PAR A D IS E

LO ST
THREE ARTISTS CAPTURE
THE DESTRUCTION OF
EARTHS BEAUTYAND THE BEAUTY
OF ITS DESTRUCTION.

THE RESOURCES ISSUE

BENJAMIN GRANT BERNHARD EDMAIER ALEX MACLEAN

EXTRACTION WATER AGRICULTURE
SEPT/OCT 2016 $8.99 U.S./CAN
 SPONSORED REPORT

Nothing but Net: Fighting a Global Scourge

Malaria claims the lives of 460,000 Africans each year. where they were needed
Fortunately, an invention from Japan-based Sumitomo Chemi- in local African commu-
cal has made a big diference in stopping the mosquitoes that nities to create jobs for
spread malaria. It is one of many success stories from Japanese and improve the techni-
companies that are committed to working hand-in-hand with cal skills of local people.
local Africans to save lives, develop physical infrastructure Sumitomo Chemical has
and human capital, and create sustainable economic growth jumpstarted a vibrant
for a vibrant Africa. homegrown ecosystem
Sumitomo Chemical for producing nets in
developed a technology We created 7,000 Tanzania by partnering Sumitomo Africa Photo
that embeds insecticide with A to Z Textile Mills,
directly in the iber of mos- jobs, and 90 percent a family-owned manufac- A local African woman enjoys the
safety of a Sumitomo net
quito nets. It is so efective of the jobs were turer in Arusha, Tanza-
at preventing malaria nia. We created 7,000 jobs, and 90 percent of the jobs were
that it has earned a seal of filled by women. i lled by women, says Sumitomo strategic communications
approval from the World Sumitomo strategic and marketing manager Adam Flynn.
Health Organization. Un- FRPPXQLFDWLRQVDQGPDUNHWLQJ In 2003, the company produced 3 million nets a year but
like other mosquito nets, PDQDJHU$GDP)O\QQ boosted that number to 30 million nets by 2009. Each local-
Sumitomos Olyset Net ly-produced net is a symbol not just of a potential life saved
doesnt easily fray into holes, and uses insecticide technology but also of a life forever changed by exposure to the technical
that repels and kills mosquitos for up to ive years. hese mos- skills, community empowerment, and business culture unique
quito nets are also helpful in the ongoing eforts to eliminate to Japan. As the Sumitomo example shows, preventing the loss
Zika by killing the day-biting mosquitos that spread the virus. of lives is only the irst step to a vibrant Africa; Japan has also
Representative of Japans long-term commitment to Africa, shown a long-term commitment to the human security and
Sumitomo Chemical felt that their nets should be produced infrastructure development that Africa needs to shine.

A Life Memorialized  $FURVVWKHZRUOG1RJXFKL the hideyo noguchi

Science isnt only done in laboratories,
\HWHOGEDVHGVFLHQWLFUHVHDUFKRQWKH
ground is often regarded as soft compared
WRKLJKWHFKODEUHVHDUFK&RUUHFWLQJWKLV
PLVFRQFHSWLRQLVDFRUHSULQFLSOHRIWKH
+LGH\R1RJXFKL +LGH\R1RJXFKL$IULFD3UL]H

(VWDEOLVKHGLQ0D\E\-DSDQHVH3ULPH
GHGLFDWHGKLVOLIHWRQGLQJDFXUH
africa prize
IRUDPRVTXLWRERUQHLOOQHVV\HOORZ Miriam Were, 2008
IHYHUZKLFKWKUHDWHQHGPLOOLRQVRI Kenya
OLYHV+HXOWLPDWHO\VXFFXPEHGWRLW Brian Greenwood, 2008
KLPVHOIZKLOHUHVHDUFKLQJLQ$IULFD United Kingdom
+LVQDPHVDNHSUL]HUHFRJQL]HV
Alex Coutinho, 2013
1RJXFKLVRQJRLQJOHJDF\ Uganda
 )RXUSHRSOHKDYHZRQWKH3UL]H
0LQLVWHU.RL]XPHWKH3UL]HKDOIQDQFHGE\WKH*RYHUQPHQWRI 
-DSDQDQGWKHRWKHUKDOIE\SXEOLFGRQDWLRQVKDVVKRZFDVHGWKH
ZRUNRIPHQDQGZRPHQZKRDUHPDNLQJVWULGHVLQKHDOWKLVVXHV
WKDWWRXFKRQELJJHUTXHVWLRQVLQ$IULFD$QGLQKRQRURI+LGH\R
1RJXFKLLWUHFRJQL]HVWKRVHVFLHQWLVWVWDNLQJWKHSDWKOHVVFKRVHQ
 7KHGHFNZDVVWDFNHGDJDLQVW1RJXFKLIURPFKLOGKRRG
)URPELWLQJSRYHUW\WRDSK\VLFDOGHIRUPLW\RQKLVOHIWKDQGWR
LQVWLWXWLRQDOUDFLVPKHRYHUFDPHWUHPHQGRXVRGGVWRHDUQD
PHGLFDOOLFHQVHLQ-DSDQEHIRUHEHLQJSHUVRQDOO\UHFUXLWHGDVD
UHVHDUFKHUWRZKDWLVQRZWKH5RFNHIHOOHU8QLYHUVLW\LQ
VHHULJKWZLWKUHVHDUFKRQGLV Peter Piot, 2013
Belgium
HDVHVVXFKDV(ERODPDODULDDQG
+,9$,'6%\UHFRJQL]LQJVFLHQWLVWV
ZLWKSDUDGLJPVKLIWLQJLQVLJKWVDERXWWKHFDXVHVRIGLVHDVHVDQG
RIIHULQJDQDQFLDODZDUGFRPSDUDEOHWRWKH1REHO3UL]HWKH
1RJXFKL3UL]HKDVHDUQHGLWVUHSXWDWLRQDVWKHJROGVWDQGDUGIRU
DGYDQFLQJ$IULFDQKHDOWKFDUH
 $QGWKDWVWKHSRLQW,IZHZDQWGUDPDWLFDGYDQFHVWKHQZHKDYH
WRHQFRXUDJHRXUVFLHQWLVWV0XFKOLNH+LGH\R1RJXFKLKLVSUL]H
HPERGLHVWKHEHOLHIWKDWVFLHQFHDQGVRFLHW\PXVWJRKDQGLQKDQG
Towards a Vibrant Africa: TICAD VI
Teaching a man to ish is much harder but ultimately assistance to Africa, Japans direct
more rewarding than giving him one. When it comes to now and going forward investment in Africa
Japans impact in Africa, this philosophy is applied every- as the process evolves.
where: the roads and bridges it builds, the businesses it helps TICAD is no symbolic (US$ billion)
create, and the children it educates. hats why Japan was one meeting; it established 7
of the irst countries to make a long-term commitment to a process that is built 6.2
development in Africa. onto and crated over 6
In light of a brain time through cooper- 5.2
drain of top talent and That TICAD VI is ation, hard work and 5
skills from many African relationships made 4.2
countriesmore than being held in Africa along the way. 4
Target
3.4
15 million Africans have and specifically in In August 2016, 3.3
let the continent since Japan will hold the 3
1980 according to the Kenya for the first sixth TICAD meeting 2.3
World Bankone-of time in the 23 years in Kenya to help spur 2 1.7
aid packages just arent investment, further
enough. he guiding
of TICAD, is itself of development and 1
principles behind Japans great significance training, and build an
approach are that Africa independent future for 0
is more than a place to set
to Kenya and Africa Africa. he location 2002- 2003- 2004- 2005- 2006- 2007-
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
up commerce and that at large because symbolizes Africas
Africans deserve more it demonstrates a ownership over its own destiny now and in the future
than short-term help. he previous conferences were all held in Japan.
country wants to be a real much-valued vote of Ambassador B.H.O. Ogutu, Kenyas Special Envoy for
partner for growth by confidence on Kenya TICAD and Director General of the TICAD VI Secretariat,
helping Africans develop says TICADs presence in Africa this year is incredibly sym-
long-term skills and shar- and Africa as a whole. bolic for Kenya, which is the largest recipient of Japanese Offi-
ing technical know-how. $PEDVVDGRU%+22JXWX cial Development Assistance, currently at over $450 billion.
By launching the .HQ\DV6SHFLDO(QYR\IRU hat TICAD VI is being held in Africa and speciically
Tokyo International 7,&$'DQG'LUHFWRU*HQHUDORI in Kenya for the irst time in the 23 years of TICAD, is itself
Conference on African WKH7,&$'9,6HFUHWDULDW of great signiicance to Kenya and Africa at large because it
Development (TICAD) demonstrates a much-valued vote of conidence in Kenya and
in 1993 with its partners, Japan chose to develop a partner- Africa as a whole, he says.
ship with Africa and engage directly with its leaders and TICAD summits are co-hosted by the Government of
citizens for shared accountability. TICAD exempliies this Japan, the World Bank Group, the United Nations Develop-
commitment to continuous improvement, development, and ment Program, the United Nations Office of the Special Advi-
sor on Africa, and the African Union Commission (AUC).
his collective partnership and focus on steady, tangible
28 million
tons of rice production by 2018 20 million
progress together mean that TICAD isnt all talk. Since 2008,
Japan has built nearly 1,500 schools, improved nearly 5,000
healthcare and medical facilities, and is providing safe drink-
children ing water to more than 10 million Africans. Japan has also

$2 billion
to develop low
10
million
people
with better
access to
to receive
quality
education
been instrumental in spearheading progress on important
measures such as infrastructure, education, human security,
agriculture, and health (see next page), especially in terms of
carbon energy water African ownership of these initiatives.
As progress in Africas transformation accelerates, it will be

$320 million toandsupport conflict resolution

disaster relief
Africans who must take the lead: progress has to be personal
to be sustainable. hats where embedding the ideas of owner-
ship, partnership, and steady but tangible improvement into

$6.5 billion $32 billion

to build infrastructure
African culture through forums like TICAD are critical.

in aid for development projects

Source: JICA
 SPONSORED REPORT
7KURXJKWKH-DSDQ,QWHUQDWLRQDO&RRSHUDWLRQ$JHQF\-,&$-DSDQKDVKHOSHGEXLOGDQGIXQGWKH
KXPDQDQGSK\VLFDOLQIUDVWUXFWXUHWKDWOLQNDFRQWLQHQWDQGLWVSHRSOHWRJHWKHUIRUPRUHYLEUDQW
FRQQHFWHGFRPPXQLWLHV%HORZDUHVRPHH[DPSOHVRI-DSDQVFRPPLWPHQWWR$IULFD)RUPRUH
GHWDLOHGH[DPSOHVSOHDVHYLVLW)RUHLJQ3ROLF\FRPVSRQVRUHG-DSDQ86

1. Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia:

1
2. Senegal:
34
3. Guinea:

4. Sierra Leone:

5. Liberia:3URMHFWVDUHIRFXVHGRQ 32
LPSURYLQJPDWHUQDOKHDOWKDQGUHVWRULQJ
XUEDQIDFLOLWLHV)XQGVZLOODOVRDLGWKH 2 31
6RPDOLD'ULYH5HFRQVWUXFWLRQ 11
33 30
6. Cote dIvoire:
3
7. Burkina Faso: 12
4 29
8. Ghana: 28
5
9. Togo:7ZREULGJHVZLOOEHFRQVWUXFWHGLQ 27
.DUDDQG.RXPRQJRX7KHVHEULGJHVZLOOUHGXFH 6
WKHWLPHFXUUHQWO\QHHGHGWRWUDYHOE\SHUFHQW 9 10
8 15 26
7
10. Benin: 25
13
11. Niger: 24
16
14
12. Nigeria:3URMHFWVDUHIRFXVHGRQUHDO
L]LQJKXPDQVHFXULW\DFKLHYLQJ0'*VDQG
SURYLGLQJEDVLFLQIUDVWUXFWXUHIRUVXVWDLQDEOH
23
HFRQRPLFJURZWKWKDWLVEDODQFHG
20. Mozambique: 22
17
13. Cameroon:
21. Zimbabwe:-,&$KDVEHHQ
14. Gabon: H[SDQGLQJLWVKXPDQLWDULDQDLGKHUH 21
IRUVHYHUDO\HDUV
15. Democratic Republic 20
of the Congo: 22. Zambia:

16. Angola: 23. Malawi: 18 19

17. Namibia: 24. Tanzania:7KH.HQ\D7DQ]DQLD3RZHU

18. Botswana:)XQGVDUHGHGLFDWHGWRZDUGV
LQIUDVWUXFWXUHGHYHORSPHQWIRUHFRQRPLFJURZWK
DQGGHYHORSPHQWDFFHOHUDWLRQLQDUHDVRISRYHUW\
,QWHUFRQQHFWLRQ3URMHFWLVFRQVWUXFWLQJD
KLJKYROWDJHWUDQVPLVVLRQOLQH-DSDQLVDOVR
28. Uganda:
UHLQIRUFLQJSRZHUGLVWULEXWLRQLQ'DU(V6DODDP
DQGH[SDQGLQJQDWXUDOJDV 29. Ethiopia:

19. South Africa:3URMHFWVDUHIRFXVHGRQ 25. Burundi: 30. Djibouti:

KXPDQFDSDFLW\GHYHORSPHQWSURPRWLRQRI
SDUWLFLSDWLRQRIYXOQHUDEOHJURXSVLQVRFLDODQG
HFRQRPLFDFWLYLVPDQGSURPRWLRQRIUHJLRQDO
GHYHORSPHQWLQVRXWKHUQ$IULFD
KEY
26. Rwanda: 31. South Sudan:-,&$LVKHOSLQJLPSURYH
WKH-XED5LYH3RUWDPDMRUSRLQWRQZKLFKWKH
27. Kenya: 1LOHVHUYHVDVDGLVWULEXWLRQURXWH&RQVWUXFWLRQ
RIWKH1LOH5LYHU%ULGJHLVSURPLVLQJWRERRVW
WUDGHLQHDVWHUQ$IULFDDQGVPRRWKWUDIFLQ
DQGRXWRIODQGORFNHG8JDQGD

Electrical distribution 6RODUSRZHUJHQHUDWLRQ (FRQRPLFQDQFLDO 5XUDOGHYHORSPHQW

GHYHORSPHQW 32. Eritrea:
5RDGQHWZRUNV 'LVDVWHUUHOLHI Education $LG
33. Sudan:
$JULFXOWXUHIRRG /LYLQJHQYLURQPHQW (QYLURQPHQWDO
3RUWLPSURYHPHQWV FRQVHUYDWLRQ
DOOHYLDWLQJSRYHUW\ LPSURYHPHQWV
34. Egypt:
Infrastructure *HRWKHUPDOSRZHU &RQVROLGDWLRQRISHDFH Water/sanitation
generation
%ULGJHLPSURYHPHQW +HDOWK )LVKHULHV
construction 6RFLDOVHUYLFHV
$LUSRUWLPSURYHPHQW 'LYHUVLFDWLRQRI
construction Human resource industry
GHYHORSPHQW
Source: JICA
How will you
change the world?
Since its founding in 1919, SFS has been
preparing young people to be global leaders
in business, tech, development, security,
andof coursegovernment.

Join the legacy, change the world.

SFS.GEORGETOWN.EDU

Graduate and Undergraduate Degrees in

International Affairs
 contents 09|10.2016

040
Above and Below
Visual commentaries
on the Earths resources
by three artists.
by BENJAMIN GRANT,
BERNHARD EDMAIER,
AND ALEX MACLEAN
essay by BINA VENKATARAMAN

056
Every Move
You Make
Over eight years, U.S. President
Barack Obama has created
the most intrusive surveillance
apparatus in the world.
To what end?
by JAMES BAMFORD

064
The Thrill of
the Hunt
Chinese customers paying
hundreds of dollars per pound
of wild Appalachian ginseng
are feeding a digging frenzy
that threatens to decimate
the revered root for good.
by SUZY KHIMM

ON THE COVER
PHOTOGRAPH BY Benjamin Grant
ARLIT URANIUM MINE, NIGER

Photograph by JACOB BIBA

EARN YOUR MASTER OF ARTS IN DIPLOMACY ONLINE
The world is ready for change. Are you ready to help change the world?
Norwich University has contributed to the strength and security of our nation for nearly
two centuries. Join us and expand your ability to help impact global change by developing
an advanced understanding of critical thinking, problem solving, conflict management and
negotiation techniques.
Choose from four concentrations and graduate in as few as 18 months.

