, or a black.” They’re going to have to bend a little to open the power base. But, like any effort, it’s going to take folks on all sides. There is definitely change afoot. I hope it’s not just a trend. It’s been talked about for years, the fact that this industry is mostly men. Now people are being called on the carpet. Now you are going to raise some eyebrows

12.5%

THE PERCENTAGE OF SPEAKING AND NAMED CHARACTERS WHO ARE BLACK IN MOVIES RELEASED IN 2014.

if you are producing 13 episodes of a TV series and there is not one woman director. That’s 50 percent of the population that you are basically ignoring— purposefully. It has to be on purpose. It’s not like female directors don’t exist. They are here, they are ready and willing and want to do the work. So, that’s discriminatory. So why is that important? How does having more female and Latino directors change national policy or create better laws? For me, the image is supreme over music or other kinds of art. When you close your eyes, when you dream, when I look at you, I see an image that I then process. It helps me behave in the world and in the moment. So if the images that are constructed and projected and amplified in society don’t include certain places and situations—if some people are absent—that affects future generations. If some people are rendered as caricatures or as less than human, that has a big effect. So, yes, I think it impacts policy and politics, culture. And you know, it’s just vital that we get that part right. Where does this deep sense of justice in you come from? Maybe from my aunt Denise, who was a nurse, and who really, in my early years, introduced me to the idea. When I think back to the first time when I felt any kind of activist leaning, it was with my aunt Denise taking me to an Amnesty International concert. I saw U2 perform. It was one of my first concerts, and the music and the meaning behind the songs— to be able to see art and music converge. I remember I had my little Amnesty sticker, and I joined, and I thought: “Wow. You can do something about things that aren’t right,” you know? I still have the souvenir book that Amnesty gave out. That’s funny that I remember that show. It had a big effect on me. So your aunt was an activist? Yeah. Just in the ways that some people are. True

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activism shows itself not necessarily through the artists or the leaders with the microphone. Nothing can be done if you don’t have the nurse who takes her niece to the thing, you know what I mean? Nothing can be done if you don’t have the people who walk with and behind King. Nothing can be done if everyone doesn’t rally around Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street or immigrant rights. You need that mass. You can’t dismiss the importance of the crowd, of the unsung heroes, of everyone who helps to move the needle. And now, you raise funds for the residents of Flint, Michigan; raise awareness about post-Hurricane Katrina problems; and agitate for #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite. How do you balance your art and activism? I do the things that are important or that resonate with me. Flint resonated with me. For whatever reason the idea of folks not having water emotionally resonated for me to the point that I wanted to do something. Issues of incarceration and mass criminalization really move me. I’m just finishing a documentary that I’ve been working on quietly for a while. After Selma, Netflix came to me and very generously asked what I might be interested in doing. They are like-minded people, and I said: “You know what? I want to make a doc. I want to do a definitive overview of the prison system and how we got here.” So they gave me a nice chunk of change and we went off with our indie crew and tried to tell the story. We interviewed Bryan Stevenson, we interviewed Michelle Alexander. We interviewed everyone from Angela Davis to Newt Gingrich to try to deconstruct it and to really make clear that prison is not a place where bad people go, which is what most Americans think. It’s this really insidious, unjust system that has been built over many generations, but something can be done about it.

And you use Twitter a lot. Yeah. Today I was trying to get some eyes on this New York Times op-ed about the language of incarceration— how when we call someone a felon it’s really branding them as second-class citizens. They’ve done their time. Why do we call them ex-cons? They were punished for whatever they did, rightly or wrongly. Now they should be free of the stigma and the box-checking. It’s something that I care about. I love having social media as a way to amplify things. I don’t have to have an interview; I can just point to something that means something to me.

On set, DuVernay was like the eye of a hurricane, calm in the midst of intense forces. Sometimes during our conversation, she’d talk and gesticulate with such emotion that her tiny braids would dance around her shoulders. You get the sense that DuVernay is not only passionate about things that mean a lot to her, but has had to defend her passions and positions repeatedly. Take Selma, for example. In making that film, DuVernay was the outsider who told the story of the civil-rights era through the eyes of the black men and women who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. It was the first major film about King, and, when it premiered in 2014, critics forecast that DuVernay would get an Oscar nomination, potentially doubling the number of female Best Director winners from one to two (Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker being the first). But not everyone was impressed. Director Quentin Tarantino condescendingly said that DuVernay “did a really good job in Selma, but Selma deserved an Emmy,” implying it was better suited for TV than the big screen. Harsher still was a Washington Post op-ed penned by Joseph Califano Jr., a former aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who claimed that Johnson, not King, came up with the idea of a march on Selma. Never mind that the distinguished historian Taylor Branch has pointed out that King purposely kept his plans for Selma from LBJ, “knowing that Johnson would not welcome his tactics of street protest.” The campaign to dis-

PHOTOS COURTESY OF OWN / ARRAY

credit the black female director had begun. And it continues.

This morning, a New York Times reporter sent me a quote by the director of this new film about LBJ [Robert Schenkkan, All the Way], and in the quote, which is about me, he says, “She’s a very talented filmmaker, she did a great job with King and Coretta, but her portrayal of LBJ was unfair because she portrayed him as someone who didn’t care about civil rights and I don’t believe any historian would agree with that.” This gets into the issue of truth and fact and perception, because this white male director’s perception of the facts of LBJ’s presidency—and I put

“facts” in air quotes—is perceived by him from a place of privilege. It’s perceived by me as the granddaughter of a civil-rights marcher. Yet he and folks in power who hold a similar view can disparage my perception and my comprehension of the quoteunquote facts, and call them lies, and not truths, because our perceptions are not the same. I’ve come up against this quite a bit. Do you think it’s because you’re a woman? I attribute it more to being black. I don’t think people lack comprehension. I don’t think people lack an understanding. But they lack an embracing of our differences. They want everyone to line up behind one way of thinking, which

I’m not going to do. You’re not going to ask permission. No. But I think it’s interesting that a different perspective is seen as a lie, not a truth, and I think that rhetoric can get you into a really dangerous place. I welcome people. I encourage people to see that man’s film. I encourage people to see my film. I encourage people to see any artist’s rendering of whatever and to investigate it and study it for yourself and see what you think about it, because that’s all that really matters in the end. What you think about it doesn’t have to be the same as what I think about it. I won’t think less of you because you think differently about it.

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The Many Milestones of

AVA DUVERNAY By Katie Kilkenny & Kathleen Sharp

1972 Born in Long Beach, DuVernay grows up about 15 miles south of Hollywood. West Side Story is the first time she remembers seeing a Latina actress (Rita Moreno) on screen.

1990 Graduates from St. Joseph High School, an exclusive allgirls Catholic school. Spends her weekends cruising her South Central neighborhood with friends at a time of heightened racial tension.

I sensed a change in you after Selma was locked out of Oscar contention in yet another all-white Best Director category, and you skipped the awards to attend a fundraiser you’d helped to organize for the people of Flint. Prior to that, you seemed really focused on getting your films completed in order to make a certain festival or award deadline. What was it like promoting Selma, given all the pressure and hype? I used to be a publicist in the film industry, so I knew what the awards season was. That wasn’t what I was chasing so much as bandwidth. I want my films to be seen. I want them to be distributed. I want them to be at the festival. I’ve seen so many beautiful black films sit in people’s drawers, not being seen,

not being talked about, not moving the needle, not doing anything. I just didn’t want that. My singular thought was, “I won’t allow my films not to be seen, considered, or amplified, even if I have to do it in a different way.” You know, I still struggle with awards, because I don’t really have a grasp on how I should feel about it. I’m not ambivalent, but when I walk a red carpet, it doesn’t do for me what it does for some of my colleagues, because, as a publicist, I used to get down on my hands and knees and roll out the red carpet. I know how all those photographers who are screaming your name got there. Someone had to call them, pitch them, write the media alert, send the media alert, check them in. So, unfortunately, a little bit of that shimmer doesn’t

shine as brightly for me as it does for others. I think in the Selma time, I found myself getting caught up in it. Part of the work is to amplify the work, but you can get caught up in it—like a hamster wheel. I think there’s a point where the amplification stops and the glorification begins so hardcore that it’s not healthy. It’s certainly not healthy when you’re an outsider, and just the whole #OscarsSoWhite thing. All I can say is I’m just over it. You know what I mean? Now that you’ve started working with major studios on high-stakes projects, is it harder for you to keep your vision and voice? It’s definitely been challenging to be talking with big companies about projects when there’s millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars at stake. The film I’m developing for Disney right now, A Wrinkle in Time, is a $100 million project. To try to keep one’s voice and keep what matters in play, I’ve just had to be really focused on the kind of projects and the people I want to be involved with. My intention is to be really rigorous in finding like-minded people and like-minded companies who want to tell the same kinds of stories that I do. Not every studio and every network wants to do it the same way. With Queen Sugar, it was Oprah

Winfrey’s network OWN that said, “We’ll give you the freedom to tell the story the way that you think it should be told.” There were a lot of companies coming my way, but not offering that freedom. Folks said, “Oh, why go there when you could have gone here, here, or here?” Those other places weren’t saying: “Be free. We just want to hear your voice.” The studio, Warner Horizon, was very, very supportive of that as well. I was really specific that I didn’t want a pilot, so we went straight to series, which is also worth noting because there are very few companies that give women that kind of space, particularly black women. So, I’m grateful for that. I think it’s really important to name-check the people and the companies that aren’t hiring us, and the companies that are. On the first two episodes, which I directed and wrote, there were no studio notes. There were no network notes either. It was literally going on air exactly how it came out of my brain, which is really rare in this industry. For me, it’s about hanging on to the fact that it’s possible for me to have that kind of freedom. I see many of my white male counterparts retaining their voice, so why can they do it and I can’t? Why is my voice one that should have to bend or be made smaller to fit into some kind of studio paradigm? I also just think you have

2008 Returns to a college hangout, the Good Life Café, to make the hip-hop documentary This Is the Life. Turns down distribution offers and makes her own DVDs for 75 cents each, selling them for $19.99.

2010 Releases her first feature film, I Will Follow (named for the U2 song), about a young woman who stops working to care for her dying aunt, a subject inspired by DuVernay’s own aunt Denise.

2010 Founds a cooperative film-distribution business, the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement, to close the gap in independent distribution for filmmakers of color.

2012 Becomes the first black woman to win the Sundance Film Festival Directing Award for Middle of Nowhere, a film about a woman of color who delays medical school while her husband serves time.

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1995 Lands an internship at CBS Evening News. The big story at the time was O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. DuVernay was assigned to sit outside a juror’s house and go through the garbage.

1995 Graduates from UCLA with a joint major in English and African-American studies. In her first job as a junior publicist at 20th Century Fox, works on films made primarily by white people.

to not really care about the money portion of it. A lot of the director game is to go from a $1 million movie to $5 million, to $10 million, to $25 million, and there’s a status that goes with having made a $100 million movie. But it just doesn’t matter to me as much. It makes things easier to have more money, but there’s always something that you want to do that you can’t do. There’s always some shot you want to get and the day is not cooperating. The sun is not going to wait for you no matter how much money you have. It’s going to go down. So I don’t chase it. And I think that has allowed me to always have a security blanket. I can say, “Let’s go make a $100,000 movie,” which I have many ideas for. One year I’m just going to make five $200,000 movies. I’ll take a crew for a year and just pound out the films. I mean, there are different ways to tell the story. The reason I love TV now, and Netflix and the collapsing windows and walls, is that my foremothers—women who directed, and the black folks who directed films before me—were really trapped in a segregated cinema. They were restricted in the kinds of films that they could make because of the tools. There was no digital; you had to shoot with a 35-millimeter. You had to get that camera, get that film, get the resources to process the film. It’s a very expensive medium.

But now, to be wrapped up in the money game when I can literally make a movie on my iPhone? It just doesn’t compute for me.

2015 Is the first female black director to have a film (Selma) nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but isn’t nominated for Best Director, a decision that disappointed many.

2015 Is celebrated by toy-maker Mattel with the holiday release of a special edition Ava DuVernay Barbie, which sells out within minutes.

I hear you’re casting some new faces to play the three time-traveling kids in A Wrinkle in Time. Yeah, they’ll be unknowns. My work is not based on any studio algorithm by which a certain actor is going to be hired to bring in more money. It’s based on a point-of-view and the way I want to tell this timeless story. The lovely thing about Disney and about working on a classic like this is that they are wisely saying it’s the property itself that’s the star. So it doesn’t have to have George Clooney in it, you know what I mean?

DuVernay is very deliberate with her projects and doesn’t stray far from her chosen path. She turned down the chance to direct Black Panther, a tentpole project based on the Marvel Comics character, and dropped out of a Steven Spielberg production whose timetable might have clashed with the schedule of A Wrinkle in Time. Meanwhile, she’s working on a murder mystery set in New Orleans that explores the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina. And her documentary about America’s grossly unfair prison system, The 13th, opened the New York Film Festival in September, the first time a non-fiction film was

1999 Forms her own agency marketing films to, by, and about people of color, among them Lumumba, Dreamgirls, and Invictus.

2006 Releases her first short film, Saturday Night Life, focused on a struggling single mother whose trip to a 99-cent-store turns unexpectedly uplifting.

THE PERCENTAGE OF THE 250 TOP-GROSSING FILMS THAT WERE DIRECTED BY WOMEN IN 2015, ACCORDING TO THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN IN TELEVISION AND FILMS.

selected for that coveted slot. Meanwhile, Oprah has been cast to play Mrs. Which in A Wrinkle in Time, Queen Sugar got picked up for a second, 16-episode season, DuVernay’s distribution firm ARRAY has inked a deal with Netflix, and there are other pet projects—far too many to discuss today. The late afternoon sun is slanting across the porch, and I spy an assistant hovering in the background, waiting for the right time to break this up. The director and I are deep in conversation, sitting across from each other knee-to-knee in the golden light. Red-winged blackbirds dart under the branches of oak trees, embroidering the air with song. A lizard scampers across the floorboards. DuVernay doesn’t move, but clearly she is needed back on set.

