The southeastern United States is struggling back onto its feet following this month’s battering from two huge storms. Thankfully, the human toll from hurricanes Harvey and Irma was not as great as feared. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other government first responders have so far won plaudits for the speed and organization of initial aid deliveries.

But as can be said about the aftermath of so many important events, now the hard part begins. Rebuilding of some of the most damaged areas will take months, possibly years, as President Trump saw first-hand on Thursday during an inspection tour of Naples and other Florida cities. Lack of basic services creates continuing dangers, as the tragic, heat-related deaths at a Hollywood, Fla., nursing home showed.

America will face more of these crises as extreme weather appears to be on the increase and the built environment in harm’s way continues to expand. For FEMA, state and local responders, and planners the point is to learn from Harvey and Irma – as they learned from hurricane Katrina and superstorm Sandy – about better methods of prevention and revival.

“What we’re learning is that responding to disasters, as tragic as they are when they happen, is kind of the easy part,” says Gary Webb, professor and chair of emergency management and disaster science at the University of North Texas in Denton. “It’s that longer term recovery process . . . that’s the challenge we face locally and as a nation.”

Chris Aluka Berry/Reuters

Coby Cochran (l.) and her daughter Elizabeth Thomas lie on the bed in their FEMA-provided hotel room with a visitor in the aftermath of hurricane Harvey in Houston on Sept. 10.

So far at least 40,000 federal government personnel are directly involved in the response to this September’s one-two hurricane punch. Of those, about 2,600 are employees of FEMA, the fed’s main disaster response agency. As of Sept. 14, FEMA has provided states in the southeast with 6.6 million meals and 4.7 million liters of water, according to officials.

State and local responders provide the bulk of response manpower, however. In Harvey and Irma, semi-organized volunteer efforts such as the “Cajun Navy” have been a significant presence as well. That’s one of the new developments that helped make the overall response effective so far, says Dr. Webb.

“That’s a major shift in emergency management in this country. It’s more inclusive. They’re not just tolerating the presence of volunteers,” he says.

On the ground this can make a world of difference. Take the experience of Gail Elder and her friend Kathy Martin, evacuees from Tampa. Last week they pulled into an Alabama fairground with two dogs and little else. They figured they’d be sleeping in a car.

Wrong. A volunteer from a local church, Grandview Baptist, immediately came over to see how they were doing. Soon they had a brand-new tent, air mattress, and sleeping bags.

“Keep it or give it back, whatever you need to do,” the volunteer told them.

The response to the hurricanes has also been boosted in part by increased coordination among government entities themselves. Years of Department of Homeland Security exercises have strengthened links between federal agencies and local police departments.

Frank Bajak/AP

Salvador Cortez stands by debris in the front yard of his home in Houston on Sept. 9. Unable to afford an alternative, and awaiting a solution from FEMA, he is sleeping in his musty, flood-gutted home.

FEMA – which constitutes about 22 percent of the Department of Homeland Security budget – is the face of Washington’s involvement in the recovery. The agency is opening offices throughout the affected area to provide temporary housing and rebuilding funds. In the wake of the storms Congress quickly passed a bill providing $15 billion for such efforts.

 “I would give them credit for speed of action through both storms,” says Amy Liu, vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, referring to the overall federal response.

But much more will be needed. In terms of cash, the $15 billion might run out in a month. Total federal recovery costs could be $100 billion or higher.

“It is to be determined how quickly the second round of money will be provided, particularly in response to Irma,” says Ms. Liu.

Following the disaster of hurricane Katrina in 2005, the ability of agencies to coordinate on the dissemination of aid, and plans for transitioning to longer term recovery roles, are now much clearer, according to Liu. But the need to move quickly stretches beyond FEMA. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is an essential part of housing assistance and infrastructure redevelopment. The Department of Labor needs to step up to provide to provide quick flexible funds to pay to train local workers to fill huge gaps in the workforce doing debris removal and home repairs. With 100,000 damaged homes in Texas alone, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for anyone in the area who wants to work to do so.

