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The ocean is home to some of the richest biodiversity on Earth. From coral reefs and mangrove forests to the deep sea, marine ecosystems sustain countless species, support coastal communities, regulate the climate and underpin global food security.

But these systems face growing pressure from overfishing, habitat loss, pollution and climate change.

In response, nations have adopted an ambitious global goal to conserve at least 30% of the world’s ocean by 2030 – known as 30×30. This target has expanded marine protection worldwide, particularly through marine protected areas.

But what happens after protection is announced?

Decades of experience have shown that effective marine protection requires consistent rules, regulations and oversight, along with financing and meaningful collaboration with local governments, industries and communities. Without it, these areas risk becoming paper parks: lines on a map without real-world impact, where marine life may continue to face overfishing and other threats.

Two new reports we led, one from Oregon State University and the other from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, offer an important reality check on where marine conservation stands today and what must be done to achieve the goal of protecting 30% of the ocean.

Together they argue that the primary barrier to realizing the 30×30 ocean conservation goal is no longer ambition to protect the ocean, but effective action that can make it real.

A decade of commitments

The 30×30 goal is often promoted at global ocean meetings, including the 11th Our Ocean Conference, being held in Kenya on June 16-18, 2026.

According to the Oregon State analysis, the conservation commitments announced at past Our Ocean Conferences have helped establish more than 3.88 million square miles (10 million square kilometers) of marine protected areas, or about 2.8% of the global ocean.

In all, marine protected areas now cover nearly 10% of the global ocean. But only about 3.5% of that is fully or highly protected.

The reach of protected areas shows that voluntary pledges can translate into tangible conservation gains when progress is consistently tracked and publicly reported. However, the findings also point to a key challenge: the growing difference between the extent of protection and its effectiveness.

In other words, ocean protection cannot be judged by area alone.

The implementation gap

The Smithsonian report takes a closer look at what is needed to turn such commitments into effective conservation.

Since the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was approved in 2022, with almost every country agreeing to protect at least 30% of Earth’s land and waters, marine protection has expanded considerably. However, global numbers show that at least half of existing marine protected areas remain unimplemented or inoperable, with rules and regulations not in place or even allowing destructive activities like bottom trawling.

Achieving the 30×30 goal still requires protecting an additional 20% of the ocean over the next four years. The challenge is twofold: expanding coverage, while also ensuring that the areas are actually benefiting marine life and people.

Effective, long-lasting conservation depends on management plans, trained personnel, monitoring systems, enforcement capacity, sustainable financing and community participation. Without these elements, legal designation alone does not lead to biodiversity protection, thriving ecosystems and benefits to people.

Yet, across regions, the Smithsonian report found a troubling pattern: Countries’ ambition to create protected areas is outpacing their capacity to help those areas succeed.

We found two key constraints: lack of coordination around capacity development – the strengthening of skills and tools needed to effectively achieve a goal – and applying a one-size-fits-all approach to distinctly different regional contexts.

Many countries and communities are committed to marine protection, but they often need better continuous governance and policy, stakeholder engagement and inclusion, data and technology, socio-ecological integration, and communication for effective implementation of marine protected areas over time.

Similarly, securing funding for marine conservation remains a persistent challenge. When we spoke with groups and communities involved in marine conservation, they often cited complex application processes and funding structures that often do not match their local realities or priorities. This creates a mismatch between how conservation is funded and how it is implemented.

There are efforts to close this gap. The Bali-based Coral Triangle Center’s Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security Capacity Building Roadmap works to conserve ocean areas in a region that harbors the richest marine biodiversity on the planet. Through regional training hubs, leadership programs, internships and digital platforms, it has trained over 8,200 government officials, community leaders and private-sector representatives in science-based marine conservation practices.

The Sustainable Finance Coalition, a group of nonprofits and international organizations, is using its expertise in another way: finding creative ways to secure money for projects in Africa and the South West Indian Ocean to protect key habitats on land and sea. To date, the coalition has tapped into more than US$43 million to protect nature and support the effective management of 170,500 acres (69,000 hectares).

Beyond lines on a map

The two reports found that political momentum for ocean protection is strong. Governments, Indigenous peoples, local communities, scientists and conservation organizations have rallied around the 30×30 target, creating a global movement of support.

The challenge now is delivering on this momentum.

Achieving the conservation goals behind the 30×30 plan will depend less on announcing new protected areas and more on investing in the capacity, finance, enforcement and long-term institutional support needed to help these protected areas function as planned.

As 2030 approaches, the central question is becoming sharper. It is no longer simply how much of the ocean can be protected — but whether that protection can be made real, durable and effective.

Kirsten Grorud-Colvert has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their appointment with Oregon State University. Kirsten Grorud-Colvert receives funding related to this work from Oceans 5, Bloomberg Ocean Fund, Oceankind, Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy, and The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Ana Spalding has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their appointment with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. In terms of the report cited in the article, this work was made possible through the support of the Bloomberg Ocean Fund within the Ocean Impact Partnership, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, which served as the key negotiator between the U.S. and Iran, announced on June 14, 2026, that the two sides had agreed on a deal to end the war. It will be officially signed on June 19 in Switzerland.

President Donald Trump announced it on Truth Social as a triumph, claiming that the Strait of Hormuz is open for everyone, the U.S. blockade has been lifted, and the oil is flowing again. What Trump did not mention was Iran’s nuclear program and what happens to its enriched uranium stockpile, one of the main reasons cited for starting the war.

The nuclear issue – along with core issues such as ballistic missiles and Iran’s proxies – has been deferred for 60 days.

This raises two important questions: What was the war actually for? And what did the U.S. achieve?

As an international and nuclear security expert, I believe the answer is nothing – and in the process the U.S. lost credibility as a negotiating partner.

Why the nuclear question is the hardest

The “rationalist theory of war,” as developed by political scientist James Fearon in 1995, identifies three problems that drive states to war when they would prefer to reach a deal: incomplete information about each other’s resolve; the inability to credibly promise a deal or commitment; and what international relations scholars call the indivisibility problem – when the thing in dispute cannot be split or shared, because it leaves no middle ground to settle on.

The war clarified the first reason. Each side saw what the other would actually do – how much force the U.S. was willing to use and what Iran could absorb while still staying in the fight.

What the war could not solve was the nuclear commitment problem. And this goes far back between the U.S. and Iran.

Iran adhered to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the landmark nuclear deal that restricted Tehran’s nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency verified that Tehran kept uranium enrichment to 3.67% and its stockpile under 300 kilograms – a concentration used to fuel a power reactor but far too low for a weapons program.

But the U.S. walked away in 2018, and Trump later called it “the worst deal ever” over its sunset clauses and on its silence on Iran’s ballistic missiles.

