Daily Archives: March 4, 2022

SOUTHERN INDIANA It's a title that Southern Indiana shares with only nine other regions nationwide.

Earlier this year more the 3.5 million acres near military installations Naval Support Activity Crane, Lake Glendora Test Facility, Atterbury Muscatatuck Training Center and the Indiana Air Range Complex earned the Sentinel Landscape designation.

This means the lands around these locations, often used as buffers between the facilities and civilian life, will be protected.

The Conservation Law Center at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington will help to manage this designation.

It took about six months to work on the application for these lands, saidAndrea Lutz, Conservation Law Center Director of Advancement.

"It's an interesting thing to have the Department of Defense partnered in conservation," Lutz said. "The military manages so much land in our country, they're a big part of conservation people don't think about."

The Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior are all part of the project. In addition to Indiana, officials chose lands in Florida and Texas to be part of the program.

"(We were) putting together the application, pulling together a plan and showing the federal Department of Defense, 'Listen we are serious about conservation and we are serious about your mission as well,'" she said. "We can work together to make this a really impactful thing for the state."

The Conservation Law Center is part of IU Bloomington, and Lutz said it's a pro bono law firm that helps conservation organizations statewide.

"Like a land trust in Indiana (for example)," she said. "As a non-profit it's expensive, so we supply that legal advice and support free of charge."

The CLC is interested in making sure land can be conserved across Indiana and often, she said, it's only conserved in pieces and parcels, like a park or nature preserve. The Sentinel Landscape connects these kinds of areas.

This designation will allow the maintenance of healthy forests and saving of habitats for wildlife. Two of those animals are the endangered Indiana bat and threatened northern long-eared bat. Partners will also work on protecting local rivers and watersheds.

Lutz said a major goal of this project is also to support agricultural land in Indiana. The group is still working on the ins-and-outs of the designation.

"This is not something where we are looking to change how people use land without their buy-in or without their interest," she said.

Ideas about conservation have changed since the law center opened in 2005.

"I think back in the day, 40 years ago, people thought conservation was more liberal," she said. "They wanted to put kind of a political stamp on it. We are not a political organization whatsoever. We are looking to have cleaner water, more conservation and to save endangered species."

Conservation Law Center Executive Director Christian Freitag said in news release that this is one of the biggest conservation projects of all time in Indiana.

"This is a tremendous opportunity for farmers, forest owners and other private landowners to gain even greater access to existing federal land management programs," he said.

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Federal designation goes to millions of Southern Indiana acres - Evening News and Tribune

Theyve reminded us that you can believe things with greater and lesser intensity, faintly, with words, or deeply and fervently, with a conviction in your bones. Theyve reminded us how much the events of the past few years have conspired to weaken our faith in ourselves. Theyve reminded us how the setbacks and humiliations (Donald Trump, Afghanistan, racial injustice, political dysfunction) have caused us to doubt and be passive about the gospel of democracy. But despite all our failings the gospel is still glowingly true.

This has been a week of restored faith. In what exactly? Well, in the first place, in leadership. Weve seen so many leadership failures of late, but over the past week Volodymyr Zelensky emerged as the everyman leader the guy in the T-shirt, the Jewish comedian, the guy who didnt flee but knew what to say: I need ammunition, not a ride.

It wasnt only Zelensky. Joe Biden masterly and humbly helped organize a global coalition. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany understood the moment. So did Emmanuel Macron of France and Fumio Kishida of Japan. Across governments, businesses and the arts, we were well led this week.

Theres been restored faith in true patriotism. Over the past few years, weve seen so much sour ethnonationalism from the right, an angry and xenophobic form of patriotism. From the left weve seen a disdain of patriotism, from people who vaguely support abstract national ideals while showing limited gratitude toward ones own inheritance; people who rightly focus on national crimes but while slighting national achievements. Some elites, meanwhile, have drifted into a soulless globalism, an effort to rise above nations into an ethereal multilateral stratosphere.

But the Ukrainians have shown us how the right kind of patriotism is ennobling, a source of meaning and a reason to risk life. Theyve shown us that the love of a particular place, their own land and people, warts and all, can be part and parcel of a love for universal ideals, like democracy, liberalism and freedom.

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Opinion | The Week That Awoke the World - The New York Times

Russias war in Ukraine is not only reshaping the strategic and political order in Europe, it is also upending long-held assumptions about the intricate connections that are a signature of the global economy.

Millions of times a day, far-flung exchanges of money and goods crisscross land borders and oceans, creating enormous wealth, however unequally distributed. But those connections have also exposed economies to financial upheaval and crippling shortages when the flows are interrupted.

