Writing from her desk at Andalusia Farm, Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once recalled witnessing a Ku Klux Klan gathering on the courthouse steps here in Milledgeville, Georgia.

O’Connor’s eye zeroed in on a searing detail. Since it was “too hot for a fiery cross,” the robed mob brought one draped “with electric light bulbs.” 

In December, Mary Parham-Copelan, the city’s first Black female mayor, took her second oath of office on the same courthouse steps. She won her first election by five votes. This time she ran unopposed.

Mayor Parham-Copelan’s success here in a town once defined by segregation is a reflection of a state in political flux. A growing Black electorate and a shifting sense of Southern identity is bucking a power structure that has historically been white, male, and rural.

“It hasn’t been the easiest, because people had to adjust to having a female mayor,” says Mayor Parham-Copelan, who is also a preacher. “For so much of our time, it has felt like things were going backward. But now here we are and it’s moving forward. I think people are voting their own conscience now. ... We just don’t know who is capable and what that person can do unless they’re given an opportunity.” 

John Bazemore/AP/File

The Baldwin County Courthouse is shown Oct. 27, 2020, in Milledgeville, Georgia. In December, Mary Parham-Copelan, the city’s first Black female mayor, was sworn into office for a second term. She won her first election by five votes. This time she ran unopposed.

The central Georgia region to which Milledgeville belongs remained a “racist police state” up until the 1970s, says Hamilton College historian Ty Seidule. “The violence wasn’t just racism. It had a political purpose. It was about enforcing white political power.” 

The state is today in the throes of a less violent, yet related struggle, where majorities of both parties believe democracy is at risk of failing. As Georgia voting rights activist Stacey Abrams seeks to become the nation’s first Black female governor in a tough year for Democrats, Republicans are scrambling to control access to the ballot box in the name of election integrity.

Georgia’s gubernatorial election marks not one, but two, high-profile matchups that will be closely watched nationwide. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who drew former President Donald Trump’s ire by refusing to overturn his state’s election in 2020, is facing a primary fight with the Trump-backed David Perdue, who lost the Senate runoff election to Jon Ossoff. Whoever wins that contest will then face Ms. Abrams, who lost her first bid for governor by a little over 1% in 2018.

That all puts Ms. Parham-Copelan’s Georgia at the center of a national struggle over identity, power, and the halting evolution – and potential hobbling – of American democracy.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to be in Georgia on Tuesday for the president’s voting rights address.

In a speech last week commemorating the violent bid by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn a free and fair election, Mr. Biden said that “new laws are being written not to protect the vote, but to deny it.” 

A recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that 64% of Americans think U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” Even though 61 lawsuits, numerous recounts, and President Trump’s own attorney general found no evidence of widespread fraud, two-thirds of Republican respondents believe that “voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.” Three of those recounts, including one by hand, affirmed President Biden’s victory in Georgia.

In that way, Georgia represents how the country has entered a “new phase” in the struggle between voting rights and voter mobilization, says Domingo Morel, a political scientist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.

“Elections are really governed at the county and local level. So what are the ways that the state is going to come in and usurp power from the local community at the local level?” says Mr. Morel. In a state like Georgia where liberal ideology seems ascendant, “there are ways that that growing political power – ... that electorate – doesn’t get to actually exercise their power commensurate with their numbers.”

He adds, “The undermining of democracy, in my view, really works away in the shadows.”

Alyssa Pointer/Reuters

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, makes remarks during a visit to Adventure Outdoors gun shop in Smyrna, Georgia, on Jan. 5, 2022. Governor Kemp, who drew former President Donald Trump’s ire by refusing to overturn his state’s election in 2020, is facing a primary fight with the Trump-backed David Perdue.

“It’s almost never a slam-dunk”

Georgia and her 10 million residents are a study in contrasts, bound by history. 

It is a state where last week a judge sentenced three white men to life in prison for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man jogging in their neighborhood. In 2020, voters here chose a Democrat – Joe Biden – for president for the first time since 1992. Then, fueled in part by efforts by President Trump to overturn the election, Democrats outpaced Republicans in a runoff, sending Raphael Warnock and Mr. Ossoff – a Black pastor and a Jewish filmmaker – to the U.S. Senate the day before Trump partisans stormed the Capitol.

