In September of 2014, Barack Obama gave a White House address in which he pledged that the United States and its allies would “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State.

The world could not tolerate a terrorist organization that kidnapped and killed innocents in the most barbaric of manners, the president said, or that possessed a base from which to launch its attacks and spread its poisonous ideology.

After several years, heavy destruction of several Iraqi cities, and the loss of many innocent lives, ISIS was substantially degraded and denied the “caliphate” it briefly declared in parts of Iraq and Syria.

But it was not eradicated, and it remains active today.

Now Israel, in the wake of the worst terrorist attack of its 75-year history – with more than 1,400 people killed, thousands wounded, and more than 220 taken hostage – is promising its citizens something similar to what Mr. Obama pledged: the destruction of Hamas, the militant Palestinian organization that rules the Gaza Strip and calls for Israel’s destruction.

But questions over the feasibility of “destroying” Hamas and its ideology, as well as over the moral issues raised by the high price that both sides – and in particular, civilians in Gaza – will pay in the war, are being asked as people anticipate Israel’s ground invasion of the enclave.

“What Israel aims to do is not unlike the U.S. going in against Al Qaeda and ISIS,” says Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington. Those groups “were severely weakened,” and in a similar way, “Hamas seems very unlikely to survive this or ever return to anything near its power” today, he adds. But “that will still leave the question of Palestinian nationalism, which will not go away.”

Saul Loeb/AP/File

President Barack Obama addresses the United States from the White House in Washington, Sept. 10, 2014. In the address, Mr. Obama said he had ordered a broad military campaign to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State.

The U.S. reportedly has been pressing Israel to delay the offensive to facilitate diplomatic efforts to secure the release of more hostages and deliver more humanitarian aid to southern Gaza. But reports in Israeli media Monday suggested the Israeli military was pressing the government to authorize the start of the invasion.

No one should expect the delay to last much longer, Israeli officials said.

Biden’s caution to Israel

The heavy weight of this war’s moral dilemmas was one of the main drivers behind President Joe Biden’s extraordinary wartime visit to Israel last week.

While offering Israel full-throated support, and ordering a show of force intended to discourage additional entrants into the conflict, Mr. Biden sought to caution one of America’s closest allies “not to be consumed” by its outrage nor to make the mistakes the U.S. made in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

If anything, Israel will face far more daunting odds than the U.S. and its allies did against ISIS. That’s because Hamas is not a carpetbagger extremist group, but a deeply implanted governing organization espousing a brand of Palestinian nationalism that won’t be extinguished with regime change in Gaza.

Given those realities, the promised Israeli ground invasion may indeed topple Hamas from power and destroy much of its military apparatus, some Israeli military veterans and longtime analysts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict say.

But in the process, Israel will also kill many more thousands of Gaza residents – more than 5,000 people have already been killed, Gaza health ministry officials say – and destroy much of the densely populated territory’s physical infrastructure.

That severe toll is likely to create more sympathizers for whatever remnants of Hamas survive. And when the invasion is over, Israel and the international community will be left with the daunting question of who administers the 2.2 million people who have been under Hamas rule since 2007.

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

President Joe Biden attends a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as he visits Israel amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Oct. 18, 2023.

“Of course this goal of destroying Hamas is realistic. It just depends on the price you are willing to pay to achieve this. After what took place Oct. 7, Israel does not have any other choice,” says retired Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni, commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza Division in the early 2000s.

“But we recognize that Gaza will be piles of rubble after this war,” he says. “It won’t be short, and even if you kill and capture all the leadership and take out the weapons production, you can’t reduce to zero the Hamas supporters.” If anything, he adds, “there may well be even more supporters after this.”

How Hamas can declare victory

As difficult as toppling Hamas will be, the challenges that will surface when the ideas behind the organization are perhaps invigorated will be no less daunting, some experts say.

“We do ourselves no favors by underestimating the ideological commitments that will be there no matter the outcome of the war,” says David Makovsky, director of the Koret Project on Arab-Israel Relations at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

All it will take will be one senior Hamas leader able to emerge from hiding after Israel’s onslaught for Hamas to declare, “We survived; therefore we won,” he says.