The snarled supply lines and shortfalls caused by the pandemic created a wide awareness of these vulnerabilities. Now, the invasion has delivered a bracing new spur to governments in Europe and elsewhere to reassess how to balance the desire for efficiency and growth with the need for self-sufficiency and national security.

And it is calling into question a tenet of liberal capitalism that shared economic interests help prevent military conflicts.

It is an idea that stretches back over the centuries and has been endorsed by romantic idealists and steely realists. The philosophers John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant wrote about it in treatises. The British politicians Richard Cobden and John Bright invoked it in the 19th century to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws, the tariffs and restrictions imposed on imported grains that shielded landowners from competition and stifled free trade.

Later, Norman Angell was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for writing that world leaders were under A Great Illusion that armed conflict and conquest would bring greater wealth. During the Cold War, it was an element of the rationale for dtente with the Soviet Union to, as Henry Kissinger said, create links that will provide incentive for moderation.

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the idea that economic ties can help prevent conflict has partly guided the policies toward Russia by Germany, Italy and several other European nations.

Today, Russia is the worlds largest exporter of oil and wheat. The European Union was its biggest trading partner, receiving 40 percent of its natural gas, 25 percent of its oil and a hefty portion of its coal from Russia. Russia also supplies other countries with raw materials like palladium, titanium, neon and aluminum that are used in everything from semiconductors to car manufacturing.

Just last summer, Russian, British, French and German gas companies completed a decade-long, $11 billion project to build a direct pipeline, Nord Stream 2, that was awaiting approval from a German regulator. But Germany halted certification of the pipeline after Russia recognized two separatist regions in Ukraine.

From the start, part of Germanys argument for the pipeline the second to connect Russia and Germany was that it would more closely align Russias interests with Europes. Germany also built its climate policy around Russian oil and gas, assuming it would provide energy as Germany developed more renewable sources and closed its nuclear power plants.

Benefits ran both ways. Globalization rescued Russia from a financial meltdown and staggering inflation in 1998 and ultimately smoothed the way for the rise to power of Vladimir V. Putin, Russias president. Money earned from energy exports accounted for a quarter of Russias gross domestic product last year.

Critics of Nord Stream 2, particularly in the United States and Eastern Europe, warned that increasing reliance on Russian energy would give it too much leverage, a point that President Ronald Reagan made 40 years earlier to block a previous pipeline. Europeans were still under an illusion, the argument went, only this time it was that economic ties would prevent baldfaced aggression.

Still, more recently, those economic ties contributed to skepticism that Russia would launch an all-out attack on Ukraine in defiance of its major trading partners.

In the weeks leading up to the invasion, many European leaders demurred from joining what they viewed as the United States overhyped warnings. One by one, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi talked or met with Mr. Putin, hopeful that a diplomatic settlement would prevail.

There are good reasons for the European Union to believe that economic ties would bind potential combatants more closely together, said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. The proof was the European Union itself. The organizations roots go back to the creation after World War II of the European Coal and Steel Community, a pact among six nations meant to avert conflict by pooling control of these two essential commodities.

The idea was that if you knit together the French and German economies, they wouldnt be able to go to war, Mr. Haass said. The aim was to prevent World War III.

Scholars have attempted to prove that the theory worked in the real world studying tens of thousands of trade relations and military conflicts over several decades and have come to different conclusions.

Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders have accused Russias president, Vladimir V. Putin, of reducing supplies to gain a political edge.

Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the worlds largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.

Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctionsintended to restrict Russias access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.

In terms of the current crisis, Mr. Haass argued, in some ways the economic benefits were not mutual enough. The Germans needed Russian gas much more than Russia needs exports, because they can make up for lost revenue with higher prices, he said.

Thats where Europe handled the relationship all wrong, Mr. Haass added. The leverage wasnt reciprocal.

Despite its huge land mass, nuclear arsenal and energy exports, Russia is otherwise relatively insulated from the global economy, accounting for 1.7 percent of global output. And since Russias invasion of Crimea in 2014, Mr. Putin has moved to isolate the economy even more to protect against retaliation.

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that the willingness to impose such devastating sanctions against Russia may point to the flaw in that strategy. If Russias financial system was more integrated with those of the allies, they might have been more hesitant to take measures that could provoke a financial crisis.

At the moment, economic relations with Russia are running on parallel tracks. Countries opposed to Russias invasion of Ukraine have imposed a series of damaging financial and trade sanctions, yet Russian oil and gas exempted from the bans are still flowing.