Iran returned to negotiations in 2025, and the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran while those talks were still taking place. Similarly, in February 2026 the negotiations were ongoing and a deal was within reach when Israel and the U.S. struck Iran – killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and lead negotiator Ali Larijani.

The U.S. has demonstrated a record of reneging on its deals and breaking the negotiating process. Which is why Iran now insists on guarantees and demands sanctions relief before signing a deal, and not just good faith.

A state that previously kept its commitments and was still bombed has little reason to accept promises of relief in the future. For this reason, I believe the 60-day deferral is a window for Tehran to watch whether the U.S. and Israel will hold the ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon.

The third problem of indivisibility – when the thing or issue in dispute can’t be split or shared – is why the nuclear question is the hardest.

Most disputes can be split. Sanctions, for example, can be lifted by degrees. Even a nuclear program can be split, which the world saw in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action deal, with centrifuges counted, enrichment capped and a stockpile metered.

What cannot be split is the U.S. demand for zero uranium enrichment and Tehran calling uranium enrichment a sovereign right.

A deal, a war and a ceasefire

The 2015 nuclear deal also limited Iran’s centrifuges – the machines that do the enriching – and placed Iran’s nuclear program under the most intrusive inspections, all in exchange for sanctions relief.

The nuclear question was not part of the 2015 deal – it was the actual deal.

During the June 2025 negotiations with Iran, and again in February 2026, the U.S. position was about the nuclear program, but in the opposite direction from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It was not about limits but the total elimination of Iran’s nuclear program.

In both rounds of talks in 2025 and 2026, Washington’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, demanded zero enrichment and the dismantling of Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan – Iran’s three most important nuclear sites. Iran called enrichment a sovereign right and refused.

Both rounds of negotiations ended in bombings.

The current deal to be signed on June 19 does not put a cap on Iran’s enrichment, nor does it discuss the elimination of its nuclear program. It ends the fighting, reopens the Strait of Hormuz and consigns enrichment, the stockpile, missiles and Iran’s regional proxies to 60-day negotiations.

In a recent New York Times interview, Trump said he was in no rush to remove the near-bomb-grade fuel still buried under the bombed sites. He claimed Iran would suspend enrichment for 15 or 20 years and enrich only for nonmilitary purposes.

In the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action deal under President Barack Obama, the nuclear question was addressed where 97% of Iran’s stockpile was shipped out of the country and the cap was a verified fact.

Because it doesn’t address any of these issues, the Trump deal is a ceasefire agreement, not a nuclear agreement.

A costly return to the status quo

Going back to the bargaining theory, we know the war settled the information problem – it revealed what each side would endure.

The commitment problem remains. Neither side can yet make a promise the other believes, least of all an Iran whose negotiators were killed.

And I believe the indivisibility problem is now worse. The question of zero enrichment versus a sovereign right cannot be split. The current 60-day deferral is not a resolution. It is the same unsolved problem with a clock attached.

The one thing that could change is American restraint. If Washington holds Israel from striking Iran and Lebanon, it can slowly rebuild its credibility that was destroyed by the two wars. And that is a real challenge for the Trump administration.

Even as the deal was being finalized, Israel struck Beirut, the kind of action that can derail any talks.

In my view, the 60-day window should be read not as the path to a settlement but as the interval or pause before the next one fails.

I argued in April that this conflict would not end in a clean settlement but in a series of contested pauses. The deal to be signed on June 19 is the first of them.

Iran emerges with its enrichment knowledge intact, its stockpile buried and fresh reason to believe that only a nuclear weapon would have deterred the U.S.-Israel attack.

But Iran also knows that it stood its ground and was able to strike U.S. bases and allies in the region. It has discovered leverage it did not previously know it held. The Strait of Hormuz has proved a better deterrent than the nuclear bomb.

The strait is open, the oil is flowing, and the question the war was fought over sits exactly where it began. Thousands of lives were lost to arrive back to square one. Nobody has won, though both sides will say they did.

Farah N. Jan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Lately, much of the news about the Arctic has been bleak. The far north is warming three to four times faster than the rest of the planet. Arctic climate change – manifesting in sea ice loss, permafrost thaw and coastal erosion, among other phenomena – is already causing serious problems for Arctic residents, ecosystems and the rest of the planet.

At the diplomatic level, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had spillover effects in the Arctic, raising tensions and causing a breakdown in cooperation among the Arctic countries. The Trump administration’s interest in Greenland, along with its combative approach to NATO, has roiled relations among Arctic allies. The Arctic Council, established in 1996 to promote cooperation among the Arctic states, significantly scaled back its operations after the Russian invasion.

But there is a bright spot. Five years ago, the United States, Russia and China joined six other nations and the European Union to bring into force a new treaty – the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement – to keep commercial fishing out of the region, at least for now.

The agreement’s moratorium on fishing remains in place today, and the parties to the treaty, including Russia, continue to work together to advance scientific understanding of the Arctic Ocean under the treaty, despite other tensions in the region.

While serving in the U.S. State Department, I chaired the negotiations that produced this treaty. It’s useful to look at why this unusual pact came together, why it still works, and whether it could serve as a model for future diplomacy in the Arctic.

The need for precaution

At the heart of this treaty, and part of what can make it a good role model, is a tenet of modern international law known as the precautionary principle, or precautionary approach. In fact, it may be the best example of it that I’ve ever seen in international law.

In the context of managing international fisheries, this tenet calls upon governments to “be more cautious when information is uncertain, unreliable, or inadequate.” Unlike many treaties, including past fishing treaty failures, the countries agreed to take action in advance, before commercial fishing could become a problem.

Commercial fishing has never taken place in the Central Arctic Ocean. That’s because the area was completely covered by ice as far back as records exist, until recently. Today, as temperatures quickly rise in the Arctic and sea ice declines, a significant portion of the Central Arctic Ocean – the ocean’s international waters – is open water for part of each year.

Nobody can say what effect commercial fishing might have on the ecosystem in this region, given the dearth of scientific knowledge about the Arctic Ocean.

In the face of such uncertainty, this treaty – applying the precautionary approach – delays the start of commercial fishing until governments have adequate information to manage fishing sustainably. The treaty also sets up a research program to study and monitor the Central Arctic Ocean.

US leadership fostered international cooperation

The origins of the agreement trace back to a bipartisan effort in the United States that may be difficult to imagine now. In 2008 Congress passed a joint resolution, signed by President George W. Bush, calling for a Central Arctic Ocean fisheries treaty.

Under President Barack Obama the United States convened two sets of international negotiations. The first round aligned the views of the United States and the four other countries that have coastlines on the Central Arctic Ocean: Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, Norway and Russia. Next, the negotiations expanded to include Iceland and others with large, distant-water fishing fleets: China, Japan, South Korea and the European Union.

