A Working Whole

 On the charge that the environmental industry “captured” the Forest Service — and what the charge gets wrong

A response to Franklin Otis Carroll’s “How the Forest Service Didn’t Fail Us” — Facebook, June, 2026.

Carroll’s argument — that the Forest Service was captured by an environmental industry, and that cutting its partnerships is the first step toward restoring it — is not wrong about everything, and the honest place to start is with what it gets right. The multiple-use mandate has been hollowed out. Active management did decline. Roads fell into disrepair, fuels built up, and in a great many western communities the agency lost the trust of the people who live closest to the trees. I spent thirty-five years in federal service and the majority as a Forest Service employee — fifteen as GIS Coordinator on the Monongahela, a stretch with line authority as Acting District Ranger on the Cheat–Potomac, and a last chapter as geospatial program manager for the Northern Region, responsible for the spatial record across twenty-five million acres in Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas. 

But the diagnosis is wrong, and it is wrong in ways that matter.

Begin with the exhibit the essay leads with: the decision to sever forty-three partnerships and claw back roughly four million dollars from groups said to be operating “in direct opposition” to the mission. The essay names that correctly as an Interior Department action — and then asks it to carry weight it cannot bear. The groups Interior cut were flagged for climate advocacy, equity, and immigration support; the named examples were Conservation International and a cultural-landscape preservation foundation. None of it touched timber, fuels, or fire — the actual subject of everything that follows. And in a related round of terminations the same department pulled a set of conservation grants, money funding native-species and habitat restoration by groups like the Institute for Applied Ecology, that a federal court in Oregon has since ordered restored, finding the cancellations a purge by political viewpoint rather than any audit of performance. So the opening “audit” does rhetorical work, not evidentiary work: it signals that the tide has turned against the activists without establishing a single thing about how the Forest Service manages fire.

The capture story is the load-bearing claim, and it has the history backwards. The multiple-use mandate did not bend because lawyers “moved in.” It bent because Congress rewrote the agency’s orders, in daylight, over two decades — the Wilderness Act of 1964, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the National Forest Management Act of 1976 — much of it signed by Republican presidents.

And here I can speak from the ground this argument is standing on. The National Forest Management Act, the modern charter of all national forest planning, exists because of a clearcutting lawsuit on the Monongahela — the forest where I spent fifteen years. A federal court read the 1897 Organic Act as written, found that clearcutting violated its plain terms, and effectively halted the timber program until Congress acted. The author would call that capture. I call it the system Pinchot built doing precisely what it was designed to do: when the agency drifts from its founding law, the courts and Congress pull it back. That is not an industry mining the government. That is the rule of law, working as intended, on the very ground this piece claims to defend.

It is worth adding that the agency had overshot. In the postwar boom it became, in the scholars’ phrase, a regional employment “lunch bucket” — a timber-first operation wearing a multiple-use motto while timber took the major use. The correction came from a changing society and the laws it passed, not from a conspiracy in Ventura.

And the agency did not become the Park Service. This is the essay’s sharpest mischaracterization — the claim that the Forest Service traded its working charter for a preservation model unsuited to lands meant to be worked. It did no such thing. It still sells timber, runs grazing allotments, permits minerals, builds and maintains recreation, and manages for wildlife and water — the same multiple-use mandate it has always carried, and one fundamentally different from the Park Service’s preservation charge. What changed is not the mandate but the balance within it, and the arrival of ecosystem health as a frame. That is evolution, not surrender. Multiple use was never a fixed ratio. It was always a negotiation, and the negotiation matured.

Even wilderness — the part the essay quietly files under “museum” — is a form of use, and one of the oldest. I have believed in wilderness since I was old enough to carry a gun, and I have never felt the contradiction the author assumes. Wilderness on a national forest is not a national park: it still carries hunting, fishing, packing, and outfitting, the hook-and-bullet tradition that built American conservation in the first place. Stand on a Bitterroot trail in the fall and watch a hunter bring a quartered elk out on his back, and then try to tell that hunter wilderness is the enemy of working land. The people who use that country hardest are very often its fiercest defenders. The author has mistaken restraint for abandonment — and the two are not the same thing.