The longer it takes for a family to return to their home, the longer it is until breadwinners go back to work and the local economy begins to recover.

“There are a lot of benchmarks to look for. When you are a family in an affected area, every day counts. Lack of attention, lack of aid, is felt day by day,” says Liu.

One difficult area where government may have performed well in the Harvey and Irma crisis was in evacuations. An improvement in the understanding of when and where to tell residents to flee may be one reason the death toll was not higher than it was. 

“We are getting better with hurricane evacuations. I would say our ability to use traffic and management and operations is much, much better than it was 20 years ago,” says Brian Wolshon, a professor of transportation engineering and an evacuation expert at Louisiana State University.

Evacuation decisions are made with incomplete information under extreme time pressure and with life-or-death consequences, points out Dr. Wolshon. In Houston, for instance, there was no evacuation order, and people hunkered down. That decision is up for debate, Wolshon says, but it’s worth pointing out that evacuation itself is dangerous. The last major evacuation of Houston resulted in more than 100 deaths. So far, the recorded death toll from hurricane Harvey is 70 people.

What the extreme flooding in Texas may indicate is that experts might work more on identifying areas of extreme vulnerability. That is a forecasting problem, Wolshon says: identifying what areas will flood to what point given assumed rainfall.

That’s a specificity emergency agencies can’t yet provide. But individuals can make that decision on their own, Wolshon adds. Evacuation is really a personal choice.

“If you know your area is a flood danger and you hear forecasts of lots of rain ... you don’t have to wait for an order,” he says.

Staff writer Patrik Jonsson contributed to this report.

Stephanie Keith/Reuters

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, delivers remarks in a UN Security Council meeting on North Korea on Sept. 11 in New York City.

The North Korean nuclear crisis has challenged the Trump administration and its formation of coherent and effective foreign policy like no other.

And like no other international issue, North Korea has demonstrated why nearly eight months into Donald Trump’s presidency, many are still wondering who is in charge of US foreign policy – and what its guiding vision is in the era of a president elected on a slogan of “America First.”

After President Trump’s promise of “fire and fury” over the North’s ever-more threatening long-range missile tests, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was forced to glumly reassure Americans that they could “sleep well.”

After the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, hailed unanimous approval in the Security Council of what she said were the toughest sanctions ever on North Korea, Trump this week contradicted his New York envoy, dismissing the diplomatic victory as “not a big deal” and adding that “those sanctions are nothing compared to what ultimately will have to happen.”

Many factors are contributing to a lingering sense of an ad hoc and chaotic foreign policy process, say diplomats, experts, and longtime observers of US foreign policy.

Among the factors are the upheaval – even in the administration’s short existence – in the foreign-policy team, and a secretary of State who has often seemed absent and who has shown no interest in using his high office to be the voice of American foreign policy.

Also important, say former diplomats in particular, is the administration’s perspective that the nation’s corps of diplomats and foreign-service officers, far from being the civilian counterparts of those defending the nation’s security in the military, instead constitute a “swamp” to be drained.

Not a chart, but a vortex

But above everything else, what explains the image of a scattered foreign policy with no clear guidelines directing it, these experts say, is that the man ultimately in charge is mercurial, runs hot and cold on issues, and doesn’t appear to have a set vision guiding his foreign-policy pronouncements.

“We’re dealing with something we haven’t seen before – a far less structured administration, out of which can come all sorts of things that are unfathomable, because it’s the chief executive who is the least disciplined of the group,” says Wayne White, a retired diplomat and specialist in Middle East intelligence who is now an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

“You get the sense,” he adds, “that rather than an administrative chart, what you have in this administration’s foreign-policy team is a vortex.”