Visit graduate.norwich.edu/fpp

BE THE CHANGE.
Norwich is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
 contents 09|10.2016

Observation Deck

074
MAPPA MUNDI
Sightlines How Not to Be a
Civilization
by DAVID ROTHKOPF

020 APERTURE 076

The Underworld ECONOMICS
photographs by OSCAR B.
CASTILLO Through the Looking
Glass
by GILLIAN TETT

028
THE THINGS THEY CARRIED 080
The Abortion Doctor BOOKS & CULTURE
interview by ANNACATHERINE
BRIGIDA Man of the World
by ADAM KIRSCH

030
VISUAL STATEMENT
082
THE FIXER
The Beast of Misogyny
by RICK SEALOCK Out and About in
Ljubljana
interview by VALERIE HOPKINS

032 THE EXCHANGE

Chigozie Obioma and
Taiye Selasi on the Myth
of the Nation-State

034 DECODER
Keynote Cosmos
by KATIE PEEK

036 INNOVATIONS
A Chinese Mega-
Telescope, Super Speedy
Submarines, and More 009 Contributors
by ELIZA STRICKLAND 084 The Final Word
 David Rothkopf
CEO AND EDITOR, THE FP GROUP

Mindy Kay Bricker Benjamin Pauker Yochi Dreazen

EXECUTIVE EDITOR, PRINT EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ONLINE MANAGING EDITOR, NEWS

Seyward Darby Rebecca Frankel Lara Jakes

DEPUTY EDITOR, PRINT DEPUTY EDITOR, ONLINE DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR, NEWS

Cludia de Almeida, Margaret Swart (o Banquinho) Adam Griiths

CREATIVE DIRECTORS, PRINT CREATIVE DIRECTOR, ONLINE

Amanda Silverman Amy Finnerty Cameron Abadi

STORY EDITOR, PRINT BOOKS AND CULTURE EDITOR, PRINT SENIOR EDITOR, ONLINE

SENIOR EDITOR, TEA LEAF NATION SENIOR STAFF WRITERS

David Wertime Dan De Luce, Keith Johnson,
MIDDLE EAST EDITOR Colum Lynch
David Kenner SENIOR REPORTERS
AFRICA EDITOR David Francis, John Hudson,
Ty McCormick Molly OToole
EUROPE EDITOR STAFF WRITERS
Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer Elias Groll, Paul McLeary,
ASSOCIATE EDITORS Siobhn OGrady
Jake Scobey-Thal, Reid Standish COPY CHIEF
ASSISTANT EDITORS Michael Crescione
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, DEPUTY COPY EDITOR
Ilya Lozovsky, Shannon Schweitzer
Benjamin Soloway COPY EDITOR
FELLOWS Brian E. Stout
Megan Alpert, Henry Johnson INTERACTIVES AND EDITORIAL
FEATURE DESIGNER
TEA LEAF NATION INTERN
Leah Liu C.K. Hickey

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Daniel Altman, John Arquilla, William Inboden, Charles Kenny,
Peter Bergen, David Bosco, Christina Larson, Aaron David
VICE PRESIDENT, EVENTS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF Ian Bremmer, Rosa Brooks, Miller, Thomas E. Ricks, J. Peter
Grace Rooney REVENUE OFFICER Christian Caryl, Mohamed A. Scoblic, James Traub, Stephen M.
Christopher Cotnoir El-Erian, Peter D. Feaver, Walt, Micah Zenko
DIRECTOR, EVENTS
VICE PRESIDENT, ADVERTISING SALES David E. Hofman,
Stephanie Cherkezian
Duc Luu CONTRIBUTING PHOTO EDITOR, PRINT
PRESS DIRECTOR VICE PRESIDENT, EDUCATION SALES James Wellford
Maria Ory Keith Arends
DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND AD
OPERATIONS 2009 NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARD
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Matthew J. Curry GENERAL EXCELLENCE
DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL
Allen Chin
Aaron Schumacher
ASSISTANT TO THE CEO ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, ADVERTISING SUBSCRIPTIONS  SUBSCRIBER SERVICES
Cathryn Hunt Ben Rodabaugh Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy, P.O. Box 283, Congers, NY 10920-
JUNIOR ACCOUNTANT 11 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 600
MARKETING ASSOCIATE 0283; ForeignPolicy.com/subscription-services;
Henry Riggs Washington, D.C. 20036
Hanna Berman PUBLISHING OFFICE e-mail: fp@cambeywest.com; (800) 535-6343 in
U.S.; (845) 267-3050 outside U.S.; Publications
SENIOR WEB DEVELOPER (202) 728-7300
mail agreement no. 40778561. Rates (in U.S.
Saxon Stiller SUBSCRIPTIONS
funds): $59.99 for one year. NEWSSTAND AND
(800) 535-6343
WEB DEVELOPERS BOOKSTORE DISTRIBUTION Curtis Circulation
Priya Nannapaneni, Company, 730 River Road, New Milford, NJ 07646-
ADVERTISING
David Varndell 3048; (201) 634-7400. BACK ISSUES $10.95
(202) 728-7310
per copy. International airmail add $3.00 per copy;
online: ForeignPolicy.com/buy-back-issues; e-mail:
fp@ForeignPolicy.com. SYNDICATION REQUESTS
2016 by The FP Group, a division of Graham
Contact Matthew Curry (202) 728-7351;
Holdings Company, which bears no responsibility
for the editorial content; the views expressed in matthew.curry@ForeignPolicy.com. OTHER
the articles are those of the authors. No part of this
PERMISSION REQUESTS Copyright Clearance
publication may be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the publisher. Center, Inc. (978) 750-8400; www.copyright.com.

8 SEPT | OCT 2016

 contributors 09|10.2016

Bina Suzy Khimm

Venkataraman is a writer based in
is a Carnegie Washington, D.C.
fellow at New Formerly a staf
America and teaches member at the
in the department Washington Post,
of science, technol- MSNBC, and the New
ogy, and society at Republic, she has
MIT. She previously also written for the
served in the Obama New York Times,
administration as Slate, the Wall
BENJAMIN GRANT a senior advisor Street Journal Asia,
for climate change and the Economist.
I know I have succeeded when I show innovation. She has Before moving
someone a final composition and they excit- also worked as a to Washington,
edly ask me, What is that? By stitching journalist for the Khimm reported
New York Times and from Brazil and
together numerous high-resolution the Boston Globe. Cambodia.
satellite images to form one single view, I
elevate my audience from their usual line
of sight and allow them to see our Earth
like never before. The overviewswhat I call
my imagesprimarily focus on places where
humans have altered the natural landscape,
so they offer an unexpected perspective
of our impact on the planet. The flatness Alex MacLean Bernhard
of the Earth when seen from this great dis- is a pilot and photog- Edmaier
rapher. He has own is a photographer
tance, combined with my emphasis on crop- over much of the based in Ampng,
ping, crispness, and color, gives my work United States, doc- Germany. A former
an abstract feel. Yet each captured moment is umenting the land- geologist, Edmaier
scape and focusing switched careers
indeed real, and as viewers try to under- on changes caused two decades ago.
stand what they are seeing, they may also by both human Since then, he has
begin to consider exactly what that means for activity and natural founded a photo
processes. Trained agency and pub-
our one and only home. (Grants book Over- as an architect, he lished numerous
view will be published this fall.) P. 40 is the author of 11 books of photogra-
books, including, phy, including, most
most recently, Up on recently, Water. In
the Roof: New Yorks 2001, he received
Hidden Skyline the Hasselblad
Spaces. Masters Award.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 9
YOUR MUST-READ SOURCE OF EXPERT
INSIGHTS ON U.S.-RUSSIA RELATIONS

GET FULL DIGITAL ACCESS TO OVER

40 ANALYTICAL REPORTS
www.russia-direct.org/subscribe

Q&A WITH EDITOR
Launched in 2013,Russia Direct provides expert
analysis on Russia at a time in history when such
insight is most needed. By engaging a diverse
group of stakeholders in the U.S.-Russia rela-
tionship from both sides, Russia Direct provides
unique intelligence not found anywhere else.
Recently, Russia Direct Editor-in-Chief Pavel
Koshkin answered frequently asked questions
including questions about our eforts to en-
sure editorial balance.
WHATS YOUR EDITORIAL
VISION AND HOW DO YOU
MAINTAIN THE RIGHTBALANCE?
Our guiding principle is to showcase contrast-
ing opinions sometimes, extremely divergent
ones so our readers can reach their own con-
clusions.
We avoid imposing any agenda. We bring
both Russian and foreign experts together and
createa space for them to debate issues, express
views and develop arguments. This approach
incorporates multiple formats including analyti-
cal articles, opinion pieces, white papers and live
events.
This approach is deeply embedded in our DNA.
For example, we visually direct our reader to-
wards an opposing viewpoint by inserting a box
at the beginning of an article encouraging them
to read an opposing view.
WHERE DOES YOUR FUNDING
COME FROM?
Russia Direct is funded by advertising and spon-
sorship sales, as well as through nancial support
from Russias oicial daily newspaper, Rossiyska-
ya Gazeta. We alsolaunched a paid subscription
model and began charging for analytical reports.
Our website remains free for all readers. Now we
have almost 9 000 newsletter subscribers.
SINCE YOURE FUNDED
BY RUSSIAS OFFICIAL
NEWSPAPER, ROSSIYSKAYA
GAZETA, DO YOU FOLLOW THEIR
EDITORIAL POLICY?
No. The Russia Direct editorial team is indepen-
dent from the editorial staf of Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
We have diferent editorial guidelines andtarget a
diferent audience. What we have in common is
that our Moscow oices are in the same building.
ARE YOU JUST PUSHING
KREMLIN PROPAGANDA?
No, were not. We are passionate about Russia,
but we dont idealize it. Were not out to promote
only one side of the story, or push an agenda on
our readers. We strive to create a platform for
dialogue and debate between Russian and inter-
national analysts, business leaders, and decision-
makers. We aim to introduce Russian voices to
English-speaking audiences, and to bring a nu-
anced understanding of Russia that we believe is
all-too-often missing in Western press coverage.
WHOS YOUR TARGET
AUDIENCE?
Our target audience includes English-speaking
analysts, politicians, academics, decision-mak-
ers, business leaders, and students with a deep
interest in Russia and U.S.-Russia relations.
We also target what wed call cosmopolitans
those who truly believe in global multipolarity,
and who seek to understand Russias stance on
S p o n s o re d C o n t e n t
certain issues or its relations with other states.
Were proud to say our subscriber list includes
prominent foreign politicians, decision-makers,
experts, researchers and academics from the
worlds top universities.
WHAT IS THE FORMAT OF
RUSSIA DIRECT? ARE YOU
A THINK TANK, OR A MEDIA
COMPANY OR BOTH?
Russia Direct is something of a hybrid between a
media outlet and a think tank. We have a website
that is updated daily with analytical articles, op-
eds, videos, quizzes, and the like. Our authors are
mostly foreign afairs experts. We issue monthly
and quarterly analytical reports written by aca-
demics and experts. In addition, we host round
tables and panel discussions that bring together
foreign and Russian pundits.
Importantly, however, we dont consider our-
selves to be a news publication as such in the
sense that we dont cover the news itself, but
rather provide analysis. We produced more then
40 analytical reports that are now regularly used
by academics, think tanks and businesses world-
wide to gain in-depth analysis on key trends and
opportunities in the US-Russia relationship.
Russia-direct.org has between 65,000 and
85,000 visitors per month. Our goal is to reach
100,000 visitors per month this year. In Febru-
ary, the Russia Direct website reached a major
milestone: 1,000,000 unique visitors.
HOW CAN READERS LEARN
MORE ABOUT RUSSIA DIRECT?
Please visit our web site www.russia-direct.org
and feel free to email our Editor-in-Chief at:
p.koshkin@russia-direct.org
GUIDE

2
TRANSFORM YOURSELF
AND YOUR CAREER!
Its easy to connect with the worlds leading


ASSOCIATION OF PROFESSIONAL
SCHOOLS OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS.
VISIT APSIA.ORG TODAY

FIND LEARN
the right graduate about fellowships
program for you and scholarships

REGISTER DISCOVER
for admissions events careers in
around the world and online MRXIVREXMSREPEEMVW
GUIDE

2
 STUDY WITH
PURPOSE
In a world where problems of
growth, poverty, governance,
inequality, and vulnerability
persist as central questions of
global afairs, the demand for
advanced study in international
relations has never been higher.
Johns Hopkins SAIS graduates
play key roles solving critical
global problems.
DEBORAH BRUTIGAM, PhD
Director of the International
Development program and the
China-Africa Research Initiative

LEARN HOW YOU CAN ADVANCE YOUR CAREER WITH GRADUATE DEGREES
AND CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ECONOMICS, AND MORE

sais-jhu.edu/fp
EUROPE WASHINGTON CHINA
GUIDE

4
GUIDE

6
 GUIDE

GLOBAL INSIGHT+
WASHINGTON ACCESS
=LEADERS
READY TO SERVE
Harness our faculty expertise in security, development, and
peacebuilding. Join more than 20,000 alumni worldwide,
and build your career of leadership through service.

Learn more at american.edu/sis.

APERTURE THE THINGS VISUAL STATEMENT THE EXCHANGE DECODER INNOVATIONS
Culture and com- THEY CARRIED The beast of vio- Novelists Chigozie Hillary Clinton A sub that stays
munity thrive in An abortion doctor lence that denies Obioma and Taiye and Donald Trump dry, a telescope for
a Venezuelan tests Argentinas millions of girls Selasi on why soci- make bank on the phoning E.T., and
prison. But laws with gloves, an education also eties cling to the speaking circuit. a DNA scanner that
gangs enforce syringes, and threatens global myth of nation- So do Jon Stewart catches poachers
the rules. | P. 20 forceps. | P. 28 security. | P. 30 hood. | P. 32 and RuPaul. | P. 34 red-handed. | P. 36

The moment you think youve understood something to the letter, youre finished. | P. 32

Illustration by YOMAR AUGUSTO

 aperture
photographs by OSCAR B. CASTILLO

The Underworld
Venezuela is in the middle of an
economic collapse. With hyper-
inflation projected to reach 480
percent by the end of this year,
severe food shortages and riots
have shaken the nation. Condi-
tions in prisons are particularly
desperate. According to human
rights groups, 50,000 people
live in complexes designed for
less than half that number.
Where conditions languish,
though, prisoners sometimes
claim authority. Since 2014, Ven-
ezuelan photographer Oscar
B. Castillo has been document-
ing life in a convict-controlled
detention facility in San Juan
de los Morros. Gang members,
not guards, enforce de facto
rules. A church, pictured here
in 2015, is a prison within a
prison, where men go for steal-
ing or not paying debts.
The culture can be violent, yet
Castillos project shows inmates
leading dynamic lives. Despite
being enclosed in an incredi-
bly dangerous place, he says,
[they] are looking to find cul-
ture and community.

20 SEPT | OCT 2016

 SIGHTLINES

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 21
 aperture

Top: Amateur evangelists preach

to other inmates in 2014. Gangs
allow devout Christians to live,
with some autonomy, in a special
section of the prison. Bottom:
Drugs such as marijuana and
cocaine are easy to get. Visitors
and corrupt security personnel
smuggle them in, and prisoners
control illicit trading.
 SIGHTLINES

Small ad hoc businesses, such

as a barber shop, offer services
to prisoners and sometimes to
visitors. Inmates transact mostly
in cash brought in by family
and friends, but they also barter
for products.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 23
aperture
SIGHTLINES
 aperture

Previous: At a recording studio, an

inmate nicknamed Masta R and
his daughters, visiting one day
this year, listen to songs recorded
by his hip-hop group, Free Con-
vict. The group includes about
15 people, some with gang ailia-
tions; their lyrics run the gamut
of topics, from prison life to
family to social justice.

26 SEPT | OCT 2016


On visiting days, when fresh cash
arrives in the prison, eager gam-
blers crowd around tables to play
guaraa. Inmates, pictured here
in 2015, bet on numbers, and
then the winning digits are pulled
from a box.
SIGHTLINES
A prisoner named Freedom
jokes with his mother at the facil-
itys entrance earlier this year.
He is eligible for release, but his
paperwork winds up taking more
than a week to arrive. Adminis-
trative delays plague Venezuelas A man tattoos another convict in
detention system; some inmates an improvised parlor in 2014.
wait years behind bars without Popular ink includes religious sym-
standing trial. bols, relatives names, and guns.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 27
 2

The Abortion 1

Doctor
Germn Cardoso

3
5

1 2 3 4 5 6
Cell phone Syringe Gloves Forceps Curette Photo of father
Women can call me I administer local These are a basic These pull out Now I mostly I was a general
at any time. Some anesthesia pre- sanitary measure the fetus. Prior use an aspirator, surgeon, but it
have called during surgery through a for a clean clinic. to becoming an but sometimes a wasnt until my
emergencies, often syringe to numb Underground clin- abortion doctor, I curette is still nec- father died in
when they are hem- the pain, but ics, which can be in mostly performed essary when the 2001 that I began
orrhaging from a patients remain garages, are gross. abdominal sur- embryo or pla- performing abor-
miscarriage and conscious during The problem is big- geries. When I was centa isnt com- tions. Women who
dont know what to the procedure. ger, though; some performing stom- pletely removed. were his patients
do. I always try to Many women women come in ach, colon, and Id use it to scrape started coming
convince them to are anxious, so I after trying an liver operations, the uterus clean to me for advice
hang up the phone try to talk to them unsanitary DIY I didnt think Id because otherwise, on reproduc-
and get to the near- the whole time, technique, such as someday work as the remains could tive health, and I
est hospital even if to calm and putting parsley into a gynecologist to cause an infection decided to follow
they are ashamed. distract them. their vaginas. extract fetuses. or hemorrhage. in his footsteps.

28 SEPT | OCT 2016 Photographs by ALEJANDRO KIRCHUK

 the things they carried SIGHTLINES
interview by ANNA-CATHERINE BRIGIDA

GYNECOLOGIST Germn Cardosos abortion

clinic is easy to nd. Located on a residen-
tial street in Tandil, Argentina, a small
city four hours south of Buenos Aires, the
6
oce is marked with a placard bearing the
9 59-year-old doctors name. His website
prominently features a phone number and
email address. This may just seem like good
advertisingbut in Argentina, its risky.
Terminating a pregnancy is illegal in the
predominately Catholic country except
under narrow circumstances: when a wom-
ans life or health is in danger, or when
shes been raped. Doctors who perform
consensual abortions can face up to six
years in prison. Cardoso, though, oers
unrestricted access by claiming that any
10
unwanted pregnancy threatens a wom-
ans health.
Although the courts have yet to test his
legal interpretation, Cardoso hasnt escaped
the governments crosshairs entirely. He
worked in Buenos Aires until 2011, when
police raided his clinic in what he viewed as
8 a warning. Cardoso then moved to Tandil,
his hometown, where his father once pro-
vided abortions. He sees about 400 patients
annually and charges around $800 per pro-
cedure (less if a patient cant aord it).
Cardoso sees his job as crisis response.
7 8 9 10
The most recent statistics, from 2009, esti-
Dilators Foley catheter Speculum Birth control pills
During childbirth, If there is a heavy This separates I always give con- mate that up to 500,000 Argentine women
the cervix naturally hemorrhage, I the vaginal walls; sultations on repro- get abortions each yearending about 40
dilates. During the place the device its the first step. ductive health. percent of pregnanciesand that many go
abortion proce- basically an inflat- Each time I use I want to help
dure, which usu- able rubber ball this, I have a flash women avoid other to underground clinics. The World Health
ally takes less than inside the uterus. that brings me unwanted preg- Organization says unsafe abortions cause
an hour, we try to It applies pressure back to the first nancies. Yet many over one-third of the deaths from preg-
mimic that using to stop the bleed- time I performed refuse to use con-
this device to ing. In extreme an abortion. I was traception, say- nancy complications in the country.
manually open cases, I would definitely nervous ing its the mans Women are going to have abortions,
the cervix. That send the patient then, but after responsibility. Cardoso told FOREIGN POLICY in April.
way, the fetus and to a hospital; Ive thousands of pro- Ive had a few that
placenta can exit only had to do that cedures, now its have come back for If a doctor doesnt do it, someone else
the body. once, though. old hat. another procedure. is going to.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 29
 visual statement
by RICK SEALOCK

I am consistently saddened
and angered by the lack of
educational opportunities
that meet tens of millions of
girls because of early marriage,
war, migration, trafficking,
forced labor, and poverty,
to name but a few reasons.
The results? Repeating cycles
of poverty, little sustainable
development for families,
communities, and countries,
and increased security risks
felt on every level, from the
personal to the national.
While some girls, like my own
daughter, are born into a world
that rewards learning, others
are barred by a beast of neglect,
disparagement, exploitation,
violence, even death. Simply
because they are girls. In this
image, blindfolds represent
barriers to education, and the
creature symbolizes the ways
girls suffer as a result. Some,
though, have ripped theirs off
and are striving for a better
life. If more girls arent able to
do the same, it will be a failure
of and for all.
THE ARTIST

30 SEPT | OCT 2016

SIGHTLINES
 the exchange

Does the world

really need
nation-states?

To CHIGOZIE OBIOMA , there is more to writing fiction than craft-

ing engaging characters and plots. Writers, he says, have an
opportunity to assess and critique the world in which they
live. The 2015 Global Thinkers debut novel, The Fishermen,
is a domestic drama about sibling rivalry, but its also an
allegory for Nigerias destructive colonial legacy. TAIYE SELASI,
though, finds value in literary stories that singularly explore
interior landscapes, free of societal or political metaphor.
To that end, her acclaimed 2013 novel, Ghana Must Go,
delves into an immigrant family dealing with the death of
its patriarch. Both authors are interested in the reasons
intimate relationships can cease to function and in the com-
plex forces that shape identitywell beyond the place where
someone is born. Obioma and Selasi recently discussed the
purpose they bring to writing, the responsibility readers
have to novels, and whether the narrative of nationhood is
the greatest story ever told.