Today, Mr. Trump remains under investigation for a phone call in which he was recorded asking Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” over 11,000 votes to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory, a potential violation of state election law. Yet, signs along rural roadways here still proclaim “Trump won.” 

Those statewide races were largely decided in Georgia’s urban and suburban counties, where some Republicans, believing Mr. Trump that the vote would be fraudulent, stayed home while Democrats came out in droves. But of the state’s 159 counties, some 120 qualify as rural based on population.

In rural Georgia, “you get this interesting mix of Trump supporters, country club Republicans, and then you have Black voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic,” says Scott Buchanan, a political scientist at Georgia College, in Milledgeville. “What does that mean? It means that someone like mayor, sheriff, whomever, they really try to stay in the middle, politically speaking, to attract voters from across the spectrum. Because it’s almost never a slam-dunk one way or the other.”

And political scientists say it’s the rural regions that may come to define Georgia’s role in a broader voting rights debate.

“If you’re white in rural Georgia, those are dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters,” says University of Georgia political scientist Trey Hood. “But of course there is the Black Belt area. ... We are a closely divided state and pretty fractured in some ways. It all sort of depends on who decides to show up. That’s your electorate.” 

Such narrow margins in Georgia and other key battlegrounds have put the focus on voting rules. Last year, nearly three dozen laws were passed in 19 states that make it more difficult to vote and in some cases threaten election officials with criminal proceedings, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Georgia lawmakers passed SB 202, a law that put new requirements on absentee voting, allowed the legislature to appoint new election administrators when fraud was suspected – rather than proved – and barred people from handing out water at polling places.

In 2020, there were 331 fewer polling places in Georgia than in 2012, despite the state’s growing population. Lincoln County, which is one-third African American, has plans to go from seven precincts to one in the next election, to make voting “easier and more accessible,” according to a press release. The moves, critics say, go beyond efforts to secure the vote to actively discouraging Black voters, who largely are Democrats, from casting ballots.

“We pull it off, mostly”

Like most of Georgia’s 139 rural counties, Morgan County is solidly conservative: Four of five county commissioners are Republicans. But Democrats here are energized. In last year’s Senate runoff, party leaders delivered 98% of their voters to the polls; Republicans managed 92%.

A few months later, a Republican county commissioner named Ben Riden led an effort to scrap the bipartisan Board of Elections, calling it “dysfunctional.” Five other counties joined suit.

Democrats are concerned that such efforts are laying the groundwork to reverse the will of the people if power continues to slip away from white conservatives.  

But the fight over election administration in Morgan County has also highlighted real problems.

That debate is healthy, says Morgan County voting rights activist Jeanne Dufort. The challenge, she says, is how to rebuild the kind of public trust that democracy requires to function.

“It is absurd to imagine a democracy that isn’t full of robust debate and big fundamental differences. The miracle is, we pull it off, mostly, except for when we have a civil war or an insurrection,” says Ms. Dufort. But when lawmakers “decide that power is the only governor of whether you can do something or not – raw power – then you are going beyond” founding values.

For Mr. Riden’s part, he says most folks in the county aren’t interested in preserving a racial order, but a rural dynamic. 

In fact, Mr. Riden, who is white, says he recruited a Black Democrat to sit on the new Board of Elections. Though party affiliation wasn’t on the application, the new board has the same political dynamic as the old one: three Republicans, two Democrats.

“Let’s face it, voting is pretty easy,” says Mr. Riden. “Some people think what we did was intended to suppress the vote. It wasn’t. It’s really to protect the integrity of the vote to make sure that only legitimate people vote.”

“We have to swallow the past”

For Michelle Gilley, a white voter, how those in power define “legitimate people” represents the broader challenge over the right to vote. 

Last summer, Ms. Gilley bought a house on a creek on the Walton County line. 

Soon after, her daughter, Audrey, learned about the 1948 lynching of two African American couples in what is now their backyard. The lynching at the Moore’s Ford Bridge came after Gov. Herman Talmadge made a fiery campaign speech warning that blood would run in the streets before Black people would vote in the Democratic primary.

Audrey is building a small commemorative cross for the site. 

“As grown-ups in the South, we have to swallow the past, to never forget it but also make sure that our children do better,” says Ms. Gilley. “I think we are learning how to lead with love.” 

But as part of that reckoning, the South is undergoing another broad shift – one of what it means, beyond race, to be Southern. 