The reality is economic interdependence can breed insecurity as well as mutual benefits, particularly when the relationship is lopsided.

Philippe Martin, the dean of the School of Public Affairs at SciencesPo in Paris, said that the 2014 agreement between Ukraine and the European Union may have marked a turning point for Russia. That translated into more trade with the E.U. and less with Russa, he said.

Mr. Martin has written skeptically that economic ties promote peace, arguing that countries open to global trade can be less worried about picking a fight with a single nation because they have diverse trading partners.

In the case of Russias march toward Kyiv, though, he offered two possible explanations. One is that no one including the European leaders who imposed them expected such crippling sanctions.

I think that Putin miscalculated and was surprised by the harshness of the sanctions, Mr. Martin said. The second interpretation is that Putin does not care about the impact that sanctions are having on the welfare of most Russians.

Which does he think is correct? I think both interpretations are valid, he said.

Read more here:

Economic Ties Among Nations Spur Peace. Or Do They? - The New York Times

March 3, 2022

March 3, 2022

One of the many things that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not expect when he launched his gratuitously stupid invasion of Ukraine was international resolve. After all, from the genocide against Uyghurs in China to the devastating civil wars in Syria and Yemen, the international community has proven unwilling or unable to consistently come to the aid of innocent civilians facing violence and displacement.

But in having his forces beeline for the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv last week, Putin stumbled headlong into one principle that global leaders appear willing to fight for: state sovereignty.

The reaction to Russia's aggression has been swift and overwhelming. The U.S. and its allies moved to cut Russia out of the international banking system and freeze critical assets overseas. European countries closed their airspace to Russian traffic and fell over one another in the rush to provide both lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine including Finland, which had maintained its alliance neutrality for decades. Germany announced a major increase in defense spending, and NATO moved to reposition forces in Eastern Europe, both as a show of solidarity with Ukraine and as a warning in the highly unlikely event that Putin is tempted to continue West.

Despite the creeping authoritarianism on the American right, supermajorities of the American people expressed disapproval of Russia's actions, proving that not every issue can be immediately polarized along partisan lines by the Fox News propaganda machine. The gallantry of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was offered evacuation by the United States but decided to stay with his people in Kyiv, has surely played a role in galvanizing Ukrainian resistance as well as international support. At this point, there is no way that Putin will not end up paying far more than he will gain with this ill-advised provocation, including possibly his hold on power in Russia.

But it is clear what principle is driving this across-the-board pushback, and that is the right of states to be secure within their own borders. What is happening to the Ukrainian people today, while tragic and harrowing, is not experientially different than what Syrians and Yemenis have endured in recent years, or what is transpiring in Ethiopia today. While outside actors may be involved in these conflicts, they are civil wars, and the external patrons of various factions do not have designs on permanent occupation or annexation of territory.

My colleague Samuel Goldman wrote that the Russian invasion of Ukraine heralds "a decisive end to the era" of rules-based internationalism. If it leads to a period of widespread and successful territorial land-grabs and interstate wars launched by revisionist powers, he might be right. But there's another way of looking at it. The liberal international order, after all, was never capable of preventing territorial aggression altogether. But since the Second World War, there has been a consensus that this aggression is wrong. Whether force or even economic statecraft was used to roll back territorial gains always depended on the relative balance of power between norm-enforcers and aggressors.

What hasn't really changed is the normative principle that interstate war should not happen. The U.S. felt the wrath of global condemnation with its outrageous and self-defeating invasion of Iraq in 2003 just as the Soviet Union did in 1968 when Leonid Brezhnev ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring reform movement. That neither was meaningfully punished for their actions says less about the global acceptance of the principle of state sovereignty and more about the overwhelming power asymmetries that allow the strongest states to violate international law.

What would herald the true end of the liberal international order would be global indifference to interstate aggression. And that's not what we see here. On the contrary, Putin's reckless invasion andbarbaric siege of major Ukrainian cities have created a global sense of indignity, forcing even governments that are very reluctant to tussle with Moscow to get off the fence. Only the cold reality of Russia's nuclear arsenal is preventing NATO from intervening to rescue Ukrainian democracy, but other punitive measures are being thrown against the wall to make the costs to Russia as steep as possible.

Ironically, the sanctity of sovereignty has long been a cherished principle for Russia. After all, it was Putin himself who declared in 2008 that the NATO-led creation of an independent Kosovo carved out of Serbia "will de facto blow apart the whole system of international relations, developed not over decades, but over centuries." He then added ominously, "At the end of the day it is a two-ended stick and the second end will come back and hit them in the face." Later that year, Russia went to war with Georgia, a development that would mark the beginning of a new phase of Russian expansionism.

