On most Monday mornings, while many of her friends are at work logging into their laptops, Nancy Walters puts on leggings and a baseball cap and heads – counter to rush-hour traffic – to an art studio near the beach in Newport, Rhode Island.

She sets up her easel and, with James Taylor playing softly in the background, begins to sketch out her latest watercolor alongside her dad. 

Before her company, The Wanderlust Group, adopted a four-day workweek, Ms. Walters and her husband would drive down from Boston after work on Fridays. But weekends in Newport are always busy, and she often found her schedule filled up too fast to spend much one-on-one time with her dad. Now, she cherishes these moments of quiet, as the two lay color over color, side by side.

“It’s prioritizing what’s really important in life,” she says. “It’s nice to have that time to make a concerted effort to see family, be creative, and spend that time with my father.”

For many workers, Mondays – or, more typically, Fridays – are morphing into something other than a regular workday. It may be as simple as making it a day of no meetings, which allows employees to catch up on projects they haven’t finished, or as extensive as a companywide move to a 32-hour week. For some companies, the four-day workweek is a new recruiting tool that resonates with a younger generation that prioritizes work-life balance. And just as shifts in thought and economic circumstances accelerated the historic moves from seven days to six days to five days of work, so the pandemic has accelerated the four-day trend.

In January, the United Arab Emirates became the first nation to adopt a 4.5-day week. In February, Belgium allowed workers to choose a four-day week but with more hours per day. In June, the United Kingdom began a six-month experiment with a four-day workweek involving more than 3,300 employees at 70 companies. A nonprofit coalition, 4 Day Week Global, is coordinating pilot programs in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – encouraging companies worldwide to adopt a 32-hour workweek with no cut in pay.

Before the pandemic, the number of four-day full-timers in the U.S. tripled between 1973 and 2018 to some 8 million employees, according to a paper co-written by Daniel Hamermesh, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin. The Netherlands, Germany, and South Korea also saw substantial growth. One website lists more than 170 companies worldwide that have moved to a four-day schedule. 

But the trend is by no means mainstream yet. Some of the world’s largest and best-known corporations, which gave employees extraordinary work-from-home flexibility during the pandemic, are now calling their workers back to the office with a traditional five-day schedule. At stake are not only economic questions, such as the future growth of national wealth and new ways of managing workers, but also social balance questions, such as the proper role of work in one’s life, community engagement, and the importance of family and friends. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Nancy Walters paints with her father, Richard C. Grosvenor, at the Spring Bull Gallery on Sept. 5, 2022, in Newport, Rhode Island. Since her company, The Wanderlust Group, moved to a four-day workweek, Ms. Walters often spends Mondays with her dad.

Historian Benjamin Hunnicutt at the University of Iowa calls the push for more free time the forgotten American dream: “that freedom we have to realize the better parts of our existence ... self-expression, community, spirituality.” But somewhere along the way, that vision was replaced by a conception of work and wealth as ends in themselves, he adds. “The dream is necessary to reawaken the awareness of what is possible.”

But some studies suggest more free time can create space for pursuits that aren’t as creative or community-oriented as some proponents hope. When Japan ratcheted down working hours from 48 to 40 per week in the late 1980s and 1990s, their notoriously hardworking denizens watched more TV, says Dr. Hamermesh of the University of Texas. When South Korea made similar cuts in the 2000s, workers spent more time on personal grooming, he adds. 

Some statistics suggest the shift to a three-day weekend in the U.S. is too small to register. As of last year, Americans who worked on Fridays (or Mondays) were still working the same number of hours (40 or more per week) as they did before the pandemic, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some observers see no change in the status of Fridays. Others see a subtle shift from the old “casual Friday” to the no-meeting Friday. “It seems like there is this unspoken, almost respect for the fact that people need catch-up time” to get their work done, says Andrea Vanecko, design principal at NBBJ, an architecture, planning, and design firm. Still others worry about TWATs – not the vulgar British expression but an acronym for those who work only Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. 

But Dr. Hamermesh says that a measurably smaller share of Americans are working five-day weeks – 52% to 53% in the early 2000s to about 49% to 50% now. And if researchers don’t yet know what those workers are doing with their newfound free time, the anecdotes, at least, are intriguing.

Fitting work around life

The new four-day schedule at Goosechase, a Canadian-founded startup with a London base, has given Natasha Delisle-Barrow more time for the circus. 

“I sometimes train in activities like aerial hoop,” she says of her circus acts. Her spare Friday also gives her the flexibility to stage-manage cabaret and circus shows and festivals.

There’s a generation of workers who want more life in their work-life balance, says her boss, Andrew Cross: “A four-day week is an opportunity to fit work around life” and not the other way around.

When Stephanie Yang chose a career in law, she knew she was signing up for a lifetime of long hours. A normal workweek consisted of 55 to 60 hours. Then her daughter, Serena, was diagnosed with autism.

At the time, Ms. Yang and her husband made things work as best they could. They hired an au pair and a behavioral therapist to come to their Pleasanton, California, home to work with their now 5-year-old daughter. Ms. Yang made time for understanding Serena’s development program: 30 minutes here, 15 minutes there. But she never felt like she was doing enough. Then she started a new job at ThredUp, an online consignment company, with a four-day week. 

Now, Friday afternoons are for her daughter. She attends Serena’s session with the behavioral therapist. In recent weeks, she’s watched her daughter learn how to trace letters without deviating too far from the lines, mimic and follow directions, and play simple board games. 