TAIYE SELASI: Ive heard your novel described as an

analogy of the dissolution, in a sense, of Nigeria as a
consequence of its, lets say, colonial encounter, as well
as a meditation on the coming apart of the familyas
a love letter to your brothers and to brotherhood. Does
one of those things take precedence in your mind over
the other? Did those ideas bloom simultaneously?
CHIGOZIE OBIOMA: I think they formed together. Ive
always had this idea that a novel cannot function as
just one thing. I hope to write one that functions in
at least two dimensions: on the personal side and on
the conceptual level. You can add a third layer, which
CHIGOZIE OBIOMA
narrowly and very intimately at a specific
set of human beings as individuals, and
not as representations of a broader experi-
encesay, the immigrant experience or the
West African experience. Listening to you,
though, I think: Is it that I actually believe
that one can tell a story for a storys sake,
OBIOMA: PHOTO COURTESY OF SCOTT SODERBERG

would be the philosophical level. What drives me most
is the fact that I dont believe we should tell a story
just for the fact of telling a story. If I dont have any-
thing that I feel is crucial or pressing to say, together
with that story, I dont even attempt to tell it. TS: That
makes sense. I wouldnt say my novel, though, asks
questions about immigrant families. Its asking ques-
tions only about one immigrant family. For better or
worse, Ive staked a very different claim: to look very
rather than needing to have, in order to
claim any meaning, a philosophical com-
ment? In a sense, I think the answer is yes.
Ive always been completely convinced by
the storytelling itself, as well as the beauty
of the language. Perhaps Im discovering
right now that what moves me is something
entirely different than what moves a more
philosophical novelist. CO: My ideas about

32 SEPT | OCT 2016


what a novel should do come from what my
expectations are as a reader first, before
those as a writer. When I watch movies, I
generally dont look beyond what the actors
are doing or saying. When I read books, I
look beyond what is on the page. I always
hope that whatever I write, even if its a
short story about a woman who is fetch-
ing water at a well, we can look at it and
apply it to something bigger so it can be
a microcosm for the exploration of some-
thing deeper. TS: Reading brings me much
more unadulterated joy than writing ever
can, because reading is easy and delight-
ful, and writing is delightful and hard. I was
about halfway through your book before
I realized I was resisting the idea that it
was an analogy. I felt the need to defend
its wholeness as a story not about broth-
ers, but a story about these brothers. Then
I thought: This is absurd. As a reader, you
are insisting that a text do one thing, and
thats not your place as a reader. Let the
text do every damn thing that it can pos-
sibly do and luxuriate in the multiplicity
of its effects and its aims, which is very
different, of course, than what happens
when were writing.
TS: I love this phrase: Write what you
know. I once had the pleasure of speak-
ing with a very great novelist who said, I
think its inane to tell young writers, Write
what you know, because you know noth-
ing. What Ive discovered through writing
fiction, as distinct from writing nonfiction,
is that the novelist writes because of what
we dont know. Whats actually compelling
us to soldier on in our quest is an answer
to the questions that we cant answer, the
knowledge that we dont already have. CO:
That is true. I dont think that knowledge
can be absolute. The moment you think
youve understood something to the letter,
youre finished. Life is, in itself, a constant
quest to understand any kind of phenom-
enon at all.
TS: Nation is one of the greatest stories ever
told: The mythology of the country and
the fantasy of the unified state are wildly
successful acts of narrative. Whats inter-
esting to me is how the nation functions
at the levels that you describe the novel
functioning: the personal, the conceptual,
the philosophical, and then theres what
I think is the most pressing and perhaps
most tragic level, which is the physical.
Because the nation kills, right? CO: Having
TAIYE SELASI
SIGHTLINES
grown up in a small town in Nigeria, I relate
more to having that sense of ownership
towards a particular province, provenance.
Im Igbo and I grew up in a Yoruba-speak-
ing place; I started speaking the language
of other people before that of my own.
I do believe, especially in Africa, that
the nation-state as a Western concept is a
problem. We need tribe nations that can
form organic nations on their own, and
then if they want to merge into orders
and form actual states, they can do that.
Western culture is very foreign, and weve
not found a way to form coherent nations
out of that, so we need to reinvent some-
thing. I see myself as an Igbo man, as a West
African. I dont know whether I believe in
Nigeria, but I have a Nigerian passport,
so I have no choice but to see myself as a
Nigerian also. TS: I was drawn to what you
just said about ownership. It is something
the immigrant can come to know, but it is
almost always an abstraction developed
through what I call ritual and relation-
ship. You also say African countries have
not been able to make a success of the West-
ern nation-state, and I would argue that
absent slave labor in the New World and
empire in the old, neither has the West.
The nation-state is not exactly working
out as well as it may appear. The question
becomes: How can human beings orga-
nize themselves? It is our nature to cluster
together in groups. How can we under-
take that project in a way that is in some
sense affirming to human life, rather than
the opposite? Q
This conversation has been condensed for
publication. Go to FOREIGNPOLICY.com to
read the extended version, or listen to the
discussion by subscribing to FPs Global
Thinkers podcast on iTunes.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 33
 decoder
by KATIE PEEK

DONALD TRUMP

$200K+

GEORGE W. BUSH
FORMER PRESIDENT
OF THE UNITED STATES
$100K+
JEFF BEZOS
ELLEN JOHNSON SIRLEAF
CURRENT PRESIDENT OF LIBERIA
$50K+
CSAR GAVIRIA $100K+
FORMER PRESIDENT
OF COLOMBIA
$30K$50K GRO HARLEM BRUNDTLAND
FORMER PRIME
MINISTER OF NORWAY LEADER LISTED BY
$33K+ THREE TOP BUREAUS
LEADER NOT LISTED BY
THREE TOP BUREAUS

JOHN BRUTON
FORMER PRIME
MINISTER OF IRELAND
$20K$30K $50K+

Keynote Cosmos FOR HIRE: WORLD LEADERS

BEFORE BATTLING on the campaign trail, Hil-
lary Clinton and Donald Trump shared
common ground on a dierent circuit:
high-paid public speaking. Clinton has
earned more than $200,000 per speech,
while Trump has reportedly commanded
as much as $1.5 million. Big names
including celebrities like Lady Gaga and
Larry the Cable Guyare one elite slice
of a booming business, which grew after
World War II as the meetings industry
spread across America. Today, more than
100 agencies broker agreements between
event organizers and speakers or their
representatives, taking a 10 to 35 percent
cut of the fee. The industry doesnt keep
GENDER PAIRS
comprehensive data, but Marie Fredette
of the International Association of Speak-
ers Bureaus says business is rebounding
post-recession. A 2013 survey of 175 orga-
nizations by professional development
advisories Tagoras and Velvet Chainsaw
Consulting found that respondents hired
PROFIT CORPORATION
an average of 15 speakers annually, up from
11 two years prior; one-fth had speaker
budgets topping $100,000. To peek into
Most bureaus are anchored in the West, but
plenty of the talent is internationalincluding
former heads of state. Above is a sampling
of countries whose leaders are cashing in
through three top agencies.
MAP SOURCES: AMERICAN PROGRAM BUREAU, HARRY $30K $50K
WALKER AGENCY, AND WASHINGTON SPEAKERS BUREAU. FEE
ESTIMATES: ALL AMERICAN SPEAKERS BUREAU AND GLOBAL
SPEAKERS BUREAU. DATA COLLECTED JULY 2016.
WHOS TALKING?
Each bubble to the right represents a speaker,
organized by professional category, fee range,
and gender, as aggregated by the All Ameri-
can Speakers Bureau. The fees represent the
bureaus estimated prices for potential engage- $20K $30K
mentsactual prices would vary. A total of
7,413 speakers are included. An additional
2,939 appear on the agencys rolls, but without
fee estimates; the bureau did not respond to
requests for further information.
MEN WOMEN GROUPS AND MIXED
DATA COLLECTED JULY 2016.
WHOS LISTENING?
ORGANIZATIONS HIRING PROFESSIONAL SPEAKERS
$10K $20K
PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
TRADE ASSOCIATION
FOR
EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION
CHARITABLE
OR PHILANTHROPIC
ORGANIZATION
OTHER

this world, FOREIGN POLICY analyzed data

compiled by the All American Speakers
Bureau, a talent aggregator. It shows that
a few keynote addresses are all it could
take for one to jump into a new tax bracket.
85 percent surveyed in the 2013 report had hired
speakers, and nearly 80 percent of those were
professional societies and trade associations. $5K $10K
SOURCE: THE SPEAKER REPORT, NOVEMBER 2013, TAGORAS BUSINESS, FINANCE,
AND VELVET CHAINSAW CONSULTING.  LEADERSHIP

34 SEPT | OCT 2016 Illustrations by ALEX KUEHNE

 SIGHTLINES

ELON MUSK

HILLARY CLINTON

OPRAH WINFREY

TIMOTHY GEITHNER

JON STEWART
GEORGE W. BUSH SERENA WILLIAMS

SHERYL SANDBERG
DEEPAK CHOPRA
SARAH PALIN

SHAQUILLE ONEAL
SNOOP DOGG

NANCY PELOSI

JODIE FOSTER

ANNEMARIE SLAUGHTER

JANE GOODALL

RuPAUL

PATCH ADAMS
JOHN KASICH

JACKIE JOYNERKERSEE

DR. RUTH WESTHEIMER

MARCO RUBIO

KEN GRIFFEY JR.

KENDALL JENNER

SANDRA DAY OCONNOR

CELEBRITIES GOVERNMENT, HEALTH, SCIENCE, MOTIVATION ATHLETES

 ENTERTAINERS POLITICS,  POLICY  TECH  INSPIRATION  SPORTS FIGURES

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 35
 innovations
by ELIZA STRICKLAND

Blowing
Bubbles
SUBMARINES ARE still stuck in
the slow lane. Because they
have to push through resis-
tant water, even the fastest
subs top out at about 40 miles
per hour. But thats without
supercavitation, in which a
bubble of gas, produced in
the nose of the ship, envelops
the entire submarine. This
eect protects the watercraft
from drag and allows it to
achieve high speeds. The rst
supercavitating torpedo was
designed by the Soviet Union
back in the 1960s and report-
edly blasted at 200 miles per
hour. That missile was only
about 27 feet long, however.
No navy has succeeded in
developing a bubble system

PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY IMAGES

ABOVE; COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER / OXFORD NANOPORE
RIGHT
that can encompass an
entire sub.
Part of the problem is pul-
sation, or the way a bubble
continuously expands and
contracts. This can cause
the vehicle to get wet and
thus slow down. But now,
researchers at Pennsylvania
State University have modu-
lated the release of gas from
an objects nose, discharg-
ing it at a frequency that can
cancel out pulsations.The
U.S. Oce of Naval Research
helped fund the project
but its keeping tight-lipped
about when the Navy might
deploy the technology in
its submarine eet.
E.T., Phone China
In July, workers finished installing the last of 4,450
aluminum panels inside a dish the size of 30 soccer
fields in Chinas Guizhou province. Officially named
the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope
(FAST), the structure should be ready to enable gaz-
ing at the cosmos in September. Also known as the
Heavenly Eye, it is the worlds largest single-dish
THATS HOW MANY SPECIES ARE telescope, with an area 2.5 times larger than its near-
INCLUDED IN A FIRST OF ITS est competitor, and therefore the most sensitive.
KIND GLOBAL SURVEY OF MAM Whats more, all the panels can be tilted to change
MALS CARRYING INFECTIOUS
DISEASES THAT CAN JUMP TO the dishs shape and catch radio waves coming from
HUMANS. BY MAPPING THE DIS all directions. FAST will help Chinese researchers
TRIBUTION OF PLAGUE AFFLICTED detect weak radio signals from the distant reaches
CRITTERS, RESEARCHERS AT
THE CARY INSTITUTE OF ECO of the universe and study astrophysical mysteries,
SYSTEM STUDIES IN MILLBROOK, such as the nature of dark matter and gravitational
N.Y., AND THE UNIVERSITY OF waves. It will even search for evidence of extrater-
GEORGIA HAVE BEEN ABLE
TO IDENTIFY HOT SPOTS WHERE restrial life, looking for signals from exoplanets cir-
OUTBREAKS ARE LIKELY. cling alien suns.

36 SEPT | OCT 2016


The Five-hundred-meter Aperture
Spherical Telescope (FAST) is as
large as 30 soccer fields.
The MinION handheld DNA
sequencer could be useful for
fighting poaching.
Do You Have Any
Tigers to Declare?
LAST YEAR, 1,175 rhinos were
poached in South Africa,
up from just 13 in 2007. This
slaughter fuels a booming black
market for animal products: In
2014, the United Nations esti-
mated the illegal wildlife trade
to be worth between $50 billion
and $150 billion annually. A
slew of factorspoverty, weak
regulations, even weaker law
enforcementmakes poaching
dicult to eradicate in the eld.
Some governments are hop-
ing to tackle illicit networks
at the worlds airports, where
poached products are smug-
gled. Certain items, such as tiger
skins and elephant tusks, are
easy enough for customs agents
to identify, but they have to be
spotted in declared shipments
or stashes of goods that author-
ities happen to ag. Most illegal
wildlife trade is more discreet:
Hides are turned into leather,
for instance, while horns are
ground down and put into
medicine capsules. This makes
it nearly impossible for ocials
to determine if an illegal prod-
uct is right under their noses.
To help them, Jon Wetton,
a geneticist at the University
of Leicester, has developed a
portable, on-the-spot detection
system that can rapidly analyze
the DNA of any biological sam-
ple. Typically, genetic analy-
sis would be done in a lab by
a refrigerator-sized machine
and take about 24 hours. Wet-
ton, though, has devised a
technique that relies on a new
handheld genome scanner from
Oxford Nanopore Technologies,
known as the MinION. Once
fully functional, it could inspect
a samplepowder, skin, blood,
boneand identify its prove-
nance in just an hour.
Heres how it works: First,
the MinION sequences a spec-
imens DNA and searches for
genetic barcodes, or small
stretches of material unique
to certain species. Then, via a
standard USB, the device plugs
into a computer, where soft-
ware analyzes the barcodes and
checks them against an expan-
sive database of DNA markers.
The aim is to have a univer-
sal species identication tool,
Wetton tells FOREIGN POLICY,
so we can test anything from
a piece of bush meat to a ship-
ment of caviar. The rst try-
out of the system is scheduled
tentatively for February 2017
at Londons Heathrow Airport.
Down the road, Wetton
hopes his innovation could be
used in remote locales, employ-
ing a pocket-sized gadget from
MinIONs creators that would
prep biological samples for
sequencing anywhereinclud-
ing jungles and savannahs.
Wetton is already in talks with
the Kenya Wildlife Service,
whose rangers have to send
biological material taken from
suspected poachers in national
parks to distant labs for test-
ing. Wetton says his technol-
ogy could ensure that rangers
get an immediate answer to the
question, Whats that blood-
stain on your knife?
SIGHTLINES
Vitamin
Power
MANY RENEWABLE energy
advocates think the best way
to store solar and wind energy
may be to use what are known as
ow batteries, which hold liq-
uid electrolytes in tanks and then
pump them through a reactor
to produce electricity. A major
advantage of these batteries is
that they can be adapted eas-
ily to suit particular applications,
whether one requires storing a
tiny amount of energy that needs
to be released in a single burst,
a huge amount discharged in a
trickle, or any other combination
of circumstances. A disadvan-
tage is that the commonly used
liquidssuch as vanadium and
bromineare expensive, corro-
sive, or toxic to humans.
A Harvard team has made a
ow-battery breakthrough that
takes inspiration from the human
body. The vitamin B2 helps store
energy in humans, so research-
ers decided to copy its molecular
structure. The result is an organic
molecule that, in liquid form,
can store energy within a flow
battery, replacing nasty mate-
rials with a safe, organic substi-
tute. The new material should be
cheap and easy to synthesize in
large quantities; the research-
ers estimate they could use it to
make a ow battery for one-third
the cost of current ones. This is
great news for developing nations
hoping for reliable, renewable,
and afordable energy sources
to light up remote communities
currently of the grid.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 37
 GMAP is more than a masters degree it is a global
community of colleagues and lifelong friends.
Ignatius Puguh Priambodo, GMAP 14
First Secretary Embassy of Indonesia in Brussels

 For the past 15 years, GMAP has set the standard for international
 leadership in and out of the classroom. An intensive, one-year masters
Courses Include: degree program in international affairs, GMAP brings together
Corporate Finance and International Negotiation
Global Financial Markets International Politics distinguished mid- and senior-level leaders to examine issues at the
Foreign Policy Leadership International Trade intersection of business, law, diplomacy, finance, development, and
International Business Leadership and Management
and Economic Law Security Studies geopolitics. The GMAP hybrid learning format offers the ability to pursue
International Macroeconomics Transnational Social Issues an executive-level graduate degree program without career interruption
or relocation. Join us today.
CLASSES START JANUARY AND JULY.
 
 the resources issue

A mote of dust suspended in a sunbeamthats how Carl Sagan once described the world. Like it or not, he added,
the Earth is where we make our stand. Sagan was calling for perspective: a shared understanding that set against the
universes immensity, the Earth is nothing, but to the species living here, it is everything. A quest for perspective also
guides FOREIGN POLICYs Resources Issue. Benjamin Grant, Bernhard Edmaier, and Alex MacLean take to the skies to
reveal Earths beauty at its most abstract, including the designs and patterns of human destruction. Suzy Khimm travels
to Appalachia, where ginseng is being overharvested because Chinese customers pay exorbitant sums for a pound of the
root. James Bamford oers an experts view of the colossal surveillance state that U.S. President Barack Obama has built
on the premise that private data are vital to national security. Whether the resource is digital information or clean water, a
question of viewpoint remains: Who decides whats worthy of protection on this mote of dust, and how? THE EDITORS

Photograph by BENJAMIN GRANT

 ABOVE AND
VISUAL COMMENTARIES ON THE EARTHS RESOURCES BY THREE ARTISTS.

