The Trump administration’s latest move on environmental policy may sound like a familiar tussle: Green activists want to retain ambitious standards to reduce tailpipe emissions, while free-market advocates say automakers are saddled with onerous and unnecessary regulations.

Both those elements are there in the story line. The Trump administration is moving to ease up on automotive fuel-economy regulations, after the auto industry requested a rethink.

But look deeper, and this isn’t the same old regulatory clash from yesteryear.

First, many in the industry want only modest changes to make the rules more flexible, rather than the more major rollback apparently on the way from the Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Ford Motor Co. last week cautioned the Trump administration against going too far.

Second, the stakes are much higher than a mere ideological duel. The overwhelming consensus among climate scientists is that global warming represents an urgent threat to humanity, and that addressing the human causes must include big changes in the transportation sector. (That helps explain Ford’s position.)

Meanwhile, the environmentalist side of this debate has some hard facts to face up to. Even if former President Barack Obama's fuel efficiency target – an average of 54.5 miles per gallon for US car fleets by 2025 – were to remain in place, a rapid transition toward electric or “zero-emission” vehicles is far from guaranteed.

Sales of those vehicles are rising but still very small. The major US producer of those all-electric cars, Tesla, has stumbled out of the gate with a model aimed at a mass audience. And the path toward any true “decarbonization” of the transportation sector is fraught with hurdles, such as making electric vehicles convenient to use, producing electric power increasingly without fossil fuels, and figuring out how to decouple economic prosperity from ever-rising miles traveled.

"This [2025 target] is one point along a long trajectory. Even if we did hit the 2025 target, we can't slow down beyond that point," says Dave Cooke, an automotive expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group urging action to address climate change. From charging stations to power-grid enhancements to "smart growth" aimed at more walkable communities, "there's got to be a much more fundamental shift on the infrastructure side of things."

This doesn't mean that corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards are unimportant. Many experts say the industry is capable of hitting the target finalized at the very end of the Obama administration, thanks to things like lighter materials and more efficient gas-powered engines.

Slipping to 36 m.p.g.? 

The standards also help promote zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), such as electric cars. But those standards alone won’t answer the challenge posed by climate change.

In fact, under the complex CAFE system in which carmakers can get credits for things like more efficient air conditioning, even keeping the Obama administration rules in place wouldn’t mean new-car fleets would actually average 54.5 m.p.g. by 2025.

“We're actually on track to have 36 miles per gallon,” says Varun Sivaram, an energy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “Taming the Sun,” a new book on renewable energy.

On Monday, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said current CAFE standards are “too high,” and charged the Obama administration with “politically charged expediency” when it cut an evaluation process short in a bid to lock in its standards ahead of the change in administrations.

He also said he would reexamine the waiver that for years has allowed California to set its own alternative standard (which other states can voluntarily follow).

“Cooperative federalism doesn’t mean that one state can dictate standards for the rest of the country,” he said in a statement Monday. “EPA will set a national standard for greenhouse gas emissions that allows auto manufacturers to make cars that people both want and can afford — while still expanding environmental and safety benefits of newer cars.”

The waiver arose because California was pursuing its own air-quality regulation years before the federal Clean Air Act. Today, roughly one-third of Americans live in states that opted for California’s stringent standards.

World weighs in 

The rise of ZEVs has some global momentum, thanks in part to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, in which the vast majority of nations agreed to step up efforts to curb carbon emissions.

It’s not just environmental groups calling for concerted action. At Ford, CEO Jim Hackett and executive chairman Bill Ford don’t have a problem with a regulatory nudge toward cleaner cars. “Today, our planet faces increasing challenges [including] climate change,” they wrote on March 27.

They asked not for a rollback of standards but “for one set of standards nationally, along with additional flexibility to help us provide more affordable options for our customers.”

Although improving fuel economy costs carmakers some money (adding modestly to the price of new cars), it also saves consumers money in lower gas-pump prices – or by substituting electric power for gasoline.

“The stringent standards still provide benefits in excess of costs” for the whole economy, even when oil prices are low, Mr. Sivaram says, citing research he did in 2015 with colleague Michael Levi.

Legally, the administration may face a legal test over the standards – one that gets steeper the more it attempts to roll back the rules.

“This is certain to go to the courts; it will be a significant legal battle,” says Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law. And “the more aggressive the EPA is in reducing the stringency of the existing federal standards, the more difficult it will be for the EPA to justify that evaluation.”

