Markus Schreiber/AP

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands behind a European flag as she waits for the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, July 5, 2017. Xi is in Germany to open an Panda enclosure in Berlin and to attend the G-20 summit in Hamburg later the week.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel first took office in 2005, her British counterpart was Tony Blair. Jacques Chirac was president of France. And in the United States, George W. Bush occupied the White House.

At the time Germany was suffering high unemployment and sclerotic growth, and under Ms. Merkel, the country largely had its head down – just the way it has long liked it.

Now, with Merkel preparing to host the Group of 20 in Hamburg Friday – in the middle of an electoral campaign for a fourth term in office – none of these countries is operating within the previous political status quo. While Germany emerges as the clear preserver of the norms of the postwar era, Merkel has had to turn her face to the world.

In terms of the transatlantic relationship, Merkel is speaking more boldly than ever. In May, she warned Germans they can’t depend on old relationships like before, a statement widely interpreted as being about the US under President Trump. On Monday, her party released its campaign platform, omitting the word “friend” from its reference to the US.

Merkel is polling well ahead of her rivals for the September federal election, but her popularity doesn’t mean Germans want the prominent role on the world stage assigned to them on defense or trade. Most would prefer to continue on with heads down. Rather they have accepted – particularly young voters – that they face no other choice, with many viewing Merkel’s leadership as the safest path forward.

“It is pushing Germans out of their comfort zone,” says Ulrich Kühn, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg. “But what we see right now are rapid developments. We really see shifting tectonic plates of geopolitics.”

If it is largely the German instinct to focus inwards, he adds, "the German public has understood this is not possible anymore.”

Reliable partners

Germans are not alone in recalibrating their own role in the world in the era of President Trump. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey across 37 nations, only an average of 22 percent of respondents have confidence in Trump to do "the right thing" when it comes to international affairs. In Germany, just 11 percent do, one of the lowest of all the nations polled. That’s a 75-point drop in trust from German confidence in former President Barack Obama in his last year in office.

Trump has taken direct aim at Germany, accusing it of currency manipulation and Merkel of “ruining” her country with her open refugee policy. His attacks on the EU, welcoming Britain’s choice to leave the bloc, and pulling out of the Paris climate agreement are seen as direct threats to the German preference for collaboration and consensus. His first stop in Europe is in Poland, whose governing Law and Justice party (PiS) has butted heads with Western Europe over democratic rollbacks.

“The Germans can’t deal with unpredictability,” says Thomas Risse, a professor of foreign relations at the Free University Berlin. “They want reliable partners. That’s a typical German trait: We don’t like this kind of ‘everyday something else.’”

It is in this context that Merkel seems to be blazing new ground. She has promised that Germany will meet the NATO requirement that members spend 2 percent of GDP on military, which in the case of Germany would represent a significant increase. In the platform that her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party released this week, it reiterated her words from May in Bavaria, after Trump’s first visit to Europe to attend NATO and Group of Seven meetings. “The times in which we could fully rely on others are, to a certain extent, in the past,” the program states. “We Europeans must take our fate into our own hands more decisively than we have in the past.”

Germans' 'need for balance'

But if Trump foes or pro-EU liberals have sought in her a new global leader to fill a vacuum, most Germans hear in her words a promise of stability in an uncertain time. “In her way of doing politics, Merkel satisfies much of people’s need for balance and avoiding conflicts,” says Hans-Joachim Busch, a professor at the Sigmund-Freud-Institute in Frankfurt.

Germans in fact aren’t gunning for a giant leap. Instead they see their country’s rise in the context of the EU. Although new French President Emmanuel Macron faces uncertain terrain in France as he seeks to transform the political culture and usher in unpopular labor reform, Germans have been reassured by his Eurocentric vision, including on a European defense fund.

Korinna Wellmer, who works as a child educator assistant in a Berlin daycare center, says she believes Germany should only grow stronger alongside Europe. She says she appreciates how her country “can talk to America from an equal level today.”

And yet on defense she reverts to long-held views. “We should not be selling all those weapons abroad, to start with,” she says, referring to Germany's large arms export industry, “nor should we take part in too many missions abroad; because of our past on the one hand, and because I believe in diplomacy on the other.”

It is younger Germans who might be willing to push new boundaries on foreign policy. While Merkel’s favorability – and Trump's unfavorability – are higher among the oldest Germans according to a breakdown of the recent Pew data, young people have rallied around Merkel’s campaign. Almost half of first-time voters say they back her, according to a Forsa poll in April.

An uncertain future?

