Colin Powell – who held some of the most stressful national security posts in the U.S. government during decades of public life – used to relax by fixing up old Volvos.

He would say that unlike many geostrategic problems, a balky carburetor could be straightforward to fix. 

When he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1990s, he kept five or six Volvos stashed in garages near his quarters in Fort Myer, Virginia. At that point he figured he had already renovated more than 30 of the boxy, reliable Scandinavian cars.

Lynne Cheney, wife of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney (and mother of current GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming) wanted to buy one of Chairman Powell’s finished projects. The JCS chief and the head of the Pentagon eventually decided that wasn’t a great idea.

“Dick and I allowed as how it would be better if the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of Defense did not have a car-selling relationship dealing with a used, ancient car,” General Powell said in an interview.

Colin Luther Powell, who passed away on Monday, was a thoughtful, witty, and self-aware public servant. He never ran for electoral office himself, despite pressure from many who believed that, as a Republican with moderate social and economic views and military experience, he had a good chance of becoming the first Black American president.

Instead, he served an important transitional leadership role from the late 1980s to the early 2000s as America’s national security forces switched focus from the clarity of the Cold War to the diffuse demands of a worldwide war against terrorism.

Asked in an interview how he dealt – for years and years – with the firehose of news, opinions, advice, and criticism that washes over any top U.S. official, General Powell quoted one of the U.S. Army’s favorite military theoreticians, 19th-century German Gen. Carl von Clausewitz. 

“There’s a great Clausewitzian expression which says ‘beware the vividness of transient events,’” General Powell said. “There are lots of transient events out there, and I am trying to beware of their vividness.”

Bill Grant/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Gen. Colin Powell, shown during a visit to The Christian Science Monitor newsroom in Boston, served an important transitional role as America’s national security forces switched focus from the clarity of the Cold War to the diffuse demands of a worldwide war against terrorism.

A military life at high speed

Colin Powell’s parents immigrated to the United States from Jamaica. He was born in Harlem and grew up in the South Bronx. He attended City College of New York, where he participated in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army upon graduation in 1958.

Military life provided the rituals, symbols, and sense of belonging and purpose that the young Powell craved, and he never looked back. Early on he was tagged as a “fast burner,” or man on the move. In his first tour of Vietnam, he survived a Viet Cong shell that hit a tree under which he was sheltering; in his second tour, he survived a helicopter crash.

Then his crisp efficiency began to land him Washington jobs. After Vietnam, he spent 17 of the next 22 years in Pentagon or D.C.-based employment. Along the way, he met two future Republican secretaries of Defense who became mentors: Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed him national security advisor, where he dealt with a Soviet Union in the final throes of its existence. He then served as the nation’s top military officer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, from 1989 to 1993. In the Gulf War of 1991 he became known for the so-called “Powell doctrine” of military force, which was, in essence, that the U.S. needed to employ overwhelming strength.

This approach worked well in expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 – perhaps too well even for Chairman Powell. As Iraqi forces streamed back toward Baghdad under withering U.S. fire, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff began to push for an end to hostilities, remembered then-Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gates in an oral history archived at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia.

“This is turning from a military conflict into a rout and from a rout into a massacre and the American Army does not do massacres,” Mr. Gates recalls General Powell saying.

A bend in history

General Powell’s popularity soared in the wake of the Gulf War victory. By the mid-1990s pundits often mentioned him as a possible strong candidate for the 1996 GOP nomination.

But he never even launched an exploratory bid – perhaps because of family reasons, perhaps because he was beginning to seem like a moderate policy throwback in the GOP, or maybe because he just felt he didn’t have the near-maniacal drive it takes to successfully compete for the nation’s highest office.

In 2001, newly elected George W. Bush, with little foreign-policy experience, asked General Powell to be his Secretary of State. When he was sworn in, Secretary Powell became the highest-ranking Black official to that point in American history, ranking fourth in the presidential line of succession.

The September 11 attacks that year bent the course of U.S. history, and the Bush administration began to look at foreign military intervention as a forceful step in the newly declared war on international terrorism.

In February 2003, Secretary Powell delivered a speech before the United Nations in which he presented evidence the U.S. intelligence community said proved that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had continued accumulating weapons of mass destruction. International inspectors weren’t enough to head off the danger of a possible Iraqi nuclear weapon, Secretary Powell insisted.

The subsequent U.S. invasion succeeded in toppling Hussein, but no weapons of mass destruction were found. The pre-war U.S. assessment had been wrong.

Secretary Powell later defended his presentation, saying it wasn’t something that had been pasted together from scraps of espionage in his Foggy Bottom office.

“It wasn’t an exaggeration, and it wasn’t a falsehood,” he said in an interview.

But he also acknowledged that the presentation was in fact wrong, and that it would remain a “blot” on his record.

“I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world,” General Powell told Barbara Walters on ABC News in 2005.

What might have been for the GOP – and America

What would it have been like if Colin Powell had run for president – and won?

The history of the Republican Party could have been different. After all, his political boomlet long pre-dated the Trump years and the party’s sharp turn right toward populist conservatism.

But the election of Ronald Reagan – and the continuing rise of a young House member from Georgia named Newt Gingrich – might have indicated that shift in the GOP was already occurring.

