Does the bloodshed in Central America really count as “gang violence” anymore?

That question took on renewed urgency this week, after United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced new limits on asylum Monday, ruling that domestic abuse and gang violence can no longer be considered factors.

The decision would restore “sound principles of asylum and longstanding principles of immigration law,” he said, as US immigration courts face a backlog of some 700,000 cases – increasingly from Central America’s Northern Triangle, made up of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Immigrants’ advocates hunkered down with the ruling this week, formulating arguments against it. But many also say it raises a larger issue about the reality in Central America: Over the past decade, violence has taken on a new shape.

Transnational criminal groups have not only carved out physical territory, but play outsize roles in formal and informal politics and power brokerage, observers say. Violent death rates in El Salvador and Honduras are higher than most nations at war, and more people are estimated to be dying today than during the region’s bloody civil wars of the 1970s and ’80s. The military is deployed on the streets from Mexico to Honduras, and in recent years international organizations that typically limit their work to war zones have started popping up in Central America.

“Gang violence,” most observers agree, is no longer a suitable label. And in light of Mr. Sessions’ ruling, finding more accurate language could become more urgent. More than 80,000 unaccompanied minors and family units from the Northern Triangle were apprehended at the US’s southern border in fiscal year 2018, often fleeing extreme violence back home. Fewer people crossed the border in 2017, but asylum claims for individuals from the “Northern Triangle” region went up 25 percent between 2016 and 2017.

“I would say 80 to 85 percent of my clients are coming from a context of gang violence or unchecked domestic violence,” says Nicole Ramos, an asylum lawyer in Tijuana with the legal-aid organization Al Otro Lado. “They’re coming from countries, especially domestic violence victims, where there is no system of protection. Lives are seen as not worthy of protection.”

The concepts of war and persecution that shaped today’s asylum laws, many advocates argue, no longer match reality. “The language we use to describe armed conflict is surprisingly imprecise,” says Robert Muggah, co-founder and research director for the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based think tank focused on security in the Americas. He was part of the team that ran the Humanitarian Action in Situations Other than War project, which studied how changing violence in Latin America has created the need for new approaches to humanitarian response.

“The language we have goes back to the mid-20th century with the laws of war and the Geneva Convention,” he says, but the nature of conflict around the world has transformed dramatically since then.

“Today we’re increasingly seeing organized crime, extremism, terrorism, and [we’re] grappling with what to call these things. There’s no international legal class,” he says, which affects not only asylum-seekers’ treatment, but how the international community observes and regulates the conflict.

'Never meant to alleviate all problems'

Sessions notes in his ruling that “the mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes – such as domestic violence or gang violence – or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim.”

"Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems – even all serious problems – that people face every day all over the world," he said Monday. The number of people claiming a “credible fear of persecution” in interviews with homeland security shot up to 94,000 in 2016 – nearly 19 times the number in 2009, Sessions said.

The announcement overturned previous decisions that abused women could apply for asylum, if they can prove that their home country is unable or unwilling to protect them. Experts fear the move could push domestic violence back into the shadows, where it has festered as a “private matter” for decades.

And Ms. Ramos says she hopes this doesn’t translate into judges interpreting any case that happens against the backdrop of violence in Central America as invalid.

“This will be harmful for people detained right now or having their cases heard right now,” she says.

Nearly all her cases coming from Central America are related to gang activity in some way, even if that’s not the sole argument for an applicant’s credible fear. Take, for example, a religious figure in El Salvador who was forced to preside over a gang-member’s funeral. Later, he was threatened by an opposing gang for his involvement, she says, and told he couldn’t participate in religious events anymore. Will US authorities see this as interference in the free practice of religion, or more narrowly as “gang violence?”

“It’s time to redefine how we label violence in Central America,” says Ramos. “I don’t think it’s an apt term at all.”

Other options?

Apt or not, there are few good alternatives, observers say. Referring to what’s happening in Central America as a “war,” even if it looks and feels like one, comes with consequences.

“There’s certainly a political element,” says Steven Dudley, co-director of Insight Crime, a foundation that studies organized crime in Latin America. “It creates a de facto recognition of an enemy when you declare something like a war or civil war…. That could embolden and strengthen the gang’s position, essentially giving them political capital they can use for everything from recruitment to negotiations,” Mr. Dudley says.