Joerg Forbrig, transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US in Berlin, says that as a first-time voter in the early 1990s he witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain and the process of reunification of Germany. But he says he believes that first-time voters today face even more uncertainty than they did in the '90s “about the future and their own prospects,” which he says draws them to Merkel “as an anchor.”

First-time voters also belong to the first generation to have grown up without the US as the unquestioned superpower, and they are thus more willing to imagine a new role for Germany beyond the passive one prescribed for it in the postwar order.

“I think a lot of younger people support more of a leadership role for Germany in the world,” Mr. Forbrig says. “They acknowledge that this is a big and resourceful country that can make a difference in a positive sense and that it should take on that responsibility."

Of course, Germany faces its own domestic limitations and realities on the ground.

Merkel is the first to scoff at the "leader of the free world" tag that some Western liberals have applied to her. German analysts say that outsiders misunderstand the importance of consensus in German society, and deeper reflexes against military use or economic spending that would secure its leadership. Many are hoping the current era is but a blip, a finite period that will end at the end of Trump’s term, not the beginning of a fundamental shift.

Germany also simply lacks a long-term vision, entering this era in crisis management mode as the “hard reality of geopolitics” arrived unannounced, says Mr. Kühn. Still he says, it’s forcing Germany to ask itself what strategic tools it needs for the future.

“During the next years we will see more of a sense of what Germany’s role in the world should be, and what the role of the EU should be.”

• Sara Miller Llana reported from Paris. Daniel Mosseri also contributed reporting from Berlin.

Justin L. Fowler/The State Journal-Register/AP

Illinois Speaker of the House Michael Madigan (c.), a Chicago Democrat, has battled over budget plans with Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner. The legislature is now aiming to pass a budget plan by overriding the governor's veto of a tax hike.

States are supposed to be the places where government works, where politicians put aside their differences to pass good programs and balanced budgets. But that reputation for pragmatic compromise looked threatened this year as legislatures in nine states – an unusually high number – failed to pass budgets by July 1, their new fiscal year.

Declaring a state of “civil emergency,” Maine’s governor partially shut down state government for three days this month, no longer renewing driver's licenses or registering titles for cars.

A budget impasse caused New Jersey’s governor to close its parks and beaches to everyone (except himself and his family, as it turned out).

In Illinois, things are so shaky that it faces the risk of becoming the first state to have its debt downgraded to junk, a development that would cost residents millions of dollars in increased interest costs.

So, in an era of rising partisanship, does state government still “work” – or are the missed deadlines and partisan rancor a taste of what lies ahead for states?

The answer is nuanced. When it comes to social issues, which often get wrapped into budget bills, polarization appears likely to continue to rise. But on actual spending measures, partisanship has its limits. For political and procedural reasons, most states are expected to continue forging the necessary compromises to keep state government from grinding to a halt.

Already, the pressure to reach fiscal compromises is visible. Over the four-day stretch from the weekend to Tuesday’s July 4 holiday, Delaware, New Jersey, and Maine reached budget deals.

Even Illinois, entering an unprecedented third year without a budget, passed a major income-tax increase and, with the help of Republican legislators, the Senate overrode the Republican governor’s veto. The Democratic-controlled House is expected to do the same this week.

Yet there’s little doubt that polarization is rising in most state legislatures – with far-reaching consequences.

“What we're seeing at the states is a mirror of what we're seeing at the national level,” says Boris Shor, a political scientist at the University of Houston who has studied the issue. “A lot of the policy battles that we've seen at Congress are getting shifted over to the states.”

Rising divisions

Looking at 15 years of survey and roll call data, he and fellow researcher Nolan McCarty of Princeton University found that 15 states were more polarized than Congress in 2011. “California is by far the most polarized state legislature, and Congress looks decidedly bipartisan by comparison,” they wrote then.

Since that time, the partisanship has become more extreme, with Colorado passing California as America’s most polarized state, according to updated figures on the researchers’ website. States in the West are where polarization is rising the fastest. And unlike at the national level, where Republicans in Congress are widening the chasm by moving to the right, the picture is more mixed at the state level, where Democrats, more than Republicans, are driving the trend by moving to the left.

One factor behind the polarization: the nationalization of politics.

“While voters elect and hold the president responsible for one job and state legislators for another, the outcomes of their elections are remarkably related,” concluded Steven Rogers, a political science professor at Saint Louis University, in a study last year.

He found that changes in a president’s approval rating was three times more important in electing state legislators from the same party than voters’ assessments of the state legislature itself. “While state legislatures wield considerable policymaking power, legislators’ electoral fates appear to be largely out of their control,” he wrote.

