Orion Magazine has published a story I did with Francesco Zizola on the struggle for water in the Middle East. They also put together this narrated slideshow, with my voice over Francesco’s photographs:

HOLY WATER

In Israel, not far from the place where Jesus is said to have walked on water and fed thousands with just five loaves of bread and two fish, government engineers have performed a miracle of their own—they’ve made a river disappear. The Jordan River leaves the Sea of Galilee on its way to the Dead Sea in a slow laze past a series of campsites to a concrete complex, beside which white-robed pilgrims submerge themselves in its waters. From there, it pushes onward, winding through olive groves, farmers’ fields, and patches of brushwoods. Then, suddenly, it stops. At a pumping station less than three kilometers from the river’s source, five broad green pipes dip like elephant trunks to suck the water out. Beyond this point, the river has been reduced to less than 2 percent of its original flow.

The disappearance of the Jordan River, much like the area’s dropping aquifers, is a symptom of the struggle for water that has shaped the modern Middle East. The flow of a river that once irrigated the fields of the West Bank has been channeled through pipes, pumps, and canals to gush from the taps in Tel Aviv, and to “make the desert bloom” in the Negev. This diversion of water may be a technical marvel, but it’s emptying rivers and leaving critical aquifers dangerously susceptible to the intrusion of salt water and raw sewage.

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The Atlantic has just published my piece on how scientists are planning to use genetically modified mosquitoes to fight malaria.

Ridding a region of malaria is, in theory at least, fairly simple. Female mosquitoes transmit the disease when they make a meal of infected blood, gestate the malaria-causing parasites (called sporozoites), and then inject them into the bloodstream of another victim at a later feeding. Break any part of that cycle, and the parasite can’t reproduce; keep up that effort, and you can halt any malaria epidemic. In practice, however, breaking the malaria cycle takes a lot of work. Italy and the American South have all but eradicated the disease by draining swamps, spraying insecticides, improving medication, and introducing air conditioners, screen doors, and mosquito nets. But for many places—including most of Africa—the resources for a broad, sustained effort are out of reach.

Which is why I found myself in a basement laboratory in central Italy last spring, peering into a cage of mosquitoes. The scientist in charge of the lab, Andrea Crisanti, a parasitologist and microbiologist at Imperial College London, has developed a technique that can spread a genetic modification through generations of the insects. “In one or two seasons, you can thoroughly attack an entire wild population at a chosen site,” he says.

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My piece on Italy’s privileged parliamentarians has just been published in Time.

It’s been a hot summer for Italy’s politicians. First, many of them had to postpone their holidays to try to calm a skittish bond market with a €50 billion ($70 billion) austerity plan. Then the markets continued to buck and kick, forcing the government to propose ever more controversial cuts and taxes. And on top of all that, somebody leaked the menu from the senate restaurant.

Suddenly on the nation’s front pages, slashes in government spending were juxtaposed with taxpayer-subsidized meals served on white tablecloths by men in livery: risotto with turbot and zucchini flowers for €3.34 ($4.70); grilled swordfish at €3.55 ($4.99); a choice of dessert, €2.45 ($3.45). The cut-rate prices, coming at a time when the cost of a meal in Italy has climbed to unprecedented levels, infuriated a public already fed up with the disproportionate compensation enjoyed by its ruling elite. “In this time of crisis, when we are asking sacrifices of Italian citizens, politicians need to exhibit a bit of sobriety,” says Carlo Monai, the opposition parliamentarian who leaked the menu.

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Time has just published my story on Liberia’s surprisingly sustainable logging industry.

Liberia, a country that for much of its recent history has been engaged in bloody wars, was once the last place on earth you’d expect to find a showcase for sustainable logging. As recently as 2003, before the country’s timber industry was slapped with U.N. sanctions, revenues from the sale of lumber were being used to fund a brutal uprising in Sierra Leone next door. Timber companies maintained private militias, accused by human-rights groups of rape and torture. Logging vessels arrived at port laden with weapons.

And yet today the country is on the path to becoming a model for sustainable timber. Ever since the U.N. sanctions were lifted after democratic elections in 2006, Liberia has been working on a painstaking reboot of the industry. With help from the U.S. and the European Union, the country is seeking to position itself as a guilt-free source of timber. “Liberia is different from other countries because of its history,” says Catherine Ray, a spokesperson for the E.U.’s commissioner for development. “They really want to avoid going back to where they were 20 years ago,” when the timber industry was rife with corruption and violence.

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My piece on how some winemakers are preparing for a warmer future was just published in Time.

When the Spanish winemaker Miguel Torres was a young man, his father sent him to Chile. It was 1979, and the South American country was years away from being recognized for the quality of its wine. But the elder Torres was thinking about the future. He had not forgotten the chaos of the Spanish Civil War, when he twice faced death and the family winery was seized by one side, then bombed by the other. Torres’ father reasoned that a landholding in the New World that was climatically suitable for growing wine would hedge against instability at home.

Spain never did slide back into civil war, but the investment in Chile turned out to be valuable nonetheless. The vast bulk of the family’s wine production remains in Spain, but its vineyards in South America are producing high-quality vintages that, along with the company’s properties at home and in California, make the Bodegas Torres wine company one of the major labels in the industry. Now 69 years old, Miguel Torres oversees sales of more than 42 million bottles a year in more than 140 countries.