“You really put them on a different playing field.”

But there are positives, too. The rules of the game become clearer when a country is officially at war. There is more international observation of human rights abuses by players on both sides of the conflict.

“You have much less accountability when there’s no declared war,” Dudley says. “For the military in particular.”

The conversation over what to call the violence across Latin America has been heating up since around 2010, Mr. Muggah says. But it’s not all talk. Groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have expanded their work in the region.

“ICRC has quietly been running pilot projects across Latin America and the Caribbean, where they never really worked before outside a war context,” says Muggah, noting small projects in Brazil, El Salvador, Haiti, and Mexico. “The idea was to see if they had a role to play in these kinds of situations, and they determined that yes, they do. It was a very radical move for an otherwise conservative organization.”

“Every day along the migration route we treat and counsel patients from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, who have survived the types of violence our organization usually sees in war zones,” Jason Cone, executive director of MSF-USA, said in a statement this week.

Sessions’ decision Monday is “in a way highlighting the limitations of our international legal systems,” says Muggah.

“The dirty secret of international laws of war is that there is no actual legal definition of what is or is not a war,” he says. “It’s like the judge who had to define pornography: [War] is hard to define, but you know it when you see it.”

Caner Güneş, with short black beard, nationalistic tattoos, and blue jeans, is a member of the youth wing of Turkey’s main opposition party.

He helps staff a Republican People’s Party (CHP) tent blasting music and political speeches at a ferry terminal in Kadiköy, on the Asian side of Istanbul.

“The atmosphere now has really changed,” says Mr. Güneş. “In one neighborhood, when we went out there they used to throw stones at us,” he says. “Now they shake our hands and say, ‘You have our vote.’ ”

Not every district in Turkey has seen such a dramatic change of heart. In the neighborhood in question, Güneş attributes the shift to the clumsy handling of residents whose homes were razed to make way for a top-dollar building project run by a company linked to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

But day after day, Turkey’s opposition parties brave a scalding heatwave to hand out leaflets, energized like never before by a belief that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP – after half a generation in power – may be vulnerable in June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections.

To be sure, Mr. Erdoğan remains the most popular politician in Turkey, burnished by wall-to-wall television coverage of his every utterance – the result of the AKP’s successful, systematic effort to control Turkey’s key media organs – and a campaign that has used state resources to blanket the country with his image and the words “strong leader.”

But Erdoğan’s us-versus-them style has polarized Turkey, and his dream of ushering in a new presidential system with supreme powers may be in jeopardy as opposition parties have put up stronger-than-expected candidates, unified for the first time, and smell blood.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A man tries to clear the road in Istanbul as supporters of Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party await an address from their candidate Muharram Ince on June 8, 2018.

The transformation to the all-powerful new presidential system, approved in a narrowly won referendum last year, is to begin with this vote.

Erdoğan called this snap election 18 months early, expecting yet another victory by out-running an opposition resurgence and economic downturn. Instead, the currency has dropped nearly 20 percent in recent months with more trouble to come, prices have continued to soar, and more and more Turks are showing signs of Erdoğan fatigue.

“For the first time in almost 16 years of AKP rule, people are able to imagine a situation in which he wouldn’t be the ultimate winner,” says Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a Turkey analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “This is a natural course of events. There is no single person anywhere in the world who's in power for 16 years, and would not start going down in popularity.

“He may still end up winning, but the truth is, inside Turkey he no longer looks invincible – quite the opposite,” says Ms. Aydıntaşbaş, noting that Erdoğan has had to make new alliances, distribute large government handouts, and jack up AKP mobilization to score a 51 percent win in the presidential vote that would avoid a second-round runoff.

“Erdoğan has spent so much time creating a one-man regime, but in a one-man regime all the problems you have in your life – whether it’s the economy or politics – you end up blaming on that one man,” says Aydıntaşbaş.

“He’s still the most popular guy on the street, but it is also a very divided country,” she says. “The anti-Erdoğan camp is now almost half the population, so it’s quite a challenge to continue to win elections, if you have a very determined 50 percent of the population who doesn’t like you.”