Brynn Anderson/AP

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams poses for a photo on Dec. 16, 2021, in Decatur, Georgia. Ms. Abrams, a Democrat, is calling on Congress to act on voting rights as she launches a second bid to become her state's governor.

Take November’s election of Winsome Sears, a gun-toting Black conservative woman, to lieutenant governor in Virginia. North Carolina’s current lieutenant governor is African American; he is also a “Make America Great Again” devotee.

That is partly why Ms. Abrams has resisted labels like progressive and moderate. In her last campaign for governor, she visited all 159 counties to talk about Medicaid expansion and saving rural hospitals.

“The power of the Black vote has been significantly less than the power of the white vote, and that’s what reminds us that there’s so much at stake,” says Mayor Preston Blakely of Fletcher, North Carolina. He’s the 27-year-old Black leader of a Southern town that is nearly 90% white. “It’s about a voice in government ... and having people that look like us represent us in this ever-changing country and in our ever-changing communities.”

In that context, efforts in Georgia and across the South to expand Black leadership, at least in part, “is African Americans reclaiming what was rightfully theirs: the mantle of Southernness,” says Christopher Cooper, co-author of “The Resilience of Southern Identity: Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of its People.” “It is a reckoning in how we are thinking about and experiencing our history. It’s about the politics of the past and the politics of Southern memory as much as anything.” 

In Milledgeville, Ms. Parham-Copelan navigates that landscape of memory by focusing on today’s problems. She ran unopposed in large part because of her popularity. 

For her, the focus is on character and capability.

“My race speaks volumes,” says Ms. Parham-Copelan. “People didn’t know what to expect. Now they realize that I’m truly the community’s mayor.”

Peace and order appear to be returning to the major cities of Kazakhstan. But the political landscape, both at home and in Kazakhstan’s relations with its neighbors, is vastly changed.

Despite a week of the most violent and destructive disorder in Kazakhstan since the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago – set off by apparently spontaneous protests over the doubling of gas prices at the start of the new year – the Central Asian republic’s authoritarian regime seems more firmly entrenched than ever. That is due in part to the intervention of Moscow, through its post-Soviet military alliance, the six-member Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).

The crisis in Kazakhstan has turned the CSTO from what formerly looked like a paper tiger into a functioning tool of regional elite solidarity. Now, its future goals will likely be to crush attempts at regime change and enforce pro-Moscow geopolitical alignment across a space that contains several emerging states that have yet to solidify strong national identities amid the turbulence and power struggles of the still-collapsing former USSR.

“Moscow was afraid that the state system in Kazakhstan might collapse, and if that happened the consequences for Russia and the region would be huge,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, a leading Russian foreign policy analyst. “Turmoil across this region is common, and to be expected, so there are signs that Russia has been developing these tools for some time.

“During the recent unrest in Belarus, it was enough to just signal a readiness to intervene, but in Kazakhstan they found it necessary to go in militarily,” he says. “Russia is reassuring local authorities that they won’t be overthrown. But given the symbolic nature of the deployment, the message is that it’s up to those governments to stabilize their own societies.”

What happened?

There are still very different theories about the root causes of the unrest.

Last week a wave of peaceful demonstrations broke out in the impoverished west of the country, apparently over rising fuel prices. The government initially tried to assuage the protesters by capping prices, dismissing the Cabinet, and removing the former president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, from his post as chairman of the Security Council of Kazakhstan.

But that failed to stop the protests, which quickly spread and became violent riots, which some claim were highly organized. The upheaval left the downtown of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, almost in ruins. Well-armed gangs reportedly fought pitched street battles with police, while mobs ransacked shops and public buildings.

Vladimir Tretyakov/NUR.KZ/AP

Vendors clean up their store that was broken into and looted during clashes in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Jan. 10, 2022.

Following a ferocious crackdown by security forces, with at least 164 dead and almost 6,000 arrested, the former Soviet republic is now firmly under control of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the hand-picked successor of longtime leader Mr. Nazarbayev, and the immediate danger has apparently receded.

“Even yesterday there was gunfire in the streets, and it was impossible to go out,” Vyacheslav Abramov, founder of the Vlast online magazine in Almaty, told the Monitor Monday. “Today there are buses running, the streets are being cleaned up, things seem to be returning to normal. ... But we have only fragmentary information, and it’s hard to know what’s really happening.”

