Martin Walker, the gifted former Washington correspondent of The Guardian, used to start his speeches saying that the Fourth of July wasn’t a time for sorrow for him, as it was a time when good British yeomen farmers in the colonies revolted against a German king and his German mercenaries.

Walker — who now lives in France and writes the hugely successful “Bruno” detective books set in the Perigord region — once told me, “It’s exciting living in a country where the president can order up an aircraft carrier to settle a dispute.”

He, an Englishman, and I, a former British colonial, shared our admiration for the United States. For America’s birthday, I have counted some things I most like and admire about this country of endless experimentation. Also, alas, I admit it is getting harder to feel as proud of it as I once did.

America, for me, has always embodied a special freedom: the freedom to try. The wonderful thing about it is that you can try a business, an idea, a way of living, or even a way of thinking. I read in “The Waist-High Culture,” the 1958 book by Thomas Griffith, that Europe was a “no” culture and the United States was a “yes” culture. So true.

In my first year here, I wrote to a family member in England, marveling at the size and scope of the American market. I wrote to her, “You could make a fortune here making glass beads, so long as they were good glass beads.” I still believe that.

The other great freedom, which I treasure, is that you can move across the country and start all over again. If you feel you have failed in New York, you can take a fresh sheet and try again in Chicago, Austin or San Francisco. You can have failed in marriage, in business, in a career, and in some very public way, but you can go on anew somewhere else.

You can’t do that in what are, in many ways, city-states — for example, in the way England is dominated by London and France by Paris. There is geographic freedom in the United States that has an exhilaration all its own.

I was intoxicated by America from the first. I didn’t dwell on the sins of the past, from the cruelty of the Puritans, the pioneers and the planters to the folly of Prohibition. When I arrived, I embraced all that was in the present; the civil rights movement was underway and gathering strength, and it was possible to believe that the United States would continue to be the shining example of how you get it right, how you correct big and small errors, and how you let people prosper. John F. Kennedy was president, and it was a new day.

When I covered Congress, I was enchanted with it: the committee power centers, the indifference to party discipline, and a system where you really did need majority approval to get a law passed.

Overall, members of Congress were among the hardest-working (and some were the hardest-drinking) around. They sought to understand issues from atomic energy to cancer. Congress wasn’t perfect, but it aspired to get things right.

For many years, I participated in the Humbert Summer School — a think tank — in the west of Ireland. I used to enjoy talking up the presidential system as superior to the parliamentary one, where a simple majority can wreak havoc.

Now, alas, Congress is experiencing the evils of parliamentary government and none of the virtues, particularly swift legislating. Party discipline — as in the case of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California shunning Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming — has supplanted the old tolerance for differences within the party. It began with the 1994 Gingrich Revolution, abetted by the proliferation of single-point-of-view talk radio.

Like all unchecked decay, it has gotten worse.

America the Beautiful, I wish you a happy birthday. I thank you for your generosity over these decades, and I say sincerely, “Mind how you go.” The world needs your seeking to be fair and just, and full of possibility, not divided and rancorous, and a threat to yourself.

This, the 21st century, is set to be the electric century. We are in the middle of a profound electrification binge that is going to leave its mark, an electrical mark, on every aspect of human endeavor.

I believed this before I attended the Edison Electric Institute annual meeting and convention in Orlando. Now I think it more than ever. The institute is the trade association of investor-owned utilities.

Civilization already has been running on electricity, but it will do so in a more complete way in the future. In simple terms, what will happen is what hasn’t been electrified will be electrified. Manufacturing, mining, farming and processing of everything, from grains to making concrete, will be electrified.

The first big shift — we can all see and participate in — is the electrification of transportation, total electrification. That will include aircraft in time, but light aircraft are already in the experimental phase.

You can see it with the plethora of electric vehicles coming to market from old marques but, more exciting, new companies making everything from huge tractor-trailer trucks to snazzy new pickups and sedans.

Three of these were among a lineup of all-electric vehicles on display at the convention in Orlando:

—2022 Lucid Air: A stunning beautiful sedan, and the MotorTrend Car of the Year, with an impressive range of 530 miles and an equally impressive price of about $139,000.

—Rivian pickup: One of a range of all-electric pickup trucks; this one is designed for lighter loads but still boasts a towing capacity of 11,000 pounds.