Unity in opposition

To maximize their chances, four of Turkey’s fractious opposition parties have joined in an unprecedented show of unity for the parliamentary vote. They have not held back in their criticism – and neither has the president, in return – as their leaders crisscross Turkey, speaking to multiple rallies each day.

CHP candidate Muharrem İnce, a former physics teacher who has vowed to restore democracy and the rule of law, told crowds last week that Erdoğan was “too tired” to solve Turkey’s “big problems.”

Addressing Erdoğan, he said he would collapse the 1,000-room presidential palace he had built in the capital, Ankara, “on your head.” He vowed to reverse the president’s “repressive” culture and promised that his face would not appear – as Erdogan’s often does – every time a Turk turned on the television.

“We will change the man who has been shouting at us for 16 years,” Mr. İnce told another rally.

Yet the campaign trail is the natural place for Erdoğan’s charismatic and combative style.

Erdoğan accuses İnce of “supporting terrorism” by meeting with a Kurdish presidential candidate, Selahattin Demirtaş of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), who is currently in prison; of “manipulating the electorate”; and of wanting to “return to the old Turkey” by destroying what the AKP has built.

“You will never even have the opportunity to even come to the palace,” he told İnce at a rally as crowds cheered.

A mixed record

Since 2002, the Islam-rooted AKP has transformed and modernized Turkey’s economy, raising the standard of living across the board even as top figures – and construction barons linked to the party – gained vast wealth.

But Erdoğan’s definition of democracy is rule by the majority only, without reaching out to other parties, and his authoritarian style prompted widespread protests in 2013, which vilified him as a “dictator.”

A crackdown on opponents that Erdoğan routinely castigates as “terrorists” was stepped up in 2013, then intensified after a failed coup in July 2016. Scores of journalists remain in jail – Turkey ranked highest in the world for jailed journalists in 2017, for the second year in a row – and 150,000 people have been purged from state institutions.

Every opposition leader has said they will immediately end the state of emergency, begun after the coup attempt and meant to last just three months. Erdoğan finally followed their lead, making the same promise on Wednesday.

“Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is human, we all make mistakes, but no one has done as much for the country,” says Yakup Varol, an aircraft technician and volunteer at the AKP tent at the ferry terminal, as he rolls up a string of orange and blue flag bunting at the end of the day.

“In every system, one person has the final say. This is no different,” says Mr. Varol. “This election the opposition is very aggressive. Now Turkey is a very beautiful country, but if the opposition wins it will all go.”

But that election outcome is impossible, say AKP officials at a mobile party kiosk in Üsküdar district, where they hand out red carnations and party balloons. Most volunteers are women wearing headscarves.

“His chance of losing is zero,” says İbrahim Yürür, head of a local AKP neighborhood association. “In every election we increased the level of support and number of votes, and the new presidential system will be – God willing – our crowning achievement,” he says of Erdoğan’s long-held dream, which would begin with a new five-year term.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Young women supporters of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party hand out coffee at a late-night political rally addressed by Prime Minister Binali Yildirim in Istanbul, June 10, 2018.

'No good slogans'

But not all ruling party operatives are convinced by their own propaganda.

“People are not enthusiastic this time – neither us nor our voters,” one AKP official told the Financial Times. “We are just saying the same things as before: we built a new bridge, we are building a new airport. There are no good slogans, no good songs.”

Instead, Erdoğan has inadvertently provided the opposition with useful slogans. When he said at a rally that he would go when the Turkish people said “enough,” the Turkish word “tamam” went viral and became part of the opposition lexicon.

Turkey faces a host of problems. Erdoğan has lambasted some European leaders as Nazis, exacerbated a collapse in Turkey’s relations with the US and with NATO, and been deeply involved in the Syrian war, which has brought more than 3.5 million refugees into the country.

Turkey this week launched attacks against the headquarters of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq – in a popular move dismissed as an election ploy by critics – and has engaged in multiple cross-border military operations in Syria.

“We are out here going to markets and bazaars, meeting 1,500 to 2,000 people a day. From their facial expressions and body language they are telling us they are tired,” says Hüseyin Yalçintaş, a flooring shop owner manning a tent for the nationalist İyi (Good) party, whose leader Meral Akşener is a veteran female politician.

“Then they actually say to us, ‘You’ve got to save us from these people. They are taking us away from democracy to a one-man regime,’” he says. “It’s a groundswell of people who are victims of the government, and we are the voice of these people.”