And because social issues, such as immigration and abortion, are stalemated at the national level, they’re being played out increasingly in the states, says Professor Shor.

Rules that nudge toward pragmatism

The exception is budgets, which unlike social issues that directly affect only a minority, hit every state resident, he adds. Very few governors or state legislators have been unwilling to compromise when their own electoral prospects were involved.

“There’s such a strong incentive from the practical standpoint” to enact a budget, says Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Governors Association. “There are real quick impacts at the state level if you don’t have a budget.”

Every year a few states fail to pass a spending plan before their new fiscal year, especially this year because “there are some really tough budget issues out there,” says John Hicks, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO).

This year’s impasse in nine states was unusually high, he adds, but states have certain legislative measures in place that help push compromise. Every state except Vermont must balance its budget, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (although by other definitions only 46 states have balanced-budget laws). In addition, 44 states give their governor’s line-item veto power, which means they can strike down individual items in spending measures passed by the legislature.

Moreover, 31 of the 50 state governments have the same party holding the governorship and a majority in both legislative houses. In Michigan, for example, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder got the GOP-run legislature to agree to a budget before July 1 for seven straight years, even though the budget year doesn’t start until Oct. 1.

One-party control doesn’t always work. Wisconsin Republicans, for example, don’t have a budget because they can’t agree on funding for road construction. Rhode Island is also the scene of a budget stalemate over cuts in auto taxes, with a Democratic governor trying to get the House speaker and Senate president (both Democrats) on the same page.

Key states to watch are Kansas and Illinois.

A Kansas experiment

In Kansas, deep tax cuts enacted by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback proved so unpopular that, in the 2016 elections, moderate Republicans ousted 14 conservative state legislators in the primaries and Democrats gained some additional seats in both state houses.

The Kansas experience suggests there might be some limit to the amount of polarization that voters will accept when it comes to budget issues, Shor says.

In Illinois, conservative Gov. Bruce Rauner battled the Democratic majorities in both Houses by vetoing measures that raised taxes, so that the state went two years without a budget, racking up billions of dollars in unpaid bills, forcing cuts at state colleges and universities, and risking a downgrade to junk status – which may still come about if the state doesn’t begin to clean up its fiscal mess.

Governor Rauner is up for reelection next year.

“You are going to see both sides spin the outcome” for next year’s elections in both states, says Mr. Pattison of the NGA, but it will come down to the voters. “Ultimately, who do they believe the most?”

As long as the economy doesn’t tank, fewer states will miss their budget deadlines next year, predicts Mr. Hicks of NASBO. State legislatures by and large don’t let partisanship run wild, “not to the point of stopping the machinery of government.”

In the fall of 1970, a schoolteacher named Judith Arcana walked into a meeting held at a church a few blocks from her Chicago apartment. She emerged hours later a newly minted member of Jane, an underground collective that counseled women through – and later performed – thousands of illegal abortions between 1968 and 1973.

To Ms. Arcana, then 27, the idea of providing women with safe, dignified abortions dovetailed with her interest in reproductive justice and the burgeoning women’s liberation movement.

“It seemed so right,” she recalls. “I was energized spiritually and politically, as well as intellectually.” 

Forty-seven years later, another group of women convened to talk about reproductive rights. They gathered not at a church but at the Los Angeles home of Francine Coeytaux, a veteran women’s health advocate. The conversation centered on the abortion pill – medication that when taken early in the first trimester can safely end a pregnancy more than 95 percent of the time.

The team is called Plan C. And for the women who are members, it is a sign of how the abortion debate in America is changing – even as it echoes the cultural battles of the past. 

The women of Jane operated in a world in which abortion was illegal but viewed as necessary, even by many in law enforcement and the clergy. Today, abortion is legal, but advocates for it often work in a climate where the procedure is increasingly fraught with the risk of persecution and prosecution.

Between 2011 and 2015, legislators across dozens of states implemented nearly 300 laws that regulate who can perform abortions and restrict how, when, and why a woman can undergo the procedure. The result is a two-tiered system where access to clinic-based abortion care is limited to those with the resources to get to a place that provides it, says Jill Adams, chief legal strategist for the Self-Induced Abortion (SIA) Legal Team, a nonprofit consortium that works out of the University of California, Berkeley. 

At the same time, women from both eras say the right to full control over when, where, and how women choose to have children – or not – remains at the heart of the abortion rights movement.