BELOW

40 SEPT | OCT 2016

PHOTOGRAPH BY BENJAMIN GRANT
 By Bina Venkataraman

In 1858, a notorious artist and stuntman

soared above a village near Paris in a
hot air balloon to capture the worlds first
aerial photographs. By then, the Industrial
Revolution had already set humanity
on its current course of radically
re-engineering the planet. Gaspard-Flix
Tournachon, better known as Nadar,
published his images in French newspapers
to stoke public interest in building a
heavier-than-air machine. Nadars friend,
the author Victor Hugo, wrote in support
of the artists dream for the future of
flying: It is the abolition of all boundaries.
It is the destruction of separation.
That obliteration eventually gave human-
ity a new self-imagea sweeping perspec-
tive, at once empowering and humbling.
Today, airplanes, satellites, and drones
summon images that allow cartographers
to map continents, countries to spy on arse-
nals, and relief workers to rescue the vic-
tims of floods and earthquakes. Yet the
view from above has not ceased to abet
artistic imagination. The vantage point
of 30,000 feet, a device used by some of
the artists whose work appears on the fol-
lowing pages, is familiar to the contempo-
rary global traveler as the cruising height
of commercial planes. It is an elevation
of transition, where a passenger does not
inhabit a geography but passes over it in
the fog of jet lag and oxygen deprivation.
But Hugos prediction rings incom-
plete today: Altitude does separate down-
ward-gazing observers from their more
mundane experiences on the ground
and it recasts the planets surface as a
canvas of colors and abstract geometries.
When viewed from above, mineral mines,
industrial farms, and power plants have
the potential to spur curiosity and awe,
revealing artistic patterns while obscur-
ing purpose.
At the same time, the aerial perspective
of Earth is not pure abstractionit pro-
vokes contemplation of the scale of both
landscape and human infrastructure, the
contrast between the slow chisel of geol-
ogy and humanitys swift jackhammers.
Within just a few hours hovering above
the western United States, for example,
PREVIOUS MANIFA OIL FIELD, SAUDI ARABIA | With a pumping capacity of about 900,000 barrels of crude per day, this field is the fifth-largest operat-
ing in the world. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that daily global oil consumption grew by 1.4 million barrels in 2015.
a viewer can survey a nervous system of
highways firing cars across the synapses of
Southern California. Behemoth hotels on
the Las Vegas Strip flanked by improbable
fountains and palm trees in the desert. The
Grand Canyon, its bilious folds and steep
gulfs carved from plateaus by the Colorado
River. The Rocky Mountains, erected by
crashing plates of the Earths crust more
than 50 million years ago, etched by gla-
ciers into rugged silver peaks.
From a high elevation, the observer
cannot help but sense the magnitude and
expanse of human populations, energy
appetites, and excavations. The aerial
view also makes visual sense of mathe-
matical harbingersrising parts per mil-
lion of carbon dioxide molecules in the
atmosphere or degrees Celsius of future
planetary warmingdata points that
have left unmoved the bulk of the public.
The famous blue marble image of Earth,
captured by an Apollo crew during a 1972
flight, portrayed the planets fragility and
unity, rallying the environmental move-
ment. From 30,000 feet, we see more viv-
idly the human imprint.
Humanity has redrafted Earths land-
scapeand even more urgently, its atmo-
sphereto the point that the planets state
of transition now reflects both control
and utter chaos. Fossil fuel extraction to
power civilization has reconfigured for-
ests, oceans, and mountains. Burning
coal and oil has turned up the planets
thermostat, spurring man-made climate
disasters. Glaciers melt. Species migrate
north and upland. Droughts, pests, and
heat waves ravage farms and forests,
and rising seas threaten iconic cities.
Fifteen of the 16 warmest years in the
Earths recorded history have occurred
since 2001, with 2016 on pace to be the
warmest yeta feat owed to emissions
from the fuels that electrify, transport,
heat, cool, and feed human society.
When humans remake the landscape
like this, the temptation arises to deem
our deeds unnaturalbut are they? The
abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock
dripped globules of paint on his vast can-
vasses with the cadence and abandon of a
jazz soloist. When urged to paint what he
saw in nature, he reputedly retorted, I am
nature. As artists reshaping the planets
canvasand beneficiaries of the Earths
resourceshumans exist as both part of
nature and outside it, in perpetual conflict
with their self-interest, rendering places
they once knew unfamiliar.
The aerial view offers the distinct expe-
rience of seeing the beauty in the horrible.
Upon closer inspection, however, observ-
ers also may discover the horror in what
they find beautiful. As climatic upheaval
quickens, high elevation opens the aper-
ture to view humanity in its full expression
on Earth: in conflict, progress, triumph,
and destruction.
BINA VENKATARAMAN is a Carnegie fellow at
New America. She previously served as a
senior advisor for climate change innova-
tion in the Obama administration.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 43
RESOURCES EXTRACTION

There needs to be a
dramatic shift in the way
we look at our planet
for us to protect it. When
we are removed from
our usual line of sight on
the Earths surface, we
can better understand
the sheer enormity,
intricacy, and impact of
the extraction systems
weve constructed. If
we embrace this new
perspective, perhaps we
can create a smarter,
safer future.

Benjamin Grant

44 SEPT | OCT 2016

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 45
 GLOBAL VIEW
From 1980 to 2008, the
amount of material resources
globally extracted, harvested, and
consumed per year increased
60 PERCENT , to nearly 62 BILLION

just one 1 carat.

other pollutants.
METRIC TONS. That figure is pro-

per year. In 2015, the

MINE, BOTSWANA | The

Chinese government
jected to hit 100 billion by 2030.

an additional billion

into the atmosphere.

worlds single largest

as annually belching
try had been burning
some 17 percent more
tons of coal are trans-
LEFT QINHUANGDAO COAL

RIGHT JWANENG DIAMOND

TERMINAL, CHINA | From

rock. On average, 1,750

its kind in China, more

tons of carbon dioxide

steelbut its extraction

closed. Thats the same

ported to power plants
open-pit iron ore mine,

this port, the largest of

reported that the coun-

be extracted to produce
waste, metallic dust, and

put of at least 12 million

than 200 million metric
Today, three material cate-

million metric tons each

IRON ORE MINE, AUSTRALIA |

coal than previously dis-

Mount Whaleback is the

year. About 98 percent of

also releases radioactive

caratsas well as 37 mil-

Earth has an annual out-

lion metric tons of waste

mined ore is used to make

metric tons of earth must

producing more than 100
PREVIOUS MOUNT WHALEBACK

richest diamond mine on

goriesbiomass for food and
feed, fossil energy carriers, and
construction materialsaccount
LOCAL VIEW
for 80 PERCENT of extraction.
Mining of metals saw the largest
growth rate from 1980 to 2008,
at 133 PERCENT. The acceleration,
particularly in the early 2000s,
was due to multiple countries
entering intensive development
phases and to robust consumer
demand in wealthier states.
About 20 percentor more
than 12 BILLION METRIC TONS of
extracted raw materials wind up
as waste. Roughly HALF OF ALL
material extraction by states in
the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development
occurs in the Americas, led by
FOUR countries: Canada, Chile,
Mexico, and the United States.
Gas, oil, and coal taken from fed-
eral land by private companies
account for more than ONE FIFTH
of U.S. greenhouse gas emis-
sions. In 2011, China produced
roughly 95 PERCENT of the worlds
rare-earth elements, used in an
array of computing, green energy,
and other technologies. A sin-
gle large wind turbine contains
roughly 600 KILOGRAMS of rare-
earth metals. The Chinese
Society of Rare Earths estimates
that every ton of these metals
mined creates 75 CUBIC METERS of
acidic wastewater, 9,600 TO 12,000
CUBIC METERS of waste gas, and 1
TON of radioactive residue.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM
EXTRACTION BENJAMIN GRANT

47
R E S O U R C E S WAT E R

Water, like no other

natural element, leaves
an indelible mark on
the Earth. Fluid, frozen,
or gaseous, it shapes
landscapes. On the one
hand, Im a fine-art pho-
tographer interested
in showing the phenom-
ena of changing water
sources in an aestheti-
cally pleasing way; on
the other hand, Im a
scientist who wants to
make people aware that
something serious is
happening. From the air,
I can do both.

Bernhard Edmaier

48 SEPT | OCT 2016

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 49
 50
GLOBAL VIEW

SEPT | OCT 2016

Only about 2 PERCENT of the
worlds water is fresh, and
75 PERCENT of that supply is con-
tained in glaciers. Some 780
MILLION people currently do not
have access to clean, safe drink-
WAT E R B E R N H A R D E D M A I E R ing water. Climate change is
to blame for THREE QUARTERS of
U.S. coastal flooding events over
the past decade. Assuming a
2 degree Celsius rise in the
worlds average temperature this
century, global climate change
adaption costs related to water
flood management, for instance
could cost up to $19 BILLION
annually between 2020 and
2050. Agriculture is already
responsible for 70 PERCENT of
freshwater extraction, and the
sectors liquid consumption could
increase by nearly one-fifth by
2050. In India, where around
one-quarter of the population,
or more than 300 MILLION people,
cope with severe water short-
ages, the water table is dropping
an average of at least 0.3 METERS
each year. By 2050, water
shortages could cause an
average GDP loss of 6 PERCENT
worldwide. This decline could be
worstto the tune of 14 PERCENT
in the Middle East. Melting
ice is releasing pathogens and
LOCAL VIEW
chemicals. This year, thawing
in Russia caused an ANTHRAX
OUTBREAK . A radioactive Cold War
military base in Greenland could
begin to leak due to melting ice
by 2090. For every 1 DEGREE

Europe like Kirr.

CELSIUS that the average global
large atolls in the

with conservative
oration of coral by
ICELAND | Icelands
longest river is fed

light, or nutrients,

in the winter, it can

Maldives coral and
sustained, extreme
Coral reefs encircle
ciers in Iceland and

lagoons in one of 26

Pacific to disappear.
temperature increases, scientists
is due to interaction

the Baltic Sea. Rising

which can ultimately

ening even islands in

estimates at 1.9 milli-
meadows in summer;
RIGHT KIRR ISLAND, GER
Greenland are disap-

the Great Barrier Reef

with iron elements in

sea levels have caused

than 60 percent of the

is covered by saltgrass
Maldives archipelago.
287 billion metric tons

become submerged by
Bleachingthe discol-
local swampland. Gla-

Thjorsa could run dry.

PREVIOUS THJORSA RIVER,

per year. When theyre

kill reefsaffects more

predict an additional 320 MILLION

mainly by glacier melt-

five small islands in the

gone, rivers such as the

The increase continues,

changes in temperature,

more than 90 percent of

MANY | This coastal area

meters annually, threat-

LEFT ARI ATOLL, MALDIVES |

off the coast of Australia.

pearing at a rate of about
water; its yellowish color

cases of diarrheal illnesses.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 51
R E S O U R C E S A G R I C U LT U R E

Soil is dwindling
needlessly because of
poor stewardship and
industrial agricultural
practices. Flying is
a great way to look at
the effects. You cant
see over a hill from
the ground, but from
an airplane, you can:
Vegetation patterns
pop out on a larger
scale, showing just how
complex agriculture
has become.

Alex MacLean

52 SEPT | OCT 2016

 54
SEPT | OCT 2016
A G R I C U LT U R E A L E X M A C L E A N
GLOBAL VIEW
Desertification caused by
unsustainable agricultural prac-
tices destroys 12 MILLION HECT
ARES of natural ecosystems
each year. Many high-demand
crops, including soy, cotton, corn,
and sorghum, cause soil erosion
when native plants are cleared
and land is plowed. Brazil cur-
rently loses about 55 MILLION TONS
of topsoil each year because of
soy production. Half of the
worlds habitable land is already
used for agriculture, and an esti-
mated 120 MILLION additional
hectares will be converted by
2050. Global use of pesticides,
which contaminate agricultural
runoff and thus water supplies,
has increased 26 FOLD over the
past 50 years. Farming is
responsible for between 11 AND
15 PERCENT of global emissions.
The entire food system, including
production, shipping, processing,
and other aspects, contributes
between 44 AND 57 PERCENT of all
 PREVIOUS PRAIRIE DU ROCHER,
LOCAL VIEW

ILLINOIS, UNITED STATES | Wheat is

planted amid corn stalks as a
cover crop to help prevent ero-
sion, but it is killed off with an
herbicide, which creates the
yellow color. Between 1981 and
2003, roughly one-quarter of
the Earths land surface experi-
enced degradation.

LEFT SNOWVILLE, UTAH, UNITED

STATES | A farmer has tilled over
an erosion gully similar to the one
above the dark strip of soil. The
Earths soil contains about three
times the amount of carbon as the
atmosphere does, and farming
practices like tilling release it: Soil
contributes 37 percent of agricul-
tures greenhouse gas emissions.
They are expected to rise another

CENT making it more difficult for

farmers to adapt to changing cli-
decline by 15 TO 30 PERCENT in the

SPECIES for 90 PERCENT of calories

RIGHT ADAIRVILLE, KENTUCKY, UNITED

mate change: Africa, South Asia,
and Central America. Some sin-
tural emissions of methane and

mate conditions. As monocrops

By
nitrous oxide, two major green-

become reliant on just 30 PLANT

CENT between 1990 and 2005.
house gases, increased 17 PER

regions most vulnerable to cli-

2080, estimates suggest that

gle countries could see reduc-

diversity decreased by 75 PER

greenhouse gases. Agricul-

tions of up to 50 PERCENT. In

have increased, humans have

STATES | A pivot irrigator moves

the past century, agricultural
agricultural productivity will

clockwise, its downward spray-

35 TO 60 PERCENT by 2030.

ing nozzles distributing water.

Shortly after starting, the sys-
tem faltered, as indicated by the
light-colored wedge on the right.
consumed.

In the United States, pollution

found in agricultural runoff is
the leading cause of water quality
impacts in rivers and streams.
 BY JAMES BAMFORD
OVER EIGHT YEARS, U.S. PRESIDENT
BARACK OBAMA HAS
CREATED THE MOST INTRUSIVE
SURVEILLANCE APPARATUS IN THE
WORLD. TO WHAT END?
ILLUSTRATIONS BY RAYMOND BIESINGER