—Freightliner eCascadia: A semi-truck with a load capacity of 82,000 pounds but a range of only 230 miles.

The significant thing here is the number of new manufacturers. These mean new ideas, new visions, new materials and new horizons.

Each huge advance in transportation has required new entrepreneurs — otherwise, the car companies would have built the aircraft. It wasn’t Chrysler, General Motors and Ford that rose into the skies, but new names like Boeing, Douglas and Sikorsky.

Ultimately markets will decide, and markets aren’t welfare organizations. They are cruel judges and executioners as well as supremely generous patrons.

The driver for this revolution is climate change. Twenty years ago, you could still with some credibility debate its reality. Today, the evidence is in every weather forecast. Things are getting hotter and, as any science student will tell you, when stuff heats up, things happen.

The utility industry has embraced the rationale of change to modify and one day reverse climate change by curbing the volume of greenhouse gases going into the air. It starts with their own generation and soon will embrace all the carbon that spews from boilers and tailpipes.

Revolutions are messy things. Once underway, they get a life of their own. There is confusion and mistakes are made at the barricades. But once underway, they can’t be turned back; yesterday can’t be summoned rule tomorrow.

The utilities I spoke to in Orlando feel they will be able to meet the new electric load demand with a mixture of leveling out the power from intermittent renewables. This is called DSM (demand-side management) and uses data from smart-metering to manage the demand in collaboration with their customers. For example, incentivizing commercial firms to agree to shut down some operations during peak demand and even to enter into agreements with homeowners to operate dishwashers and other appliances late at night.

Then there is using the transport fleet as a big battery. The theory is your new electric vehicle can feed back into the grid as needed when it is fully charged. But there are those who doubt that this will be enough to bridge the gap between generation and future demand. Andres Carvallo, one of the fathers of the smart grid and a polymath who runs numbers on the future from his perch at Texas State University and his company, CMG Consulting, believes a lot more actual generation will be needed to meet the growth in electrification.

Presumably, much of this would come from the new, small modular reactors. Here is a paradox. Utility executives say, to a person, that nuclear is needed, but none say how it will be bought, sited and built. When nuclear is talked up by utilities, there is a dream quality about it.

The great goal of the industry, or the revolution, is zero emissions by mid-century. All embrace the electrification surge. Many utilities have plans to eliminate their own emissions, but none is ready for a huge, nationwide surge in demand, nor is there a national plan to deal with pressing impediments like a lack of transmission.

 

Photo: The 2022 Lucid Air is a luxurious all-electric sedan that aims to redefine the genre.

You could be excused for believing that everything is going to hell. We are living through a tumultuous time, and the next two years are going to be especially difficult with severe disruption to supply chains, runaway inflation and, worst of all, food shortages in much of the world.

But it also may be a time when human creativity has never been more liberated, when fewer impediments to innovative ideas and products are coming to the surface.

John Sibley Butler, professor of management and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, said on PBS’s “White House Chronicle” that there was a start-up surge during the pandemic, from high-tech to homemaking.

Particularly, it is a time when capital is more available to the entrepreneur than ever. Morgan O’Brien, executive chairman of Anterix and co-creator of Nextel Communications, said on the same PBS episode, “A lot of times venture capitalists are portrayed as a rapacious, unforgiving, and out-to-make-the-best-buck bunch. Our experience was so radically different. Nextel, as a company, would have been impossible without the belief, the resiliency and the support of the private equity invested in it. And the same again for Anterix.”

No longer is the sole source of capital a bank with its rigidities. No longer does the loan-seeking entrepreneur have to hear from a banker that they have no collateral. Raising capital has become a public activity, so much so that it has spurred a hugely successful network show, “Shark Tank.” Direct investment also can be found on crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter.

Bringing a new product to market is easier than it has ever been. At one time, an inventor of a consumer product had to make a sample and then suffer abuse by a buyer in a department store chain and be told about the shortage of shelf space and the small chance of success; and to face a haggle over the pricing — if, in the remote chance, the product was approved.

Now, if you have an idea for a nifty new product, you can possibly use a 3D printer to make it at home and sell it on Etsy before you decide to raise capital and go into business full time.