“[Jane] was about women trying to take back the night,” says Ms. Coeytaux, who founded Plan C. “It was women saying, ‘If it’s going to be illegal to go to a doctor then maybe we will be our own doctors.’ ” 

Plan C “is women saying, ‘OK, this system isn’t working for me, and I’m going to build something new,’ ” says Madison Liddle, who joined the group in November. “I see it as a reproductive health revolution, with women taking [their bodies] into their own hands.”

Some antiabortion activists have responded to the push toward more expansive abortion access – and the rise of groups like Plan C – by seeking to reframe the issue in feminist terms.

“We can do a lot of stuff now, but should we?” says Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of the pro-life group New Wave Feminists. “Is it ultimately good for us as a gender? Is this truly liberating and empowering?”

But both Plan C members and former Janes say that such perspectives only prove how much the debate has transformed over the past generation.

“The cultural atmosphere [today is] way worse than the atmosphere that the underground service worked in during the ‘68 to ‘73 period,” Arcana says. “Then there was an understanding that this was a necessity, that criminalizing [abortion] was a terrible mistake, that women and girls should be assisted. 

“Now it’s the other way.”

Politics in play

The difference between now and the 1960s is that today’s tug-of-war over abortion access – and women's overall health care – is more deeply tied to politics, culture, and morality than ever.

Democratic-led states are fighting to make birth control available over the counter even as congressional Republicans push a health care bill that cuts federal funding for Planned Parenthood and allows states to opt out of maternity care and contraceptive coverage. 

Within the medical community, more professionals are getting behind research that shows that the use of the abortion pill in the first trimester is safe and effective – but some clinics have begun to offer services that claim to reverse the procedure’s effects. 

Among women’s rights advocates, a debate is raging over whether a person can call themselves a feminist when they are against abortion rights.

“I’m all for women controlling their own bodies,” says Ms. Herndon-De La Rosa, whose group stands by the idea that “the unborn child is the most vulnerable member of the human family” and deserves protection. “The issue is when you have another body in your body. That’s a different story.”

As the conflict churns at both the personal and the policy levels, some analysts are noting a growing interest in abortions outside the clinic setting. In 2016, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz ran in The New York Times an analysis of Google searches of terms like, “how to have a miscarriage” and “how to self-abort.” He found that states with the highest rates of searches for self-induced abortion are also the ones where the procedure is most restricted.

“They show a hidden demand for self-induced abortion reminiscent of the era before Roe v. Wade,” he wrote. 

'Ask for Jane'

Arcana first encountered the Jane collective during a pregnancy scare in the summer of 1970. This was before the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which affirmed a woman’s right to seek an abortion. Back then terminating a pregnancy often meant finding “back-alley” doctors who might botch the procedure. Those who did perform it effectively often asked for outrageous fees or sexual favors in return.

Panicked, Arcana reached out to a friend who was in medical school. 

“After a while he comes back to me and says, ‘Everybody here says call this number and ask for Jane,’ ” she says. She did, and found herself chatting with the woman on the line not only about her situation, but about politics and women’s health. “We talked for nearly an hour,” she recalls. 

The woman advised Arcana to get a pregnancy test. (This was before home pregnancy kits were available over the counter.) The missed period turned out to be a false alarm. Arcana called the number again with the news, and this time the woman on the other end invited her to an orientation for new members of the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation – the official name of the Jane collective – at a nearby church.

Arcana worked with the service for three years. She answered phones, scheduled women for abortions, and drove them to apartments where the procedure would take place. When the group, in 1971, began training its members to perform surgical abortions themselves, Arcana was among those who participated. 

“We literally, literally, had people’s bodies in our hands,” she says. “I found the interactions with my sister Janes and the women who came through the service to be so deep, so fruitful in terms of human value.”

The experience altered the way she and her colleagues viewed women’s rights, the female body, and the politics surrounding both, Arcana says. 

“We challenged the medical model for care,” says Laura Kaplan, another former Jane who published a book about the service in 1995. “We didn’t use drapes, we didn’t separate off a woman’s body. We sat with them, held their hands.

“We always said, ‘We’re not doing this to you but with you. We are a partner. You are putting your lives in our hands and vice versa,’ ” she adds.

Abortion via Amazon

Today, Plan C hopes to provide a similar service. By raising awareness about the abortion pill – and eventually making it accessible – the group hopes to give women the option to safely terminate their pregnancies without relying on distant or costly medical providers.

The team envisions a world where medical abortion pills are as ubiquitous as the morning-after pill, which is available not only over the counter at any pharmacy, but also online via Amazon. 