The treaty is also one of the best examples of a binding international agreement that requires incorporating Indigenous knowledge and the involvement of Arctic Indigenous peoples in its implementation. I believe the negotiations would not have succeeded without the involvement of Indigenous and other nongovernmental experts and groups, including scientists, industry leaders and environmental organizations.

The resulting treaty entered into force in 2021. The United States signed and ratified the agreement during President Donald Trump’s first term.

Each country has something to gain from cooperation. For the United States, the agreement extends the successful model of fisheries management off Alaska to the high seas and helps limit foreign vessel activity in the region. For countries that don’t border the Arctic Ocean, such as China, Japan and South Korea, the treaty gives them international recognition as Arctic players. At the same time, the treaty doesn’t preclude future commercial fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean, but instead allows time to ensure any fishing there can be sustainable.

A rare venue with Russia

The 10 parties to the treaty have met each year since 2022 to implement the agreement. They have advanced scientific research in this little-known part of our planet and are developing rules for very limited “exploratory fisheries” to study the migration of fish into the Central Arctic Ocean.

The fact that these meetings are taking place at all is an anomaly. In contrast to the Arctic Council, the conferences of the parties to this treaty have involved Russian experts each time, including during a meeting taking place June 16-17, 2026, in Brussels.

Despite the geopolitical turmoil in the world, those working to implement the treaty have put aside their differences to pursue their common interests concerning the Central Arctic Ocean.

Looking ahead

That willingness to set aside differences in pursuit of common interests can have many benefits.

Even during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union worked together on a wide range of issues, including a joint effort to spearhead the Antarctic Treaty, which has kept Antarctica demilitarized and facilitated scientific advancements at the Earth’s other pole.

After the Cold War ended, the Arctic also became a region of exceptional East-West collaboration. Nations cooperated to protect the Arctic environment, to promote economic development, to bolster search-and-rescue capacity and to improve scientific understanding.

The current breakdown in cooperation with Russia is, on one level, entirely understandable, given the desire to maintain pressure on Russia to end the war in Ukraine. However, the Arctic Ocean is facing new challenges, with commercial shipping increasing as the ice melts and the rising potential for seabed mining, each of which poses unknown risks to its environment.

I believe the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement could serve as an inspiration, maybe even as a road map, for the path back to a cooperative, well-managed Arctic region, if countries follow its example.

David Balton receives funding from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and from the Ocean Conservancy.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Pause for a moment and listen. What do you hear? Chances are, somewhere in the background, is the ever-present hum of a road.

More than 4.2 million miles of public roads crisscross the lower 48 states – enough to reach the Moon and back almost nine times. This vast network of roads spiderwebs its way across the contiguous U.S., leaving only about 5% as an inventoried roadless area or wilderness.

Now, some of those last remaining lands free of roads are under threat from the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of the 2001 Roadless Rule. That includes southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, where eagles, bears, salmon and many other species thrive in old-growth coastal forest along the Inside Passage.

In announcing its plan, the administration said rescinding the rule would remove prohibitions on road construction and logging on nearly 59 million acres of national forest, arguing that the rule slowed economic development.

In Congress, another effort is underway to try to change the law through an amendment to the Wildfire Prevention Act. That change, if approved, would both remove the Roadless Rule and prevent the U.S. Forest Service from reinstituting it in the future, despite overwhelming public support for the rule.

As ecologists who have spent decades studying wilderness and the animals and ecological functions that depend on undisturbed habitats, we believe it’s important to understand that preserving roadless areas has value for environmental health, clean water, wildlife survival and people’s own well-being.

What is the Roadless Rule?

The National Forest Roadless Area Conservation Policy, better known as the Roadless Rule, was issued in January 2001 by President Bill Clinton. It has had overwhelming public support and received more public comments than any other rule in history.

The rule prohibits road construction, maintenance and commercial timber harvest in inventoried roadless areas within the National Forest System. It applies to over 58 million acres across the country, excluding Idaho and Colorado, which have their own state-specific roadless rules. While most of these roadless areas are in the western states and Alaska, 38 total states as well as Puerto Rico host roadless areas.

The primary goal of the Roadless Rule is to maintain forest health and productivity for future generations. It also helps avoid exacerbating the U.S. Forest Service’s road maintenance backlog by not making new roads.

The Roadless Rule prohibits new road construction, with very limited exceptions, as well as commercial logging in designated roadless areas. It does not restrict other uses that are compatible with the management plan, such as hiking and mountain biking, or resource uses such as grazing livestock and working existing mining claims.

Beyond providing vital habitat for species and enabling healthy forests, the rule protects drinking water for the millions of Americans whose water flows from national forests. It also preserves high-quality recreation opportunities – hiking, camping, hunting and fishing – that Americans cherish.

The problem with roads in national forests

While roads can provide benefits, such as access to forests, they can also do ecological harm.

Roads enable invasive weeds to spread by being carried on vehicle tires and deposited in exposed soils, erode sediments into streams and fragment habitat that wildlife rely on. Vehicles directly kill and injure animals through collisions. They occasionally start fires, too. A recent study found that fires are more likely to start in areas with roads than in areas without.

Studies show that road noise displaces wildlife, increases stress and can affect wildlife behavior patterns at distances of over a mile from the road.

And roads don’t just cause problems for species on land. Most roads cross streams and rivers, which requires building a way for those waters to keep flowing under the road (structures called culverts). While culverts can be designed to allow fish to pass through and maintain ecological connections, they are rarely built to do so. This leads to declines in the health of fish populations and can leave some species locally extinct.

The benefits of roadless areas

Inventoried roadless areas are among the most ecologically intact and wildest places left in the United States, yet – unlike Wilderness Areas and National Parks – there are no signs acknowledging their boundaries when you enter one.

Most are part of larger ecosystems, directly adjacent or ecologically connected to better known national parks and wilderness areas. Removing Roadless Rule protections would erode ecological buffers to these more famous protected lands.

For some species, roadless areas protect critical core habitat. For instance, over half the suitable habitat for relictual slender salamander, a critically imperiled species native to the Sierra Mountains of California, occurs in a roadless area. Nearly 40% of Mount Pinos, lodgepole chipmunk, an imperiled subspecies of the lodgepole chipmunk, also live in roadless areas in California.

Research shows that every formal roadless area provides habitat for at least two wildlife species of conservation concern – those facing risks to their long-term survival – with the median roadless area supporting 10 of these imperiled species. Some Arizona roadless areas contain habitat for up to 62 of these species.

Roadless areas also protect watersheds that supply drinking water to 47 million Americans.

Without this protection, these watersheds would still provide water, but their long-term health and hydrological sustainability could be compromised if roads block stream flow and increase sediments flowing into waterways. The result can be higher costs for water purification.

The Forest Service’s own watershed health assessment, known as the Watershed Condition Framework, uses road density as a key indicator of conditions that can disrupt water quantity and quality.

