President Joe Biden faced a fresh call to fully end “forever wars” after his administration released former President Donald Trump’s secret rules regarding the use of lethal strikes outside of designated war zones.

The Biden administration released the partly-redacted 11-page document, “Principles, Standards, and Procedures for U.S. Direct Action Against Terrorist Targets,” late Friday to the ACLU and New York Times, which had both filed transparency lawsuits to see the guidelines.

Biden suspended the rules once he took office, the Times reported, and began a review of them in March. That move prompted Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s national security project, to urge not a “review” but an end to the program. “Tinkering with the bureaucracy of this extrajudicial killing program will only entrench American abuses,” she said at the time.

According to the Times: “The review, officials said, discovered that Trump-era principles to govern strikes in certain countries often made an exception to the requirement of ‘near certainty’ that there would be no civilian casualties. While it kept that rule for women and children, it permitted a lower standard of merely ‘reasonable certainty’ when it came to civilian adult men.”

Author and director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law Karen J. Greenberg summed up the background recently, writing:

In his second term, [former President Barack] Obama did try to put some limits and restrictions on lethal strikes by [remotely piloted aircraft], establishing procedures and criteria for them and limiting the grounds for their use. President Trump promptly watered down those stricter guidelines, while expanding the number of drone strikes launched from Afghanistan to Somalia, soon dwarfing Obama’s numbers.  According to the British-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism, Obama carried out a total of 1,878 drone strikes in his eight years in office. In his first two years as president, Trump launched 2,243 drone strikes. 

The document’s release follows a fall court order saying the Trump administration could no longer keep the rules secret or deny their existence.

“The United states will continue to take extraordinary measures to ensure with near certainty that noncombatants will not be injured or killed in the course of operations, using all reasonably available information and means of verification,” the Trump-era document states. However, it adds, “Variations to the provision… may be made where necessary.”

Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney for the ACLU, said in a statement, “We appreciate this release, which confirms our fear that President Trump stripped down even the minimal safeguards President Obama established in his rules for lethal strikes outside recognized conflicts.”

“Over four administrations,” Kaufman continued, “the U.S. government’s unlawful lethal strikes program has exacted an appalling toll on Muslim, Brown, and Black civilians in multiple parts of the world. Secretive and unaccountable use of lethal force is unacceptable in a rights-respecting democracy, and this program is a cornerstone of the ‘forever wars’ President Biden has pledged to end. He needs to do so.”

Letta Tayler, associate director and counterterrorism lead with Human Rights Watch’s Crisis and Conflict Division, shared the Times reporting on Saturday with a tweet saying the deadly force rules document was “Not surprising but no less repugnant: Trump stripped down already minimal safeguards from U.S. targeted killings.”

Saturday also marked the 18th anniversary of former President Geroge W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech—a date noted by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who cast the sole vote against the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

“Eighteen years ago, George W. Bush stood in front of a ‘mission accomplished’ banner backdrop and told the nation that ‘major combat operations in Iraq have ended,'” Lee tweeted. “After the loss of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, it’s time to finally put an end to our forever wars.”

Hope — it seems to be everywhere these days. Humans routinely hope for all sorts of stuff — easy-to-assemble IKEA furniture, vaccines against COVID-19, economically painless solutions to global warming. Some believe we’re born with an “innate” sense of hope, and according to positive psychologist Barbara Frederickson, hope is one of the “top ten positive emotions.” It’s even been said that “when hope dies in a person, physical death is not far off.”

Among conservation workers, activists and anyone concerned with the climate crisis, hope is called upon to do particularly heavy lifting. A recent Google search on the phrase “hope and conservation” returned a whopping 779,000 results. In the top result, conservation journalist Jeremy Hance asks “Has hope become the most endangered species in conservation?”

There’s a common narrative shared by Hance and other like-minded commentators. Hope, according to this line of thinking, is a bulwark against the despair that would be an all-too-natural reaction to torrents of environmental bad news. Ecologist Steve Morton calls it “the elixir of (environmental) action,” whereas, to feel hopeless, according to numerous sources, is to be numbered and paralyzed into inaction. Gregory Balmford and Nancy Knowlton, architects of the Earth Optimism movement, even argue that hopelessness among conservationists could become “a driver of extinction.”