Unity in a box (of chocolate)

And that voice is magnified by unprecedented opposition unity.

“We haven’t wanted him from the beginning, but in 16 years Erdoğan has even worn out his supporters,” asserts Hülya Memoğlu, a local CHP activist at the ferry terminal tent.

“He’s never had all of Turkey, but he’s taken his half of it and kept pushing,” adds Yıldız Dikin, a leader of the CHP women’s wing in Kadiköy, nodding in agreement.

A box of chocolates arrives at the CHP tent as a gift from the HDP kiosk nearby, and begins to melt in the heat, even as it is offered around.

“This is HDP chocolate, this is unity!” says Ms. Dikin, clearly impressed. “Altogether we are going to take these [AKP] people down.”

Brenda Ahearn/Daily Inter Lake/AP

Veteran Nathan Brown, shown on June 6, in Kalispell, Mont. Mr. Brown, who has survived homelessness, post-traumatic stress disorder, and an attempted suicide, wears a hat with a badge that reads, 'Bomb Squad: If you see me running, try to keep up' reminiscent of his time working in explosive ordnance disposal for the Army.

Matt Kuntz stood on a chair in his attic with one end of a rope around his neck. It was 2000, and Mr. Kuntz, then 22, found his nascent Army career ruined after he shredded ankle ligaments during a training exercise. The West Point graduate had dreamed of a life in uniform since childhood. The abrupt demise of his military ambitions pushed him toward the void.

“My sense of being was broken,” says Kuntz, a native of Helena, Mont., who now serves as executive director of the state’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). He stopped himself from stepping off the chair only when he realized he had yet to pay his monthly rent. He felt obligated to his landlords for the burden his death would impose, so he walked outside and slipped a check in a nearby mailbox.

On his way back, he happened to hear his neighbor crying, and when Kuntz approached and asked what was wrong, the man began to pour forth his marital troubles. For two hours, Kuntz sat on his neighbor’s porch and listened, and while he shared nothing about his own struggle, the chance exchange broke the closed loop of suicidal thoughts. He went home and took down the noose.

Eighteen years later, the memory of his worst day motivates the former soldier to fight the scourge of suicide in Montana, where residents die by their own hand at a higher rate than any other state in the country. “The need here is so dire, and the resources in most areas are so scarce,” Kuntz says. “When as a country and as a culture are we really going to drill down and help all these people who need care?”

The scope of the crisis received renewed attention last week when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report showing the national suicide rate climbed 25 percent between 1999 and 2016. The rate rose across categories of age, gender, ethnicity, and race, and more than half of those who died by suicide lacked a diagnosis for a mental health condition. In 2016, nearly 45,000 people took their own lives, and suicide now stands as the country’s 10th leading cause of death.

The report arrived the same week that news broke of the suicides of fashion designer Kate Spade and chef and author Anthony Bourdain. Their deaths drew extensive coverage that at once magnified the reach of the crisis and obscured the reality that tens of thousands of suicides occur far from the glare of fame in the country’s least populated expanses.

The problem runs deep in the Mountain West. Montana and six other states in the region — Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Nevada — ranked among the 10 states with the highest suicide rates in the CDC study; Arizona was 15th. From 2014 to 2016, the most recent period analyzed, the average rate of 25.1 suicides per 100,000 residents in those eight states almost doubled the national rate of 13.4.

Several factors linked to suicide — social isolation, drug and alcohol use, access to firearms, economic adversity — persist at higher levels in rural areas compared with urban centers. Meanwhile, an acute deficiency of behavioral health services and a stigma against seeking treatment stymie suicide prevention efforts in the Mountain West.

“We’re suffering throughout the state,” says Michael Sandvig, president of NAMI’s Idaho chapter. “Even in the urban areas, you usually have to make your appointments weeks in advance to get routine care, let alone crisis care. If you’re in a small town and it’s going to take you an hour to drive somewhere for services, you’re probably going to stay home.”

'Medical deserts'

Vast swaths of the Mountain West meet the federal definition of health professional shortage areas  for primary care, dental, and behavioral health care. The prevalence of so-called “medical deserts” is compounded in the mental health field by the growing scarcity of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other practitioners across the country.