Putin calculated that because he paid no major price for annexing Crimea in 2014, the global community neither cared much about Ukraine nor would do much of anything to oppose Russian efforts to claw back territory from non-NATO states on Moscow's periphery. But it seems more likely that world leaders mistakenly believed he would stop there. The move from piecemeal dismemberment of Ukraine to total obliteration triggered a normative tripwire that finally alerted the democratic world to the gathering menace of Russian revanchism and the broader phenomenon of authoritarianism on the march.

But Putin clearly misjudged the international community's commitment to sovereignty as a going concern. It is one thing to implicitly accept that there is insufficient resolve to intervene in every civil conflict that erupts around the world; it is quite another to stand aside and watch one U.N. member state get gobbled up by another without even the flimsiest pretext.

Giving real teeth to the principle of sovereignty was perhaps the most important piece of the effort to prevent another calamitous world war driven by the imperial ambitions of expansionist countries. And while effectively freezing borders has led to a great deal of subnational conflict, it has largely succeeded in making it more or less unthinkable for a state to embark on a campaign of subjugating neighbors by force as part of a project of regional or continental domination.

Whether the punitive measures that have been put into place will succeed in restoring Ukraine's democracy and frontiers is an open question. But the imposition of harsh sanctions and other restrictions on a country as powerful as Russia, even with the potential for significant economic blowback, is actually a sign that liberal internationalism is far from dead. In fact, this might be a wake-up call for prosperous democracies: If the long post-war peace is not to be seen as a historical aberration, it must be fought for rather than taken for granted.

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Liberal internationalism gets its wake-up call - The Week

March 3, 2022

Sometimes fiction can illuminate a real-life topic better than nonfiction.

That's the reason Book Riot gave for including anArizona State University alumna's novel about Ukraine as part of its list posted earlier this week of "Books for understanding Russia's invasion of Ukraine."Kalani Pickhart's lyrical "I Will Die in a Foreign Land," published this past October, was the only fiction entry on the list.

The novel takes place during the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv, which began in late 2013 and stretched into 2014, when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protested against then-President Viktor Yanukovych's decision not to sign a referendum with the European Union, choosing instead to build closer ties with Russia. The demonstrations and civil unrest would widen to encompass more rights and corruption issues. By the end of summer 2014, hundreds of civilians and dozens of police officers had been killed,Yanukovych fled the country, a new president was elected, Russia seized the parliament of Crimea, and Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot downIn September 2016, an international team of criminal investigators said evidence showed the Buk missile had been brought in from Russian territory and was fired from a field controlled by Russian-backed separatists. Russia has denied any role. while flying over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 aboard.

All of that is covered in a three-page timeline at the start of the book.

The rest of the novel follows more slowly and more personally the lives of four people whose paths intersect over the course of those protests and the months that followed a Ukrainian-born doctor adopted by U.S. parents who returns to help at a makeshift medical clinic; a former KGB agent; a mining engineer whose life was forever altered by the Chernobyl meltdown; and a young activist who finds both love and grief.

The story dips in and out of their individual stories, interspering those chapters with lists of the dead, folk-song lamentations based on the traditional kobzari, wandering Ukrainian bards news reports and transcripts of cassette recordings. All the pieces add up to a novel that has garnered praise from a range of sources, from a starred review in Kirkus to a recommendation by a Washingon Post critic.

Pickhart has a number of ties to ASU: She finished her Master of Fine Arts with the Department of English in 2019. Afirst-generation college student, she also earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from ASU in 2009 and was a Barrett, The Honors College student. Now she works as a coordinator at the Design School, part of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

She spoke with ASU News about the inspiration behind her novel and how it came about.

Question: What first drew you to this nation and its history? What was your aha moment when you knew this was the story you wanted to tell?

Kalani Pickhart

Answer: As many people around the world are now witnessing, Ukrainians are tough people. They arent mincing words or actions with the Russian president and invaders.I watched a documentary about the 2014 protests in Kyiv called "Winter on Fire: Ukraines Fight for Democracy," and I was simultaneously in my first semester in grad school, in a novel-writing course taught by Matt Bell. I was really moved by the story, and the sheer grit and fighting spirit Ukrainians have as a nation.

The moment I knew I wanted to write the book was the ringing of the bells at St. Michaels Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv: The last time all the bells had been rung, it was during the invasion of Kyiv from the Mongols in AD 1240 in order to warn the people of the attack. I found it especially heavy that they were being rung in 2013 against their own police force. There was something there I couldnt shake.

Q: What kind of research and travel went into writing this book?