One last question. After working for months on a huge production like this, how do you take care of

2016 Makes a point of hiring only women to direct the first 13 episodes of the OWN Network drama Queen Sugar, which is picked up for a second season before it even premieres.

yourself and re-fill the creative well? [Throwing her head back, she laughs.] I don’t do that very well. I don’t do it very well at all. I think that’s coming more to light for me with the passing of my father [in March]. Because he didn’t live to work, he worked to live. He worked to enjoy everything outside of work, whereas my work is my life and I really enjoy it, so in some ways I feel like, well, I’m living my dream. I’m happy. There’s no other way I’d want to be spending my day, and yet I know that I could definitely have more balance in life. So it’s something that I’m going to do as soon as I finish these next nine projects.

•KATHLEEN SHARP is an

award-winning journalist, the author of four books, and a film producer. She writes regularly for Smithsonian, the New York Times, and others. @KSHARPAUTHOR

2016 Becomes the first woman of color to direct a live-action movie with a production budget over $100 million, the forthcoming feature A Wrinkle in Time.

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THE BUFFALOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BURDEN Photographs by MICHELLE MCCARRON

{

Text by CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

Bison grazing on the Blacktail Deer Plateau, an important feeding ground in Yellowstone National Park.

ONE MORNING, YEARS AGO, WHILE CAMPED AT THE WESTERN EDGE OF YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, I awoke to a rich wildanimal stench. A smell of upturned earth and wet fur filled the air, and in my half-sleep I perceived what seemed to be a wall blocking the sky that hadn’t been there when I’d gone to bed. Unzipping the tent, I was stunned to see 1,500 pounds of towering, living flesh: an adult bison, no more than three feet from my nose, gently ignoring me as it nibbled on the grass, its great god-like head dreadlocked with mud and swaying softly as it ate. And at the sight of the creature I found myself frightened and awed and full of love and respect and a desire to talk. “Hey bud,” I said. Then I became aware of a low grunting and snorting in the quiet of the forest, and the sound of many mouths chewing, many hooves pawing and prodding and moving about. It was springtime, when the bison migrate to calv-

ing grounds, and a herd had surrounded my tent. But it moved on quickly, and when the animals had passed beyond the narrow view afforded by the tent door, I stumbled half-naked into the light and followed them to the edge of the Madison River, which they forded in a kind of snorting conga line. There were 50 or so, mothers and bulls and calves, and there was power and grace and terribleness in their crossing of the water. The Yellowstone bison population—consisting of around 4,900 animals—is an extraordinary example of the preservation of a species that might have been lost. In the 19th century, as the white man descended on the West with his rifles and railroads and shrewd business sense, tens of millions of bison were slaughtered for the sale of skins and meat back East. A more sinister motivator than greed was also at work: the goal of crushing the rebellious Plains Indians by removing their supply of food. The slaughter of the bison, called, colloquially, the buffalo, ranks as one of the largest and most rapid losses of biomass at the hand of man in modern history. A few stragglers

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survived. Their descendants—those that have been continuously living in the wild, the only genetically pure and free-roaming bison today—are the ones living in Yellowstone. This is a fraction of the estimated 30 to 60 million bison that once roamed North America. The wild bison is ecologically extinct throughout its former range. There are, of course, hundreds of thousands of buffalo in this country stuck behind fences, domesticated for meat production, often adulterated with cattle genes through interbreeding. They are not true bison. They do not roam; they are not free. In May 2016, President Barack Obama signed into law the National Bison Legacy Act, which declares the species Bison bison to be our national mammal, the ambassador of the wild American West. This may mean something to the American people, but it is meaningless to the bison. The irony is that the legislation does nothing to protect the Yellowstone buffalo, the most iconic herd of wild ungulates in the nation. And make no mistake, it is a herd under assault. Another iconic figure of the West, the cowboy, has organized a regime of persecution against the Yellowstone bison, and the National Park Service, under pressure from the politically powerful cattle industry, has implement-

ed it. Stockmen who graze their cows on public lands adjacent to the park claim that bison carry a disease that threatens the health of their cattle. There is no scientific basis for this claim. There is not a single documented case of the disease, brucellosis, being transferred from wild bison to cows. Nevertheless, the fate of our national mammal is being decided by ranchers who seem to think bison are the enemy, science be damned. As a result of a lawsuit filed against the Park Service in the 1990s by the Montana Department of Livestock, the Interagency Bison Management Plan was created to facilitate cooperative decision-making among stakeholders, which today include the Park Service, several Montana state agencies, and three tribal entities—but the bison have no voice. Under the IBMP, bison that roam outside the Yellowstone park boundaries face a multitude of abuses. Some are harassed back into the park by men on horseback, in pick-up trucks, and even in helicopters. Some are captured, quarantined, and tested for brucellosis. Some are sent to slaughter, whether they have the disease or not. Since the animals are not supposed to roam beyond park boundaries, the National Park Service, along with other IBMP agencies, must cull (read: kill) a percentage of the herd annually—in recent years, it’s been about 20 percent—to keep the population within what they claim is the park’s carrying capacity.

•CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM is a freelance writer based in Boise, Idaho. •MICHELLE MCCARRON is an Irish-American photographer and nature advocate. @MMCPHOTO

We’re talking about the National Park Service— whose mission includes preserving “native wildlife species and the processes that sustain them,” whose logo is emblazoned with the figure of a bison—helping to kill hundreds of healthy wild bison each year because ranchers fear transmission of a disease that has never once been documented to have been transferred to cattle in the wild. Not only does the Bison Legacy Act fail to protect the last wild buffalo herd, it ensures the persecution will continue. “Nothing in this Act,” it states, “shall be construed or used as a reason to alter, change, modify, or otherwise affect any plan, policy, management decision, regulation, or other action by the Federal Government.” While people across the country were busy celebrating the 100th anniversary of the national parks this year, our national mammal was being demonized, brutalized, and effectively caged in what amounts to a Yellowstone National Zoo. If this is the sum of respect for our nation’s great symbols, then I say killing wild bison is no different than burning an American flag.

1/ Catcher Cuts the Rope and his son Conan Cuts the Rope, from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, and a bear dancer from the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes protesting the bison slaughter at the state capitol in Helena, Montana. The banner behind them reads “Love the Buffalo, Let Them Roam.” 2/ A pair of Yellowstone bison in the park in winter. In heavy snow years, bison migrate out of the park to find winter forage at lower elevations, where ranchers fear they may make contact with cattle and infect them with brucellosis.

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1/ Stephany Seay, bison advocate and media coordinator for the Buffalo Field Campaign, a nonprofit public-interest group that works to stop the slaughter of the Yellowstone bison and protect their habitat both within and beyond the park. 2/ Bison at the edge of Highway 191, which runs along the western border of Yellowstone National Park. Numerous bison are killed every year by vehicles on this highway, which interrupts their migration route to spring calving grounds.Â Sometimes Park Service employees, along with Montana Department of Livestock and Montana fish and game officers, will haze the animals back inside park boundaries. 3/ The town of Gardiner, Montana, at the northern entrance to Yellowstone. In the winter and spring, it is common to see bison all around Gardiner, where they are subject to being shot by ranchers, or by members of native tribes, who are, by treaty rights, the only people legally allowed to hunt bison as they leave the park.

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1/ Bison await shipment to slaughter after being processed and tested for brucellosis by Park Service employees at the Stephens Creek facility, located at the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park.

2/ Bison-blood samples taken by Yellowstone park biologists for brucellosis testing. Brucellosis causes cows to abort, and bison are being blamed for spreading the disease among cattle, even though there has never been a recorded case of transmission from wild bison to cows. 3/ Angie Stewart (left) and Doug Blanton (right), Yellowstone park biologists, and Kevin Dooley, a park ranger, use prods to force bison toward a trailer for transport to a slaughter facility.

4/ A Yellowstone ranger at the Stephens Creek facility prods bison into a series of chutes for processing and testing. 5/ A bison in the squeeze chute at Stephens Creek, where the animal will be weighed and have blood drawn. The testing can only confirm brucellosis exposure, not infection. Some animals may test positive because of the presence of antibodies, an indication that they are developing resistance to the disease.

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BORN I DENTITY O n e s o l d i e r ’s s t o r y o f t r a n s i t i o n .

BY DENI ELLIS BÉCHARD photos by Bryan Anton

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STYLING BY RAUL GUERRERO

N THE MOUNTAINS

of eastern Afghanistan, Sergeant Major Edward Long of the United States Army, his French guard, and six Afghan National Police officers were on a training operation to arrest a group of insurgents that the Army had identified as mid- to low-level operators. They were following a sanitation canal between qal’ats—the mud-walled compounds around many homes— when a machine gun opened fire. Long threw himself into the canal. His French guard dropped to his knee to return fire and was instantly killed. Three of the Afghan police were shot, and the rest fled. Long was alone, armed with an M4 assault rifle and a pistol. The canal—filled with human excrement and trash: water bottles, candy wrappers, the bones of

slaughtered animals—was just deep enough to protect him. There was no way to retreat without exposing himself. Bullets struck so close they threw mud into his face. On the second floor of a house 150 meters away, he saw the muzzle flash of the machine gun. He’d spent decades in the infantry and trained alongside Special Forces, and he knew that if his attackers had received proper instruction, they would have waited until his team was closer and then fired down, killing them all. Instead, the angle of fire allowed Long to use the canal for cover. Staring through his rifle scope, he returned fire, forcing his breathing to slow, holding his breath when he pulled the trigger. Each magazine held 30 bullets, and he did not want to waste them. He was trying to reload quickly and avoid jamming his rifle with mud when two insurgents appeared between the qal’ats. He dropped his M4 and grabbed his pistol. In his telling of the story, he hesitated before saying, “I put them down.” After 14 minutes in the ditch—“it felt like hours,” he recalled—a team of French soldiers and Afghan police surrounded the house, killing several insurgents and capturing the rest.

That night, in his room at Forward Operating Base Morales-Frazier, at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains, Long pulled off his equipment. Mud and bullet casings fell out of his clothes. He stripped to the sports bra he wore to prevent his body armor from rubbing against the small breasts that were coming in, as tender as a pubescent girl’s—so sensitive that “even the water from the shower hurt.” Over the days that followed, he shared the trauma of the firefight with a group of female soldiers. Since his arrival, they had been his allies—the only people on the base who knew that, prior to his assignment to Afghanistan, he had begun a gender transition and had been planning on leaving the military after nearly 30 years of service to start a life as a woman—as Jennifer.

DWARD LONG

joined the Army at the age of 18, propelled by a sense of patriotism and a desire to prove his masculinity. As a 10-year-old, Edward used to watch his mother doing needlepoint, and one day he asked to be taught. His mother was confused by the request, saying, “Don’t you want to do something else?” Edward insisted, and, as his mother showed him

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how to do it, he enjoyed sliding the needle through the cloth. When his father— an Anglo-Irishman who worked in trucking, on the loading docks—got home, he shouted that his son shouldn’t behave like a girl and called him a faggot. Two years later, Edward took some clothes from his mother and sister, among them a bra and a top, and alone in his room he enjoyed putting them on. He kept them hidden under his mattress, but his mother eventually found them and told his father. “He cracked me a couple of times really good,” Jennifer recalled, sitting across from me at her kitchen table in Kearny, New Jersey. (For the sake of clarity and by Long’s agreement, I will use the pronoun associated with the gender she is expressing at any given point in the story.) Her yellow dress had floral designs, and her dark auburn hair fell just below her shoulders. Over the course of several conversations, she returned to this story repeatedly, each time sharing more details: “That was a terrifying experience. You’re experimenting at an early age, and you don’t know why. There are things that you want to experience but you can’t. You get caught, and there are consequences. Those consequences spin you off into a life of feeling awful about it.” Edward enlisted in 1983, when the Army still classified transgenderism as a psychosexual disorder. His attraction to the military aligned him with some striking statistics. Transgender Americans are about twice as likely to join as cisgender people (those whose self-identified gender conforms with 48

E DWA R D L O N G JOINED THE A R M Y AT T H E AGE OF 18, PROPELLED BY A SENSE OF PAT R I O T I S M AND A DESIRE TO PROVE HIS M A S C U L I N I T Y.