The US Department of Health and Human Services designates a mental health shortage area when the population-to-provider ratio eclipses 30,000 to 1 (or 20,000 to 1 in regions with high demand for services). The agency reported in April that most of Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming fall into shortage areas, along with two-thirds of New Mexico and Utah and half of Colorado and Montana. The eight states would need an additional 900 providers combined to remove the designations; more than 10,800 are needed nationwide.

A limit on federal funding for medical residency training since 1997 has exacerbated the dearth of providers. Merritt Hawkins, a physician search and consulting firm in Dallas, reported earlier this year that the spending cap has slowed the number of behavioral health clinicians entering the field at a time when 60 percent of psychiatrists are age 55 or older and nearing retirement.

The study found that 40 percent of the country’s 30,000 psychiatrists work in the five most populous states of California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania. Fewer than 4 percent practice in the eight states of the Mountain West. The disparity results, in part, from the presence of more residency programs in large cities coupled with the higher rate of uninsured patients in rural regions.

Mr. Sandvig laments the relative absence of practitioners in much of the West​ while recogniz​ing why ​they gravitate to metro areas.

“You have a lot of people out here who, even under the Affordable Care Act, choose not to get any insurance because they think they’re healthy or they can’t afford it,” he says. “That leaves them without any mental health coverage. Providers are aware of that, so they go to places where more people are insured.”

NAMI estimates that 1 in 5 adults in the US, or some 44 million people, experience mental illness a year and 40 percent receive treatment. The deepening need for care and the rising suicide rate has led mental health advocates to call for a federally funded suicide prevention program that could deliver more clinicians to sparsely populated regions.

“We have to start treating suicide as a public health problem,” says Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in New York. “And part of what we have to do is encourage mental health professionals to come into the field and work in areas outside cities.”

The expansion of telemedicine networks — technology that enables clinicians to provide long-distance diagnoses and treatment to patients, most often via videoconference — has alleviated the practitioner shortage in some remote areas to varying degrees. As behavioral health providers extend their virtual reach, more primary care doctors in urban and rural settings alike are integrating mental health into patients’ course of care, conducting screenings to identify conditions and make referrals to specialists.

In Montana, Kuntz, who worked to establish a mental health research center on a college campus in Bozeman four years ago, has joined other advocates in nurturing a plan to create a psychiatric residency program in Billings. If the initiative takes shape, he hopes that providers-in-training will decide to practice in the state after completing their residency.

“We can’t wait for the pharmaceutical companies or the federal government to do something,” he says. “As it is, it sometimes feels like we’re trying to put out a fire after several rooms of the house have burned down. We have to act.”

Yet persuading people in rural regions to seek care poses a quandary perhaps more intractable than attracting behavioral health providers. K. Bryant Smalley, chairman of the American Psychological Association’s committee on rural health, explains that while civic leaders might hail the opening of a new clinic, travel distances and the prospect of losing a day’s wages can deter potential patients.

“It’s not a ‘Field of Dreams’ scenario,” he says. “If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. These are areas that rely on productivity-based labor, where people can’t always get a day off or can’t afford to take a day off. They’re faced with difficult choices.”

The myth of the rugged individualist

The pervasive fear that asking for help reveals mental weakness — even moral decay — further discourages residents from receiving treatment. A study published last year by Carolyn Pepper, a professor of psychology at the University of Wyoming, suggested that the Mountain West’s mythical code of self-reliance contributes to the region’s high suicide rates.

“This isn’t rural. It’s frontier,” Sandvig says. “Out here, you’re deemed to be a rugged individualist. People think they’re supposed to suck it up, and they don’t know what to do or what to say or who to say it to when they start having problems.”

In 2000, Kuntz learned the limits of the frontier ethos when his silent despair brought him to the brink of suicide. Seven years later, he watched his stepbrother, an Iraq War veteran struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, retreat into his mind rather than accept help. He turned a gun on himself in 2007.

His death instilled a sense of urgency in Kuntz to save others from a similar fate. At the invitation of Sen. Jon Tester, (D) of Montana, he testified before Congress in support of legislation that requires the military to perform face-to-face mental health screenings of all service members before and after their deployments. The bill passed in 2010.

But the sense of accomplishment soon dissipated ​f​or Kuntz, the married father of three young children.​ The experience taught him how much work remains, how much suffering exists​.