Uncertainty rising

Court challenges could come along two fronts. Opponents could sue to stop any loosening of the rules, possibly citing the EPA’s own finding that greenhouse gases threaten the climate. Also, California could sue if the EPA tries to take away its waiver.

The risk of a years-long legal battle is unsettling for carmakers, leaving them to decide how much to back away from efforts to develop and sell cleaner cars.

“If this doesn’t get resolved for a while, then that really creates a lot of uncertainty,” says David Gerard, a professor of economics at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis. “If they had a choice between the current rules and not finding out for 10 years, they’d probably choose the current rules.”

Of course, the industry isn’t monolithic and thus strategies vary. Tesla is betting solely on the future of electric cars – but has been challenged in trying to ramp up production of its newest sedans. Toyota has met a good many of the emissions goals with its Prius hybrid strategy.

Some other major car companies are rushing out electric models simply to comply with federal rules, says Bruce Belzowski, managing director of the automotive Futures group of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Even Nissan, an early innovator with its all-electric Leaf, seems to have fallen back from cutting-edge innovation, he adds. “It makes you wonder about what their strategy is.”

The rise of self-driving cars throws an added wild card into the mix, says Mr. Cooke at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. It’s not clear if it’ll reduce or expand the overall number of miles traveled – a distinction that matters a lot for total vehicle emissions.

It’s an example he says, of how fuel-economy rules are only one piece of a larger puzzle.

“The industry is global in nature at this point ... but so is the problem of climate change,” Cooke says.  And “we are a culture built around the automobile in large respects.”

Mark Wallheiser/AP

Florida Gov. Rick Scott signs the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act in the governor's office at the Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla., on March 9. Among the measures, it raised the legal age to buy a gun to 21, limited high capacity magazines, and banned bump stocks.

Jake Decardenas, a Daytona Beach 20-year-old, may not have had his gun taken away. But his attempt to buy a BB gun for his younger brother at Walmart the other day failed.

He is one among tens of thousands of young Floridians who had their gun rights curtailed in March in a state that, to a large extent, has defined the modern American gun rights movement.

For Mr. Decardenas, the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland has prompted a personal reconsideration: notably that it is important to him that the state restrict gun purchasing more – even though that may drive some purchases underground.

"I'm not sure restricting guns for people my age is going to help, but it could," he says. "On some level, it makes sense."

Polls and interviews suggest Decardenas is not an outlier when it comes to being open to new restrictions. The Parkland tragedy jarred many Floridians. The state is at the heart of America's gun movement, with booming gun manufacturing, liberal gun laws, and a cultural reverence for the Second Amendment.

But the Parkland shooting – and the election of Donald Trump – is subtly changing the political dynamics even on the Gun Coast, where nearly 700 gun manufacturers hold licenses to build custom weaponry. Florida has long been a testing ground for expansion of gun rights. With the gun industry facing its first serious headwinds in two decades, experts say shifts in perception and policy in Florida could, once again, lead the way.

"Florida has been the petri dish for a lot of pro-gun legislation that has blossomed [here] and then been transplanted to other states," says Republican lobbyist John "Mac" Stipanovich, who goes to work at the Tallahassee capitol building armed with a concealed 9 mm pistol.

Given what is happening here in Florida, that could mean that the NRA "has reached the end of its rope," he says.

Indeed, Florida's own high-schoolers launched the national movement that has marched right over the expected script in America's gun debate, with several million protesters taking part in more than 800 March for Our Lives events on March 24. And, in the wake of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, some Floridians are now seriously mulling whether, after years of loosening rules on gun possession and use, the US has overshot the bounds of the Second Amendment, which guarantees a "well-regulated" militia that, according to the US Supreme Court, extends to individual gun owners.

For one, the post-Parkland soul-searching pushed Florida's Republican lawmakers, 91 percent of whom enjoyed an A rating from the NRA, to pass a gun control package that went beyond symbolism, including raising the minimum age of purchase from 18 to 21, instituting a three-day waiting period, and banning so-called bump stocks.

Lynne Sladky/AP/FILE

Jorge Corbato, owner of Nebulous Ordnance, works on shortening the barrel of an AR-15 rifle, Tuesday, April 9, 2013, in Miami. Mr. Corbato is a gun manufacturer who custom builds AR-15 rifles, services guns, and restores historic pieces for museums and collectors. Since the Sandy Hook school shootings in Newtown, Conn., Corbato says the supply for components needed to build the AR-15 has gone down, while prices have gone up.