I’m an ecologist, not a psychologist, but I’ve long been struck by the centrality of hope in professional conservation discourse. Commentaries in the conservation literature extoll and debate the virtues of having “hope in hard times.” But are we, I asked myself, expecting hope to do too much?

To investigate this question, I teamed up with psychology Ph.D. candidate Elizabeth Williams and sustainability expert Melanie Zurba to investigate the many dimensions of hope and to ask whether hope’s really a necessary prerequisite for people to engage in environmental action. Our resulting review, published last year in the journal Biological Conservation, reached back to the earliest definitions and psychological theories of hope and found that it has both benefits and pitfalls for people working on conservation and environmental issues.

Hope Status? It’s Complicated.

Strong claims for the power of hope in modern human affairs follow a long history in which hope was seen in a negative light. Ancient Greek writers, for example, often perceived hope as a refuge for wishful thinkers, the gullible and those who underestimated the gravity of their situations.

It was left to thinkers from the Enlightenment and later to reframe hope as a positive attribute with goals that can be actively pursued.

That brings us to contemporary positive psychology, which defines hope as “a positive motivational state” (not an emotion) that enables people to exercise agency (goal-directed energy) in the pursuit of objectives that are possible but not 100% certain.

This type of “active” or “authentic” hope is what conservation biologist David Orr had in mind when he described hope as “a verb with its sleeves rolled up.” Orr’s folksy definition capture the idea of hope as having pragmatic, achievable goals that demand conservationists take the actions needed to realize them. You may not know how to save the world, but you can hope to conserve a watershed.

However, don’t confuse hope — especially active hope — with four related but different states that have less positive implications.

First, there’s optimism. Unlike active hope, optimism’s objectives may be vague or even absent. Optimism is best thought of as a sunny expectation that “everything will turn out for the best.”

Then there’s passive hope, in which individuals hope for favorable but fuzzily defined outcomes such as “a solution” to climate change. Passive hope may actually be demotivational. For example, those who feel hopeful because they only expose themselves to positive visions of the future may fail to follow through on those feelings to make them real.

There’s also absolute hope, the refusal to despair in the face of an inevitably bad future, like a terminal illness. A patient may be terminal, but absolute hope allows them to maintain their sense of self and resist dwelling on the diagnosis.

Finally, at the extreme end of making the best out of bad times, there’s radical hope, which helps to makes unsatisfactory or disastrous present circumstances tolerable by maintaining hope for future deliverance. You can have radical hope without knowing what future deliverance looks like or when it will arrive. One individual often held up as an archetype of radical hope is Plenty Coups, last principal chief of the Crow Nation, who led his people through a period in which Crow traditions of hunting and warriorship were destroyed.

Though it may seem noble, radical hope can be a slippery slope to “positive reappraisal,” where negative outcomes are re-evaluated as opportunities or even as beneficial. Naturalist and blogger Phil Barnett appeared to be practicing positive reappraisal when he wrote: “…if only for the sake of our mental health, we can accept the reality of a globe, everywhere sullied by man’s footprints and perhaps even learn to love it.” In a real-world conservation example, I’d posit that both radical hope and positive reappraisal lie behind the “Hail Mary” plan to clone the functionally extinct northern white rhinoceros, now down to two individuals, both of them female.

To Hope or to Hope Not?

Not everyone buys into the hope agenda. Environmental writers Paul Kingsnorth and Derrick Jensen accuse environmentalists of buying into false hope. Echoing the ancient Greeks, they say that false hope leads to unattainable goals, illusory expectations, and inept action strategies. To Kingsnorth, “False hope is worse than no hope.” Jensen seems to be thinking about both false hope and radical hope when he says hope is a “longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”

Furthermore, absence of hope doesn’t stop some people from acting in pro-environmental ways. Greta Thunberg doesn’t always come across as a fount of positivity, yet she continues to fight for the world she wants. Neither Kingsnorth nor Jensen feels hopeful, yet each continues to act in the world, albeit from outside mainstream environmentalism. To Jensen, removing false hope is a precondition for action: “When we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it.”

So, to hope or not to hope? Should we embrace and encourage hope because it is the “elixir of conservation”? Or should we avoid investing too much emotional and professional capital in hope? Because, let’s face it, while conservationists may try to save as many endangered species and populations as possible, disappointments are inevitable.