At an emergency meeting of the CSTO’s Security Council on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin placed the blame squarely on “international terrorism,” claiming that the violence came from “well-organized and well-controlled militant groups ... including those who had obviously been trained in terrorist camps abroad.” The Islamist threat to Central Asia has been a deep Russian concern for many years, and has only been magnified since the chaotic U.S. retreat from Afghanistan last year left behind a dangerous vacuum.

But Kazakh leaders have offered a different explanation, pointing to high-ranking internal traitors who utilized the pretext of price increases to trigger protests, then unleashed specially trained armed units in an attempt to stage a coup d’état. At least one top former official, the recently dismissed head of the security services, Karim Masimov, has been arrested and charged with plotting against the state.

Vladimir Tretyakov/AP

Demonstrators sing Kazakhstan's national anthem while standing in front of a police line during a protest in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Jan. 5, 2022.

Other experts note that no movement has claimed responsibility for the uprising, and no set of unified demands or discernible leaders have emerged from the turmoil. That highly unusual circumstance is hard to square with an organized rebellion, Galym Ageleulov, head of the independent human rights group Liberty, told the Monitor from Almaty on Monday.

“I think what happened was that a peaceful civil meeting of people who are tired of authoritarian government got used by elites in their internal struggles,” he says. “It was a spontaneous upsurge without leaders because there is no permitted legal opposition, and civil activism is not able to grow.

“At some point in the protests, police abandoned their positions and left the streets to bandit formations, and they proceeded to loot the city. Bandits don’t make declarations,” he adds. “What we need here is a new government, one that people can trust. We need reforms and honest elections. Instead, they shuffle a few people at the top, like a deck of cards.”

It seems likely that a combination of factors were in play, says Mr. Lukyanov.

“All the elements are there: socioeconomic tensions, elements of outside interference, and a half-completed transfer of power” from the aging autocrat Mr. Nazarbayev to his chosen successor, Mr. Tokayev, he says. “It is well known that some groups behind Nazarbayev were not happy with his choice. There is a feeling among many observers that it was not a purely spontaneous outburst.”

Russia’s new role

The impact of the intervention by 2,600 troops from CSTO members – mostly Russian paratroopers, but also contingents from Armenia, Belarus, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan – was largely symbolic, confined to securing the Almaty airport and a few other strategic points. But the swift and efficient injection of these forces into the crisis demonstrates an unprecedented level of elite solidarity among emerging post-Soviet states, which are often depicted as allergic to Russian leadership.

Russian Defence Ministry/Reuters

Russian service members disembark from a military aircraft in Kazakhstan, Jan. 7, 2022, as part of a peacekeeping mission of the Collective Security Treaty Organization amid mass protests in Almaty and other Kazakh cities.

“There is a lot of solidarity among ruling elites” in the post-Soviet area, says Andrey Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry. “There are no mature democracies in this region, and none likely to emerge soon. This intervention will set a precedent, boost stability, and create more confidence in Moscow” as it deals with the myriad challenges confronting the post-Soviet region. In the past three years alone, political crises have hit Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, and now Kazakhstan.

“Stability is one thing, but it will only work if elites deliver development,” says Mr. Kortunov. “Kazakhstan, with an abundance of natural resources, should be a rich country. But it has a deeply unequal social system and pockets of real poverty. I hope they understand that this needs to be addressed.”

Mr. Lukyanov says that Moscow’s policies are evolving and it is seeking ways to influence the former Soviet states of its neighborhood with a minimum of blunt force. It will be needed, he adds.

“The whole post-Soviet area has entered the period where all states must pass the test of sustainability,” he says. “Russia needs instruments that help maintain political stability, and once that’s accomplished these states will be closer to Moscow. It really doesn’t matter who is in charge there, as long as they understand the objective situation. This limited operation in Kazakhstan may prove an example of how that can work.”

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

The Animas View MHP Co-op in Durango, Colorado, sits above the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, Dec. 6, 2021. Animas View MHP Co-op is one of six resident-owned manufactured housing communities in Colorado.

One sunny, cold morning last January, John Egan joined fellow mobile home park residents on a neighbor’s front porch. They needed to organize. But how? 

“I had to go to the restroom, and when I came back from the restroom, they said, ‘Hi! You’re president!’” recalls Mr. Egan.