What is at risk in rescinding the Roadless Rule?

The Trump administration’s proposed rollback, expected to be formalized in 2026, would open these last wild places to development, fragmenting habitats that can never be restored.

The American public spoke loudly in 2001 when they supported the Roadless Rule. Two decades later, the public comments submitted on the recission notice overwhelming opposed rolling back the rules, a Center for Western Priorities review found, reaffirming that U.S. roadless forests remain as vital and valued as ever.

Protecting these areas is about promoting healthy ecosystems on public lands so they can provide hiking, hunting and fishing opportunities for generations to come to enjoy the tranquility of being in nature.

Mariah Meek has received research funding from federal agencies, such as the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Science Foundation. She also serves as the Director of Research for The Wilderness Society and is an affiliate associate professor at Montana State University.

Travis Belote does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

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Who was the first transgender person? – Dexter, age 11, Las Vegas, Nevada

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Imagine you have a time machine, and you can travel back to any civilization in history. Maybe you’d go back to ancient Athens, or to a monastery in the Middle Ages. Or you could mingle with Hittite warriors before battle in Bronze Age Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.

In all of these times and places, you’d see differences between people that you would understand as men and women, generally speaking. You’d see a variety of clothing, hairstyles, body shapes and other indicators of gender in these different cultures.

But if you asked anyone you met in these time periods what is essential to being a man or a woman, or whether a man could become a woman and vice versa, or whether there was any kind of human besides men and women, you’d get different answers depending on whom you asked.

And not only would a medieval monk in the 13th century respond differently from a Hittite warrior from 2,500 years earlier, but even within a single city, people with different jobs, social roles or ways of thinking might answer differently.

The interesting thing is that wherever there is evidence of gender boundaries in ancient societies, there is evidence of people crossing those boundaries. In fact, as long as there have been humans, there have been people whom we would call transgender today.

We are both teachers of classics, the study of the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. Nick specializes in ancient Greek mathematics and science, and Ky specializes in the history of gender and gender categories in Greece and Rome. So we will focus mainly on ancient Greece and the regions near it as we consider trans people from past civilizations.

Defining the terms

Just because people’s ability to cross, blur or redefine the boundaries of gender has been around since ancient times doesn’t mean ancient people would understand the term “transgender” as people do today. In today’s language, this word refers to someone who was labeled as either a boy or a girl when they were born, but later decided that they were not what they were labeled as.

Along with that definition comes a whole set of ideas about what it means to be a boy or a girl in the first place. The shape of your body, the hormones inside it, which chromosomes you have and how all of that affects how you behave and how other people treat you – these have all become part of people’s notion of “gender” now.

But before hormones were discovered in 1849 and DNA was discovered in 1869, people thought about gender – and therefore being transgender – pretty differently.

Gender in antiquity

Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who wrote in the fourth century B.C.E., distinguished men and women in part by how much heat and moisture they supposedly have in their bodies.

Meanwhile, Isaeus, a Greek lawyer from around that same time, described men and women according to their different privileges under the law.

But there were always groups of people who didn’t easily fit into these categories. Ancient authors used many different words for these people, such as hermaphrodite, eunuch, androgyne, tribad, malthakos and others. Many of these terms were meant as insults and were – and remain today – tremendously rude, but others reflect the bewilderment of trying to categorize people who don’t fit into standard categories easily.

In the fifth century B.C.E., two Greek authors – Herodotus, known as the father of history, and Hippocrates, the father of medicine – wrote about people they call Anarieis from Scythia, a vast ancient territory to the north and west of the Black Sea that today would be part of Ukraine and Russia. Their descriptions of the Anarieis’ gender are similar to the way many people describe trans women today. Their accounts are supported by what we know about Scythia and Anarieis from anthropologists and archaeologists today.

Going back to the Stone Age

And you can find evidence of trans people even further back in history. In March 2026, archaeologists published a study of 125 burials from a Stone Age civilization in modern-day Hungary. Their study shows that even 7,000 years ago, people could cross gender boundaries.

The archaeologists used DNA evidence and the shapes of skeletons to make their best guess as to what gender most of these Stone Age people would have been assigned if they had been born in the modern era. They labeled 64 females and 52 males.

Overall, an examination of the skeletons showed a clear difference between how the skeletons labeled as females and those labeled males lived, worked and were buried. But a few of the skeletons had lived, worked and been buried in a way opposite to the gender that the archaeologists had assigned them. One skeleton that archaeologists had marked female, for example, was buried with stone tools that otherwise went with the skeletons labeled as male, and it showed stress injuries more similar to the “male” skeletons than to the other “female” ones.

So have these archaeologists found a 7,000-year-old trans man? Well, that depends. It’s impossible to say for certain how that Stone Age person understood gender or their own place in society. It’s hard to look back in 2026 and say whether they felt or were treated the same as the men whom they seem to have worked alongside.

But looking at what anthropologists do know of this society, there were normal lifestyles for each gender, and this person didn’t follow the normal route. That’s something that most trans people can recognize and relate to. So even though it’s impossible to know how this person would self-describe, our modern idea of transgender is big enough to include them.

All this is to say that no one will ever know who the first trans person was, because there was never just one. There were people we would now call trans in ancient Egypt, Imperial China and among the Mayans. Trans people were then, as they always have been, part of the human community.

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Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In northern Oregon, just before dawn in October 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested and shackled two farmworkers on their way to work. The man and woman were Guatemalan citizens who spoke no English and very little Spanish. They spoke Mam, an Indigenous Mayan language.

Despite the man trying to tell an ICE officer as much, he was not provided with an interpreter, according to his sworn declaration. Suspected of being in the country illegally, they were detained in an immigration processing center and signed papers they did not understand. They were released later with ankle monitors and placed under an intensive supervision program requiring frequent check-ins at an ICE office in Portland.

Their experience points to a problem that reaches far beyond Oregon.

The civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution broadly apply to everyone in the U.S., regardless of immigration status. Courts have held that the right to an interpreter is protected by the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a fair trial – including understanding court proceedings and communicating with counsel. It’s also protected by the Fifth and 14th amendments, which state that no person can be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process.”

But in a multilingual society, these rights collide with how little most Americans, including law enforcement and court professionals, are taught about language itself. Speakers of minority languages, or languages that are not commonly used in schools, courts or government, are often disadvantaged by this lack of linguistic awareness. This can even affect nonstandard English speakers or people who speak a variety of English that differs from the mainstream varieties privileged in courts and schools.

Imagine an English speaker detained abroad and forced to navigate a criminal trial in a language they do not understand. Most people would recognize that as fundamentally unfair, but speakers of minority languages often face this reality in U.S. courtrooms.