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their biological sex). According to a 2014 study by the Williams Institute at the University of California–Los Angeles School of Law, 32 percent of transgender women assigned male at birth had enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces, compared to 19.7 percent of cisgender men. As for transgender men assigned female at birth, 5.5 percent had enlisted, which is about three times the rate for cisgender women. An estimated 8,800 transgender people were on active duty in 2014, with an additional 6,700 in the National Guard or Reserves. The entire transgender military community, including veterans, was estimated at nearly 150,000. “We join because sometimes we’re trying to overcompensate,” Jennifer explained to me. “If we become gladiators and warriors, we can justify to ourselves that we are men.” These statistics appear to corroborate the research of Dr. George Brown, a psychiatry resident at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the 1980s. After counseling male patients who identified as women, he wondered why they would join an organization that viewed them as having a disorder, and would discharge them if they revealed their true gender identity. In 1988 he published “Transsexuals in the Military: Flight into Hypermasculinity,” defining hypermasculinity as a state characterized by frantic preoccupation with the need to prove manliness. In his paper, he compares interviews with 11 transgender patients, eight of them enlisted soldiers, theorizing that military service affords a male-tofemale transgender indi-

vidual a means of “purging his feminine self” and becoming, in their words, “a real man.” Brown speculated that the masculine roles available in the Armed Forces resulted in “a higher prevalence of transsexualism in the military than in the civilian population.” A growing body of research has supported this view, calling the military’s longtime ban on transgender soldiers into question, and on June 30th of this year, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter repealed it, announcing that transgender people can serve openly. It was a major victory in the American transgenderrights movement, which began to coalesce in 1959, with a clash between transgender people and police at a Los Angeles donut shop. Clashes occurred again in San Francisco in 1966 and in New York City in 1969, during the Stonewall Riots—perceived by many as the birth of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. The 1970s saw more organized activism, and, in 1975, Minneapolis was the first city to pass a law preventing discrimination against transgender people. Organizing, advocacy, lobbying, and marches throughout the 1990s brought transgender issues national attention, and, since then, 20 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted employment non-discrimination laws that cover gender identity. The 2000s saw the first openly transgender mayor as well as presidential appointees, and, in the 2010s, there have been federal protections for transgender employees and Medicare coverage for sex re-assignment surgery. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association replaced the diagnosis of “gender

identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria” in an effort to “avoid stigma and ensure clinical care for individuals who see and feel themselves to be a different gender than their assigned gender.” Many of these changes were taking place unbeknownst to Edward Long, who rose through the ranks in the 1980s and ’90s, seeking out the most challenging and traditionally masculine roles available. He served as a drill instructor, was assigned to Fort Benning and later Fort Jackson, and, after a few years, met a sergeant major—Vietnam-era Special Forces—who got him an interview with the 11th Group Special Forces at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. Despite Edward’s extensive training, he lacked the Airborne qualifications of a paratrooper, and was sent to Staten Island to join a National Guard unit—a six-man long-range surveillance attachment whose job was deep reconnaissance. He received his Airborne badge there and went on to lead the team, which comprised some of the top non-commissioned officers in the state. They did training missions with Special Forces, traveling to Puerto Rico, Panama, Antigua, Canada, Germany, and Iceland. When Desert Storm began, they were sent to the Georgia National Guard, and spent months awaiting a deployment that never came. Edward was married twice during this time, and, after his unit dissolved in the wake of Desert Storm, he held a number of military positions in quick succession. Trips away, frequent moves, and lean pay wore down his marriages, and a 2004 deployment to

Guantanamo resulted in his second divorce. He ran prison security at Gitmo—a job he hated for its long hours and oppressive conditions, stationed inside a small room without a window, staring at security monitors and computer screens. During those years, he found small ways to intermittently express Jennifer. He would cross-dress alone for a few days at a time before shame and disgust overcame him. He didn’t understand why he was drawn to women’s clothes. “It would come and go,” Jennifer explained to me. “Sometimes it was in my face every day for a month or a week. Sometimes I wouldn’t think about it for a month. As I got older, it was more prevalent.” The one pleasure Edward could maintain in public was clean, more delicate-looking hands. He’d let his fingernails grow a little and took his time filing them, squaring the ends. One Sunday, after his second divorce and years after his father’s death, he and his mother had dinner. When he reached for a dish, she grabbed his hand. “What’s up with these nails?” she asked. That night, as soon as he got home, he cut them off. Years later, in Afghanistan—after his decision to change genders had been made—he maintained a single long pinky nail that he polished like a talisman: a promise to Jennifer that, after serving this one final tour, she would have the opportunity to live the life she should have been living all along.

DWARD returned

from Gitmo in 2005, and found himself alone

in an empty apartment in New Jersey. His attraction to feminine objects grew stronger, and he increasingly turned to Jennifer for comfort, struggling all the while to understand his impulse to be what many still called a transvestite. The Internet provided validation. “The earlier part of my life, where was I going to get information from? There was nowhere you could go. Here, with the Internet, in the privacy of the house,” Jennifer told me, “I was trying to find a definition of who I was. I started to read the psychology behind it and found the word transgender.” Inside the apartment, she lived as Jennifer, but each time Edward had to work, he hid the women’s clothes in an Army backpack filled with gear, which he put in a duffle loaded with more gear, which he hid in the closet under a stack of military equipment. Returning home one afternoon, he saw that he’d left a pair of heels out in the bedroom. Overwhelmed with panic, he rushed to hide them. Only after he’d finished concealing them and sat down to clear his mind did the truth become apparent: He lived alone. No one else had a key. “So I realized it was safe. I’m OK. I got the damn shoes out and put them back out in the bedroom and left them there.” The rapidly expanding Internet taught her that she wasn’t alone. There were other transgender people, and clubs where they hung out. But Jennifer had never existed outside of the house. She had to find a way to bring herself into the world. Though she was more than ready to put

the manly soldier behind her, her infantry training inclined her toward doing a little reconnaissance first. So she “played the part of Ed” and visited a club she’d found online. She met a woman there who encouraged her to return, and, a week later, Jennifer put on a blouse and skirt and a small white jacket. She did her make-up. She looked out the window, afraid of running into her neighbors or landlord. “It was easier to jump out of an airplane the first time than it was to turn that doorknob. My knees were shaking, my heart was racing. Everything was just so overwhelming. It was March. For God’s sake, when you’re standing outside in the cool air in a skirt for the first time, it’s a little invigorating. You feel the breeze.” She drove to Manhattan. It was a struggle just to get out of the car. But once she did, she realized that the beauty of New York is that nobody notices you. She made her way down the sidewalk, trying to avoid the cracks in her high heels. In the club, she saw her friend from the previous week, and, for the first time, spoke the words, “Hi, I’m Jennifer.” It was at this moment that Jennifer became real. The friend asked if she was into guys or girls, but Jennifer didn’t know. She’d never thought about it.

HEN SHE was

Jennifer, she felt as if she’d always been a woman. It was Edward who suddenly seemed like a story: the one she needed to hide. She began to engage with the world

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differently, to show more compassion and emotion, to be more maternal. She was relieved to no longer have to be the gruff man hanging out with the guys. But as much as she loved being Jennifer, the reality of transitioning was something she came to hate. “The Middle World,” she called it. She spent weekends living like a woman, only to find herself in men’s work clothes on Monday morning, sobbing at the sink as she removed her nail polish. She had two sets of friends—two sets of everything—and had to be more covert than ever to keep her two lives from intersecting. At the club, she met the man who would become her first boyfriend—a 6’3” attorney. With him, she experienced her first kiss. She was a teenage girl in the body of a 43-year-old man. The first time he stayed over, she was wearing a wig and didn’t know how she would get through the night with it on. When he reached up and took it off, she began to cry, and he held her. It was the first time she truly felt safe with another person. They dated for a year and a half, until 2008, when Edward was deployed to Iraq. He was sent to Camp Bucca in Basra Province and put in command of 450 Ugandan military contractors, managing patrols and perimeter security. His bunkmate was a fellow soldier with whom he’d shared a room and office in Cuba. Off duty, Edward sat for hours on a camp stool, shielded by the lockers they’d placed between their beds for privacy. He watched DVDs or read emails, got lost in his thoughts or cried when it felt safe to let emotions 50

overcome him. He was trapped. If he came out or was found out, he would lose his career and social standing. His friends took their gender and sexual desires for granted and had never had that freedom challenged. He knew they wouldn’t empathize. Jennifer stopped in the middle of her story and asked me to imagine giving up my career and friends so that I could live the gender that felt natural to me. Would I suppress my desires in order to keep everything I’d built? Or could I make peace with walking away from a life of hardearned skills and respect? Month after month, sitting on the camp stool, Edward came to realize that the question was no longer whether he would transition, but how. When he came home from Iraq, he resumed life as Jennifer and began taking hormones: spironolactone to depress testosterone levels and estradiol to introduce estrogen. Soon she was on an emotional roller coaster, pitched headlong into the intensity of a second puberty. Her chest grew itchy and then sore, her body hair and muscle mass diminishing as her skin softened. In 2010, a year after starting hormones, she got word that Edward had been assigned to Kapisa Province to advise the French military’s training of the Afghan police. She was horrified. The “Middle World” had already been hard, and, on a few occasions, she, like many people in transition who suffer from isolation, had considered suicide. She was well on her way to a new life. She’d been removing her facial hair, and her breasts were so tender that once, during pre-deploy-

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ment training, she had to wrap her chest with an ACE bandage so she could put on body armor. In Afghanistan, she was Edward again, though he spent more time with the women on the base, as well as a bisexual male soldier he met through them—the only other LGBTQ person he encountered in his years of service. Eventually, he felt safe enough to tell them about Jennifer. Edward’s work in the field involved overseeing police training, station construction, and distribution of pay to Afghan forces. He was almost killed by a rocketpropelled grenade during a meeting with village elders, and had to throw himself over a wall to escape. Weeks later, he would find himself lying in the garbage-strewn canal, firing back at attackers who had, just minutes before, shot and killed his guard—an experience Jennifer would struggle to recall clearly every time we spoke. Two months after that attack, Edward returned stateside and filed to resign. The process took longer than anticipated, because— as Jennifer explained to me—soldiers often want to quit after overseas deployment, and the Army tries to give them time to cool down and settle into a new job. But she was more than ready to leave Edward behind.

NE MORNING,

back in New Jersey, Jennifer picked up the phone to hear her mother crying on the other end. “What is this? Is this a joke?” she shouted in between sobs. Her mother had found Jennifer’s Facebook page. As more people in her life accepted her as Jennifer,

the overlapping connections to Edward’s profile had pointed the way. After several phone conversations, they met. It was the first time her mother saw Jennifer in person. Jennifer explained a life of covering up, of trying to be the son her parents wanted despite how unnatural it felt. Her mother listened intently, and, after Jennifer was done, she took her in her arms and held her as only a mother can. She told Jennifer she loved her. Later, when Jennifer was in the process of legally changing her name, she asked her mother to choose a new middle name for her. Her mother chose her own: Marie. The court papers for the name change went through faster than the military discharge, and suddenly Jennifer’s driver’s license read Jennifer Marie Long and her military ID Sergeant Major Edward Long. While waiting for her discharge, she worked in battalion operations—“another one of those tough-guy divisions.” She was so far along in her transition now that she felt she was reverse cross-dressing in order to play the part. Some of her co-workers started to notice things, making comments like, “Dude, don’t you have to fucking shave?” or “Doing too much landscaping there, pal?” in reference to her eyebrows. Near the end of July, one of the guys saw the resemblance between Edward’s and Jennifer’s Facebook profile photographs. Overnight, Edward became the butt of jokes. Men he’d known for years turned their backs. His bunkmate from Cuba and Iraq wouldn’t speak to her. Two weeks later, the bureau-

cratic logjam cleared, and her retirement request was processed. A sergeant major, being the highest non-commissioned rank, normally retires with ceremony and the gift of a sword or a plaque. But as Jennifer handed in her equipment, men who might once have taken a bullet for Edward ignored her. The day she turned in her paperwork, she put on make-up, a dress, and a wig, and drove to Fort Dix. She was no longer willing to be Edward for their sake. The woman in human resources was a civilian, and, because of Jennifer’s legal name change, agreed to process her out as Jennifer, giving her a retiredmilitary ID card that read Jennifer Marie Long. She handed her a flag in a box. “When I left that building that day, there were other peers and guys I knew in the halls. Nobody came to shake my hand. Nobody came to say goodbye. Nobody said, ‘Thanks for your service.’ I ended my career with a flag in a box.”

IFE OUTSIDE the

military will not necessarily be safer for Jennifer than serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Transgender women in the U.S. are about four times more at risk of violent death than cisgender women, with transgender murder rates having reportedly almost doubled in 2015. Transgender veterans face increased risks of homelessness and suicide. Because they are members of two of society’s more vulnerable groups, the challenges are compounded. There is no way of knowing how many transgender

soldiers were discharged from the military before the ban was repealed earlier this year. No record was kept of the number of expulsions, or the reasons given—whether medical or behavioral. Those who received less-than-honorable discharges—as was the case with gay service members prior to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—were disqualified from receiving tuition assistance and, in some cases, access to health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Individuals re-entering society with anything less than an honorable discharge on the papers they present to potential employers may be stigmatized and stymied for the rest of their lives, shadowed by questions about the reasons for the discharge. Because she’d attained the rank of sergeant major and completed a number of tours, Jennifer was not at risk of losing her benefits. She believed that the military wouldn’t give anything other than an honorable discharge to a sergeant major, and, in her case, she was right. As a veteran, she was finally able to speak openly. She worked with the American Civil Liberties Union on a New Jersey law that would protect the privacy of trans people by allowing birth certificates to be changed without being labeled “amended.” The bill passed the state assembly and senate, only to be vetoed by Governor Chris Christie. Jennifer then tried to amend her DD214, the military record of service used in civilian life when applying to college or jobs. With the ACLU’s help, she and another veteran requested that their DD214 forms be updated

SHE SPENT WEEKENDS LIVING LIKE A WOMAN, O N LY T O F I N D HERSELF IN MEN’S WORK CLOTHES O N M O N DAY MORNING, S O B B I N G AT THE SINK AS SHE REMOVED HER NAIL POLISH.

to reflect their genders. Traditionally, the review board would only change the form in the event that an entry or omission was erroneous or unjust. The board decided that neither was the case and denied the request. However, Francine Blackmon, deputy assistant secretary of the Army, overturned the vote, based, in part, on Jennifer’s explanation of how much the document affects her life. “I just wanted it to reflect who I am now,” Jennifer told me, “so that it honors me and my service, and I don’t have to tell the story of being transgender to everyone.” TAVA, the Transgender American Veterans Association, now offers instruction sheets and guidance for changing the DD214 on the basis that the presence of an old name reveals a person’s transgender status, and therefore constitutes an injustice. During her transition, Jennifer completed a college degree in finance, and, after her discharge, she became a financial advisor. In 2013, she joined her local VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars). Most of the members had done a tour or two. She was among the few career soldiers, and, in 2014, she was elected the post’s first female commander in its 91-year history. No one at the VFW knew she was transgender—until a local paper ran an article about her activism and transition. She was apprehensive that her VFW peers might turn on her, but the veterans’ response was markedly different from that of her fellow soldiers on active duty. A few veterans said they were shocked to learn she hadn’t always been a woman, but they already had an established relationship with Jennifer, and she had earned their respect. They

had never known Edward, whereas her colleagues in the military had known only Edward, and may have felt lied to or betrayed by him. Jennifer’s experience with the VFW suggests that, once people know a transgender individual in their target gender and have worked with them, they are more likely to accept them. She has since been elected VFW district commander and re-elected to a third term as post commander. Media and online interactions can also create a sense of familiarity, and society’s changing attitudes toward LGBTQ people may be fueled, in part, by media-generated empathy. The caricature of the drag queen has faded, and not conforming to one’s birth gender is gaining wider acceptance in our culture. Transgender characters are now featured in young adult novels and television series. In 2013, former Navy SEAL Kristin Beck published a memoir about her transition, and, in 2015, Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn Jenner. Progress in LGBTQ rights helped pave the way for these changes: the 2011 repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the legal battles and activism leading to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right. In July 2015, a year before the military ban on transgender people was lifted, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter had announced a de facto moratorium on judgments against transgender soldiers. Questions abounded: Could genetic females who transitioned to men serve in the infantry, which was open only to men? Could biological males who identified as women remain in the infan52