The half-dozen folks had convened to think through how to buy their Durango, Colorado, park from the private landlord – a move Mr. Egan and others deemed a shot in the dark. But now they at least had a president for what would become an interim board. With guidance from a housing nonprofit and majority support from the community, residents succeeded in purchasing the roughly 15-acre property within five months. They celebrated with a picnic, as the new Animas View MHP Co-op joined some thousand other resident-owned communities countrywide. 

Their achievement is unusual. The resident-owned market constitutes just 2.4% of manufactured housing communities nationwide. Bolstering the health and longevity of mobile home parks is important as they are a critical source of affordable housing, say industry experts. Recent legislation in Colorado offers some provisions for communities like Animas View that hope to secure their future by governing themselves.

“Everybody sleeps better at night,” says Steve Boardman, here for 20 years, as he takes out his recycling. 

“We’re in control.”

Affordable homes with a view

River, mountains, grasses bleached blonde in autumn – the Durango mobile homes have a million-dollar view. Largely immobile and costly to move, these factory-built units have been commonly called “manufactured homes” since 1976. They house an estimated 18 million to 22 million people in the United States.

“This is one of our nation’s largest sources of deeply affordable housing, and it’s deeply affordable without any federal subsidy,” says associate professor of sociology Esther Sullivan at the University of Colorado Denver. 

The median annual household income of these homeowners – $35,000 – is half that of site-built homeowners, according to Fannie Mae. Manufactured housing fills 6.3% of U.S. housing stock, with more than double that share in rural areas.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

A sign at Animas View MHP Co-op celebrates the residents' successful acquisition of their mobile home park. With their roughly $15 million purchase, they joined some thousand other resident-owned communities countrywide.

Many residents own their homes but not the underlying land, for which they pay “lot rent.” That model can spur financial precarity: These homeowners are “more likely to see their homes depreciate and have fewer protections if they fall behind on payments,” reports the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

Media reports have increasingly shed light on private-sector purchases of these parks that often result in rent increases, which housing advocates deem predatory. 

Mobile home park investor Frank Rolfe counters: “When we buy these properties, they’re often in terrible condition, and [we] bring them back to life. … You can’t bring old properties back to life without raising rents.”

Mr. Rolfe estimates that he and a partner are the fifth largest owners of U.S. mobile home parks. “There is this conception I think out there that park owners are in some way hostile to residents buying their own communities, and that is completely off base,” says Mr. Rolfe, co-founder of Colorado-based Mobile Home University, which trains investors to purchase parks. Three parks he co-owned have been sold to residents. 

No more landlords

Mr. Egan and his wife, Cate Smock, bought their trailer here in 2012 – an affordable move to Durango so their son could attend a better school. But afterward, they saw their lot rent, which includes utilities, increase annually, if not twice a year. 

“You would dread the piece of paper with the black electrical tape on your door,” she says. Animas View residents also complained of the previous owner’s lack of attention to their needs and delayed repairs.

Shortly before Christmas 2020, residents learned that the latest landlord, Strive Communities, intended to sell. Residents began to organize almost immediately. (The Monitor could not reach Strive for comment.)

“We don’t tell people that it’s easy” to become resident-owned, says Mike Bullard, communications and marketing manager for ROC USA, a New Hampshire nonprofit that, along with its affiliates, reports having helped nearly 300 manufactured housing communities become resident-owned. (ROC stands for resident-owned communities.)

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

John Egan, former president of the interim board, and his wife, Cate Smock, sit in their home decked out for Christmas in Durango, Colorado, Dec. 6, 2021. They moved to Durango so their son could attend a better school.

With 430 households, the Halifax Mobile Home Estates Association in rural Massachusetts is the largest in the ROC USA network, resident owned since 2017. The budget is tight due to the community’s size, says board president Deborah Winiewicz, but at least members have a say in how those funds are spent by voting at an annual meeting. 

“We’ve found, too, that people take more pride in the community because it is theirs,” she adds, noting that their sales office is run by resident volunteers.

In Colorado, the network affiliate Thistle ROC helped the Durango cooperative patch together funding for their purchase. But to afford the financing, the co-op increased lot rent by $80 this fall (rent ranges between $755 and $825). While the uptick may seem counterintuitive, it’s not uncommon, says Mr. Bullard. 