Israel is at some risk of “raising the bar too high” with its rhetoric of destruction, Mr. Makovsky says.

“The Israelis know they are not going to take out every Hamas foot soldier,” he says, “but they are aiming to take out the governing apparatus that directed this attack.”

Others are even less sanguine about the prospects of eliminating Hamas.

“I understand the desire to destroy the Hamas apparatus, but I just don’t think it’s doable,” says Benjamin Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank promoting a realist foreign policy. “If you envision any degree of Palestinian self-rule, then I think some version of Hamas 2.0 remains in power,” he adds, “and Gaza goes back to what it was, but with fewer people and buildings.”

It’s worth considering the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mr. Friedman says, noting they were deposed by a superior military power – only to return and take back control of the country.

Abed Khaled/AP

People help evacuate a Palestinian woman following Israeli airstrikes that targeted her neighborhood in Gaza City, Oct. 23, 2023.

Some Israelis refer to the U.S. campaign against ISIS not as a cautionary tale but as an example of what Israel intends to accomplish.

“The U.S. said it was going to destroy ISIS, and essentially it was destroyed,” says Maj. Gen. Amos Gilad, a former head of politico-military affairs at the Ministry of Defense. “For Israel, what ‘destroy’ means is that all the relevant leaders need to disappear.”

In addition, Israel will aim to take out as many Hamas fighters as possible, destroy Hamas’ weapons production infrastructure, and find and destroy the underground military infrastructure and extensive tunnel system, military experts say.

In many cases that infrastructure is located under residential buildings and public services like hospitals and schools.

Appeal to Israel’s neighbors

In terms of what comes after the invasion, there is near unity among officials and experts: Israel does not intend to stay in Gaza long as an occupying power.

Secondly, Israel is likely to call on its Arab neighbors – and in particular those Gulf countries with which it recently established diplomatic relations – to formulate an administrative authority for Gaza and begin funding reconstruction.

“The exit strategy will rely on intensive discussion with our American friends and with our Arab neighbors,” says Major General Gilad, who is now executive director of the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks to members of the media before leaving Egypt en route to Jordan, Oct. 15, 2023.

Mr. Makovsky co-authored a Washington Institute plan that envisions a “consortium” of Arab countries acting as something of a bridge administrator. That consortium would take over policing and public order functions and begin work on the long rebuilding process – while ultimately turning the reins over to the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governed Gaza until it was chased out by Hamas in 2007.

The PA is the logical alternative for governing a demilitarized Gaza, Major General Shamni says, although he acknowledges there will be challenges to that plan. Foremost will be the widespread perception of the PA as a corrupt and unpopular governing entity in the West Bank that was already “kicked out” of Gaza once.

Others doubt that Arab countries will be enthusiastic about joining a plan to administer a devastated Gaza, as they would risk a perception of bailing out Israel when anti-Israel sentiment in Arab publics is likely to have spiked.

Indeed, many military and diplomatic experts assert that how Israel carries out its war on Hamas and how Gaza emerges from it will go far in determining the Middle East’s trajectory: stability and even fresh paths to peace, or further violence and chaos.

“The real question will be whether the dismantling of Hamas and the destruction that accompanies it leaves a horrible taste in the mouths of the Palestinians and their supporters in the Arab and Muslim worlds,” says the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Dr. Schanzer. “If any part of Hamas is left standing, that taste could allow [it] to reconstitute itself somewhere else.”

Former prime minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif touched down in Lahore on Saturday, after almost four years of self-imposed exile in London. 

Mr. Sharif – who has thrice been elected prime minister and thrice removed from office before completing his term – left Pakistan in November 2019 to seek treatment for an autoimmune disorder, having been granted bail in two corruption cases that he has always maintained were politically motivated. With Pakistani politics in a state of limbo, the controversial figure has returned to spearhead his party’s campaign in the forthcoming general election. 

On Saturday evening, Mr. Sharif addressed a large gathering of triumphant supporters in Lahore and promised to return Pakistan to its “former glory.” Political activist Gul Bukhari describes his return as a vindication. “You know all the generals and judges who collaborated to throw him out? It’s comeuppance for them,” she says.