Likewise, a high-tech inventor doesn’t have to beg a big company to listen and probably get an out-of-hand rejection. Instead, science-based invention is in demand, sought and cultivated. The great fortunes of recent years have nearly all been in science-based businesses.

Great fortunes have been made by venture capitalists and they are spreading out. No longer are they blinkered to examining only the possibilities of computers and the electromagnetic universe. Venture capitalists are now trolling the world for new ideas.

This creativity, this new age of discovery, is already transforming the way we live, from safer cars to a surge in new medical discoveries. Cancer, though not defeated, is being beaten back, and electricity production is getting cleaner.

The speed with which the vaccines for COVID-19 were researched, tested and produced is an inspiration for what can be done when will and need are aligned.

A new transportation future is at hand, according to Dwight Smith, a relentless Jamaican-American inventor who heads Paragon VTOL Aerospace. The Brownsville, Texas-based company is collaborating with Rolls Royce and others on vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for cargo and passengers.

The immediate bleakness in the global outlook can give way to an age redolent with possibilities so long as the talented of the United States and the world continue to produce and know that their ideas and products will find acceptance.

For example, more movies are coming to screens across the world than ever before. Netflix, Amazon, even Hallmark are offering new opportunities to writers, actors and producers. Opportunities that weren’t there a decade ago.

The trick is to keep inventing, developing and dreaming as we contend with the horrors of Ukraine, the shortages today of baby food and bulk electrical equipment, and who knows what shortages tomorrow.

And, oh, the prices! They will abate as we invent alternatives and efficiencies and we adjust our consumption.

Just when it didn’t seem things couldn’t get worse — gasoline at $5 to $8 a gallon, supply shortages in everything from baby formula to new cars — comes the devastating news that many of us will endure electricity blackouts this summer.

The alarm was sounded by the nonprofit North American Electric Reliability Corp. and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The North American electric grid is the largest machine on earth and the most complex, incorporating everything from the wonky pole you see at the roadside with a bird’s nest of wires to some of the most sophisticated engineering ever devised. It runs in real-time, even more so than the air traffic control system: All the airplanes in the sky don’t have to land at the same time, but electricity must be there at the flick of every switch.

Except it may not always be there this summer. Rod Kuckro, a respected energy journalist, says it depends on Mother Nature, but the prognosis isn’t good.

Speaking on “White House Chronicle,” the weekly news and public affairs program on PBS that I host and produce, Kuckro said, “There is a confluence of factors that could affect energy supply across the majority of the (lower) 48 states. These are continued reduced hydroelectric production in the West, and the continued drought in the Southwest.”

The biggest threat to power supply, according to the NERC and the FERC, is in the vast central region, reaching from Manitoba in Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico. It is served by the regional transmission organization, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator.

These operational entities are nonprofit companies that organize and distribute their regions’ bulk power for utilities. In California, it is the California Independent System Operator; in the Mid-Atlantic, it is PJM; and in the Northeast, it is the New England System Independent Operator. They generate no power, but they control power flows and could initiate brownouts and blackouts.

With record storm activity and high temperatures predicted this summer, blackouts are likely to be deadly. The old, the young and the sick are all vulnerable. If the electric supply fails, with it goes everything from air conditioning to refrigeration to lights and even the ability to pump gas or access money from ATMs.

The United States, along with other modern nations, runs on electricity and when that falls short, it is catastrophic. It is chaos writ large, especially if the failure lasts more than a few hours.

On the same episode of “White House Chronicle,” Daniel Brooks, vice president of integrated grid and energy systems at the Electric Power Research Institute, also referred to a “confluence of factors” contributing to the impending electricity crisis. Brooks said, “We’re going through a significant change in terms of the energy mix and resources, and the way those resources behave under certain weather conditions.”

If power supply is stressed this summer, change in the generating mix will get a lot of political attention. At heart is the switch from fossil fuel generation to renewables. If there are power outages, a political storm will ensue. The Biden administration will be accused of speeding the switch to renewables, although the utilities don’t say that.

The weather is deteriorating, and the grid is stretched in dealing with new realities as well as coping with old bugaboos, like the extreme difficulty in building transmission lines. Better transmission would relieve a lot of grid stress.