“These groups are buying not just the real estate, but the business,” he says, adding that lot rent for new resident-owned communities will typically drop down to market rate or below within five years. 

The sale, first reported by The Durango Herald, closed in June for a purchase price of around $15 million, according to Dan Hunt, a former Animas View board member who now serves on the operations and finance committees. 

Learning about the community’s grassroots organizing helped convince Kevin Miller to rent land there for his RV. Now board president, Mr. Miller, who moved in last year, says he likes the idea of keeping money within a community.

“I’m proud to tell people where I live now,” he says.

Progress from failure

Among legislation aimed at strengthening protections for mobile home dwellers, Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill into law in 2020 that requires landlords to provide residents at least 12 months’ notice of a potential change in use of the land. It also gives residents 90 days after being notified by the landlord of a potential sale of the park to pitch an offer to purchase and organize financing. Landlords must respect this “opportunity to purchase” window before selling to anyone else.

But the resident-owned model is still the exception, not the rule. Animas View is one of three parks to become resident owned in Colorado in 2021, out of a few dozen that changed ownership.  

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Dan Hunt, a former member of the interim board that helped fellow residents buy their park, tours the Animas View MHP Co-op in Durango, Colorado, Dec. 6, 2021.

Still, the new legislation “gives [residents] the opportunity to be able to compete with an offer that they previously wouldn’t have known about,” says Andy Kadlec, program director at Thistle ROC.

Advocates say this legislative momentum grew out of the activism and unsuccessful attempt by residents of another Colorado mobile home community, Denver Meadows, to purchase their park ahead of its expected closure as the owner eyed redevelopment. Despite help from advocacy group 9to5 Colorado and Thistle ROC, the Aurora-based community’s purchase offer in 2017 was reportedly rejected. Though some homeowners received relocation assistance, many ended up paying double rent elsewhere, says Cesiah Guadarrama Trejo, 9to5 associate state director.

The Denver Meadows saga was featured in the 2021 mobile home documentary “A Decent Home” by filmmaker Sara Terry, a former Monitor journalist. Her team arranged an event in Colorado this November that connected manufactured housing homeowners from across the country with activists, policy experts, and former Denver Meadows residents.

Reflecting on when she started the film six years or so ago, Ms. Terry notes, “I had to say the ‘underreported’ affordable housing crisis. … [Now] people are paying attention. I think grassroots activism is flourishing, and that makes me hopeful.”

Mr. Hunt, one of a few Animas View residents who attended the gathering, says he went up to a displaced Denver Meadows man and thanked him.  

No threat of eviction

Just beyond the limits of the Durango park, a train slices through the mountain view with a harmonic huff. Current and former board members are keen to keep this community intact, and, so far, residents report no one has moved out since the sale.

“One of the first things that we decided when we met as a board was that we would not allow anybody to be forced out of the park because of an inability to pay the rent,” says former board president Mr. Egan in his home, where Christmas stockings hang above an electric fireplace.

To ensure folks can afford to stay, the community is developing a rental assistance fund. In addition to seeking outside funding, some residents plan to donate spare dollars themselves. Lindie Hunt, board treasurer and Mr. Hunt’s wife, recently jump-started the fund with a check for $60 – a sum she’d been given for checking on a neighbor’s home while they were away.

“It wasn’t my money in the first place,” she reasons in her kitchen, preparing to leave for work one morning.

Beyond paying off the five initial loans, the 120-lot community faces infrastructure projects, such as a wholesale water and sewer system replacement. To help keep maintenance costs down, several residents volunteer their time and skills. Mr. Boardman wields a weed wacker sometimes.

Needing to collaborate, residents have also begun to get to know their neighbors better. Surrounded by sawdust and screws, Kirby MacLaurin and Doug Harris are voluntarily tearing up a duplex that the co-op hopes to renovate into a rental. 

Though they’ve overlapped at Animas View for a few years, the men just met. 

“Ever since we made the co-op, we are meeting each other for the first time. Isn’t that amazing?” says Mr. Harris.

“It’s true,” says Mr. MacLaurin, hammer in hand. “Best buds … what a find.”

With the turn of a corner, the scorched, sandy roads of this concrete jungle suddenly give way to cool, shaded streets. Lining doorways for a handful of blocks are trees planted just last year, already reaching toward second-story windows. Younger sprigs poke their stems out of planters made from refashioned tires. 

