The latest issue of Time has a piece I did on how the Netherlands are adapting to climate change.

Just downstream from the Dutch Port of Rotterdam, a storm-surge barrier waits for the seas to rise. Twin latticework arms, each as long as the Eiffel Tower and twice as heavy, stand ready to swing together to shield the city from the wind-whipped waves. Together, they form one of the longest moving structures in the world.

The Maeslant Barrier, or Maeslantkering, is the culmination of an effort initiated in the wake of a 1953 flood, when a storm surge overwhelmed the country’s dikes and killed 1,800 people. Completed in 1997, the $7.5 billion Delta Works — a series of dams, dikes, locks and gates — was designed to put a permanent end to flooding in a country where two-thirds of the population lives below sea level. “The general idea was that water would never be a threat to the Netherlands again,” says Tineke Huizinga, Vice Minister for Transport, Public Works and Water Management.

But even as the great barrier was being tested, it was becoming clear that climate change would one day make the effort obsolete. In 1995 and ‘98, several rivers burst their banks, forcing mass evacuations. Then, in 2005, the country watched in horror as Hurricane Katrina shattered New Orleans. “We saw what could happen,” says Eric Boessenkool, an adviser for international affairs at Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch equivalent of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “And it really changed our mind-set.”

Read the rest.

Time has published my story on the danger of a world where the seas are ruled by jellyfish.

The jellyfish in the photos didn’t look like they’d pose a danger to swimmers. Thinly veined and translucent, they didn’t have stinging tentacles trailing behind them or dramatic colors signaling danger. But Ferdinando Boero, a professor of zoology at the University of Salento in Italy, knew that they meant trouble nonetheless.

The pictures, sent by a biologist in the northern Italian town of Lerici in July, marked the first time the species Mnemiopsis leidyi, a thumb-size jellyfish known as the sea walnut, had been documented in the western Mediterranean Sea. Native to the Atlantic coast of the U.S., Mnemiopsis was introduced to the Black Sea in the 1980s — most likely from the ballast water of oil tankers — and played an instrumental role in the collapse of the region’s fisheries. “Now the question is, Will it do in the Mediterranean the same thing it did in the Black Sea?” Boero says. “It’s harmless for [humans], but it can be deadly for the fish.”

Read the rest.

Time has published my essay on why GDP is a bad way to measure progress.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy drew heat last month when he suggested that countries should factor happiness into their statistics for growth. After all, Sarkozy campaigned on promises of wealth creation, and rejigging the data to include France’s welfare system, famously generous holidays, and je ne sais quoi seems like an easy way to fulfill a promise he is struggling to keep.

But what if Sarkozy has a point? After all, the figure at which he was taking aim — gross domestic product — was never intended to gauge anything other than how much money was changing hands. Yet we routinely use economic growth as shorthand for how well a country is doing. If we’re going to use a metric to track our progress, shouldn’t we choose something that measures the things we care about?

Read the rest.

My contribution to Time’s annual Heroes of the Environment issue was a profile of the Nigerian oil campaigner Nnimmo Bassey.

It wasn’t an oil spill that made Nnimmo Bassey an environmentalist. It was a massacre — the 1990 assault by Nigeria’s armed forces on the village of Umuechem, where residents of the oil-rich Niger Delta had accused the Shell Petroleum Development Company of environmental degradation and economic neglect. In two days of violence, 80 people died and nearly 500 houses were destroyed. “We woke up from a sleep and … everything was collapsing around us,” says Bassey, 51, head of Environmental Rights Action, the Nigerian chapter of Friends of the Earth.

The deaths convinced Bassey and his colleagues that they needed to broaden their efforts. “We realized that if people don’t have a safe environment to live in, then they don’t have literally any other rights,” he says.

Read the rest.

I’m now back in Italy, where I’ve written an essay for Time on the sad, sad state of Italy’s newspapers.

Any discussion of what’s wrong with Italian politics eventually leads to the question of what’s wrong with the country’s media. In a nation where the Prime Minister controls the airwaves, only one out of 10 people buys a daily paper, compared with one in five Americans and three in five people in Japan, according to the World Association of Newspapers. Italians, it seems, don’t care to read the news.

But what if the fault doesn’t lie with Italians’ appetite for news? What if the problem is with what’s on the menu?

Read the rest.

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.