Peter Londa, president of Tantalus Systems, which helps its 260 utility customers digitize and cope with the new realities, explained some of the difficulties facing the utilities not only in the shifting sources of generation but also in the new shape of the electric demand. For example, he said, electric vehicles, particularly the much-awaited Ford F-150 Lightning pickup, could be an asset to homeowners and utilities. During a blackout, their EVs could be used to power their homes for days. They could be a source of storage if thousands of owners signed up with their utilities in a storage program.

The fact is that utilities are facing three major shifts: in the generation to wind and solar, in customer demand, and especially in weather. Mother Nature is on a rampage and we all must adjust to that.

All the portents are that 2022 will be a summer to remember — and not in a good way.

It will be a summer of shortages, high prices, possible electric blackouts, and severe and unpredictable storms. It also promises to be a summer of political ugliness, where civility and facts are missing.

National unity and cohesion, which usually can be expected in times of crisis, isn’t in sight. We are gracelessly at each other’s throats.

Also missing will be any sense that there is strong leadership anywhere; not in the White House, Congress or among our allies.

Given these tribulations, caused by a dangerous war in Ukraine following the COVID-19 pandemic, and you are entitled to be despondent. All this wasn’t in the playbook — the events that shape the world never are.

But don’t reach for the arsenic. For most of us, glorious summer, so important to the North American lifestyle, will be as it always is with crowded beaches, jammed highways, chaotic airports and painful sunburn. We will have summer; and summer will have its joys, its rituals and its happiness.

For Americans, these aren’t the worst of times. They are just very trying times. We will feel them directly in the wallet, painfully so. Gasoline and other fuels will be very expensive, and heating oil will be a big-ticket item next winter. House prices are still stratospheric, and rents are going up. The markets are shaky.

Americans are feeling that all isn’t well and that things are coming unstuck — reliable, everyday things.

In democracies, we seek relief by changing the government. All the indications are that we will do that in the midterm elections just months away.

The Democrats are likely to take a drubbing. The Republicans will joyfully seize victory — and they won’t know any better what to do about the great stresses that are shaking the nation and the world.

Instead, they will be tempted to double down on social issues and a raft of things that will exacerbate the divisions in the country, further curb the rights of women, mess with education curricula, seek to influence social media platforms and keep the government firmly in gridlock.

President Biden and his unlucky administration will get the blame if the Democrats are routed in the midterms. Indeed, it should, even though the alternative may not be better.

Certainly, a Democratic White House and Republican Congress suggests just one thing: crippling inaction.

Biden hasn’t been a proactive president but a reactive one. He has waited for the water to rise before he has acknowledged that it is happening, and it is time to start bailing.

Take, for example, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. When Biden tried to get ahead of the news, to identify an issue and resolve it before it mugged him, he got it terribly wrong. It was a foreign policy calamity of Biden’s making, and it seems to have curbed his enthusiasm for pre-empting issues.

Mostly, Biden has sought to balance things. His reaction to outrageousness is a sedate, genteel sense of horror. You expect him to say to the Supreme Court, or the gun lobby, or Russian Vladimir Putin, “Look what you have done!”

One gets the feeling that Biden doesn’t have a grip on much except his decency. Everyone who knows him will tell you what a decent man he is. Decency supports, but it doesn’t lead. Decency isn’t a policy. It isn’t a way forward. It isn’t a solution.

After the midterms, Congress likely will be in the hands of two ruinous vacillators, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and the even more wobbly Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. They aren’t exemplars of the Republican ideal. They aren’t in the previously worshipped Ronald Reagan tradition. Both have shown themselves captive to former President Donald Trump’s vengeful malevolence and have twisted the truth in their servitude to him.

Politics are sour, prices high, the future bumpy, but summer is glorious. Revel in it, celebrate it, and bask in its untroubled rays. I plan to do just that. Thoughts of politics are worse than sunburn.

America, spare me your thoughts and prayers. Get off your backsides and do something. Wringing hands over the gun lobby, lamenting the love of guns by so many Americans, these won’t do anymore.

The best argument against a bad argument is a better argument. Let us unpack that argument and make it.

I understand the love of guns. I grew up in Africa and I enjoy firing them, love handling them, thrill at their majesty, and admire their craftsmanship. When you handle a firearm, you are handling something awesome, refined power in a form that you can carry.

