/Michael Probst/AP

Water vapor rises from the Neckarwestheim nuclear power plant in Germany, on Aug. 22, 2022. Many Germans don't see nuclear power as a long-term solution. But with Russia indefinitely shutting down the Nord Stream 1 pipeline into Germany, keeping nuclear plants available is one way to diversify European energy supplies.

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, a leading Green Party member who also serves as minister for climate and economic affairs, this week made the sort of announcement that would have been all but unthinkable even a year ago.

Germany, he said, in a subtle shift from longtime promises to rid the country of all nuclear power by December, was no longer going to shutter all three of its remaining nuclear power plants. Instead, given the pressures of climate change and energy shortages, the country would keep two nuclear facilities as emergency energy backups – at least into next year.

Mr. Habeck was adamant that the move did not reflect a new embrace of nuclear technology.

Yet the announcement still seemed to reflect what analysts say is a worldwide trend: Environmental groups and policymakers are softening their stances against nuclear power, some reluctantly, some whole-heartedly, and many with a new sort of humility in the face of today’s climate and energy realities.

“We’re seeing a resurgence of support for nuclear energy, both to address our climate goals, but also to deal with broader energy security goals that have been amplified because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” says Lindsey Walter, director for the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank in Washington. “I think it’s humility, and it’s also kind of a hard-hitting reality.”

That reality has two main components: First, climate change and governments’ need to dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions. Although renewable sources of energy, such as wind and solar, have increased tremendously in the past decade, nuclear power is still the second largest source of carbon-free electricity in the world, behind hydropower. In advanced economies, it is number one.

Second, there is a growing strain on energy systems and electric grids. In Europe, the war in Ukraine has upended natural gas supplies and has resulted in a spike in electricity and other energy costs – a trend expected to get worse during the winter. Elsewhere, heat waves, droughts, and other extreme weather events that have been linked to climate change are putting new pressures on electric grids – another situation expected only to worsen.

“We’re electrifying transportation” and electrifying buildings in the move away from fossil fuels, says Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “This is the story of a power structure that needs to grow. We cannot retire nuclear power plants that are providing vast quantities of clean electricity.”

Michael A. Mariant/AP/File

The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, south of Los Osos, California, is viewed Sept. 20, 2005. Last week, California legislators extended production at the state's last operating nuclear plant, which had been scheduled for decommissioning over the next few years.

The shifts are global:

• California’s legislature passed a bill last week extending the life of the state’s last operational nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, where reactors had been scheduled to be decommissioned in 2024 and 2025.
• In Japan, which has eschewed nuclear power ever since a 2011 earthquake and tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has promised reinvestment in the energy source.
• The United Kingdom this year presented an energy plan that had nuclear power providing a quarter of its electricity.
• China is planning 150 new reactors in the next 15 years – more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35 years.
• And in Finland, the Green Party voted this year to endorse nuclear energy as a sustainable energy source.

In particular, the latter is a sign not only that governments are seeing a logistical necessity to keep as many power sources online as possible, but that many who once adamantly opposed nuclear power are showing an ability to shift positions.

“We’re seeing it on a grassroots level, but also we’re seeing it at the political level,” says Jonathan Cobb, spokesman for the World Nuclear Association. “That’s quite a thing, to see a Green Party come forward with that policy.”

Among youth, a focus on climate

Underlying this new acceptance, says John Parsons, deputy director for research at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, are younger environmentalists who see climate as their top environmental concern.

“They want to solve the climate problem,” he says. “And they are committed, and interested, and very open-minded about how to do that. They haven’t already made up their mind about this, that, or the other technology in an earlier time when climate was not as urgent an issue.”

And through the lens of climate, he and others say, nuclear power is tempting.

Although critics say it should not be considered a “clean” energy because of its waste byproducts, nuclear fission – the splitting of atoms that creates energy, which in turns heats water and creates steam to run turbines – does not emit carbon dioxide. Unlike wind or solar, nuclear is a consistent energy source, one that is always available.