Modou Fall stops to inspect the trees on his way back from the beach, where he was shooting a video about ocean pollution with the local news site. He’s a well-known environmental activist, dubbed l’homme plastique, or the plastic man, a nod to the homemade ghillie suit covered in plastic bags he dons at protests and when addressing the media. But it’s his “million trees, million tires” project that is transforming this densely packed, oft-neglected suburb of Dakar, Senegal, where he lives. 

Tree-planting projects have gained new currency around the world in recent years. Once prized as either ornamentation or commodity, trees are now sought for their environmental and social benefits as well. For Mr. Fall, they are a gift of community. 

“If you have the means to build a mosque, you do that. If you don’t, fine. If you have the means to build a hospital for people to treat themselves at, you do that. If you don’t have [the means], fine,” he says later from his home, surrounded by furniture made from upcycled tires. But one thing everyone can do “is to plant a tree,” he says.

Mr. Fall and his army of volunteers aim to plant one tree for every home in Senegal, using recycled tires as planters to help deter rooting animals. It’s a lofty goal, but the resources are abundant. 

Nick Roll

Ndiombane Diop, a worker at Modou Fall’s workshop, inspects a sapling growing out of an upcycled planter in Guédiawaye, Senegal.

Throughout the West African nation, tires lie strewn about roads, canals, and beaches, with few prospects for reuse or recycling. Seeds too are plentiful, as donations and private grants have yielded everything from local lime and mango trees, to shady and nutritious gmelina and moringa trees. The project got off the ground in 2020, and then, like everything else in the world, ran into a wall when the pandemic hit. But 8,500 seeds and tires were given out before the pandemic, and planting has picked up again in recent months. 

Working with local authorities and neighbors who are interested in hosting trees or, in one case, at a local school, Mr. Fall provides the tires, seeds, and wire fencing. “I only ask that you provide the water,” he says. 

“Trees breathe, people breathe”

As in many growing cities, expansion in neighborhoods of Dakar often comes at the expense of green space, Mr. Fall says. These areas are noticeably warmer than older neighborhoods where decades-old trees line streets. But restoring shade can draw people outside, to socialize and find respite in a city where the heat index can soar past 100 degrees Fahrenheit during hotter months. What’s more, trees are carbon banks in a world hoping to curb emissions. And Mr. Fall’s neighbors speak highly of local trees’ nutritional and medicinal qualities as well – in the local Wolof language, “tree” and “medicine” are the same word. 

“This tree is good,” for both animals and humans, says Arona Faye, sitting outside his home in a chair made of tires. His son learned to construct tire planters and furniture from Mr. Fall – who learned how to do it via YouTube – and now sells them. Outside Mr. Faye’s house, a stack of tires awaits transformation into chairs and tables. But the shade cast by one of Mr. Fall’s trees is the real star of the home. “Without this tree, it was hot. It was difficult,” Mr. Faye says. “The whole neighborhood has trees [now]. We’re thanking God.”

His neighbor Aminata Seck is eagerly awaiting her own slice of the shade. “When we leave the house, it’s hot – but we will have a place to sit,” says Ms. Seck, gesturing to the tires outside her home hosting maturing seedlings. “If you want to breathe clean air, you need to have trees. Trees breathe, people breathe.”

Not just any tree

The benefits of planting trees may be more universally understood, but the jury is still out on how best to restore tree cover. Many tree-planting campaigns around the world face a host of potential problems – including a lack of biodiversity if only one species is planted, unreliable seed supplies, nonnative species faltering in unfamiliar climates, and a lack of buy-in from locals who are needed to maintain the trees. Tree planting often fails to turn into “tree growing,” says Bernadette Arakwiye, a researcher with the nonprofit World Resources Institute’s forest program. But, she adds, those challenges are all surmountable with the right planning.

“A lot of successful stakeholders in this space are the ones that have long-term [plans] engaging local communities, really making sure that whatever trees that end up being planted and grown are trees that those communities want,” says Dr. Arakwiye, who is based in Kigali, Rwanda. “And usually that is also complemented by the science, because it’s not [only] about the species people want; they should be species that grow there. So those two things have to happen at the same time.”