“You would get it delivered to your house. And it would come with information and also the option to have a telemedicine consult if you wanted it,” says Amy Merrill, Plan C’s communications director. “And otherwise you would have everything that you need to [administer] self care.”

“We are not pushing this on anyone,” she adds. “We just really believe it should be an option.”

The abortion “pill” is actually two pills, which together complete the procedure known as medical abortion: mifepristone, also known as RU-486, and misoprostol.

Studies in the US and abroad show the procedure’s success rate runs above 95 percent for women seven weeks pregnant or less. At least one study has found no significant difference in safety and effectiveness between women who had medical abortions at home and those who had them in clinic. 

“The [abortion] pill itself is actually very safe – except for the fetus,” says Matthew Harrison, a family physician who runs a prenatal clinic in a suburb of Charlotte, N.C. “But life itself begins at conception. My job as a physician is to protect human life. So that’s what I do.” 

Mr. Harrison works with a group called Abortion Pill Reversal, which claims to have developed a process that counteracts the effects of RU-486. Founded by California doctors George Delgado and Mary Davenport, the group bases its practice on a study the two published in 2012 detailing the experiences of six women – including one Harrison treated in 2006 – who took mifepristone then received doses of progesterone. Four carried their pregnancies to term. 

Since its founding APR has attempted close to 900 reversals, Harrison says, and about 200 babies have been born healthy. The rest of the would-be mothers failed either to show up for their appointments or follow through with the procedure, he says. APR representatives did not respond to a request to confirm the numbers. 

“We’re not just people who are yelling, ‘Don’t abort,’ ” Harrison says. “That’s very harsh and very scary for women who are in very vulnerable positions. This gives us the opportunity to be caring and help women and walk with them through this.”

Harrison stands by the procedure, but it has been challenged by the mainstream medical community. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says abortion pill reversal is not supported by scientific evidence.

Still, Arkansas and South Dakota now have laws that require doctors to tell patients seeking medical abortions that the procedure can be reversed if they don’t take misoprostol and act quickly to follow the reversal process. At least five other states are considering similar legislation, based largely on the model bill drafted by Americans United for Life, a national pro-life law firm and advocacy group.

“Women should be trusted with full and comprehensive information, including the facts about the dangers … and information that shows they can reverse it,” says AUL spokeswoman Kristi Hamrick. She says the effort to make the abortion pill available over the counter and online is irresponsible, especially for women experiencing ectopic pregnancies, allergic reactions to the drugs, or other conditions that a health care provider could identify and address. 

“We have medical boards and licensing boards to ensure that a person who tells you they’re selling you something safe is not lying, not harming you, not exposing you to risk,” Ms. Hamrick says. “You can’t know whether someone is in danger of the greater risk without proper medical supervision.”

'The new virtual Jane'

Coeytaux bristles at the mention of APR. “That’s the new anti-choice thing,” she says, shaking her head. “To me that’s an indication that we’ve begun to make some inroads, that the abortion pill itself is scaring them.”

It’s also a demonstration of how divisive abortion has become – at least in the US. Elsewhere in the world, the trend over the past 30 years has been toward liberalization and access. While Plan C struggles to gain a foothold in the US, others like it have been operating outside the country for nearly two decades. 

Women on Web, safe2choose, and Women Help Women are online, international abortion services that provide counseling and contraception to women in dozens of countries. They also the ship the abortion pill to women in places where access to safe abortion services either don’t exist or are heavily restricted.

None of them ship the drugs to the US, because of concerns that they could lose funding or support for projects in other countries – even though in 2016 a safe2choose site administrator told Britain's The Guardian newspaper that a fifth of its traffic in April that year originated here. The paper also reported that Women on Web, which sends the pill to countries where abortion is illegal, received more than 600 emails from the US in 2015.

To Ms. Liddle, the Plan C advocate, the fact that politics has kept these services from reaching women in the US was a shock. 

“As modern women growing up in the United States you are taught that you have all the options you need for you, that you’re leading the charge in health,” she says. “And then you come to find out you can get these pills shipped to Tanzania … and I can’t get it to Miami, Florida.” 

Liddle and her team work with the SIA Legal Team to navigate abortion laws and ensure they legally shield the women they seek to help. They dream of one day working out in the open, without having to occupy legal gray areas. 

“The very crux of what we’re doing, the reason we’re doing it, is because we believe [abortion] should be accessible and open,” Ms. Merrill says. “And yet the process of getting it there is inherently full of these obstacles and these risks.”