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try? That December, when Carter declared all combat roles available to women, such questions became irrelevant; the path for transgender soldiers to serve in all branches of the military had been cleared. Carter’s June 30th announcement that transgender people can serve openly was informed by a RAND Corporation report commissioned by the Department of Defense, which summarized the policies of the United Kingdom, Canada, Israel, and Australia, all of which allow transgender soldiers to serve openly. The four have only slight differences in approach. In Australia, for instance, after a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, soldiers may begin a “social transition,” during which time they live publicly as the target gender and begin using the appropriate name, identification cards, uniforms, housing, showers, and restrooms. The report also looked to foreign militaries to help determine the effect transgender soldiers might have on group cohesion, citing a longstanding concern that “if service members discover that a member of their unit is transgender, this could inhibit bonding within the unit, which, in turn, would reduce operational readiness.” But no such problems with cohesion have been reported in studies done by foreign militaries, according to RAND, and similar concerns regarding gay and lesbian personnel have not been borne out since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Under the military’s new policy, recruits will be required to wait 18 months after transitioning to ensure stability in their new gender. The RAND report

estimates that 29 to 129 transgender soldiers will seek transition-related treatment each year, including sex re-assignment surgery. It cites “a consensus among clinicians and their professional organizations that transitionrelated treatment with hormones or surgery constitutes necessary health care,” either to diminish suffering or to help achieve self-actualization. The military has committed to paying these costs, which the report evaluates as minimal: only $2.4 to $8.4 million annually from the roughly $50 billion budget of the Defense Health Agency, which provides health care to all branches of the military and their families. The same treatment may also become available through the Department of Veterans Affairs and be provided for the first time by VA hospitals. Had this sea change in the military happened earlier, Jennifer most certainly would have been spared years of stress, including those long hours on the camp stool in Iraq, trying to determine how to be herself without losing everything she had worked for. If the stigma against trans soldiers had not been institutionalized, she might have continued to provide her expertise to the military or been able to maintain the friendships she had built there, possibly generating even higher levels of cohesion and readiness among her unit. She would have had the opportunity to show that patriotism and leadership do not require being a tough guy, and that no gender identity is an impediment to being an exceptional and exceptionally honorable soldier.

The Department of Defense released a document, effective October 1st, 2016, that provides information on how to integrate and support transgender soldiers and those who are transitioning. It will also need to address whether those who received lessthan-honorable discharges can have their records updated and benefits reinstated—as has been done for some gay and lesbian veterans since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. (A Department of Defense spokesman said those policies are currently being worked out.) Jennifer points out that progress also needs to be made at VA hospitals, where she has had to educate nurses and doctors about transgender medical issues and even had to explain to them why she didn’t need a Pap smear. The military’s new transgender policy hasn’t been without pushback. Just as the Internet has opened our eyes to the humanity of the transgender Americans living alongside us—and has taught us that trans people have existed throughout history—the online world has also given voice to conservative groups threatened by change. It’s difficult for some to understand how the military, largely perceived as a bastion of conservatism, could take such a significant step toward inclusion. The Internet creates echo chambers and silos in which people reinforce each others’ prejudices and become comfortable voicing them, galvanizing a hate that might explain the increase in violence against transgender people. While millions of cisgender Americans have learned to accept transgender people, transgender people have be-

come lightning rods for conservative rage. Following North Carolina’s example, many states are challenging the federal government’s recent expansion of transgender rights. There are even reports of vigilantes who watch over bathrooms and harass people who appear not to conform to gender norms. Jennifer believes that, ultimately, the military’s decision will move social acceptance forward and that the military may even be ahead of much of the private sector in terms of its treatment of transgender people. She also thinks that the new policies will allow the military to retain more talent. “I did the job well, on hormones, in a foreign country,” she says of her tour in Afghanistan. “We are one of 19 nations now that have open transgender service,” she is quick to point out. “We are not blazing the trail.” But Jennifer is. Increasingly celebrated for her advocacy, she has received the ACLU Torchbearer Award for Activism and has been invited to speak for Transgender Awareness Day at Bergen Community College and for LGBT Month at Picatinny Arsenal, one of the country’s oldest military installations. And yet, as the commander of her VFW post, she traveled to North Carolina earlier this year for a VFW convention, where, despite all she has endured and achieved as a transgender soldier and civilian, she had to risk arrest and harassment for using the bathroom corresponding to her gender.

•DENI ELLIS BÉCHARD is

the author of five books. He recently published Into the Sun. @DENIBECHARD

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THE B AT T L E FOR THE G R E AT APES WITH SEVERAL INCREMENTAL VICTORIES BEHIND THEM, ANIMAL-RIGHTS ADVOCATES ARE MAKING THEIR BIGGEST PUSH YET: TO EXPAND THE DEFINITION OF A PERS ON. BY GEORGE JOHNSON photos by YADID LEVY

ON A HOT SUMMER D AY at the end of January, I walked up Calle Borges from Plaza Cortázar (surrealist writers are honored in these parts) for my first visit to the Buenos Aires Zoo. As a boy, Borges himself came this way to gaze through the bars at the Bengal tiger—a beast so fantastic that it lodged itself in his imagination, haunting him ever after in his words and dreams. I passed quickly by the pony rides and the man selling balloons at the wrought-iron entryway, and past Lago Darwin, where pink flamingos swam. Past the dark reptilario, torpid with snakes and lizards. Past the bears and the lions and the cheetah and the ocelot. And finally, just beyond the towering condor cage, I saw her: redheaded Sandra, who, in the eyes of some humans, has become the world’s most important ape. Last year, to the delight of animalrights advocates, a Buenos Aires judge ruled that Sandra is a “non-human person” and a “sentient being”—a bearer

Inside the locked gates of what was once the Buenos Aires Zoo.

of legal rights. Just what that means is still a matter of dispute. But, in the meantime, the case has been hailed by activists as a milestone in civil rights— another sign that human society may be ready to expand its embrace, recognizing great apes and perhaps other species as more than just things. Standing before the glass wall of Sandra’s enclosure, I looked across an empty moat into her open-air habitat—one of those Flintstones-like rockscapes that in the 1960s began replacing barred cages in the architecture of zoos. There she was, sitting alone in the shade of an artificial cliff, hiding beneath her blanket. Unlike the screaming chimpanzees nearby, orangutans are quiet creatures that guard their privacy. This was an animal I could identify with. While waiting for her to show her face, I tried to decipher the educational signage. Orangutans, which live in reduced numbers in Sumatra and Borneo, are known by the natives as hombres del bosque—“men of the forest.” Threatened with extinction, their hope for survival lies in conservación and sustentable de su hábitat. The sign, like almost everything else at the zoo, was sponsored by Coca-Cola. As I puzzled over the words, I glimpsed from the corner of my eye a flicker of movement. Sandra? But it was just a reflection of a boy who had come with his family to see the orangutan. They quickly grew bored and moved on. It wasn’t until the next afternoon that I got a better look. Sandra had returned to the same spot, but now

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her head was sticking out from the blanket as she scrutinized the ground for insects, popping them like candy into her mouth. A group of visitors approached, guided by a young woman wearing khaki shorts and an official zoo polo shirt. Sandra recognized her. She rose from the ground and ambled, as if in slow motion, across her paddock and into the building that served as her indoor quarters. Looking out through the glass, she matched hands with her human keeper, mano a mano, and I wondered, What was Sandra thinking? Was this a mindless act of imitation? A sign of affection? Or could it be an entreaty? Why do you taller apes get to be out there with the towering trees, where space appears to be infinite? Then, as if remembering her part of the contract, Sandra walked back outside and climbed slowly onto a platform built to provide her with a semblance of arboreal existence. After a round of acrobatics, she returned to her corner to pick for more bugs. ••• WE HOLD THESE truths to be self-

evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence shook the world, “men” meant men, and Thomas Jefferson, the man who drafted these words, counted among his possessions hundreds of slaves. But society moved on. First came abolition and emancipation. It wasn’t until 1920—less than a century ago— that women in the United States secured the right to vote. Now there are foreshadowings of what some see as the next logical and moral step. Feld Entertainment, whose Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has been a target of animal-rights activists, recently decided to retire the last of its traveling elephants to a 200acre conservation center the company operates in central Florida. Not long after, SeaWorld ended its breeding of orcas as part of a plan to replace killerwhale shows with what the company called more “natural” encounters. But the pressure for reform has been especially intense with regard to great apes, creatures for which—or for whom—humans feel the strongest kinship. In May, when zookeepers

in Cincinnati shot dead a gorilla to save a child who had fallen into its enclosure, waves of outrage were aimed at the marksman and the boy’s mother, whose negligence was treated as the equivalent of manslaughter. Bowing to sentiments like these, the National Institutes of Health began phasing out chimpanzee research in 2013. Most experiments critical to human health, an advisory panel recommended, could be performed as effectively on other animals. Last year, captive chimpanzees were added to the list of endangered species maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (wild ones had already been included), and Francis Collins, the NIH’s director, announced that most of the institutes’ chimps would be retired to sanctuaries—a migration that is already underway. But with Sandra the orangutan—and Cecilia, a chimpanzee in another Argentine zoo who is also under consideration by the courts as a non-human bearer of rights—the stakes are higher. No one is proposing that they be allowed to vote in an election or run for office, simply that they be recognized as thinking, feeling beings in a court of law. In the U.S., the Nonhuman Rights Project has been pursuing a similar kind of recognition for Hercules and Leo, two recently decommissioned laboratory chimps, and for Kiko and Tommy, another pair of chimps. Kiko is being kept as a pet, and Tommy’s last reported whereabouts was a zoo in northern Michigan. But with Sandra, Argentina has moved to the forefront. Animal-welfare laws have long held that we should avoid making other creatures suffer—to the extent that this doesn’t interfere unreasonably with human commerce. Many people think that strengthening these ordinances is enough. Others look to commerce for a solution. Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society, has argued that the animal-products industry, responding to pressure from consumers, has been steadily improving conditions. His new book is called The Humane Economy. But some animal-rights lawyers are skeptical that moral decisions should be left to the marketplace. They are calling on Homo sapiens, the self-declared wise ones, to go further, enlarging the definition of what counts as a person—a legal entity entitled to certain rights. Persons, as defined by the law, are not necessarily human beings. Corporations, after all, have long been considered “juridical” or “artificial” persons with some of the rights and obligations of people. They can sue and be sued and have rights to freedom of speech (as in Citizens United) and even, to a more limited extent, religious expression (as in the Hobby Lobby case). Off in another realm, legal scholars foresee a day when a judge will decide whether to grant personhood to an artificially intelligent computer program or to a chimera created in a lab by fusing human and non-human genes. ILLUSTRATIONS BY COREY BRICKLEY

So where does Sandra—and all the world’s great apes—fit into this jumble: species just a twig over from Homo sapiens on the tree of life, but without the capacity to argue on their own behalf? ••• IT’S BEEN MORE than half a century since Jane

KOKO A western lowland gorilla known for communicating with hand signs.

ELEPHANT Ringling Bros. has retired its elephants to a conservation center.

KANZI A male bonobo who uses a keyboard of lexigrams to communicate.

ORCA SeaWorld has ended its breeding of orcas in captivity.