Over the long term, that shift may be limited in scope. Yet facing midterm elections  in November that could hinge on gun control, Florida's shifting stance means its leading-edge work in spreading a gun rights ideology over the past two decades may now become more synonymous with a broader reining-in of how – and even which – guns are sold and used in the US.

Among the states that have passed gun-control laws in the weeks since the Parkland massacre, Florida's measures were both the largest and the only ones passed by a Republican-led legislature and signed by a Republican governor. Other states, such as Washington and Oregon, also passed new legislation that banned bump stocks and made it harder for a person with a restraining order to buy a gun, respectively.

In some ways, the shift in Florida is the saga of a Southern culture confronting some of its most deeply-held beliefs and traditions – and, in some cases, changing them.

According to a recent national poll by Public Policy Polling, 64 percent of respondents supported banning assault-style weapons, including 49 percent of Republicans. Forty percent of Republicans rejected the idea outright. The US had an assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004.

Through her statewide polling at the University of South Florida, veteran Florida-watcher Susan MacManus says those attitudes are reflected in Florida, as well.

"Florida is split in two: the northern piece, where guns are entertainment and food, and urban areas, where they are about [protecting oneself from] violence," says Professor McManus. "The change among gun owners now, especially women, is that they no longer believe that the average American needs to have a military-level assault weapon."

That shift has been accentuated as gun manufacturers in the US and Florida are experiencing what could be called "peak gun."

The 'gun coast'

Port Orange lies in the heart of Florida's easterly "Fun Coast." "Gun coast" is equally fitting. Gun culture bumper stickers like "We the People 2.0" and "Assault Life" – a play on the coastal "Salt Life" meme, but with a silhouette of an AR-15 – are fairly common.

The "gun coast" is an amalgam of attitudes, beliefs and culture that mirror the rest of Florida. There are more than 1.8 million concealed-carry permit-holders in the state, a trend leader as such permits have exploded to more than 15 million in the US. And Florida pioneered the "stand your ground" movement that removed the duty to retreat from conflict that threatened bodily harm. Twenty-three other states – from New Hampshire to Arizona – followed suit.

The gun business has also exploded under Gov. Rick Scott, quadrupling since 2009 to 691 manufacturers across the state. The coastal counties – Broward, Brevard, and Volusia among them – lead the way.

Florida "is often the first place the NRA pursues specific gun rights protections," former ACLU attorney David Cole writes in "Engines of Liberty."

But given what Mr. Stipanovich calls "atmospherics" around the role of the Second Amendment in American life, it has also been the place where the limits of gun rights have been defined by interpersonal violence.

Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teen who committed no crime, was killed here in 2012 by a resident named George Zimmerman, setting off a national debate about race, guns, and "stand your ground" laws. The state saw the Orlando Pulse shooting in 2016 – at the time the worst mass shooting in America. That was followed by a mass killing at Fort Lauderdale Airport, and, now, the Parkland massacre, where 17 high school students and teachers were killed by a former student who attacked the building with an AR-15, the technology for which has been pioneered in part by skilled Florida machinists.

Some Floridians, including a ropy "half-Sicilian, half-Cherokee" native named Heather Pignato, believe the guns are necessary beyond self-defense – to defense of nation in a constitutional crisis.

"The citizenry has to have equal firepower," says Ms. Pignato. "I am no fan of government. That's how you keep it in check."

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Heather Pignato, breaking down her flea market stand in Port Orange, Fla., on March 28. Ms. Pignato says she is a firm supporter of the Second Amendment as a check on government.

But despite such antigovernment attitudes – low taxes and expansive gun rights go hand-in-hand here – the combination of a growing body count and vulnerable people like high school students speaking out have given many Floridians pause, says Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

"Frankly, [what's happening in Florida] fits into a huge historical challenge," says Dr. Lankford, author of a 2015 study called "Mass Shooters, Firearms, and Social Strains: A Global Analysis of an Exceptionally American Problem." "This is bigger than just guns and just America. We started with sticks and stones and we've continued to improve the technology of killing ever since. What do you do about that when one person composes a bigger threat to lots of people as technology becomes more sophisticated? There has to be some sort of limit to that."