Therefore, let us start the argument for a new gun regime by eschewing any idea that we are going to ban guns outright, take them away from their owners and collectors who treasure them; no federal marshals will be going door to door confiscating weapons.

You can dream of that, but it won’t happen. You can dream that like Australia, Britain and most of Europe, guns will be kept under lock and key for the enthusiasts. It won’t happen either, though we can start down that road by ending the disingenuous claim that guns make you safe.

Instead, dream of a country where certain guns aren’t available to the public; where guns have better safety devices; where our children aren’t slaughtered, whether it is in Uvalde, Texas, or Newtown, Connecticut; and where the Constitution is honored as written.

First, we should clamp down on assault rifles, designed for use in war, not for sport or self-defense. We should cherish marksmanship, even teach it in schools, which is where I learned to shoot one round at a time. We should inspire the National Rifle Association to return to its original purpose: teaching marksmanship and gun safety.

We should disentangle masculinity, patriotism, fear of government and love of freedom from the possession of automatic weapons, now so promiscuously available. Buyback schemes could take millions of them off the streets.

I offer these as ideas, but they’re not prescriptions. Before we solve the gun carnage in homes, in schools and other places, and on the streets of our great cities like Chicago, we need to think. We need to think about what can be done, not what is inarguably out of reach: With 400 million guns in private hands, to think about confiscation is insane.

Some more thoughts:

Traditionally, social engineering has been practiced through taxation: Introduce it to guns. Tax gun sales heavily, just as we tax liquor and tobacco. But exempt gun clubs, where weapons are kept safely, as happens in many countries.

Then tax ammunition equally severely, but exempt ammunition used at ranges and in controlled gun-sport environments.

Draw a firm line between sporting weapons and automatic weapons of mass destruction, which is what they are. A quail hunter in Georgia shouldn’t have a problem applying for and getting a tax exemption on a shotgun and ammunition.

Take the profit out of selling guns. Eight states operate liquor stores. That worked fine when I lived in Virginia, and it did offer society some control; a kind of check on excess because there is no pressure to make a profit.

If you think nothing can be done because of the Second Amendment, go to the Constitution and read it. Over the decades, it has been alleged to extend a banal entitlement for all and any to carry the latest military weapons. The framers couldn’t have intended that because they couldn’t have conceived of the vast improvement in the lethality of weaponry that has occurred over time.

The bit about “a well regulated Militia”? Let us have some realistic originalism about what the framers meant.

It is a tough thing to do, but the media can make the case for gun-smarts by showing the shattered bodies of the little victims: torn limbs, scattered brains, young, beautiful, innocent, precious blood everywhere.

If we don’t get gun-smarter, this will be a new normal: dead children, randomly slaughtered, sometimes by children. Thoughts and prayers will neither save their lives nor ameliorate the unbearable suffering of their parents. They are weeping today in Texas. Where will they weep tomorrow?

Technology is tampering with freedom of speech, and we don’t know what to do about it. At issue are the global platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the disturbing propaganda, disinformation and lies propagated on them.

The inclination, on the left and the right, is to censor. It is a terrible solution, more toxic and damaging to the body politic than the disease.

The left would like to shut down Fox Cable News and its principal commentator, Tucker Carlson. The right would like to have Twitter sold, presumably to Elon Musk, so that it stops blocking tweets from the right, notably those from former President Donald Trump.

How our society and others deal with the downside of social media — racial incitement, disinformation, mendacity and opinions that are offensive to a minority, whether that is the disabled or an ethnic group — is a work in progress. The instinct is to shut them down, shut them up. The tool — that old monster solution — is censorship.

The first trouble with censorship is that it has to define what is to be eradicated. Take hate speech. The British Parliament is struggling with a bill to limit it. The social networks seek to exclude it, and there are U.S. laws against crimes inspired by it.

How do you define it, hate speech? When is it fair comment? When is it satire? When is it truth taken as hate?

I say if you can untie that knot, go ahead and censor. But I also know you can’t untie it without savaging free speech, doing violence to the First Amendment, arresting creativity and hobbling humor.