A: A lot! Because Im not Ukrainian, I felt an immense responsibility to tell the story compassionately and accurately it also became clear very quickly that even though I was writing a story that took place in 20132014, there was a ton of history that led to that particular protest, so I was doing a lot of reading to try to understand the context of the moment. Meanwhile, we were reading about two novels a week at the time, so a lot of ideas on how to write the book came from a few choice authors, with the most obvious being Milan Kunderas "Unbearable Lightness of Being." I was fortunate to have this confluence of both logistical research and artistic influence it helped me get a quick, bare-bones draft at the end of my first semester of graduate school.

I went to Kyiv and Prague on research and language fellowships the summer of 2018: one from the Melikian Centers Critical Languages Institute through the U.S. Department of State, and the other from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. I took eight intense weeks of Ukrainian easily the most difficult courses Ive ever taken and immediately left for Europe afterward. At one time, my Ukrainian wasnt too bad! But I have certainly, regrettably, lost a lot of it now.

Q: Your book begins with a timeline of the events that were part of the Euromaidan demonstrations and unrest in late 2013 and into 2014. Why did you decide to start a historical fiction book this way?

A: This was a conversation I had with my publisher, Two Dollar Radio. I had originally made a timeline when drafting the book but removed it when I was sending it out to publishers and agents. I owe a lot of credit to Eric and Eliza (Obenauf, the husband-and-wife team that runs Two Dollar Radio) for thinking critically about this book we decided a general timeline and a map would be helpful for American readers, especially since theres a lot of movement. The timeline helps provide some more straightforward context that the kobzari and journalists touch on here and there.

The map was something my dad wanted, actually. He told me after reading it that it could use one because he wanted to be able to have a simple frame of reference since he didnt know anything about it. Im glad we included it he was right. Its strange right now seeing maps of Ukraine every day, everywhere. I check one every day on the movement of Russian troops. Its surreal and incredibly sad.

Q: The structure of the book not strictly chronological, with chapters of the four main characters action interspersed with news reports, lists of the dead and the lamentations of the kobzari is unusual, and quite lyrical. It forms a tapestry of the story, rather than a strict timeline such as you put at the start of the book. What were your goals/thoughts in structuring it this way?

A: So, I mentioned that as I was doing research on this particular protest, I quickly realized that I was uncovering a long, intense historical context. I felt that in order for a reader to understand why these protests were so important, it was critical to provide that context so they realized what was at stake. Practically speaking, I didnt want to have the people in the book Katya, Misha and Slava bogged down with that responsibility. There was no way to do it without it feeling heavy-handed or awkward. The kobzari sections and articles help fill in that context in a way that felt more natural this omniscient and third-person perspective that knows more than the perspective characters do.

Q: You weave the history and effects of Chernobyl into some of the characters stories. How important is it to include Chernobyl in any story of Ukraine?

A: Chernobyl is a word that I think most people recognize, so I wanted to be careful with it. I didnt initially seek to include Chernobyl in the book because I was afraid it would be too much of a kitchen sink book with everything significant in Ukrainian history. Everything needed to be intentional.

When I was learned about the old generation of survivors who did not leave their homes despite the radiation, the samoselyResidents of the roughly 20-mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone surrounding the most heavily contaminated areas near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant., things changed. The research for this book was really geared toward understanding the Ukrainian psyche as much as I could, and the particular fact about Pripyats samosley population organically reflected this protectiveness over home and the land of Ukraine that I was seeing pop up again and again through my studies. Ukrainians had been murdered by the millions because Stalin wanted their land, for example. There are a number of Ukrainian poems and laments from soldiers missing their villages while fighting for the Russian Empire the significance of home and identifying as Ukrainian is profound.

The other reason I included Chernobyl was the fact of the negative influence of the USSR and the lasting effects of one of the largest environmental disasters in human history under ineffective and corrupt leadership. In 201314, Ukrainians were still trying to shake that Soviet influence and had been both literally and figuratively cleaning up for decades. You feel that significance in the novel even though its not blatantly stated.

There are many ways people can donate to help Ukrainians displaced and in need during the current conflict. Pickhart highlighted these groups:

Top photo: Protests in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 18, 2014, when Ukrainian police used tear gas, grenades and live and rubber ammunition on Euromaidan protesters in Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti. More than 100 civilians and a dozen police officers were killed over the course of several days. Photo byVadven/iStock

News director , Media Relations and Strategic Communications

480-965-9689 penny.walker@asu.edu

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ASU alum's lyrical novel explores a time of revolution in Ukraine - ASU News Now