'I'm tired of the politics'

At a manufacturing space in a Deland Airport industrial park, Jim Jusick's Tactical Machining was spinning out millions of dollars worth of weapons during the Obama years.

He was an "80 percent" purveyor. That means his shop produced the "receivers" that make up the "actual part that goes boom" in a gun, as Mr. Jusick puts it.

By assembling the last 20 percent of the gun themselves, owners are not legally required to have a serial number. In that way, Jusick helped pioneer how to create a legal but untraceable weapon, that had the bonus of being preferred by soldiers the world over.

The machining shops, usually set up in airport industrial parks, have names like Kel-Tec, SCCY, and Knight's Armament in Titusville, which advertises a "commercial" rifle with a "drop-in, two-stage trigger ... enabling surgical speed shooting at close range."

Florida's gun-buying more than doubled from about 350,000 in 2005 to about 885,000 a year by 2016, leading an American trend.

But after revving up manufacturing in anticipation of a Hillary Clinton presidency and facing, under Trump, a "hyper-saturated" market, demand has plunged. The iconic gunmaker Remington Arms recently filed bankruptcy.

Smaller manufacturers are even more vulnerable says Jusick. "The black rifle type market has basically been destroyed," he says.

Once a rising star among Florida's prolific gunmakers, Jusick has left the trade and his old shop behind. He now machines custom boat propellers.

"I'm tired of the politics, the constant highs and lows," says Jusick, a former police officer and SWAT team member. "Things have definitely shifted. Now you've got the president supporting some of this crap. It is very disheartening to a lot of conservatives ... who will now say, 'Why should I even bother to vote?' "

The national implications of gun control in Florida

From her office in Tallahassee, Marion Hammer, the NRA's most powerful lobbyist, finds herself in an unfamiliar position in the "gunshine state": on the defensive.

The septuagenarian's massive get-out-the vote list has steered politics in Florida for decades, with legislators clamoring to sign onto the bills she has written. For her work advancing constitutional freedoms she has received plaudits from Mr. Cole, the civil liberties advocate. She wrote the state's Stand Your Ground law.

 In 2016, Hammer suffered a small defeat when GOP lawmakers agreed to beef up the stand your ground law, but not before removing a section of Hammer's bill that would have remunerated those who claimed self-defense in a shooting but still had to go through the legal process to be found not guilty.

That small act of legislative defiance came into sharper focus this year as Ms. Hammer failed to stop the gun control package. Instead of turning to legislators, she turned to lawyers to comb the language. Florida's gun control package "has national implications," she told the Tampa Bay Times. She did not respond to a request for an interview with the Monitor..

That dynamic leaves especially Republicans struggling to find a middle ground between a pro-Second Amendment base and an increasingly diverse electorate, caused both by immigration and the Gen X and Millennial generations, which now make up 47 percent of Florida voters.

The debate will rage into the primaries and general election, with national implications. Governor Scott is expected to announce his candidacy for the Senate, at a time with both Republicans and Democrats coalescing around gun control as a campaign issue and a razor-thin Republican majority in the Senate.

"The races are big and Florida is of course very purple, where statewide elections hang on a knife's edge – 10,000 votes here or there – and the thing that may be changing is the situation in which the Republicans might be hoisted by their own petard in 2018," says Stipanovich, the Republican lobbyist. "It is intriguing and perhaps a little bit of poetic justice: having fostered, enabled, and exploited [the gun culture], they are now stuck with it."

'I voted for Scott. I never will again.'

Outside a Port Orange gun-assembly plant with a gun shop storefront, a tall Trump voter named Rick agrees to talk, under one condition: No last name, given his concern that the new atmosphere could get his name "pinged" if it shows up in a newspaper article.

He says he wouldn't put a "gun grab" outside the bounds of liberal activists, who he sees as licking their chops at Florida's new openness toward gun control.

The gun control concessions, he is convinced, will be short-lived. But he admits to feeling the ground shift. His connections to the Republican Party are rapidly fraying.

President Trump's hemming and hawing on gun control reform struck gun rights advocates as weakening their cause. Scott's decision to sign the gun control package stung. That, plus what he sees as a Republican retreat on abortion issues, led to a decision by Rick.

"I voted for Scott. I never will again," he says. "And I just went out to the driveway last night and scratched the 'Trump/Pence' sticker off my truck bumper."

Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters/File

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the ex-wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela, smiles as she arrives for the 54th National Conference of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Dec. 16, 2017. Ms. Madikizela-Mandela, a leading anti-apartheid activist in her own right, died Monday in Johannesburg.