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 57

THIS SUMMER, AT 1:51 P.M.
June 11, an unearthly roar shattered the
afternoon quiet along the Florida coast. On
Cape Canaveral, liquid fuel surged through
the thick aluminum veins of a Delta IV
Heavy rocket nearly as tall as the U.S. Cap-
itol. Two million pounds of thrust in three
symmetrical boosters fired the engines,
sending the craft hurtling over the Atlan-
tic Ocean into the heavens. Eighty sec-
onds after takeoff, it hit Mach 1, the speed
of sound.
The Delta IV Heavy, introduced in 2004,
is the most powerful rocket in American
history, and this was only the ninth time it
had launched. Even more exclusive, how-
ever, was its top-secret cargo: Inside its
nearly seven-story-high nose cone was an
Advanced Orion, the worlds largest satel-
lite. About eight hours after launch, when
the most advanced spy craft ever built went
into geosynchronous orbit, it unfurled its
gigantic mesh antenna, larger than a foot-
ball field, and began eavesdropping on the
Earth below.
The missions patch, dubbed epic/ter-
rifying by the Verge, depicted a masked,
armored knight standing defensively
before an American flag. A sword strapped
to his back bore a cross-guard resembling
a set of claws. According to the National
Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the intelli-
gence agency responsible for the satellite,
the image delivered a message of tena-
cious, fierce focus representing extreme
reach with global coverage.
In a sense, this was a fitting tribute to
President Barack Obama as his adminis-
tration entered its last six months in the
White House. Over his two terms, Obama
has created the most powerful surveillance
state the world has ever seen. Although
other leaders may have created more
oppressive spying regimes, none has
come close to constructing one of equiv-
alent size, breadth, cost, and intrusive-
58 SEPT | OCT 2016
ON SATURDAY,
ness. From 22,300 miles in space, where
seven Advanced Orion crafts now orbit;
to a 1-million-square-foot building in the
Utah desert that stores data intercepted
from personal phones, emails, and social
media accounts; to taps along the millions
of miles of undersea cables that encircle
the Earth like yarn, U.S. surveillance has
expanded exponentially since Obamas
inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.
The effort to wire the worldor to
achieve extreme reach, in the NROs par-
lancehas cost American taxpayers more
than $100 billion. Obama has justified the
gargantuan expense by arguing that there
are some trade-offs involved in keeping the
country safe. I think its important to rec-
ognize that you cant have 100 percent secu-
rity and also then have 100 percent privacy
and zero inconvenience, he said in June
2013, shortly after Edward Snowden, a for-
mer contractor with the National Security
Agency (NSA), revealed widespread gov-
ernment spying on Americans phone calls.
Since Snowdens leaks, pundits and
experts (myself included) have debated the
legality and ethics of the U.S. surveillance
apparatus. Yet has the presidents blueprint
for spying succeeded on its own terms?
An examination of the unprecedented
architecture reveals that the Obama
administration may only have drowned
itself in data. Whats more, in trying to
right the ship, Americas intelligence cul-
ture has grown frenzied. Agencies are ever
seeking to get bigger, move faster, and pry
deeper to keep pace with the enormous
quantity of information being generated
the world over and with the new tactics
and technologies intended to shield it
from spies.
This race is a defining feature of Obamas
legacyand one that threatens to become
never-ending, even after hes left the
White House.
THE FOUNDATIONS of Obamas shadow state
date back to the immediate post-9/11
period. Six weeks after the attacks, the
Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the
governments surveillance powers, was
rushed through Congress and signed by
President George W. Bush. A few months
later, the Bush administration created
the Information Awareness Office, part
of the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA). That led to the devel-
opment of the Total Information Aware-
ness program, designed to vacuum up vast
amounts of private electronic databank-
ing transactions, travel documents, medi-
cal files, and morefrom citizens. After the
media exposed and criticized the program,
which didnt use warrants, Congress shut it
down in late 2003. Much of the operation,
though, was simply transferred to the NSA.
In 2005, the New York Times revealed
that Bush had authorized the NSA to mon-
itor the international electronic communi-
cations of hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of people in the United States. Code-
named Stellar Wind, the program inter-
cepted telephone conversations, emails,
and metadata from taps inside AT&T facil-
ities and from satellites. Each day, mil-
lions of communications were scanned for
addresses and keywords associated with al
Qaeda. Any leads were sent to the FBI. (A
secret internal analysis conducted by the
bureau in 2006 indicated that no informa-
tion from Stellar Wind had proved useful.)
The same week the Times investiga-
tion was published, Obama, then a sena-
tor, gave a speech defending civil liberties
and asking the Senate to hold off on voting
to reauthorize the Patriot Act. If someone
wants to know why their own government
has decided to go on a fishing expedition
through every personal record or private
document this legislation gives peo-
ple no rights to appeal the need for such
a search in a court of law, the former con-
stitutional law professor declared. This is
just plain wrong.
Obama rode a wave of negative public
opinion on mass surveillance. In January
2006, a Zogby Analytics poll showed that,
by a margin of 52 to 43 percent, Americans
 wanted Congress to consider impeaching
Bush if he wiretapped citizens without a
judges approval. Obama then carried the
opposition narrative into his White House
bid. In late 2007, he publicly promised, No
more secrecy. Thats a commitment that I
make to you as president. That means no
more illegal wiretapping of American citi-
zens. He even vowed to support a filibuster
of any bill that gave retroactive immunity
to companies providing assistance to gov-
ernment spies. (PRISM, a secretive program
to gather data from major internet compa-
nies that was later revealed in Snowdens
leaks, was launched in 2007.)
Yet as his campaign progressed, Obamas
stance hardened. Overseas, scores of peo-
ple were being killed in Iraq by suicide
bombings; at home, opponents were ham-
mering Obama for being weak on terror-
ism. Amid this shifting political climate,
he brought in John Brennan, a former CIA
deputy director, as his top intelligence
advisor. During the Bush years, Brennan
had supported the very policies Obama
campaigned against. Within months, his
influence on the candidate was evident.
In July 2008, Obama reversed his earlier
AMERICAS INTELLIGENCE CULTURE
HAS
GROWN FRENZIED.
AGENCIES ARE EVER SEEKING
TO GET BIGGER, MOVE FASTER,
AND PRY DEEPER.
promises, announcing support for a sweep-
ing surveillance law that largely legalized
the NSAs warrantless eavesdropping pro-
gram and granted immunity to telecom
companies that aided in spying.
Many of Obamas supporters were hor-
rified. I am disgusted, one wrote on the
candidates website. Obama will NOT
receive my vote in November. But the
Democratic nominee justified his switch
by pointing to violent threats in places such
as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In a
dangerous world, he wrote on a campaign
blog, government must have the authority
to collect the intelligence we need to pro-
tect the American people. From a prag-
matic perspective, Obama was also heading
into the last push for the presidency and
needed to appeal to the broader electorate,
which viewed terrorism as a bigger threat
than his liberal base did.
After being elected, Obama staffed up
with intelligence officials who supported
mass surveillance. Brennan became his
chief counterterrorism advisor (and, a few
years later, director of the CIA). Maureen
Baginski, the NSAs former director of sig-
nals intelligence, a job that had placed her
in charge of wiretapping, joined the transi-
tion team that helped establish policy for
the NSA and other spy agencies.
Most notable, though, was Obamas deci-
sion to keep the NSAs chief in place. Keith
Alexander, a three-star general whod led
the agency since 2005, was a force to be
reckoned with. We jokingly referred to
him as Emperor Alexanderwith good
cause, because whatever Keith wants,
Keith gets, a former senior CIA official
told me. We would sit back literally in awe
of what he was able to get from Congress,
from the White House, and at the expense
of everybody else. Alexanders preferred
spying method was blunt. According to a
document leaked by Snowden, while vis-
iting Menwith Hill station, the NSAs giant
listening post in England, in June 2008,
Alexander asked, Why cant we collect all
the signals all the time? He applied this
approach in Iraq, pulling intelligence from
phone interceptions, planes, drones, sat-
ellites, and other sensors into a powerful
computer analysis system known as the
Real Time Regional Gateway. He also ran
the NSAs massive metadata surveillance
program, which involved secretly keeping
track of every phone in the United States:
what numbers were called, from where,
and exactly whenbillions of communi-
cations each year.
One of the few people with the security
clearance to witness Alexander in action
was Judge Reggie Walton of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
He didnt like what he saw, particularly
that the NSA did not have reasonable and
articulable suspicion to justify monitoring
some 90 percent of targets in its metadata
program. In a January 2009 opinion, Wal-
ton wrote that he was exceptionally con-
cerned that the agency was operating in
flagrant violation of the FISCs orders
regarding privacy. Two months later, he
accused the NSA of making material
misrepresentations to the court, which
in less polite language is known as lying.
He pointed the finger at Alexander, writ-
ing that the generals explanation for why
his agency had been eavesdropping ille-
gally on tens of thousands of Americans
essentially, that he thought privacy restric-
tions applied only to certain archived
datastrains credulity. Walton con-
cluded that oversight of metadata gath-
ering has never functioned effectively.
Yet Obama didnt dismiss Alexander.
In fact, the following year, the general was
awarded a fourth star and tapped to lead
the newly minted, top-secret U.S. Cyber
Command. And rather than limit the NSA
chiefs collect-it-all regime, the president
authorized its expansion.
FOR THE OBAMA administration, the next
frontier in spying was being able to eaves-
drop on every single person in a country
by obtaining full-take audio of all cell-
phone conversations. For this new pro-
gram, code-named SOMALGET, it needed a
testing ground. The Bahamassmall, con-
tained, peaceful, 50 miles from the Florida
coastfit the bill.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 59
 In 2009, not long after Obama had taken
office, the NSA gained access to Bahamian
communications networks by subterfuge.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administra-
tion got legal permission to plant moni-
toring equipment in the nations telecom
systems by convincing the islands govern-
ment that the operation would help catch
drug dealers. Really, though, it opened
a backdoor for the NSA so that it could
tap, record, and store cellular data. [O]ur
covert mission is the provision of SIGINT
[signals intelligence], a document leaked
by Snowden stated. The host country was
not aware.
Within two years, SOMALGET would
achieve its goal of 100 percent surveil-
lance in the Bahamasall without legal
warrants. This included spying on the cell
phones of some 6 million U.S. citizens who
visit or reside in the country each year;
notable celebrities with homes there are
Bill Gates, John Travolta, and Tiger Woods.
The NSA didnt stop with the Bahamas,
however. It eventually deployed SOMAL-
GET in Afghanistan, which brought the
total number of conversations recorded
and stored by the program to over 100
million call events per day, according to
leaked agency files. It also began collecting
metadata from phones in the Philippines,
Mexico, and Kenya. NSA planning docu-
ments in 2013 anticipated further uses in
other countries.
In some cases, the Obama administra-
tion cooperated with foreign governments
to expand its reconnaissance capabilities.
This included members of the Five Eyes, a
clandestine alliance of intelligence agen-
cies in the United States, the United King-
dom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand
that dates back to the Cold War. During
Obamas first three years in office, the U.S.
government paid the British equivalent of
the NSA, the Government Communica-
tions Headquarters (GCHQ), at least $150
million to enhance surveillance. Because
undersea fiber-optic cables from North
and South America transit the United
Kingdom on their way to Europe and the
Middle East, the GCHQ was in an ideal
position to place taps on them. It did just
60 SEPT | OCT 2016
that, on cables that could transfer upwards
of 21 petabytes of information daily; this
included a large slice of the internet, which
could be stored for three days before being
replaced by new data, and some 600 mil-
lion telephone events every 24 hours.
In 2010, not long after becoming oper-
ational, the program grew to be so suc-
cessful that the GCHQ boasted it had
the biggest internet access of any Five
Eyes member. This is a massive amount
of data! acknowledged an agency Pow-
erPoint later made public by Snowden.
Another leaked document declared, We
are in the golden age.
To sift through everything, 250 NSA
analysts joined forces with about 300
from the GCHQ. Using computer sys-
tems, they searched for data containing
any of 71,000 selectors, such as key-
words, email addresses, or phone num-
bers. Internally, this work was dubbed
Mastering of The Internet (MTI). A leaked
2010 GCHQ document stated, MTI deliv-
ered the next big step in the access, pro-
cessing and storage journey. In a single
INTO THE NSAS BLUFFDALE, UTAH FACILITY
WOULD FLOW
EMAILS,
TE XTS, TWEETS,
FINANCIAL RECORDS, FACEBOOK POSTS,
YOUTUBE VIDEOS, AND
TELEPHONE CHATTER.
day, the file continued, a GCHQ surveil-
lance operation known as Tempora had
captured, stored, and analyzed some 39
billion pieces of information.
THE ACCELERATION of surveillance required
a construction boom of a scale unprece-
dented in the history of U.S. intelligence.
On March 5, 2012, Alexander opened what
is likely the worlds largest listening post,
about 130 miles north of Savannah, Geor-
gia; members of the press were warned
not to bring cameras within two miles.
The $286 million, 604,000-square-foot
facility has more than 2,500 workstations
and 47 conference rooms, and it employs
more than 4,000 eavesdroppers and other
personnel who focus on the Middle East.
Earphones on, facing their computers,
employees sit in cubicles and listen to
cuts, or intercepted conversations. Its
very near real time, Adrienne Kinne, a
former intercept operator at the complex,
told me a few years ago. We would just
get these thousands of cuts dumped on
us [from] Iraq, Afghanistan, and a whole
swath of area. We would get [calls in] Tajik,
Uzbek, Russian, Chinese.
As of 2013, the NSA had spent upwards
of $300 million to expand a former Sony
chip-fabrication plant near San Antonio
and turn it into the agencys principal lis-
tening post for the Caribbean and Cen-
tral and South America. About 900 miles
northwest, it was also constructing a new
operations building at Buckley Air Force
Base near Denver. The mission was to col-
lect intercepted communications from
spy satellites, including Advanced Orions,
and ground stations like Menwith Hill,
then transmit the data through fiber-optic
cables to analysts at their desks near Savan-
nah, San Antonio, and at other NSA out-
posts. Meanwhile, in January 2012, the NSA
opened a $358 million listening post on the
island of Oahu targeting Asian and Pacific
countries. Upon its debut, Alexander said
in a news release that the facilitys goal is
to produce foreign signals intelligence for
decision-makers as global terrorism now
jeopardizes the lives of our citizens, mili-
tary forces, and international allies.

Not to be left out, Menwith Hill also
underwent a multimillion-dollar expan-
sion. Like a moon base hidden in the roll-
ing Yorkshire hills, the stations 33 giant
golf-ball-like radomes house parabolic
antennas capable of 2 million intercepts
an hour from communications satellites.
To better analyze data at the post, in 2012,
the NSA added powerful supercomputers
and boosted personnel from 1,800 to 2,500.
That November, Obama was re-elected
following a campaign that centered almost
exclusively on domestic and economic
issues; little attention was paid to surveil-
lance and privacy. (The Snowden leaks
were still more than six months down the
road.) Beyond the campaign trail, how-
ever, on high ground in Bluffdale, Utah,
construction was in progress on the pice
de rsistance of Obamas shadow empire.
The $2 billion, 1-million-square-foot com-
plex was set to function as the centerpiece
of the NSAs global eavesdropping opera-
tions. Into it would flow streams of emails,
text messages, tweets, Google searches,
financial records, Facebook posts, YouTube
videos, metadata, and telephone chatter
picked up by the constellation of satellites,
cable taps, and listening posts by then in
operation.
For intelligence analysts, the Bluffdale
facility serves as a sort of cloud, or exter-
nal hard drive, for intercepted data. About
200 people tend to some 10,000 racks of
humming, blinking servers containing
trillions of words and thoughts sucked up
from unsuspecting people. Some areas of
the complex contain data considered criti-
cal, such as calls and emails to and from key
members of al Qaeda and the Islamic State;
other information is eventually erased
to make room for more on the servers.
Outside the facility, theres been the
occasional protest. In June 2014, a bul-
bous, 135-foot-long blimp appeared in the
sky bearing a giant sign that read, NSA
Illegal Spying Below. Inside were repre-
sentatives from a coalition of grassroots
groups dedicated to privacy. Were fly-
ing an airship over the Utah data center,
a written statement from one participating
organization, the Electronic Frontier Foun-
dation, proclaimed, which has come to
symbolize the NSAs collect-it-all approach
to surveillance.
ALTHOUGH THE EFFORT to gather every pos-
sible bit of information follows a certain
logicthe more you have, the more likely
you are to find what youre looking forit
is complicated by what NSA officials refer
to as the three Vs. Inside [the] NSA, we
often say thats the volume, velocity, vari-
ety issue, Alexanders deputy, Chris Inglis,
told an audience of intelligence officials in
2010, an enormous quantity of informa-
tion moving ever faster and coming at us
in very complex forms.
Obamas surveillance architecture, it
seems, has done little to address this multi-
faceted problem. In fact, it may have made
it worse. Privacy hasnt been traded for
security, but for the government hoard-
ing more data than it knows how to han-
dle. Kinne, the former intercept operator,
described her work as just like searching
blindly through all these cuts to see what
the hell was what.
In the wake of the Snowden leaks,
administration officials tried hard to jus-
tify the secret collection of Americans
telephone records. We know of at least
50 threats that have been averted because
of this information, Obama said during a
visit to Berlin in 2013. He offered no specific
examples. Alexander, meanwhile, claimed
numerous times to the media and in public
speeches that 54 different terrorist-related
activities had been thwarted. But he, too,
offered no examples.
On Oct. 2, 2013, when called to testify
before the Senate Judiciary Commit-
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 61
tee, the general backtracked. Alexander
cited only one instance when an intercept
detected a potential threat: a Somali taxi
driver living in San Diego who sent $8,500
to al-Shabab, his home countrys notorious
terrorist group. That winter, a panel set up
by Obama to review the NSAs operations
concluded that the agency had stopped no
terrorist attacks. We found none, Geoffrey
Stone, a University of Chicago law profes-
sor and one of five panel members, bluntly
told NBC News in December 2013. Since
then, despite mass surveillance both at
home and abroad, shootings or bombings
have occurred in San Bernardino, Califor-
nia; Orlando, Florida; Paris; Brussels; and
Istanbulto name just a few places.
Beyond failures to create security, there
is the matter of misuse or abuse of U.S.
spying, the effects of which extend well
beyond violations of Americans con-
stitutional liberties. In 2014, I met with
Snowden in Moscow for a magazine
assignment. Over pizza in a hotel room
not far from Red Square, he told me that
the NSA puts innocent people in danger.
In his experience, for instance, the agency
routinely had passed raw, unredacted
intercepts of millions of phone calls and
emails from Arab- and Palestinian-Amer-
icans to its Israeli counterpart, Unit 8200.
Once in Israeli hands, Snowden feared, this
information might be used to extort infor-
mation or otherwise harm relatives of the
individuals being spied upon.
That September, after my interview with
Snowden was published, 43 members of
Unit 8200 quit their posts in moral pro-
test. They charged publicly that Israel used
intercepted communications, like those
sent to it by the NSA, to inflict political
persecution on Palestinians. They said
data were gathered on sexual orientations,
infidelities, money problems, family med-
ical conditions, and other private matters
and then used as tools of coercionto force
targets into becoming Israeli collaborators,
for example. [T]he intelligence is used to
apply pressure to people, to make them
cooperate with Israel, one member of the
dissenting group, who asked that his name
not be used, told the Guardian.
62 SEPT | OCT 2016
The NSA has at least considered
employing similar tactics in the United
States. In a top-secret memo dated Oct. 3,
2012, Alexander raised the possibility of
using vulnerabilities discovered in mass
dataviewing sexually explicit material
online, for instanceto damage reputa-
tions. The agency could, say, smear indi-
viduals it believed were radicalizing others
in an effort to diminish their influence.
Obama, meanwhile, has taken virtually
no steps to fix what ails his spying appa-
ratus. After the Snowden revelations, the
president called for ending the NSAs col-
lection of metadata from phone calls by
U.S. citizens. But this represents a rare
tremor in the surveillance state. More con-
sistently, Obama has limited oversight. In
his first year as president, he threatened to
veto a bill from his own party that would
have required him to brief all members
of congressional intelligence committees
about covert operations, as opposed to the
much smaller Gang of Eight, made up of
top-ranking party and committee leaders
and created in the Bush era to shield ille-
gal activities from scrutiny. Gang brief-
ings, former White House counterterrorism
czar Richard Clarke told Rachel Maddow
in 2009, were often a farce.
While keeping critics at bay, the Obama
administration has gone after people blow-
ing the whistle on intelligence abuses. The
Justice Department has charged eight
leakersmore than double the num-
ber under all previous presidents com-
bined. [T]his trend line should be going
in the opposite direction, an ACLU lawyer
argued in a 2014 blog post. The modern
national security state is more power-
ful than evermore powerful even than
during the Cold War. It demands demo-
cratic accountability.
THE NATIONAL Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency (NGA) released a report in June
detailing what it calls a data tsunami. By
the end of this decade, there will be any-
where from 50 billion to 200 billion net-
worked devices on a planet of some 8 billion
people. For the intelligence community,
this equates to 40 zettabytes of data, or 1
sextillion bytes, the NGA states. Described
in more familiar terms, this is the equiva-
lent of every person on the planet having
174 newspapers delivered daily. Viewed
another way, thats more data than 7 billion
Libraries of Congress could hold.
In the surveillance state Obama has built,
this deluge threatens to bury the few nee-
dles that might existwarnings of attacks,
signals of radicalizing groups, rallying cries
of extremist recruiterseven deeper in the
proverbial haystack. So, too, does encryp-
tion: Once a tool used mostly by spy agen-
cies and militaries, encryption is becoming
commonplace in everyday digital chatter to
keep government eyes and ears out. Gmail
offers it. WhatsApp began providing its bil-
lion-plus users with automatic encryption
in April. In July, Facebook announced that
it would soon give the option of end-to-end
encryption on its Messenger app. More ser-
vices will surely follow.
Speed is a critical component in break-
ing encryption because most codes are
based on factoring extremely large prime
numbers. Conducting whats known as
a brute force attacktrying every pos-
sible combination of digitsusing even
the most powerful computers in operation
would take centuries or longer to succeed.
Obama, though, signed an execu-
tive order in July 2015 urging the cre-
ation of an exaflop supercomputera
machine about 30 times faster than any-
thing in existence. It would be capable
of conducting more than a quintillion
(1,000,000,000,000,000,000) operations
per second. The presidents charge to build
was mostly targeted at the scientific com-
munity; behind the scenes, however, the
NSA has been preparing to breach the exa-
flop barrier since 2011.
That year, the agency secretly built a
260,000-square-foot facility at the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory in Tennes-
see, the same place where the Manhattan
Project developed the atomic bomb. Its
research focuses on hitting the computing
speed that would not only give the agency
an edge over encryption, but also provide it
with better cataloging capabilities to tackle
the ocean of data already arriving daily at
 complexes like the one in Bluffdale, Utah.
The government is also finding ways
to cheat, most notably through Bullrun,
a code-named program run jointly by the
NSA and the GCHQ. The agencies clan-
destinely collaborate with technology
companies and internet service provid-
ers to insert vulnerabilities into commer-
cial encryption systems, as reported by
the Guardian. As of 2010, according to a
top-secret GCHQ PowerPoint, the NSA had
already achieved a breakthrough: Vast
amounts of encrypted Internet data which
QUANTUM COMPUTING COULD
BE A
GAMECHANGER
IT WOULD BREAK THE LAST LINE OF DEFENSE
AGAINST GOVERNMENT
have up till now been discarded are now
exploitable, the leaked slides state. By
2015, the British agency hoped to have
cracked the encryption of 15 major inter-
net companies.
Looking further into the future, Obamas
NSA has also explored quantum comput-
ingtechnology that, theoretically, could
defeat encryption for good. Its science
breaks all the rules. Today, data are stored
in binary bitseither ones or zerosbut
in quantum computing, so-called qubits
could be both one and zero at the same
time. This would allow for almost incom-
prehensible operating speeds. According
to documents released by Snowden, the
NSA has been working to build a cryp-
tologically useful quantum computer as
part of a research program broadly called
Penetrating Hard Targets.
Ultrafast computing could be a game-
changer in U.S. intelligence. It would break
the last line of defense against government
intrusion. Though this wouldnt necessar-
ilyor even likelyguarantee that security
threats could be identified, it would allow
the surveillance state to seize every bit of
power that its backers, including Obama,
have sought to give it.
After the White House panel set up to
review NSA surveillance in 2013 suggested
halting efforts to undermine commercial
encryption, the president demurred. In
a speechone of the few hes given on
surveillance in his second termObama
kept to the middle of the political road.
We have to make some important deci-
sions about how to protect ourselves and
sustain our leadership in the world, while
IN U.S. INTELLIGENCE.
INTRUSION.
upholding the civil liberties and privacy
protections that our ideals and our Consti-
tution require, he said. We need to do so
not only because it is right, but because the
challenges posed by threats like terrorism,
and proliferation, and cyberattacks are not
going away anytime soon.
Zack Whittaker, the security editor for
ZDNet, summed up Obamas remarks in a
headline: Keep calm and carry on spying.
WHOEVER WINS the upcoming presiden-
tial election will probably do just that. In
response to the Orlando shooting in June,
Hillary Clinton said, I have proposed an
intelligence surge to bolster our capabil-
ities across the board with appropriate
safeguards here at homebut offered no
details on what that would entail. She has
called for Snowden to return from Russia
and face trial, and while supporting the end
of the NSAs metadata program, shes sug-
gested that the agency never broke the law.
I think its fair to say the government, the
NSA, didnt, so far as we know, cross legal
lines, but they came right up and sat on
them, she told an audience at a San Fran-
cisco technology summit in August 2014.
Donald Trumps rhetoric, meanwhile,
suggests that he would prioritize making
Americas surveillance empire as powerful
as possible. I think security has to preside,
and it has to be preeminent, he told Fox
News in June 2015. Trump has also said
NSA reconnaissance is just a fact of modern
American life. I assume that when I pick
up my telephone, people are listening to
my conversations, he told radio host Hugh
Hewitt last December, implying that Amer-
icans should just get used to being spied on.
Whistleblowers, it seems, would not fare
well under a Trump administration. If I
were president, [Russian President Vlad-
imir] Putin would give him over, Trump
said of Snowden in a July 2015 appearance
on CNN. In 2013, speaking on Fox & Friends,
he was even tougher. I think Snowden is
a terrible threat. I think hes a terrible trai-
tor, and you know what we used to do in
the good old days when we were a strong
country? Trump asked. You know what
we used to do to traitors, right? One of the
hosts interjected, Well, you killed them,
Donald. Trump agreed.
This is Obamas legacy on surveillance: a
shadow state of brick and mortar, hardware
and software, satellites and eavesdroppers,
that is ready to grow on the next presidents
command. How big is too big, though, is a
question the outgoing president has never
answered fully. At what point does gath-
ering data become an end in itself, rather
than a means to an end? Is the U.S. gov-
ernment already there or approaching it?
Unless answers come, 50 years from
now, the world may look back at Obamas
architecture of surveillancefull of
radomes, windowless walls, phone taps,
and double-ringed fenceswith the same
puzzled astonishment that 1950s bomb
shelters elicit today. Q
JAMES BAMFORD (@WashAuthor) is a colum-
nist for FOREIGN POLICY and the author of
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA
From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on Amer-
ica. He also writes and produces docu-
mentaries for PBS.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 63
64 SEPT | OCT 2016
 BY SUZY KHIMM
CHINESE CUSTOMERS
PAYING HUNDREDS
OF DOLLARS
PER POUND OF WILD
APPALACHIAN GINSENG
ARE FEEDING A
DIGGING FRENZY THAT
THREATENS TO
DECIMATE THE REVERED
ROOT FOR GOOD.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACOB BIBA