And the fact that Plan C – and other organizations like it – exist at all suggest that the strategies of the civil rights era endure. Only now, advocates say, technology also exists to democratize abortion, make it accessible, and address the issues that have dogged the procedure in the decades since it was legalized.

“The internet is the new virtual Jane,” says Susan Yanow, a longtime reproductive rights advocate and consultant for Women Help Women.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Duniya Mahad explains that she cannot marry her fiancé, her childhood sweetheart, because he could not pay her bride price of 10 camels and 10 cattle after all his livestock died due to the severe drought in the Somali Region of Ethiopia.

In another life, it would have gone like this: Duniya in a floor-length dress, something gauzy and loudly colored; Muftah tall and slender and serious beside her.

Duniya and Muftah. Muftah and Duniya. They had known each other since they were kids, when they spent long, slow days together walking their families’ cattle and camel herds across the scrubby brush to pasture or water. For a long time, they were friends, close ones, until one day they were not only that anymore. It was that simple, she says, and that obvious.

She thinks of it often, that wedding that would have been. There would have been seven days of dancing – the entire village gathered around them – and fresh roasted goat every night. She would have eaten soor, a soft corn porridge, mashed with milk, butter, and sugar, and worn a different new dress each night. And then, when it was done, she and Muftah would have slipped quietly into the rest of their lives.

Instead, she is here – in a sun-baked settlement of displaced persons near the market town of Gode – and he is there – 40 miles away in the parched village where they both grew up. She hasn’t seen him in two months. She worries, she says, that she never will again.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A donkey stands near temporary huts in the Somali Region. Displaced people stay near main roads so the government can see them and know they need aid. After three failed spring rain seasons, this region in the southeast of the country is experiencing extreme drought.

Since rains first failed to fall in this eastern region of Ethiopia in early 2016, drought has disrupted life in ways seismic enough to register – if barely – on the Richter scale of global disasters. By April, nearly 300,000 people had been displaced from their homes by drought in the Somali Region, and country-wide, the government estimates that 7.81 million people are in urgent need of food, water, and other humanitarian assistance. Aid groups and Ethiopia’s government have warned that food aid may run dry as soon as mid-July.

But at close range, a drought like this one does even more than leave people sick or hungry or far from home. It warps the shape of what is possible. It shoves the ordinary just out of reach.

For Duniya and Muftah, the future should have been set. By the time Ethiopia’s government and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) began warning of severe incoming drought early last year, the elders in their families had already met and set a plan for their wedding. Muftah would pay a hefty bride price (though one that was worth it, both families agreed) of ten camels and ten cows, and they would hold the aroos – that seven day party – during gu, the rainy months at the beginning of 2017.

Their plan didn’t fall apart all at once, but in slow motion.

Over the next several weeks, the pastures their village had always grazed on began to turn dry and chalky. Muftah’s camels grew skinny and listless. First one died, then another.

In six months, they were all gone – the entire life savings of his family withered to nothing. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Dalbila Muhumed sings a song as she and others displaced by drought listen to Duniya tell her story.

“I knew then that we could not get married anymore,” Duniya says. Without the bride price, after all, there could be no wedding. And without the wedding, there could be no life together. That was the tradition – and it didn’t change just because the weather did.

Then, early this year, Duniya’s parents made a decision: they would leave their village and walk towards the paved road 40 miles away. It was a place they could be seen by the aid convoys and the water trucks. Their livestock had died, too, so there was little to keep them at home, and anyway, they had family members near the road. Maybe someone could help them there.

“I don’t know what to say. It was very hard to leave him,” she says quietly, staring at a patch of ground in the small thatched hut where she and her family now stay. But he had his family and she had hers, and that was that.

And so one day two months ago, they packed their remaining belongings on a cart tethered to their last two donkeys and set off. She and Muftah didn’t exchange cell numbers – neither has one – or make a plan to meet somewhere down the line. There wasn’t any point, she says.

“Even if it rains now, it won’t be enough [for us],” she says. “All our livestock is gone, and without them, we can’t have any hope.”

Nearby, an older woman clucks softly in agreement. “He loved her very much,” she murmurs. So then wouldn’t it be possible, a reporter asks, to marry some other way, without the camels?  She shakes her head.

For now, there is nothing anyone can do but wait.

Courtesy of Kenneth Wood/National Tropical Botanical Garden

Steve Perlman surveys the Kalalau cliffs on the island of Kauai, Hawaii, where he pioneered 'extreme botany.'

Steve Perlman doesn't let anything, even hundreds of feet of vertical cliff, get in the way of his efforts to find and save endangered plants in the wild.