The fault lies with the Oval Office and with the president’s lack of a “worldview” to guide the administration’s policymaking, says Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

“The question of foreign policy is a straightforward one. Most presidents – like them or not – have a guiding vision, what it is they stand for, and that signals to foreign countries what we will and won’t do and it forms the framework that guides the national security adviser and the secretary of State and others in the policymaking process,” Ms. Pletka says. “But I didn’t see any worldview after the first 100 days of this White House, and I don’t think there is one now.”

Matt Dunham/AP

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reaches out to begin a handshake with Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson at the end of their press conference after their meeting on Libya at Lancaster House in London on Sept. 14.

Some of Trump’s top advisers, notably Mr. Tillerson, have insisted to allies, for example, that “ ‘America First’ does not mean ‘America alone.’ ” But then why would the president choose the height of tensions with North Korea to savage South Korea’s trade deal with the US and threaten to nix it?

Or why make a point of traveling to Poland, a NATO ally on the frontlines of Europe’s tensions with Russia, to make a speech that asked if the West has the “will to survive” even as it downplayed the threat of Russian interference in Western elections, including in the US, as Trump did in July?

“Poland is about the last place you’d want to make that kind of statement, given the deep fear there of Russia,” says Mr. White. “But it leads to all kinds of doubts and insecurity and confusion about what US policy really is in places well beyond Poland.”

Other diplomatic experts say they do see the makings of an effective foreign-policymaking team in the Trump administration – as long as that team is not constantly blindsided by the president.

“I don’t agree with those who say there is no normalcy whatsoever” in the foreign-policy structure, says Peter Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

'Super-powered' team

What he sees taking shape is a “super-powered national security team” – comprised of Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and national security adviser H.R. McMaster – that he says has already demonstrated effective policymaking.

The Trump national security team is even showing better coordination and unity than did the Powell-Rumsfeld-Rice team that served President George W. Bush, says Dr. Feaver, who served as a special adviser on national security strategy in the Bush White House.

The team works well as long as the three are allowed to “be in charge and run things,” he says. Where things go awry, Feaver adds, is when Trump doesn’t like what the three come up with – or when he makes a spontaneous statement that contradicts the policy the three have crafted.

“The risk is that when the three powerhouses come up with a policy the president isn’t comfortable with – the best example to date is probably Afghanistan – it misfires,” says Feaver. He notes that an Afghanistan plan was first presented to Trump in March – but then was hashed out for another five months over the president’s distaste for the plan.

The other wild card the national security team has to deal with is Trump’s habit of tweeting or making off-the-cuff remarks in public that veer away from discussed policy. “Things can seem settled, and then a new unscripted statement from the president can drive policy in a new direction,” Feaver says.

But for many foreign policy experts, the picture of a strong three-man national security team obscures the problem they see of a weak secretary of State who has willingly ceded his role as voice to the world of US foreign policy.

Division of labor?

Tillerson’s focus on State Department reform – really a hefty downsizing – has won him suspicions among the department’s domestic and overseas staff and critics on Capitol Hill. Indeed, Congress seems unlikely to allow the reform plan, which was to be unveiled Friday, to ever fully see the light of day.

Tillerson’s absence from the public stage has opened the way for Ambassador Haley, a polished politician and former governor of South Carolina, to emerge as the administration’s strong voice on issues like North Korea. Some say it’s simply a neat division of labor between Tillerson and Haley given each one’s talents, but others say the US is not well-served by a secretary of State who does not have a strong global presence.

“Certainly it matters that we have a secretary of State who is perceived by friends and enemies alike as the chief representative of US foreign policy and who is capable of multitasking in his own job,” says Pletka.

Tillerson’s low profile and incessant rumors about a distant relationship with the president have many in the foreign policy community and the media waiting for the former ExxonMobil chief’s departure.

'Waiting for Godot'

But Feaver says that expectation fits a pattern of many diplomats and others in the foreign policy community waiting for the administration’s rocky initial months to settle down and yield a more conventional presidency, including a more traditional foreign-policymaking process.