Having that time each week for her daughter “is very transformative,” she says. “She’s definitely more interactive. She makes more eye contact with me relative to before.” The change has affected Ms. Yang’s work life, too.

With less time in the week, she’s mastered the art of prioritizing “high-impact” projects, which she says help her feel like she’s contributing more meaningfully than she had in previous organizations. And “I don’t feel as guilty as I did before,” she says. “It’s pretty precious.”

Courtesy of Stephanie Yang

Stephanie Yang hugs her daughter on the first day of kindergarten in Pleasanton, California, in August 2022.

Time for sewing and canines

As a former full-time musician, who joined her first band at 14 and began touring at 19, Meredith Graves never separated work from life. Now, as the director of music at Kickstarter, a crowdfunding enterprise, which began its four-day workweek early this year, she has Fridays to bring her creativity, intellectual interests, and community engagement into harmony in a way that supports her work. 

“I don’t sleep in; I wake up on Friday with plans,” she says over Zoom from her couch in Brooklyn, dressed in a pair of red overalls she found on a recent Friday off strolling through Manhattan. Helen, a rescue Chihuahua she now has time to foster, sits on her lap. “I read a lot of really dry theological academic research, I hang out with tiny elderly dogs, and I hunch over a sewing machine.” Ms. Graves also takes part in more local music and art events now, which, she says, means she is better informed for her work at Kickstarter.

“People have realized that a lot of what we think we know about the nature of work is a relic,” she adds. “It’s best left in the last century, and a radical reconfiguring would be best for the collective. I think it’s cool we’re volunteering to be a part of it.”

Kickstarter’s decision to join the four-day trial came after the company’s global strategies officer and head of sustainability, Jon Leland, became involved with 4 Day Global, the nonprofit. His initial reasons were environmental. 

“I thought it was a really compelling climate lever,” says Mr. Leland. On average, he says, the country burns 10% less fossil fuel on weekends than on weekdays. “If we were able to move one of our weekdays into a weekend day, we would reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. by about 50 million tons per year.” 

But as he learned about the prospect of a four-day week, his vision expanded. He began to see the four-day week as a response not just to a climate crisis, but to a growing sense of civic fragmentation and burnout. Using back-of-the-envelope math, Mr. Leland calculates that for a 100-person organization like Kickstarter, a four-day week allows for around 5,000 days a year freed up for people to spend with their families, with friends, in nature, volunteering, or resting.

“That’s so much value,” he says. “I don’t see the point of being a business leader, honestly, if it isn’t to have that broader vision of how business and seeking profit can coexist with other values in our society.”

A history of shorter workweeks

The push for shorter work hours goes back more than a century. In 1830 in the U.S., when most people had farms, seven days a week was a norm. As manufacturing began to grow in the latter half of the 19th century, unions and states began to push for shorter hours. Companies often ignored such efforts, so progressives concentrated on children and, in the 1900s, young unmarried women in factories, who legislators feared might be harmed by such long hours, says Price Fishback, economics professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson.  

In 1916, Congress set an eight-hour workday for interstate railroad workers. In 1926, convinced fewer hours would make workers more productive and give them more leisure time to enjoy a car, Henry Ford implemented the eight-hour, five-day week. In the 1930s, the Great Depression threw so many people out of work that President Herbert Hoover and then President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed employers to dramatically reduce workers’ hours so that more people could stay on the payrolls. By 1940, an amended Fair Labor Standards Act institutionalized the 40-hour workweek with overtime pay for hours worked beyond that.

All along, reformers and others have pushed for even shorter hours. “If every Man and Woman would work for four Hours each Day on something useful, that Labour would produce sufficient to procure all the Necessaries and Comforts of Life,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1784. Today, the pandemic looks like the kind of event that could accelerate that trend.

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Praytell workers gather at their Brooklyn, New York, offices. The company adopted a four-day workweek to combat burnout.

Lessons from a four-day flop

In 2020, Praytell suddenly did not feel like the best place to work (even though the New York public relations firm had just won a seventh Best Place to Work prize). When the pandemic hit, burnout was high, and employees began to leave. Even founder Andy Pray was waking up and, for the first time, not loving his job.

“I felt very confused as a person,” he says. To deal with burnout, something had to give. While the four-day workweek had been on his radar for some time, it never seemed viable for a firm in the service industry. Now, it looked like low-hanging fruit. 

That first attempt was a flop. To avoid inconveniencing clients, the company assigned 70% of its 200 employees to Mondays through Thursdays, and 30% worked Tuesdays through Fridays. Scheduling became increasingly complicated, and worse, the sense of division and disjointedness in the workplace grew. Leadership nixed what they saw as a “noble attempt” and went back to a five-day system – reliable, if not inspiring. 

“Then, that just fell apart,” Mr. Pray says, as job-quitting began to accelerate across the U.S. in 2021. So last October, Praytell experimented again – this time going all-in. Instead of trying to cover all five days, the company told its clients about the switch, even adding it to the slide deck for presentations to new clients. It eliminated some meetings and shortened others. Employees had Fridays free – as long as they weren’t more than an hour away from their computer if something urgent came up.

Seven months in, 98% of Praytell employees reported wanting to see the four-day week become permanent. And 90% strongly agreed that teams operate as “efficiently and respectfully” as before while still meeting deadlines.