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Mr. Fall is familiar with tree-planting pitfalls. His trees sometimes die from lack of water from forgetful caretakers or are torn up by rambunctious toddlers. The tires offer some degree of protection for young trees that might look tasty to hungry animals. (As trees outgrow their planters 10-15 years from now, the tires can be removed.) But errant cows and sheep do sometimes make a snack out of recent seedlings. 

At a primary school, Mr. Fall and local officials tussled with residents who wanted the courtyard to remain tree-free, so they could use it for pickup soccer games. Eventually, school authorities determined that trees were a better fit for the space – about 75 planted by Mr. Fall are prospering now, with the trees providing shade and lemons, and chairs made of tires providing a place to rest outside the library. Mr. Fall hopes to incorporate an environmental educational component into the curriculum so students can learn to plant and tend to their own trees one day. 

It’s all part of his effort to grow a community of stewards in a city where physical and economic growth has often outpaced environmental concerns.

A mindset takes hold

“There isn’t a single place around here that does recycling, you understand?” says Ndiombane Diop, who constructs furniture to sell and planters to give away at Mr. Fall’s workshop. “But tires are useful.”

In recognition of that utility, local repair shops have started to donate spare tires that are no longer roadworthy and might have languished on beaches or by the side of the road. “I’m going to come get your tires!” Mr. Fall shouts at one shop owner from a taxi window as he zips through Guédiawaye. The owner laughs and nods. A few blocks later, the taxi passes another auto shop; this one hosts one of Mr. Fall’s chairs and planters on its patio.

“I want my neighborhood to be a neighborhood of reference – a neighborhood without sun,” he says. He might be exaggerating a bit about that last part. But on a hot day earlier this fall, with temperatures climbing into the 90s, it doesn’t sound so bad.

Reuters

People attend a rally to protest against a fuel price rise in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Jan. 5.

A global narrative that contends more people prefer to give up their rights in favor of authoritarian rule got shot down last week in Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth-largest country by area. To the shock of dictators in neighboring China and Russia, tens of thousands of Kazakhs took to the streets in spontaneous protests starting Jan. 2. At first the outcry was over a nearly doubling of fuel prices for vehicles. But protesters quickly began to demand equal opportunity in business and politics.

One democracy activist, Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, called the protests an assertion of “natural rights” that reside in each individual over the claim that political power lies in the few. Kazakhstan is a virtual one-party state with the elite battling over resources.

“Our citizens, as in any civilized states, had the right to express their opinions and protests if the authorities do not hear them,” Mr. Zhakiyanov told independent news site kz.media.

While the protests have since been repressed – with the aid of Russian troops – Kazakhstan now joins a string of former Soviet states that have had either a successful or an incomplete democratic “color revolution” since Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution. These include Armenia’s 2018 revolution and the ongoing dissent in Belarus following peaceful protests in 2020.

Moscow’s surprise at the Kazakhstan protests may add to its efforts to roll back Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and 2014 Maidan revolution. Those popular upwellings for individual rights are still pushing Ukraine to join Western democracies, such as membership in the European Union.

Dictators are usually so isolated they don’t notice grassroots stirrings to assert individual dignity and equality, especially in people’s daily struggle against official corruption. Transparency International reported in 2019 that 1 in 5 entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan encountered corruption when applying to start a business. Last year, the government of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev admitted that the pandemic has exposed “chronic” corruption in official bodies.

Since Kazakhstan’s independence in 1991, the country’s elite rulers, starting with Nursultan Nazarbayev (“Leader of the Nation”), have failed to suppress a vibrant civil society and independent media on the internet. Protest activity in Kazakhstan has been rising since 2018, according to the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs.

One reason, according to journalist Sher Khashimov and researcher Raushan Zhandayeva, writing in Foreign Policy last July: “Scores of people across Kazakhstan have turned to YouTube, Telegram, and Instagram in the past five years to conduct journalistic investigations, discuss and analyze events in the country, report on political protests ignored by pro-government media, and push against the government’s narrative.”

The internet has allowed citizens in former Soviet states to easily follow the democratic progress in other countries. “Young, internet savvy Kazakhs ... likely want similar freedoms as Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans, Kyrgyz and Armenians,” Timothy Ash, a strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, told the Euractiv media network.

During last week’s protests, one popular chant was “Forward, Kazakhstan.” It was a sign of just how much the people of that Central Asian country see progress toward freedom as not only possible but also a natural right.