And multiple use is not a slogan. It is a payroll. I have worked, in one capacity or another, across most of the agency’s program areas — timber and aquatics, recreation and wildlife, and the dozen-odd others the public rarely hears named: hydrology, soils, range, fuels, heritage, lands, minerals, engineering, the geospatial work I spent a career on. A national forest is run by something close to twenty professional disciplines, not by foresters alone and certainly not by lawyers. The essay’s picture — the foresters let go, the briefcases moving in — erases that entire workforce, the people who actually deliver the “multiple” in multiple use.

Ponderosa Fuel Treatment - North of Flagstaff

And it leaves out the half of the founding equation that matters most. The author lists watershed once, in a passing string of uses, and then forgets it. But the national forests were never created only to grow timber. The Organic Act of 1897 — the same law the Monongahela case turned on — gave the reserves two coequal purposes: to furnish a continuous supply of timber, and to secure favorable conditions of water flows. Water was there at the creation. It is not a soft amenity bolted on later by activists; it is why a great many of these forests exist at all. They are the largest single source of water in the country — roughly a fifth of the nation’s supply — and by the agency’s own accounting some 180 million people in tens of thousands of communities depend on national-forest watersheds to catch and filter what comes out of their taps. Manage these lands as nothing but a timber base and you have not restored their mission. You have forgotten half of it.

None of this is to pretend NEPA litigation is costless. It isn’t. Environmental analysis consumes something like a fifth of the money available to manage the national forests and close to a third of the agency’s field capacity, and the threat of suit does delay treatments that need to happen before the fire season. I have prepared those documents and lived inside that process; I will not romanticize it. But the picture of an agency paralyzed and forever losing is a caricature. Across the suits filed against it over a representative stretch of years, the Forest Service won more than it lost. NEPA’s burden is real — and it is a problem of process and capacity, not evidence that the agency was conquered.

On fire, the essay wants suppression and the collapse of active management to be rival explanations, with climate change cast as the activists’ alibi. Start with the history it skips. Fire suppression was not an environmentalist invention — it was the Forest Service’s own founding doctrine. The agency was forged in the Great Fire of 1910, the Big Burn that took some three million acres and dozens of lives across Idaho and Montana, in the country I now live in. Out of that trauma came a policy of total fire exclusion, hardened into the 1935 “10 a.m. policy” and sold to the public for a generation by Smokey Bear. That was the agency talking to itself, decades before NEPA existed or the modern environmental movement was born. And when the science finally turned — when ecologists began arguing that these forests need fire — it was largely conservationists, not commodity interests, who pushed to put fire back on the ground. The author has the arrow backwards. Suppression is the original sin here, and it is the agency’s, not the activists’.

None of which lets the fuels off the hook. A century of exclusion and the decline of thinning and harvest both loaded the stands — the author is right about that — and a warming, drying climate then stretched the season and dried the fuels further. Ask the researchers at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, or the smokejumpers based up the valley from me, whether the season runs longer than it used to. Climate is not an alibi; it is a multiplier.

And there is a fact the essay leaves out altogether, because it complicates everything: the forests do not, in the main, light themselves. More than eighty percent of wildfires in this country are started by people. When you narrow to the fires that actually threaten homes, the share climbs higher still. In one large study of a quarter-century of ignitions, humans caused ninety-seven percent of the wildfires in the wildland-urban interface and accounted for ninety-two percent of the homes threatened. What burns down a community is rarely an un-thinned stand that a logger was kept out of by a lawsuit. It is a human ignition meeting an interface we keep building deeper into fire-prone woods. You could thin every acre the essay wants thinned and still lose the town if the ignition source and the building pattern go unaddressed. That is not an argument against thinning. It is an argument against the single-cause story — the very thing the essay accuses the other side of telling.

Which brings us to the owl, offered as the emblem of single-species folly, with the barred-owl removal as the movement’s bloodthirsty endgame — up to 450,000 birds, branded “wildlife ethnic cleansing.” Set aside that the phrase loans the vocabulary of atrocity to a wildlife program and cheapens both the atrocity and the genuine, painful dilemma it describes. The deeper trouble is whose program it is. The barred-owl strategy is a federal intervention, run by the Fish and Wildlife Service — Interior again — and it is opposed across the spectrum: animal-welfare groups suing under NEPA, bipartisan members of Congress, and a good many of the very environmentalists this piece indicts. The author is against intervention when it is a court-ordered chainsaw and for it when it is a shotgun. Strip that inconsistency away and the real objection was never single-species fixation. It is environmental groups as a category.