The censor is often as much clothed in moral raiment as in political garb. Take Thomas Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, who in 1807 published an expurgated version of the works of Shakespeare. Henrietta did most of the work on the first 20 plays, later Thomas finished all 36. They expunged sex, blasphemy and double entendre. Thomas was an admired scholar, not a crackpot, although that might be today’s judgment.

Oddly, the Bowdlers are credited with increasing the readership of Shakespeare. People reached for the forbidden fruit; they always do.

Likewise, many a novel would have avoided success if it hadn’t been serially banned, like D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” The moral censorship of movies by the Hays Office, starting in 1934, didn’t save the audiences from moral turpitude. It just led to bad movies.

The censors often begin with specific words; words, which it can be argued, represent offense to some group or some social standing. So specific words become demonized — whether it is the naming of a sports team or a colloquial word for sex, the urge to censor them is strong.

Jokes, like the English ones about the Welsh or the Scots ones about the English, became victim to a newly minted sensitivity, where political activists sell the idea that the joked about are victims. The only victim is levity, to my mind.

When you start down this slope there is no apparent end. Euphemisms take over from plain speech, and we live in a society in which the use of the wrong word can suggest that you are not fit for public office or to teach. Areas around ethnicity and sexual orientation are particularly fraught.

Until the 1960s and the civil rights movement, newspapers de facto censored people of color: They ignored them — a particularly egregious kind of censorship. At The Washington Daily News where I once worked, a now defunct but lively evening newspaper in the nation’s capital, some of us once ransacked the library for photos of Blacks. There were none. From its founding in 1927 until the civil rights movement took off, the newspaper simply hadn’t published news of that community in a city that had a burgeoning African-American population. 

That was collective censorship as pernicious as the kind that both political extremes would now like to impose on speech.

Alas, censorship — banning someone else’s speech — isn’t going to redress the issue of the rights of those maligned or lied to or excluded from social media. In print and traditional broadcasting, libel has been the last defense.

Libel laws are clearly inadequate and puny against the enormity of social media, but they are a place to begin. A new reality must, and will in time, get new mechanisms to contend with it.

One of those mechanisms shouldn’t be censorship. It is always the first tool of dictatorship but should be an anathema in democracies. For example, it is an open issue as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been able to invade Ukraine if he hadn’t first censored the Russian media.

Newspapers are on death row. The once great provincial newspapers of this country, indeed of many countries, often look like pamphlets. Others have already been executed by the market.

The cause is simple enough: Disrupting technology in the form of the internet has lured away most of their advertising revenue. To make up the shortfall, publishers have been forced to push up the cover price to astronomical highs, driving away readers.

One city newspaper used to sell 200,000 copies, but now sells fewer than 30,000 copies. I just bought said paper’s Sunday edition for $5. Newspapering is my lifelong trade and I might be expected to shell out that much for a single copy, but I wouldn’t expect it of the public to pay that — especially for a product that is a sliver of what it once was.

New media are taking on some of the role of the newspapers, but it isn’t the same. Traditionally, newspapers have had the time and resources to do the job properly; to detach reporters to dig into the murky, or to demystify the complicated; to operate foreign bureaus; and to send writers to the ends of the earth. Also, they have had the space to publish the result.

More, newspapers have had something that radio, television and the internet outlets haven’t had: durability.

I have a stake in radio and television, yet I still marvel at how newspaper stories endure; how long-lived newspaper coverage is compared with the other forms of media.

I get inquiries about what I wrote years ago. Someone will ask, for example, “Do you remember what you wrote in 1980 about oil supply?”

Newspaper coverage lasts. Nobody has ever asked me about something I said on radio or television more than a few weeks after the broadcast.

I was taken aback when, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee decades ago, a senator asked me about an article I had written years earlier and forgotten. But he hadn’t and had a copy handy.

There is authority in the written word that doesn’t extend to the broadcast word, and maybe not to the virtual word on the internet in promising, new forms of media like Axios.

If publishing were just another business — and it is a business — and it had reached the end of the line, like the telegram, I would say, “Out with the old and in with the new.” But when it comes to newspapers, it has yet to be proved that the new is doing the job once done by the old or if it can; if it can achieve durability and write the first page of history.

Since the first broadcasts, newspapers have been the feedstock of radio and television, whether in a small town or in a great metropolis. Television and radio have fed off the work of newspapers. Only occasionally is the flow reversed.