Goodall first filmed chimpanzees in Tanzania fishing for termites with sticks they had modified by stripping off the leaves—a simple example of making and using tools. Chimps have also been observed using a pair of rocks, a big one and a small one, as a hammer and anvil for cracking nuts—and even adding a third rock as a wedge to stabilize their platform. Chipped pieces of granite that archeologists suggest are chimpanzee nutcrackers have been discovered in Ivory Coast and radiocarbon dated to 4,300 years ago. Other apes show a similar aptitude for gadgetry, and orangutans seem to have devised an especially neat trick: They put sticks in their mouths, lowering the pitch of their voices and making themselves sound bigger and scarier to potential enemies. Toolmaking itself doesn’t seem like grounds for a constitutional amendment. If so, we would also have to include New Caledonian crows, which make probes and hooks from twigs and leaves for retrieving elusive grubs. Self-awareness may be a more persuasive criterion. Great apes, many primatologists argue, can recognize themselves in mirrors. They exhibit signs of altruism and grieving for the dead, and they appear to know that other creatures have desires and intentions—what psychologists call a “theory of mind.” That comes about as close as you can get to showing that another creature is a vessel of consciousness and an autonomous agent possessing something like free will. But these abilities too, in various dilutions, have been demonstrated elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Set the bar too low and you end up emulating the Jains in India, wearing masks to keep from accidentally inhaling and killing flies. What about an aptitude for counting and other crude arithmetical skills? Those have been reported in great apes—and also in parrots, newborn chicks, and lizards. There is a small body of literature claiming that ants follow Fermat’s Principle of Least Time to find the shortest path to a source of food (which is a little like arguing that planets solve differential equations as they orbit the sun). In all of these cases one must be wary of anthropomorphism. But just as perilous is what the primatologist Frans de Waal calls anthropodenial: the mystical belief that consciousness sprang into existence only with the birth of humans. The most persuasive evidence for human-like intelligence may be an ability to communicate with sounds and symbols, including hand gestures and lexigrams on a keyboard. We’ve all heard NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

about the linguistic feats of Kanzi the bonobo and Koko the gorilla. But Alex, the grey parrot trained by Irene Pepperberg, a well-known researcher in comparative psychology, also showed uncanny communication skills. All of these claims are subjective and open to dispute. Maybe genetic similarity is a better measure. Great apes, it’s commonly said, share as much as 99 percent of our DNA. (The precise number depends on how you do the counting.) But for mice the overlap is still as high as 90 percent. And there are those eerily intelligent whales, porpoises, and dolphins way off on their own limb of the evolutionary tree. In the end, the science seems almost beside the point. Brains are organs that think, and any creature with a brain—or even a ganglion—processes information. What we’re left with is a hierarchy of intelligence—and, presumably, consciousness. And it’s we humans who have the power to arbitrarily draw the line. The planet’s alpha apes, not Jefferson’s “Creator,” are the endowers of inalienable rights. And that’s where the politics comes in—people with conflicting values and assumptions competing to do what they think is right for the world. ••• LATE ONE AFTERNOON, shortly

after my visit to the zoo, I arrived at a law office on a jammed, noisy block of downtown Buenos Aires to meet with a group of activists eager to explain, with the help of a translator, why they believe humans are not the only creatures deserving of legal rights. In my ignorance of the language, their words came in a rush—layers of Spanish colliding with English that would later take hours to sort out. I wondered if this was how Sandra feels as she huddles beneath her blanket and listens to the clash of human voices. “Animals are not objects to satisfy outside needs,” said Gerardo Biglia, an animal-rights lawyer who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Sandra case. “What most interests us is that zoos not exist.” As she prepared a gourd of mate, Malala Fontan explained how their group—called SinZoo (“Without Zoo”)—came together in 2014 after the city announced its annual Night of Museums. The zoo, along with other 58

public institutions, would be kept open after dark for people to enjoy the exhibits. It wasn’t just the additional stress on the animals the group objected to, but the idea that they were being treated like paintings and sculptures. “Any animal in the zoo is suffering from being captive and from being exhibited,” Fontan said. “This is like slavery.” The group also objected to the city’s earlier decision to turn over operation of the zoo to a private subcontractor—another reminder that the animals were considered not just inmates but commodities. Aldo Giudice, a biologist who had joined the conversation, proposed that the effects of imprisonment are especially hard on intelligent creatures like great apes, which can see people coming and going without constraint. Called on to submit a friendof-the-court brief in the Sandra case, he spent many days observing her. “Sandra is bored,” he said. “She lies there waiting for stimulation from her keepers.” Deprived of trees to swing through, he believes, she has become depressed, overweight, and anxious. “It’s like being locked in an elevator your whole life, 365 days a year.” I described how I had seen her, the day before, putting her hand to the glass, reaching to touch the hand of a young woman. “In all jails you have interaction with the jailers,” Giudice said. “Sandra is lost in the heart of a perverse system that treats her like an object— like a camel, a horse. All the animals get treated the same, except that Sandra is more like us. Like a human.” ••• “I HAVE HEARD nearly as much

nonsense about zoos as I have about God and religion,” says Piscine Molitor Patel, the son of a zookeeper in The Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s novel about the détente we strike with the other creatures of the world. “The life of the wild animal is simple, noble and meaningful. ... Then it is captured by wicked men and thrown into tiny jails. Its ‘happiness’ is dashed. It yearns mightily for ‘freedom’ and does all it can to escape. This is not the way that it is.” It is the wild, in Pi’s estimation, that is the prison with the constant worries about finding food or being eaten—the struggle to survive. In

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such a world what can be the meaning of freedom? Living in a zoo is like checking into a hotel. I was thinking of that passage as I sat in the small office of Adrián Sestelo, the Buenos Aires Zoo biologist— a man who clearly cares about Sandra and all of the animals in his charge but who is frustrated by the romantic notions society thrusts upon them. “The people who work in the zoo are not evil people who are keeping animals captive for their own enjoyment,” he said. “We are proud professionals who are concerned about conservation.” He told of a jaguar run down by a car in the northern part of the country. The body was sent to his lab so that the animal’s sperm could be cryogenically preserved and used to increase the diversity of the zoo population. Beyond firing the imaginations of children, the animals in the zoo can serve as a repository for this genetic information— DNA that can be introduced back into the wild to help ensure the survival of a species. There are reasons for keeping animals other than exhibition. He acknowledged that conditions at the zoo, which had opened in 1875, needed improvement and that its mission must change. Plans were already in the works, he said, to move away from displaying exotic creatures, concentrating instead on local fauna and teaching visitors about the importance of protecting wild habitat. For that reason he is not opposed to sending Sandra to a sanctuary or a zoo where there are other orangutans. But it is just as important, he stressed, that there be people around her. “She needs contact with humans,” he said. “This is normal for her.” Sestelo is dubious that great apes are especially deserving of something called personhood. “I don’t think it’s right to draw some animals closer to our laws and keep other animals more distant,” he said. “It takes us back to medieval days when man was considered closest to God.” “It’s not fair,” Sestelo continued. “Why not the cow, the pig, the chicken? ... It is almost racist.” All species, he said, have a right to be on this planet and to live in their unique way. As our conversation drifted into the philosophical—the legacy of Descartes and A.O. Lovejoy’s The Great

Chain of Being—I asked if he thinks Sandra is happy. It was a question he had heard too many times before. “I can’t tell you,” he said with a hint of exasperation. “That is a human feeling. People talk about Sandra’s sadness without understanding the biology of apes or orangutans. It’s easy to wonder if they are conscious because they are similar to us. But why not ask the same question about spiders?” ••• DEEP IN A sub-basement of West-

ern jurisprudence is an assumption that has rarely been questioned: that there are precisely two kinds of entities under the law, persons and things. A brain-dead human kept alive by machines holds rights not accorded to the smartest ape. Last year, Judge Elena Liberatori challenged the dichotomy, declaring that Sandra is a non-human person with fewer rights than people but more than, say, a lump of clay. The case began in November 2014 when a group called AFADA (the Spanish acronym for the Association of Officials and Lawyers for Animal Rights) petitioned a Buenos Aires court for a writ of habeas corpus. Invoked by criminal defense lawyers on behalf of their clients, habeas corpus is a demand that a prisoner be brought before a tribunal to determine whether his or her confinement is justified. The maneuver, which dates from medieval times, has been adopted as a tactic by animal-rights advocates. A judge ordering habeas corpus for an ape would be implicitly recognizing the animal’s personhood. To no one’s surprise, the petition for Sandra was quickly dismissed—and dismissed again on appeal. But then a federal appeals court took a more ambiguous stance. The three judges, Alejandro Slokar, Ángela Ledesma, and Pedro David, also declined habeas corpus, remanding the case to a lower court to decide whether animal cruelty had been committed. But in their order the judges referred, in passing, to Sandra as a non-human holder of rights. Seizing on those words, AFADA filed a new case—this one in a Buenos Aires court where citizens can seek redress against the government. And so it fell to Liberatori to consider the simian’s fate. It is hard to imagine that Sandra could have been dealt a more sympaPSMAG.COM

thetic judge. When Liberatori met me in her office near the Plaza de Mayo, where Eva Perón once stirred the masses, she was wearing striped pants and tennis shoes. On the wall was a cartoon showing her dressed in rags like a homeless person and declaring, “We have to urbanize.” “The slum judge,” the caption called her. The reference was to an incident in which she ordered the city government to extend services to one of Buenos Aires’ shantytowns. She was also the first judge in Argentina to rule that a marriage ceremony between two women could take place. (And the second to do so for two men.) When the Sandra case came to her in March 2015, she was prepared to make more waves. Working with a young anthropologist, Lucia Guaimas, she solicited advice from orangutan experts in Argentina, the U.S., and Australia. She also dug into the literature of animal-rights law, including a book, La Pachamama y el Humano (Mother Earth and Humans), by Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, a former justice of the Argentine Supreme Court who is now a member of the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights. I asked if he was an influence on her thinking. “Totalmente,” she said. In October she handed down her decision, a remarkable document that reads in parts like a dissertation in postmodern philosophy. “All forms of classifying and categorizing the world

“Sandra is lost in the heart of a perverse system that treats her like an object.”

are a social construction,” Liberatori writes, sounding the jargon. That includes our conventions about “what is considered superior and what is considered inferior and who or what should have rights.” Marshaling reasons why it may not be so crazy to consider Sandra a “non-human person” and “rightsbearing subject” (like you, me, and Monsanto), Liberatori draws on a wide range of sources. Recently, a revision of France’s Napoleonic code (as influential on Argentina’s civil code as English common law is for the U.S.) added “sentient beings” as a legal category, a move already taken by some other countries. And the constitution of Ecuador, she noted with a nod to Zaffaroni, recognizes nature itself as a bearer of rights. Looking closer to home, the judge considered instances in which the Argentine legal system already appeared to look upon other creatures as subjects rather than objects. A federal anti-cruelty law refers to animals as “victims,” suggesting a right to be treated with dignity and respect. When sniffer dogs used by federal customs agents reach retirement, she noted, the state provides them with housing, health care, and food—something you wouldn’t do for a surplus truck. “There is no doubt that even if a living being’s life and dignity are completely outside the realm of the legal system,” she wrote, “this does not stop them from being extended analogically from ‘human people’ to Sandra when she is granted the condi-

tion of ‘sentient being.’” After many pages of such considerations, she arrived at her conclusion: “Sandra has the right to enjoy the best quality of life possible, tailored to her individual circumstances.” “To achieve this,” Liberatori wrote, “we must tend toward avoiding any type of suffering that could be generated by Man’s meddling in her life.” Acknowledging that the orangutan was born in captivity and had never known the wild, Liberatori appointed a panel of advisors to determine whether Sandra should be freed to a sanctuary or remain under improved conditions at the zoo. In the meantime she ordered Sandra’s keepers to take steps “to preserve her cognitive abilities.” For the plaintiffs, it was a landmark moment. “There has never been a decision of this magnitude,” said Andrés Gil Domínguez, AFADA’s lawyer. “It was historic, a turning point in animal rights.” Not long afterward the case was cited by another Buenos Aires court, which ruled that 68 mistreated dogs were, like Sandra, rights-bearing subjects. More decisions like this are bound to follow. Maybe one will go as far as granting habeas corpus. As expected, the city appealed—as did AFADA, which was disappointed that the judge stopped short of deciding Sandra’s fate, deferring instead to an expert panel. In June, eight months after Liberatori’s decision, the Court of Appeals of the City of Buenos Aires handed down its ruling. The judges agreed that there was no need for the advisory panel. Moreover, they upheld Liberatori’s demand that the city provide Sandra with more-stimulating surroundings, taking into account her “well-being, behavioral complexity, and emotional states.” Later, if it seemed in the ape’s best interest, the zoo could send her to a sanctuary. As for the larger question of nonhuman rights, the judges decided to leave that open for future tribunals to decide. The matter, they wrote, “no es pacífica”—it remains unsettled, a controversy still unfolding. They disagreed with Liberatori that federal law, as it currently stands, implies that the zoo must treat Sandra as a rights-holder. But whatever one’s position on non-human personhood, they observed, “Nobody now ques-

tions that the suffering of animals must be outlawed and that humans have a duty to care for them.” Later that month, animal-rights advocates claimed another victory. Declaring that the zoo “generates more sadness than happiness,” the mayor of Buenos Aires announced that the city was closing the gates and accelerating plans to create an ecoparque, much along the lines Adrián Sestelo, the zoo biologist, had described to me. Most of the 2,500 animals will gradually be moved to nature reserves, while those too old or infirm will be cared for onsite but no longer displayed to the public. Sandra would remain, at least for the time being, wondering perhaps where all the people went. ••• BEFORE FLYING TO Buenos Aires,

I had downloaded the original Planet of the Apes to watch on the plane. I’d forgotten that the orangutans in the story are actually bad guys—evil scientists and upholders of orthodoxy who happily perform brain-ablation experiments on dumb humans. The gorillas are even worse, while the heroes are the chimpanzees, Zira and Cornelius—upholders of non-simian personhood and human rights. Six hundred miles across the Argentine pampas, in Mendoza, a court is considering the fate of a chimpanzee named Cecilia—the target of another habeas corpus suit by AFADA. It’s easy to say when you’re on this side of the bars, but I liked the Buenos Aires Zoo, with its arching tipa trees and Victorian architecture—nature merging harmoniously with artifice. I’m glad I got to see it before it closed. The Mendoza Zoological Park was a mess. Reports of dying animals had been in the local news in recent months. On the day I arrived the zoo had just re-opened temporarily after being closed for safety reasons by its newly appointed director, Mariana Caram. (Three months later it was closed again, this time indefinitely.) She was a most unusual choice for the position. A former Fulbright Scholar working in sustainable development, Caram had been collaborating with environmental organizations pushing to reform the zoo. Hired last fall by a newly elected provincial government, she is trying to clean up the place and

eventually turn it into an ecopark like the one now underway in Buenos Aires. She must deal, in the meantime, with the matter of Cecilia, who became a poster chimp for activists after an incident in 2014. A pack of wild dogs had charged through the grounds and killed 27 rheas, a vicuña, four guanacos, and two llamas. During the rampage, one of Cecilia’s companions, a chimpanzee named Charly, died of a heart attack, and, six months later, another chimp, Xuxa, succumbed to what were said to be natural causes. With Charly and Xuxa gone, Cecilia, the youngest, was left on her own in a concrete habitat, with no vegetation or natural ground to walk on—“one of the most horrible enclosures in the zoo,” Caram said. She hopes the court rules in favor of recognizing Cecilia as a nonhuman person. In the meantime, discussions are under way about moving her to a sanctuary in Sorocaba, Brazil. “I know I’m crazy taking on the zoo,” Caram said as we walked from her office to a bear enclosure with a fetid pond that smelled like sewage. Just up the hill, kept out of sight from visitors, was a jail-like building with two more bears. There was no other place to put them. “We talked about non-human persons,” she said, “but do we have the right to keep any animal like this for its entire life?” Farther along the path was the worst cage of all, packed with more than 100 frantic baboons. “No birth control,” Caram said. Two weeks earlier some of them had escaped, and one injured a girl. “Look at this—concrete, concrete, concrete,” Caram said as we walked quickly past more cages. “Why does an animal have to live like this?” We ended with a visit to Cecilia and one of her keepers, Daniel Garrido—a third-generation zoo employee who has cared for the chimpanzee since she was born. He was worried about how she would fare at a sanctuary with strange new chimps. When Charly and Xuxa were alive, he said, they would gang up on her. Though she was depressed temporarily by their absence, he has since seen her thrive. Animals, like people, are individuals. Maybe she prefers being on her own. You could tell he would miss her. “Are you a father?” he asked. “It would be like taking away a child.”