The interesting thing about discussing politics with General Powell was that he didn’t home in on foreign policy, or military strength, or other security issues he’d spent his life on.

He’d talk about kids, and providing them the opportunities he’d had in life.

One fall day in 1995, after he retired from the military, he looked out of the windows of his office in Alexandria, Virginia, at the city seven stories below him in the gathering dark.

Asked what special skills he’d bring to the presidency, he ticked off a rote list: pretty good leader, experienced at the process of compromise, somebody who knows how to set goals.

Then he paused, and looked at the city’s housing projects visible in the near distance.

“I want to bring the sense of hope and faith that fueled my life into the life of every young kid,” he says. “I can take you five blocks from here and show you kids that don’t have that anymore in their lives.”

David Zalubowski/AP/File

A prospective buyer looks over cars at a Mazda dealership in Littleton, Colorado, on June 14, 2020. A shortage of semiconductors has affected availability and pricing in the auto industry – and has helped fuel a push for legislation to expand U.S. government support for key high-tech industries.

The computer chip shortage, which has disrupted supplies of everything from automobiles to wheelchair accessories, is pushing Congress to take big steps in helping America’s high-tech industry.

Congress has already passed legislation to encourage semiconductor firms to build chip fabrication facilities, or fabs, in the United States. It has not yet authorized the funding. Not for the first time, the nation is poised to dramatically pump up funding for scientific research and, more controversially, help high-tech companies to meet an international challenge.

“Rather than a sea change, we’re on another wave,” says John Alic, an author and visiting scholar at Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes. 

The wave wouldn’t solve the chip shortage. The current mismatch between constrained supply and soaring demand will likely be over, perhaps by next year and almost certainly before any federal incentives make a meaningful contribution. But they could induce a big leap in domestic production, possibly making future chip shortages less acute. And, politically speaking, the current shortage is so visible to car buyers and other consumers who have seen soaring prices and huge delays in product shipments, that Congress is eager to act.

“The continuing impact of the chip shortage – epitomized most recently in the news that GM will be forced to idle plants across North America – speaks to the urgency of passing bipartisan legislation,” said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and champion of the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors Act, or CHIPS. Funding more U.S. production won’t solve things overnight, he said, but “the longer we wait, the worse this supply chain crunch will become.”

If Congress funds CHIPS and passes two other bills now before it – the Innovation and Competition Act and energy demonstration projects in the new infrastructure bill – it would represent a big shift toward more of the collaborative efforts between government and industry known as industrial policy.

“There is a shift,” says William Bonvillian, a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of a new report on the subject for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank. “There is a sense that the U.S. faces major technology challenges and that our longstanding basic-research-only approach, outside of defense, is not working. It’s not giving us the technological leadership that we need.”

Rising urgency in Congress

The U.S. semiconductor industry remains a leading designer of chips. But it has fallen behind in their manufacture. Nominally, the competition is from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and South Korea’s Samsung, which have moved ahead of U.S.-based Intel in producing the smallest and most advanced semiconductors. But the real threat, at least in the eyes of many in Congress, is China. Although it remains far behind in state-of-the-art fabrication, it is throwing huge resources in the sector to catch up.

Traditionally, the U.S. has used a hands-off approach with civilian industry and technology development. Republicans and many economists oppose industrial policy, because governments have not proved very adept at picking high-tech winners. But in the face of a strategic challenge, they have supported more federal intervention beyond the funding of basic scientific research.

In the 1980s, it was Japan, whose chipmakers were taking over the memory chip industry. Two Republican administrations supported various efforts to boost corporate research and development and funded a private-public partnership, called Sematech, to help U.S. semiconductor equipment manufacturers regain the lead over Japan.

Today, it’s China. Bipartisan majorities in Congress have supported the $53 billion CHIPS Act, which would offer a 40% investment tax credit to companies that build chip fabrication facilities in the U.S. The act also authorizes the Defense Department to conduct research and development, workforce training, testing, and evaluation for chip-related programs, projects, and activities. The act also calls for the government to act as a customer for the domestic semiconductor industry. (The military, which already uses these methods, is the exception to America’s aversion to industrial policy and has maintained the U.S. lead in military technology, sometimes expensively so.)

“It does make sense to try and put us in a position where we are going to be more competitive economically,” says Mike Watson, associate director of Hudson Institute’s Center for the Future of Liberal Society in Washington. But “I’m not a fan of a lot of that. ... A concern about trying to throw a bunch of money into research and development right now is that as these numbers get larger and larger, our ability to actually meaningfully track anything that we’re doing starts to go down.”

If CHIPS Act funding is approved on the order of $50 billion, the U.S. could see 19 fabs built domestically by the end of the decade, more than double the nine that would be built if the status quo prevails, according to a Boston Consulting Group report a year ago.

One bill, 10 sectors of innovation

The Innovation and Competition Act, which is being hashed out by House and Senate conferees, represents another step toward a more coherent commercial industrial policy. The broad Senate version would expand the National Science Foundation, which currently funds basic research, into an organization that’s also dedicated to aiding development in 10 areas, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other advanced technology. The House version of the legislation is much narrower in scope. 