The Economist asks whether Russians would have supported President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine if they had had a free media and could have known what was going on; or whether the spread of COVID in China would have been so complete if free media had reported on it early, in the first throes of the pandemic?

The plight of the newspapers should be especially concerning at a time when we see democracy wobbling in many countries, and there are those who would shove it off-kilter even in the United States.

There are no easy ways to subsidize newspapers without taking away their independence and turning them into captive organs. Only one springs to mind, and that is the subsidy that the British press and wire services enjoyed for decades. It was a special, reduced cable rate for transmitting news, known as Commonwealth Cable Rate. It was a subsidy, but a hands-off one.

Commonwealth Cable Rate was so effective that all American publications found ways to use it and enjoy the subsidy.

United Press International created a subsidiary, British United Press, which flowed huge volumes of cable traffic through London. Time Inc. had a system where its cable traffic was channeled through Montreal to take advantage of the exceptionally low, special rates in the British Commonwealth.

That is the kind of subsidy that newspapers might need. Of course, best of all, would be for the mighty tech companies to pay for the news they purloin and distribute; for the aggregators to respect the copyrights of the creators of the material they flash around the globe. That alone might save the newspapers, our endangered guardians.

Did the fire at the end of Walt Disney’s iconic animated movie “Bambi” prejudice the country against forest management with controlled burning? Maybe so.

The U.S. Energy Association in February presented a virtual media briefing on the fire threat in the West and the Southwest this year. The prognosis, especially from the weather forecasting company AccuWeather, was grim.

Now that prognosis is being borne out as terrible fires again scorch those regions. Fire is now a year-round danger.

Enter forest scientists, who believe the solution to rampant wildfires is scientifically managed, pre-emptive burning. But this fire management practice isn’t without controversy. The memory of Bambi and his father, trapped by a raging forest fire, can spill into politics, with fierce advocates for prescribed burning often at odds with those who believe fire should be suppressed.

The epicenter of the science of forest management with fire isn’t in the West but in the East — in the Red Hills, stretching from Tallahassee, Fla., to Thomasville, Ga. This is the home to the research stations of the Tall Timbers Institute, which studies and practices prescribed burning to save the long-leaf pine forests and their abundant populations of game birds and other wildlife.

It can be argued that a small game bird, the Northern bobwhite quail, has been responsible for preserving a huge acreage of forest land in the Red Hills. The name Red Hills is more poetic than accurate as the land is undulating rather than hilly. However, the name is enshrined in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The area is home to some of the largest private estates — still called plantations — in the nation. They have been preserved and lovingly tended for hunting since the 19th century.

Conservation began in the 1920s to preserve the habitat of the quail, fell off in the 1930s, and came roaring back in the 1950s when philanthropist Henry Beadel gave 2,200 acres to establish five ecological research stations. This has grown to 4,000 acres.

The theory of deliberate burning is that it keeps down the forest-floor “fuel” that makes wildfires so deadly and unmanageable. The prescribed burns are carefully organized, considering the weather, the vegetation and the escape routes for the fauna.

During these burns, the fires sweep through without damaging the soil. The trees are left standing — because the fires are fast and very hot — but the forest floor is cleared.

Tall Timbers researchers showed me and a small group of visitors the product of a new burn on the previous day, where there was lingering smoke, and the revived, flourishing areas that were burned one, two, and three years earlier. These researchers have a passion for their work and their conservation with fire.

The institute is active on more than 500,000 acres in Georgia and Florida and leads the country in remedial burning. California is now tentatively trying to burn on a limited scale, learning from Tall Timbers.

But Tall Timers conservation extends well beyond fire.

They explained the real threat to forests is urban sprawl, and they are active —  vigorously so — in persuading Red Hills-area landowners to write easements into their deeds to preserve what the Nature Conservancy has called one of America’s “Last Great Places.” 

And the movement is growing. “We have been working with nonprofits in the West,” said Morgan Varner, fire research director at Tall Timbers. Varner said Florida leads the country in preservation of great tracts of untrammeled forest and savannah managed with prescribed burning.

As we toured through Tall Timbers, one could marvel at the resiliency of both the flora and fauna. Animals and birds, which naturally flee fire, also enthusiastically return after the fires have done their work. Bambi went back.