Right now, it seems as though most conservation-oriented literature is solidly on hope’s side. A sparse but growing body of psychological research supports a role for active hope in helping conservationists “stay in the game.” During the past six months two intellectual heavy hitters, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and science communicator Elin Kelsey, brought out books extolling the virtues of hope. Their titles: Commanding Hope (Homer-Dixon) and Hope Matters (Kelsey) leave little doubt as to where their authors stand on the importance of hope.

Personality, Leadership and Organizational Strengths Matter

At the end of our review, we concluded that active hope can be a powerful ingredient in conservation success, provided the complexities of hope as a motivational state are acknowledged.

We found that passive hope, radical hope and positive reappraisal seem to be unlikely motivators of success in most environmental battles. And optimism certainly won’t cut it, since optimists don’t typically feel obligated to act in the world to make their expectations real.

It’s active hope, we argue, that’s the gold standard. Only active hope provides the inspiration, agency and pathways to success that are needed for environmental action to succeed. Research in fields as diverse as athletic performance and psychotherapy has associated active hope with successful outcomes. Furthermore, active hope may provide environmental workers with a buffer of resilience against the repeated pain of environmental loss.

But hope on its own, we also found, is not particularly useful.

By themselves, expressions of hope are imperfect predictors of engagement in pro-conservation action. Nor is the direction of causation between hope and action always clear. Pro-environmental behavior may sometimes be a prelude to having hope rather than the other way round. And hope isn’t the only determinant of future action. Life goals, personality traits, cognitive biases, cultural values, childhood experience, age, gender, religion and cultural identity also influence pro-conservation attitudes and actions.

An important take-home message that emerged from our review is that conservation organizations must work to foster personal qualities and behaviors that turn active hope into action. Having a sense of personal agency, engaging in goal-directed projects, and developing clear roadmaps to the future enable conservation workers to be effective.

Leadership is also important. Strong conservation leaders inspire their troops with clear, long-term visions allied to pragmatic road maps of how to make those visons real.

And yet, as important as vision may be, it is often neglected. In a 2018 report based on interviews with 116 Canadian environmental leaders, Graham Saul, the executive director of Nature Canada, concluded that many environmental organizations lack a unifying vision around which forward-looking hopes could coalesce.

The bottom line is that having active hope helps to make conservation visions reality. But don’t expect hope to achieve good things unaided. Inspirational leadership and solid organizational scaffolding are needed to help hopeful conservation workers succeed. In the present environmental moment, conservation organizations may also need to cultivate resilience among workers and volunteers against the times when even active hope fails to pan out.

MYTH #1: We’re all getting the COVID vaccine…

No. Not all of us. Many developing countries don’t have any supply at all yet. Nothing. At best, many will only be able to vaccinate one person in 10 this year. Unless something changes, vaccinating everyone across the entire world will take years. But if you’re lucky enough to live in a rich developed country then you’ve either already had a jab or are very likely to get one soon. Rich countries are vaccinating at a rate of one person-per-second—which is fantastic!—but for most people in the world the future is an uncertain and unprotected one.

MYTH #2: … and we’re beating the pandemic.

Well, there’s hope if you live in a rich country, sure. But poor countries all over the globe just don’t have enough vaccines. They don’t have enough oxygen or medical supplies either. We’re simply not making enough vaccines because big pharmaceutical corporations have a monopoly on them and rich countries cornered the vaccine market long ago. As a result, vaccine inequality is going to make COVID both more deadly and more costly. Vaccine inequality could cost the world as much as $9 trillion. And then there’s mutations: the longer we let the virus spread, the more it will evolve and today’s vaccines won’t work, sooner than we think. Which means we’re not beating COVID until we beat it everywhere.

MYTH #3 The UN is getting enough vaccines to poor countries.

It’s trying to—but the UN alone can’t do it. The World Health Organisation’s “COVAX” facility aims to get 20% of people living in poor countries vaccinated by 2021. This is welcome—but would you be happy if only one person in five was vaccinated in your neighbourhood? There’s another UN initiative called the “COVID Technology Access Pool” (C-TAP) where Big Pharma corporations were invited to volunteer their vaccine technology and know-how so that more producers around the world could make them. This is a super-important initiative. But not one Big Pharma corporation has signed up so far—zero! Meanwhile, some rich countries say they’ll donate some of their surplus vaccines to poor countries which is helpful too, but we’re not going to vaccinate everyone by donation.