One of the challenges of industrial policy is that what’s implemented by one administration can be undone by another. The most enduring programs are those with broad constituencies, argues Andrew Schrank, a professor of international and public affairs at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. 

In perhaps the earliest example of American industrial policy, President George Washington made sure the U.S. Navy’s first six frigates were built in six different ports, bolstering their local economies and at the same time broadening political support for the program. Successful modern iterations of industrial policy have done the same thing, says Mr. Schrank. The Manufacturing Extension Partnerships, authorized in 1988, are mandated to operate in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, helping small and midsize manufacturers adopt new techniques and new technologies. 

By focusing exclusively on smaller companies and conducting performance reviews, the program also insulates itself politically from criticism that it’s a corporate giveaway. A real danger of the CHIPS Act is that the largest tech companies will try to make sure federal funds flow to them.

“I worry that a relatively small number of very, very powerful manufacturing firms, electronics firms, and chip firms can capture this thing,” says Mr. Schrank. “We need this industrial policy to pay attention to the little guy, partly for economic and moral reasons, but partly for political reasons.” That might well ensure its longevity.

Editor's note: An update has been made to correct the name of Mike Watson.

Annegret Hilse/Reuters

Free Democratic Party leader Christian Lindner arrives for exploratory talks on a possible new government coalition in Berlin, Oct. 12, 2021.

If you’ve overlooked the Free Democrats, the party that finished fourth in German elections last month, you’re probably not alone.

Its last spell in government ended in 2013 when it polled so poorly that it lost all its seats in Parliament. Now the FDP has emerged as a likely partner in Germany’s next ruling coalition, one of two small parties positioned to determine who will run Europe’s largest economy. On Monday, it agreed to enter formal talks to form a coalition led by the center-left Social Democrats. 

Yet pinning down what the FDP stands for, and how it might shape German politics after Angela Merkel’s 16-year reign, is complicated: It has libertarian ideas – lower taxes, legalization of cannabis – but supports a modest welfare state and market-driven policies to combat climate change. What may seem like contradictions, though, make perfect sense to its base, as long as party leaders stick to its brand of fiscal responsibility. And its resurgence highlights a strain in German society that tends to pragmatism over partisan signaling.

“They care about rights and liberties yet also about maintaining [society’s] basic capitalistic nature perhaps with some regulation of capitalist excesses. But they’re very centrist,” says Eric Langenbacher, professor of government at Georgetown University, who compares the FDP’s politics to those of moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin and traditional Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney.

For Ann Cathrin Riedel, a former FDP candidate in Berlin, the appeal of the party is in its defense of civil liberties in the face of mainstream political support for a sweeping national data retention law seven years ago. She felt that “I have to do something now.” So, she joined the party, which opposed the policy and argued for the preservation of user-data anonymity.

Eventually Ms. Riedel decided to run for Parliament, though she comes from a nonpolitical family and considers herself shy. Still, her practical approach to policymaking and strong sense of personal liberties is textbook FDP.

“A lot of people say that we’re a boys’ club and we only have interest in economics. My goal was to show another face of my party as a young woman advocating for civil liberties and human rights,” says Ms. Riedel, who failed to win a seat. “I’m not a guy with a tie – liberalism is much broader than that.”

Annegret Hilse/Reuters

The Free Democratic Party's deputy chairwoman, Nicola Beer (right), and federal manager, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, arrive at a meeting on a possible new government coalition, in Berlin, Oct. 12, 2021.

Since September’s election, in which it got 11.5% of votes cast, FDP has taken up its previous role as small-party kingmaker. The first-placed Social Democrats (SPD) had courted the FDP and third-placed Greens to form a so-called traffic light coalition, with the FDP coded as yellow. The three-way coalition would allow SPD leader Olaf Scholz to succeed Ms. Merkel as German chancellor. 

“The FDP has been one of those parties that’s always kind of punched above its weight because it was so crucial in forming that parliamentary majority and lending its support behind either a [Christian Democrat] or SPD chancellor,” says Dr. Langenbacher.

In coalition negotiations, the Free Democrats will be seeking support for critical parts of their policy platform and control of key ministries such as finance and economics; last week it proposed during talks that its leader Christian Lindner become Germany’s next finance minister.

Deficit hawks, climate activists

Hawkish on deficit spending and in favor of lowering taxes, the FDP has much in common with Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). But its other priorities include climate change and digital transformation of Germany’s economy, along with progressive social policies such as same-sex marriage, legalization of cannabis, and lowering the voting age to 16. 

The FDP’s role in a coalition government, says Dr. Langenbacher, will be to ensure that its policies stay centrist, while blocking or diluting the ambitions of its left-leaning partners, the Greens and SPD. For example, while the FDP supports an energy transition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as do the Greens, the two parties disagree over how this should happen and at what cost to Germany’s economy.

This is a countervailing force that Germans will want, given their centrist policy preferences. “They like continuity and stability with maybe a dash of change thrown in once in a while,” says Dr. Langenbacher. “And I think German voters see the FDP as a bit of a balancing force to the more progressive policy that the Greens, and to a lesser extent, the SPD are pushing.”