And research from California and elsewhere shows that when nuclear power goes offline, it is often replaced with fossil-fuel generated power. The Nuclear Energy Institute says that in the United States alone, the use of nuclear power in 2020 prevented more than 471 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions – the equivalent of removing 100 million cars from the road.

This was what convinced Kristin Zaitz to change her views about nuclear power. Now an engineer who works at the Diablo Canyon plant, her background as an environmentalist and outdoorswoman had made her skeptical of nuclear power. It was after scouring data about energy emissions and electricity demands that she shifted her view. In 2016, she co-founded the group Mothers for Nuclear, which advocated to keep Diablo Canyon open.

“We don’t have other great technologies that can do the same things that nuclear can do, which is provide carbon-free electricity whether or not the sun is shining, or the wind is blowing,” she says. “So how could we possibly be saying as a state that we want to electrify everything if we are shutting down clean power? It doesn’t really make any sense.”

Jean-Francois Badias/AP

A pro-nuclear activist demonstrates outside the European Parliament, July 6, 2022 in Strasbourg, France. Europe is staring an energy crisis in the face. The cause: Russia throttling back supplies of natural gas. European officials say it's a pressure game over their support for Ukraine after Russia's invasion.

At first, she says, people told her that she and Mothers for Nuclear co-founder Heather Hoff were crazy. Others threatened her; environmental groups shunned her. But over the past years, she says, she noticed more people starting to open up to an alternative point of view.

“It’s so hard to change your mind,” she says. “It requires humility. It was hard enough for Heather and me – we used to be suspicious of it. ... But after many years of learning about it, we changed our minds because it aligned with our environmental and humanitarian values.”

Governments’ “yes, and” approach

Those who oppose nuclear energy say it is neither the best nor most effective way to solve the climate crisis. They say it is more cost-effective – and safer – to continue to invest in and ramp up solar and wind energy.

But governments seem to be taking a “yes, and” approach. The new Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S., for instance, offers substantial tax credits for keeping nuclear power plants online, gives incentives for next-generation “advanced nuclear” projects, and also supports solar and wind projects. More than a dozen states in recent years have adjusted legislation to allow for advanced reactor technology, and many have recently reversed bans on the construction of new nuclear power facilities.

“We’re doing a lot of computer modeling that looks at the energy system and uses models to simulate how to make the energy system zero carbon,” says Judi Greenwald, executive director of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance. “And it’s really hard to get there without nuclear energy. ... And so that is seeping into policy circles. It’s also seeping in more broadly to the advocacy community.”

But the embrace of nuclear power does still depend on the political environment at home.

Germany, for instance, has been committed to a nuclear phase-out for the last decade, ever since then-Chancellor Angela Merkel famously did an about-face after Fukushima. Now, the Russian-energy-dependent country is scrambling for alternatives, especially as Russia last week announced it was indefinitely shutting down the Nord Stream 1 pipeline into Germany.

The announced plans this week to keep two of three German plants on standby, therefore, is not necessarily a promise to restart nuclear, or to invest in a future with more nuclear power in it.

Rather, experts say, it’s a reflection of the divided political environment around nuclear energy. The European electricity system is interconnected, so that electricity can flow where it’s most needed.

“If we should face serious shortages in France this winter, and we had previously shut down nuclear in Germany, that would be a bad sign for European solidarity,” says Christoph Maurer, managing director of energy consulting firm Consentec GmbH. “That’s why other countries urged Germany to keep them running.”

But Germany’s political environment prevents as bold a move as reinvesting in nuclear. The roots of Mr. Habeck’s Green Party, after all, are deeply intertwined with an anti-nuclear platform.

The German public would have to be won over, as well.

“Up until last year, the overwhelming majority of the German population was strongly opposed to nuclear power,” says Dr. Maurer. “That’s changed a little in the face of crisis, but Germans remain deeply skeptical.”

Editor's note: One sentence in the story has been updated with a reference to electrifying buildings, to reflect a source's intended meaning. And John Parson's title has also been updated to reflect his most recent role. He is deputy director for research.

Two months ago, the small Texas town of Emory saw its population almost double.