It’s not perfect, employees say, because the industry is chronically overworked. Whereas before Praytell employees might have worked up to 50 hours each week, now they are more likely to work on average 35 to 40 – more than the 32 hours normally considered a four-day week, but a significant improvement.

“It’s a big shift that was hard at first, honestly,” says Dele Odumosu, a senior supervisor on the digital team from Praytell’s Brooklyn office. “When you’re making creative work and you have deliverables and due dates, losing that business day is tough.”

At the same time, “I’ve started using my Fridays as Saturdays. I do my laundry. I do my grocery shopping. I go to the nail salon,” she says. And her team has been noticeably more productive in recent months because everyone is mentally “ready to go” when Monday rolls around. Even business partners are taking note. 

“A lot of our clients, I feel like they’re kind of jealous,” Ms. Odumosu says.

While the move toward a four-day week is generally understood to mean adopting a 32-hour schedule, some companies have stuffed the traditional 40 hours into four days. 

During the pandemic, Enterprise Rent-A-Car at Boston’s Logan Airport offered Trandoe Gilmere a job that would spread his 42 hours over four days instead of five. The new 10.5-hour overnight shifts can be exhausting, but it means he has time to spend doing the things he really loves, like writing poetry and nurturing his budding clothes brand, H.I.E.R.O.S. 

“With the five-day week, you’re tired,” he says. He used to spend one of his weekend days recuperating. “Now I feel like I have one day to rest, and then the other two to really enjoy two days off.” 

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Trandoe Gilmere works for Enterprise Rent-A-Car at Boston’s Logan Airport. Working long shifts four days a week can be exhausting, he says, but it’s worth it to get three days off.

Making space for deep work

Advocates of the shorter workweek say a key to success is “deep work” – time set aside to focus, without distraction. They say managers must understand that “truly deep work” lasts at best between two and three hours every day for most workers. One U.K. company reportedly adopted a “traffic light” system to reduce disturbances. Colleagues have a light on their desk that’s set to green if they can talk, amber if they are busy but available to speak, and red if they do not want to be interrupted. Other companies have found that to get the equivalent productivity in four days, they had to mandate fewer and shorter meetings.

The productivity record of the 32-hour workweek is mixed. Some studies show there’s no hit to productivity. Andrew Barnes decided to try a four-day workweek in his New Zealand company Perpetual Guardian after reading reports suggesting that cognitive productivity drops dramatically after just a few hours of work. He reduced all of his 240 employees’ weeks to 30 hours, without cutting pay or benefits. In his estate planning firm, Mr. Barnes found that productivity increased 20%, sick day costs fell by half, and his employees reported a greater sense of balance and satisfaction. Later in 2018, Mr. Barnes started 4 Day Week Global with Charlotte Lockhart to help other companies do the same. 

But if the four-day workweek is only remote, some research suggests productivity could drop. A study last year of 10,000 professionals at an Asian information technology company found they worked 18% more hours once they were forced to work from home during the pandemic, but output fell slightly anyway, implying a productivity loss of 8% to 19%. Uninterrupted work hours – what the Becker Friedman Institute called “focus time” – actually fell considerably.

It’s the fear of a loss in productivity that is causing some employers to lure their workers back to a traditional five-day-a-week office routine. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, for example, told employees in a May memo that they must be in the office a minimum of 40 hours a week or leave the company. 

The problem with such ultimatums is that a company’s most talented workers may go somewhere else that offers more flexible schedules.

To Reem Hassan, a four-day-a-week job was “a unicorn.” But this spring, she was approaching her second anniversary with a New York firm whose mission statement said it put children first. Unfortunately, it offered parents no scheduling flexibility. With joint custody of her two children, who lived three hours away and whom she typically saw during weekends, holidays, and school breaks, Ms. Hassan was seeking a change. She wasn’t looking specifically for a four-day workweek; rather, she says, “I was looking for an employer who valued real work-life balance, not just something written on a website, and was able to walk the walk.” 

She got three offers. One firm offered fully remote work. Another had a hybrid of on-site and remote. Only Knowledge Futures Group (KFG), a small tech nonprofit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offered a four-day week and fully remote work. She jumped at the chance, even though it paid less than one of the other offers.

“The summer break just ended for us, and it was one of the best we have had since I moved back to New York City in 2020, thanks to the awesome KFG team,” she says. 

Wealth as personal time

Startups as well as software, design, and consulting companies with their openness to experimentation are often more willing to embrace four-day weeks than are larger, more established organizations. 

Since joining the U.K. trial of the four-day week, CEO Paul David Perry of Literal Humans, a digital marketing agency based in London, has seen a tighter focus and more trust from his eight full-time staffers and 15 to 20 freelancers around the globe. An unexpected bonus: The company’s job postings get two to three times more interest than what they generated back in the five-day-per-week era.

Society has a choice to make, says Dr. Hunnicutt, the historian. Between 1979 and 2020, U.S. worker productivity increased by 61.8%, while hourly pay increased by just 17.5%. Meanwhile, hours worked remained constant and often increased for salaried employees in white-collar industries, which sociologists have linked to a decline in civic participation and community engagement since the mid-20th century.

“You can either continue working full time, and take all of the productivity gains in terms of profit and wages – a lot of the story has been profit – or you can take part of the gains in wealth in the form of time,” he says, noting that society is in the middle of an automation revolution that will make this question even more relevant.