“It’s something of a ‘Waiting for Godot’ kind of scenario,” he says, ticking off the many moments over the Trump campaign and then presidency when pundits and others predicted a shift to more normal operations.

“There’s a lot of talk and expectation, but what they’re waiting for never arrives.”

Christophe Ena/Reuters

France's President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during a press conference as part of his visit to the French Caribbean island of St. Martin after hurricane Irma on Sept. 12.

Remy Pichon joined tens of thousands on the streets of France this week to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s labor reform. They opened the first front in a battle whose outcome could reshape the French economy, or keep things largely as they already are.

Mr. Pichon’s positioning is clear. “We are here to protect a century of workers’ rights that we have earned,” says the laboratory technician, who missed a day of pay to march down the tree-lined boulevards of Paris.

But if Pichon's rhetoric, and the sea of placards, pins, and posters, is a familiar scene, even the most fervent protesters aren’t sure if the fight will follow the conventional playbook.

The strikes that started Tuesday – and will continue later this month to oppose Mr. Macron’s attempt to make hiring and firing more flexible, a goal that’s eluded his predecessors – were smaller, and narrower in scope, than previous protests. And even as Macron’s popularity has waned – and perhaps because of it – he appears to be looking beyond public opinion to prove that he’s the one who can finally liberalize France’s economy.

“I really think Emmanuel Macron is going ‘Thatcher-style’ on this,” says Thomas Guénolé, a professor of politics at Sciences Po in Paris. “That is why I think the social movement and political movement will defeat him only if they go for a long, tough mobilization.”

Charles Platiau/Reuters

Demonstrators in Paris hold placards with portraits of French President Emmanuel Macron and the slogan "Clear out" during a national strike and protest against the government's labor reforms on Sept.12.

Dr. Guénolé says all eyes need to stay focused on the street. “Will it or will it not be on fire? That’s the only question,” he says.

So far it is not. The front page of Wednesday’s Le Parisien read, “First round, Macron.”

Fulfilling promises

Pierre Gattaz, head of France’s small and medium-sized business federation, told foreign journalists this summer that he expected strikes to be smaller because Macron is carrying out campaign promises made during presidential and subsequent legislative elections, where his party won a large majority.

In short, Macron promised to move fast on labor reform to spur investment and reduce unemployment that has stood above 9 percent for nearly a decade. “He has been elected on a program that he explained for weeks and months,” Mr. Gattaz says, “so he has the legitimacy of the election.”

Perhaps more crucially, he also negotiated for weeks with unions over the summer to come up with proposals that ultimately kept two of the three biggest unions off the street Tuesday and the labor movement divided. “It puts the government in a better position,” says Philippe Frémeaux a, columnist at Economic Alternatives news magazine.

The CGT, the hard-line union at the center of French resistance to labor reform, said that 60,000 marched in Paris – compared to 100,000 who came out in the spring of 2016 to protest labor reform under François Hollande.

Derek Doyle, an electrician and member of the largest union, CFDT, which didn’t formally join the strikes Tuesday, says he came to protest anyway because he is worried about Macron’s determination. “It is harder with Macron, [his administration] wants to go fast,” he says.

Macron’s approval rating slipped to about 40 percent over the summer, and he will be under pressure to show that he can effect change despite his fragile victory.

Although he won the most votes in the first round of elections in April, it represented only 24 percent of the electorate. Many of his second-round supporters chose him because they feared a win by National Front candidate Marine Le Pen.

Macron doesn’t seem deterred. He provoked controversy ahead of the protests by saying he wouldn’t cede ground to “slackers.” He later stood by his words, saying he was referring to those who continuously stand in the way of reform, but it heightened the sense that he is aloof and arrogant.

Potential for backlash

Macron is expected to push through the reform by decree later this month, while two more protests are planned. On Wednesday, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said on TV that he was “listening” and “paying attention” to the street. But, he added, “the reform that we are putting in place was announced by the president at the time of his election.”