Ludger Ramme is a former CDU member who became drawn to the FDP’s “personalized concept of liberalism.” The party switch was a personal transition that took decades; he was elected to the provincial council in a Berlin suburb as a CDU member, then quit to avoid being in coalition with the SPD, which had been a campaign promise.

Then, after a decade without party affiliation, he joined the Free Democrats. 

“The [FDP] voters are not a fixed group that you can identify easily. They are very diverse, found in all parts of the country, consisting of all kinds of people and all sorts of professions, all sorts of ethnic or religious backgrounds,” says Mr. Ramme, who works at an association that provides professional support to German managers.                                     

“What is uniting them is this concept of being free, having no boundaries, being able to assess topics always with a new spin.”

A share of first-time voters

Mr. Ramme is excited about the FDP’s future, since governing would give the party a chance to “show that they can do very good work and that they are producing added value for the citizens.”

The FDP seems in a good position to bring more voters into its tent. In September’s election, the FDP and the Greens together won 44% of first-time voters, earning about equal shares and giving both a shot at challenging larger national parties for power in the future. 

One of the FDP’s young supporters is 28-year-old law student Julian Laschek. He joined the FDP’s youth organization in 2017 and supports its emphasis on “self-determination” and on education to help Germans reach their full potential.

“It doesn’t matter where you come from, or if your parents are lawyers or work in handcrafts,” says Mr. Laschek, a Berliner. “Every young person should be able to make his own decisions on where they want to go.”

They have been waiting for three years, growing fat and long in the tumult of the Pacific Ocean. Now the salmon turn, inexorably, driven by some ancient smell, into the mouth of a river along the wild Northern California coast.

For millennia, Native Americans watched the fish enter the Klamath River. The tribes celebrated them as a gift from the gods, but the fish numbers dwindled. Once the water teemed with millions of fish; last year, only 46,000 chinook salmon migrated successfully.

Huge dams, proclaimed by newcomers to the region as wondrous monuments to their dominance of nature, and promoted by the U.S. government as a way to open the West to settlers, blocked the fish from their upstream spawning grounds and slowed the Klamath in torpid reservoirs.

Now humanity is set to surrender much of the river back to nature. Four large dams on the Klamath River are due to be torn down in what is called the largest dam removal project in American history.

“It’s massive. It’s huge,” says Amy Cordalis, a legal adviser to the Yurok Tribe, of which she is a member, as she watches a heron lumber along the Pacific coast. “For the tribes and for the Yurok, it’s the beginning of healing. We remove those dams, the river runs free, and the salmon can go home.”  

Ann Hermes/Staff

“It’s huge. For the tribes and for the Yurok, it’s the beginning of healing. We remove those dams, the river runs free, and the salmon can go home,” says Amy Cordalis, a legal adviser to the Yurok Tribe, standing along the Klamath River in Requa, California

The removal will mark a major victory for environmentalists in their campaign to restore once-wild rivers in the United States by tearing down unneeded dams. It will be a historic victory for Native Americans who were promised eternal fishing rights, only to see fish blocked from their rivers. And it promises to help salmon, once a massive driver of the natural life cycle here in the Pacific Northwest.

But it could be too late. Environmentalists already see fish migrations dwindling in tributaries of the Klamath – a warning of further decline to come – and tribes no longer can count on fish as a source of food and a central part of their culture. Farmers upriver, meanwhile, who depend on irrigation, will continue to lay claim to their share of water from the river system. All of which means that the contentious issues that have swirled around the mighty Klamath for decades won’t vanish with the removal of four massive walls of earth and concrete. 

“We are in a race with extinction,” says Michael Belchik, a senior biologist for the Yurok Tribe, of the declining salmon stocks. “And we are losing.”   

The dams have foreshortened the ancient fish migration and slowed the Klamath River’s fast and wild run. Drought has stolen water. Climate change has warmed the river, now steeped with toxins and disease.  

The Klamath River once strode unimpeded from southern Oregon through Northern California. Its kingdom is an overlooked corner of America, an untamed swath of rugged land and insular people. America knows the legends the area has spawned: the American Indian wars drenched in treachery and blood. The relentless gold rush miners who ravaged salmon streams. The broken treaties. The Bunyanesque loggers felling centuries-old trees. And, in modern times, the environmentalists chaining themselves to hemlock and fir in the name of a small, spotted owl.

“There are layers of culture, of history, of biology,” says Mr. Belchik. “All put together.”   

Mr. Belchik, wind whipping at his words aboard a fast jet boat, is following the start of the salmon’s route from the cold waters of the Pacific. To trace the salmon’s journey inland is to see the challenges facing the river, the fish, and the people who depend on both – and how it might all soon change. 

Ann Hermes/Staff/File

Associate Judge Bill Bowers (right), of Yurok Tribal Court, fishes with his son Will on the Klamath River in Northern California.

The salmon turn from the ocean into a choppy estuary at the ancient Yurok community of Requa, California, beside the town of Klamath. The place is a busy depot: Waves of chinook and coho salmon face upriver for their last brutal trip to spawn and die, meeting young salmon swimming seaward with new silver scales broadcasting a readiness for ocean life. They swim alongside steelhead trout, ropy lamprey eels, and even some massive green sturgeon. Seals prowl. Anglers prey. All mix in the estuary briefly, then go their own ways.