MYTH #4: ‘Intellectual property’ isn’t the problem here…

It really is a big part of it. Everything needed to make the vaccine—the know-how and technology—is held under the lock-and-key of the pharmaceutical corporations’ “intellectual property”. And there is a huge fight over it: 101 developing countries led by South Africa and India are calling for World Trade Organisation members to waive intellectual property rights over the COVID vaccines and a powerful minority of rich nations led by the US, UK, EU and Japan are fiercely opposing them (although the Biden Administration is said to be reconsidering its position—which is encouraging news). Intellectual property goes to the heart of vaccine inequality. In the 1980s Big Pharma led an idea (that inventors be given sole control in order to profit from their “intellectual property”) that became one of the key rules governing global trade today. They argued for these deliberate monopolies as the best way to guarantee innovation and maximise the benefits for humanity. It also happened to be heavily in their own financial interests. Today this approach is actually locking away the benefits of publicly funded science for billions of people on the planet.

MYTH #5: …. it just allows Big Pharma to protect its discoveries…

No—the discovery and production of these vaccines was funded by more than $100 billion in tax-payers’ money. Vaccines have effectively been privatised and handed over to big Pharma. So the likes of Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson have significant control over all the technology, know-how and science—and along with that, all the decisions about how many vaccines get made, their cost, and who gets it and when. They’re protecting huge revenue: Pfizer’s vaccine will be one of its best-sellers at around $15 billion in revenue this year alone. It has sold almost all its doses to rich nations and isn’t interested in producing them outside the US and Europe for years.

MYTH #6: … and it gives them an incentive to keep discovering.

This excuse is designed to really play upon our worst fears (“they won’t help us in the next pandemic if they don’t make billions out of this one“). It doesn’t hold water. Governments will always incentivize private corporations to help protect public health (remember that $100bn of public money that sparked today’s COVID vaccines?). Nor is anyone suggesting the Big Pharma corporations do it for free. There are times, certainly, when respecting private property can drive greater efficiency and productivity. But these rights aren’t sacrosanct. Sometimes they simply don’t guarantee the best social or economic outcome. This is one of those times where to do so is causing greater inequality and will lead to many more deaths and economic ruin.

MYTH #7: The real problem is the lack of manufacturing capacity.

Nope. Right now, there is more manufacturing capacity all around the world that isn’t being used, and is could be. There are vaccine producers from Bangladesh to Denmark saying they’re ready to go. You might expect, during a deadly pandemic, that once a vaccine was discovered factories everywhere would swing into action. Not so. In large part because Big Pharma corporations—backed by rich countries—are not willing to share their technology and know-how. If they did, we’d see generic competition being able to produce more global supply at lower prices.

MYTH #8: We can’t risk sub-standard vaccines coming onto market.

Really!? Pharmaceutical manufacturers over the world are already making hundreds of thousands of medicines and vaccines that we all use and have done for years. They are qualified and capable of making a COVID vaccine in accordance with strict WHO quality standards—if only they were allowed. AstraZeneca itself has licensed production to companies around the world, including in India and in Argentina, so it is already comfortable that its vaccine can be produced in countries that are able to test, control and regulate quality standards. Suggesting they can’t ‘keep up standards’ smacks of arrogance and excuse. It is a long-used tactic of the most powerful pharmaceutical corporations to protect their profits. Protecting standards is vital and can be achieved

MYTH #9: There are legal ways around intellectual property.

Yes—in theory, for public health emergencies like this—but rich countries make these exceptions nearly impossible for others to use. For example, “compulsory licenses” should allow countries to access certain technologies. But to make a COVID vaccine, there are hundreds of different things for which they would have to obtain a license. For many countries, compulsory licenses are like being offered a toothpick to break down the steel fence of Big Pharma’s intellectual property control.

MTYH #10: Anyway… there’s nothing you can do about it.

OMG … but you can! Join the People’s Vaccine campaign. Support the majority of people who believe that vaccine monopolies are at odds with our universal right to health. The only way these big pharmaceutical corporations and rich governments will move is by being shamed into it. As they have been before. In the 2000s Oxfam joined a global campaign that pressured many of these same corporations from their shameless monopoly profiteering from HIV/AIDS drugs.