The government of Macron, who campaigned as a candidate neither on the “right” nor “left,” says the intention is not to blaze a liberal path like Ms. Thatcher did in Britain. He campaigned to protect the vulnerable while unleashing the country’s economic potential.

Yet while that drew him support from the right and left, he faces challenges keeping both happy. His political party comprises members across the political spectrum. “His majority in the National Assembly is made up of very different people,” says Mr. Frémeaux. “If there is too much dissent in the country about what he does, or promises, there may be some division within his majority.”

Pichon, the protester, dismisses the “centrist” agenda on offer. “He’s on the side of the bosses.”

“Why is it not possible to maintain our rights when we had them after World War II when the country was in ruins?” he asks. “There are no wars, no epidemics, and the rich have never been richer. If the people don’t resist, it’ll never stop.”

He admits this week has so far not been a “social explosion,” but says he believes it will take time to foment. “It’s a battle of wills,” he says.

Inside an airy room overlooking the Himalayas, Pampha Basel squints at a map scrawled out for her on a sheet of paper. Villagers stream into the room and drag their chairs around her, their new deputy mayor, and comment on the drawing. It shows the hike they take each day to collect safe drinking water.

They are Dalits, or “untouchables,” the lowest Hindu caste. For more than a decade, their water source was separate from that of higher-caste villages. They now use the same tap, but the women must trek to reach it, lugging jerry cans down a steep and slippery path cut through the mountain. The water is often speckled with dirt. The villagers hope Ms. Basel – a Dalit woman herself and one of more than 5,000 Dalit women recently elected to Nepal’s local government bodies under a new quota system – will use her clout to help them.

Nepal, a tiny Himalayan country tucked between India and China, now has one of the world’s largest gender quota systems, intended to swiftly increase the number of women in politics. Since the civil war between Maoist rebels and state forces ended in 2006, the government has adopted quotas that reserve seats for women and, in particular, women from disadvantaged caste and ethnic groups – like Basel. In 2007, quotas were enacted at the national level; this year, in the country’s first local elections in 20 years, they are being enacted for cities and districts. 

The local elections – held in three phases, ending Sept. 18 – are catapulting women into politics. These women, who range from activists and small business owners to laborers, homemakers, and teachers, want to reshape the social norms that have left their communities excluded for centuries.

Quotas are a controversial solution, with critics saying they propel women past more qualified male candidates. Yet, for the most part, the quotas here have been welcomed, and the elections have spurred hope of change. But the real challenge, women’s advocates say, comes after the ballots are turned in. Gender quotas guarantee women are elected, but experts say additional efforts can help them participate meaningfully once in office.

Ila Sharma, an election commissioner, says the government plans to train newly elected women for their positions. And after Nepal’s turbulent path to democracy, she believes the quotas are essential.

“Everybody – women, Dalits, minority groups, Muslims – they all have to be here,” she says, sitting in her office near a framed photo of President Bidhya Devi Bhandari, Nepal’s first female head of state. “Then only can we practice democracy.”

A leap in representation

Today, Nepal leads South Asia with the most women in parliament, and since May has elected 11,630 women to local government bodies, according to its Election Commission. But even with the quotas, women’s political representation still trails behind other equality indicators, like their access to education and paid work opportunities.

Discrimination also persists against Dalits, although the practice of treating them as “untouchable” has been formally banned. Dalits, who comprise about 13 percent of the population, are often denied entry into temples and the homes of higher castes. For Dalit women, the discrimination is even more acute. Most are illiterate and only finish primary school. They also face staggering levels of violence, from human trafficking to witchcraft accusations, particularly in rural and remote areas.

At a recent victory rally for Parbati Bisunke, a Dalit woman elected to her ward committee in western Nepal, her own supporters from higher castes refused to dab the customary good-luck powder on her forehead, the Nepali Times reported. That would have required they touch her.

This year’s local elections are the first since 1997; they were halted during Nepal’s conflict and ensuing political instability. They’re a step toward implementing its 2015 Constitution, which restructures the country as a secular, federal republic and requires that local, provincial, and federal elections be held by January 2018.