The surge lasted about a day, as a livestock auction attracted upward of 3,500 people looking to offload cattle – a sign of how extreme drought has been affecting ranchers’ ability to feed and water their herds. A line of trailers stretched for over 3 miles on July 9, and the auction stayed open until 5 a.m. the next day.

While areas like the Texas Panhandle are accustomed to severe drought, areas like Emory, less than 100 miles east of Dallas, are having to get used to it. Other pressures, like inflation and supply chain issues, are also adding up to a tough year for ranchers in the iconic Texas cattle industry.

Beef producers are used to adapting to changing conditions, and those in Texas are innovating and building their long-term resilience to a changing climate. They are shifting how pastures are planted and managed, diversifying their cattle stock, and diversifying their businesses, too.

“If you look at 2011 to today, it’s amazing how far we’ve come in terms of producing beef more efficiently,” says Jaclyn Roberts, executive director of communications at the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, referring to the state’s last major drought.

“You can’t plan for a drought when it’s here. You plan years in advance, and I think that’s something more producers are doing,” she adds. “If we do see more intense and extreme swings in weather, I think we’re certainly prepared for that.” 

Diversifying the rangeland

About a hundred miles southwest of Emory, Gary Price is preparing for the future – in part by looking to the past.

He has owned and operated the 77 Ranch with his wife, Sue, for 45 years, on about 2,600 acres of prairie he’s slowly acquired and converted from Great Depression-era cotton fields to a landscape from centuries earlier.

“We’re trying to duplicate what was going on a few hundred years ago with bison, roaming through and not staying long,” says Mr. Price.

That means planting their pastures with long, native grasses, as opposed to the short Bermuda grass many ranchers in this area use. And it means rotating the pastures their herds graze in every few weeks.

Walking through one of those pastures on a late August morning, his jeans are tucked into his cowboy boots to protect them from the damp grass. A few inches of late August rain have given the pastures a green flush, but signs of a recent two-month stretch of extreme heat and scarce rain are still visible. Sickly yellow grasses shake in the breeze, and rings of mud surround shallow rainwater ponds.

Month-long periods with no rain – Mr. Price calls them “mini droughts” – have grown more common, he says. “The intensity [of droughts] I think will be more pronounced” in the future.

The diverse ranch has had enough resources to see them through this drought so far. This morning a herd of cattle is chewing on grass. (Not long ago they’d been forced to graze on mesquite beans and lily pads.) The native grasses he’s planted over the decades are more drought-resistant than short grasses, and 47 of 75 stock tanks – those rain-fed ponds – have held enough water for the herd. Despite nine months of drought, they haven’t had to buy feed or haul water. He hasn’t bought fertilizer in decades.

They’ve had some fortune, Mr. Price admits. They sold some older cattle late last year, so when the drought hit they had relatively few to feed, for example. But they’ve made some of that fortune for themselves, he says.

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Angus cattle graze in a pasture of long native grass on the 77 Ranch. Planting pastures like this are one way Texas ranchers are innovating so they can become more sustainable and resilient to extreme weather.

The native grasses cover the soil, helping it retain moisture, which in turn helps the grass endure drought longer and recover quicker after rain. Rotating their herds over the years has also helped the grass grow longer and deeper. Keeping a diversity of grasses, ponds, and other food sources, like mesquite, means different pastures flourish in different conditions.

“This whole ranch has not had the same management for 45 years,” says Mr. Price. “You just have to be very, very flexible in this business.”

“You’ll never be able to control how much it rains, but we can control how much benefit we get from what moisture we get,” he adds. 

“These are not quick fixes”

Although one of Mr. Price’s neighbors also has native grass pastures, other pastures near the 77 Ranch are visibly different. They’re mostly Bermuda grass, and on this late August morning the grass is brown and patchy, some soil washed into nearby ditches by the recent rains.

There’s nothing wrong with their approach, Mr. Price says – and it’s not his place to tell other producers how to manage their land – but “it’s not sustainable.”