Back at the Newport gallery, Ms. Walters and her dad, Richard C. Grosvenor, reflect on the time they’ve gained back. The four-day week “is something they promised us in the ’50s and ’60s,” he says. “And it never came about.” 

So he designed his own in the 1990s, working long hours at an early web company in New Jersey Monday through Thursday so he could dedicate Fridays through Sundays to his family. Now, with a long career in real estate mostly behind him, he’s had time to reevaluate what really matters: things like family, art, and nature.  

“That change of activity is so critical I think, to work, to love, to life, to everything,” he says. “It’s being able to take that time and explore what’s going on in yourself.” 

For three decades, Russia has been struggling to manage the ongoing collapse of the USSR. Its primary goals have been to bind former Soviet republics to Moscow-led international organizations, to keep outside powers away from its backyard, and to use its considerable clout to at least freeze the many territorial and political disputes that still bedevil the region.

Now, thanks to the war in Ukraine, all of those objectives look compromised.

Tensions are spiking around the former USSR, where a massively distracted Russia seems increasingly unable to perform its usual role of regional stabilizer due to growing commitments to the war and the negative example it has set by using force to settle its own post-Soviet disputes.

Over the past month, an armistice brokered by Russia between Armenia and Azerbaijan after a bitter war two years ago broke down as Azerbaijani forces, backed by Turkey, surged forward and attacked the recognized territory of Russian-allied Armenia. And an unresolved border dispute ignited in bloody fighting between the mountainous Central Asian republics of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, both Russian allies, leaving at least 100 people dead and a diplomatic quandary for Moscow in its wake.

Those two crises have simmered down with hastily imposed cease-fires, but those and many other potential flashpoints remain. Analysts warn that the entire post-Soviet region – never very stable – will continue to present problems for Moscow in the form of conflicts, political instability, and an increasing tendency to flirt with foreign powers to offset the influence of a Russia preoccupied with Ukraine.

“Russian military action in Ukraine, which is not going according to its initial design, has consumed a lot of Russian resources and energy,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow-based foreign policy journal. “Obviously different countries will use this situation to pursue their own agendas. ... A general reconfiguration of the post-Soviet space has been underway for some time. Many of these new countries need to demonstrate their sustainability as states. They are very nervous about their neighbors and their own internal stability. The Russian operation in Ukraine has given a big impetus to all such tensions and uncertainties.”

Indeed, Russian behavior in Ukraine, which is ostensibly aimed at protecting Russian-speaking populations, must worry other post-Soviet states with large ethnic Russian minorities in their midst, such as Kazakhstan, Moldova, and the Baltic States, says Andrey Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry. “It’s not just that Russia is distracted,” he says. “Many must wonder, if it can happen in Ukraine, why not to other countries as well?”

Simmering regional conflicts

The world breathed a sigh of relief three decades ago when the USSR broke up peacefully along its internal borders, which had been drawn by successive Soviet leaders largely for their own political convenience. The savage wars that had rocked the former Yugoslavia seemed to be largely avoided, and 15 new sovereign states took their place on the maps and in the United Nations. That was in large part due to the extraordinary restraint and nonviolent convictions of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

But post-imperial issues abounded, including territorial disputes and breakaway statelets in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and even Russia itself. Large populations of ethnic Russians were left stranded beyond the borders of Russia, especially in Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Central Asia, and have been a constant source of tensions ever since.

“The problems that followed the USSR’s collapse were serious. The rules, boundaries, economic conditions that prevail in a united state turn dangerous when parts of it become separate entities. Rules and systems change,” says Vladimir Zharikhin, deputy director of the official Institute of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Moscow. “These problems are not always resolved peacefully.”

Russia overturned any semblance of post-Soviet accord, experts say, by invading Ukraine and seeking to redraw the borders it inherited from the USSR. That sets an example to others, and also undermines Russian credibility as a mediator for other frozen conflicts in the region.

Two years ago, Russia declined to come to the assistance of its Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) ally Armenia on the grounds that the attacking Azerbaijanis were only retaking their own sovereign territory that had been illegally occupied by Armenia in a post-Soviet war. Russia was able to impose a peacekeeping regime at that time, but it has all but unraveled in recent weeks as Azerbaijan moved to take more territory and even attacked Armenia proper.

As Russia struggled to reimpose the cease-fire, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flew to Yerevan to express her support for Armenia, and also fan the flames of Armenian outrage – that its supposed big protector, Russia, appeared to be missing in action as Armenia faced Azerbaijani aggression alone.

“Pelosi has a big Armenian American constituency, so she might have been acting in her own political interests, but she also seems to speak for the U.S.,” says Mr. Lukyanov. “It was an opportune moment to emphasize to Armenians that Russia is not a reliable patron for Armenia, and she said that explicitly in Yerevan.”

Stepan Poghosyan/Photolure/AP

Demonstrators with American and Armenian national flags gather at the Cafesjian Center for the Arts where U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered her speech, in Yerevan, Armenia, Sept. 18, 2022. Ms. Pelosi called for a negotiated solution to the countries' conflict.

That situation remains exceedingly dangerous, not just because Azerbaijani ambitions have grown amid political crisis in Armenia, but also because it raises the specter of a much wider war. Turkey is Azerbaijan’s key sponsor, while Iran has mobilized forces and warned that it might intervene if Armenia’s borders should be threatened. In recent years, Iran has become an important trading partner and even something of a strategic partner for Armenia.