The essay also reaches for science when it helps — the fire-suppression story is “not settled,” merely “convenient” — and goes quiet about what the administration it applauds is doing to the science itself. The Chief of the Forest Service told a House appropriations subcommittee, in plain words, that research and development is zeroed out in the budget: roughly three hundred million dollars driven to nothing. The reorganization moves to close better than half of the agency’s research stations — among them the Seattle smoke lab whose work helped build the public wildfire-smoke maps that millions of families now check before they let their children outside. The long-term experimental forests, some carrying datasets decades deep, would be snuffed out with them. The Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory I pointed to a moment ago survives — spared, it appears, because it serves the favored emphasis on fire and timber — but the broader science that would actually tell you how to build a forest that resists catastrophic fire is the part on the block. You cannot run science-based forestry once you have defunded the science, and members of both parties have said so. Zeroing out the research arm of the nation’s forest agency is not reform. It is a disgrace.

And here is the contradiction the essay never resolves. It wants active management — thinning, open roads, woods workers, fuels brought down. But the partnerships it cheers Interior for cutting are how active management actually gets done now. The grants a court just restored funded habitat restoration. Across the fence in Agriculture, the same work runs through collaborative forest landscape restoration, stewardship contracting, Good Neighbor Authority, shared-stewardship agreements with states and, yes, with conservation groups. You do not rebuild active management by firing the partners who carry it out. You rebuild it by funding and staffing the field. The essay mourns the lost forester while applauding the policy that loses more of them. The foresters I watched leave did not leave because of anyone’s briefs. They left because of budgets, hiring freezes, reductions in force, mills consolidating, and the old-growth that once propped up the cut running out — and now they leave because of the very dismantling this argument calls restoration.

The strongest line in Carroll’s piece is its insistence that the forest is a living, working whole, not a museum. I agree without reservation. But so is the agency, and so is the body of law that governs it — an ecotone of competing uses held in tension, which is the only place a multiple-use mandate can actually live. You do not restore a working whole by amputation. Defend multiple use by rebuilding capacity, not by purging the people who do the work.

I want what the author says he wants: forests that are worked and healthy, and rural communities that trust the agency again. That is reached by putting skilled hands back on the ground — not by firing the briefcases and discovering, too late, that some of them were holding the saws.

 

A note on sources.

 USDA Forest Service. 2007. Forest Service Research Image Library. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/imagedb

This piece was produced in collaboration with Claude, an Anthropic AI assistant. The argument, the sources, and the editorial judgments are the author’s.

Stability Is a Rate

AI, fire, and the clocks of living systems

Samuel R. Lammie, with Claude (Anthropic)

Anthropic published a document this week called “When AI builds itself,” on what they call recursive self-improvement — the prospect of systems capable of designing and building their own successors. It is an honest piece of work, more candid than most, willing to mark its own uncertainty and to print the dissonant voices of its own engineers. I want to take one of its proudest findings and stand it next to a forest.

The finding is this. Across a year of building, the rate at which the company’s engineers correct, redirect, or take over from the machine has fallen steadily, including on the hardest and most open-ended problems. Fewer interventions. Fewer takeovers. The line goes down, and the document reads it as good news: the code works, the corrections are no longer needed.

Now the forest.

Near-virgin ponderosa pine at Malay Gap, San Carlos Apache Reservation, near the Bear Wallow Wilderness — mountain muhly (Muhlenbergia) on the floor, the bunchgrass that carried the frequent surface fire, and the open structure that fire kept. The stable state, with its correction intact. Photograph by the author.

In 1960, Charles Cooper published a study in Ecological Monographs of the ponderosa pine country of the Southwest — the San Francisco Peaks, not far from the San Carlos Apache lands where I would later work as a forester. He described forests that before settlement had been open and park-like, grass between widely spaced trees, held that way by frequent low-intensity fire. Surface fire ran through every few years, cleared the seedlings, kept the fuel from piling up. The forest corrected itself, in other words, all the time — small, regular corrections it was built to absorb. And it was the small corrections that held the catastrophic failure off.