What if a vampire suddenly lost its fangs?

Would it still be a vampire?

That’s the question at the heart of a major change in the largest charter school network in western Pennsylvania.

This week, staff at the Propel network of charter schools voted overwhelmingly to unionize.

So the money men behind the Allegheny County system of charter schools are probably wondering if they’re still investing in charter schools at all.

After all, when encumbered by the need to collectively bargain with employees, can a charter still do all its usual profitizing tricks?

Thursday, Propel teachers and other staff voted 236-82 to join the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA).

The drive took 9 months to achieve. Propel enrolls about 4,000 students at 13 schools in Braddock Hills, Hazelwood, Homestead, McKeesport, Pitcairn, Turtle Creek, Munhall, McKees Rocks and the North Side.

Though PSEA represents staff at about a dozen charters throughout the state, unionization is a rarity at charter schools.

And the reason is pretty obvious.

Charter schools are all about escaping the rules that authentic public schools have to abide by.

Though publicly financed, they are often privately operated.

They don’t have to be run by elected school boards. They don’t have to manage their business at public meetings. They don’t have to open their budgets to public review. Heck! They don’t even have to spend all the money they get from taxes on their students.

They can legally cut services and pocket the savings.

Nor do they have to accept every student in their coverage area. They can cherry pick whichever students they figure are cheapest to educate and those who they predict will have the highest test scores. And they can hide this discrimination behind a lottery or whatever other smoke screen they want because – Hey! The rules don’t apply to them!

I’m not saying every charter school does all this, but they all can. It’s perfectly legal to do so, and we rarely even see it happening until the school goes belly up and taxpayers are left paying the tab.

So how do unions change this system?

Most obviously, they put a check on the nearly limitless power of the charter operators.

Now you have to pay a living wage. You can’t demand people work evenings and weekends without paying them overtime. You have to provide safe working conditions for students and staff. And if you want to cut student services and pocket the difference, the staff is going to have something to say about that – AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN!

How much will union power beat back charter bosses?

It’s hard to say. But there is no doubt that it will play a moderating influence.

And how much it does so may depend to a large degree on the individuals working at the school and the degree of solidarity they can exercise against their bosses.

One thing is for sure, with a union the gravy train is over.

Wall Street speculators often fawn over the charter industry because it’s possible to double or triple your investment in seven years.

This will probably not be the case in a unionized charter. And the impact of such a reality has yet to be felt.

Will the worst financial gamblers abandon school privatization because unions make it too difficult to make handfuls of cash? One can hope.

If it happened, the only charters left standing would be those created without profit as their guiding principle. The goal would really have to be doing the best thing for children, not making shadowy figures in the background a truckload of money.

Do such charter schools even exist? Maybe. With staff continuing to unionize, maybe there will be even more of them.

However, even if all of them become altruistic, there still remains a problem.

There still remains an authentic public school with which the charter must compete for limited funding.

Even a positive charter school that only does the best for its students still needs money to operate. And most districts barely have enough funding for one education system – certainly not two parallel ones.

This is a problem I don’t think unions can solve.

The state and federal government will have to find a better way to fund education. Relying on local property taxes to make up the largest share as we do in most parts of the country must come to an end.

But even if we figure out how to adequately, equitably and sustainably fund one education system, the presence of a charter school requires we do it twice.

Fiscal watchdogs may object to this as irresponsible, and one can certainly see their point.

However, in a country where we spend more on the military than the next ten nations combined, perhaps it isn’t so much to ask that we more than double spending on education.

Maybe there is something to be gained by having two parallel school systems. But there are certainly dangers.

Obviously the situation would be rife for de facto segregation. Charter schools already increase racial and economic segregation wherever these schools exist. However, if we regulated them to eliminate this risk, it is at least conceivable that these two systems could coexist.

It could certainly solve the problem of large class sizes by decreasing student to teacher ratios.

But will it?

Most of the people who work at charter schools are dedicated to their students and want them to succeed. They deserve every opportunity to thrive in a profession centered around children, not profit.

But can a system created to enrich the few ever be fully rehabilitated into one that puts children first?

When you defang a charter school, are you left with something harmless?

Or have you simply forced the beast to find other ways to feed?