“Azerbaijan is getting stronger; Armenia is growing weaker. That’s reality,” says Mr. Kortunov. “If Armenia should be in real jeopardy, Russia will have to intervene because its credibility is at stake. But it’s the worst possible moment for that, as far as Moscow is concerned. For now, diplomatic tools are being deployed.”

The danger of a wounded Russia

No matter how it turns out, Russia’s war in Ukraine is going to have a huge impact on many former Soviet countries. If Russia should lose the war, the consequences could be widespread and devastating, says Mr. Kortunov.

In 2008, Russia successfully intervened to block a Georgian military attempt to retake two pro-Russian breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which belong to Georgia under international law.

“A lot of these suppressed conflicts will swiftly unfreeze,” he says. “Georgia has unfinished business [with those rebel regions], and a wounded Russia may not be able to exert itself next time. There is endemic unrest in other places, like Belarus, that could easily flare up again. Central Asia is a perennial problem. Russia and the CSTO were able to quickly restore stability in Kazakhstan earlier this year with a quick and limited intervention. Would it be able to repeat that in future?”

After experiencing battlefield setbacks, Russia has doubled down on its Ukraine gamble and embarked on a “partial mobilization” that will likely bring more troops and fresh tactics to its prosecution of the war.

As of now, Mr. Kortunov adds, “Russia still intends to win in Ukraine. In that case, we will be looking at a very different set of consequences. But the changes will still be huge.”

Clad in a feathered collar, Romancil Gentil Kretã took to a small stage in Brazil’s capital earlier this year as thousands of Indigenous people watched on. Mr. Kretã has dedicated his life to advocating for Indigenous rights, and by launching a bid for political office he said he now hoped to bring that fight to the halls of power.

“For me, it’s a new moment, it’s a new challenge,” said Mr. Kretã, a member of the Kaingang people, announcing his plans to run for Paraná state legislature. “I have a commitment to the Indigenous cause.”

Mr. Kretã’s father was Brazil’s first Indigenous city councilor, killed in 1980 for defending Indigenous lands. Violence against Indigenous people hasn’t let up since, but observers say it has intensified over the past four years under far-right populist President Jair Bolsonaro, who is up for reelection on Oct. 2.

Mr. Kretã believes Brazil is now on the brink of a new dawn. His political bid is part of a record number of Indigenous people running in this weekend’s elections – 180 candidates competing for seats at the federal and state level – in response to assaults on Indigenous rights in recent years and in an effort to transform Indigenous representation in politics. In 2020, some 182 Indigenous activists were killed here, the highest toll on record, according to figures from the Missionary Council for Indigenous Peoples.

“We have seen attacks on Indigenous communities intensify since 2018,” when Mr. Bolsonaro took office, says Luisa Molina, an anthropologist and consultant at the Instituto Socioambiental who investigates illegal mining on Indigenous lands.

But, we’re also seeing “the Indigenous movement gaining force,” she says. “These candidacies are an expression of this new strength.”

Bruno Kelly/Reuters

Vanda Witoto became a symbol of resistance during the pandemic when she fought to bring health care to Indigenous communities. The congressional candidate for Amazonas state greeted supporters in Manaus, Brazil, Sept. 18, 2022.

The “headdress lobby”

Mr. Bolsonaro is an enthusiastic supporter of developing the Amazon rainforest, pushing to open Indigenous reserves to mining, ranching, and agriculture during his time in office. He gutted agencies tasked with protecting Indigenous people, while vowing not to shield “another centimeter” of Indigenous land from development.

“Before, the rural man would wake up horrified to find his property … included in a new Indigenous reserve,” Mr. Bolsonaro said earlier this year. “We put an end to that.”

Lawmakers allied with Mr. Bolsonaro have introduced a series of state and federal bills aimed at easing environmental licensing laws and unwinding protections on forests, making it easier for people to illegally stake claim on Indigenous lands.

Advocates say it’s emboldened invaders to encroach on those lands. In 2019, for example, an estimated 20,000 illegal miners descended on the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in search of gold, polluting water with mercury and gunning down Indigenous people.

“The rhetoric from the top has repercussions,” Ms. Molina says, referring to Mr. Bolsonaro’s comments. “Invaders feel protected, and it gives rise to violence in Indigenous lands.” More than 1,200 Indigenous people have been killed for their activism in Brazil since 1985.

Now, Indigenous organizations have put forward a well-organized group of federal and state candidates that they call the “headdress lobby.” They believe that by electing Indigenous representatives, these communities can better resist attacks on their rights – and usher in a transformation that involves giving Indigenous people a louder voice in politics.

“Indigenous people also have a right to these spaces,” says Marcio Kókoj, a Kaingang activist who runs an Indigenous news portal, referring to elected office. “So we can fight for policies that help Indigenous communities, instead of harming them.”

Whashington Alves/Reuters

Célia Xakriabá is a congressional candidate from the state of Minas Gerais and has won backing from high-profile Brazilians, including legendary singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso. Like many of the Indigenous candidates in the Oct. 2 elections, she has proudly displayed her ancestry on the campaign trail, here smiling for photos with a traditional headdress in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Sept. 20, 2022.

A seat at the table

There are some 818,000 Indigenous people in Brazil, roughly 0.4% of the population, according to the country’s last census. But leaders estimate a new count currently underway may put the population closer to 1 million, as more Brazilians with Indigenous roots embrace their ancestry.

