In Libya, say migrants, you can get beaten at any moment — or arbitrarily arrested and have the police use your cellphone to call your family in Niger and demand a ransom for your release.
.. Just as Syria’s revolution was set off in part by the worst four-year drought in the country’s modern history — plus overpopulation, climate stresses and the Internet — the same is true of this African migration wave.
.. Chaifou explains that West Africa has experienced two decades of on-again-off-again drought. The dry periods prompt desperate people to deforest hillsides for wood for cooking or to sell, but they are now followed by increasingly violent rains, which then easily wash away the topsoil barren of trees. Meanwhile, the population explodes — mothers in Niger average seven children — as parents continue to have lots of kids for social security, and each year more fertile land gets eaten by desertification. “We now lose 100,000 hectares of arable land every year to desertification,” says Chaifou. “And we lose between 60,000 and 80,000 hectares of forest every year.”
.. Says the U.N.’s Barbut, “Desertification acts as the trigger, and climate change acts as an amplifier of the political challenges we are witnessing today: economic migrants, interethnic conflicts and extremism.” She shows me three maps of Africa with an oblong outline around a bunch of dots clustered in the middle of the continent. Map No. 1: the most vulnerable regions of desertification in Africa in 2008. Map No. 2: conflicts and food riots in Africa 2007-2008. Map No. 3: terrorist attacks in Africa in 2012.
All three outlines cover the same territory.
.. “If we would invest a fraction of that amount helping African nations combat deforestation, improve health and education and sustain small-scale farming, which is the livelihood of 80 percent of the people in Africa, so people here could stay on the land,” says Barbut, “it would be so much better for them and for the planet.”
How Kasich’s Religion Is Hurting Him With Conservatives
“I don’t go out and try to win a vote by using God. I think that cheapens God.” That would be John Kasich.
.. The irony here is not just that the most pious Republican candidate has been largely overshadowed in a campaign for which Christianity is a major calling card. As Kasich makes what could be his last big campaign push to win Ohio’s primary on Tuesday, his devout faith might actually be hurting him. The governor’s faith appears to drive his politically moderate stances on immigration, climate change and gay marriage—positions that alienate him from mainstream conservatives whose support Kasich needs to have a chance at the nomination.
.. For example, a cornerstone of Kasich’s governorship has been his expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Expanding Medicaid wasn’t a politically savvy move for an aspiring presidential candidate of a party almost single-mindedly dedicated to repealing Obamacare. But, as Kasich told the Christian Broadcasting Network, “I’m playing for a bigger game.” He cited as his motivation a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus speaks about the importance of kindness: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine,” Jesus tells his disciples, “you did for me.”
.. That Kasich would link the expansion of health care benefits so explicitly to the Bible upset the conservative establishment
.. .“When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,” he said in 2013. “But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”
.. “I happen to believe there is a problem with climate change,” he said in 2012. “I don’t want to overreact to it, I can’t measure it all, but I respect the creation that the Lord has given us, and I want to make sure we protect it.” Compare this with Rubio’s claim that “for all we know, God wants the Earth to get warmer.”
.. If you’re in the business of commerce, conduct commerce. That’s my view. And if you don’t agree with their lifestyle, say a prayer for them when they leave and hope they change their behavior.”
.. Kasich cites the late University of Southern California philosophy professor Dallas Willard as one of his theological inspirations—an unusual choice because Willard was not always accepted by the Christian establishment. His teaching that the Kingdom of God is available here and now—“eternity is already in session,” he was known to say—follows a school of thought known as spiritual formation, or the idea that with discipline and spiritual development, ordinary Christians can grow to become more like Jesus.
.. Kasich, with his unique mix of left- and right-leaning views, seems to have adopted Willard’s focus on the Kingdom of God as far more important than the Republic of the United States.
.. Recently, a voter at a Georgia town hall asked the governor when would he “live out [his] purpose” by finally punching back at Trump and Rubio. Kasich’s response—perhaps not surprisingly—was a study in temperance: “I don’t know if my purpose is to be president,” he said. “Whether I’m president or whether I am not president, OK, I’m carrying out my mission. Don’t you think?”
Trump Clarifies, and It’s Worse
Still, it was interesting to learn that Marco Rubio doesn’t care about climate change, considering he lives in a city that seems to be submerging rather rapidly.