As South African universities erupted in protests over the rising cost of tuition in late 2015, it was hard not to see the echoes of the country’s past in the young demonstrators’ raised fists and fearless clashes with authority. And the students themselves took that history to heart, conjuring up the names of the liberation heroes who inspired their fight.

It was people like Mandela, they said, who taught them that the world doesn’t always bend towards justice – sometimes you have to twist it that way yourself.

But the students’ Mandela wasn’t Nelson, the peacemaker and father of their so-called “Rainbow Nation.” It was Winnie, the unapologetically angry activist to whom he was once married, who never shied away from telling South Africans that she believed their beloved story of racial reconciliation was a fiction.

“To me, it was a myth from the beginning,” she said to a reporter last year. “The rainbow color does not have black…. So it was really a facade that we were totally free, we are not.”

Among young South Africans, who had grown up in an increasingly unequal society, statements like that held deep resonance. At Wits University in Johannesburg, student protesters waved signs proclaiming themselves “Children of Winnie,” and at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, activists went so far as to rename the campus administration building “Winnie Mandela House.”

For those students and many others, Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela, who died Monday in Johannesburg, embodied both the rage of being a black South African under apartheid and the biting disappointment, for many, of being a black South African after it.

Unlike Nelson Mandela, whom she divorced in 1996, Madikizela-Mandela remained until the end of her life publicly bitter about South Africa’s dark history and the shadow it cast over the country’s present. Meanwhile, she openly and repeatedly refused the roles that same history tried to cast her in – as the mother of a nation, as the moral compass of a liberation struggle, and finally, as an aging hero quietly fading into the past.

“She was independent. She spoke her mind. She wasn’t scared of anything or anyone,” says Sithembile Mbete, a political scientist at the University of Pretoria. “In a South Africa where black women are the lowest rung on the hierarchy, she defied white supremacy and white patriarchy, but also black patriarchy too.”

“I was not going to bask in his shadow and be known as Mandela’s wife,” Madikizela-Mandela wrote in her prison memoir, “491 Days.” “I said ... ‘I am going to form my own identity because I never did bask in his ideas.’ ”

And indeed, Mandela’s shadow she was not. The first black social worker at South Africa’s largest hospital, Baragwanath, she was already an activist when, in 1957, she locked eyes with a young lawyer with kind eyes and fiery politics at a bus stop. 

Their whirlwind romance was built on a shared passion for revolution. But in 1964, Mr. Mandela was sentenced to life in jail for conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government – leaving Madikizela-Mandela alone to carry on their fight, and their young family.

As Mr. Mandela languished in prison, he faded into a symbol of the anti-apartheid cause.

“Ma Winnie,” on the other hand, was its living embodiment – broadcast again and again into the world’s living rooms as she delivered fiery speeches and tussled with apartheid police outside the couple’s Soweto home. (“What are you doing here killing our people?” she demands of a baby-faced white apartheid policeman in one famous clip. “I didn’t know about it,” he mumbles back.)

Nelson Mandela “was an old photograph to us,” says Trevor Dhliwayo, an activist who grew up in Soweto. “But as for her, she was the movement. She was always here.” 

In May 1969, she was dragged from the home she shared with her two young daughters and spent 491 days in solitary confinement under the country’s antiterrorism law. That experience, she later wrote, was “what changed me, what brutalized me so much that I knew what it is to hate.” Later, she was confined for nearly a decade to a bleak township deep in South Africa’s rural hinterlands, where police twice set fire to her house.

By the time she returned home to Johannesburg in 1985, her frustration was sharply palpable.

“This is now the right time to take your country. We shall use the same language the [whites] are using against us,” she said in a 1986 speech. “We have no arms, we have stones, and we have boxes of matches. With our necklaces we will liberate this country.”

The final statement was particularly ominous – the practice of necklacing was to throw a gasoline-soaked tire around someone’s neck and set it on fire, commonly used to kill black South Africans who were seen as turncoats. Three years later, a group of violent vigilantes who were working as informal bodyguards for Madikizela-Mandela slit the throat of a 14-year-old activist named Stompie Moeketsi, who they claimed was an informer for the apartheid government. She denied responsibility, but was convicted of kidnapping, though her jail sentence was later reduced to a fine.