“These are not quick fixes,” he admits. To grow pastures like those on the 77 Ranch, with their long, deep-rooted grasses, takes time, patience, and hard work. But “over time, growing a lot of grass, that’s the cheapest feed you’ve got. That’s what’s going to enable us to stay through hard times.”

Texas leads the country in beef production, generating over $10 billion in gross income last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The 2011 drought cost the industry over $3 billion in livestock losses, and it’s been hit similarly hard this year – by drought and more – according to David Anderson, a livestock economist at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

The drought has been both long and intense, beginning last fall and peaking this summer with over 90% of the state experiencing drought conditions. Wildfires burnt up valuable pasture. There’s been inflation and high gas prices. The extreme heat has stressed cattle and hurt their ability to birth and wean calves, which will mean long-term difficulties. The geographic breadth of the drought has kept hay prices high due to widespread demand.

These conditions are especially tough on Texas ranchers, most of whom run smaller operations, says Dr. Anderson.

“We may not be talking about folks being forced to sell off their land,” he says, “but depending on how long [the drought] goes on, and the severity, they may have to sell all their cows.”

Then “it becomes expensive to start again,” he adds. “Some with land may choose to do that, but some may not.”

Producers in the state have been building their drought resiliency, experts say. They’ve been rotating herds through different pastures and building rain-fed stock tanks. They’ve also been breeding calves to improve longevity and resistance to drought and disease.

But again, those solutions aren’t financially viable for everyone, according to Ms. Roberts.

“The average producers [in Texas] are small,” she says. “It’s going to be harder for them to implement those changes at prices that make sense for them.”

What could especially help Texas producers in the long-term is diversifying their land use beyond cattle. Some ranchers in south Texas have combined ranching with hunting leases. That is something else Mr. Price has been developing over the years, including leasing his property to duck hunters and fishers. He’s also being paid for “ecosystem services” like storing carbon and cleaning stormwater.

Several of those ventures involve the connection between the 77 Ranch and the more than 7 million people who live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area an hour north. The Tarrant Regional Water District, which serves Fort Worth, is paying him through a USDA program to clean stormwater that flows to its water supply, for example.

The years of bison freely roaming the Texas landscape are long gone. But ranchers have adapted before, and they can continue to now, Mr. Price believes.

“Never has there been a time when there’s so much focus on the land by all people,” says Mr. Price. “I think it’s the most opportune time for landowners to make the connection with all of society. What we’re doing here impacts everybody.”

“We can have a sustainable ranch, a profitable ranch. We can benefit wildlife. We can hold soil in place. And we can provide recreation,” he adds. “It’s just a really good circle.”

In the middle of the jungle in southern Venezuela, a 60-foot-wide hole oozes brown, polluted water. Sandy earth is piled around the perimeter of this abandoned, informal gold mine, a permanent blemish on the once-wild land.

Bolívar state is bursting with biodiversity, breathtaking waterfalls, jungles, and tabletop mountains, known as tepuis. But, mining that can clear and destroy vast swaths of land has become an important source of income among the nearly 200 Indigenous communities that live here, especially since the breakdown of Venezuela’s oil industry accelerated in 2014. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an already perilous economic situation, when what little remained of tourism and government social services all but evaporated.

Now, sights like large semicircles carved deep into the jungle floor and buzzing with untrained workers are more common. As Venezuela’s economic unraveling eviscerated incomes and social support systems in recent years, Indigenous communities have increasingly turned to a place they’d rather not go – the gold mines. But as the state refuses to take responsibility for the protection of the lands or the people who live there, many perceive mining as the only viable option right now, even as it conflicts with larger principles like environmental stewardship.

“We know that what we’re doing is not good,” says one Indigenous man in charge of a mining community located on a plateau of the Guiana Shield that extends to Brazil and Guyana. He, like many in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the illegal nature of his work.

The gold mining “creates all kinds of destruction,” he says. For “the ecosystem, the water, everything.” But it’s all this community has, he says. “We don’t see any alternative. So we keep mining ... to sustain our families.”