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 65
 N THE OUTSKIRTS OF BOONE, North
O Carolina, a small college and
ski town in the Blue Ridge
Mountains, Travis Cornett had
turned his bucolic farm into a virtual for-
tress. Hed started by installing a handful of
security cameras across his 12 acres of slop-
ing pine woods. Then hed nailed 15 bright
red signs to tree trunks along the property
line that warned, Trespassers will be pros-
ecuted. He also kept a .22 Ruger rifle and
a Kalashnikov on hand.
As far as Cornett was concerned, no one
was going to touch his ginseng.
It was the fall of 2013, six years since Cor-
nett had planted his first sang, as locals
call it: some 40 pounds of seed in a patch
of forest shade. Initially, Cornett wasnt
too worried about poachers, well known
around Boone for stealing ginseng from
land that isnt theirs. His fledging crop, low
growing with green, jagged-edged leaves,
had looked like wild strawberry plants.
Now, though, it was coming into its prime.
The maturing stems were taking on a dis-
tinctive purple tinge, their leaves multi-
plying, their berries turning lipstick red.
Cornett knew that the plants roots, which
are more valuable with age, could soon
fetch hundreds of dollars per pound. It
was only a matter of time before the rest
of his farm, where hed planted more seed
over the years, would grow ripe for profit
and for theft.
Yet his fortifications werent enough.
One September afternoon, neighbors saw
a scruffy man creeping around Cornetts
land. When Cornett got the newsthe
security cameras had failed to pick up the
intruderhe grabbed a weed whacker and
unleashed it on his oldest ginseng, slicing
off the leafy tops. If poachers couldnt spot
the decapitated plants, he reasoned, they
couldnt steal the roots.
A week later, though, he got a call that
the trespasser had returned. Just then, the
man was walking up a country byway near
Cornetts property, wearing dirt-covered
jeans and carrying a backpack. Cornett,
who was a few minutes from home, jumped
into his black GMC truck and sped through
the rural hills until he spotted David Pres-
66 SEPT | OCT 2016
nell. When confronted, Presnell pleaded
with Cornett not to call the cops. Cornett
pulled out his cell phone anyway, and Pres-
nell took off running, unzipping his back-
pack as he went. Then he reached inside
and started tossing tan, snaking ginseng
roots by the handful into laurel thickets
lining the road.
By the time police arrived several min-
utes later, nothing was left in Presnells
bag save some dirt and a few stringy run-
ners. At Cornetts urging, however, the cops
drove to Presnells mobile home, where
they found several roots strung up to dry.
Others were dehydrating on large screened
trays. The incursion into Cornetts prop-
erty, police suspected, wasnt a first offense.
In December 2014, Presnell became the
first person in North Carolina to be con-
victed of felony ginseng larceny on private
property. He joined other thieves across
Appalachiathe mountainous strip of ter-
ritory extending from southern New York
through the Carolinas down into Missis-
sippiwhove been arrested, fined, even
imprisoned for various ginseng-related
crimes, including poaching, illegal posses-
sion, and unlawful trade across state lines.
Presnell received 30 months probation.
For Cornett, now a taciturn 39-year-
old with brown hair and a goatee, the ver-
dict was a warning shot to other poachers,
including one who struck his backyard
about a year after Presnells arrest. One
morning, Cornett found footprints and
empty holes where several big, valuable
plants had been. He suspects that a for-
mer neighbor stoled every one of them,
he recalls in his Southern drawl.
Cornett went into business for the same
reason poachers are keen to rob him. The
global market for ginseng root, popularly
used as an herbal supplement, is estimated
at more than $2 billion. Long a staple of
traditional Chinese medicine, ginseng
products are also ubiquitous in Korea and
increasingly popular in Singapore, Malay-
sia, and other countries with large ethnic
Chinese populations. These days, most
ginseng is mass-produced on large, pes-
ticide-sprayed farms under the artificial
shade of wood and fabric canopies. Wild
ginseng, which tends to grow in temper-
ate forests, is considered more potent and
fetches a higher price. Plants like Cornetts,
cultivated in the woods, are closer to wild
than to conventionally farmed ginseng.
Due to centuries of overharvesting, how-
ever, wild roots are rare commodities. In
East Asia, native stocks are nearly extinct;
in China and Russia, they are banned from
being traded. The only other place where
ginseng is indigenous is the eastern half
of North America, where it grows amid
ferns, trillium, bloodroot, and other low-ly-
ing vegetation. Concerned about overhar-
vesting, Canada has prohibited the sale
of wild roots. In the United States, its still
legalbut scientists have observed stocks
in Appalachia, where ginseng once flour-
ished, dipping over the last decade.
Dwindling supply and robust demand
have inflated wild American ginsengs
value. In 2014, according to public and aca-
demic data, the 81,500 pounds that were
legally exported commanded an average
wholesale price of $800 per dried pound.
That was almost 15 times more than the
going rate for farmed roots. Nearly all
exports go to China, where a burgeoning
middle class is willing to pay marked-up
retail pricessometimes even thousands
of dollars per pound.
To feed this appetite, some Appala-
chians hunt during government-desig-
nated harvests and sell to local dealers,
who then trade with wholesalers in Hong
Kong, the epicenter of the ginseng market.
Others, however, help themselves to roots
with no regard for the law, hoping for easy
cash in a region thats home to six of the
10 U.S. counties with the lowest median
household incomes.
An alphabet soup of agencies is respon-
sible for the land where ginseng grows
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS),
the National Park Service (NPS), the U.S.
Forest Service, various state agencies, local
police departmentsand no one keeps
comprehensive, national statistics on gin-
seng theft. Still, theres strong evidence
that criminal activity is expanding. In West
Virginia, officials seized 190 pounds of ille-
gally foraged roots worth about $180,000
T R AV I S C O R N E T T G R O W S G I N S E N G I N B O O N E , N O R T H C A R O L I N A .
in the weeks leading up to the 2014 har- tently, ginseng may make the body light
vest season. Thats compared with just 30 and prolong life. This restorative repu-
pounds in a typical year, according to the tation spurred widespread harvesting in
Wall Street Journal. Everyone will tell you China and later earned ginseng the basis of
that ginseng90 percent is illegally dug its scientific name, Panax, from the Greek
somehow, one way or the other, Cornett word for cure-allthe same linguistic
says on a stormy May afternoon as we drive origin as that of panacea. Modern studies
along the picturesque Blue Ridge Parkway. have found that chemical compounds in
The fear among growers and dealers ginseng can reduce inflammation, relieve
is that Appalachias ginseng, traded with extreme fatigue in cancer patients, and
Asia since the earliest days of the Ameri- help treat diabetes. Contrary to longstand-
can republic and now among the last wild ing beliefs, however, theres limited proof
roots on Earth, may soon be gone for good. that it enhances sexual performance or
Cornett, who keeps his energy up by chew- athleticism.
ing on a gnarled ginseng root he stashes in For all its mythos, ginsengs life cycle is
his truck, says the situation is dire. Out lethargic. Seeds enter the soil in the early
in the country, its gone, he tells me. Its fall, when ginseng berries ripen, but take East Asia and North America because some
been raped. Its just not there anymore. up to two years to sprout. It can then be
a year or more before the infant plant
of grows another prong of leaves, and so on.
T HE FIRST WRITTEN ACCOUNT
ginseng is a Chinese manu- Wild plants can live for up to 50 years, in
script called The Divine Farm- rare cases longer. (There are apocryphal
ers Materia Medica, penned tales of 1,000-year-old ginseng.) Roots
about 1,800 years ago. It heralds a litany of become long and aromatic as time passes,
the roots supposed health benefits, from a and believers say the older ginseng is, the
quiet mind to sharp senses. If taken consis- more powerful its medicinal qualities. After
being harvested and dried for one to two
weeks, ginseng can last up to seven years
under ideal conditions: in nonhumid air
kept just above freezing, sealed off from
rodents and pathogens like mold.
American ginseng entered the interna-
tional economy in the early 18th century.
A Jesuit cleric named Joseph-Franois
Lafitau living in Quebec read an article
about the plant written by a fellow priest
dispatched to China. He became convinced
ginseng was also in the New World, based
on the description of the plants habitat,
and searched the woods near his home.
Lafitau found the root he was looking for.
(Scientists believe ginseng is native to both
70 million years ago, the two land masses
were part of a single megacontinent known
as Laurasia, according to David Taylors
book Ginseng, the Divine Root.)
Lafitau detailed his findings in a report
that set off a flurry of foraging and trading
in Canada, and the quest for wild ginseng
soon spread south into Appalachia. After
the Revolutionary War, George Washington
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 67
wrote in his journal that a survey party in
West Virginia met with many mules and
pack horses laden with ginseng going east,
bound for ports such as New York; Phila-
delphia; Charleston, South Carolina; and
Savannah, Georgia. In 1784, the first U.S.
ship to sail directly to East Asia, Empress
of China, carried nearly 30 tons of ginseng
out of New York. Investors netted a fat 25
percent profit on the haul.
Some American icons also cashed in on
ginseng. John Jacob Astor became the first
U.S. multimillionaire because of real-estate
interests and a fur business, which began
exporting to China in the early 1800s. But
he also used his contacts in Asia to trade
ginseng, reportedly earning $55,000 on
his first shipload. Daniel Boone, the epon-
ymous frontiersman of the North Carolina
mountain town, supplemented his own
fur business by digging ginseng out of the
Appalachian wilderness.
Between 1821 and 1899, an average of 190
tons of U.S. ginseng were exported every
year, according to the journal Economic
Botany. It wasnt just harvested by wealthy
entrepreneurs: Hunting ginseng became
a routine way for Appalachian families,
who lived far from ports and other com-
mercial centers, to earn cash. According
to Kristin Johannsen, author of Ginseng
Dreams: The Secret World of Americas Most
Valuable Plant, mountain forests at higher
elevations than most settled lands were
seen as commonsplaces where anyone
could graze their livestock, cut trees, and
gather ginseng.
Around Boone, old-timers say other cus-
tomary hunting rules lingered into the 20th
century. People could only harvest plants
that were old enough to reproduce, and they
needed to replant ginsengs berries to ensure
new growth. They could forage on private
land unless it was fenced off or had signs
telling people to keep out. If I wanted to
go up on [someones] property and hunt,
they didnt care, says Clint Cornett, Traviss
85-year-old uncle, who started gathering
ginseng after he quit school as a teenager
to cut timber.
Diggers sold roots to herb stores and
traveling traders known as sang men. One
68 SEPT | OCT 2016
popular buyer was Wilcox Drug in down-
town Boone, then home to a cluster of trade
and supply stores catering to locals. People
came to the family-run business from the
Blue Ridge slopes with burlap sacks full of
ginseng, as well as ginger, sassafras, and
other medicinal plants. Since the plant
matures in the fall, ginseng roots were
often sources of Christmas money, says
Jeff Van Hoose, a friend and business part-
ner of Travis Cornett. Wilcox Drug, in turn,
sold roots to brokers in New York, whose
clients were mostly buyers in Hong Kong.
Yet ginseng wasnt profitable enough
to encourage intensive poaching. When
theft happened, no one tended to make a
fuss. Wild ginseng grew on Clint Cornetts
land, and local boys knew when to pounce.
Wed go to church on Sunday, so theyd
come out, help themselves, he says. Yet
he didnt think to call the law.
The foraging culture began to change
after the United States joined the Conven-
tion on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)
in 1974. Along with lions, mahogany, and
alligators, wild ginseng falls under Appen-
dix II of the treaty, which includes species
on the verge of becoming endangered.
For the first time, states that wanted to
export wild roots were required to issue
broad regulations on hunting. They des-
ignated specific digging and trading sea-
sons; some mandated permits to forage on
public lands. Dealers were instructed to
register their businesses and certify that
roots were harvested legally. The federal
government had to clear inspected gin-
seng before export. (In the late 1990s, rules
were tightened to stipulate how old har-
vested plants had to be; five years became
the minimum.)
CITES had practical shortcomings,
though. Dealers could do little more than
take diggers at their word about ginsengs
provenance: In appearance, a root is a root
is a root. Rangers, meanwhile, were hard-
pressed to patrol vast forests. If anything,
the new regulations expanded Americas
ginseng market as people turned to farm-
ing roots, which wasnt subject to as many
bureaucratic hassles and was possible in
different environments. Among them
was Paul Hsu, a Taiwanese immigrant
in Wausau, Wisconsinfar from Appa-
lachiawho claimed that ginseng had
alleviated his mothers chronic pain from
arthritis and diabetes. He started planting
crops in 1978. Today, Wisconsin produces
95 percent of farmed American ginseng,
and Hsu, with more than 1,000 acres, is
one of the countrys biggest single growers.
As states registered dealers and com-
piled their names on public lists, overseas
buyers began contacting them directly
much to the chagrin of New York export
companies that had guarded their Asian
contacts closely. Wilcox Drug was one ben-
eficiary. In 1982, Tony Hayes, an herb-pur-
chasing agent, joined the business and
helped it build a network of international
buyers. Within a year, Wilcox Drug tri-
pled the amount of wild ginseng it sold,
according to Hayes. Twelve years later, it
was acquired fully by the Zuellig Group, a
Swiss company that has global interests in
pharmaceuticals and agribusiness.
Other Appalachians, including Tra-
vis Cornett, would jump into the ginseng
game. First, though, China had to get rich.
INSENG BECAME MORE lucrative
G than ever in the 1990s, thanks
to economic reforms under-
taken by Chinese leader Deng
Xiaoping. As China privatized industries
and opened its markets to foreign invest-
ment, personal wealth surged. Between
1991 and 2002, the countrys middle class
jumped from less than half to almost three-
fourths of the population, according to the
Asian Development Bank. This boosted
demand for all manner of commercial
goods, including ginseng, a symbol of her-
itage and health. People wanted it however
they could get it: whole, sliced, powdered,
packed into pill capsules, infused in cos-
metics, steeped in beverages.
Expensive wild roots, in particular,
became emblems of newfound prosper-
ity. The Asian kind wasnt readily available
because authorities had never prioritized
replenishing it, focusing instead on farm-
ing ginseng of lower value in massive
 quantities. That made the wild Ameri-
can variety a premium product. Modern
considerations mattered, too. U.S. gin-
seng was considered clean and safe, and
the soil is not contaminated from pollu-
tion, says Shaun Rein, managing direc-
tor of the China Market Research Group,
a Shanghai-based business consultancy.
(Rein says he takes ginseng every day, the
more expensive the better.) According to
Eric Burkhart, a botanist at Pennsylvania
State University, after remaining under
$300 per pound for a decade, wild ginsengs
price cracked $400 in 1995. Over the next
decade, that number doubled.
While ginseng consumption was on the
rise in China, Appalachias economy was
TO GET HIM THROUGH THE ROUGH
PATCH,
TRAVIS CORNETTTURNED TO GOD
HES A BORN AGAIN CHRISTIAN
A ND
GINSENG.
falling fast. West Virginia and Kentucky
hemorrhaged jobs as traditional indus-
tries like coal mining declined, and west-
ern North Carolina bore the consequences
of U.S. manufacturing moving offshore.
According to the Journal of Fashion Mar-
keting and Management, manufacturing
was once the states largest economic sec-
tor, employing more than one-third of the
labor force in 1975. By the end of the cen-
tury, that percentage had been cut almost
in half.
At the time, Travis Cornett was an elec-
trician. He found steady jobs in construc-
tion around Boone, escaping the doldrums
that afflicted other blue-collar workers.
But the bottom fell out in 2007, when the
housing market crashed. Cornett was also
coming out of a bad divorce. (I caught her
cheating on me, and it ripped my heart
out, he says.) To get him through the rough
patch, he turned to Godhes a born-again
Christianand ginseng.
Cornett had hunted roots as a teenager,
learning from his uncle and cousin, and
remembered the tradition as having sooth-
ing, almost spiritual qualities. Theres
something about getting into the woods,
Cornett says. Its like you dont have any the forest floor. Some take an au naturel
problems anymore. Hed also heard how
lucrative the root now was, bringing in
$1,000 per pound just before the finan-
cial crisis hit. So he started digging.
He foraged about 40 pounds during the
2007 harvest season. As the weeks passed,
however, it got harder to find. Then he
had a thought: What if he could grow his
own? Not on industrial farms, but in the
rugged setting where ginseng belongs.
Cornett bought some seed online and
started planting it in the forest around his
house. It was his first foray into whats
known as wild-simulated ginseng, which
according to websites peddling how-to
guides, could bring huge paydays.
WildGrown.com calls it the best retire-
ment business available today.
Market classifications arent stringent,
but they do break down along some gen-
eral lines: Wild ginseng thats 10 years
oldconsidered a loose benchmark for
a market-ready producttypically has a
thick trunk and notched, skinny neck; its
taste is sharp and bitter. In 2015, according
to Boone dealers, it went for an average of
$850 per dried pound. A root grown on a
conventional farm, like Paul Hsus in Wis-
consin, doesnt usually make it to 10 years
of growth, but is harvested after just three
or four. Its immediately recognizable as
smoother, plumper, and straighter, with
a sweeter taste, and typically sells for $50
a pound or less. Entrepreneurs like Cor-
nett are trying to bridge the gap between
the two by seeding ginseng directly into
approach, while others till the soil or add
chemical fertilizers. (Cornett says he uses
gypsum.) Depending on its appearance,
taste, and aroma, it can fetch roughly the
same price as wild ginseng. As they say,
Hayes explains, beauty is in the eye of
the beholder.
Cornett has sowed more than 20 acres
over the past nine years and convinced
some friends, including Jeff Van Hoose,
to join him. He hopes High Country Gin-
seng, which he officially named his busi-
ness in 2014, ultimately will produce 500
pounds of dried roots per acrea harvest
that could make him millions. Hes waiting
at least two more years to dig, however, let-
ting the oldest roots mature to the decade
mark while monitoring ginseng prices.
He hopes to identify a sweet spot when
he feels hes ready get back the $100,000
already invested in the companyplus a
hefty profit.
In the meantime, High Country Gin-
seng sells seed and serves as a dealer,
purchasing wild roots from local dig-
gers and selling them to larger buyers,
including foreign ones. Three years ago,
a man saying he worked for Hang Fat, one
of Chinas biggest ginseng wholesalers,
showed up in Boone: skinny jeans, lit-
tle 20-year-old, earrings all in his ear,
Cornett recalls. Once a small family firm
that traded in deer antlers and shark fins,
Hang Fat has carved out a niche over the
past two decades by importing Ameri-
can ginseng, sorting and grading it based
on quality, then shipping it to mainland
China. Between 2011 and 2013, according
to an internal business prospectus, Hang
Fats net profits rose an average of 70 per-
cent annually.
After the Chinese businessman arrived
on Cornetts doorstep, he took pictures of
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 69
the roots on offer, sent them to his boss,
and quickly closed the deal on a purchase.
Cornett hopes selling his homegrown crop
will eventually be so easyif he can get it
safely to market.
starts
D AVID PRESNELLS STORY
much like that of the man he
stole from. As a child in the
1970s, his truck-driver father
taught him to find ginseng in the woods.
We used to hunt it all the time, says Pres-
nell, standing outside his trailer smoking a
cigarette. He looks older than his 52 years,
with unruly grayish-brown hair, a deeply
lined face, and ice-blue eyes that stare out
from under a faded baseball cap. My dad
used [ginseng] to buy clothes, foodthats
how we survived, Presnell tells me.
Ginseng became a matter of survival
again decades later. Presnell ran afoul of
the law; he was convicted of murder in 1983
and was incarcerated for 24 years. When
he got out on parole, he was hurting for
money and coping with post-traumatic
stress disorder from his prison term. At
most, in hunting ginseng, I felt I did a lit-
tle bit of wrong, Presnell says. Its just a
wild plant, he adds.
Research shows that Presnell isnt the
only one who thinks this wayand acts on
it. Jim McGraw, a conservation biologist at
West Virginia University, studied 30 wild
populations of ginseng across seven states
over 11 years, ending in 2010. He found that
65 percent were poached from land where
hunting was forbidden, 20 percent were
dug up outside of legal harvest seasons,
and 82 percent were uprooted before they
were 5 years old. McGraw calculates that
just over 1 percent of the plants he tracked
were gathered in accordance with the law.
The methamphetamine and heroin epi-
demics have increased poachings allure.
According to the Centers for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention, in 2014, West Virginia
and Kentucky had the countrys highest
and fourth-highest rates of drug over-
doses resulting in death. The same year,
in Tennessee, more people died from opi-
oid overdoses than in car accidents. Police
say people who need money for drugs will
70 SEPT | OCT 2016
steal anything they can convert quickly
into cash, from chainsaws to copper wir-
ing to ginseng. Its as good as money on
the streets, says Lucas Smith, a deputy
sheriff in Boone. Recently, local officers
found a load of roots when they arrested
a meth cook. They suspected that it was
being used for trade, Smith explains. In
eastern Tennessee, a prescription-drug
trafficker named Johnny Grooms, who ran
a poached-roots-for-pills operation outside
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, was
convicted by a federal court in 2011 and
sentenced to more than 24 years in prison.
Hayes, formerly of Wilcox Drug, now
runs his own herb-dealing company, Ridge
Runner Trading. He describes jittery and
CHINA,
IN
EXTREMELY VA LUABLE
AMERICAN ROOTS ARE
HIGH END LUXURY ITEMS SOLD IN
SWANK BOUTIQUES, WHERE THEYRE
SOMETIMES KEPT
nervous addicts showing up at his ware-
house with ginseng. Ive seen em come
in twice a day. Theyll be there when you
get in in the morning, because they dug it
late the night before, he says. Some come
bearing young roots that arent worth very
much. They tear them out of the ground,
Hayes says. If theres a lot of damage, that
means they were in a hurry.
He claims not to buy roots from people
he suspects use drugsDont cater to it,
dont want it, dont want em aroundbut wild plants growing on their property, the
other local dealers dont draw a line. I know
one very well that caters to em, Hayes says.
Hes pretty dependent on that crowd.
None of this has been helped by poach-
ings recent glamorization in pop culture.
On an episode of Appalachian Outlaws, a
reality show that ran on the History Chan-
nel from 2014 to 2015, the narrator intones,
In the Far East, ginseng is used for just
about everything, from fighting off illness
to lifting libido. Large ginseng roots
dangle in the frame suggestively before
the camera cuts to thick wads of cash. But
for Appalachians, its a chance to make
a ton of money. The slickly edited pro-
gram featured poachersanti-authority
types with bushy beards, bandanas, and
camouflage gearpursued by gun-toting
landowners.
The show, along with National Geo-
graphics Smoky Mountain Money, pro-
duced a flood of interest in wild roots.
Ginseng experts were inundated with calls
and emails from would-be diggers who said
they saw the TV show, says Jim Hamilton,
BEHIND GLASS.
an agricultural extension agent in Boone.
Janet Rock of the NPS remembers one man
who called a ranger for help because he
heard coyotes and wanted to be rescued.
He admitted at the time that he had been
trying to poach ginseng after watching one
of the shows, she says.
Because of theft, the first rule of growing
ginseng is: You do not talk about growing
ginseng. Registered dealers cant escape
being on public lists, but for people with
best thing is just not to tell anybody, says
Hayess son, Josh, who works in the fam-
ily business. (Any ginseng they dont sell
in-season they stow in a temperature-con-
trolled vault the size of a large closet, with
Pentagon emblazoned on the door.)
Another source declined to be named,
fearing thieves would come for his roots
if they knew his identity. Dont put that
in there cause Ill have to shoot somebody
if you print that, he tells me with a laugh.
Its not necessarily an idle threat: In
2012, an Ohio man using an AK-47 killed
a ginseng thief who came onto his land.
HILE ITS DIFFICULT to quantify
W exactly how much wild gin-
seng has been drained from
Appalachia, some numbers
illustrate a grim picture. Not for lack of
demand, American exports shrank by more
than half between 1992 and 2002, then by a
third over the next decade. Gary Kauffman,
a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, isnt
seeing the plants grow back. Wild plots
hes monitoring in North Carolina have
shown a 25 to 30 percent decline over the
past decade.
In addition to overharvesting, deforesta-
tion and a thriving population of white-
tailed deer, which feed on ginseng, are
contributing to the loss. Future climate
change will only accelerate the decline.
Conservation biologist Sara Souther has
simulated what a 1-degree Celsius increase
over the next 70 years would mean for wild
ginseng. Shes found that when warming
is combined with harvestings effects,
the plants extinction risk hits 65 per-
cent. The temperature rise Souther exam-
ined, though, is well below projections of
global increases over the next century.
Whats going to happen in the next 50 to
100 years, says Burkhart of Penn State,
is that any truly wild [ginseng] is going
to be wiped out. I think its inevitable.
There is a fierce debate over what should
be done to save ginseng. Some states have
shortened their harvesting seasons or limited
the number of digging permits they grant. To
tackle poaching in the 800-square-mile Great
Smoky Mountains National Park, plant-pro-
tection specialist Jim Corbin has devised a
reddish dye to mark ginseng roots that is visi-
ble only under black light. His team has dyed
more than 43,000 plants to date. Between
2010 and 2014, the NPS says Corbins sys-
tem helped convict more than 40 poachers
who tried to sell illegally foraged roots. It
would be impossible, though, to tint every
wild plant; they can be difficult to find, and
there isnt the political will to implement
more comprehensive monitoring. Plants
dont have big brown eyes or fur, says Tom
Chisdock, a special agent with the FWS.
Among growers, traders, and conserva-
tionists alike, theres speculation that the
United States might take the leap to pro-
hibiting the export of wild ginseng entirely.
Burkhart, though, says an all-out injunc-
tion probably would create a black mar-
ket for roots. All its going to do is double
or triple the price, he says. East Asia offers
a cautionary tale: According to a 2011 U.N.
report, as much as 1,300 pounds of ginseng
are smuggled from Siberia to China every
year, and the finest specimens sell for
tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram.
Burkhart says the U.S. government
shouldnt double down on regulations that
arent enforceable. Instead, it should focus
on popularizing crop-growing in the woods.
Increased forest cultivation to produce
high-quality products is really the future,
he says. It can be a risky business, though,
especially for cash-strapped Appalachians.
They invest upfront and wait several years
for a payoff, all while worrying that disease,
pests, or thieves might leave them with
nothing to show for their patient efforts.
Hayes thinks the government should
distribute free seeds to law-abiding dig-
gers to scatter during harvests, like the
sang-hunters of yore used to do. We had
stewards for years, Hayes waxes nostalgi-
cally. Like this guy, his son adds, point-
ing to a print hanging on the wall of their
trading companys warehouse, depict-
ing an old-fashioned mountain man mar-
veling at a ginseng plant in full bloom.
Most ginseng hunters are honest, good
people, Cornett says, echoing the call to
give seeds to harvesters. Most of them.
N CHINA , extremely valuable
I American rootstypically 20
years or olderare high-end
luxury items sold in swank
boutiques, where theyre sometimes kept
behind glass like valuable gemstones or
pieces of art. Business elites give associates
gnarled ginseng to impress or even bribe
them. Rein, of the China Market Research
Group, says he once attended a meeting
with a real-estate developer at the home of
a powerful government officials daughter.
She gave the developer what she claimed
was $30,000 worth of ginseng tea.
Ginsengs vaunted status, Rein notes,
is why Chinese consumers arent fretting
about overharvesting in Appalachia. I
dont think the buyers care how they get it.
They understand its a rough worldlong
as its getting to them, he says.
Arguably, if theres a force that threatens
the Chinese side of the market, its greed.
This year, Hang Fat nearly went belly
up after its founders artificially inflated
stock prices then used them as leverage
for personal investments. After the com-
pany abruptly failed to make payments to
ginseng suppliers, its shareholders started
offloading stock, and Hang Fats shares
dropped by more than 90 percent. Scores
of farmers in North America havent been
compensated for their cultivated roots, and
the fallout has affected the wild market,
as well: Hayes reports price decreases in
the first half of 2016 as large as 20 percent.
In Cornetts experience, the ginseng
business has always rebounded. It aint
hard to sell it, he says. [Customers are]
calling you, begging. Hes aware, though,
that the ties binding his home to China
could fray in a matter of years.
Hes doing his part to put that off as long
as possible, evangelizing about growing
roots in the woods. But deterring poachers
will be a battle to the end, he pronounces
one spring morning over a breakfast of
eggs, hash browns, and sugared ham at
Cracker Barrel.
To stiffen security, hes setting up more
cameras around his property. He keeps
tight-lipped about his bounty, telling
workers who help tend his land that hes
just growing alfalfa. And hes willing to
use tools far more powerful than a weed
whacker to scare off would-be thieves.
Ill come in shootin, Cornett says, a wry
expression on his face. Q
SUZY KHIMM (@SuzyKhimm) is a journalist
based in Washington, D.C.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 71
 standup2cancer.org
#reasons2standup
#su2c