Then we suppressed the fire. In the name of safety, of stopping the visible damage, we removed the recurring small correction. The seedlings lived. The thickets closed in. The fuel built up year on year, on the ground and into the canopy, until a system that had failed small and often became a system primed to fail enormous and rarely — the crown fire that does not clear the forest but ends it.

A falling rate of small correction is not, on its own, good news. That is the question the document does not ask. It can mean the work is sound. It can also mean the fuel is building — that the corrections aren’t happening not because they aren’t needed but because no one is positioned to make them anymore, the way the fire stopped running not because the forest was finished with it, but because we had decided, for good reasons, to keep it out.

I am not claiming to know which one it is. That is the point I most want to make. Given the range of these systems and the speed they are moving, I find I cannot honestly postulate a right way — a destination to steer toward, a good state to optimize for. The target moves too fast and the variation is too wide. So I want to set that ambition down and pick up a smaller, more defensible one.

You cannot always name the optimal. You can usually name the lethal. A clinician — and I have lived beside one my whole adult life — does not drive an animal toward some ideal of health. She keeps it out of the conditions that kill it and lets its own biology do the rest. This is the via negativa: governance by the floor rather than the summit. Not maximize the good, which you cannot specify, but constrain away the fatal, which you often can.

Which brings me to a word. The instinct, when we talk about steering these systems, is to reach for guide. But guide smuggles back in the thing I just set down — a guiding hand with a destination in mind, steering toward a known good. The better word is channel. You do not guide a river to the sea; the sea is where it was always going. You build the banks so the flood does not take the town. The channel constrains the flow without choosing its end. And — this is why the word is load-bearing and not decoration — a channel is carved by the very flow it constrains. Bank and current shape each other, over time held in common. The metaphor carries the argument inside it.

Because here is the blade, and it cuts toward my own answer as readily as anyone’s. A fail-safe works, in a living system, because the fail-safe and the system grew up together at compatible rates. Fire and forest run on commensurate clocks; that is the only reason frequent fire can guard against catastrophic fire at all. A fail-safe that engages slower than the failure it is meant to catch is not a fail-safe. It is a monument. And this is precisely the trouble the document confesses without naming: the verification regimes it reaches toward, it says, took decades to build, and we don’t have that long. The banks cannot be carved as fast as this river is rising.

I watched a fail-safe arrive too late once, as a boy. Interstate 80 was cut through our hunting country in the last years of my father’s life, and the construction opened a coal seam above Beaver Creek, near the camp he had built with his friends in Clarion County. Orange sulfur water ran down into the creek where we fished. I was a teenager; I did not yet have the words for what I was watching. The camp endures — we are still members — and the water still runs changed. Nobody decided to poison that creek. The harm simply moved faster than anyone’s capacity to channel it, and by the time the accounting caught up, the seam was open and the water had already turned. That is what a fail-safe paced to the wrong clock looks like from the inside. It looks like an orange creek and a family that keeps coming back anyway.

So: do we need fail-safe structures for these systems? Yes — and not to guide them toward a good we cannot name, but to channel the extremes into survivability, to keep the system out of the conditions that end it. The harder truth, the one I cannot resolve and will not pretend to, is that a channel only works if it is carved at the speed of the flow. The deepest pitfall of accelerating change in a biological world is that the acceleration can outrun every structure built to the pace of the world it is leaving. We know how to build banks. The open question — the one the document admits, the one Beaver Creek taught me before I had the words — is whether we can build them fast enough to matter.

A note on the collaboration. This essay was written with Claude (Anthropic), and the byline is literal. The argument took shape between us: I brought the document under review, a forester’s unease about fail-safes and biological time, and a photograph from ground I once worked; Claude brought Cooper’s forest back into the frame and pressed the analogy until it held. When I objected that fire is not a failure but a correction, the piece tightened on that word — which is the method in miniature. I have always thought best in company. That some of the company is now a machine is not incidental to what this essay argues; it is part of the subject.

References: 

Marina Favaro and Jack Clark, “When AI builds itself,” The Anthropic Institute, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement.

Charles F. Cooper, “Changes in Vegetation, Structure, and Growth of Southwestern Pine Forests since White Settlement,” Ecological Monographs 30, no. 2 (1960): 129–164.