••• AS THE CAMPAIGN for non-human

personhood presses on, hundreds of chimpanzees in the U.S. are being retired from medical research and moved to primate sanctuaries like Save the Chimps in Fort Pierce, Florida. Carved out of old citrus groves, this simian paradise has grown to include 12 man-made islands and 250 chimpanzees. Each island is connected by a land bridge to a building on the mainland where the chimps are fed and receive veterinary care. If they choose, they can spend the night inside. They are still things under the law. But they are allowed to live beyond the gaze of the public, and with some of the autonomy that seems appropriate for sentient beings. One of the first to arrive was Cheetah, who boarded a trailer in Alamogordo, New Mexico, five years ago to join what became known as the Great Chimpanzee Migration. Leaving behind a biomedical lab called the Coulston Foundation, he and nine companions, each with a window seat, began the two-day journey to Florida. “Cheetah endured multiple liver biopsies, possibly without anesthesia,” Molly Polidoroff, the sanctuary’s executive director, told me when I arrived there early this year. “That he can be so people-friendly just amazes me. We have other chimps that, not surprisingly, will throw things. And you kind of can’t blame them. We’re not their friends in a lot of cases.” As we toured the grounds in a golf cart, she pointed across a lagoon to Air Force Island, where the sanctuary’s first residents, retired from the U.S. space program, arrived in 1997. Stopping across from Alice’s Island (named for one of its inhabitants), she introduced me to Cheetah. Reaching through the mesh with a piece of rubber hose (a “tickle stick”), he tried to untie my shoelace while his friend Timmy competed for attention. Nearby, a group of chimps played with torn colored paper left over from a “Chimpmas” party. At the outbuildings across from another island, Jocelyn Bezner, the sanctuary veterinarian, told me about Bobby. “He was definitely the most traumatic,” she said. When she first saw him back at Coulston, living in a place his rescuers called the Dungeon, his left arm was like a chewed piece of meat.

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“Every day he would scream and bite a chunk out of it,” she said. Somehow his nerve fibers had become damaged and were sending spurious signals to his brain. Several surgeries later, his suffering was relieved and he was introduced into a group of other chimps. He rose to become leader of what is now Bobby’s Island. He was like Gandhi, Bezner said, breaking up fights between other chimps. Later, when another male challenged him as alpha, he gracefully stepped aside. Before the day was over I saw Clay, taken from his mother hours after birth and used to test the toxicity of ibuprofen and other pharmaceuticals. And there was Rebel, born at Coulston and then rented to a lab at the National Institutes of Health. And I met Lisa Marie, the newest resident, who had just turned nine. She had been rescued from the entertainment industry—she’d been owned by an Elvis impersonator who used her in animal shows. Still afraid to venture onto her new island home, she was living ashore and slowly being initiated into chimpanzee society. When a chimp named Christopher intimidated Lisa Marie, Bezner brought in two others whom she knew Christopher would defer to. I was struck by how the chimps—they all looked the same to me—were treated as individuals. Through trial and error, the right family would be found for Lisa Marie. I wished that Daniel Garrido, the zookeeper in Mendoza, could see this. It might help relieve his worries about Cecilia’s going away. ••• AFTER LEAVING Fort Pierce I drove

inland past Yeehaw Junction and signs advertising “P-Nuts and Gator Jerky” to Wauchula, where a Family Dollar sat next to a Dollar General and across the street from a Dollar Tree—products of our superior human intellect. A few miles outside of town I found the Center for Great Apes, the only sanctuary in North America licensed to keep orangutans as well as chimps. Shaded by a canopy of dense forest, the center is home to 30 chimps and 15 orangutans living in a dozen spacious enclosures, each about three stories high and connected by a mile and a half of elevated chutes. Taken from their mothers as infants, most of the apes worked in Hollywood or 62

in roadside zoos, or were kept as pets. Once they became too willful, their owners didn’t want them anymore. “At two years old they’re stronger than we are,” Patti Ragan, the founder and director of the center, told me. She started the sanctuary 23 years ago, when she was trying to find homes for an infant orangutan and chimpanzee who were being kept at a Miami tourist attraction. At around age five, young apes begin to have tantrums, she said, and after seven or eight years they’ve passed their “shelf life.” But they are still youngsters at that point, with as many as 40 more years to go. As we walked past the domed structures, Ragan introduced me to some of the residents. There was Mowgli, a chimp who was in The Shaggy Dog with Tim Allen; Jonah, who appeared in the 2001 re-make of Planet of the Apes; and Ripley, who was on Seinfeld. The most famous resident, Bubbles, once belonged to Michael Jackson. “Bubbles was his No. 1 son before he had his kids,” Ragan said. “But then he couldn’t handle him anymore.” By now the alpha chimps had worked themselves into a frenzy, screaming and banging—the familiar bedlam of chimp life. (It’s a madhouse! It’s a madhouse!) It was a relief to move on to what Ragan calls the Zen area, where the orangutans seemed as peaceful and contemplative as their cousin Sandra in Buenos Aires. A turquoise mound turned out to be Mari, huddling beneath a blanket. “Mari has a lovely face. Too bad you can’t see it,” Ragan said. “This is how she was the first four months she was here. She sat under a blanket or a sheet with a little eyehole, peeking out like from a burka.” Long before her arrival, Mari’s arms had to be amputated. She had been mauled in a moment of panic by her mother. But that hasn’t stopped her. She climbs ladders with her chin and feet and navigates the walkways with her partner Pongo. She never would have survived in the wild. I met Bam Bam, who played Nurse Precious in a soap opera called Passions. Nearby was his partner Tango, who was used in television commercials for powdered orange juice. “And this is Popi, my oldest orangutan,” Ragan said. She would soon turn 45. Popi was born at the Yerkes Nation-

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al Primate Research Center in Atlanta and then sold to a circus trainer, who hired her out for two Clint Eastwood movies and used her in a nightclub act at the Stardust in Las Vegas. Compared with these other apes’ past lives, Sandra’s situation didn’t seem so grim, but I imagined her thriving in this place and finding the orangutan equivalent of a friend. “We’re willing to take her,” Ragan said. Early on she was contacted by both AFADA and the Buenos Aires Zoo and began investigating the possibilities. But so far the red tape involved—import regulations, federal quarantine requirements—has proved insurmountable. ••• DURING THE LAST two years, Steven

Wise, the founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project, has been dealt one setback after another by New York state courts in his attempt to win habeas corpus for the four chimpanzees he has chosen to represent. And so he keeps filing and filing. Lately he has been preparing for a new case involving elephants. With cases in the works nationwide and in 10 countries, Wise keeps hoping for a decision that will pierce the barrier between person and thing. His ultimate goal—one that some colleagues consider quixotic—is a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court. Among his inspirations is a landmark ruling in 1772 in which Lord Mansfield, a renowned London jurist, was persuaded to grant habeas corpus to James Somerset, a slave who was being held prisoner on a ship bound for a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Wise wrote a book about the case, Though the Heavens May Fall, in which he imagines Somerset as he runs joyfully through the streets to thank Granville Sharp, the abolitionist who had worked to free him, hastening the end of slavery in Great Britain. If Wise someday succeeds on behalf of his non-human clients, they won’t run through the streets in celebration. They won’t even know what has happened or what it means to have legal rights. And that is what makes this notion of non-human personhood so hard to wrap one’s mind around. Don’t you have to know you are a person? Granting the status to corporations is strange enough, but at least the humans on the board of directors are

capable of understanding the nature of their company’s meta-rights. Sanctuaries like the ones in Florida are demonstrating that great apes can be treated with dignity—without bestowing them with some subset of human rights. But these are the lucky ones, and their partial liberation came only after the labs and Hollywood studios were done with them. AFADA and the Nonhuman Rights Project make a powerful point: Animal welfare laws and ordinances, which have been on the books for centuries, haven’t been enough. It may only be when animals are recognized as rights-bearing subjects that their advocates will have the leverage to push for greater protections. If we the people choose to take that route, it probably makes sense to start with our closest cousins, the great apes. We can tolerate the nepotism. Maybe whales and dolphins will follow. These new rights could be construed to allow the use of great apes in research that is genuinely crucial to human welfare. But in each instance the tradeoffs would have to be carefully considered—with the subjects treated as subjects, not objects, and with the assumption that they are aware, at least vaguely, of what is going on. When he was old and blind, Borges wrote a poem, “The Other Tiger,” lamenting the difficulty of distinguishing between animals as we like to imagine them and as they actually exist in the world. The tiger in his poem is “made of symbols and of shadows.” It is “a system and arrangement of human language.” But deep in the jungle is the real flesh-and-bone tiger which, out of reach of all mythology, paces the earth And so it goes with these apes. After all of our legalizing and romanticizing and foraging for words, we can’t really know what’s going on behind those eyes. What we do know is that we, with the accidentally bigger brains, are the ones who got them into this mess. Maybe we can get them out.

•GEORGE JOHNSON is a science

writer who lives in Santa Fe and the author of nine books. His work appears regularly in the New York Times, where he writes a column called Raw Data. @BYGEORGEJOHNSON PSMAG.COM

THE CULTURE PAGES WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE

The Miseducation of Frank Waln

On and off the reservation, American schools tend to whitewash the stories of Native Americans. Frank Waln, a Lakota hip-hop artist from He Dog, South Dakota, is endeavoring to change that—with music that champions his heritage while demolishing Native American stereotypes. BY TONY REHAGEN

A YOUNG MAN walks onto an empty stage. The spotlight glares off

of his white moccasins and crisp long-sleeved button-down, which billows, untucked, over dark slacks. He cuts a slight figure against the venue’s deep, black backdrop, and his clean-shaven face, framed by two long black braids, makes him look younger than his 27 years. He speaks softly into the microphone, first in his native Lakota, then in English: “Hello, relatives. My Lakota name is Walks With Young People. I also go by Frank Waln. And I welcome you with an open heart and an open handshake.” Beyond the stage lights, in the darkened auditorium of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sit about a hundred Native American men and women from all over the country: Pueblo, Shoshone,

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Cheyenne, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Apache. The Gathering of Nations, an annual meeting of more than 500 tribes, is taking place across town, and many have broken away from the powwow to attend this concert, the culmination of the Rezilience (“rez” referring to reservation) Indigenous Arts Experience. Throughout the festival, visitors have attended events centered on Native art, poetry recitals, and traditional music, most of which celebrate the Native cultures and mourn their hastening disappearance. Waln, the headliner, is something different. After his introduction, he is joined by the Sampson Bros., Sam and Micco, performance artists whose faces are painted colorfully beneath full and fluttering Native dance regalia. Waln bends to his laptop, triggering a barrage of hip-hop beats that blasts across the venue. As the Sampsons dance to the music, the diminutive Waln springs into action, grabbing the mic from its stand and spitting lyrics at the crowd. Pain and anger are palpable in his voice as he bobs and weaves and hacks at the air with his free hand, fighting some unseen onstage foe. The enemy is ignorance, which reveals itself plainly in Waln’s new song “What Makes the Red Man Red,” his send-up of the racist tune “What Made the Red Man Red” from Disney’s 1953 film Peter Pan. Waln’s song samples the tune’s chorus and the film’s offhand references to Native Americans as “aborigines” and “Indians.” That is, before Waln drowns them out with a sharp verse. Your history books (lies) Your holidays (lies) Thanksgiving lies and Columbus Day Tell me why I know more than the teacher Tell me why I know more than the preacher Tell me why you think the red man is red Stained with the blood from the land you bled Tell me why you think the red man is dead