If he encounters a steep drop while traipsing through the most rugged vegetation in Hawaii or on other Pacific islands, Mr. Perlman simply pulls out ropes and rappels down to where he wants to go. Once you're out there, he says casually, "you just want to keep going. You don't want to be stopped by a waterfall, you want to see what plants are on those steep cliffs." And at 69, he's still roping into uncharted territory looking for rare plants.

Perlman’s brand of extreme botany, as he calls it, is just one example of heroic conservation efforts going on around the globe. But not everyone agrees on the best way to save the vast amount of the natural world that is under threat. Some say conservationists should use some sort of triage system to prioritize which species or ecosystems get attention, while others suggest that every species is valuable and deserves conservation attention.

For Hugh Possingham, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, it’s a matter of saving as many species as possible, with limited resources.

“I suppose the question is not how far should we go to save a single plant species, it is what can we do with the resources we have,” says Dr. Possingham.

Acknowledging the limits on time and financial resources, Possingham has developed a formula for prioritizing conservation projects that also takes into consideration the number of species that could potentially benefit from each project and the probability of success.

“The system favors those species that are most in danger of extinction,” Possingham says, “but it is countered by the fact that sometimes those species that are most in danger of extinction are the ones that are harder to save, or more expensive to save.”

Perlman and Possingham bookend an ideological spectrum of views in the conservation world. Both are profoundly dedicated to preserving biodiversity but approach the problem from vastly different perspectives. Where Possingham finds clarity in careful cost-benefit analysis, Perlman functions in a perpetual race against time.

Divergent models of conservation

In Hawaii, where Perlman works as a statewide specialist for the University of Hawaii’s Plant Extinction Prevention Program (PEPP), there are 238 known plant species teetering on the brink of extinction, each with fewer than 50 individuals left in the wild. To Perlman and his colleagues at PEPP, each one of those species deserves saving. And he is willing to do whatever it takes to try to save them: fencing off plants to keep out goats, pigs, and other grazers; rappelling off cliffs to collect seeds and pollen; and even hand pollinating the last few individuals of a species.

Eva Botkin-Kowacki/The Christian Science Monitor

Steve Perlman points to the Waimea Canyon on Kauai, where he has made numerous exploratory botany trips. The canyon was once dotted with the white of the flowers of the now-rare Hibiscus waimeae, which is only found on Kauai, he recalls.

But on a global scale, nurturing each individual species back to health is a more weighty proposition. One in five of the world's plant species is threatened with extinction, according to the annual State of the World's Plants report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. That's a lot of plants that need tender love and care – and money – to keep them from going extinct.

That’s where Possingham’s formula comes in. In New Zealand, for instance, where nearly a third of the archipelago’s indigenous plants are threatened, Possingham’s calculated approach has enabled conservationists to make educated decisions about where to allocate funds. In some cases, his formula has helped Kiwis stretch conservation dollars to save more species.

On the other end of the ideological spectrum, however, conservationists like Stuart Pimm worry that the triage-based approach not only dooms species that potentially could have been saved, it also stymies innovation.

“As a scientist, I think triage is such a bad idea because it doesn't advance the field,” says Professor Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., whose research is behind the widely cited figure suggesting that species are going extinct as much as 1,000 times faster than the background rate of extinction.

When biologists are fighting to save the last few individuals of a species from extinction, they are driven to innovate, he says. And through this process, “We are getting very, very much better at saving species from the brink of extinction,” he says. “We have forced ourselves not to write species off.”

What’s at stake?

One risk of extinction is that when a species disappears, its absence could disrupt other parts of the ecosystem if, say, it was the primary food source for a particular animal. But even if other species can fill the newly extinct species' ecological niche, something specific will still be lost: its genetics.

“Every species that is lost, I think it's fair to say, is a treasure that is gone forever,” says Ruth Shaw, a professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University of Minnesota. Each species is genetically unique, she says, and “the diversity that we have came about through just awe-inspiring expanses of time, and is not replaceable in any kind of a time frame that we can understand.” 

Preserving one-of-a-kind genetics is one of the reasons that Perlman and other botanists around the world collect seeds and cuttings of rare plants that can be stored in seed banks, tissue preservation facilities, or at least grown in captivity.

Eva Botkin-Kowacki/The Christian Science Monitor

Brighamia insignis once grew all over the cliffs of the Na Pali coast on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. But after two hurricanes slammed the island, just one plant is known to remain in the wild. But the plant, sometimes called vulcan palm or cabbage on a stick, lives on in homes across Europe as a houseplant, thanks to Steve Perlman's seed collection efforts. Some, like these pictured, grow in nurseries at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the island of Kauai in Hawaii.