Yet authorities’ relatively warm welcome of the ex-PM highlights deeper issues of fairness and integrity in Pakistan’s governance. Last week, Mr. Sharif was granted protective bail until Oct. 24, despite the fact that he had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment under Pakistan’s anti-corruption laws in July 2018. Meanwhile, Mr. Sharif’s main political rival, Imran Khan, remains incarcerated as authorities investigate his handling of state secrets. That dichotomy has many in Pakistan criticizing the country’s politicking military, with journalist Taha Siddiqui saying that the army’s interference has made a mockery of Pakistan’s political and judicial systems. 

“The message is: if you are friends with the military in charge, you can do politics in the country and the cases against you will dissipate into thin air,” he says. “But if you disturb the military’s hegemony, you will rot in jail like Khan is doing, or in exile like Sharif did when he was a military critic.”

Anjum Naveed/AP

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (center) waves to his supporters upon his arrival to address a welcoming rally in Lahore, Pakistan, Oct. 21, 2023. There, he promised to return Pakistan to its “former glory.”

Caught in old cycles

Throughout its 76-year history, Pakistan has seen long periods of direct military rule. Mr. Sharif’s second government was deposed in a military coup in 1999, and his most recent term in office was marred by constant squabbles with the top brass of the armed forces. 

Indeed, when Mr. Sharif was convicted of corruption in the run up to the 2018 general election, many saw his legal troubles as punishment for falling out with the country’s influential military, which disagreed, among other things, with Mr. Sharif’s desire to normalize relations with India.

Now, observers say he’s being drafted in as a foil to Mr. Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician who was initially promoted by the army, but eventually removed from office by a military-sponsored vote of no-confidence in April 2022. Mr. Khan and members of his PTI party face mounting legal challenges which will likely bar them from meaningfully participating in the next election.

“The courts have bent over backwards to give him [Mr. Sharif] relief in a couple of days before his arrival,” says Sayed Zulfiqar Bukhari, who served as a special assistant in Mr. Khan’s cabinet, “whereas Imran Khan and all of us that have frivolous charges against us can’t even get a date down on the register of the court. … In one way it’s laughable, really, what’s happening, but in another way we all predicted that this was part of the bigger plan.”

In November 2022, the outgoing chief of Pakistan’s army, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, vowed that the institution would confine itself to its constitutional role moving forward. Many view the circumstances surrounding Mr. Sharif’s return as further evidence that this promise is not being kept. 

Rather, political commentator Cyril Almeida claims that Pakistan has returned to its “oldest politics.”

“The generals fall out with their latest protégé and then have to hurriedly draft in an older protégé … to run the country,” he says. “It’s tiresome and never works, because the only rule is to never let whoever is the most popular politician run the country lest he or she get ideas about actually being in charge.”

A new political landscape

Familiar military meddling notwithstanding, experts note that the Pakistan Mr. Sharif left in 2019 is markedly different from the one he returned to this weekend. 

Anjum Naveed/AP

Motorcyclists drive past welcoming banners for Pakistan's self-exiled former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, installed along a highway in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Oct. 19, 2023. A court in Pakistan on Thursday granted protective bail to Mr. Sharif in graft cases, clearing the way for his return.

The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government, which Mr. Sharif headed from 2013 until his disqualification in 2017, oversaw a period of relative economic stability with single-digit inflation and growth rates that compared favorably to those achieved by its predecessor. After Mr. Khan fell out with the army, his government was replaced in 2022 by a coalition led by Mr. Sharif’s younger brother, Shehbaz Sharif, who presided over a sixteen-month economic meltdown. Annual inflation in 2022 was measured at just under 20% while the Pakistani rupee plummeted to as low as 306 against the U.S. dollar. Pakistan currently has a caretaker government as it awaits the next general election, slated for no later than February 2024. 

“He [Mr. Sharif] comes back with the difficult task of uniting his party at a moment when it faces fissures and energizing his support base against the backdrop of a terrible economic crisis that has hit the public hard,” says Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. “But with the military now having his back, there’s one less thing – one less big thing – for him and his party to worry about.”