Today, Torres is preparing once again for an uncertain future, not because of war but because of global warming, which is threatening his industry. This time, the investment isn’t across the ocean. It’s up the hill — a two-hour drive from the company’s headquarters in Vilafranca del Penedès, near Barcelona, into the foothills of the Pyrenees. There, on a high bluff brushed with pines and peppered with wild rosemary and thyme, swatches of ripening vineyards take advantage of the cool mountain air to produce grapes that would wilt under the Mediterranean heat of the lowlands. “We’re buying land even higher, in areas that are still too cold to plant,” says Torres.

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My piece on Italy’s post-Gaddafi maneuvering has just been published in Time.

If one of the first casualties of the six-month-old uprising in Libya was Italy’s relationship with Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, one of the first dividends of its conclusion could be renewed ties between Rome and whoever replaces the fallen dictator. Even as gunshots continued to ring out in the streets of Tripoli, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was on the phone with Mahmoud Gebril, Prime Minister of the anti-Gaddafi National Transitional Council (NTC), congratulating him on the rebels’ rapid advance on the Libyan capital, promising him Italian support and warmly inviting him for a visit. “The National Transitional Council and all the combatants involved in Tripoli are realizing their aspiration for a new, united, democratic Libya,” Berlusconi said in a statement. “The Italian government is at their side.”

The last time a Libyan leader visited Italy, he took an entourage of hundreds of people and pitched a tent in the grounds of one Rome’s historic villas. As long as Gaddafi ruled Libya, Berlusconi was bent on pleasing him. Before fighting broke out in February, Libya was Italy’s largest provider of oil and gas, providing roughly a third of Italy’s oil production to the country. Gaddafi’s government owned substantial shares of Italian companies, including 7.5% of UniCredit, the largest bank in Italy, and 7% of the Torino-based Juventus soccer club. In 2009, Gaddafi was given a seat at the table during the G-8 summit in Italy. And at one point, Berlusconi leaned down to kiss his hand.

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Time has just published my story on the future of Europe.

It may be called the European Union, but at least part of that name is being called into question. The market convulsions of the past week are clearly about short-term concerns, about the balance sheets of countries like Italy, Spain and even France. But they’re also about a problem with a more distant horizon: Does the E.U. still make sense in its current form?

As long as that question remains unanswered, uncertainty is bound to continue. Short-term measures, like the propping up of Spanish and Italian bonds by the European Central Bank “are quick fixes that smooth things over the short term,” says Stephen King, chief economist at HSBC in London. “But they don’t answer the questions the markets are asking: What are the political and fiscal arrangements that would create stability in the future?

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My piece on Italy’s (most likely) upcoming Burqa ban has just been published in Time.

The thing about Italy’s proposed law to ban women from wearing veils that cover their faces is that it’s not clear what difference it would make.

Just like in France or Belgium, which have introduced similar measures, Italy does not have a large population of women who wear the burqa or the niqab, which cover almost the entire body and face. “In my 20 years in Italy, I don’t think I’ve seen ten women who wear the veil,” says Izzeddin Elzir, head of the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy (UCOII), the country’s largest Muslim organization. According to Elzir, most Muslims in Italy subscribe to a school of Islam that doesn’t require women to keep their faces covered. “In summer, there are more, because there are lots of tourists [from Arabic countries],” he says. “But here in Italy, we see few cases.”

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Time has just published my story on Italy’s austerity package.

It wasn’t a burst of negative financial news that threatened to tip Italy toward economic catastrophe this week. Instead, it was something that in less fraught times would have been seen as politics as usual: the escalation of a feud between Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and a member of his government.

The trouble was that the man Berlusconi was criticizing is Italy’s Finance Minister, Giulio Tremonti, a former law professor many believe has been instrumental in keeping Italy from following in the footsteps of crisis-ridden Greece, Portugal and Ireland. So when Berlusconi told the Italian daily La Repubblica in an interview published July 8 that Tremonti is “the only Minister who is not a team player” and that “he thinks he’s a genius and everyone else is stupid,” the markets reacted.

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My piece on Italy’s nuclear power referendum is up at Time.

The fallout from Fukushima continues. Concerns about an effort by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to revive his country’s nuclear power program helped drive millions of Italians to the polls June 13, when they voted overwhelmingly to block any such revival amid safety concerns following the meltdown in March of the Japanese plant.

Berlusconi’s name didn’t appear on the ballots, which also offered voters the opportunity to overturn laws governing the privatization of water and a controversial measure protecting top government officials from prosecution. But it might as well have. Italy’s law on referendums requires more than a 50% turnout in order to overturn legislation. And while the opposition framed the vote as a referendum on the way the country is being governed, Berlusconi spent the days leading up to the polls challenging the nuclear power measure in court, declaring he wouldn’t vote and suggesting his fellow Italians stay at home too. “This vote was a mix of policies and politics,” says Roberto D’Alimonte, a professor of political science at Rome’s LUISS University. “It was about the issues, and it was about delivering another knockdown to Berlusconi.”

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