“Too many people are being lost to suicide,” he says. “More must be done. Every day.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Ed Soph, a retired University of North Texas jazz studies professor, and his wife Carol stand in front of solar panels they installed on their roof ten years ago. They are local environmental activists in Denton, which earlier this year became the second city in Texas to commit to derive 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources.

When Ed and Carol Soph first installed solar panels on their roof in 2007, the rest of the town’s gaze was fixed underground. It was the dawn of a natural gas revolution that seemed like it would alter Denton, Texas, forever.

Today, however, some 150 homes in this mid-sized college town sport rooftop solar panels and Denton, about 40 miles north of Dallas, is on track to become the second city in Texas to draw all of its electricity demand from clean energy.

With explosive renewable energy growth and a uniquely isolated electricity grid that doesn't cross state lines, some analysts say the Lone Star state could become a model for local communities around the country looking to transition from fossil fuels to cleaner sources of electricity.

“The tide has really turned,” says Mr. Soph, a retired jazz studies professor at the nearby University of North Texas.

“Thank God we got to this point,” he adds. “It took going to the opposite extreme.”

Indeed, in a state renowned for drilling anywhere and everywhere, Denton became a poster child. Soon after the Sophs installed their solar panels – and encouraged the city to help others do the same – high oil prices triggered a natural gas boom. Energy companies began drilling hundreds of natural gas wells within the city limits, including near hospitals, children’s playgrounds, and the UNT football stadium. Today, there are more than 300 wells in the city.

As more and more residents complained of nosebleeds, headaches and breathing problems, the town voted in 2014 to ban horizontal hydraulic fracturing (better known as “fracking”) in the city. Five months later, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law prohibiting cities and towns from enacting local bans on fracking.

In that context, Denton City Council’s pledge in February to transition to 100 percent renewables may seem unsurprising. But environmental concerns were not the decisive factor in the city’s decision.

The city had already approved a 70 percent renewable energy plan in 2015 – the furthest they felt they could go without raising rates. When renewable energy prices continued to drop, however, a full-scale transition began to appear within reach, says Jessica Rogers, deputy director of Public Affairs for the city.

By 2017 “it became financially feasible to move to 100 percent,” she adds. “The city could purchase enough renewable energy to maintain rates [and] maintain reliability.”

Not the first, not the last?

When Georgetown, a city about 30 miles north of Austin, pledged in 2015 to become the first city in Texas to go 100 percent renewable (a goal they met in 2017), the economic benefits were also cited as the primary factor.

“Make no mistake, this was a business case,” Georgetown Mayor Dale Ross told the Monitor at the time. In his eyes, going 100 percent renewable would protect the town from volatile fossil fuel prices and better control energy costs.

While the cost of coal or natural gas may spike or crash depending on new discoveries or international trade policies, the guarantee that the wind will always blow and the sun will always shine means cities and towns feel comfortable signing long-term, fixed-rate contracts for clean energy.

“You don’t know what the price of natural gas is going to be in five years, but you know the sun is always going to be free,” says Joshua Rhodes, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute.

“Producing solar and wind means you can lock in a price for 15 or 20 years these days,” he adds. “Even if it wasn’t the cheapest [energy resource], having that price certainty is valuable.”

Scaling up?

Denton’s move to 100 percent renewable energy is significant not just because it is the second Texas city to do so, but also because it has twice the population of Georgetown. More people means greater electricity demand, and more demand means lower prices for renewables. If those prices are at the point where Denton can afford to forgo fossil fuels entirely without raising rates, experts believe that larger cities in the state could soon follow their lead.

“The cost is going down, and volume helps get that cost down,” says Cyrus Reed, conservation director of the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club. “The more megawatt/hours of solar and wind that go into the system the better, because it means less of that is being filled up by coal and natural gas.”

It could be difficult for cities larger than Denton to meet a goal of 100 percent renewable energy, however. Not only do they simply need more power, but many of them also have long-term contracts with fossil fuel plants that can be prohibitively expensive to terminate.

Austin Energy, the municipal utility for the Texas capital, has a goal of increasing its renewable energy capacity to 55 percent by 2025, for example, but the utility also has ties to a coal plant and some natural gas units. Meanwhile CPS Energy, the utility for San Antonio, plans to generate about half its power from renewable energy by 2040, a pledge that is partially shaped by long-term commitments to coal, nuclear, and natural gas facilities.