Across Bolívar state there are community leaders, individuals, and families working to pinpoint ways to survive – and thrive – without digging for valuable minerals. For some, that means finding creative ways to generate tourism in a crisis-hit country that has few international visitors. For others, it means leaning into community education and a return to historical practices, such as cultivating cassava or pineapples and bananas for subsistence. Despite the scramble for alternatives, for many, the responsibility of choosing between feeding one’s children and protecting ancestral land shouldn’t fall so heavily on citizens’ shoulders to begin with.

“More than the Indigenous people’s responsibility, it’s the responsibility of the state,” says Armando Obdola, director of Kapé Kapé, an Indigenous rights organization based in the southeastern city of Ciudad Bolívar. The government “doesn’t guarantee the safety of Indigenous lands, nor compliance with the law when it allows mining to take place in areas where it’s prohibited.”

“Let’s do something else”

More than 6 million Venezuelans have fled the country over the past decade due to simultaneous political and economic crises. For years, annual inflation has hit triple digits, and shortages of basic food products and medical supplies have left communities hungry and vulnerable. The government clamped down on freedom of expression and other civil liberties, tying remaining support, like food baskets, to public approval of the administration. Amid the hardship, some Venezuelans have chosen to migrate internally, coming to the mines in search of opportunity.

Sitting in a dilapidated local community center, one Indigenous leader says she feels herself tugged in opposing directions over the mining debate. Although she’s an outspoken advocate for ending the practice, her own partner has made it his profession.

For her, it’s about contaminated drinking water, polluted by toxic chemicals used to extract gold, and poor working conditions in which often-untrained neighbors toil long hours using dangerous tools, like high-pressure water jets. She has witnessed too many tragedies, she says, such as landslides suffocating workers.

She has spent the past roughly five years fighting to keep people out of the mines, encouraging community members to find alternative sources of income like agriculture. “Let’s do something else. Let’s open a shop. Let’s farm. Let’s fish,” she says, acknowledging that part of the challenge is the very lack of alternatives in the first place.

But her activism hasn’t been enough to sway even her family. Her partner grew up watching his parents mine and has trouble imagining anything else. “I cannot be radical about it, because then we’ll clash,” she says of her efforts to convince him to find something – anything – else. She tries leaning into their shared Indigenous heritage: “We’re destroying a nature that is so beautiful, our very own land,” she says she’ll tell him. He doesn’t disagree, she says. Although he’s eager to see her campaign for change succeed – brainstorming alternatives like building infrastructure – he still heads to the mines himself, motivated to help feed the family and keep them clothed.

Doing away with environmental protections

Back in the late 1970s, Venezuela was one of the first Latin American countries to create a ministry of environment, enacting comprehensive laws to protect land and Indigenous people. But starting in 2011, the government censored environmental and scientific data. In 2014, it eliminated the Ministry of Environment and the following year launched the Ministry of Eco-socialism. In 2016, the Ministry of Ecological Mining Development was created. These steps intensified and justified mining activities in the south, observers say.

“Venezuelan authorities have failed to protect Indigenous people from violence, forced labor, sexual exploitation ... and they fail to stop deforestation and pollution,” says Tamara Taraciuk, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Latin America.

In 2016 Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in search of alternative revenue sources amid a growing economic crisis, designated an area larger than the size of Cuba for the strategic development of gold and other precious minerals. The move legitimized mining activities, which quickly scaled up. At the same time, artisanal mining – using rudimentary methods to extract and process minerals and metals – and large-scale mining operations continued to develop outside the designated zone, reaching into areas that were, at least on paper, protected from such activity.

As of January, thousands of mining locations have already eaten away the equivalent of 40,000 soccer fields of forest in the states of Bolívar and Amazonas alone.

Despite efforts to identify alternatives, many here say what’s needed at this point is outside intervention, whether formal job creation or, more contentiously, cash transfers. “If the government offers us something better, with great pleasure, we’ll accept it,” says one miner.

“Mother Nature is sacred,” says Ángel Paez, a member of the Taurepán Indigenous Territorial Guard in the Gran Sabana municipality, a grassroots effort that polices protected land to stave off outsiders. “Our ancestors taught us to respect her. She’s a living thing that gives us fruits, nutrients, produces vegetation and oxygen for us,” he says. “She gives us life.”