(:;9(A,5,*(*(5(+0(5)9,(:;*(5*,9-6<5+(;065*(5(+0(5047,90(3)(526-*644,9*,*(5(+0(505:;0;<;,:6-/,(3;/9,:,(9*/
*(5*,9:;,4*,33*65:69;0<43033@65*636.@-(99(/-(>*,;;-6<5+(;065.,564,*(5(+(3(<9(A0:205-(403@;9<:;
5(;065(36=(90(5*(5*,9*6(30;06565;(90605:;0;<;,-69*(5*,99,:,(9*/6=(90(5*(5*,99,:,(9*/-<5+(330(5*,
;/,7(92,9-6<5+(;065:;)(3+90*2:-6<5+(;065=(5(5+,39,:,(9*/05:;0;<;,
:;(5+<7;6*(5*,90:(796.9(46-;/,,5;,9;(054,5;05+<:;9@-6<5+(;065,0-(**/(90;()3,69.(50A(;06504(.,:-964;/,:;(5+<7;6*(5*,9(5+:/6>:
;/,(4,90*(5(::6*0(;065-69*(5*,99,:,(9*/((*90::;(5+<7;6*(5*,9::*0,5;0-0*7(9;5,9
 MAPPA MUNDI ECONOMICS BOOKS  CULTURE THE FIXER
When it comes to Negative interest England heralds Matic Zorman on
climate change, rates make the Shakespeare as where to nosh
nature is speaking markets look like a beloved son, but on a horse burger
loud and clearbut a version of Alices his plays also reso- and witness
how carefully are Adventures in nate from Zanzibar unrequited love in
we listening? | P. 74 Wonderland. | P. 76 to Korea. | P. 80 Ljubljana. | P. 82

Illustration by ANTONY HARE

 mappa mundi
by DAVID ROTHKOPF

How Not to Be a
Civilization
Mother Nature is
using her words.
Are we smart enough
to heed them?

Who has not stood before a

vistasnow-capped peaks, a
coral seascape teeming with reef
fish, a desert stretching parched
and golden to the horizon, the
canopy of stars in the night sky
and not professed humility?
Nature should be humbling. It is,
after all, infinite beyond our com-
prehension. All we do as human
beingswhether as government
officials or artists, engineers or
schoolteacherswe do within
the parameters set by nature: to
grapple with problems imposed
or shaped by it or, in our best
moments, to aspire to reflect or
complement the natural world
within our own creative work.
Yet, despite our declarations of
awe and respect, we could hardly
show less respect for the inspired
and inspiring environment
against which our tiny lives are
set. I do not simply mean the
myriad ways we have despoiled the Earth, exploiting its riches but
ignoring the consequences of our actions. Nor do I mean the per-
verse rationales we have created to justify our actions or to deny
that the consequences we face are really our responsibility. Think
about the position of climate change deniers: Not only do they
seek to prolong activities that are damagingbeyond repairthe
Earths ecosystems, but they are also seeking to deny scientific
evidence so they can place the blame back on Mother Nature.
Think about that. The argument is that the planet may or may
not be dying but if it is, its its own fault. (This is perhaps not so
surprising as many of the political ilk who deny climate change
also are among the hunters who regularly comment on the beauty
of wildlife before gunning it down with high-powered rifles.)
These indignities certainly belie our regular protestations
of love for creation and the Creator. Yet, many of those most
likely to invoke the Creator for political reasons show the most

74 SEPT | OCT 2016 Illustration by MATTHEW HOLLISTER


contempt for creation in their political
actions. Although a double irony, these
people also regularly show contempt for
the stated laws of their Creator. What is
more, they are just the tip of the iceberg.
The reality is that most people seem to
think nature is full of shit.
Seriously, though, how many floods or
hurricanes are necessary in disaster-prone
areas before people either move or build
homes that are designed to withstand what
nature has clearly stated it intends to do? It
just stands to reason, right? If nature puts
cougars or bears or alligators in your back-
yard, it is sending a clear message not to let
DESPITE DECLARATIONS OF AWE,
WE COULD HARDLY SHOW
LESS RESPECT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
AGAINST WHICH OUR LIVES ARE SET.
your little Chihuahua play out there unsu-
pervised. Yet, every week, some small pet
turns into a snack, despite the big, toothy,
growling warning label that nature has
placed in plain sight.
Everywhere we look, nature is sending
us messagesrising seas, disappearing
lakes and rivers, and dying species are just
a few of them. If we actually paid atten-
tion to natures clues, we probably would
avoid driving our cars into flooded streets
(because that never ends well) or lying on
the beach without sunscreen (because the
fact that your body turns red and starts to
hurt cant really be a sign of good health,
can it?). We would probably not keep
chimpanzees or other wild animals as
house pets (because what clearer mes-
sage do you need than animals that tear off
peoples faces?). And we probably would, I
dont know, avoid setting off fireworks or
creating bonfires in the midst of fields that
are dry as kindling.
Nature sends signals. For many people,
in fact, one of the most neglected aspects of
the natural world is not that nature stands
before us in silent majesty as many poets
have incorrectly asserted. No, it is that
nature never shuts up. Nature is constantly
sending us messages about how to behave.
It lets us know what will kill us, what will
hurt us, and what will make our lives mis-
erable. It also gives plenty of warning with
the messages. It wasnt like we drilled our
first oil well, flipped the ignition switch
on our first internal combustion engine,
andbingo! Global warming!
No, it took a century. The clouds filled
with black smoke. Gradually, the weather
changed. Storms washed away communi-
ties. Science was given mountains of data.
I can just imagine Mother Nature off
wherever she resides (near the hollow
tree in which the Keebler Elves live, I am
pretty sure, not too far from Bilbo Bag-
gins), watching this and saying, How
many once-in-a-millennium storms does
it take to get these bozos attention?
But knowledge of gravity has been
around for centuries, and people still try
to hang Christmas lights from places that
neither they nor their ladders can reach.
In fact, each and every one of us knows
countless peoplerelatives or even smart
OBSERVATION DECK
friends or teacherswho have wantonly
disregarded the unmistakable messages
nature sends: For once and for all, steer
into the skid for Chrissakes, and chew your
food 32 times! Jeez.
Cynics might suggest that the explana-
tion for this is not hubris but rather nat-
ural selection. It is one thing to bump off
the idiots who make the Darwin Awards
such hilarious reading each year; climate
change, on the other hand, could do in life
on the planet as we know it. Could natu-
ral selection actually be conceived by the
ineffable intelligence that imbues the uni-
verse to be capable of eliminating an entire
higher life form and the planet on which
it was briefly privileged to reside? If so,
would that be viewed as nature cleaning
up its own messes, as it is wont to do with
its errors, including the dodo birds and,
well, anything it left lying around near a
black hole? Or is there something differ-
ent at work here?
If one of the most fundamental roles
the universe seems to be playing is that
of being the ultimate Great Communica-
tor, then perhaps destroying a society that
ignores its messages is not simply penal-
izing those who have transgressed. Maybe
we have been intended all along to be a
message to someone somewhere else. Per-
haps we are just nature constructing one of
those How Not to Be a Civilization case
studies for some other society out there
that seems more inclined toward and capa-
ble of recognizing that somewhere within
the infinite glory that created usand
within which we have livedthere must be
messages worth heeding and bounties
worth preserving. Q
DAVID ROTHKOPF (@djrothkopf) is CEO and
editor of the FP Group.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 75
 economics OBSERVATION DECK
by GILLIAN TETT

Through the Looking Glass

Once unthinkable,
negative interest rates are now
dangerously en vogue.