The adult salmon swim toward the continent as the estuary narrows. They dart under the tall slender bridge of Highway 101, the sinuous coastal traffic vein of California.  

“From here, the salt water stops. And the salmon will not eat again,” says Mr. Belchik, as the shadow of the bridge passes overhead. 

Five miles upriver, the Klamath River becomes shallower. At the helm of the jet boat, Hunter Mattz reads the ripples on the surface. He cuts and weaves like a matador. It seems reckless – rushing forward in a boat with a V-8 engine above shallow rocks. But speed is necessary, the pilot explains. Backing off the throttle would cause the craft to settle in water. He needs it to skim the surface. “I had to learn to press forward, not to hesitate,” Mr. Mattz says.

The struggle over fish is a family matter for Mr. Mattz, as it is for many tribal members. His grandfather, Raymond Mattz, was arrested 19 times in the 1960s as authorities tried to force the Native Americans to stop fishing. He finally invited California game wardens to take him away, and eventually won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming the Yurok’s tribal rights to fish in their ancestral waters. 

“I’ve spent a lot of my time here, fishing,” says the young Mr. Mattz, his long ponytail dancing in the wind.

The salmon wend past the rocks, expending precious power. Eagles patrol the sky. Black bears visit at night. All await the salmon. 

Sixteen miles upriver is the first turnoff. The salmon are drawn, in ways humans still do not fully understand, to the place of their birth. A few thousand veer into Blue Creek, whose headwaters lie far up in the Siskiyou Wilderness.

As he chats at the juncture of the creek, Mr. Belchik is distracted. Suddenly the water churns with leaps and splashes. A cloud of fish has brought a harbor seal upstream for a banquet. “Did you see that?” Mr. Belchik exalts. “I just saw a big 20-pound salmon like right there. Big 20-pounder! Wow.” 

Mile after mile upriver the salmon swim, past ancient redwoods that somehow evaded the sawyers’ saws, towering Douglas firs, alders, and cottonwoods. The wet air of the coast rises with the land, and drops its rain – more than 100 inches per year – feeding the temperate rainforest.

The fish leave the territory of the Yurok, who have been here for thousands of years. They move forward in the Klamath through deep, spectacular gorges that crease uplifted granite mountains.

Sixty-six miles upriver, the Salmon River bustles in to join the Klamath. The river used to be famous for its surfeit of thousands of chinook each spring. This year biologists counted 95 fish.

In what can be a race of days or a hesitant swim of weeks, the salmon have labored their way more than 100 miles upstream. They reach Happy Camp, California, which flies the three eagle-feathered flag of the Karuk Tribe. The river at the center of the town – and at the tribe’s cultural heart – is tired and foul. The flow of water this far up is weak and the shallow currents intolerably warm for the cold-loving salmon. Blooms of toxic algae threaten the river as well.

Russell “Buster” Attebery, chairman of the Karuk Tribe, rarely eats fish from the river anymore. Mostly, he says, the fish are not there. It is an honored tradition for young men to catch and present salmon to their elders. But the tribe ended the practice four years ago. For its age-old ceremonies celebrating the return of the salmon, the tribe now gets fish from the Yurok on the coast. 

“My saddest day as chairman was to tell our elders that we can’t bring them any [local] fish,” says Mr. Attebery, who has headed the tribe for 11 years. “I think the happiest day will be when I tell them that we can.”

The struggling salmon seek shady water in the day, and move at night when the river is cooler – and alive. On a fierce windy night, the Klamath, lit by the moon, turns silver. Its usual gentle shush swells to a thousand voices, and the willows on its banks flail their branches in wild genuflection.

The fish leave the green folds of the Klamath Mountains and enter high steppe plains of volcanic rock. After 175 miles, they reach the Shasta River tributary. In the 1930s, fish counts put the number of chinook salmon in the Shasta at 80,000. Last year, volunteers who walked the river recorded 4,000.

Eventually, as it nears the Oregon border, the river begins to flatten. RV parks, with fat vehicles parked on concrete pads, line its banks. The current picks up, and the fish plunge forward, oblivious of human rafters who float past them on inner tubes. 

The fish turn a corner, 190 miles from the ocean where they began. But here, straddling the river, is an imposing red-clay and concrete barrier – the Iron Gate Dam.  

There is no ladder, no passage for fish. The wall, 740 feet wide, is the end of the line. 

Ann Hermes/Staff

Iron Gate Dam, a hydroelectric facility opened in 1964, is one of four dams slated to be removed along the Klamath River in Northern California.

Six dams were built on the Klamath River between 1918 and 1962. The Iron Gate Dam is 173 feet tall. Sluice pipes wind down the face of the dam from the reservoir behind it, ejecting water through two turbines to create hydroelectricity and providing the Lower Klamath a ration of lake-warmed water. Three shorter dams further upriver – the Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and John C. Boyle – also were built to bring kilowatts to a rural land.    

“This is so easy to be done, the benefit so great, and the cost so little, that it cannot fail to meet with the approval of every citizen,” gushed the Klamath Evening Herald when the dams were proposed in 1901.