To date, only two Indigenous people have ever held seats in Brazil’s Congress: Mário Juruna was elected in 1982, and Joênia Wapichana won a seat in 2018. Indigenous representation is scarce in state politics, too. 

“We are many, but we have so few representing us,” says Bia Kokama, an Indigenous leader who is running for a deputy seat in Amazonas state.

In local elections two years ago, there were signs of a changing tide: 197 Indigenous candidates were elected as councilors, mayors, and vice mayors at local levels across Brazil.

This election, Indigenous candidates have their sights set on higher office – and some of their campaigns are causing a stir. Sônia Guajajara, who is running for Congress, landed a spot on Time magazine’s list of most influential people for her Indigenous rights activism.

In Minas Gerais, another congressional candidate, Célia Xakriabá, has won the backing of Brazilian stars: Famed film director Wagner Moura urged his Instagram followers to support her, while legendary singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso invited her on stage at a show in August.

And a congressional bid by Vanda Witoto, a nurse who became a symbol of resistance as she fought to bring care to Indigenous communities during the pandemic, has drawn financial backing from the main shareholders of one of Brazil’s largest banks.

Most of these candidates have proudly displayed their Indigenous ancestry on the campaign trail, often appearing in red-and-black face paint and traditional headdress. Some have used the internet to reach a wider audience, launching polished, media-savvy messages on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

“Today, we use our phones as an instrument of resistance,” says Mr. Kókoj, who believes social media has helped make the struggle of Indigenous people more visible.

Still, without big budgets, donor support, or political machines behind them, getting elected is an uphill battle for many of these candidates

Ms. Kokama says reaching potential supporters in far-flung Indigenous territories has proved tough on a shoestring budget. Her hometown of São Paulo de Olivença, for example, is a three-day journey by boat from the state capital of Manaus.

“We don’t have the resources that other candidates have,” she says. Instead, Ms. Kokama does much of her campaigning online, although internet access can be limited in remote territories.

Still, she is optimistic that she – and other Indigenous candidates – can draw votes. “I’m part of a dream,” she says of fighting for more representation in politics. “And I see a better future for our grandchildren.”

Andre Penner/AP

Sônia Guajajara, who is running for Congress on Oct. 2, 2022, shows her hands painted in red, symbolizing blood. On "Amazon Day" in São Paulo, Brazil, earlier this month, she protested against violence, illegal logging, mining, and ranching – topics many Indigenous political candidates are discussing on the campaign trail this year.

Challenges ahead

Many Indigenous candidates are battling for support in states that overwhelmingly voted to elect Mr. Bolsonaro in 2018 – and, in some cases, continue to share his views on Indigenous land and the environment. In the Amazon state of Roraima, where Ms. Wapichana is running for reelection, 62% of people say they plan to vote for Mr. Bolsonaro, recent polls show.

Some candidates have experienced hostility. Mr. Kretã says his team was approached by an armed man while distributing flyers in Curitiba, his state’s capital. Last week, he received a barrage of racist comments during a Facebook livestream, prompting Brazil’s electoral court to order the social network to take down the messages.

“There are those who believe the Indigenous belong in the forest, not in political spaces,” says Mr. Kókoj. “The world of politics is still a battleground for us.”

Even if Indigenous candidates are elected, they still face barriers. For one, a group of legislators aligned with agricultural interests looks poised to gain more support in the Oct. 2 vote. This could make it difficult for Indigenous candidates to resist measures attacking their communities’ rights, says Ms. Molina.

“Even as we have this inspiring rise of Indigenous candidacies, we also have a constant proliferation of representatives linked to agriculture and mining,” she says.

For Chermie Ferreira, a graffiti artist and member of the Kokama people, having Indigenous candidates on the ballot is a game changer. If elected, they would fight for issues she cares about, she says, like access to health care in remote territories and decent housing for Indigenous communities in urban centers.

“They represent me; they represent my interests,” says Ms. Ferreira, who lives on the outskirts of Manaus, the state capital of Amazonas. “We have to keep fighting – but it’s not enough to march on the street anymore,” she says.

“We need our own people on the inside.”

“Is this a new kind of mobile phone?” a neighborhood woman asked Mumtaz Begam when she showed her a small black box during a meeting of women in the Delhi slum of Sawda Ghevra. “A TV?” 

But the device wasn’t for entertainment – it was a hand-held air-quality index monitor, and Ms. Begam is among 75 local women trained to measure AQI levels by a grassroots nonprofit that works on building climate resilience by making technology accessible to urban poor women. 

Many women in Sawda Ghevra work in the construction industry, where they are exposed to dust, sand, and cement, making them especially vulnerable to pollution. “AQI ambassadors” such as Ms. Begam teach workers to measure air pollution in their environment, take precautions at work and home, and use the government’s pollution-curbing Green Delhi app.

Participants say the initiative – by the Mahila Housing Trust (MHT) – has served to bolster their sense of dignity. Even Ms. Begam, who runs a small stationery shop, says that despite hearing about pollution in the media, she didn’t really believe that Delhi’s air was so bad until she read the AQI monitor for herself. Many female construction workers have since made life-improving changes. 

“Women [in construction] tell me, ‘Now, we are far more confident. We tell the contractor that we will work only if the conditions are proper,’” reports Ms. Begam.

But there are still limits to what these women can achieve alone, experts say. 