Mie Hoejris Dahl

The stunning landscape from the top of Mount Roraima, a part of the Gran Sabana region in southeastern Venezuela. An estimated 35% of the species here are endemic. Venezuelan gold mining is threatening some of the most biodiverse areas in the world.

“We cannot let our family die”

More than 160 miles away in the western part of Canaima National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the situation looks a bit different. Community members, largely part of the Pemón Indigenous group, have also felt pressured by personal responsibilities to dig for gold amid Venezuela’s economic tailspin. But unlike other parts of Bolívar state, these communities have had alternatives in the past, surviving on tourism for decades.

That all changed when the park, best known for Angel Falls, the world’s tallest uninterrupted waterfall, closed for nearly a year due to the pandemic. Mining was already underway, but the stigma around it ­– and the option to work in tourism – meant it wasn’t flaunted. When the tourists disappeared, local disdain for mining did too.

“We cannot let our family die at home,” one woman says, tearing up as she explains why she spent nearly a year working in the mines during the pandemic. She would wake up each morning and look at the vast mountains surrounding her, she says, taking in the few remaining trees still standing at the mine. “I was filled with sadness” over what I was doing to my land, she says. Now that the park is open again, she’s returned to a job at a nature lodge that the community has worked to promote as a vacation spot for the Venezuelan elite, since foreign tourists remain scarce.

“This park is still very sacred for us,” she says. She doesn’t want to go back to mining, but the pandemic gave her a better understanding of why and how it’s become so rampant.

“We are what we’ve been protecting,” she says. We are “the lungs of the world.”

Louise Perry didn’t believe there was anything controversial about her new book, “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.” On a video call, she laughs and admits, “I’ve been proven wrong on that front.” 

The British author, a columnist for the left-leaning magazine the New Statesman, majored in women’s studies. During her university years, she believed that hookup culture, pornography, and rough sex were all OK for consenting adults. A decade later, she’s changed her mind. Ms. Perry’s experience of working at a rape crisis center made her question the narrative she’d been taught that “rape is about power, not sex.” She then began to rethink other tenets of second-wave academic feminism.

Ms. Perry is grateful that the birth control pill and modern contraceptives have given women greater control over their lives. But, she argues, it’s come at a cost. Modern feminism has encouraged women to feel empowered by having “sex like a man.” Ms. Perry believes that many women can’t just unyoke sex from emotion and a desire for committed relationships, including marriage. She says there’s a power imbalance in today’s sexual marketplace that can make women feel devalued.

Ms. Perry’s book argues for a counter sexual revolution. “We should treat our sexual partners with dignity,” she writes. “We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all of our sexual relationships.” Her book has provoked strong reactions. The Guardian’s laudatory review concluded, “It makes you think, and it makes you want for a better world.” By contrast, Publishers Weekly called it an alarmist treatise with an essentialist perspective and slippery-slope arguments that “misses the mark.” 

The Monitor asked the author about some of the ideas in her book. The responses have been lightly edited for length.

In the decades following the sexual revolution, many feminists believed that liberation meant that a woman should be proud to flaunt her sexuality. You caution that women can all too easily fail to recognize that being desired is not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem. Can you elaborate on that idea? 

There’s a beautiful essay written by [former Playboy sex columnist] Bridget Phetasy a couple of weeks ago on her Substack, which went viral. ... She finished it after reading my book. She’d been writing it for many years but she decided to finish it finally. She describes this exact emotional journey of having had casual sexual relationships and having really convinced herself that she was the one in the driver’s seat, that this was good for her, that she wasn’t going to catch feelings, that this was empowering, etc., etc. – you know, really, really buying in to the sex-positive myth. And then she only subsequently realized the extent to which she had been lying to herself.

... Women do tend to get emotionally attached more easily than men do. Which is not to say that men don’t. But men in general find emotionless sex a lot easier than women do. You very often end up in this dynamic where women are having sexual relationships with men and they’re trying to suppress their emotional attachment.