The tribes say they were promised a fish passage around or over the dams, but that did not happen. Instead, a hatchery was built at the Iron Gate Dam to insert juvenile salmon into the river, obliterating the ancient spawning pull of more than 400 miles of river and tributaries upstream.

But the dams pool the river in reservoirs, interrupting its pace, and trap sediment. In this drought, the river is low, warm, and slow. That has fueled a disease called Ceratonova shasta, spores released from host worms that thrive in the slower warm current. It can kill young fish. It has claimed, by some estimates, 95% of the juvenile salmon released from the hatchery recently. 

Tribal leaders and biologists say the river – once the third most fertile salmon river in the West – may soon have no more salmon.

For 20 years, the tribes argued for restoration of the tributaries that were ravaged by logging and for removal of the dams, or the installation of working fish ladders. It has been a tortured fight. They were bolstered by the 1973 Supreme Court decision that overturned the arrest of Mr. Mattz’s grandfather. The tribes were further empowered by state and federal protections of endangered species, including the Klamath’s coho salmon.

But the fight still got ugly. In 2001, nearly 15,000 farmers, demanding more water for irrigation, mounted a “bucket brigade” protest, symbolically moving 50 pails of water from the river into an agricultural irrigation canal. The administration of George W. Bush then ordered water diverted to the farmers, which contributed to a massive die-off of tens of thousands of fish. Native groups still talk about it with a hushed tone of horror.

This year, in a reversal, federal authorities have cut off the irrigation water to farmers, as the drought has endangered the fish. That has brought an outcry from farmers that they are being sacrificed for salmon.

It’s a “disaster,” says Ben DuVal. Mr. DuVal farms far above the Iron Gate Dam, southeast of Upper Klamath Lake. He runs a 600-acre spread and raises 1,700 cattle on land his grandfather won in a homestead lottery in 1948. The grandfather of his wife, Erika, also secured acreage in the lottery. They hope to pass the farm down to their daughters, Hannah and Helena – “if that’s what they want,” the couple add in unison.

Their community of Tulelake, California, was a government project. It was created when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation drained swamps, dammed Upper Klamath Lake, and promised irrigation water forever to veterans of World War I and II who would homestead and farm the land. The government also promised fishing rights and water forever to the tribes. That duplicity burdens all of their descendants today: There is not enough water for both.

Outside the DuVals’ home, a 35-foot-high stack of hay bales awaits a buyer. Eventually, a tractor-trailer will haul them to Seattle, where they will be shrink-wrapped and shipped to Japan, South Korea, China, or Saudi Arabia.

“Believe it or not, it’s cheaper to ship it to China than to North Dakota,” says Mr. DuVal. About 1,200 farms in the area grow grain and alfalfa, potatoes and onions with water from Upper Klamath Lake.

But this year, the DuVals and their neighbors feel their livelihoods are endangered. Without the irrigation water, they cannot survive long, he says. Ms. DuVal motions out her sunny kitchen window to a fallow field. “You would not see brown out there; you would see green” in any other year. Their neighbor is sharing his well water, and many farmers are drilling deeper, even though they know the aquifer cannot support them all. “We’ve done a lot of things to get by this year that just aren’t going to work next year,” says Mr. DuVal.

“If we can’t get by for another year,” he adds, “it could very well be the end of our operation.” 

“Finding the water is one thing,” Ms. DuVal says at her kitchen table, “but dealing with the mental and emotional struggles as well can ... can break a person.”

The water cutoff has set the overwhelmingly white farmers – “irrigators” – against the defenders of the Klamath River and the Klamath River Indians. Mr. DuVal says he is not opposed to the dam removals – two remaining dams will control the lake level. But he believes the fish will not recover, given the warm and polluted waters.

“We’re putting farms out of business in order to continue doubling down on a theory that’s not working,” he says.

Don Gentry, the white-maned chairman of the Klamath Tribes, headquartered an hour north in Chiloquin, Oregon, acknowledges the dam removals will not be a panacea. Salmon may have to be reintroduced. They have not been seen in Chiloquin, on Upper Klamath Lake, for more than 100 years. But he is also concerned about two other endangered fish.

Known to the tribe as C’waam and Koptu, and called suckerfish by others, the species live in the lake. The adults are hardy and produce millions of juvenile fish each spring. But the young fish cannot survive the warm and polluted waters of Upper Klamath Lake, a shallow basin fouled by nutrients and often choked with toxic blue-green algae. Each year for nearly three decades, all the juvenile fish died by August.

Mr. Gentry frets about hydrology and biology, but it is the cultural loss he feels most keenly. He recalls the traditional catch of the C’waam and presentation to elders. 

When he was a teenager, at a time of overt prejudice against Native Americans, the practice “affirmed that I had a place in our community and a purpose,” he says. “It made me the person I am today.”

The tribal members say they are not trying to deprive farmers of all their water, but, in a historical irony, the government is now on their side. State and federal laws say endangered fish must have enough water to survive.  

Ann Hermes/Staff/File

The community of Klamath Glen, California, sits near the mouth of the Klamath River, where it runs into the Pacific Ocean, and where many salmon begin their long journey to upstream spawning grounds.