.. But the one thing he didn’t backtrack on was his recent statement to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “Islam hates us.” There were lots of openings. Trump was practically invited to say he meant only radical Islam. Or even to repeat one of his traditional softeners, like claiming he has Muslim friends. (“They say, ‘Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant and so fantastic.’”)
Ingenious: Hope Jahren
.. I think that’s the fundamental difference between a plant and an animal, is that if an animal doesn’t like where it is, it can get up and move away. Plants have to stay there and take it. There are a lot of other differences between plants and animals of course, but I believe that seeps into everything about how different they are and I believe that I can look around me and see the things that stay. Better than a person who hasn’t devoted themselves to the same activities I have. I believe I know things about what it means to stay and endure and watch and grow.
.. You can do it too you know, look around you and think about the things that stay. And when you walk away, they’ll still be there and night will fall and rain will fall and the snow will melt and … in your mind you can inhabit another life and that’s the ultimate transcendence of yourself.
.. I have three older brothers and we went to my father’s laboratory in the evenings after school and we played in the laboratory while he graded or set things up for the next day or repaired the demonstrations. And we played with all the stuff, and he never, ever said “don’t touch that,” and we always wanted to take out the lasers and clap erasers in front of them.
.. Being in a laboratory was always just the most wonderful, comforting, familiar, happy, safe place—and I still feel that way.
.. When I got to college I learned very quickly that if I became a writer society would let me die on the street. And if I became a scientist I would always have a roof over my head and a job, and my labor would be something that people needed. That difference has always struck me as so arbitrary, because I was willing to put my soul into all those activities but it became very clear to me that society viewed one of them as important and one of them as optional. So, let’s think about that for a minute.
.. The most fulfilling thing that I hear about the book is that people tell me “I understood this stuff: I’m not a scientist but I understood it,” and they’re somehow surprised at that. Somehow along the way science stopped writing stuff that people could understand and we’ve somehow got the reader blaming themselves that they can’t understand it. I mean what a scam. So that gives me great joy, is that people will even say “I was told I’m not good at science” or “I never did any of this stuff, but gosh, I liked your book.
.. . We have this discomfort between enlightenment and romantic views of nature. Is it something that we manipulate or is it something that’s bigger and more expansive than we are? So who’s on top? In the romantic version, nature is bigger than we are, it knows more, it’s been here longer, it has ways of sustaining itself and healing itself that we cannot understand. In the enlightenment version, we’re able to control everything about nature, we can fix it, it’s our duty to make it yield, etc.
.. The real challenge is living with the dissonance
.. I love oak trees because there’s pretty much a species of oak that can live almost anywhere. They just seem so indestructible, and they just have so many things figured out that we don’t, like how to live on the planet for 100 million years without substantially wrecking everything or wrecking themselves. I wonder if we’ll be able to go 5 million more. So in some ways I feel like I can transcend all the stuff that human beings worry about, each other and money and how men and women treat each other, and all that kind of stuff. I feel like I can transcend that by looking at a being that figured it out.
.. . I call that the Costco effect. If you go buy 100 rolls of toilet paper you’re going to use toilet paper at your house very differently than if you’re buying it roll by roll.
.. It’s a different world when money is free. And thinking about a world where plants operate utterly unconstrained by that particular resource is very interesting. One thing that happens of course is that other things come into play. I mean if I quadruple your salary but I don’t give you any more vacation time, you can’t take that around-the-world tour even if it seems cheap to you, because you can’t get the time off. So now it’s not money that’s limiting; it’s time. Plants have a similar thing in that nitrogen can become limiting, water can become limiting when temperatures go up.
.. So I can say well, I won’t give these little guys water for a few days, and then I’ll measure how much they didn’t grow, and then I’ll compare the stress between them. But I’ve already projected my own assumption about what stress should be into that experiment—lack of growth. I’m having a lot of fun thinking really deeply about how subjective the experience of stress is.
.. I wanted to be a surgeon very, very badly. I didn’t have the money to go to medical school. Medical school is expensive, and graduate school in science—it’s free, and that’s the most important thing to tell people to make them be scientists. Law school is expensive, medical school is expensive, business school is expensive, graduate school in science is free with a capital “F.” So that’s why I didn’t go to medical school.