But the value of the genetics of the world's flora goes beyond simply being impressed by the feat of evolution that led up to today. Having a variety of plant genetics to draw from could be useful to scientists in the future who want to innovate in agriculture, pharmaceuticals, or to produce other plant-based products, says Stuart Thompson, a senior lecturer in plant biochemistry at the University of Westminster.

Large seed banks, like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, contain many seeds from agricultural crops, as the world's population is currently at about 7.5 billion and is expected to continue rising quickly. With many mouths to feed, Dr. Thompson says, scientists may need to breed new genetics into agricultural crop species to make them more resilient or more productive. But if key genetic diversity is lost, that won't be possible.

Furthermore, he adds, "we could potentially be making use of non-agricultural species to facilitate agricultural innovation." As such, scientists might not know what plant species should be preserved. Some inedible plant could perhaps contain the genetics to revolutionize agriculture, but researchers need its genetics to be able to figure that out.

In that sense, the potential benefits of preserving a species is immeasurable. And so, day in and day out, Perlman heads for the cliffs, following his intuition and clues offered by the natural world to save as many species as he can access. 

As a young botanist, Perlman noticed that goats and other grazers that were ravaging Hawaiian plants couldn't reach the steepest cliffs. He surmised that those cliff faces might harbor some of the islands’ rarest species. And so Perlman and his field partner Kenneth Wood have become pioneers of extreme exploratory botany, armed with deep reverence for every species they encounter – and little regard for their own safety. 

“I'm not really thinking that I'm going to be dying because I'm on the cliffs,” Perlman says.

For him, saving plant species is all about responsibility. “I don't want to lose any of these species that are unique and so beautiful,” he says. “It's part of my responsibility to try and keep them all alive.”

Eugene Hoshiko/AP

TV news in Tokyo Tuesday shows an image of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

With conspicuous ceremony on the Fourth of July, North Korea launched a missile that had more than a technological purpose. It aimed to promote fear.

The test suggested that North Korean missiles can now reach Alaska. That does not mean the United States is now in North Korea’s nuclear range. Both the missile and the nuclear program appear to need further development before those dots can be connected. But with each new test, North Korea is clearly trying to send a message: With each passing day, its circles of destruction widen.

Yet six months ago, a different kind of message was sent – this time to North Korea. It came from the highest-level North Korean defector in years, and he offered an assessment perhaps as frightening as a missile test to Kim Jong-un’s regime.

“Kim Jong-un’s days are numbered,” said the diplomat, Thae Yong-ho.

Such pronouncements are not new. The collapse of the Kim dynasty has been forecast too many times to mention. Moreover, it is virtually impossible to confirm the credibility of Mr. Thae’s comments. Certainly, he is not an impartial judge.

But his words are intriguing. Why is Mr. Kim in trouble? Because, despite Kim’s best efforts to keep ironclad control of the economy, black markets are growing in new and more brazenly open ways, Thae says. And despite Kim’s best efforts to keep the rest of the world out, thumb drives with South Korean soap operas are making it through, Thae adds.

Kim’s control “can be held in place and maintained only by idolizing Kim Jong-un like a god,” Thae said.

Last year, an unprecedented North Korean research project confirmed what North Korean defectors had been saying for years: Many people in the country do not worship Kim.

“All but one of the … interviewees say people they know complain and makes jokes about the government,” said the study by Beyond Parallel. That “is an extraordinary number given the gravity with which the regime responds to criticism.”

While North Korea is attempting to present an expanding threat to the world, such reports suggest that it is also facing an expanding threat from within. They also suggest that, at a time when no military option seems remotely palatable, some of the most effective weapons against North Korea might be thumb drives and black-market hustlers.

A decade ago in Libya, Muammar Qaddafi was the brother leader, whose image stared from every street corner. The number of people who came to his compound to pay homage sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands. But then someone shared a social media post of injustice in Tunisia, and the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East. Mr. Qaddafi’s political cult crumbled.

Libya is not North Korea. The Kims have built their “hermit kingdom,” in ways that have allowed them to push cruelty, domination, and secrecy to extreme lengths. Tuesday’s missile test was, in essence, simply an attempt to expand that shadow.  

But the world is pushing back, too, usually in ways that seem much less potent than a ballistic missile. Yet even the smallest freedoms, squeezed in through the cracks of a totalitarian state, carry the seeds for change.