Nor, it seems, will he have to worry about Mr. Khan. The government of Mr. Sharif’s younger brother, which suffered from accusations of nepotism throughout, found it difficult to counter the political messaging of Mr. Khan, who went on a nationwide speaking tour shortly after his removal and doubled down on his accusation that he had been removed by a “gang of crooks” in cahoots with the U.S.

It was a message that resonated more and more as the country’s economic crisis deepened and propelled Mr. Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), to a string of by-election victories in both the National Assembly and the large province of Punjab. However, in the aftermath of the May 9 riots – when a number of PTI supporters laid siege to military installations in response to Mr. Khan’s arrest – the military unleashed a brutal crackdown against Mr. Khan’s party and launched a full-throttle campaign to remove Mr. Khan from the political arena.

“The biggest argument in support of the idea that the election is already rigged, no matter what happens on Election Day, is the scale of the broader crackdown on Khan’s party,” says Mr. Kugelman. “Leaders jailed or forced to leave politics, arrests and intimidation of party supporters, bans on media coverage of Khan and his party, and so on. The election campaign may have started, but with the PTI cut down to size and hollowed out, there’s little chance of a level playing field.”

Even if Mr. Sharif manages to revive his party’s fortunes and form the next government, his mandate to govern will be limited by the illegitimacy of such an election. 

“Imran’s term was dominated by the Nawaz question, Nawaz’s likely fourth term will be dominated by the Imran question,” says Mr. Almeida, the political commentator. “Pakistan seems destined to go around in circles.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the year that Mr. Khan was removed from office, and to clarify the nature of PTI’s by-election victories. The party won seats in national and local assemblies.

CHRIS GRANGER/THE TIMES-PICAYUNE/THE NEW ORLEANS ADVOCATE/AP

Crews lay out miles of flexible pipeline to help supply fresh water to Jefferson Parish, Oct. 4, 2023, in Marrero, Louisiana, as salt water moves up the Mississippi River.

Salt water from the Gulf of Mexico is steadily creeping up the Mississippi River in Louisiana, prompting urgent efforts by officials to maintain tap water quality for people in the region.

The reason: Droughts across the Midwest have slowed the river’s flow, and as a result, a “wedge” of higher-salinity water is encroaching farther upstream. The river, in turn, is a primary source of water for many parts of the state, including New Orleans. With some experts attributing the problem partly to climate change, many Louisianians worry about their future water supply. 

“Long term, we can’t continue like this,” says Stephen Murphy, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Tulane University. “We can’t keep putting Band-Aids on this.”

What is the problem, and is climate change a factor? 

For the second year in a row, droughts in Mississippi basin states such as Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas have weakened the river’s flow. In essence, that creates room for salt water to flow upstream in Louisiana, where the river bottom is lower than the Gulf of Mexico’s surface level. A wedge of salt water, mostly near the bottom of the riverbed due to its density, is traveling north; it reached 64 miles upstream by mid-October.  

Other contributors besides climate change can affect saltwater intrusion, such as how the river is dredged, seasonal variability, and other weather patterns such as El Niño. And instances of saltwater intrusion have occurred in Louisiana before.

But after back-to-back years of unusually low flow in the river, the world’s hottest summer to date, and abnormal precipitation across America, scientists say climate change is likely playing a role.

“If I had to put my money on it, I would say climate change is part of this,” says Nicole Gasparini, an earth and environmental sciences professor at Tulane University.

The river’s flow has recently been about 170,000 cubic feet per second, barely twice the lowest ever recorded. (Flows can exceed 2 million cubic feet per second at their strongest.)

How long might it last? 

State officials suggest saltwater intrusion could last through next year.

“The bottom line is there’s not a whole lot of relief in sight,” at least not soon, says Barry Keim, a climatologist at Louisiana State University. The roughly 10 inches of precipitation across the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys needed to push the wedge downriver could take months. 

What are the effects on people? 

In addition to affecting drinking water, saltwater intrusion can corrode pipes and pose a problem for agriculture, as irrigation water for many farmers comes from the Mississippi. The shipping industry – including barges laden with grain – is also affected by narrowing channels for navigation.

Plaquemines Parish, which is located south of New Orleans and is the site of the Mississippi River delta basin, issued a drinking water advisory in June. Officials supplied bottled water until the advisory was lifted on Oct. 18. As of Sept. 27, President Joe Biden has declared a state of emergency covering four Louisiana parishes. His statement said water supplies for 20% of the state’s population are at risk.