When the last local elections were held, just 20 percent of the winners were women. In the first two rounds of elections this spring, that number has leapt to 41 percent. The quotas require political parties nominate at least one woman for chief or deputy chief at the district, municipal, and village levels. On local councils, called ward committees, two out of four seats are reserved for a woman and a Dalit woman. Election officials expect 2,678 more women to be elected during the final phase of the polls Sept. 18.

Nepal’s political parties have nominated few women for mayors – a pattern many ascribe to sexism – and more frequently field female candidates for deputy mayors, who sit parallel to local judges and oversee mediations. On local councils, women have sway over development issues, like managing sanitation and health facilities.

The women’s responsibilities, like deciding how to dispense money for development projects, could yield major changes for Dalits, says Kala Swarnakar, the president of Nepal’s Feminist Dalit Organization.

“Dalit communities are left out because other castes never tell them these opportunities exist,” she says. “So if a Dalit woman is on the council, she can circulate information to her community.”

Now in power, Ms. Bisunke, Basel, and other female politicians say they want to use their platforms to fight untouchability and gender discrimination.

Laxmi Gautam, elected as deputy mayor of Itahari, has already set up a help desk for gender-based violence victims in her office. Since July, 45 girls and women have stopped by for information about where they can access services, she says. Namsara Nepali, elected to her ward committee in Gauriganga, says she wants to start income-generation projects for Dalit women and encourage them to pursue politics.

'I haven't spoken yet'

Each week in Lalitpur, Tulsi Pariyar, a Dalit woman who spends her days hawking vegetables on a dusty roadside, slides into a seat at her ward committee meetings. She listens to her fellow members debate the budget and scans the thick documents they pass her to read, frazzled over some words she doesn’t recognize. Sometimes they suggest ideas she disagrees with, but she says they also don’t ask her about her own, like using the budget surplus to start a sewing course for poor women in her neighborhood.

“I haven’t spoken yet,” she says on a recent afternoon, perched on a bed in the room she shares with her husband and two sons in Kathmandu. “But I’m still learning.”

Pampha Basel, a seasoned political activist with years of experience in the Maoist rebel movement, spotted a similar issue. At a crowded meeting, she stood up and introduced herself to a sea of other recently elected women. But many of the women flinched when asked to speak, mumbling out their own names and positions. Trainings will make them more assertive, she says.

Her concerns echo those of Nepal’s leading women’s groups. Many are scrambling to fund leadership trainings focused on enhancing women’s public speaking skills and policy knowledge.

This concern is pressing among Nepal’s Dalit women’s groups that say lower caste women face even more obstacles. Anjana Bishankhe, a former parliamentarian, says she and other Dalit women elected under quotas faced pushback from colleagues who said they didn’t deserve their positions. Only six out of 21 Dalit women elected to Nepal’s parliament said they spoke during sessions, according to interviews conducted by the Center for Dalit Women last year.

“If parliamentarians can’t even speak on their own issues, can we imagine some community groups elected to local bodies will take part in discussions?” says Tajendra Lama, the executive director of the Center for Dalit Women in Kathmandu, referring to female and Dalit candidates.

Changing perspectives

Drude Dahlerup, a professor at Stockholm University who studies gender quotas, believes capacity-building trainings are beneficial, but she usually starts her research with a different question.

“When we ask, ‘Are women qualified?’ we should also ask, ‘Are men qualified?’” she says, highlighting a perceived double standard.

In Nepal, political parties often question whether female politicians and women elected under quotas are competent enough to lead, adds Pranika Koyu, a feminist activist and poet. “What are we actually saying when we say women have to be ‘competent’?” she asks. “Is it experience? Is it education? Is it money? Is it family connections?”