In “normal” years, the removal of four dams downstream would not affect Upper Klamath Lake. Its two remaining dams, with fish ladders, would still control the farmers’ allocations. But climate change is altering normal expectations, and the farmers worry that the government will cut them off again to bolster water supplies for the endangered fish.

And nearly 4 million wild birds that stop on the historic ponds and marshes on their migration are “the last in line for water,” notes Bill Lehman, executive director of the nonprofit Klamath Watershed Partnership. He argues that water allocations must sustain the wetlands that support migrating birds.

In the end, the decision to remove the dams was simply a matter of business. The hydroelectric plants are now owned by the energy company PacifiCorp, which is a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. The owners looked at the requirements for modernizing the old dams – including a court order that they install fish ladders – and concluded the modest electrical power produced by the plants no longer justified their upkeep.  

“We won because Warren Buffett decided it was too expensive” to keep the dams, admits Mr. Attebery of the Karuk Tribe.

The dams will be turned over to a legal entity called the Klamath River Renewal Corp., backed by the California and Oregon governments. Earthmovers are scheduled to begin dismantling the dams in two years.

But tensions remain ragged. Mark Bransom is chief executive officer of the new entity, and sometimes meets hostility as he explains the project in local communities. He recalls being confronted in a parking lot one night after a public meeting by two burly men who warned him never to return to the county. They added that they were armed.

“Oh, really?” Mr. Bransom says he told them. “What do you shoot? I carry my Glock .45 everywhere I go.” He offered to show them a shooting stance. “I can hit a 2-inch [target] at 30 feet every single time.” He says the men shuffled away.

Mr. Bransom, who grew up in rural Colorado, says he understands the distrust. “Your grandparents may have worked on these dams,” he tells people at public meetings. “Your ancestors came here to mine and they lost mining. And then they turned to logging and they lost logging – the spotted owl came along. Now agriculture is under assault, because we’re using too much water to grow hay and killing the salmon. So, you know, I understand what you’re saying.”

But Jeff Mitchell, an elder of the Klamath Tribes, says his people also are fighting for their way of life, their culture, and religion.

“We are fish people and we are water people,” says Mr. Mitchell. “We have a few laws that we believe the creator passed down to us, from generation to generation, and one of those is it is our responsibility to protect these fish. If for some reason these fish go away, the creator has told us we will go away. I believe that.”

Armed with broomsticks and wearing colorful, jagged-edged costumes, a dozen women break out into a lively dance routine in the tiny Polish village of Tuławki. Adults join in the end-of-summer rock performance, casting giant shadows across the park. Children marvel at the crazy hats and noses of these buoyant ladies who dare embrace the archetype of the witch in such a highly Catholic nation.

But this group of outlandish witches – as many in the rural villages surrounding the northern town of Olsztyn already know – do more than just put on a good show. They are also a lifeline for women in all kinds of trouble. Rehearsal sessions are a de facto safe space to share stories, help each other cope with the hardships of their past, and heal together from the extraordinary blows that life can deliver.

The women of Wiedźmuchy (Polish for witches) are bound by a common zest for life but also resilience in the face of terrible hardships. Together, they have discovered that there are many ways of healing and that each person makes that journey at their own pace. Different types of pain call for different restorative gestures. For one member, it was a symbolic funeral for her murdered daughter. For the mother of a child with cancer, a friendly visit.

“We keep taking in new people because we learn from them: among other things, humility,” says founder Alicja Tomaszewska. She describes her experience of rape and the long road to recovery as traumatic, but finds the stories of women who have lost a child the hardest to hear. “Everyone thinks that their pain is the greatest, then someone comes and tells you such stories that you think you have no problems. Nothing is by force. We don’t make anyone share things.”

“This group is for you”

As a professional performer at weddings and other events, Ms. Tomaszewska always found solace from her problems on stage. The idea to form a band of female performers came to her after watching a raucous group of male carolers trigger roars of laughter with their kitsch attires and goofy gestures during a mountain town festival.

So five years ago, Ms. Tomaszewska made a fake nose out of modeling clay, donned fake, gold teeth, and covered her face with garish makeup. She turned to her camera and launched an invitation on Facebook for others to join her in celebrating life and letting go of pain.

“I told the camera that no matter if you are a CEO, store assistant, doctor, or teacher, this group is for you,” she recalls. “We will dance, sing, overcome our barriers, and pretend to be other people because thanks to that we are allowed to do more.”

Monika Rębała

Villagers join the dancing as Wiedźmuchy perform in Tuławki, Poland, on Sept. 11, 2021. Women in the troupe have taken part in dozens of festivals across Poland and regularly participate in charitable activities.

She borrowed – with permission – the theme song of a German group of witch performers and hosted the first meeting of Wiedźmuchy near Olsztyn. Seven women turned up. The group has grown over the years and now counts about 20 regulars: the eldest over 60, the youngest (the daughter of another attendee) just 8 years old. They spend their time dancing, chanting, singing, and crafting choreography.

“I like the dancing and the support, and the anonymity too, because nobody recognizes us when we’re dressed up,” says Jolanta Kiapśnia, who first hit the stage with the group on her 60th birthday, two years ago. She credits Wiedźmuchy with helping her to expel negative emotions rooted in the trauma of an abusive marriage that ended in divorce when she was young, as well as joyless years of working in a bank.