While the saltwater wedge has not yet reached New Orleans, the state’s most populous city, the Army Corps of Engineers has been tracking the risk that this could occur. The Corps predicts the wedge has the potential to move another 50 miles upstream – past New Orleans. But recent efforts by the Corps to slow the saltwater wedge, coupled with slightly stronger river flows than expected, have reduced the immediate threat.

How are officials trying to help? 

The Corps has been sending fresh water by barge to water treatment facilities along the river to reduce tap water salinity. Longer term, building a pipeline that starts a few miles upriver could be one way to safeguard key water treatment facilities.

In July, the Corps built a sill in the Mississippi at river mile 64, which brought the bottom of the river up nearly 35 feet, and Corps engineers are currently working to expand the sill. Sills act as underwater levees that can block or slow the saltwater wedge from moving upstream. A “notch” in the sill allows oceangoing vessels to pass. The Corps has also built sills in Louisiana in 1988, 1999, 2012, and 2022.  

“The magic number we kind of look for in the river is a flow rate of 300,000 cubic feet per second,” says Matt Roe, a spokesperson for the Corps. “And that’s enough to push the wedge further back out of the river. But also when the river hits above that rate, it does erode out and wash the sill away.”

“Beyond Utopia” follows a family who has escaped what some describe as a maximum security prison: North Korea.

After the Ro family crosses a river into China, they furtively travel to Thailand via Vietnam and Laos. If caught, they’ll be sent back. At one point, the six refugees enter a Vietnamese rainforest at night. To avoid being spotted, they’re careful not to shine their flashlights upward. The group includes two young girls, who take turns piggybacking on their father. The children’s 80-year-old grandmother stoically staggers up a slick mountainside. 

“When people see Grandma going through the jungle, they can’t believe [it],” says the documentary’s director, Madeleine Gavin, in a video call. “Her life has been one of endurance.”

“Beyond Utopia” focuses on an underground railroad funded by a South Korean church. Its pastor, Seungeun Kim, travels to Vietnam and Laos to personally aid refugees, even though he’s been warned that he could be kidnapped and turned over to North Korea. He has liberated over 1,000 North Koreans since 2000. The movie, appearing on 700 screens in special Fathom Events screenings on Oct. 23 and 24, followed by a regular release on Nov. 3, examines the lengths people will go to in order to attain freedom. 

“This film definitely stopped me in my tracks when I watched it,” says Meira Blaustein, documentary programmer and co-founder of the Woodstock Film Festival in New York, where the movie unanimously won the jury award for best documentary. “It’s heartbreaking but also inspiring. ... The people in it are all in pursuit of liberty and democracy. I am so impressed by this filmmaker and what she has taken upon herself with this film. It could not have been easy to make.”

A few years ago, Ms. Gavin was offered an opportunity to adapt Hyeonseo Lee’s bestselling memoir, “The Girl With Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story,” into a movie. When the director began research about North Korea, she came across videos that brokers in Mr. Kim’s underground railroad had filmed inside the secretive country. They compelled Ms. Gavin to broaden the scope of her movie, which also includes Ms. Lee.

“When I found this hidden camera footage that was being smuggled out of the country, I realized how much we didn’t know,” she says. “There were 26 million people who we had never had an opportunity to hear from.”

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

Seungeun Kim (left) and Hyukchang Wu, a relative of the Ro family, talk together in the documentary “Beyond Utopia.”

Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst who appears in the documentary, tells the Monitor that it’s difficult for Westerners to understand the most isolated country on the planet. The dynastic regime tries to prevent information from getting in or out. The movie doesn’t linger on brutalities such as the torture of dissidents, but it doesn’t shy away from them either. As a counterweight to the grim scenes, the film’s center features the humanity of Mr. Kim and the family.

“He is one person. They are one family. But in that, there is the hope of what can come,” says Ms. Gavin.

Years ago, Mr. Kim was working as a missionary in China when he fell in love with a defector from North Korea. The snag? He had to figure out how to smuggle his now-wife into South Korea. He parlayed the knowledge he gained into founding the underground railroad with a route that goes through China.

