An interview about Forecast is airing this week on Writers Voice. It seems I’m on just before Leonard Nemoy.

Foreign Policy has just released its annual Failed States Index, and with it my article on how climate change can make a bad situation worse.

Hopelessly overcrowded, crippled by poverty, teeming with Islamist militancy, careless with its nukes—it sometimes seems as if Pakistan can’t get any more terrifying. But forget about the Taliban: The country’s troubles today pale compared with what it might face 25 years from now. When it comes to the stability of one of the world’s most volatile regions, it’s the fate of the Himalayan glaciers that should be keeping us awake at night.

In the mountainous area of Kashmir along and around Pakistan’s contested border with India lies what might become the epicenter of the problem. Since the separation of the two countries 62 years ago, the argument over whether Kashmir belongs to Muslim Pakistan or secular India has never ceased. Since 1998, when both countries tested nuclear weapons, the conflict has taken on the added risk of escalating into cataclysm. Another increasingly important factor will soon heighten the tension: Ninety percent of Pakistan’s agricultural irrigation depends on rivers that originate in Kashmir. “This water issue between India and Pakistan is the key,” Mohammad Yusuf Tarigami, a parliamentarian from Kashmir, told me. “Much more than any other political or religious concern.”

Read the rest.

I was on Weekday with KUOW’s Steve Scher in Seattle this morning.

The New Yorker has just published my decription of a descent into midtown with the Italian actor Roberto Benigni as my Virgil.

It begins:

For the record, the Italian actor Roberto Benigni does not believe that New Yorkers are going to Hell. “I hope they go to Paradise, every one of them,” he said last Thursday, in the back seat of a taxi, blinking against the swish and roar of traffic. But that might be because he thinks it’s a journey the city’s residents have already made. “This is the beginning of Hell,” he said. “The deeper we go, the greater the range of utterances of grief and fury we will hear. Different colors of people. Slang! Obscenity! Curses! Sighs! Keening!” He paused while a van blasted its air horn. “This is really the sound of Hell,” he said. “But we need to pass through the Inferno to reach Paradise.”

read the rest.

J Carrier, who traveled with me to the Masai Mara, has put up a beautiful slideshow of photos from our trip and from the Koiyaki Guide School, where our young guide was a student.

Make sure you click through to the last one.

Time has also published my story about an agricultural war of ideology taking in place in Africa. It’s a fight that could turn out to be good for the continent, but that’s not something that’s guaranteed.

Joseph Odiambo walks decisively past eight plots of corn and comes to a stop in front of the ninth. Where the other plants towered sugar-cane thick with broad crisp blades, here the plants are skinny and stunted, draped with yellow-tinged leaves. The contrast is deliberate, an advertisement for the wares Odiambo sells from his roadside supply shop in western Kenya. While the shopkeeper’s robust plots were planted with commercial seed and carefully nurtured with inorganic fertilizer, his sickly specimens are the result of seeds sown in the bare ground. “We wanted to have a control plot, to show the difference,” he says.

Odiambo’s demonstration plots are an opening salvo in a battle between two very different agricultural philosophies. The goal itself is not in dispute: a healthier, wealthier Africa, one that can feed itself and perhaps even export. Both sides also agree that the solution should be green. The disagreement lies over just what that word means.

Read more.

When I was in Kenya last fall I visited a school that was trying to enlist the Masai in the importance of conserving the lands in which they live. Time has just published a brief peek at my findings.

It begins:

After we pull our land rover off the track to watch a pair of leopards, I ask my two safari guides what animal they’d be most excited to see. I’m thinking elephants, lions, rhinos — the charismatic megafauna that attract tourists from across the world. Their answer: aardvarks and porcupines, the reclusive nocturnal residents of Kenya’s Masai Mara. “I took care of cattle on the Mara when I was a boy,” says Jackson Tinka, 21. “So I’ve seen a lot of wildlife.”

Tinka and his companion are what was until recently a rarity in Kenya’s biggest-drawing game park: tour guides working in the land of their fathers. Though the vast stretch of savanna lies in territory owned by the Masai, until a few years ago the red-robed pastoralists made up less than 20% of those employed in its camps and lodges. Those who could find work did so mostly as low-paid camp guards. Yet there’s a growing realization that the Masai and the 590-square-mile (1,530 sq km) national reserve share a common future. The tribe’s fortunes will most likely be found in the tourists who provide Kenya with the bulk of its foreign exchange — and in the wildlife those tourists pay to see.

Keep reading.

UPDATE: Check out more photos from this trip here.

NPR’s Living on Earth is running a segment on Forecast this week that we recorded back in January. I talk a bit about Darfur and a bit about wine.

GlobalPost.com published excerpts of Forecast this weekend

I was on Link TV a little while back, talking about Forecast. We covered the impact of climate change on Darfur and the Maldives and on the Arctic and discussed Obama’s Environmental Policies.