“At first I had moments of doubt that I couldn’t dance like that,” she says, joined by her current husband at the event. “Now I can’t wait to rehearse. I always liked people. When I retired, I was afraid that I would end up sitting at home watching TV.”

A different kind of support for women

According to human rights organizations, Poland under the Law and Justice government has become a country where women’s rights have been increasingly restricted. Since 2020, after a controversial ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal, it is almost impossible for women to access legal abortion in Poland. Last year, the minister of justice said that Poland would withdraw from the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women and domestic violence. And the minister of education said that women were called on by God to have children, and should focus on that before their careers.

Ms. Tomaszewska thinks that women’s rights in Poland are violated and that politicians use the women’s agenda for their own purposes. “I always thought about supporting women, but all the women’s organizations that I came across were involved in politics and were often fighting with each other,” she says. “That’s why I thought, ‘I have to create my own group.’”

She says she established Wiedźmuchy to teach women to be strong and to fight for their rights. “A witch in Polish language and culture means a woman who has knowledge, who is wise and strong,” Ms. Tomaszewska says.

The women have taken part in dozens of festivals across Poland and regularly participate in charitable activities such as reading books to individuals in comas or children at libraries, and collecting books for foundations. Their approach has also ruffled feathers – members of the community have written complaints to local authorities voicing concern that their approach promotes occultism. But that has never been part of the program.

“Witches can encourage everyone to have fun,” says Agnieszka Sakowska-Hrywniak, the mayor of Tuławki. “The good thing is that they support each other. However, you don’t have to belong to their group to have their support. You can always talk to them, get advice.”

An opportunity to laugh, and to help

Former policewoman Ewa Lapinska says her daughters were initially unhappy by her participation in the group. They would have preferred her to act like a “typical grandmother,” but they came around after they saw how much the group meant to her. Thursday practice is the highlight of her week – an opportunity to laugh and sweat. But it is also a moment to help and pass on strategies for exiting abusive relationships, the kind of words that would have helped her leave her first, abusive husband all the sooner.

“First we talk and laugh, then we practice,” she says. “If someone needs help, if something bad happens to them, we act. At our meetings, I learned most women have been through something [difficult] in their lives, but they just hide it inside.”

Ewa Leończak says she initially joined the group out of pandemic fatigue. “I had to find positive people. I was missing positive energy and witches are positive fun,” says Ms. Leończak, who is a professional caretaker for an elderly woman in Germany, and also helps her husband run a small horse farm in the village of Florczaki, near Olsztyn.

But being with the group has also given her a safe space to process the loss of her daughter, who was discovered dead on the train tracks during the summer of 2007 – a case she feels the police mishandled.

“Each of us, despite the baggage of experience, is a positive person,” she says of Wiedźmuchy. “I have depression and I will have it for the rest of my life. How I deal with it depends only on me. Life has a finite number of seconds, minutes, and hours, so I’d rather laugh than cry. It takes me the same amount of time.”

Dominique Soguel contributed from Basel, Switzerland.

Reuters

People in Port-au-Prince go through a blockade Oct. 18 as Haitians joined a general strike to protest a wave of kidnappings, days after the abduction of a U.S.-based group of missionaries fueled international concerns over gang violence.

In its annual reports, Christian Aid Ministries makes sure to highlight “new or significant” changes influencing its charity work. The changes range from wars to hurricanes to new types of microfinancing. Last year’s report noted that even before the pandemic, “we were confronted with an abundance of physical needs and spiritual opportunities.”

This week, the Ohio-based relief organization faced a very significant change. In Haiti, which is in political chaos, 17 of its missionaries were abducted by a notorious gang, presumably for ransom. The aid group asked for prayers, especially to “pray that the gang members would come to repentance.”

The crisis for Christian Aid Ministries is the latest example of the difficult challenges and rapid shifts confronting those who give, whether the giving is in the form of money, goods, volunteering, or prayer. From COVID-19 to a big drop in donations by middle-class Americans, the “giving industry” is being forced to innovate while also rediscovering its core motive – a love for humanity.

The instinct to give is eternal, but to help revive it, philanthropy leaders such as Points of Light and Salvation Army announced last week that they had formed a 17-member panel called the Generosity Commission. Its task is to assess the new ways that people are giving and to rethink “generosity across America.”

“We want to capture and celebrate the ways in which giving, volunteering, and civic engagement are being re-imagined before our eyes,” says Suzy Antounian, the director of the commission, which was initiated by the Giving Institute and the Giving USA Foundation.

The forms of giving are rapidly changing beyond philanthropic foundations or traditional charity groups. They range from social entrepreneurs – who seek a profit in bringing about social change – to crowdfunding and social impact bonds. More companies now accept a responsibility toward society at large. Young people want to serve differently by building community, beyond giving money or doing short stints as volunteers. “People are redefining their philanthropy and their engagement,” says Ms. Antounian.

For those involved in giving, each new crisis or adverse trend can help expand current ideas of how to achieve the public good. They also challenge the idea that goodness itself has limits or that generosity is a fleeting quality of the heart.