When her husband finally emerged from prison in 1990, they grasped hands as they marched, fists raised, from the Cape Town prison. But the chasm between the lives they had led over the preceding 27 years quickly became evident.

As he preached the need for reconciliation and dialogue, she told an American talk show host she was prepared to “go back to the bush and take up arms” if discussions with the white government went sour. The two separated two years later.

In the years that followed, Madikizela-Mandela weathered new scandals, including fraud charges that led to her resignation from leadership positions within the ruling African National Congress.

But for many here, the impatience and disappointment she carried into South African democracy was far more relatable than her ex-husband’s insistence on forgiveness and reconciliation.

“Mandela let us down," she said in a 2010 interview. “Economically, [black South Africans] are still on the outside.”

And for many South African women in particular, she was an icon – a woman who had slashed her own path at a time when it was largely expected that female comrades would hang back and play a supporting role in the country’s liberation.  

“She was the original badly behaved woman,” says Ms. Mbete.

Among many observers, particularly outside South Africa, Madikizela-Mandela’s connections to apartheid-era violence tarnished that legacy of leadership. Indeed, there was a sharp dissonance between the throngs of mourners who gathered at her Soweto home Monday and Tuesday and the way she appeared on the pages of many international newspapers. Reuters called her a “ruthless ideologue,” and The Guardian’s obituary declared, “rarely can there have been someone who was called to greatness and yet failed that calling as decisively.”

She could be brutal – but it was apartheid that shaped that brutality, many South Africans argue.

“I think that South Africans see her in her full context and her full complexity,” Mbete says. Because the struggle against apartheid was an armed one, “there are very few of our heroes that are not linked to somebody’s death, that are not connected in some way to terrible violence.”

For instance, she notes, the last white president of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, presided over some of apartheid’s bloodiest years. And at the end of it, she says, “he got a Nobel Peace Prize. So it isn’t hard for people here to feel there is a double standard being applied to Ma Winnie.”

“I don’t think she wanted to be worshiped and I don’t believe we should see our leaders that way,” says Mr. Dhliwayo, the activist, standing in front of her home in Soweto Tuesday morning. “But you must understand that at that time we were living in a battle zone. And for us, she was on the front lines fighting for our freedom.”

In recent years, Madikizela-Mandela herself had considered her place in history. As the student protest movement heated up in late 2015, she met two leaders, Shaeera Kalla and Nompendulo Mkhatshwa. As TV cameras huddled around the three women, she offered them a pithy piece of advice. 

“Revolutions, you must always remember, always consume their heroes.”

Noble Ingram/The Christian Science Monitor

Fort Point Channel in Boston, Mass., March 19, 2018. The city has plans to build a string of water-absorbent parks along the channel that would help mitigate the effects on low-lying areas of the city of more frequent flooding caused by rising sea levels. As outlined in its "Climate Ready Boston" report, the parks would double as appealing public spaces in times of non-flooding and would be connected by pedestrian bridges, Marshlands, and artificial islands.

Boston’s Fort Point Channel is a dreary corner of an otherwise rapidly beautifying city. In the shadow of the glittering financial district, this thin canal lined with aging concrete factories could easily pass for the setting in a Charles Dickens novel. It’s also low-lying and right on the water – and that’s a problem. In 2018, record high tides brought on by nor’easters in January and March inundated the area several times with icy stormwater.

But last fall, Boston Mayor Martin Walsh announced plans for a network of public parks along the channel that could revitalize the waterway. The sloping banks of this grassy installation would serve as a catchment, protecting nearby neighborhoods from floodwater. The idea is an extension of a broader initiative, Climate Ready Boston.

American cities typically dredge rivers and build concrete walls along waterfronts to stem rising tides. But this so-called gray infrastructure can be unsightly, costly to maintain, and inflexible, says Kimberly Gray, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University. Severe flooding is on the rise in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As a result, urban planners from Boston to Houston to Milwaukee are increasingly considering transforming valuable waterfront real estate into climate-adaptable natural greenways.

“There are a number of powerful and necessary forces that are saying we need to make infrastructure improvements, particularly under these conditions of climate change and extreme events, and green infrastructure provides a very economically savvy way of dealing with it,” says Professor Gray. 

The issue of rebuilding infrastructure generally draws a lackluster response from taxpayers, Gray says. But open wetlands and flood plains are aesthetically appealing and provide opportunity for recreation. At the planned Fort Point Channel Park in Boston, for instance, residents will be able to ride bikes and walk along the grassy waterfront when water levels are low. Wildlife, too, will benefit from the presence of natural ecosystems.