These failures are poised to multiply. Early in his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating English as the official U.S. language and rescinding a 2000 executive order that directed federal agencies to provide language access – despite the fact that around 25 million people in the U.S. have limited English proficiency.

At the same time, the Trump administration has sharply expanded an immigration crackdown that targets Latino communities. In immigration enforcement, heavily reduced training may be leaving ICE officers with limited understanding of constitutional protections, sweeping growing numbers of Indigenous-language speakers into a legal system unequipped to communicate with them.

As a linguist, translator and courtroom interpreter for the Ch’ol language – a Mayan language spoken by roughly a quarter of a million people – I see firsthand the ways in which the court system is unprepared.

Minority and Indigenous languages

More than 30 Mayan languages are spoken today by roughly 7 million people; they’re not dialects of Spanish but members of a separate linguistic family and have their own vocabulary, grammar and sound systems, as distinct from one another as the languages spoken across Europe. A speaker of Ch’ol would not be able to understand Mam, as is the case for thousands of other minority or Indigenous languages worldwide.

Since 2015 I have worked in southern Mexico with speakers of Ch’ol, and since 2023 I have been an expert witness and court interpreter. I have twice worked with defendants suspected of having learning disabilities, when, in reality, they had just been provided interpretation in the wrong language.

Consequences in the courtroom

A lack of awareness about language diversity and linguistic needs can have serious consequences in the courtroom. In the 1980s, a speaker of a Mixtec language was wrongfully convicted of murder after a trial conducted through a Spanish interpreter, a language he barely spoke. Four decades later this problem persists: In Texas in 2022, a man who spoke the Northern Tepehuan language was convicted of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and sentenced to 24 months in prison despite not understanding his court proceedings.

Data on linguistic diversity is more available in Los Angeles and New York City, two cities with large Indigenous populations. But in other areas of the country, court systems are unprepared for diverse linguistic needs. Even the 2020 census, which researchers and Indigenous-rights advocates say undercounts these communities, recorded more than 1.3 million people identifying as Latin American Indian. Still, in court files and immigration records, Indigenous-language speakers are typically logged as Hispanic or Spanish-speaking, erasing the distinction that determines whether someone gets an interpreter they can understand.

Although neither ICE nor Customs and Border Protection tracks Indigenous immigrants or the languages they speak, reporting at the border suggests as many as 1 in 5 people in immigration detention are Indigenous.

By one estimate, speakers of Indigenous languages represent between 10% and 44% of new arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border, but without the right language services, misunderstanding and bias can push asylum-seekers to abandon valid claims and return to dangerous situations or otherwise jeopardize their chances of gaining entry.

Indigenous language–speakers are denied asylum in the U.S. more often than speakers of more commonly spoken languages. In one instance, when a woman was asked to describe a domestic abuse injury to a judge, one interpreter used the word “heel”; another, later, used “ankle.” In Mam, “heel” and “ankle” are the same word, but the inconsistency led the judge to think the asylum-seeker was changing her story. The judge ordered her removed.

A broader impact

The failure to respect language and dialect diversity threatens the fairness of the legal system for immigrants and citizens alike, as linguistic discrimination can extend to varieties of English as well.

Court reporters are required to transcribe at a minimum of 95% accuracy, but that measure does not evaluate their ability to transcribe nonstandard English. In one study, researchers tested more than two dozen Philadelphia court reporters and found that when it came to African American English, their transcriptions were less than 60% accurate, sentence by sentence. AAE is a group of varieties of English spoken by many Black communities in the U.S. with their own rule-governed syntax, lexicon and phonology that make them distinct from mainstream American English. Inaccurate transcription, the study explained, can lead to errors that “change the official record of who performed what actions under which circumstances, with potentially dramatic legal repercussions.”

In 2012, George Zimmerman killed unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin and was charged with second-degree murder. Rachel Jeantel was on the phone with Martin before his death and, so, was a key witness for the prosecution. She testified for nearly six hours – including about the start of the encounter and who confronted whom, a question central to Zimmerman’s self-defense claim – but jurors found her testimony not credible and ended up disregarding it. One said it was hard to understand. Zimmerman would eventually be acquitted.

It is difficult to show how many people are affected by linguistic discrimination. Unlike people whose proficiency in English is low, AAE speakers are not counted as a distinct linguistic group, so the scale of the harm is undocumented. Nevertheless, one study showed that witnesses with foreign-accented English are viewed as less credible, and studies in both the U.K. and the U.S. found that speakers of nonstandard varieties of English are perceived to be guiltier.

In cases involving stigmatized varieties of speech, expert witnesses could help jurors understand linguistic diversity and separate how someone speaks from whether they are credible. Expert witnesses could also help jurors understand what linguistic discrimination is and explain that biases against someone’s language are often masked biases against their race, gender or socioeconomic background.

‘The last bastion of overt social discrimination’

The case against the two Mam-speaking farmworkers in Oregon was challenged in court, and in January 2026 a federal judge found the agents’ actions to be “reckless and erroneous.” The judge ordered ICE to remove their ankle monitors and end the supervision program imposed on them. Neither was convicted of a crime.

Despite the ruling in the farmworkers’ favor, though, their case reflects a broader problem: Although the right to an interpreter is constitutionally protected, that right means little when courts and officers are unaware of linguistic needs. Education for law enforcement and court officials on linguistic diversity, early language identification and increased funding for interpretation services are all essential before the courts can deliver on the rights the Constitution guarantees.

As sociolinguist James Milroy argued in a 1998 essay about linguistic discrimination in education, unless societies become more educated about linguistic diversity, “the last bastion of overt social discrimination will continue to be a person’s use of language.”

Carol Rose Little does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

On June 6, 1966, on a stretch of Highway 51 just south of Hernando, Mississippi, a portly, middle-aged white man named Aubrey Norvell stepped out of a gully, lifted his shotgun and fired three shots at James Meredith, a Black civil rights activist and Air Force veteran.

Famous for integrating the University of Mississippi four years earlier, Meredith was on the second day of a walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, with the aims of registering voters and defying white intimidation.

Bloodied by bird shot, Meredith again returned to the national spotlight. The shooting transformed his walk into a civil rights spectacle.

Activists descended upon Mississippi for a three-week mass march. It featured titans of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., while inspiring Mississippians to march down country roads, volunteer their homes and food, and register at their local courthouses. During these protests, the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael introduced “Black Power,” a slogan of self-determination that marked the next stage in the Black freedom struggle.

It is a rich, intricate and evocative story – one that I tried to chronicle in my book, “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.”

Sixty years later, however, a mystery lingers. Clouded in the haze of a political extravaganza, Norvell never revealed his motivations for shooting Meredith.

His silence allowed for the flourishing of conspiracy theories – most notably, from those most resistant to racial equality. In a political and rhetorical strategy that echoes into the present day, many white conservative Southerners painted themselves as Norvell’s real victims.