“Providing the most impacted communities with data tools to be able to tell their own story, advocate for their well-being, and to quantify the risk that they are exposed to is definitely an important first step,” says Ulka Kelkar, director of the World Resources Institute India’s climate program, adding, “Beyond that, there has to be enforcement of policies and building of capacity to monitor and ensure compliance.”

Taking control in the workplace

The construction industry is the second-largest employer in India. It is also largely unregulated, with workers often migrating from rural to urban areas for jobs. Women are especially vulnerable.

Married off at the age of 15 by her family, Rambharosi (who, like many in poor communities, goes by only one name) migrated with her in-laws to Delhi from the northwestern state of Rajasthan. Every night, her one-room home in the Bakkarwala area is filled with a putrid smell and smoke that rises from a disputed piece of land nearby where people burn medical, construction, and household waste. 

Now in her mid-50s, she earns 400 rupees ($5) a day mixing cement and fixing tiles.

“The female wages in the construction sector are substantially lower than their male counterparts’,” says Arup Mitra, professor of economics at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, due to a bias against female productivity and women’s low bargaining power.

With no safety training or protective equipment, women breathe in debris linked by medical experts to various diseases, including tuberculosis and cancer, as well as to skin and breathing conditions. 

Vandana K

Waste is regularly dumped in an empty plot of land near Rambharosi and Laxmi's home in New Delhi, pictured on June 8, 2022. The fact that an influential local hospital, shown on the left, burns its medical waste here at night makes the women hesitant to complain.

“Women suffer doubly in this work ... because there is no compliance with safety standards,” says Thaneshwar Dayal Adigaur, secretary of a construction workers union in Delhi.

In 2021, MHT partnered with social impact agency Purpose to launch a nine-month air pollution awareness and advocacy project for female construction workers in three areas in Delhi – Sawda Ghevra, Bakkarwala, and Gokulpuri. 

Rambharosi, who started wearing a mask, scarf, and gloves to work for the first time last year after attending a community meeting, has borrowed the AQI monitor to show other women how polluted the air was at their work site.

“The round thing was red because the pollution was high at that time,” she says. “I told them it’s an alarm bell showing danger from smoke and dust.”

She now speaks to the contractors at each site and ensures that the sand, gravel, and bricks are sprayed with water twice a day, in addition to covering unused materials with tarps. She makes it a point to tell other women to dress their children in full-sleeved clothing and ensure they don’t play in the sand. 

Reporting risks

In addition to training AQI ambassadors, MHT and its community action groups also drove around an electric rickshaw with posters, distributed handouts, performed street plays, made wall art, and met legislators to push for safer work sites. They managed to reach 100,000 construction workers. The group’s end-line survey found that 82% began to wear masks at work, and 13% took steps to prevent pollution at their work sites.

During the project, the Delhi government took notice of their efforts and decided to work with MHT to promote its relatively new pollution-fighting app. 

Launched in 2020, the Green Delhi app enables citizens to report various environmental offenses across the city, including waste burning and road dust accumulation. GDi Partners, a social impact consultancy organization, has been working with the government since 2021 to make the app more effective, and trained the AQI ambassadors on using the app to report violations.

Rambharosi’s daughter, Laxmi, received training and has since helped 300 women download the app. She’s made 14 complaints herself, most of which were resolved. 

In July, the app had 75,677 downloads and had registered 51,554 complaints. GDi claims that 95% of these were solved. 

One complaint that hasn’t been addressed is the medical waste burning outside Rambharosi and Laxmi’s residence. Laxmi lodged the complaint on the app, but the women are nervous about pushing the issue since there’s a powerful hospital involved. 

It’s a fear shared by many users, whose names and locations are recorded by the app, leading to data security concerns. Some worry about retribution or harassment.

“This hasn’t happened yet, but we are scared that this may happen,” says Rambharosi. 

Other women who used the Green Delhi app say they received pushback from city employees. “I helped many people file complaints about waste not being picked up,” says Saroj, a fellow AQI ambassador from Bakkarwala. “The municipal worker came to me and said, ‘Don’t complain about us again.’”

Despite these hurdles, the Green Delhi app aims to get 5 million people using the app over the next three years. MHT also plans to expand its program to other informal settlements. 

As for Rambharosi, she says even small measures like covering up at work have made a difference. Once battling frequent rashes and ulcers, Rambharosi no longer needs medicines for her skin. “My hands remain clean, the cement doesn’t rub on my skin, and it feels better,” she says. 

She reminisces about the earthy scent of the village she grew up in, and hopes to return to someday when she retires. “I still want clean air,” she says.

Shawn Miller/Library of Congress

Ada Limón starts her tenure as U.S. poet laureate on Sept. 29. She is the 24th poet laureate and was named to the post by the librarian of Congress.

Award-winning poet Ada Limón begins her term as the 24th poet laureate of the United States on Sept. 29 with a reading of her work at the Library of Congress. Ms. Limón, who is of Mexican American descent, is the first Chicana to hold the post. She succeeds Joy Harjo, the first Native American poet laureate, who served three terms in the position (2019-2022). 

Ms. Limón has published six acclaimed collections, most recently “The Hurting Kind,” and hosts the podcast series “The Slowdown” from American Public Media, which was launched as part of Tracy K. Smith’s poet laureateship in 2019. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program of Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.

In a recent interview, Ms. Limón said she feels privileged to be named poet laureate because the position will allow her “to help people connect with poetry on a larger scale, something that has always been really important to me, both as an artist and as a person.”