In Houston, even before hurricane Harvey’s record rainfalls, the city regularly saw its system of bayous overflow, says John Jacob, director of the Texas Coastal Watershed Program at Texas A&M University. Most neighborhoods here were built on low-lying prairies, and now nearly 40 percent of local flood plains house commercial or residential buildings, according to Dr. Jacob’s research. 

But a new effort seeks to restore some of the city’s natural waterfront. The Bayou Greenways 2020 initiative has purchased more than 3,000 acres of land to develop linear parks. The goal, according to the Houston Parks Board, which oversees the project, is to bring usable green space back into the heart of Houston. Revitalizing the region’s natural hydrological system can also aid the absorption of floodwaters, notes Jacob. And building these parks challenges the notion that urban development and nature are incompatible. 

“It’s a tremendous step toward getting to where we see these bayous as amenities rather than threats,” Jacob says.

But to fully achieve sustainable development across the country much more green infrastructure will be needed, and quickly, says Gray. “As we go forward, we’re finding increased urbanization, increased impervious areas, and more storms. Altogether, that is a formula for disaster,” Gray says.

Milwaukee is working to avert such disasters. In July 2017, the city announced plans to develop sewage and stormwater treatment projects using green infrastructure. The projects range from the expanding rain gardens to the redevelopment of natural wetlands along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Flooding has historically plagued the Great Lakes city, and runoff from heavy rainfall has carried toxic sewage into the region’s rivers and streams. Through green infrastructure development, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District plans to capture and hold 740 million gallons of water every time it rains by 2035. 

For other cities considering taking a lead from the likes of Milwaukee, it’s a matter of approach, according to Annalisa Onnis-Hayden, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University. “Welcome the water, but find a way to use those spaces as mitigation. It looks a lot better than building walls around the city.”

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

With those nine words, HAL-9000, the sentient computer controlling the Jupiter-bound Discovery One, did more than just reveal his murderous intentions. He intoned a mantra for the digital age.

In the 50 years since the US premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” virtually everyone who has used a computer has experienced countless HAL moments: “an unexpected error has occurred,” goes the standard digital non-apology. The machine whose sole purpose is to execute instructions has chosen, for reasons that are as obscure as they are unalterable, to do the opposite.

There’s something about HAL’s bland implacability that makes him such an enduring symbol of modernity gone awry, and such a fitting vessel for our collective anxiety about an eventual evolutionary showdown against our own creations.

“HAL is the perfect villain, essentially...,” says John Trafton, a lecturer in film studies at Seattle University who has taught a course on Stanley Kubrick through the Seattle International Film Festival. “He’s absolutely nothing except for a glowing eye.... Essentially we’re just projecting our own fears and emotions onto HAL.”

HAL’s actual screen time is scant, beginning an hour into the nearly three-hour film and ending less than an hour later. And yet, during that interlude, his personality eclipses those of the film’s humans, whom Roger Ebert described in his 1968 review as “lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum.”

While the film’s human characters joylessly follow their regimens of meals, meetings, exercise routines, and birthday greetings, we see HAL, whose his name stands for “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer,” expressing petulance, indecisiveness, apprehension, and at the end, remorse and dread.

It’s this blending of human emotionality with mathematical inflexibility that some experts find troubling. Human biases have a way of creeping into code for mass-produced products, giving us automatic soap dispensers that ignore dark skin, digital cameras that confuse East Asian eyes with blinking, surname input fields that reject apostrophes and hyphens, and no shortage of other small indignities that try to nudge us, however futilely, into the drab social homogeneity of Kubrick’s imagined future.

“One of the things that makes HAL a really enduring character is he faces us with that kind of archetypal technological problem, which is that it’s a mirror of our own biases and predilections and things that we are maybe not conscious of,” says Alan Lazer, who teaches courses including “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Moral machines?

Machine learning – a programming method in which software can progressively improve itself through pattern recognition – is being used in more walks of life. For many Americans, artificial intelligence is shaping how our communities are policed, how we choose a college and whether we get admitted, and whether we can get a job and whether we keep it.

Catherine Stinson, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario who specializes in philosophy of science, cautions that the software engineers who are writing the algorithms governing more and more socially sensitive institutions lack training in ethics.