‘A quiet, Christian man’

At first, it was civil rights activists who suspected a conspiracy. Meredith’s companions testified that law enforcement had reacted slowly to Norvell’s threat. They assumed that Norvell was a virulent white supremacist, in cahoots with a racist police force.

But as reporters investigated Norvell, they found no evidence of a hate-spewing Klansman. He lived in a middle-class Memphis suburb. He had no criminal record. Neighbors described him as a “quiet, Christian man” who never mentioned civil rights, one way or another.

Upon posting bond, Norvell disappeared from the public eye until his trial that November.

The significance of bird shot

By presenting a blank slate, Norvell allowed white Southern conservatives to launch a counternarrative. The previous decade of Black activism, from the Montgomery bus boycott through the Selma-to-Montgomery march, had taught them that open violence ignited public outrage and prompted civil rights legislation. So they distanced themselves from Norvell.

Mississippi Gov. Paul Johnson noted that Meredith was attacked “by birdshot by an out-of-state resident.” It foreshadowed the language employed by a host of Southern politicians and newspaper editorialists.

Again and again, in speeches and articles and letters, they mentioned that Norvell used bird shot. If he was aiming to kill, why pepper Meredith with pellets? They claimed a conspiracy against the white South.

“The whole affair smells badly of a plot instigated by the Communist-controlled rights groups and capitalized on by the press, the government, and all the other liberal screamers,” wrote one woman to Sen. James Eastland, as I discovered during my research. Like many others, she imagined that civil rights organizations paid Norvell to wound Meredith, which would stoke a media hubbub and invite the federal government to persecute white Southerners.

Searching for a conspiracy

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission opened in 1956 to protect white supremacy. In an incredible twist to this tale, a commission investigator authorized a US$5,000 bribe to Norvell’s attorney if Norvell would admit that liberals paid him to shoot Meredith.

According to commission files, an FBI agent from Mississippi, high-ranking officials of the Memphis Police Department and a Mississippi district attorney all agreed that Norvell’s shooting was “a hired job for the advancement of various civil rights groups.”

Segregationists kept grasping at this far-fetched scenario, exaggerating and manipulating it to serve the purpose of discrediting the Meredith March Against Fear. A Mississippi sheriff named Jack Cauthen went even further, suggesting Meredith hadn’t even been shot in the first place. He claimed to have put his arm around Meredith, who had rejoined the march for its final days.

“His back was just smooth as silk. There hadn’t been no pellets or shots in James’s back,” asserted Cauthen, as I found while conducting research for my book. “I don’t think he was shot, no sir.”

Echoes from the past

Norvell pleaded guilty and spent 18 months in Parchman Prison in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Despite being approached by many journalists and historians – including me – he never revealed his motive. He died in 2016.

In the 1960s, white southerners perceived that their way of life was under assault by big institutions, including the federal government and the media. They blamed the Civil Rights Movement on nefarious “outside agitators” determined to smash their status. Their political motivations led them down bizarre and fantastical paths, with some even fashioning themselves as the true victims of Norvell’s attack.

Racist conspiracy theories still plague American politics, from baseless accusations that Barack Obama was born in Kenya to false assertions that global elites are engineering a “great replacement” of white Americans.

Even if these notions emerge from a modern sense of dislocation and anxiety, I think they have roots in the same crass bigotry that defined the conspiratorial segregationists of the civil rights era.

Aram Goudsouzian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

More than any other U.S. president in decades, Donald Trump has aggressively pursued military interventions in Latin America.

On Jan. 3, 2026, U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism. In the months before the operation, U.S. Southern Command began targeting small, fast-moving boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The death toll from the continuing war on these alleged narco-terrorists has risen to over 200 people.

At the heart of these events is the Trump administration’s stated goal of combating drug trafficking organizations. The White House and State Department have designated a plethora of guerrilla groups, drug cartels, gangs and criminal enterprises as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

Washington has also expanded security ties with Ecuador and El Salvador, which are led by right-wing Trump allies. At the same time, the administration has pressured left-wing governments in Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil and Mexico to join the U.S. war on drugs or else risk Trump’s wrath.

When it comes to opening legal avenues for the application of armed force, the narco-terrorism label is useful. Indeed, it is how the Trump administration justified Operation Absolute Resolve to capture and indict Maduro. Yet Trump’s decision to pardon a right-wing ally – former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – who was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and related weapons offenses, appeared to some observers to be “at odds with Trump’s war on drugs.”

The history of that war on drugs, however, especially during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, shows that the narco-terrorism label has always been politicized. My research on Reagan and the drug war suggests that the nebulousness of the concept aided U.S. policymakers in achieving fundamentally anti-communist and anti-leftist political objectives.

Shining Path and the roots of narco-terrorism

Peruvian President Fernando Belaúnde Terry first coined the term narco-terrorism in 1982 to describe the infiltration of Sendero Luminoso – or Shining Path – guerrillas into the drug trade.

An ultraradical offshoot of the Peruvian Communist Party, Shining Path was one of the most vicious insurgencies in Latin America. A truth and reconciliation commission later attributed at least half of the 70,000 conflict-related deaths and disappearances to the Maoist guerrillas in their campaign to overthrow the “bourgeois” democratic government. After the Peruvian army chased the guerrillas out of their home base in Ayacucho in the southern Andes, they moved north to the upper Huallaga Valley, the source of over half the world’s cocaine supply at the time.

The Peruvian police, together with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, created special counternarcotics units focused on crop eradication in the upper Huallaga. This strategy sought to reduce the supply of cocaine by eliminating its source, the coca plant. Peasant growers’ resistance to these operations fueled the Shining Path insurgency by providing recruits and creating an opening for the guerrillas to interpose themselves between the farmers and the police.

With the Cold War drawing to a close, a militarized drug war expanded under the administration of George H.W. Bush. As the federal counternarcotics budget nearly doubled, U.S. officials pressured the Peruvians to militarize their counternarcotics efforts, too. But it wasn’t until the Peruvian armed forces pursued a tacit truce with the traffickers that they were able to locate and capture Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán in September 1992 and dismantle the insurgency.

The Peruvian counterinsurgency succeeded due to a strategy that deliberately cut ties between the guerrillas and the drug traffickers. Essentially, the armed forces of Peru took control of the drug trade from the leftist guerrillas. U.S. anti-narcotics officials, together with their Peruvian police colleagues, were less than thrilled with this strategy – as were the tens of thousands of people who were caught in the crossfire. But for myriad U.S. defense officials more interested in defeating Shining Path than stemming the tide of drugs, the narco-terrorism label had facilitated a clear success – and drafted a valuable blueprint.