Ms. Limón, whose poems often focus on the natural world, intends to use poetry to help people reclaim their humanity and to repair our relationship with the earth.

“At a time like this, it feels like we need so many things that aren’t art,” she says. “We need an end to war and we need a solution for the climate crisis. But to become disillusioned about what poetry and art can do is in some ways to forget that, yes, we need to survive as a people, but we also need to flourish. We’ve been living very much in survival mode since March of 2020. I think poetry can remind us that there is a way to live that is wholehearted, that recognizes our wholeness.”

Poetry helps us do that, she says, by “allowing us to walk into the room of ourselves” and reconsider who we are. “It’s been very easy in the past two years to go numb, to kind of guard ourselves, to be brave and strong and resilient. But I think there is power in recognizing that we are emotional beings and that sometimes we need to be hit by a poem and maybe even weep a little,” she says. “Poetry can help us feel tenderness or vulnerability, and then you can also leave it.”

Reconnecting with nature can happen anywhere, says Ms. Limón, who grew up in Sonoma, California. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in drama from the University of Washington and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from New York University, before working in marketing for several years in New York. 

“I’ve lived in urban settings most of my life, so I understand that ‘nature’ is not just preserved spaces that we go to. It’s not the drive to Yosemite or Yellowstone. It’s also the pocket parks that we pass underneath the freeways and the overpasses. It’s the green spaces that we notice on our way to work or school.”

Ms. Limón remembers feeling particularly disheartened when she was working a temp job, was going to graduate school, had hardly any money, and was trying to figure out how to be a writer. “As I saw the new grass come up during the spring and watched it flourish during the summer, all during that temp job, I thought, ‘OK, things can grow here, and I can grow here.’” 

During her time living in the Brooklyn borough of New York, she learned to identify and name the trees in her neighborhood. “I suddenly felt much more connected to the world, not just the community of people around me, but the community of trees, the community of animals.”

As poet laureate, Ms. Limón wants to bring poetry into pocket parks and other public spaces, much like the Poetry in Motion project brought poems to transit systems in several major cities. “Those poems always meant so much to me because poems hit you in an unexpected way when you’re not looking for them, but instead you’re going about your day and then suddenly you’re surprised by language,” she says.

She also hopes to encourage a greater appreciation for the “golden age of poetry” the United States is experiencing now, with a rich diversity of voices. 

Her own background includes rich diversity as well. Her paternal grandfather, Francisco Carlos Limón, immigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1917. After spending time in the foster care system, he earned a college degree and worked his entire career at Con Edison, a power company. Other forebears were of Indigenous ancestry, and on her mother’s side there’s “a lot” of Scottish and Irish.

Ms. Limón learned important early lessons about the natural world from her mother. “One of the biggest things that she taught me was to pay attention. My mother is a painter, and she looks at the world with a deep intention. It was really interesting to me to watch her watch things, to pull apart, say, the way the sticky monkey flower was made. Or to look at rattlesnake grass and hold it up to your ear and shake it. And it will actually rattle.”

All those experiences enrich her writing and her life, says Ms. Limón, who has lived since 2011 in Kentucky, where her husband owns a video marketing company in the thoroughbred industry.

“I’m very proud of my Mexican heritage, of being a woman, of the places I’ve lived, and of my lineage as a poet in terms of who I studied with,” she says. 

What she doesn’t like is being defined by ethnicity or labels. 

“I like to focus on possibilities. I want all those possibilities, and I want young people to know that you don’t have to just choose who you are and then live in that box forever. You get to change. You get to change your mind. And you get to choose who you want to be every day. Every day is a choice.” 

AP

A Russian rests in at temporary facility in the town Ata-Meken after crossing into Kazakhstan Sept. 28.

Not all wars are won by brute force. Sometimes acts of universal compassion might alter a war’s course. One example came this past week when about 100,000 Russians – mainly young men – fled to neighboring Kazakhstan to evade a Sept. 21 order by President Vladimir Putin to round up 300,000 conscripts for his failing fight in Ukraine.

Despite its close economic and political ties with Russia, Kazakhstan didn’t close its 4,750-mile border to the sudden influx. Rather, in the boldest signal yet that the Central Asian nation disapproves of the war, Kazakhs welcomed the fleeing Russians, helping them find shelter and feeding them.

“Everyone was polite; they gave us practical advice,” one man in the border city of Uralsk told the Russian-language news site Meduza. “We’ve received full support from the locals. They’ve treated us like refugees – like people fleeing oppression in our own country.”

The kindness started at the top. President Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, who in the past has called Mr. Putin “comrade” and joined him in June at a conference, said Kazakhstan must stick to its values.

“In such a complex situation, we should first of all show humanity, patience, and organization,” he said. Kazakhs should take care of the Russians forced to leave “because of the current hopeless situation” and ensure their safety, he advised.

Mr. Tokayev, who took power in 2019, has slowly moved the thinly populated former Soviet republic out of the Kremlin’s orbit. He’s also made moves to improve the country’s limited democracy, especially since January after a mass uprising over a hike in fuel prices.

An estimated half of the Russians who have fled the conscription order went to Kazakhstan. Compared with Georgia, Finland, and other countries along the Russian border, it has been the most welcoming. One reason may be that Mr. Putin has said “Kazakhs never had a state,” a claim similar to one he made about Ukraine before the invasion.

To help defeat Russia in Ukraine, Kazakhs are asserting their identity and independence in helping the fleeing Russians. Not all wars are won by weapons.