“You’re more likely to see [aggressive renewable energy adoption] in the smaller cities, just because they haven’t made those larger investments,” says Mr. Reed.

Uniquely poised

Characteristics unique to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the grid covering most of Texas, have allowed renewable energy to flourish in the state – characteristics that other electric grids in the country could emulate if they want to increase their clean energy capacity.

To be sure, west and coastal Texas in particular are two of the windiest and sunniest regions of the country. But some of the same freewheeling, market-driven policies that have helped fossil fuels thrive in the past are now benefiting renewables.

About a decade ago Texas embarked on a now $7 billion effort to add vast amounts of wind power to its energy grid, including 3,600 miles of transmission lines from west to central Texas.

That effort was made easier by ERCOT's relatively unusual policy: If a new transmission project will reduce costs for everyone, the costs of building that infrastructure is “socialized,” or shared by every member of the grid, taking pressure off of developers. Furthermore, unlike most grid operators in the United States, ERCOT is confined to just one state, meaning its initiatives aren’t slowed by federal oversight or conflicting state regulations. (Wind producers were also fortunate that those transmission lines were built just before natural gas production surged and prices plummeted. Today, ERCOT likely wouldn’t approve such a buildout.)

Nevertheless, the supply of renewable energy in Texas is increasing. Eighteen percent of the energy generated in the state last year came from wind and solar power. And as of the end of 2017, more than 10,000 megawatts of new wind and solar capacity awaited connection to the ERCOT grid.

“There are limits to the amount of renewable energy that we can get onto the system, although we haven’t run into those limits yet,” says Dr. Rhodes.

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon.

There were some tense hours at the operation center for the New Horizons mission when the spacecraft briefly lost contact with Earth on July 4, 2015, just days from its long-awaited flyby of Pluto. It’s just one of many gripping moments in a book that Alan Stern, the mission leader and a co-author of “Chasing New Horizons” along with astrobiologist David Grinspoon, describes as a “techno-thriller about how the farthest planet was explored.”

Dr. Stern recently sat down for an interview in his Boulder, Colo., office, surrounded by photos and mementos from the New Horizons mission – a mission that took decades to convince NASA to get off the ground and another decade to travel 3 billion miles to the last unexplored planet in our solar system. The New Horizons spacecraft continues to explore the vast reaches of the Kuiper belt, at the outer edge of our solar system. His responses have been edited for clarity and brevity. 

Q: What inspired you to become a planetary scientist?

I got interested in part because I have a mind that is a scientific mind. But I remember being 8 or 12 years old and thinking, “If I could only grow up and work on this. This is important. This is the future.” 

When I grew up there was this interesting mélange of science fiction in movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the television series “Star Trek” that were about this future in which humans were all over, in one case the solar system and in the other, the galaxy. At the same time, it was very clear that the beginning steps of that were taking place. People were going into orbit, and going to the moon, and space ships were being fired off at Mars and Venus and Jupiter and Mercury. And those two dots got connected by a lot of kids, that there was a real thing going on and you could see where it was going in the distant future, and like myself, a lot of people were just intoxicated by that cocktail of reality and the future projection.

Q: What was it like having Pluto, and New Horizons, dominate your career for so many decades? 

There couldn’t have been anything more rewarding. To be on a first mission – it’s what planetary scientists live for. We got to run anchor leg in a 50-year relay. I often say, “Look at that, the solar system saved the best for last.”

Q: What findings from the mission stand out?

I always say there are three things, two scientific and one otherwise. There were the meta-results showing that small planets can be as complex as big ones. And all the textbooks would have told you Pluto will be geologically inactive. But instead Pluto is actually highly geologically active.

The third thing we discovered was how much it affected people. None of us on New Horizons expected the kind of public response and the personal stories of how it changed some lives. In the book we called it a final discovery. The last words of the book are David and I saying, we think this is more important than everything else that we did.

Southwest Research Institute

Alan Stern is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

Q: What do you think about Pluto’s “demotion” from planet status by the International Astronomical Union? 