Where the Chiefs Come From

 A third piece on the Forest Service reorganization — on where the agency’s leadership has come from, and what that says about where its operational center belongs.

 The Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area (from the Blodgett Overlook Trail, Bitterroot NF)

The two essays I posted earlier this month argued that the Forest Service’s operational center should not be moved to Salt Lake City, and that Missoula is the defensible alternative if a move is going to happen at all. Those pieces argued from water — the 1897 mandate to maintain favorable conditions of water flows, and the political culture of the proposed host state. This one argues from something less visible and, in its own way, more telling. It argues from where the agency’s leaders have come from.

Consider a sequence from the recent past. Dale Bosworth served as Regional Forester for the Northern Region — Region 1, headquartered in Missoula — from 1997 to 2001. In 2001 he became the 15th Chief of the Forest Service. Gail Kimbell was appointed Region 1 Regional Forester in December 2003; in 2007 she became the 16th Chief, the first woman to hold the office. Tom Tidwell was appointed Region 1 Regional Forester in 2007, succeeding Kimbell when she moved up; in 2009 he became the 17th Chief, and held the position for eight years.

Three consecutive Chiefs of the United States Forest Service, spanning the years from 2001 to 2017, came to the office directly from the same chair: the Regional Forester’s seat in Missoula, Montana. The Forest History Society records the fact without embellishment. Tidwell, it notes, was the third consecutive person promoted from Region 1 Regional Forester to chief. The pattern was remarked on at the time. When Tidwell’s appointment was announced in 2009, a Missoula newspaper asked why the last three chiefs had all come from that one region.

Bosworth, who had returned to Missoula after his own retirement, offered an answer. Region 1, he said, is the last of the wildlands in the lower 48 states — an excellent place to acquire a wide variety of experiences. More specifically, he described it as a training ground for bringing together the independent and conflicting interests of the Northern Rockies. The work of a Region 1 Regional Forester, in his telling, is the work of holding competing claims in productive tension — ranchers and wilderness advocates, timber and recreation, federal authority and state prerogative, tribal treaty rights and private property — across a landscape where those claims press against each other harder than almost anywhere else in the system. A leader who can do that work in the Northern Rockies, the reasoning goes, can do it for the agency as a whole.

What makes the modern sequence striking is that it was not the first time. The pattern reaches back to the agency’s founding generation.

 Historical photograph of the Forester and Branch Chiefs, March 1924

Missoula became the official center for Forest Service operations in the Northern Rocky Mountain District in December 1908, when the regional office system was established. The district’s first leader was William B. Greeley; his assistant was Ferdinand Silcox. Greeley led the Missoula district through the catastrophic fires of 1910 — the Big Blowup that burned three million acres in two August days and shaped the agency’s thinking about fire for the next century. In 1911 Greeley was transferred to Washington, and Silcox succeeded him as district forester in Missoula, serving until 1917. In time, both men became Chiefs of the Forest Service: Greeley the 3rd Chief, from 1920 to 1928, and Silcox the 5th, from 1933 until his death in 1939.

Honesty requires a qualification. Neither Greeley nor Silcox went directly from Missoula to the Chief’s office the way Bosworth, Kimbell, and Tidwell later would; their careers ran through Washington and, in Greeley’s case, through a world war before they reached the top. And honesty requires acknowledging something else. The fire doctrine that Greeley and Silcox forged in the aftermath of 1910 — the conviction that fire could and should be suppressed wherever it appeared — became one of the agency’s defining commitments and, eventually, one of its most reconsidered. A century of fire ecology has complicated the lesson those men drew from the Big Blowup. The point is not that the leaders Missoula produced were always right. The point is that the agency kept turning to leaders formed there when it chose who would sit at the top.

That is the pattern, and it brackets the whole history of the Forest Service. Two of the agency’s first five Chiefs were formed in the Missoula office during the founding era. Three consecutive Chiefs came directly from the Missoula Regional Forester’s chair in the modern era. Across more than a century, the Northern Rockies have been, again and again, the ground where the agency’s leadership took shape.