“Everybody thinks that they are an expert in ethics. We all think that we can tell right from wrong that if presented with a situation we’ll just know what to do,” says Dr. Stinson. “It’s hard for people to realize that there there are actually experts in this and there is space for expertise.”

In an op-ed in The Globe and Mail published last week, Dr. Stinson echoed Mary Shelley’s warning in “Frankenstein,” a novel that turned 200 this year, of what happens when scientists attempt to exempt themselves from the moral outcomes of their creations.

She points out that MIT and Stanford are launching ethics courses for their computer science majors and that the University of Toronto already has long had such a program in place.

Other groups of computer scientists are trying to crowdsource their algorithm’s ethics, such as MIT’s Moral Machine project, which will help determine whose lives – women, children, doctors, athletes, business executives, large people, jaywalkers, dogs – should be prioritized in the risk-management algorithms for self-driving cars.

But those who crowdsource their ethics are ignoring the work of professional moral theorists. Stinson notes that many computer scientists have an implicit orientation to utilitarianism, an ethical theory that aims to maximize happiness for the greatest number by adding up each action’s costs and benefits.

Utilitarianism enjoys support in American philosophy departments, but it’s far from unanimous. Critics charge that such an approach denies basic social and familial attachments and that it permits inhumane treatment in the pursuit of the greatest good.

Ordinary people tend to hold a mix of utilitarian and non-utilitarian views. For instance, most survey participants say that self-driving cars should be programmed to minimize fatalities. But when asked what kind of self-driving car they’d be willing to buy, most people say they would want one that prioritizes the lives of the vehicle’s occupants over all else.

Either way, there’s something undeniably creepy about dealing with an autonomous machine that reduces your personal worth and dignity down to code. “We can’t use our human wiles on them,” says Stinson.

It’s this disquiet that HAL evokes that Matthew Flisfeder, a professor at the University of Winnipeg department of rhetoric, writing, and communications says is the same unease we feel when our social choices are determined by impersonal forces of the market.

“There’s this constant goal,” says Dr. Flisfeder, “to try to be efficient and objective and rational, and when we see that presented to us back in the form of the dryness of a machine like HAL, we started to realize the instrumentality in that and how it’s actually very dehumanizing.”

Predicting technology’s triumph over humanity was not, however Kubrick’s aim. HAL is ultimately defeated, in one of cinema’s most poignant death scenes, and Dave moves on to the film’s – and humanity’s – next chapter.

“Essentially you have a film of this fear of artificial intelligence making humans obsolete,” says Trafton, the Seattle University lecturer. ”Yet what does the movie end with? It ends with a Star Child. It ends with human beings recycling back.”

Reuters

Women wait to fill their cooking gas cylinders outside a gas filling station amid a scarcity in cooking gas supplies in Sanaa, Yemen, March 4.

One way to end a country’s civil war is to start rebuilding its social cohesion even before the war ends. In Yemen, where years of conflict have created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the war’s end is hardly in sight. But the rebuilding has begun. And, say aid workers, it is focused mainly on women.

Yemen’s conflict has resulted in so many men being killed, recruited for battle, or mentally shattered, that it has forced many women into roles rarely seen in such a conservative society. They have had to become providers, seeking work outside the home. They must rely on other women, even those on the opposite side of the war. And some have become champions for peace, either in starting street protests or participating in diplomacy to end the war.

Some three-quarters of Yemen’s 28 million people need some form of aid while 8.4 million of them are on the verge of famine, according to the United Nations. This week, the UN raised more than $2 billion to help civilians, much of it for food and health needs. But some portion of the aid so far has been dedicated to projects that create jobs for women, loan them money to start a business, or develop skills in farming and other professions.

The idea is to restore households one at a time, building islands of peace amid a landscape of conflict, or what is called an inkblot strategy. If enough women-led families can be saved and revived, they will reconnect the social fabric of Yemen, create conditions for peace, and perhaps help end the war.

The world is becoming more aware of what women can do in Yemen. In 2011, activist Tawakkol Karman was given the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in a nonviolent struggle for the safety of women during a popular uprising for democracy tied to the Arab Spring. And since then, many women have served as peacemakers in resolving political disputes as the country slowly descended into war, a war driven in part by a proxy fight for influence between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

War often affects women in cruel ways, but in Yemen’s case, women may also be one way out. Many of them are finding themselves in charge for the first time. With enough foreign assistance, they might just be those needed islands of peace.