“The Bible [tells us] we need to help the people in the lowest place and hungry and the poor,” he says via a translator on a video call. “As I pray, I actually go rescue those people in need.”

The documentary tells another story in parallel to the Ro family’s odyssey. Defector Soyeon Lee, now living in South Korea, is trying to extract her teenage son from the communist country in the north. 

“‘Beyond Utopia’ shows the reality of human rights violence that is happening in the 21st century,” she says via a translator on a video call. She adds that Kim Jong Un’s regime is very conscious of how the world perceives it. “There was a video that Pastor Kim actually smuggled out from North Korea of a public execution. So when this video was getting widely [seen] in the world, actually North Korea stopped public execution.” 

The regime is more careful now to conceal its brutal punishments, she says. “Beyond Utopia” also illustrates how the government controls its populace through brainwashing. For example, children are taught that Americans are cold-blooded killers. When the grandmother in the Ro family met Ms. Gavin and her film crew at a safe house, she was confounded that they were so nice to her. 

“She was grappling with her feelings in meeting us and getting to know us versus what she’s believed and known for 80-plus years,” says the director. 

During layovers at safe houses in Vietnam and Laos, the Ro family gapes at a running shower inside a bathroom. In their North Korean village, they’d always hauled water from a river and poured it into a caldron at home. When the two young girls taste chocolate and popcorn for the first time, their eyes dance with delight. Defectors who make it across the Thai border spend months living in a facility where they unlearn North Korean propaganda and are taught how to live in the West.

“It’s not just an easy thing to suddenly feel free,” says Ms. Gavin. “Freedom allows you to get to know yourself and others and connect. That is a process for a lot of North Korean defectors.”

The director and the participants in the documentary believe that the increased flow of information from outside North Korea’s borders will ultimately be the regime’s undoing.

“That’s why there is edict out right now saying ... ‘You have to be careful of the southern wind,’” says Dr. Terry, the former CIA analyst. “I’m not saying this is something that’s going to happen in a decade, but I remain hopeful that one day we can free North Koreans and there will be a unified Korea.”

A while back, our friends K.C. and Scott got the word that they’d won the Denali Road Lottery, which meant they could drive their personal vehicle into Denali National Park and Preserve for one day after the regular season ended. Would we like to come along? Oh. We would.

Ours has been a long, good friendship. Forty years ago they were our neighbors in the city, with three cats and a dog. Then they moved to a country farm with half an arkful of animals, and later to Alaska where the menagerie takes care of itself.

Which brings us to Denali.

Denali is huge. It’s the tallest mountain, from base to summit, in the world. (Everest is taller only because its base starts at a much higher elevation.) I did not have an image in my head of the road into Denali. I rather thought it might wind around and around and terminate fairly high up the mountain, which is what mountain roads in Oregon do. Because the thing is over 20,000 feet high, I worried that we’d end up all woozy and in danger of being trampled by caribou. But then again it would have been worth it to see the caribou. I’ve seen moose and grizzly bears, but the caribou would be a “life mammal,” that is, new to me. I’d never laid eyes on a Dall sheep or a wolf, either.

As it turns out, the road into Denali does not climb Denali, or protrude into Denali, or scatter humans all over Denali. It’s a 92-mile narrow, dusty ribbon that does its best to not ruin the place. We’re the intruders here, but the road instructs us to stay well back, peasants attending royalty.

We got an early start and motored to the park entrance in the dark. Right away a few “life ptarmigans” were spotted apparently, but I don’t like to count skitterings on the shoulder that I have to take someone else’s word for. Still, it was auspicious, and the road purled out ahead of us for miles, all prospect and promise, like the beginning of a long, good friendship.

The dawn light was sly on the shoulders of the mountains and then spilled color into the valleys. Not just color: All the colors. Every color you ever needed. The whole box.

Dall sheep showed up against a dun mountainside. Grizzly bears revealed themselves to good binoculars and loped effortlessly over enough acreage to make it clear that binocular distance is best. Wolves eluded us, but wolf territory sprawled for miles in the braided river valleys, and the possibility of wolf turns out to be so similar to the reality of wolf that I was hardly bereft.