Colombia and the ‘narco-guerrilla connection’

The incident that indelibly linked the drug cartels and the communist guerrillas in the U.S. concept of narco-terrorism was the November 1985 M-19 siege of the Colombian Palace of Justice, the country’s supreme court. The M-19, or 19th of April movement, so named for a disputed election, had as a main objective to establish socialism in Colombia. The guerrillas took the high court hostage and intended to subject the then-president to a trial. The resulting clash with the military left nearly 100 people dead, including soldiers, guerrillas and 11 of the justices.

Allegations surfaced that Pablo Escobar, head of the notorious Medellín cartel, had paid M-19 for the raid. The guerrillas had apparently stolen hundreds of documents, including U.S. extradition requests for Escobar. Though this motive is still disputed – and even the U.S. ambassador in Bogotá emphasized that the “narco-guerrilla connection” had not been proven – the shocking event hardened U.S. public opinion against the new threat of narco-terrorism.

In April 1986 the Reagan administration issued National Security Decision Directive 221, officially linking counternarcotics and counterinsurgency in U.S. foreign policy. The declaration of drugs as a national security threat widened the scope of U.S. involvement in the Colombian counterinsurgency against entrenched communist guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army.

That cooperation continues to the present day, though it is currently jeopardized by hostility between Trump and Colombian President Gustavo Petro, himself a former member of M-19.

The selective application of trafficking claims

The narco-terrorism label was selectively applied not only to left-wing guerrillas but to the two communist governments in Latin America. The Reagan administration seized upon allegations of Nicaraguan and Cuban drug trafficking to influence U.S. public opinion at a time when the American people worried about becoming bogged down in another Vietnam-style quagmire.

Vietnam had shattered the foreign policy consensus around the containment of Soviet communism, but the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic created a powerful new rationale for U.S. intervention. After Congress, citing human rights concerns, restricted aid to the anti-communist Contra forces fighting Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government, Reagan publicly accused the Sandinistas of drug trafficking.

The only evidence produced to support the charge was likely obtained as the result of a joint DEA-CIA sting operation involving Barry Seal, an American drug smuggler turned DEA informant later played by Tom Cruise in the Hollywood cinematic version of the sordid tale, “American Made.” Questions arose as to whether the Nicaraguan trafficker identified by the sting was even linked to anyone in the Sandinista government.

At the same time, the Reagan administration ignored allegations that the Contras themselves were smuggling cocaine into the U.S. Indeed, a Senate investigation spearheaded by U.S. Sen. John Kerry revealed that administration officials had repeatedly ignored or obstructed evidence of Contra drug trafficking. The CIA’s inspector general found that the agency had received but neglected to verify similar allegations.

These activities were tolerated because they raised money for a cause that Reagan and his supporters viewed as righteous. The Contras were seen as “freedom fighters” struggling to liberate Nicaragua from communism.

Coming full circle

Then, as now, Washington policymakers pursued a regional approach designed to strengthen security cooperation and bolster the military capabilities of allied nations.

In March 2026 the Trump administration created the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, or Shield of the Americas, a security alliance to stop illegal immigration, Russian and Chinese interference, and “narco-terrorist gangs and cartels.” In his remarks at the March 7 opening summit, Trump insisted that “the only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power (of) our militaries.”

Then, as now, this collaboration appears to be aimed at the leftist and communist governments in the Western Hemisphere.

In many cases, the drug framing is an explicit rationale for action. That was most recently on display with the U.S. designation of the two largest criminal gangs in Brazil as foreign terrorist organizations, leading Brazilian officials of the leftist Lula government to warn that any pretext for intervention would be “unacceptable.”

In other cases the administration’s argument is broader. The ratcheting up of military maneuvers, rhetoric and sanctions against Cuba – including declaring the island nation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. security – has led many to speculate that Cuba is the next target of regime change.

While the narco-terrorism label may be applied selectively depending on the case, the result remains the fulfillment of anti-communist political objectives dating back to the Cold War.

The opinions expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect the views of the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, or any other part of the federal government.

Michelle D. Paranzino does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Pennsylvania has become a hot spot for data center proposals and public backlash about where to build them.

I’m a law professor and executive director of Penn State’s Center for Energy Law and Policy. I’m also a native of Archbald, a borough of 7,500 residents in the Lackawanna Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania. My hometown has drawn national attention because of proposals for multiple data centers that would cover 14% of its area.

Because of my professional and personal interest in data centers, I have been researching local responses to data center proposals across Pennsylvania. I’ve learned there are a host of considerations that local officials and citizens are taking into account when they evaluate data center proposals.

Pros and cons of big data centers

At its most basic, a data center is a building that houses and runs large computer systems.

Because data centers tend to be large developments, hosting one can provide a community more tax revenue. This revenue comes from increased property tax assessments as well as newly created jobs.

However, these job are mostly limited to the construction phase. One estimate suggests a moderately large data center would create about 15-30 long-term jobs.

On the other hand, data centers raise concerns about environmental and social impacts. They consume large amounts of energy and water, leading to fears of higher water and electric utility bills for other consumers.

Emissions from diesel generators can contribute to local air pollution and worsen asthma and other health conditions.

Data centers have also been shown to create heat island effects, raising the local air temperature by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).

They can also be loud due to the noise from cooling systems and diesel generators. And some residents object to what they consider eyesores in rural or suburban communities.

Communities can plan ahead

Because of the significant impact that a data center can have on its surroundings, communities benefit from planning ahead before any proposal has even been made in their area.

One of the most powerful tools a Pennsylvania municipality has is its authority over zoning under Pennsylvania’s Municipalities Planning Code.

Under this law, a municipality generally cannot completely exclude from its zoning ordinance a legal use of a property unless it is inherently objectionable. An example of an inherently objectionable use might be a heliport in a heavily residential municipality.

But it can regulate where within the municipality buildings or other structures can be constructed and how they can operate.

Many Pennsylvania municipalities, including East Vincent Township and Jessup Borough, have amended their zoning ordinances to account for data centers.

Zoning ordinances are a powerful tool

The Pennsylvania municipalities of Fairview Township and Butler Township/Arendtsville Borough have restricted data centers to industrial zones. Mayfield Borough has restricted them to commercial zones.

Municipalities can also determine what level of municipal approval is required for a data center development. In Pennsylvania, uses can be allowed “by right,” “special exception” or “conditional use.”

“By right” means that no approval is required as long as ordinance provisions are followed.

By “special exception” requires approval from a municipal zoning hearing board.

By “conditional use” requires approval from the municipality’s governing body. This might be a board of supervisors or borough council.

Most Pennsylvania municipalities that have addressed this issue have designated data centers as a conditional use. Some, such as Butler Township/Arendtsville Borough, have allowed them as a special exception. When a municipal body evaluates an application for a conditional use or special exception, it must determine whether the proposed data center complies with the zoning ordinance and that it would not otherwise injure the public interest.