It’s wrong scientifically, and I call it pure “BS” – bad science. It was very hurtful to a lot of people on the team because what we worked on very hard was made the subject of jokes, and we thought we were doing this Olympian thing. But by the time it was all done I don’t think it mattered; virtually no one who does research on Pluto calls it anything but a planet.

Q: How do you weigh the scientific use of a mission against the pure exploratory value?

It boils down to the tension between your head and your heart. And they’re not mutually exclusive. The fact that this had both made it all the better.

When I was growing up as a little kid and I’m watching human space flights and first missions to everywhere, I thought it seems so obvious, why would you not finish what you started, why would you leave one planet left? Just for the exploration.

Then here I am getting out of graduate school and I find out that no, it has to have a scientific case, it has to pass muster at these formal levels.

For the first mission, it seemed to me like the exploration value alone was sufficient. But it wasn’t. So we had to win it on both fronts. And it was even harder because it was far away, and a lot of people wanted to do things that would yield more immediate returns.

Q: What do you see as the next big space exploration? 

We’ve hardly scratched the surface. There will be new missions to the Kuiper belt, either to other planets in the Kuiper belt or to go back to Pluto. At the same time, the field is very interested in the next stage of Mars exploration. That will include sending humans and things you can’t do with robots.

We’re developing this whole ocean worlds initiative. There’s already a mission to [Jupiter’s moon] Europa, and we’re looking at other ocean worlds.

The planetary program at NASA is currently in a golden age. I think we were some bit of help to that, and lot of other missions were, too.

Q: What was it like being on a mission that took 10 years from launch to Pluto flyby? 

We knew what was waiting at the other end of the line, and we couldn’t wait to get there. The whole project was about delayed gratification. But the mission just physically, even if it had been trivial to get it started, it still would be one of these things where you fire it, and you have to go to the far end, to the frontier, to start. Then the Kuiper belt mission – that’s from 2016 to 2021, and probably will go another few years until we pass out of the Kuiper belt – that’s what we came to do. That’s what we built this for. That’s what we fought to get it for. So now that we’re there, it’s like being the proverbial kids in the candy shop.

Reuters

Displaced Yemeni students attend a class in a refugee camp located between Marib and Sanaa, Yemen, March 29.

Wars often can end faster when a vision of peace is clear. That may soon be the case in Yemen, a country that appears to be nearing an end to a three-year civil war as well as the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

On Wednesday, a 21,000-strong force led by a coalition of Arab nations entered the strategic port city of Hudaydah to oust the Iran-backed Houthi rebels that started the war and to force them to the negotiating table. The battle is significant enough that the United Nations Security Council met twice this week, in large part to ensure the flow of aid to millions and also to plan for Yemen being at peace. The UN and others need not look too far for a model.

Even though three-quarters of Yemen’s 27 million people are in need of basic aid, one province, Marib, has blossomed amid the conflict. It has become an island of calm and a welcoming place for more than a million displaced people – even boasting a university of 5,000 students and a low crime rate.

Iran and Saudi Arabia must still come to terms over their proxy fight in Yemen. But if the battle of Hudaydah leads to talks that end the war, then understanding how Marib has thrived would help in the design of a long-lasting peace for the rest of Yemen.

One key to Marib’s success was a national effort after the 2011 Arab Spring uprising to decentralize power. A new governor in the province, Sheikh Sultan al-Arada, who is also a highly respected local tribal leader, used the new powers to build a coalition to get rid of Houthi rebels and start rebuilding the province. His statesman-like style also won support from Saudi Arabia.

“Crucially, the backbone of all of this has been trust-building measures,” writes Adam Baron, an expert on Yemen, in a new paper for the European Council on Foreign Relations. The governor, Baron noted, pushed for greater accountability and transparency in public affairs.

“Marib’s newly acquired autonomy has allowed it to retain a share of its natural resource wealth, improve infrastructure, and expand government services, including paying state employees regularly and supporting a functioning judicial system,” Mr. Baron states.

As the Houthis continue to lose ground, Marib’s success could be replicated in other parts of the country that have already gained some stability. Its experience “holds wider lessons for Yemen’s future,” Baron concludes.

The chief lesson is that peace is attainable by decentralization of powers and the right qualities of leadership. Perhaps those ideas will be put on the negotiating table when talks start to end this war.