At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
TRAVERSE CITY, MI —Romance, certainly the most elemental energy we know, flows like human life itself. Its headwaters charge off the slopes of new love, adventurous, boiling, unstoppable. Further along, the currents of romance grow powerful and certain. The way ahead, after all, promises eddies of delight and shoals of distress. There is no way around that. Those fortunate to have married the right partner know that marriage is the sacred pact that ties two …
REDDING, CA. — Cities along the Carolina coast were under water this month. Neighborhoods in California’s northern highlands were incinerated in July and August. Mother Earth is pushing back hard in this quickly unfolding era of ecological menace and there are twice as many people in the way as there were 40 years ago. I’m in California reporting for ProPublica on the causes and the solutions to the state’s wildfire emergency. You’ve heard something no …
Like a herd of wild bulls, raging floodwaters stampeded across a highland plateau in July and tore a hole in the mammoth Xi-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower complex dam in south central Laos. The boiling torrent crashed downstream from the nearly completed $1 billion dam, drowning 39 people identified so far, leaving over 100 more missing, and forcing more than 6,600 people out of their homes and into temporary government housing. Little more than a month later, …
There are places in the world where being a journalist is dangerous. Last year 65 journalists were killed around the world, according to Reporters Without Borders. Two of the nations at the top of the list for assassinating journalists are Mexico and the Philippines, where I’ve worked. Another is Pakistan, where I won’t work. Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was killed there in 2002. Very suddenly, though, it’s become dangerous to be an …
One of the many critical details of 21st century change, learned during a decade of global reporting, is that Asia is the dominant continent of the century. Another thing is that development patterns in Asia’s big cities, the glittering metropolises along the Pacific Rim, are different than they are in the West. And the third essential feature of 21st century change is the big role American architecture, engineering, and planning firms are playing in designing …
BENZONIA, MI — On this disruptive, bittersweet July 4 let me draw you back 155 years. On this same day in 1863 the blood of the dead and the wounded seeped into the grassy fields of Gettysburg. Spawned by irreconcilable principles and values nearly as virulent as those that exist today, the Union army victory was the strategic turning point in the Civil War. It provided military and cultural momentum for the winning progressive view …
SOMERSET, KY — I’m not at all concerned by the talk about the “end of the American empire.” I saw that needless arrogance slipping by nine years ago in Beijing’s spotless and soaring international airport, fast subways, faster intercity high-speed rail lines, and well-dressed professionals building the Asian century on boulevards flanked by state-of-the art offices. No, what keeps me up at night — quite literally, I’m not sleeping well these days — is my …
SOMERSET, KY — This was the week 30 years ago, third week of June 1988, that global warming rose to the top of the list of national priorities. I was a young correspondent for the New York Times that summer, dispatched to Montana and the northern Great Plains to report on an unfolding drought so deep that elderly farmers told me it reminded them of Dust Bowl conditions a half century before. On June 23 …
SINGAPORE — Michael Fay was a 19-year-old American student in May 1994 when Singapore authorities delivered four strikes to his bare bottom with a rattan cane. Arrested nearly a year before for stealing road signs and vandalizing vehicles, Fay’s caning prompted an international debate about the fairness of Singapore’s justice system and an outcry about its “police state” tactics. I knew two facts about Singapore before I arrived here. First was the debate about Michael …
KUALA LUMPUR — I had no idea what to expect from Malaysia when I accepted an assignment from Mongabay to report on the consequences of a prodigious wave of infrastructure development that is remaking this country’s economy and geography. What I’ve found is a nation contending, like so many others, with political disruption, but fully competent to develop the new muscles and bones to support the contemporary needs of this century. People here are suspicious …