A moose grunted irritably across the road, with two admirers in tentative pursuit. Adolescents they were, their antlers the moose equivalent of a boy’s first mustache, and now and then they scraped their heads at each other halfheartedly, wondering if they were doing it right. Likely not. The cow was not visibly impressed.

But then, there, toward dusk, unmistakable, was my caribou. Not the caribou I had anticipated; I’ve seen the pictures, and so I know caribou are supposed to arrange themselves in a long picturesque string on the tundra against a snowy backdrop. The one in front is supposed to fling his antlers back in a splendid yet saucy posture, with the rest trailing behind in admiration.

This was just the one guy, but he would have been the one in front. I’ve seen ungulates before. Deer and elk and moose and what-have-you. But this one took the cake in ungulation. If you can maintain that much majesty on nothing but lichens and tundra scuzz, you’ve got nothing left to prove. If I’d seen a whole string of them, I might never have come to, and that’s a fact.

Wildlife sightings are thrilling. But it’s the realm of possibility that floats the heart: wolf and caribou and bear and moose and marmot and pika possibility. It’s the gratitude and humility that comes with a glimpse of how the world was and how it should be, a world in which we are clever, vulnerable, insignificant creatures of the margins. And beyond any individual miracle of an animal that might cross our path, it is the vastness and the perfection and the beauty of their rightful home that I want to gather with my eyes and decant into my soul, to sip from for the rest of my life.

AP/file

Kids go trick-or-treating for Halloween in Newark, N.J.

With rising concern over American neighborhoods becoming isolating social deserts, a nonprofit in Savannah, Georgia, has tapped into a holiday that once brought most neighbors together: Halloween. Known as Hello Neighbor SAV, the local group builds off the tradition of parents and their trick-or-treating kids ringing the doorbells of neighbors they may barely know or have never met – and then talking.

In recent years, Hello Neighbor has created all-inclusive events around Halloween, such as costume contests and community art, in hopes that spontaneous chitchat will promote kindness in Savannah. This is an example of many local efforts to prevent further social breakdown and political polarization in the United States, block by block, heart by heart.

The website nextdoor.com, for example, has released an interactive “treat map” to help trick-or-treaters find homes in their neighborhood that are handing out candy. “Spread the Halloween spirit in your community!” states nextdoor.com, which bills itself as the “neighborhood network.” Last year, a group called the New Pluralists invested $10 million in local groups to “learn how healing happens” in diverse communities. The variety of projects “validates our belief that people from all walks of life care about the fates of their neighbors,” says Alison Grubbs.

If the phrase “hello, neighbor” sounds familiar, it is from the late Fred Rogers, whose long-running TV show for young children put kindness into action. A 2018 film about Mister Rogers called “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” has been one of the top-grossing biographical documentaries. In the film, the real Mr. Rogers says, “Love is at the root of everything. All learning, all relationships. Love, or the lack of it.”

A 2022 survey of 10,000 Americans found that 86% care about their neighbors as much as they care about themselves, while 72% said their neighbors are kind to them. In particular, 94% said they would return a lost item to a neighbor, while 41% said they would adopt the child of a neighbor who passed away.

The survey “shows that kindness is an important part of building better communities,” said Oliver Scott Curry, chief science officer for kindness.org, which conducted the poll.

Nudging neighbors to be neighborly is often overlooked by big organizations. “Most American government bodies, philanthropists, and social entrepreneurs don’t view social breakdown through this neighborhood lens,” writes Seth Kaplan, author of a new book, “Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time.”

Dr. Kaplan, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who is an expert on fragile states around the world, says America’s local social interactions have become fragile. Neighbors are disconnected from each another. “Beyond the home, we don’t belong to place-based mutual aid societies, ethnic clubs, civic organizations, or religious congregations the way our grandparents did,” he writes.

Keeping a relationship over social media just is not the same as experiencing in-person conviviality. Or the same as checking in on an older neighbor, or holding a block party, or mowing a lawn for someone. For this year’s Halloween, at least in Savannah and many communities, the healing of broken communities begins with knowing who our neighbors are, going door to door, and ringing one doorbell at a time with a kind “hello, neighbor.”