Wildfires burn near Flin Flon, Manitoba in June 2025. Photo courtesy the Government of Manitoba.

Summertime and the living is uneasy. Geopolitical and climate change dangers demand our attention yet induce despair and helplessness. Wars continue to rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and Myanmar. US missile strikes against Iran’s deeply fortified nuclear program raised fears of a wider conflict in the Middle East. That was mid-June. It feels like an age ago.

Oppressive heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and flash floods are now routine parts of summer in the northern hemisphere. Parts of Canada and southern Europe are frequently ablaze as record temperatures scorch locations that are traditional vacation spots but now increasingly look like places to avoid. Cool weather vacationing—coolcationing—in northerly places is booming. But no place escapes the heat. Scandinavia just recorded a record shattering heatwave.

Geopolitical tensions have long been part of our world. I was born a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis, a crisis fortuitously resolved without the actual use of missiles. I remember well the uncertain days of the Cold War in Europe when the US was moving new nuclear weapons onto the continent to counter upgraded Soviet missile systems.

Our world enjoyed the good fortune of the Cold War ending the way it did. But peaceful as it was for the most part, the end of the Cold War in Europe brought a resurgence of ethnonationalist violence, most enduringly in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

For the longest time I thought that the collapse of communism in Europe, in the USSR and Yugoslavia, was the defining geopolitical event of our time. Unlike previous generations, whose lives were defined by world wars, my generation witnessed the collapse of a rival system and the sudden sense that history had reached a turning point. Implicitly I thought our era was best understood through geopolitical........

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