Dr. Dahlerup says that helping women build skills shouldn’t eclipse the need to address the discrimination they face in male-dominated institutions. It’s critical that political parties – “the gatekeepers” – learn ways they can be inclusive toward women and minority groups, she says. These measures involve looking at the way government bodies operate, like how they can be friendlier toward women’s work and family schedules.

But it would also involve sensitivity trainings for political parties, an effort Dahlerup has yet to see any country embrace. She recounts the story of a Dalit woman elected to her village council in India who lingered outside the door of meetings for a year before joining. No one invited her into the room.

“If we only educate women,” Dahlerup says, “we’re failing to change the structure and institutions.”

Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP/File

Laborers transport sand from boats to the shore after excavating it the bed of River Yamuna in Allahabad, India, in 2007.

If you’re looking for a way to express something that’s staggeringly hard to count, you won’t find a more reliable metaphor than grains of sand.

There is indeed quite a bit of it – about 7.5 quintillion grains on Earth’s beaches and deserts, according to one estimate. But if you think that this would be sufficient to supply an ever-expanding global economy with all the concrete, asphalt, glass, and semiconductors it could possibly desire, think again.

Our consumption of sand is outpacing our understanding of the economics and environmental impacts of extracting, transporting, and consuming it, finds research published last Thursday in the journal Science. Out of the complexity of the global sand trade has emerged something of a butterfly effect, in which an economic decision in one place can wreak social and environmental havoc on the other side of the world. Using a holistic, interdisciplinary approach called telecoupling, the researchers’ analysis of the global sand trade opens a window into the global interconnection of human and natural systems.

“The demand is skyrocketing, and the supply is increasingly limited. And also the consequences, both the environmental and the socioeconomic impact, are enormous,” says Jianguo “Jack” Liu, director of Michigan State University’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability and a co-author of the paper.

Sand mafias and vanishing islands 

Modern society is literally built on sand. Most of our buildings and bridges are made with concrete, which consists mostly of sand and gravel. The same is true for the asphalt that covers our roads and parking lots. Glass, from window panes to eyeglass lenses to smartphone screens, is made by melting sand, and the semiconductors in our electronics come from heating silica sand. Another type of sand is increasingly used in hydraulic fracturing, where it is used to prop open cracks deep in the Earth for fossil fuel extraction. After air and water, sand is humankind’s most consumed natural resource.

Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle/AP

A worker sprays down piles of sand at the Superior Silica Sands mine in March in Kosse, Texas. Demand for sand is surging as oil and gas production in the state's Permian Basin is booming again.

The profits of this easy-to-get, hard-to-regulate material, whose trade is valued at $70 billion annually, have lured organized crime. In India and Bangladesh, “sand mafias” have been implicated in the murder of hundreds of people in recent years. In Indonesia, more than 20 islands have vanished since 2005 because of illegal sand mining for developments in Singapore. Illegal sand mining in Sri Lanka is thought to have worsened the effects of the 2004 tsunami. In addition to coastal erosion, sand mining is also fueling habitat destruction, water scarcity, and crop failures.

“This over-exploitation makes the local communities more vulnerable to natural hazards,” says Aurora Torres, a research fellow at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the paper’s co-author. Dr. Torres cites storm surges, food and water shortages, and other events that she says could “increase or create sociopolitical conflicts, and eventually displace entire populations.”

She notes that she is amazed at how little attention this issue receives from the international research community.

In the past, most sand was mined locally, but regional shortages and rising demand, driven in part by a construction boom in Asia, have transformed it into a global commodity. Singapore, for instance, imports its sand from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. India imports sand from Indonesia and the Philippines. And even the United Arab Emirates, having exhausted its sand resources on Dubai’s artificial islands, now buys its sand from Australia.

In February, members of Florida’s congressional delegation from both parties introduced a bill to repeal a law prohibiting the Sunshine State from importing sand from the Bahamas and other foreign sources.

A 2014 report from the United Nations Environment Programme found that the mining of sand and gravel “greatly exceeds natural renewal rates.”