In 2013, Joni Mitchell gave an interview to Uncut Magazine in which she railed against the “Summer of Love” culture that began in the 1960s. She said, “So much for free love. Nobody knows more than me what a ruse that was. That was for guys coming out of Prohibition.” That’s quite a statement from someone who has been described as an avatar of the sexual revolution.

One thing I’ve noticed about some of the responses to my book ... is that in general, the more critical responses are more likely to come from younger women. ... The really positive responses are more likely to come from middle-aged and older women, particularly those who have teenage children themselves. And I don’t think that’s a generational thing. I think that’s a life-cycle thing. I think that’s because many of these older women actually used to share that same view, used to really buy in to the sex-positive myth. But they’ve let go of it because of their own life experiences and because of life experiences of people that they know. And they’re eager for their own daughters not to make the same mistake, which is the reason I think they really welcome a book. That’s what they say to me. So I’m not surprised to hear Joni Mitchell saying that. Now, I don’t know if she would have said that in the 1960s and ’70s.

You argue that the sexual revolution has had deleterious consequences for women. But are there aspects of it that you believe were a positive development?

... We really can’t underestimate the extent to which women were slaves to their reproductive systems, really. So I think that is actually, absolutely, unambiguously a good thing. It just comes with trade-offs. ... What I’m arguing for in this book is not that we should go back, even if we could, because I don’t think it’s either possible or desirable. I’m arguing that there needs to be more of a social reckoning with where we are now because there has been among liberals a very simplistic narrative of the sexual revolution. That it has been unambiguously to women’s benefit. I think there is also a converse narrative among conservatives, although it’s much less dominant, that the social revolution has been an unambiguous disaster. I think the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. And I think if we had a more honest appraisal of the history – and we also really importantly had a more honest appraisal of some of the differences between the sexes – then I think it would be possible to collectively construct a sexual culture which protected the interests of women and children more effectively. 

What is preventing that honest conversation?

There is a real squeamishness among liberals to recognize differences between men and women. Definitely psychological differences no one wants to talk about. But even increasingly, physical differences have become weirdly taboo. ... A big part of the reason why a lot of liberals don’t want to acknowledge those differences is because, if you do, it becomes much, much harder to imagine a world in which men and women are perfectly equal and in which the differences between us are erased. There has been a utopian streak running through second-wave feminism, which has fallen very hard on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate and has really pushed for the idea of the differences between the sexes really being quite trivial. 

Is there an idea that if women were to display emotion or a desire for attachment when it comes to sex, it might be perceived as a form of weakness? 

I think not just a form of weakness, but also a limit on your freedom. You know, I think that given that liberal feminism and liberalism in general sets its goal as far as freedom, that is the preeminent goal. ... I think the freedom has to be balanced against other virtues.

What are those other virtues?

I’d say that love, respect for other people, dignity, chivalry. There are all sorts of virtues which are now unfashionable, but also, I’d say, deeply pertinent to any kind of system of sexual ethics and also actually having deeply protective value for women. 

What is the underpinning of those virtues and values if you dived deep into what it gets down to? 

They are Christian virtues in the end. I recognize that. Part of what I am doing – and I’m aware that this is what I’m doing – is I’m making an argument for Christian virtues. But I’m making them from secular priors and to a secular audience. ...

There are clearly ways in which Christian conservatism places burdens on women that it does not place on men to the same degree. For instance, the fact that Christians take, historically, quite an unusual view of abortion, which obviously places burdens on women in particular. The emphasis on chastity clearly places burdens on women. ... 

However, there are a lot of alternatives to Christianity, which are by no means more feminist, and actually are potentially a lot less feminist. And Christianity is very unusual among ethical systems for expecting chastity of men. Most religions don’t do that, right? It’s very common for the sexual double standard to be completely enshrined in law and custom and say that actually men can pretty much do what they want – they can have sex with prostitutes, they can be unfaithful to their wives, etc., etc. It’s only women of whom chastity is expected. And Christianity does an extremely unusual thing when it arrives in the Roman world and says that actually men are expected to also be faithful to their spouses and men cannot use porneia, as Paul calls it. 

At times in the book, you use the phrase “moral intuition.” What is that? And should we cultivate, you know, listening to it and being aware of it?  

... I can’t claim to offer a kind of a neat answer, only to say that there clearly is such a thing as moral intuition. The complaint that I have against liberal feminism and sometimes against liberalism, too, is that there is a suspicion of moral intuition within the ideology. A feeling that it is incumbent on rational people to resist their moral intuition. And actually to suppress it. 

One of the psychological differences between the sexes, which I think explains some of what we’re seeing in our new sexual culture, is agreeableness. Psychologists call it agreeableness. Most people would call it niceness. ... Women are significantly more agreeable than men are on average. ... It’s clearly trivially easy to persuade women, particularly young women, to put their own interest second in sexual relationships and to be astonishingly tolerant of the most terrible behavior from their sexual partners and to really not protect their own interests. It’s amazing how often women will do this, and I think the younger they are, the more likely they are to do that. And I think that that’s the thing that I really resent about feminist ideology, is that it encourages that process in quite a subtle way, but because of that resistance to moral intuition. It trains young women to not listen to their gut instincts in a way that is actually really not self-protective.  

You also write that a truly feminist project would demand that it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites. What might that feminist project look like? 

I think that marriage does that, which is why I have a chapter making the feminist case for marriage. I think it’s an institution that helps to rein in male sexual misbehavior. Not perfectly by any means, but it seems to work better than pretty much anything else we’ve come up with. 

What advice would you give to young men? 

I’m the mother of a 2-year-old son. So it’s something that I think about a lot. ... One of the things that my husband and I feel about raising boys in this culture is that trying to deny sex differences doesn’t work and trying to suppress masculinity doesn’t work. ... 

I think there are clearly positive dimensions to masculinity and negative dimensions to masculinity, and the same is also true of femininity. I think men have more of a responsibility than women do to self-mastery – although women do as well, obviously – just by nature of being [physically] stronger. With strength comes responsibility to master that strength.

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Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is silhouetted during welcoming ceremonies in Barbados in 1989.

In her first formal address to the British Empire, on the advent of her 21st birthday in 1947, then-Princess Elizabeth offered what might have been heard as the boilerplate idealism of a young future sovereign not expecting the weight of the world to land on her shoulders anytime soon.

“If we all go forward together with an unwavering faith, a high courage, and a quiet heart,” she said through a BBC microphone, “we shall be able to make of this ancient Commonwealth, which we all love so dearly, an even grander thing – more free, more prosperous, more happy, and a more powerful influence for good in the world. ... To accomplish that, we must give nothing less than the whole of ourselves.”

The speech marked the moment when she formally based her sense of royal duty on the Christian ethic of the master as servant. Read today, however, at the close of an unprecedented reign shaped not by the preservation of an empire but by its fragmentation, that passage may be better understood through a different biblical lens. As Isaiah put it: “For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little: For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people.”

When empires fall, the clouds of resentment they kick up can take generations to settle. Islamist extremists cite the “humiliation and disgrace,” as Osama bin Laden put it, of the collapse of the Ottoman sultanate in 1918. Vladimir Putin rues the demise of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the 20th century.

Those men have sought the restoration of past glory through violence. By contrast, Queen Elizabeth II, who died yesterday after 70 years on the British throne, sought the stability of a global future based on a renewal of affections. Although she did so only through carefully scripted statements and tightly choreographed events (she never gave an interview to the media), her public life illustrated how individuals and societies change – gradually, through a persistent perfecting of their highest ideals.

Times of trial, she said in her final address to the Commonwealth, the assembly of former colonies that was her lasting post-imperial legacy, should lead “to a deeper appreciation of the mutual support and spiritual sustenance we enjoy by being connected to others.” It was through that ideal, said King Charles in a brief tribute to his mother today, that "we have seen our society become one of many cultures and many faiths."

Britain has lost its longest-serving monarch. But the queen’s passing offers the world a moment to pause and, reflecting on her example, renew the patient, humble work of ensuring equality and service as global norms.