Setback distances and impact studies

Another significant tool that municipalities have used is setback distances. A setback distance defines how far a data center structure must be from an adjacent property.

In Pennsylvania, ordinances have established setbacks for data centers from 50 feet (15 meters) to 400 feet (122 meters). Many ordinances establish longer setbacks from residential properties, hospitals or schools than from industrial sites.

Many ordinances also require plans or studies to be submitted as part of a zoning application. Noise or sound studies are common ones. These studies are intended to establish background noise levels for the area of the proposed data center and to identify ways to mitigate noise impacts.

Municipalities may also require developers to submit an environmental impact assessment, transportation impact study or emergency response plan, such as for a fire on-site.

How to protect your community

Learning about the specifics of a particular data center proposal can help a community to understand the potential impacts – both positive and negative – and prepare a response.

Local residents and officials should be poised to ask probing questions about:

• power and water demand, and the source of those resources

• infrastructure needs

• utility rate impacts

• cooling system design and noise and resource consumption impacts

• site design and landscape impact

• job creation and tax revenue projections

• noise mitigation strategies

• traffic effects

• air and water pollution emissions

Penn State Extension published a guide to common questions about data centers that may facilitate discussions with community officials and data center developers.

It may be possible in some circumstances for municipalities to negotiate community benefits agreements with data center developers. These agreements can ensure that the host community obtains certain specified benefits, such as local workforce guarantees or infrastructure development, as a result of the data center project.

The drive to build data centers and related infrastructure is moving quickly. By updating ordinances in advance, and diligently collecting information about any data center proposals that are made, local officials and citizens can protect the best interests of their communities.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Michael Helbing’s work for the Penn State Center for Energy Law and Policy has received funding from the Sloan Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the National Science Foundation. He is a member of Citizens for a Healthy Jessup and has volunteered for the Democratic Party. He owns shares in PPL Corporation.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Americans typically commemorate the nation’s birthday with hot dogs and hamburgers.

Instead, I think we should mark the 250th anniversary of the United States with a hearty bowl of pepper pot stew.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, pepper pot stew was a popular street food. A dish of Afro-Caribbean origin, it was typically made with tripe and other cheap cuts of meat mixed with vegetables, hot peppers and other spices.

Enslaved Africans likely brought the dish to Philadelphia from the Caribbean in the 18th century, when the two regions were tightly connected through trade.

As a historian of women and labor in the early republic, I have learned how important impoverished and ordinary individuals were to the country’s founding. Cooking and preparing food, spinning and weaving cloth, washing and mending clothes, and caring for the sick were just some of the kinds of labor that supported the fledgling nation. Much of this work was carried out by marginalized women who are often overlooked in national commemorations.

One such woman I’ve researched represents both the possibilities and sharp limitations of freedom in that era. She was a pepper pot seller in Philadelphia known to us only as Dina.

Hiding in plain sight

Pennsylvania, like many northern states, responded to the Declaration of Independence’s rhetorical commitment to liberty by enacting a gradual emancipation law.

On the day the law went into effect in 1780, however, its provisions freed no one.

Children born to enslaved mothers before March 1, 1780, would remain enslaved for the rest of their lives. Children born after that date remained in bondage until they were 28 years old. So-called “slaves for life,” the status Dina held, would have had no hope of gaining legal freedom.

In the face of this grim reality, some, like Dina, seized freedom for themselves.

She slipped away from her enslaver, Rev. James Anderson, in Middletown, Chester County, sometime in 1785 or 1786 and made her way to nearby Philadelphia.

Almost all of the information we have about Dina comes from a notice Anderson placed in a local newspaper offering a reward for her return. Each detail is stained with his opinions about the woman he held as property. Anderson described Dina as “lusty,” a word that can be interpreted in a number of ways.

White people generally held insidious ideas about Black women’s sexuality in this period. In the 18th century, lusty also meant insolent, which might have conveyed Anderson’s frustrations with Dina’s unwillingness to accept his authority over her. The word also could refer to health and vigor, so it’s possible Anderson was describing Dina’s physique and general affect.

Nonetheless, the advertisement exemplifies the paradox of liberty and enslavement at the nation’s founding.

It is impossible to know how familiar Dina was with Philadelphia, or if she had friends or family there when she arrived. She might have simply decided that her best chance of avoiding recapture was in an urban area where she could blend in with the free Black community that was growing rapidly due to migration from neighboring states and people manumitted by their enslavers. Dina might have imagined she could tuck herself into the hustle and bustle of this incredibly dense city more easily than in a thinly populated rural area.

After Dina got to Philadelphia, she made an interesting decision. Instead of finding more discrete employment, such as working as a domestic, she supported herself by selling pepper pot stew in one of the city’s markets. According to Anderson, she had been seen “numerous times” over the past 18 months.

One of many Black women selling the dish, Dina could essentially hide in plain sight from Anderson and anyone who hoped to collect the US$4 reward he offered.

It is unclear how long she was able to evade Anderson, but the fact that she maintained her freedom for at least a year and a half is remarkable. Philadelphia’s vagrancy docket is full of examples of freedom seekers who were apprehended almost immediately.

Dina’s ultimate fate is unknown. After Anderson’s three newspaper notices, she disappears from the archive. She may have been captured and returned to Anderson. Or it’s possible that working as a pepper pot seller allowed her to gain her freedom permanently.

Opportunity in Philly’s informal economy

Spiraling war debt and inflation during the 1780s fell heavily on the neediest Americans. In Philadelphia, impoverished people often subsisted on bread. Affordable, hearty street food like pepper pot stew would have offered important nutrients and perhaps pleasure from a good meal. By providing cheap, nourishing food for working Philadelphians, pepper pot sellers could be seen as participating in a kind of informal mutual aid.

However, city officials characterized some market activities during this period as “riotous and disorderly” and imposed stricter regulations around when and where pepper pot sellers could operate. Boisterous gatherings of Black and white working-class people might have seemed potentially threatening or disruptive to city leaders.

Dina’s role as an informal trader echoed across the 19th century. Many Black women took up the pepper pot trade, and some earned decent incomes. These women, in turn, contributed to a range of charitable, religious and abolitionist organizations that formed the backbone of a vibrant Black Philadelphia. They also helped support their families, even in an economic order that devalued Black women’s labor.

As the United States celebrates its semiquincentennial this year, many Americans will be reminded of the stories of popular Revolution-era figures such as Paul Revere or George Washington.

But I’ll be thinking of Dina and the countless other Black women who sold pepper pot stew on the streets of Philadelphia, the nation’s first capital. To me, they symbolize the fragile hope, terrible failures and tireless quest for true freedom that defined the founding era.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Carolyn Zola has received funding from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Association of University Women.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation