Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stands next to destroyed Russian military vehicles, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, in the town of Bucha, outside Kyiv, the site of alleged Russian war crimes, on April 4, 2022.

It feels jarring – almost disrespectful – to write these words as civilian corpses are cleared from the streets of Bucha, Ukraine, after Russian troops retreated from the Kyiv suburb. But Ukraine’s fate may well now hinge on a crude question of international politics.

It is this: How long can Washington and its European partners – governments and citizens – maintain their unity in support of Ukraine?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with his Western backers, is hoping to beat back the Russian assault as quickly and effectively as possible.

But Vladimir Putin seems to be betting that the longer the war goes on, the harder Mr. Zelenskyy’s democratic supporters will find it to withstand the knock-on effects of economic sanctions in their own countries, and that their alliance will fracture.

Which side prevails will likely become clear only in the months ahead. Yet high-level allied discussions over the next few days may well give us some clues about the degree of Western determination.

For now, the allies’ motivation to stand firm remains strong, not least because of the evidence discovered over the weekend in Bucha and elsewhere suggesting that Russian soldiers summarily executed or raped several hundred Ukrainian civilians before they pulled out of the Kyiv region.

That has been a shocking exclamation point to a lengthening list of Russian strikes against civilians, including the entrapment of tens of thousands in the battered and besieged port city of Mariupol, that have horrified European public opinion.

Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola (across the table from Mr. Zelenskyy) attend a meeting, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues, in Kyiv, April 1, 2022.

American and European leaders, outraged by the latest reports of civilian deaths, have denounced the alleged war crimes and threatened further sanctions in response.

Washington is reportedly coming round to the idea that its European NATO partners should provide Ukraine with urgently needed additional weaponry that could include Soviet-era battle tanks and more powerful anti-aircraft batteries.

Mr. Zelenskyy has been increasingly forthright in calling on European governments to stop buying Russian oil and gas, and thus stop paying for Mr. Putin’s war machine. Germany, the European Union’s main economic power and a major Russian gas importer, has until now refused to go so far. In response to the gruesome reports from Bucha, however, Berlin has hinted it may reconsider its stance.

Yet the question of a gas embargo is part of a wider long-term challenge to the allied pressure campaign against Mr. Putin. Sanctions that undermine the Russian economy also impose knock-on costs in European countries that are still dealing with the economic after-effects of the pandemic.

Rising energy prices, initially boosted by revived demand as pandemic restrictions eased, have been spurred even higher by market jitters over Ukraine. The mere possibility of interruptions to Russian energy exports to western Europe has made things worse.

As Germany knows only too well, since it relies on Russian gas for more than half its needs, the economic impact of a full-scale boycott would be dramatic, reducing supplies to both homes and industry.

Those Ukraine-related economic costs carry political costs as well for Western governments.

Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

French President Emmanuel Macron, campaigning for his reelection, walks past a person holding a sign that reads "Save Mariupol." Mr. Macron has said that there are "very clear indications of war crimes" by Russian troops in Ukraine.

In France, where President Emmanuel Macron faces a reelection vote this month, his main right-wing challenger, Marine Le Pen, has been narrowing his opinion-poll lead. She has done so not by focusing on the war – uncomfortable territory given her past chumminess with Mr. Putin – but on the cost of living and inflation.

Protests over rising prices have also broken out in other European countries, including Spain, Italy, and Greece.

U.S. President Joe Biden, who has sought to control gasoline price rises by drawing on his country’s strategic oil reserves, is also clearly aware of the dangers of inflation ahead of November’s mid-term congressional elections.

The key question is how great a sacrifice Western countries will be prepared to make, and for how long, in order to help Ukraine turn back Mr. Putin’s invasion and terror campaign.

If the allies do stay the course, it will be – ironically – because of the strength and cohesion of an element that Mr. Putin is likely to have figured as a source of weakness in the democracies aligned against his attack.

Not allied presidents or prime ministers, but the voters on whom they depend.

Grassroots outrage, as much as politicians’ calculations, has helped forge the Western response to the invasion.

So far, opinion polls suggest that popular anger over what’s happening in Ukraine and a sense of solidarity with its people have remained strong. The dreadful scenes in Bucha will likely reinforce such sentiment.

Ida Joe flinches a little as the tap sputters, then spurts water into the sink. Cautiously, tentatively, she pushes her hand under the faucet. She feels the water soak her skin and run through her fingers – first cold, then hot. After a few seconds, she starts to laugh.

Outside the one-room house she shares with her two daughters and granddaughter, a cold breeze rolls across the dusty, arid plains of the Navajo Nation. A few hundred yards away, wild horses drink from a small, briny lake.

Ms. Joe has lived on the Navajo Nation for all of her nearly 50 years. This late February day is her first with running water in her home. Until now, her family would drive to Thoreau, 10 minutes away, or Gallup, 45 minutes away, to buy gallon jugs of water. They would drive to town to do laundry, and rent a hotel room for the day to use the shower.

“It will be really helpful, especially for cooking,” she says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Ida Joe tries out her new sink with running water, which the nonprofit DigDeep installed in her home in Smith Lake, New Mexico. About 30% of those living on the Navajo reservation do not have indoor plumbing or running water.

Water is sacred on the Navajo Nation, and scarce. About 30% of the roughly 173,000 population lack running water, according to a report from the U.S. Water Alliance and DigDeep, an international nonprofit with Navajo employees who have been installing running water systems in homes on the reservation since 2014. The size of the reservation, the large distances between homes, scarce natural water sources, jurisdictional issues, and contamination from industries like uranium mines have all contributed to restricting access to running water here for generations.

But according to those working to improve water access on the reservation, the COVID-19 pandemic has heralded a bittersweet turning point.

Almost 1,700 people have died from the virus, according to the tribe, and in mid-2020 the reservation had the highest per capita infection rate in the country. At the same time, the pandemic drew widespread attention to the fact that many Navajo didn’t have enough water to thoroughly wash their hands, which was core advice of health experts at the time. From locals who had accepted they would need to live without running water, to members of Congress, the need to improve water access became crystal clear.

And the pandemic has spurred progress. New coalitions have formed, funding has increased, and innovations from organizations like DigDeep have helped expand water access here more than ever before.

“This has been a silver lining for us,” says Crystal Tulley-Cordova, principal hydrologist for the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources.

“I’m hopeful for the future,” she adds. The pandemic “has brought different partnerships, and one of the things that I know is that we can do more together.” 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Workers with DigDeep install a water system on Ida Joe's hogan, a traditional one-room Navajo home, in Smith Lake, New Mexico. The system includes an underground 1,200-gallon water tank that is refilled each month by a water truck.

A pickup, a backhoe, and “Big Ernie”

A pickup truck, a trailer towing a backhoe, and a gleaming white water truck nicknamed “Big Ernie” make up the DigDeep convoy.

Driving north from Thoreau on Route 371 on that crisp late February morning, the five-man convoy passes through a rugged, beautiful landscape of snow-pocketed mountainsides and dusty flatlands. Arroyos and creeks slash through the terrain – all dry, except for some that hold patches of snow.

At over 27,000 square miles, the Navajo Nation is larger than the state of West Virginia, extending into the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. Like much of the Southwest, the reservation has always had an arid climate, but water has become increasingly scarce.

The region has been in various forms of drought for over 20 years, and is currently experiencing severe and extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Most of the local water supply is in groundwater, and that has been dwindling. In Gallup, groundwater levels dropped about 200 feet in the 2010s, the city reported in 2018. Snowfall levels have consistently decreased since the 1930s, according to Indian Country Today.

There are also problems with water quality. Arsenic and uranium, both left over from a century of mining on the reservation, are found at dangerously high concentrations in local water sources. (Some arsenic is naturally occurring in the region’s geology.)

Legal barriers and bureaucracy are another challenge. In many areas of the country, tribes have robust water rights through the federal government’s trust obligation toward them. But it’s only in the past few years that the Navajo Nation has gained rights to major nearby water sources such as the Colorado and San Juan rivers. Meanwhile, piping water onto the reservation is challenging because of how spread out the population is. Some areas are a checkerboard of public and private land, presenting right-of-way issues.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Wild horses graze on the dusty high plains of the Navajo Nation in Smith Lake, near Thoreau, New Mexico.

On top of that, funding has typically been limited, according to Capt. David Harvey, deputy director of the Division of Sanitation Facilities Construction at the federal government’s Indian Health Service.

“These conditions result in a high unit cost to construct and to operate [sanitation] facilities to serve these remote home locations,” says Captain Harvey. “Historically the funds that have been appropriated have not met the total need.” 

In the 2020 fiscal year, for example, the Indian Health Service identified over $3 billion in sanitation facility needs on Native American lands. Congress that year appropriated $197 million. But the response during the pandemic has begun to close that gap.

Through the CARES Act – a pandemic relief funding package passed by Congress in March 2020 – the Navajo Nation received over $5 million specifically for increasing water access on the reservation. Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet and Martin Heinrich, of Colorado and New Mexico respectively, also introduced a bill last year that would provide about $6.7 billion for tribal water infrastructure.

And as federal money has begun to flow toward the problem, new partnerships have formed to identify how those funds should be spent. The pandemic also saw the creation of the Navajo Nation COVID-19 Water Access Coordination Group, a coalition of almost two dozen Navajo Nation and federal government agencies, universities, and nongovernmental organizations. 

In the eyes of Dr. Tulley-Cordova, it’s a shift from centuries of hostile and paternalistic attitudes that the U.S. government displayed toward the Diné, as many members of the Navajo Nation prefer to be known. 

From their forced relocation in the 1860s, to their attempted assimilation through Native American boarding schools, to the recent, relative indifference toward poor conditions on the reservation, there’s long been a mentality of “we know what’s best for you ... and we don’t really care what you have to say,” she says.

“Now, fast forward a couple of decades. We have the opportunity to be able to say what’s best for us, and be a part of that process,” she adds.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Don Begay (left) and Andrew Delgarito, with the nonprofit DigDeep, arrive at a Navajo home to refill an underground 1,200-gallon tank with their water truck, nicknamed “Big Ernie," in Little Water, New Mexico, in the Navajo Nation. The home has a "suitcase" conversion outside – an invention created during the pandemic to give people running water without entering their homes.

A “suitcase” packed with water tech

The DigDeep convoy has one scheduled stop before Ida Joe’s home. The trucks and trailers roll onto a dusty property just off Route 371, 25 miles north of Thoreau. Bikes, toys, trash, and a basketball hoop sit outside the hogan – a traditional one-room Navajo home, the door facing the rising sun to the east.

The crew were here 18 months ago to install one of their foremost pandemic-era innovations: a “suitcase” – a 4-cubic-foot box filled with a water pump, heater, filter, expansion tank, and battery installed outside homes to provide tap water from a 1,200-gallon underground tank. (DigDeep periodically refills these tanks throughout the year.) The group had been providing the indoor water systems for years, and this invention allowed installation of the systems outside, without workers entering homes.

During the pandemic, 100 of these suitcase systems have been installed by DigDeep crews on Navajo lands, at no cost to residents.

“People [were being told], ‘Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and water.’ But how can they do that if they don’t have running water?” says Cindy Howe, the project manager for DigDeep’s New Mexico office.

“We had to put our brains into gear.”

Today the crew is replacing the suitcase with an indoor sink. The system will be protected from the elements, and the family won’t have to go outside to get running water.

But the homeowner isn’t here this morning. A crew member calls, but there’s no answer. So they top off the 1,200-gallon tank, replace the filter in the suitcase, which had cracked after freezing during a frigid desert night, and head for Ms. Joe’s home back down Route 371.

There, the crew members work with practiced ease and efficiency, talking interchangeably in English and Navajo. Ms. Joe and her family wait in their car while Kenneth Chavez and Brian Johnson assemble the sink and Erving Spencer maneuvers the backhoe.

The backhoe work is delicate. First, Mr. Spencer has to dig out the suitcase system, bringing the metal teeth of the digger precariously close to the house itself. It looks like trying to perform a Mozart sonata wearing mittens, but he does it expertly.

But after a couple of hours they hit a snag. Specifically, they hit a thick layer of ice. The trench Mr. Spencer is digging – to lay a leach line that will pipe wastewater from the sink out and into the earth – needs to be 3 feet deep, below the freezing level. But he’s hit the freezing level.

So while Mr. Spencer pries blocks of mud-covered ice from the ground, Mr. Chavez installs the sink inside. A small table just inside the door holds an even smaller plastic tub, along with shampoo and conditioner. A towel and a small mirror hang on the wall above it, and four 3-liter water jugs – all empty – sit on a nearby bed. A wood stove in the middle of the room pipes smoke through a chimney into the blue sky overhead.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Kenneth Chavez, with DigDeep, installs a sink in Ida Joe's hogan home, the first time the family has had indoor running water, on Feb. 28, 2022, in Smith Lake, New Mexico, in the Navajo Nation.

Ms. Joe likes living here, she says. She feels safe, and she wants to raise her kids and grandkids here.

“It’s one of the most important things that I would probably want to do before I go,” she says, “teaching them the foundation of our culture.”

But living and working on the Navajo Nation has come at an especially high risk in the past two years. 

Ms. Joe lost two of her sisters to illnesses complicated by COVID-19, she says. Dr. Tulley-Cordova lost six family members to the virus between December 2020 and January 2021. “Big Ernie,” the DigDeep water truck, is named after Ernest Largo, an employee who died early in the pandemic.

As they finish their work at Ms. Joe’s house, “Big Ernie” refills the 1,200-gallon tank that now supplies her indoor sink. Though he’s gone, it feels to the DigDeep crew like Mr. Largo is still bringing water to homes across the reservation.

Lacking water “is just normal for a lot of people,” says Ms. Howe of DigDeep. Her grandparents would melt snow for water. Her parents hauled water throughout her childhood as well – always on Sundays, so she could have a bath before school on Monday.

“It was really heartbreaking to see,” she says. “Fifty-five years later, it’s still happening.”

“We’re all helping each other,” she adds. But “there’s still a lot of people that don’t have any water.”

Akbar Nugroho Gumay/Antara Foto/Reuters/File

Indonesian President Joko Widodo (left) and Governor of East Kalimantan Isran Noor visit an area planned to be the location of Indonesia's new capital in Sepaku district, North Penajam Paser regency, East Kalimantan province, Indonesia, Dec. 17, 2019.

In December 2019, Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo stood atop a hill overlooking rugged terrain on the eastern side of the island of Borneo. It looked like the middle of nowhere. But he planned to make that isolated spot hundreds of miles from Jakarta part of his country’s glittering new capital by 2024. 

Indonesia’s parliament greenlighted the move in January, making Indonesia the latest in a long line of countries that have decided to ditch bustling capitals for more bucolic digs.

However, some worry that these brand-new, often far-flung, capitals might create more problems than they solve.

Which countries have moved  capitals?

Dozens of countries around the world have relocated their capitals over the past century. Many of these moves have been like Indonesia’s: to new cities designed specifically to serve as capitals, and established in relatively undeveloped areas. Nigeria, for example, left coastal Lagos for Abuja in 1991, escaping Lagos’ overcrowding and seeking a neutral, central location in a country riven by ethnic and religious divisions. 

Egypt’s military dictator is currently building a new capital in the desert outside Cairo.

Jacob Turcotte and Alexander Thompson/Staff

Why is Indonesia relocating its capital? 

Publicly, Jokowi’s government has often attributed the move to Jakarta’s epic traffic jams and the fact that the metropolis of 10 million is sinking into the sea at a rate of about 1 to 6 inches a year. 

But those problems are used as “more acceptable” justifications that the relocation won’t actually solve, says Edbert Suryahudaya, a researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta.

Instead, the capital relocation is part of the president’s vision to modernize the country and redistribute political and economic power across the archipelago away from Jakarta, Mr. Suryahudaya says.

This is not unique to Indonesia. Governments looking to build new capitals have often cited environmental concerns as cover for more complex motives like nation building, says Ed Schatz, a Central Asia specialist at the University of Toronto.

Former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev used his country’s 1997 capital relocation from Almaty to Nur-Sultan – ostensibly due to earthquakes and smog – to shut out rivals, curry favor with separatism-inclined ethnic Russians in the country’s north, and create “a giant money laundering opportunity,” Professor Schatz says.

New capitals often do reduce the threat of rising seas, earthquakes, and hurricanes, at least to the government. They can also temporarily boost the national psyche as symbols of modernity and pride.

“But I think the charm has to wear off,” Professor Schatz says.

What are the costs?

New capitals are expensive. Indonesia’s comes with a $32 billion price tag.

Though the government contends investors and state-owned enterprises will bankroll 85% of the project, Mr. Suryahudaya says spending on a glitzy new capital as the country still struggles to recover from the pandemic just “isn’t ethical.”

“We have a lot of more pressing issues,” he says.

Beyond the budget, researchers say the construction of the new capital will release tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere, threaten endangered orangutans, and displace 20,000 Indigenous people who already live in the area.

Add political concerns to that list, says Johns Hopkins University Professor Filipe Campante. In isolated capitals, autocrats rarely have to fear the wrath of street uprisings far from the madding crowd, so measures of corruption climb while measures of democracy fall, his research shows.

For example, during the recent unrest against Kazakhstan’s authoritarian regime, protesters in opposition-minded Almaty torched the presidential palace – the old one, that is. The new palace, located hundreds of miles northwest, was safe.

Even in democracies like Indonesia, Professor Campante’s research shows people think less about politics in remote capitals where large protests are harder to muster and robust press coverage is less likely.

Watchdogs, Professor Campante says, will need to “bark louder, because they’re going to be barking from farther out.”

The wind sings a wordless song across the Colorado plains, making acres sway. Out of the brush rise concrete remains of a camp that imprisoned over 10,000 people.

Carlene Tanigoshi Tinker, a toddler during World War II, lived at this Japanese American internment camp, called Amache. She sat atop her father’s shoulders with a scarf around her face – a shield against wind-whipped sand – as they lined up outside for food. Her parents were United States citizens.

After their release, stigma followed her to Denver, she says, where kids would pelt her with rocks after school. For the rest of her childhood, Amache was “a topic that we never discussed,” remembers Ms. Tinker, a retired biology teacher living in California. “I think it was a painful experience.” 

Last month, President Joe Biden designated Amache as a national park, but for some it was, in essence, already serving as one. For years, camp survivors and descendants have visited the site that once confined their families, welcomed by a local educator in the nearby town of Granada.

Over almost 30 years, John Hopper, dean of students at Granada School District RE-1, and hundreds of his pupils have helped preserve the rural site and run a museum in Granada. Their sense of civic responsibility has built bonds across cultures and generations, transcending a dark chapter of American history.

“It’s taught me a lot about empathy,” says Bailey Hernandez, a junior. “You start to think, well, how would I have reacted if my family was forced into one of these camps?”

One of his predecessors toured Ms. Tinker around Amache in 2004, her first trip back. She remembers feeling uplifted.

“These kids are really, really amazing to be so dedicated,” says Ms. Tinker. “They know how important it is and they want to preserve this story.” 

Courtesy of Carlene Tanigoshi Tinker

Amache survivor Carlene Tanigoshi Tinker stands in front of a restored recreation building in 2021 where she attended preschool while her family was interned in the 1940s in Prowers County, Colorado.

Civilian suspects

Two months after the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. That led to the forced removal of more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes into internment camps. Amache, one of 10 such sites, was originally called the Granada Relocation Center and ran between 1942 and 1945.

On the rattlesnake-ridden plains of southeast Colorado, Amache mostly held American citizens – who were seen as potential enemies and subjected to loyalty questionnaires. In spite of these conditions, internees beautified their arid captivity by planting trees and gardens, even creating a pond. 

The U.S. government under Ronald Reagan formally apologized in 1988; reparations checks followed. And now with last month’s signing of the Amache National Historic Site Act, oversight of the property will transition to the National Park Service.

That’s welcome news to Mr. Hopper, for whom all things Amache are a daily responsibility.

AP/File

Housing barracks at the Amache internment center near Granada, Colorado, where Japanese Americans were relocated during World War II, June 21, 1943. Despite the situation, internees beautified their arid captivity by planting trees and gardens, even creating a pond.

For the students 

Despite being recognized for his work – including praise from the consul general of Japan in Denver – Mr. Hopper says he prefers to “be on the sidelines” and center his students.

“It is a heavy, heavy topic, especially when you talk about civil liberties,” he says. “But that’s part of my job I enjoy talking about – needs to be talked about.”

Mr. Hopper, who does not have Japanese ancestry, first visited Amache as a new Granada high school social studies teacher in 1990.

“It just looked like a sagebrush cactus hill with cattle on it,” he recalls.

In 1993, some “really bright and willing students” wanted to pursue an Amache project and began interviewing a survivor whom Mr. Hopper’s family knew. That year the teacher established the nonprofit Amache Preservation Society (APS). What began as extracurricular activities eventually formalized into a class. Collaboration with survivors, descendants, and the town, and partnership with groups like the Amache Club and Amache Historical Society, have been key to building trust.

Over the years, students have divided their time between physical preservation of the site – mowing or renovating a cemetery or other landmarks – and interpretive efforts. APS students present to other schools and groups, and help keep up the Amache Museum, where they double as docents. 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

A reconstructed guard tower stands watch over the site of a former Japanese American internment camp, Amache, in Prowers County, Colorado, March 24, 2022. Amache mostly held American citizens – who were seen as potential enemies and subjected to loyalty questionnaires.

“I can’t think of any group that does more for Amache,” says Calvin Taro Hada, an Amache descendant and president of the Nikkeijin Kai of Colorado, a Japanese American organization. 

Amache, whose land is owned by the town, became a national historic landmark in 2006. Two years later, APS students began working on-site with the University of Denver, which leads archaeology projects through summer field schools there and teaches high schoolers conservation skills like object handling.

“The first time I ever saw John’s kids give a presentation, ... I thought, OK, this is what this is all about,” says Bonnie Clark, an anthropology professor at the University of Denver and leader of the DU Amache Project. “They are super engaged,” she adds.

When Mr. Hopper retires, he plans to pass the mantle of APS leadership to social studies teacher Tanner Grasmick, who joined APS as a high schooler. 

The teacher credits his experience as one of Mr. Hopper’s students as the reason he became an educator himself. 

“You hear what they had to go through, the adversities that they had to face, and for them to come back and just be so grateful [for the preservation efforts], ... it’s amazing,” says Mr. Grasmick.

The teacher from a farming family says he still corresponds with his Japanese host mother, years after a trip abroad where he and peers gave presentations. Before the pandemic, APS members would travel to Japan every other year and often stay with host families.

No longer the enemy

On a March morning in Granada, Bailey wears a gray-black varsity jacket for some high school sports team – or so it seems. A closer look reveals a stitched image of an internment camp barrack. It’s part of his APS tour guide outfit at the Amache Museum. 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

High schooler Bailey Hernandez leads a tour of the Amache Museum in Granada, Colorado, for visitor Gene Bonventre, March 25, 2022.

He passes through exhibits of the staged interior of a barrack, a carved gourd decorated with seeds, a military uniform.

“Out of all the camps, we actually have the highest volunteer rate” for internees joining the U.S. military, says Bailey.

His eyes widen as he speaks, as if each retelling of facts fascinates him afresh. By the tour’s end, Bailey has impressed guest Gene Bonventre.

“He seemed to really know his stuff and be enthusiastic about it, too,” says Dr. Bonventre, retired from the Air Force. “That made the museum visit a lot more special.”

The visitor says he’s headed to Amache next, about a mile and a half away. Ms. Tinker plans to return there soon to participate in the DU Amache Project field school – her seventh summer.  

How might her parents react to her digging in the dirt, alongside students, excavating memories that many families spent years trying to repress? 

“We are no longer seen as the enemy,” she says. “They would see that as gratifying.” 

High up on the hill road leading to Malaysia’s Penang National Park, cars and motorbikes zip by the forest at great speeds. Some 40 feet above a particularly busy turn, almost invisible to the casual observer, hangs an aerial bridge made of rope and recycled fire hoses. It’s easy to miss, but this humble crossing has the power to save lives.

Dusky langur lives, that is.

Once abundant all over Peninsular Malaysia, these endangered primates – also known as dusky leaf monkeys – have wide, white-circled eyes that make them look serious and spectacled, and they are critical to the local ecosystem. Their numbers are decreasing partly because of their own movements; dusky langurs travel between treetops by jumping from branch to branch with total abandon, but when tree coverage is thin, they resort to using electrical cables or scurrying across the ground, often leading to electrocution and fatal collisions with motorists. The Langur Project Penang (LPP), a citizen science project founded by wildlife researcher Jo Leen Yap, counted seven instances of roadkill on this half-mile stretch of Teluk Bahang road before the bridge went up. Since then, thousands of animals have crossed the road without incident. 

This aerial crossing – the first of its kind in Malaysia – is part of a global trend of conservationists using bridges, tunnels, and other passageways to address habitat fragmentation caused by human development.

“As we humans encroach more and more into the natural world, we also need to step up and take responsibility for the welfare of our wildlife,” says Allen Tan, managing director of The Habitat Penang Hill, a rainforest conservation center that has awarded research grants to Ms. Yap through its charitable foundation. “Jo Leen’s bridge is a great step in that direction.”

Langur love

As a Penang local, Ms. Yap considers dusky langurs an important part of her natural heritage. Cute looks aside, the shy species serves as an important agent of seed dispersal, helping regenerate forests.

Courtesy of Langur Project Penang

Jo Leen Yap, the founder of the Langur Project Penang, on one of her numerous visits to the forest to study the behavior and habitats of dusky leaf monkeys.

She founded LPP in 2016 with the goal of ensuring future generations will get to see and enjoy the dusky langurs, just as she does. Her team of volunteers – mainly local community members and undergraduate students from the Universiti Sains Malaysia, where Ms. Yap is getting her Ph.D. – focuses on researching dusky langur behavior, as well as public outreach and education. Locals are encouraged to report dusky langur sightings, including any signs of distress or road accidents, through LPP’s social media channels.

The group named its urban canopy bridge Ah Lai’s Crossing, after the first alpha male langur that LPP tracked for an extended period of time. Ms. Yap says it took months of patience to get close to him. “Once he was comfortable with me, he took me into his habitat and introduced me to his wife and children,” she says with a delighted laugh. “Thanks to Ah Lai, I was able to study multiple generations of this langur family.”

According to Ms. Yap, Ah Lai is now expanding his family in another forest. But his local legacy lives on in Ah Lai’s Crossing, which LPP built in February 2019 and reinforced in August 2020. The now double-layered bridge is made of discarded fire hoses, collected and donated by the animal welfare organization Ape Malaysia. Ms. Yap says she chose fire hoses because they “have great tensile strength and are easy to maintain.” 

LPP’s camera trap captured over 2,100 crossings in its first two years. “It took a few weeks for the first dusky langur to get used to the crossing, but when we saw it captured on the camera, all the time and effort was worth it,” says Hoon Cheng Teo, a citizen volunteer.

Apart from dusky langurs, long-tailed macaques, black giant squirrels, civet cats, and other nocturnal rodents have all been spotted using Ah Lai’s Crossing. 

The case for animal infrastructure

In designing Ah Lai’s Crossing, Ms. Yap drew inspiration from similar projects around the world, such as bamboo bridges for primates and slow lorises in Indonesia and the famed wildlife overpass in Canada’s Banff National Park. More recent initiatives include a massive cougar bridge in Los Angeles and a beaver tunnel in Scotland. Studies in North America and Australia show there’s a significant benefit to humans, too, with wildlife crossings helping motorists avoid dangerous and costly collisions.

Courtesy of Langur Project Penang

A camera trap image shows a dusky leaf monkey crossing the road using the canopy bridge created by the Langur Project Penang.

Margaret Lowman, or “Canopy Meg” as she is known, is a pioneer in forest canopy ecology. She says wildlife crossings are absolutely essential to allow animals to roam freely and find new habitats when old ones get destroyed by humans, as is increasingly common, but they must be designed with species behavior in mind. “Canopy crossings are probably the most effective for monkeys because they exist at the treetop level, where the animals already live. They ensure the continuity of travel where humans may have cut down tree cover to clear space for construction,” she says. 

Dr. Lowman adds that the engineering for animal canopy crossings is fairly simple. Yet the crossings do come with challenges.

Ah Lai’s Crossing took many months of patiently tracking the animals’ behavior, mapping the most critical crossing zones, acquiring government permissions, and raising funds. Ms. Yap and her team are once again working on research and permits in the hopes of replicating this initiative elsewhere in Penang and beyond. 

Seeing the success of Ah Lai’s Crossing, the Habitat Foundation is considering grants to help build LPP’s future bridges, says Mr. Tan. “Dusky langurs are lovely, docile, and charismatic creatures, and we need to do our best for them.” 

Reuters

People in Colombo protest against Sri Lanka's President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and demand that Rajapaksa family politicians step down, April 4.

There is a broad consensus among global observers that the pandemic has harmed democracy. Yet as the face masks come off and normal life resumes, another trend is emerging: By exacerbating the impact of corruption and economic mismanagement, the pandemic has sharpened a yearning for better governance, from Cuba to Pakistan and Argentina to Israel.

In Sri Lanka, massive street protests in recent weeks have revealed an additional dimension: a demand for an end to the incompetent rule of a family dynasty, one that has exploited ethnic and religious divisions to stay in power. The main reason for the country’s current crises, says Medagoda Abayathissa Thero, a prominent Buddhist monk, is “family rule.”

The turmoil in this island nation on the southern tip of India may mark a turning point in the public’s demand for merit-based rule. That holds lessons for other societies striving to build durable democracies, especially ones seeking to be free of family rule. One study published in 2018 found 1 in 10 world leaders come from households with political ties.

For most of the past two decades, Sri Lanka has been dominated by the Rajapaksa family. Two brothers have served as president for all but five years since 2005, creating an impression they are entitled to rule. One brother, Mahinda, is credited with ending the 26-year civil war with the separatist Tamil minority.

Yet this dynastic rule has bred a sense of social inequality and the country’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1948. Since the family first held the presidency, the country has dropped 24 places in a global ranking of countries for corruption by Transparency International. Acute shortages of food, electricity, and gas have exhausted the public’s patience with the family’s quixotic economic policies and rule by force. Gotabaya, the other brother and current president, faces pressure to resign.

“What the Rajapaksas have been doing all these years was to divide the people along ethnic and religious lines,” Christopher Stephen, a construction businessman in Colombo, the capital, told NPR. “But this has united all Sri Lankans – Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers – all want them out.”

In recent days, scores of lawmakers have withdrawn from Gotabaya’s ruling coalition. Negotiations for a rescue loan from the International Monetary Fund hang in the balance. Yet amid the political uncertainty, Sri Lankans may be showing a way out of family rule, giving hope to other nations now more closely scrutinizing their leaders.