PHOTO BY TOMAS KARMELO AMAYA

The crowd is on its feet now, some singing along, others bobbing in agreement with the beat. Waln’s frequent tours of reservations and his blunt, firebrand style have made him well-known among his people (he’s a two-time Native American Music Award winner). Recently, Waln has made a splash in the mainstream media too: He’s been featured on NPR and MTV’s Rebel Music: Native America and in Vibe and USA Today; he has performed at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and at concerts in France and Germany. The day before his Albuquerque concert, he spoke at a Harvard University symposium on Native politics. Waln is an ascendant member of a Native American hip-hop vanguard that is taking its message of social justice off of the reservation. What separates Waln and other socially engaged artists, like War Party, Without Rezervation, and Supaman, from older generations of Native artists, says Alan Lechusza Aquallo, a professor of American Indian studies at Palomar College, is their authenticity. Waln doesn’t play to Native stereotypes, like a preaching elder or a fierce sports mascot—his performing persona is young, charismatic, believably real. “There are a number of Native hip-hop artists who play off the kitsch of what it is to be Indian because that’s what’s going to give them notoriety,” Aquallo says. “[Waln] has his long braids, but he’s wearing street clothes. He’s not playing Indian.” Waln’s activism is similarly more than mere posture. As Aquallo points out, Waln “walks the walk,” not only rapping passionately about depression and poverty on the reservation, but also demonstrating against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington and speaking to students in high schools and elementary schools on reservations across the country. “He’s not an ‘Indian artist’; he’s not a rapper who happens to be Native,” Aquallo says. “To him there’s no separation between his activism and his creative work.” Waln’s overall message is plain: Americans—Native and non-Native alike—need to educate themselves about the real history and current politics of America’s indigenous peo-

ple. And through his words and music, on the reservation and off, Waln plans on delivering the wake-up call. FRANK WALN’S own education began

on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation, on the Great Plains of central South Dakota. He grew up in He Dog, a small Sicangu Lakota community, where his single mom and her sisters ran the family ranch. His father was abusive and mostly absent—the first of many scars he would learn to bear. He Dog is located in Todd County, where the poverty rate approaches 50 percent, a problem with deep and tangled roots. Studies of modern Native Americans have shown that “historical trauma,” the name that social workers give to the perception of historical loss passed down through generations, has been linked to symptoms of emotional distress like anger, anxiety, substance abuse, and even depression. Waln remembers grappling with these manifestations even as a child. “It was very confusing to me,” he says. “I was wondering why I was struggling with depression all the time, why I had suicidal thoughts, why the suicide rate was so high on our reservation. I was very insecure.” Being exposed to pop-culture caricatures of his people—red-skinned, unsophisticated, and uncivilized— didn’t help. “What society and the media told me about myself was that being Native American is something to be ashamed of,” he says. “That who we are as a people is wrong, savage. Not to say I believed that, but that did affect my self-esteem.” Waln says his confusion stemmed from the fact that, beyond the traditions passed down through his family, he didn’t know much about the political history of his people. And indeed, with scant resources, schools on American reservations have fallen behind. A 2011 National Indian Education Study found huge deficits in reading and math scores for schools heavily attended by Native American students. Schools controlled by the Bureau of Indian Education, which are run by tribes, fared even worse: Fourth graders’ reading scores averaged 182

on a 500-point scale, compared to 204 in public schools. Only 43 percent of eighth-graders said that their teachers included any Native American culture or history in their curricula. Outside the reservation, the Native historical narrative is even more distorted. Today, many schools still reflexively honor Columbus Day’s namesake as a brave trailblazer, rather than the man who ushered in a period of slaughter and displacement of the indigenous people he “discovered” along with the New World. A recent study of elementary- and secondaryschool academic standards in all 50 states found that nearly 87 percent of those standards’ references to Native Americans harken back to events that occurred prior to the 20th century—essentially conveying the idea that Native Americans ceased to exist after 1900. None of the references said anything about current issues that are facing 566 federally recognized tribes—such as land use, voting rights, religious rights, and Internet access. “In my opinion, the way history is taught in this country is colonial propaganda,” Waln says. “I was aware of the big atrocities, like the Wounded Knee Massacre and the government giving us blankets with smallpox. But I didn’t know the details and how recent some of these discriminatory laws were.” If Waln didn’t see himself in textbooks growing up, he did in music. He learned piano at age seven; he joined a Lakota drum group in middle school. When Waln was a teenager, his older cousins started gathering in their basements to make music, influenced by rappers like Nas, Talib Kweli, Dead Prez, and Eminem. Waln started sampling beats and recording on his laptop. To his mother and most of the adults in his cowboy-and-rodeo community, Waln’s sudden infatuation with hip-hop could be attributed to hip-hop’s popularity with kids his age. But to Waln, his playlist wasn’t just about youth culture. “A lot of Native Americans are living in poverty,” he says. “Hip-hop was born in poor communities of color.” Still, Waln’s own music was his private solace—for his ears only. When he graduated high school in 2008

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as valedictorian and was awarded a Gates Millennium Scholarship, he was too insecure to gamble his ticket off the reservation on a musical lark. He chose pre-med at Creighton University in Omaha. “I was the smartest kid in my class,” he says of the experience. “Now I was the dumbest kid in all of my classes.” He studied at all hours to keep up with his peers, used his laptop solely for class, and in two years didn’t finish a single song. Without an outlet connecting him with his past, he says, he fell back into depression. After his sophomore year, he came home and poured himself into his music. His mother supported his interest in going to school for it. At Columbia College, a liberal-arts school in Chicago, Waln found his music’s public purpose. In a city pulsating with new sounds and emerging musicians, Waln met artists of color and even a few other Native Americans— including the Sampson brothers, who were learning to express their Seneca and Creek heritage through dance. In Chicago, Waln says, he also encountered the vast ignorance of the outside world. He remembers that one girl in his dorm sincerely believed that Native Americans were extinct; other students were preoccupied with pettier problems than his. “I found that I had a higher tolerance for trauma,” Waln says. “My people survived genocide. That historical trauma is passed down through our DNA.” With the encouragement of his teachers, Waln fused history into his music. By channeling his people’s anger and frustration through his lyrics, he was not only educating his classmates, he was also providing catharsis for himself. Through hip-hop, Waln was finally learning how to heal. AT THE END of an intense and spirited

first set, the Sampson Bros. clear the stage. Waln, silent, falls to his knees. An old man’s grizzled voice plays over the speakers, recounting the day in 1890 when more than 250 Lakota were slaughtered by the United States Cavalry on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota—the Wounded Knee Massacre. The first shot was

fired when a deaf elder refused to surrender his legally obtained rifle. The dead included women and children. This is Waln’s song “Wild West.” Waln is on all fours, eyes closed as the elder speaks. He raps the entire song from his knees, swaying back and forth like a bop bag. He’s talking about poverty and absentee parents and depression—the modern manifestations of his people’s inherited pain. As the track climaxes, he makes a gun with his fingers and brings it to the side of his head. The sound of a gunshot rings out; Waln collapses, rolling onto his back, leaving the audience in stunned silence. The largely Native audience is no stranger to this pain, those ancestral wounds. But as Waln prepares to release his first solo album, Tokiya (Lakota for “firstborn”), there’s no reason to believe that this young Lakota can’t incorporate his people and their unique concerns into hip-hop’s ongoing conversation about America. Waln, like artists Kendrick Lamar and Run the Jewels, is making music that shakes its listeners awake to the troubled state of civil rights in this country. “They have a foot in each of the different worlds,” says Aquallo of Waln and Native contemporaries. “When they perform in non-Native venues, they’re performing who they are. It becomes important to the people they touch.” Backstage after the show, Waln and the Sampsons are in the dressing room, unwinding in silence after an hourlong performance. It’s almost 1 a.m. There’s a knock at the door. One of the night’s other performers, a singersongwriter, comes in and immediately offers Waln a hug. She says she connected powerfully to Waln’s battle with depression, and thanks him. “Time is sure to break the stigma on mental illness in our people,” she says before she leaves. Waln peels off his moccasins and rubs his feet. He says he and the Sampsons will head over to his manager’s house to eat pizza. They plan on watching The Good Dinosaur—a children’s movie set in an alternate world where dinosaurs never became extinct.

•TONY REHAGEN is a writer based in St. Louis. @TREHAGEN

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

Pacific Standard Picks BY ALISSA WILKINSON

LOVING A lot has changed since Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case that struck down several states’ laws prohibiting interracial marriage. But as Jeff Nichols’ new film Loving may remind viewers, marriage equality remains an ongoing battle. Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton star as Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who pursued a suit against Virginia that led to the landmark 1967 decision. It’s been nearly 50 years since then, and yet anti-miscegenation laws were not repealed in all states until 2000, when Alabama removed language outlawing miscegenation from its state constitution. Loving v. Virginia has been cited in several court decisions regarding marriage since 1967, including 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage. The matter of marriage equality is, in many regards, far from settled—loving, it seems, is a right that could still use further enforcement. FOR MORE SELECTIONS FROM OUR CULTURE WRITERS AND EDITORS, VISIT PSMAG.COM.

WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE

Mapping People Back Into History How one organization is using Google Maps to save history in the Middle East. BY ROSS UFBERG

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE DIARNA PROJECT

ON A RECENT sunny afternoon at the

Center for Jewish History in Lower Manhattan, Eddie Ashkenazie, a tousled and bespectacled young historian at the Diarna Project, sits in front of a giant screen as he scrolls through photographs and navigates Google satellite maps. Beside him, Joseph Samuel, who shot the photos in Iraqi Kurdistan, narrates his recent voyage in the manner of an explorer explaining his sketches to a cartographer. He has brought back over 1,300 pictures and videos from 47 locations, and now he and Ashkenazie must, literally, put these locations on the map. Samuel is a mustachioed, cigarettesmoking, sun-creased filmmaker who has been working on documentaries about ethnic minorities, including Yazidis, in the Middle East; he took a few days to research the Jewish history in Iraqi Kurdistan as well. Samuel is neither Yazidi nor Jewish—but he is passionate about capturing the stories of the minority inhabitants, today and in earlier times, of the region. (Samuel’s name has been changed owing to the sensitive nature of his work.) Ashkenazie drops pins in consultation with Samuel to demarcate places of interest—red for cemetery, black for shrine, brown for synagogue—on the landscape of northern Iraq. The Diarna Project is headed by Jason Guberman-Pfeffer, who is also the head of the American Sephardi Association, and the two organizations share an office. Diarna is setting out to collect data from around the Arab world and the Sephardi diaspora, especially in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, where the political situations are

combustive and the majority, if not all, of the Jews left five or six decades ago. With nobody to look after them, landmarks are crumbling, and the people who can recall them are dying off. The story of a traffic roundabout in Sulaymaniyah, a city about 200 miles north of Baghdad, illustrates the point. Ashkenazie clicks and scrolls, and the screen shows a traffic circle and a road that separates a Christian cemetery from a Muslim cemetery, Samuel says. Once, locals told him, this had all been a single burial ground, and, in the middle, where the asphalt now shines, had been the Jewish section. Then Sulaymaniyah expanded, the city needed updated infrastructure, the Jews had been gone for decades, and so, locals said, Saddam Hussein’s government in the 1980s decided to build a road there. This cleaving of one cemetery into separate parts by a tyrannical regime offers a sadly apt metaphor for the region that Diarna is chronicling. One minority, the Jews, is virtually gone from Sulaymaniyah; their erasure from history, as embodied by an asphalt strip, further divides those who remain. Samuel sees his role as that of a steward of this erased or forgotten past: “If you don’t protect your history you can’t protect your future,” he says. “That history is getting challenged.” Challenged by the legacy of secular extremists like Hussein and by radical Islamists like ISIS, who blow up ancient ruins and upend the demography of a region that has been home to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet the terrible question arises: If physical traces are erased and nobody is around

to recall them, are they still even part of a region’s history? That question invites scary or fatalistic answers; Diarna is fighting against that fatalism. The organization calls itself a geomuseum, and the name, Diarna, means “Our Homes” in Judeo-Arabic. Browsers on its new website can click a pin on a map and find photos, scholarly research, and oral histories, all arranged according to geographical location. Diarna has coordinated over two dozen missions so far in Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere, creating an interactive online museum where the displaced can locate their family homes, and where the curious can learn a history that’s much more complex than what the conquerors allow to be written. The locals near Diarna sites might even learn about their own past: When textbooks gloss over the history of religious minorities such as Jews and Christians in a particular country, as has reportedly happened in Egypt, for example, a geo-museum is a way to circumvent the majoritarian view and present the rich, cosmopolitan tapestry of, say, Alexandria, in a clear light. On my first visit to Diarna, I ran into the leader of a Christian organization who was looking to copy Diarna’s formula, to preserve (in code) as much as possible of Christian life in Iraq before all traces are destroyed and the Christians chased away or murdered. The same type of geo-museum would be of great use to Yazidis, who are the victims of perhaps the fiercest massacres by ISIS. Extremism across the Middle East obliterates not only contemporary peoples, but ancient ones as well. We can’t save everything, but at the very least we can try to map it.

•ROSS UFBERG is a writer and trans-

lator in New York City, and co-founder of New Vessel Press. @ROSSUFBERG

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

A High-Concept Architect Takes on Low-Income Housing

In Rancagua, Chile, you’ll find innovative architecture where you least expect it— in low-cost housing. BY DAVID HUBER

OVER THE PAST seven years, Hugo

Anziani purchased his first home and got a divorce. The industrial maintenance technician, 55, watched his two children move in with their mother, and welcomed back his high schoolage son after he butted heads with the mother’s new boyfriend. He added a room to his two-bedroom duplex and enlarged the dining room, which he hopes will inspire his daughter to visit more often. With some leftover vinyl siding, he built a feline-size house for his three Romano cats. Anziani lives in Punta del Sol, a private, government-subsidized housing development in Rancagua, Chile, designed with the simple but novel premise that a house can grow with a family. All 126 of the homes at Punta del Sol are made to be expanded and personalized over time by their residents—an approach its designer, Elemental, the Santiago-based “do tank” led by architect Alejandro Aravena, call “incremental.” As family dynamics require and financial circum-

stances permit, a duplex like the one Anziani lives in, originally 680 square feet, can grow to nearly 800 square feet. Interior finishes are mostly left to the residents. That general adaptability is a testament to how Punta del Sol has re-cast the market-based social-housing paradigm in Chile. The cost to build each unit falls within the modest budget the government allocates for individual dwellings. And yet the units exceed the government’s minimum floor area requirements—a condition of subsidies that most housing developers only just meet, as they lack the incentive to do otherwise. For the working-class residents, who are given full ownership after an initial down payment, the future modifications are an investment akin to a mortgage. Aravena, 49, has earned significant attention among the architecture elite for his focus on social housing. In the past year alone, he has curated the Venice Architecture Biennale and won the highest honor in the archi-

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tecture field, the Pritzker Prize. Aravena’s win is an acknowledgement of a renewed social engagement among designers in the face of urgent challenges in urban housing: More than aloof dreamers, Aravena and peers such as Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, and Alfredo Brillembourg are imaginative mediators. When I visited Punta del Sol one afternoon this past April, I traveled an hour south of Santiago until I reached two clusters of three-story buildings, one painted deep crimson and the other white. I met Anziani on the street, where he explained that the hues distinguish the preferences of the two condominium organizations’ respective residents, as determined by popular vote. “I chose ‘natural,’” he remarked, referring to one of three color options, “but 90 percent wanted white.” The fragile balance of individual freedom and collective responsibility that characterizes life in Punta del Sol is reflected in the development’s facades. While the houses adhere to a standardized, repetitive design, Elemental created alcoves in each home’s front facade that can be decorated as the residents wish (within the community’s self-defined design guidelines). As Anziani walks me through the rows of buildings, gesturing at the alterations made by residents themselves, his statements form an irregular staccato of “original” and “new.” He grumbles at the sight of an ad hoc shed in front of a neighbor’s home. “It is not easy to live together,” Anziani confesses. Overall, though, Anziani is happy with his home. Out the flimsy windows, beyond the highway that creates a low din, are the Andes. The mountains are extraordinary, and nearly every room in Anziani’s house has a view of them, including the dining room, where he invites me to sit. “My life changed when I got this house,” he says, as I stir a cup of instant coffee. “It’s a gift.” A few minutes later, after re-evaluation, he amends his statement. “It should be a right, not a gift.”