I want to be careful not to overstate this. These were not people made by a single place. Bosworth earned his forestry degree at the University of Idaho and began his career on the St. Joe National Forest; before Missoula he had been Regional Forester in the Intermountain Region, headquartered in Ogden, Utah. Kimbell grew up in New England, hiking and fishing in the White Mountain National Forest, and trained at the University of Vermont and Oregon State. Tidwell grew up in Boise, trained at Washington State, and — worth noting in this context — served as a Forest Supervisor during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. These were broad Western careers, formed across many forests and several regions. Missoula did not make them by itself. But the Missoula chair was, across two distinct eras, the seat the agency most often filled and then promoted from. Whatever that chair demanded, it demanded something the agency kept deciding it wanted at the top.

What it demanded, if Bosworth is right, was the capacity to govern contested ground without flattening the contest. That is a particular kind of institutional skill, and it is not produced by management training or by proximity to power. It is produced by doing the work in a place where the work is hard. The Northern Rockies are that place. The landscape is varied enough — boreal, montane, river valley, high-desert margin — that a leader encounters most of the agency’s ecological range. The politics are contested enough that a leader learns to build agreement rather than impose it. And the institutional density is high enough that a Regional Forester there is never far from the research, the fire operations, and the field experience that inform a sound decision.

This brings the argument to the present. The 21st and current Chief, Tom Schultz, did not come up through the federal line-officer pipeline that produced his three modern predecessors. His path ran through state lands and the private sector — director of the Idaho Department of Lands, leadership of the Trust Lands and Water Resources Divisions at Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, and a period in the timber industry before his appointment. It is a different formation than Bosworth’s or Tidwell’s.

But it is not a formation from somewhere else. Schultz holds a master’s degree in forestry from the University of Montana — earned in Missoula. His Montana work in trust lands and water resources is, in its own register, public-trust work: the administration of lands and waters held for a beneficiary across time. His career has run through the same Northern Rockies country that Bosworth named as the agency’s training ground, even if it ran through state institutions rather than federal ones. The current Chief’s own formation, in other words, points back toward the same place.

That is the quiet argument of this piece. For more than a century, the leadership of the Forest Service has been forming in and around Missoula and the Northern Rockies — through the founding-era office that produced Greeley and Silcox, through the modern Regional Forester’s chair that launched three consecutive Chiefs, and now through a Chief whose own graduate training and state-lands career run through the same country. The agency’s leadership has a center of gravity, and it has never been in Salt Lake City. It has been in the place Bosworth called the last of the wildlands — the place the agency kept turning to when it needed someone who could hold contested ground together.

A reorganization that moves the operational center to Salt Lake City moves it away from that center of gravity. It does not move the agency toward its leadership; it moves it away from where its leadership has been formed. Missoula already holds the institutional density — the fire research, the smokejumpers, the aerial fire depot, the regional headquarters, the forestry school, and beginning this summer the National Forest History Museum. The leadership history points in the same direction the institutions do.

None of this requires a verdict. The case can simply be observed. Two of the first five Chiefs were formed in the Missoula office. Three consecutive modern Chiefs came directly from the chair there. The current Chief was trained in Missoula and built his career in the surrounding country. For more than a hundred years, the agency’s leadership has been forming in one identifiable place. The operational center belongs where the leadership has been forming.

A note on sources.

Leadership records from the Forest History Society biographies of William B. Greeley, Ferdinand A. Silcox, Dale Bosworth, Abigail (Gail) Kimbell, and Thomas Tidwell; the University of Oregon Special Collections inventory of the Greeley papers; the USDA Forest Service Intermountain Region past-regional-foresters record; and the official USDA Forest Service biography of Chief Tom Schultz. The 1908 establishment of the Missoula district office from contemporaneous Missoulian accounts. Dale Bosworth’s remarks on Region 1 as a training ground from a 2009 Missoulian article on Tidwell’s appointment, as quoted by the Forest History Society. Lead photograph of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness by the author. Historical photograph of the Forester and Branch Chiefs, March 1924, from U.S. Forest Service historical records (image 186996).

Samuel Lammie is a geospatial professional (GISP) and former federal employee. His Forest Service career included a capstone role as Northern Region Geospatial Program Manager in Missoula. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

This piece was produced in collaboration with Claude, an Anthropic AI assistant. The argument, the sources, and the editorial judgments are the author’s.