“A large discrepancy exists between the magnitude of the problem and public awareness of it,” the report concludes. “The absence of global monitoring of [sand and gravel] extraction undoubtedly contributes to the gap in knowledge, which translates into a lack of action.”

A tragedy of the commons

Telecoupling, a way of looking at the interactions between human systems and natural systems and their effects around the globe, aims to fill this gap. Developed over the past decade by Dr. Liu, it examines and quantifies five interconnected components – systems, agents, flows, causes, and effects – so that it can address the socioeconomic and ecological impacts all at once. It has been used to gain insight into a number of complex issues related to sustainability, from explaining how increased demand for meat in Asia drives deforestation in Brazil, to how goat farming in the Bahamas can affect populations of Kirtland’s warblers, North America’s rarest songbird.

“What telecoupling is really about is human beings are becoming a major force in the world,” says Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist whose 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” sounded the alarm about humanity’s impact on limited natural resources. “Can you imagine we’ve gotten to the point where really serious scientists are worrying about the supply of sand? I mean, give me a break.”

Telecoupling research also reveals what Liu sees as a vicious cycle in our resource consumption and development. "The more you consume, the more you want to develop even in distant places, until there is nothing left," he adds in an email. "That leads to the tragedy of the commons."

Sand may be a metaphor for abundance, but it is an equally powerful symbol of impermanence. Even Dr. Ehrlich, who has been warning of a population-driven societal collapse for the past five decades, sees potential alternatives to an economic mode of production that demands unrelenting growth. 

“The world has had a very successful economic system for a couple hundred years. But we modern human beings have been around for 200,000 years,” he says. “We need to design a different economic system.”

“[Whoever] thought we’d run out of sand?” Ehrlich asks. “It’s just nuts.”

Reuters

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker addresses the European Parliament during a debate on The State of the European Union in Strasbourg, France, Sept.13.

A good reason to watch the struggles of the European Union is that much of the world is trying to imitate its successes. How has the EU been able to link half a billion people across more than two dozen countries for so long? In a Sept. 13 speech, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, gave the simplest answer yet: “Our values are our compass.”

By values, he meant only a few: freedom, rule of law, and equality, as opposed to oppression, personal rule, and what he called second-class citizenship. The EU was set up in postwar Europe to prevent a recurrence of such practices. Now its purpose is less defensive and more demonstrative.

“For me, Europe is more than just a single market. More than money, more than the euro. It was always about values.” Mr. Juncker said in a State of the Union speech.

Over the past decade, the EU has had to keep falling back on its ideals to survive economic and political storms, such as Greece’s ruinous debt, a refugee influx, and Poland’s attack on its independent judiciary. The latest is Britain’s planned exit by 2019. The loss of the continent’s second-largest economy may actually help the EU. More than 80 percent of a shrunken EU will be using the euro as a common currency, allowing for easier integration and trust-building. “Europe was not made to stand still. It must never do so,” Juncker said.

The EU, he might have said, is a giant geopolitical experiment in creating linkages across diverse countries. At first, the EU may have bonded in trade and hard infrastructure. But it has really endured difficult times by practicing the “soft power” of unifying principles. This lesson is now more relevant than ever as a number of powerful nations are competing with visions to connect the Eurasian landmass.

The most ambitious plan is China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which aims to build a “silk road” for the 21st century, both on land and sea. Russia has launched its own infrastructure vision through the Eurasian Economic Union. Turkey has its Vision 2023 plan to link its economy with railroads across Central Asia. Japan is using its technological expertise to create land and maritime corridors across Asia. Iran, South Korea, and the 10 nations of Southeast Asia have similar visions of being the centers of interconnecting transport and other economic activity.

What may be missing in these transborder plans are the binding values that go beyond material interests and institutional power. The EU has learned by hard experience that its “soft” ideals provide the links that endure the occasional frictions between nations. That is why a speech by a well-seasoned EU leader like Juncker comes with lessons for much of the world.