•DAVID HUBER is a writer and editor based in New York. @DAVIDHUBER_

PHOTO COURTESY OF ALEJANDRO ARAVENA / ELEMENTAL

THE CULTURE PAGES

WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE

GRAPHIC MEMOIR

GUEST PROGRAMMER:

Alexander Chee

PHOTO BY M. SHARKEY

“To read Dictee is to feel you are watching a genius write herself into existence, as a way of surviving the Korean diaspora.”

Why “This is an unforgettable trip into the last moments of this genius’ life as he rages at the fatal mix of government inaction and homophobia that he had faced his whole life, and remembers a life lived along the edges of society.”

Dictee Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 Dictee blends elements of memoir and literary criticism. Written in French, Korean, English, and Chinese, Cha’s book “enlarges the notion of what a book is,” Carole Maso wrote in 1996 in Spin magazine.

Why “Cha is an important Asian-American artist and poet, and this is widely considered her masterpiece. To read it is to feel you are watching a genius write herself into existence, as a way of surviving the Korean diaspora.”

Mother Bong Joon-Ho’s 2009 film centers on a mother who investigates the murder of a girl after her son—an intellectually disabled boy—is accused of the crime. If that seems fairly standard, the plot “goes to astonishing lengths,” Chee says.

Why “The film is a favorite of mine, structurally, for the way its dark heart is hidden and then revealed, but it is also an astonishing film, as much about social class, aging, and mental health as it is about a mother’s love for her son.”

Sister Outsider This collection of essays and speeches was originally published in 1984, yet the subjects remain remarkably contemporary: Audre Lorde touches alternately on police violence, black feminism, racism, sexism, and the patriarchy.

Why “I think of this collection of essays and speeches by black lesbian pioneer Audre Lorde, one of our great poets, as essential to my education. I have never forgotten the call to action I felt reading this: ‘Your silence will not protect you.’”

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

As told to Katie Kilkenny

• In novels, short stories, and essays, Alexander Chee has given voice to marginalized voices and repressed experiences throughout history. In essays for Granta, Apology, and the New Republic, Chee is remarkably open about his own ascent as a writer who identifies as queer and Korean American, alternately writing about his time spent moonlighting as a cater-waiter for a socially conservative client and reflecting on his activism with AIDS advocacy organization ACT UP. Chee champions up-and-coming artists as a curator for New York’s Ace Hotel Dear Reader series; this fall, he will join Dartmouth College as an associate professor of creative writing.

7 Miles a Second After writer and artist David Wojnarowicz died in 1992, his friends decided to finish the memoir they’d been working on with him. 7 Miles a Second chronicles Wojnarowicz’s childhood in New York City through his battle with AIDS.

FILM

ESSAY COLLECTION

VISIT PSMAG.COM FOR MORE OF CHEE’S RECOMMENDATIONS.

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Back in the Hole

A new book teaches the alarming lesson that all attempts at reforming solitary confinement have merely enabled the practice to continue. BY PETER C. BAKER

Shelf Help Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans • Corey D. Fields • University of California Press In 2016, the black Republican is widely recognized as an anachronism, oxymoron, or joke; at all events a laughable figure to be mocked by Key and Peele. Corey D. Fields, a Stanford University sociologist, looks past the Ben Carsons and Herman Cains to take the measure of non-celebrity black Republicans, who find themselves a singledigit minority within both party and race. Fields finds they are not a monolith, but instead split into two major groups. Some espouse a “color-blind” view of racial life, and wish their fellow blacks would do the same. Others recognize the structural influence of race, but think conservative policies offer the best opportunities for the black community. Members of this race-conscious group tend to have a difficult time in the contemporary GOP, which rarely advances policies that help black communities, and frequently laces its discourse with barely concealed racism. —PETER C. BAKER

At last, mainstream America seems to be talking about solitary confinement. Over the last decade, journalists and politicians have, more than ever before, discussed the perils of the practice: how enforced isolation damages the mind, how quickly it incites and exacerbates mental illness, how frequently it encourages self-mutilation and suicide—and how disproportionately it is used for non-white prisoners. Pope Francis condemned the practice. President Barack Obama pointedly questioned its utility. The federal government banned its use for juveniles in federal prisons. Most dramatically, 30,000 inmates in California prisons went on a wellpublicized hunger strike, starving themselves to protest not only the soul-destroying effects of long-term stays in Segregated Housing Units, but also the circular logic that often determined who ended up there. In a 2013 class-action settlement, the California strikers won what appeared to be a set of stunning concessions. Thousands of people were cleared for release from SHUs, many of whom had been held there for decades; statewide, future SHU stays were capped at five years. In the years since, numerous other states have made similar reforms, either in response to lawsuits or as preemptive moves. Headlines suggest that we are witnessing the “beginning of the end” of solitary confinement, propelled by a new consensus that it is inhumane and unproductive. Unfortunately, there are good reasons to be skeptical. In her debut book, 23/7, the scholar of prisons Keramet Reiter zooms in on the influential history of the Pelican Bay State Prison SHU: a standalone, 1,056-cell, long-term solitary facility in Northern California that opened in 1989 to house, according to prison administrators, “the worst of the worst.” (The prison was a hub in the recent

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hunger strikes; it also provided the template for Camp Delta, the military prison in Guantánamo Bay.) Reiter does a decent job evoking the mindwarping hell of SHU isolation, and she unearths important new data to puncture the claim that the SHU is used only to isolate the most dangerous individuals. Her most important contribution, though, is her close attention to the tragic shortcomings of attempts to date at reforming the facility. The recent hunger strikes, Reiter reminds us, were hardly the first “major win” for solitary’s critics. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that, too often, what looked like victory at the time turned out to be something more ambiguous. Rather than signaling the beginning of the end for radical forced isolation, these episodes instead functioned to ensure the practice would continue. The central example is Madrid v. Gomez, a widely cited 1995 California district court ruling that, at the time, liberals in favor of prison reform greeted as a landmark victory. Shortly after the Pelican Bay SHU opened, Judge Thelton Henderson—long recognized as one of the most liberal judges in the country—started receiving handwritten notes from its inmates alerting him to the terrible conditions there. At the time, very few people who did not work or live at Pelican Bay had any idea of what went on inside its walls. Henderson insisted on his judicial right to visit; while he was there, guards intentionally set a riot in motion, hoping to show Henderson how chronically unruly the population was. Henderson initiated a case on behalf of the prisoners and, in his forcefully written decision, declared several aspects of the Pelican Bay SHU flatly unconstitutional: the wildly excessive use of force by guards (in one infamous example, guards had intentionally cooked off chunks of an

WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE

individual’s skin by immersing him in scalding water); the almost complete absence of medical care; and the housing of people with pre-existing mental conditions. (During the trial, it was determined that a large percentage of SHU inmates were mentally ill; onethird were acutely psychotic.) But Henderson didn’t rule on the constitutionality—on the fundamental cruelty—of long-term isolation itself. So, while Madrid v. Gomez did curtail certain extremely visible modes of brutality, the SHU itself had now survived a lawsuit. It is no coincidence that, in the decade after the ruling, the number of long-term solitary units nationwide tripled. Yes, guards in these units are now forbidden from flagrantly abusing the prisoners (though they still frequently do). Yes, these units have become less awful-looking—less dirty and moldy—to outside observers. But they are still perfectly designed to elicit the exact experience that solitary’s victims have persistently identified as its most unbearable aspect: the extreme lack of contact and erasure of context that psychologists and philosophers refer to as “social death.” The more recent story of the California hunger strikes, which involved alliances that transcended race and gang affiliations, is undoubtedly inspiring. Is it a good thing that people can no longer be held in solitary indefinitely? Yes. But the specter of Madrid should inspire caution. Five years in solitary is, in some obvious sense, “better” than 10 or 20. It is also more than long enough to send a person careening toward mental instability and social death. Just as worrying, by the end of April 2015, the overall SHU population statewide was 3,654, just 269 short of the pre-strike total in 2013. People were being sent there almost as quickly as they were being removed. Thanks to the murkiness of our prison systems, it is difficult to know how many people are being held in solitary nationwide at any given time. By most tallies, it is more than 50,000 but less than 100,000. Just as important is the truth it reveals about our prison system: that beneath its rhetoric about rehabilitation and justice

Shelf Help Future Sex • Emily Witt 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement • Keramet Reiter • Yale University Press

lurks a strong desire for punishments that, while leaving their victims technically alive, strip them, day by day, of all that makes them human. This impulse’s roots run deep—so deep that most attempts at uprooting them have instead merely re-routed their growth. Reiter traces the hyperproliferation of long-term solitary to a few intertwined trends, including the tumult of the civil rights era, the lawand-order backlash it inspired, and the resulting prison crowding and prison riots of the 1970s and ’80s. (Reiter also stresses the importance of the widespread shuttering of state-funded psychiatric hospitals.) All true—but 23/7 could have usefully followed these roots further down in the American soil, at least gesturing toward their relationship to slavery, our great national institution of blunt dehumanization. Is this the beginning of the end for solitary? It’s tempting to think so, especially if you’re hungry for evidence that nightmares of American cruelty can be corrected through existing channels. Reiter doesn’t rule on this question. What she gives us is a reminder that this life-destroying impulse, whatever its ultimate origins, is a strong and slippery thing. Rather than assume its inevitable defeat, best to watch carefully for where it surfaces next.

• Farrar, Straus and Giroux In her wonderfully ruminative debut, Emily Witt attempts to divine America’s sexual future not just by exploring the frontiers of our sexual present— from Tinder and Chaturbate to Bay Area polyamory and boutique porn shoots—but also by historicizing them, seeking out the shifting relationship between sex and, well, everything: technology, culture, politics. The whole enterprise is motivated by Witt’s personal quest to reevaluate her own assumptions about sex and partnership. Refreshingly, she arrives at no single revelation or decision; her book is delightfully thesis-free. In the place of presenting a grand argument about, say, the “orgasmic meditation” movement, Witt tries something trickier and more useful: to help us see the movement without the tint of preconception. And instead of telling us what, exactly, “future sex” will consist of, Witt reminds us that the choice is ours, or at least should be.

—PETER C. BAKER

•PETER C. BAKER is a Pacific Standard contributing editor in Illinois.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

THE CULTURE PAGES

OBJECTS THAT MATTER

ONE LAST THING

Hostile Architecture PHOTO BY BRYAN ANTON

An artist named Sarah Ross created jogging suits affixed with large foam blocks to allow wearers to comfortably recline on segmented park benches and other street furniture designed to deter Los Angeles’ homeless.

In the summer of 2014, a picture of anti-homeless spikes flanking the entrance to an upscale apartment tower in London sparked worldwide backlash: Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, called the spikes “ugly, self-defeating, and stupid”; Slate called them “inelegant and heartless.” A petition for their removal garnered over 120,000 signatures within a week. Outrage over so-called hostile architecture—design elements that discourage loiterers, scofflaws, and the homeless—persists on progressive blogs and message boards. Hostile architecture is at least as old as China’s Great Wall, but the public’s loathing for it is relatively new, memorably articulated in Mike Davis’ 1990 book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles,

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM

which heralded a “new class war ... at the level of the built environment.” Davis’ polemic excoriated decades of privatization of L.A.’s public spaces and the use of physical deterrents like concrete barriers around tower bases to cordon the city. Criminologist C. Ray Jeffery might be the godfather of these militaristic touches. “In order to change criminal behavior we must change the environment,” Jeffery wrote in an influential 1971 book describing his theory of crime prevention through design, which inspired a generation of city planners to create public spaces that felt more like private property. Subtle techniques, like adding more streetlights and shrubs, were soon deployed in public-housing projects nationwide. But yesterday’s public-safety measure has become today’s assault on the underclass. With the rise of gated residential communities and new funding to revive downtown business districts in the 1990s came a new industry of security professionals who focused exclusively on so-called target-hardening tools, like antihomeless spikes, security guards, and cameras. Research is inconclusive on whether these efforts actually prevent crime. One thing is certain: Each era gets the architecture it deserves. —MICHAEL FITZGERALD

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THE PS INTERVIEW WITH AVA DUVERNAY FROM INDIE UPSTART TO HOLLYWOOD POWERHOUSE. P.32 BORN IDENTITY A STORY OF SERVING—AND TRANSITIONING—IN THE U.S. MILITARY BEFORE THE BAN ON TRANSGENDER SOLDIERS WAS LIFTED. P.46 THE MISEDUCATION OF FRANK WALN MEET THE LAKOTA HIP-HOP ARTIST CHALLENGING NATIVE AMERICAN STEREOTYPES. P.64