In 1998, when I was a reporter

in Tokyo, an event happened
that economists once thought
impossible. Japan was at
the height of its banking crisis,
and as panic swelled, short-
term market interest rates
what traders pay to borrow
one anothers money over-
nightdipped below zero for
the first time ever. It was such
a shock that computers at local
banks went haywire; program-
mers hadnt prepared for neg-
ative interest rates. I told my
colleagues that a world where
people got paid for borrowing negative 0.5 percent in Switzerland, and economists version of Alices Adventures
money, rather than paying for minus 0.06 percent in Germany. Mean- in Wonderland: a place where normal rules
the privilege, was crazy. It would while, rates were slightly positive in the are turned upside down and nothing can
never last. I was wrong. This United Kingdom but at record lowsand be discounted.
June, Fitch Ratings released sinking. In July, the yield on U.S. 10-year There are at least three explanations for
a report calculating that there bonds dropped below 1.4 percent, to the tumbling interest rates. One is the deliber-
are $11.7 trillion worth of bonds lowest point ever. ate decision by central banks to push yields
carrying negative interest In truth, it seems unlikely that medium- down. This trend started in the 1990s, when
rates. That represents almost to long-term rates will turn negative in the Bank of Japan slashed official policy
half of all sovereign bonds in America, because the national economy rateswhat central banks charge private
developed countries. Consider is growing. I would not dare to rule it out, ones to borrowto zero in a desperate and
10-year bonds, which, as of howevernot after whats happened in ultimately failed bid to boost growth. This
press time, carried yields the two decades since negative yields first January, Japan announced that when pri-
of minus 0.01 percent in Japan, appeared. The world has slipped into an vate-sector financial institutions left

76 SEPT | OCT 2016 Illustration by MATTHEW HOLLISTER

 New from the
Cato Institute
n Our Foreign Policy Choices: Rethinking Americas Global Role, Cato Institute
I scholars and other leading experts provide realistic insights on some of our
most urgent challenges. Topics covered include military budgets, China and East
Asia, ISIS, the Korean Peninsula, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, energy security, ter-
rorism, drone warfare, NATO, the Western Hemisphere, and more. These long-
needed assessments underscore how our global influence is greatest when spread
by peacefulrather than militarymeans and that restraining our impulse to
intervene when vital U.S. interests are not at stake will make America stronger,
safer, and more prosperous.

DOWNLOAD FOR FREE AT

CATO.ORG/FOREIGNPOLICYCHOICES.

Introducing

Learn more with FP Analytics Explore more with FP Archives

Your window to the world, FP Introducing exclusive never
Analytics surfaces the important before available access to the
topics and people at any given moment FP Print Archive search and
or over time, from thousands of browse 45 years of award-winning
sources from around the world. FP content.

Do more with discounted FP Events Get more with FP Magazine

Get50% of attendance at FPs Your bi-monthly dose of FPs

signature events, including the thought-provoking magazine
Top 100 Global Thinkers Gala. delivered straight to your door.

Take 20% off your FP Premium subscription at http://atfp.co/28Jv6cO

*Expires 11/1/2016
 economics

money on reserve overnight, a rate of

negative 0.1 percent would be imposed.
Similarly, the U.S. Federal Reserve and
At a time of increasing need for specialists with Russia expertise, European Central Bank (ECB) cut policy

the Alfa Fellowship Program afords exceptional young American, British, rates to zero to offset economic stagna-
tion after the financial crisis; this spring,
and German leaders the opportunity to receive meaningful professional
the ECB levied a negative 0.4 percent yield
experience in Russia.
on funds stored overnight.
r
Build Russian language skills A second explanation is that structural
r
Learn about current afairs through meetings, seminars, factors are prompting investors to gobble
and regional trips up an abnormally large quantity of bonds,
lifting prices and depressing market rates.
r
Work at prominent organizations in Moscow
(Bond prices move in an inverse direc-
Program provisions: monthly stipend, program-related travel costs, tion to yields.) Since 2008, a host of new
housing, insurance regulations, including in the United States,
have been introduced that encourage,
To be eligible, candidates must have relevant professional experience if not force, big financial institutions to
and a graduate degree, or the equivalent, as well as demonstrate buy more bonds. Supposedly, this gives
evidence of leadership potential. banks a spare cushion of safe assets to
Deadline to apply for the 2017 2018 program year: December 1 better withstand financial shock. Mean-
while, pension funds are stockpiling
bonds in an effort to meet future payout
Additional details can be found at: culturalvistas.org/alfa
obligations.
For more information, please contact: alfa@culturalvistas.org or 212.497.3510
The third reason, and perhaps the most
OJSC Alfa-Bank is incorporated, focused and based in Russia, and is not ailiated with U.S.-based Alfa Insurance.
difficult to address, is pessimism about the
global economic outlook. Investors are buy-
ing bonds because, perhaps, they cannot
PEACE AND SECURITY imagine anything else that would offer

FELLOWSHIP value in a low-growth world or because

they think consumer prices will drop.
IN WASHINGTON, DC This shift in viewpoint is hard to quantify.
Recent surveys from the Federal Reserve
7KH+HUEHUW6FRYLOOH-U3HDFH)HOORZVKLSLQYLWHVUHFHQWFROOHJHDQGJUDGXDWHVFKRRODOXPQLWR of New York, however, have pointed to a
DSSO\IRUVL[WRQLQHPRQWKIHOORZVKLSVLQ:DVKLQJWRQ'&IRFXVLQJRQDUPVFRQWUROSHDFHDQG small decline in consumers expectations
LQWHUQDWLRQDOVHFXULW\LVVXHV)RXQGHGLQWRGHYHORSDQGWUDLQWKHQH[WJHQHUDWLRQRIOHDGHUV of inflation and growth.
RQDUDQJHRISHDFHDQGVHFXULW\LVVXHVWKHSURJUDPKDVDZDUGHGIHOORZVKLSVWRGDWH
Some blend of all three factors bears
6FRYLOOH)HOORZVZRUNZLWKRQHRI 5IF
OFYU
BQQMJDBUJPO
EFBEMJOF
JT
0DUPCFS


responsibility for the fall down the rabbit
PRUHWKDQWZRGR]HQSDUWLFLSDWLQJ GPS
UIF
TQSJOH

TFNFTUFS hole. So pointing a finger at just one cul-
SXEOLFLQWHUHVWRUJDQL]DWLRQV7KH\
pritas some analysts have done in recent
PD\XQGHUWDNHDYDULHW\RI )HOORZVDUHVXSHUYLVHGE\DQG &DQGLGDWHVPXVWKDYHDQ
DFWLYLWLHVLQFOXGLQJUHVHDUFK H[FHOOHQWDFDGHPLFUHFRUGDQGD months, targeting especially central banks
OHDUQIURPVHQLRUOHYHOVWDIIDQG
ZULWLQJSXEOLFHGXFDWLRQDQG RIWHQKDYHWKHRSSRUWXQLW\WRSXEOLVK VWURQJLQWHUHVWLQLVVXHVRISHDFH policiesisnt terribly productive. Instead,
DGYRFDF\RQDUDQJHRIVHFXULW\ DUWLFOHVRUUHSRUWV7KHSURJUDPDOVR DQGVHFXULW\7KHSURJUDPLV attention should be focused on the danger-
LVVXHVLQFOXGLQJQXFOHDUFKHPLFDO DUUDQJHVPHHWLQJVIRUWKHIHOORZV RSHQWRDOO86FLWL]HQVDQGQRQ
DQGELRORJLFDOZHDSRQVQRQ
ous, debilitating consequences of subzero
ZLWKSROLF\H[SHUWV0DQ\IRUPHU 86FLWL]HQVOLYLQJLQWKH86
SUROLIHUDWLRQPLVVLOHGHIHQVH 6FRYLOOH)HOORZVKDYHJRQHRQWR HOLJLEOHIRUHPSOR\PHQW%HQHILWV interest rates.
ZHDSRQVWUDGHHQYLURQPHQWDODQG SXUVXHJUDGXDWHGHJUHHVLQLQWHUQD LQFOXGHDVDODU\KHDOWK After all, a world of negative yields
HQHUJ\VHFXULW\DQGUHJLRQDO WLRQDOUHODWLRQVDQGWDNHQSURPLQHQW LQVXUDQFHERDUGDQGDOXPQL
is one in which savers are penalized for
VHFXULW\DQGSHDFHNHHSLQJWKDW SRVLWLRQVLQWKHILHOGRISHDFHDQG PHQWRULQJWUDYHOWR:DVKLQJWRQ
VXSSRUWWKHJRDOVRIWKHLUKRVW VHFXULW\ZLWKSXEOLFLQWHUHVWRUJDQL '&WREHJLQWKHIHOORZVKLSDQG being thrifty; they lose money just by leav-
RUJDQL]DWLRQDQGPD\DWWHQG ]DWLRQVWKH)HGHUDO*RYHUQPHQW DVPDOOVWLSHQGWRDWWHQG ing funds in the bank. Moreover, entities
FRDOLWLRQPHHWLQJVSROLF\ DFDGHPLDDQGPHGLD PHHWLQJVRUWDNHDFRXUVH that hold large quantities of bonds tend
DQG&RQJUHVVLRQDOKHDULQJV
EULHILQJV
to find it very hard to make decent invest-
&KHFNRXWRXU0HGLXPFRPOLVWLFOH5HDVRQVWR*HWD-RELQ3HDFHDQG6HFXULW\
ment returns and meet their claims. Many
pension funds, for example, have devised

3URYLGLQJ2SSRUWXQLWLHVIRU7RPRUURZV/HDGHUVLQ3HDFHDQG6HFXULW\
78 SEPT | OCT 2016
 OBSERVATION DECK

financial plans that assume they will earn

around 8 percent annual returns on the
bonds theyve amassed, so yields oscil-
lating around zero threaten to open a gap-
ing economic hole in the coming decades.
In theory, these disadvantages could be
offset by low rates prompting consumers
to spend money on new goods or spurring
companies and governments to borrow
funds and invest in areas like infrastruc-
ture. In reality, though, there is precious
little evidence this is playing out. People
are so nervous about the future that compa-
nies are leaving money idle on their books:
There are an estimated $1.7 trillion unused
funds sitting on U.S. corporate balance
sheets. The risk is that as asset prices rise
for, say, real estateincome inequality will
increase, because its the rich who have
entre to assets in the first place.
Is there any solution, even a partial
one, to interest rates bottoming out? Some
governments, such as Canadas, have
embarked on fiscal spending programs.
But these are exceptions. For America, Ger-
many, and other major economic players,
the idea of a stimulus remains too politi-
cally controversial to implement. Similarly,
central banks governors, such as Janet
Yellen and Mario Draghi, are so anxious
about being blamed for starting a reces-
sion or for instigating market shock that
they are proceeding cautiously, which
means keeping interest rates low.
Yields, then, seem likely to stay at his-
toric nadirs for much longer than anyone
ever imagined. Never mind the sorry his-
tory of the place where negative yields were
born. Im referring, of course, to Japans
lost decades. In Wonderland economics,
it turns out, rules arent the only things that
dont matter. The lessons of experience
dont either. This bizarre landscape is no
solution to modern financial woes, and the
longer we remain in it, the harder it will be
to muster the political courage and clarity
of vision to leap out. Q

GILLIAN TETT (@gilliantett) is U.S. managing

editor of the Financial Times and author of
The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and
the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers.

Man of the World
Shakespeare may
never have left England, but
he became the most
global writer who ever lived.
In the run-up to Brexit in June, as Fleet Street tried
to figure out why the Leave campaign was so alluring
to voters, some observers employed a famous phrase
again and again: this scepterd isle, a description of
England in William Shakespeares Richard II. A scep-
ter is a symbol of royal authority, and a scepterd
isle is an unforgettable image of a sovereign England
owing allegiance to no outsider. In this year mark-
ing the 400th anniversary of Shakespeares death,
his language clearly still manages to capture some-
thing essential about the way the people of Great
Britain, and especially the English, view themselves.
80 SEPT | OCT 2016
books & culture
by ADAM KIRSCH
The phrase in Richard II is uttered by
John of Gaunt in a powerful speech prais-
ing independence and self-sufficiency. He
continues, This precious stone set in the
silver sea,/Which serves it in the office of
a wall,/Or as a moat defensive to a house,/
Against the envy of less happier lands,/
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,
this England. Today, it seems that many
people still imagine this realm in such
terms. In the view espoused by the U.K.
Independence Party, outsidersPoles,
Latvians, Romanians, Syrianswho come
to live amid the fortunate English vio-
late the blessed plot. Several months
after Brexit, and even amid the backlash
against the vote, these indignant feel-
ings endure.
Yet the paradox of Shakespeare is that
the same poet who seems so essentially
English is also perhaps the most global
writer who has ever lived. His character
may have praised English isolationand
Shakespeare may never have left the coun-
try himselfbut his imagination ranged
freely across borders. Many of his most
famous plays are set abroad: Denmark
(Hamlet),
), Greece ((A Midsummer Nights
Dream), Italy (Romeo and Juliet), Egypt
((Antony and Cleopatra). Ben Jonson, his
friend and fellow playwright, praised
Shakespeare after his death, writing, He
was not of an age but for all time! Just as
accurately, it could be said that he was not
of England, but of the world.
In 2012, London hosted a Cultural
Olympiad in conjunction with the Olym-
pic Games. The highlight was a festival
in which the Globe Theatrea modern
reconstruction of Shakespeares origi-
nal playhousehosted performances of
the Bards 37 plays, each in a different
language and performed by a different
international company. There was a Hindi
Illustration by EDMON DE HARO

Twelfth Night, a Swahili Merry Wives of
Windsor, a Korean Midsummer Nights
Dream. Significantly, most of the shows
were not specially commissioned transla-
tions and productions. They were already
popular in their home countriesliving
proof of Shakespeares universality.
That word, of course, is one that aca-
demic theorists, including Shakespeare
scholars, hold in great suspicion. To say
that Shakespeare is the greatest writer
of all timeeven to say, in the hyper-
bolic words of critic Harold Bloom, that
he invented the human, creating our
modern sense of what it means to think
and feelis to imply that a white man is
the paragon of the human race. This goes
against the current intuition, or dogma,
that individuals exist primarily in terms of
identitygender, sexuality, race, ethnic-
ityand that it is impossible or offensive
to speak to and for humanity as such. This
was the point of view voiced last year in
the Washington Post by a California high
school teacher who argued, [T]here is a
WORLD of really exciting literature out
there that better speaks to the needs of
my very ethnically-diverse and wonder-
fully curious modern-day students. I do
not believe that a long-dead, British guy is
the only writer who can teach my students
about the human condition.
That Shakespeares rise to global fame
is owed in part to power politics is indis-
putable. If the whole world now reads an
English playwright and not one of the clas-
sics of Japanese or Indian literature, this
has something to do with the fact that,
over several centuries, England man-
aged to conquer and colonize much of
the globe. Shakespeare was among the
baggage of empire, sometimes literally.
In his new book, Shakespeare in Swahi-
liland, Edward Wilson-Lee observes that
many English explorers and missionaries
who descended on Africa in the 19th cen-
tury came armed with the Bible and the
collected plays. Journalist and explorer
Henry Morton Stanleyof Dr. Living-
stone, I presume? fametold a story
about being confronted by a group of Con-
golese who were suspicious of his habit of
taking notes. When they demanded that
he burn his writing, Stanley tricked them
EXAMINE SHAKESPEARES
LANGUAGE CLOSELY, AND THERE
ARE SUBVERSIVE IMPULSES
AND INSIGHTS EVERYWHERE.
by throwing his Shakespeare text onto the
fire instead. Wilson-Lee points out that
Stanleys tale uses the Bard as an emblem
of civilization, against the benighted igno-
rance of the natives.
Seen this way, Shakespeare does indeed
look like a mere talisman of Western supe-
riority. Examine his language closely, how-
ever, and there are subversive impulses
and insights everywhere. Take any cri-
tique of the human condition that arises
in modern society, and Shakespeare prob-
ably got there first. Consider plays like
Othello, with its clear-eyed examination of
racism and sexuality, and especially The
Tempest. In that play, Caliban is enslaved
by the colonizer Prospero and learns to
turn his masters language against him.
In the 20th century, Caliban became liter-
ary critics favorite symbol of resistance to
imperialism, and The Tempest is studied
as an ancestor of post-colonial literature.
OBSERVATION DECK
Shakespeare is a global poet, then, not
only because he wrote about the world
outside England and became widely read
over the centuries. He also intuited the
major issues of the globalized world just as
it was being born. As such, his work trans-
lates easily to non-English contexts. Shake-
speare in Swahililand shows how the Bard
may have come to Africa with the Europe-
ans but was adopted very quickly. One of
the first printed Swahili books, from 1867,
was a prose summary of four Shakespeare
plays, including The Merchant of Venice.
Decades later, Wilson-Lee finds, an ama-
teur performance of the text was staged in
Zanzibar, with the Jewish moneylender
Shylock recast as an Indian for audiences
on an African island where immigrants
from India dominated commerce.
Today, people seem ever more eager to
be divided by national borders, and the
liberal ideal of globalism is under attack
from all sides. The world needs Shake-
speares cosmopolitan imagination more
than ever. Q
ADAM KIRSCH is a poet and critic. He is the
author, most recently, of Emblems of the
Passing World: Poems after Photographs
by August Sanders.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 81
 the fixer
interview by VALERIE HOPKINS

Ljubljana, Slovenia
Matic Zorman on where to find a
rave and eat dormouse.

MIX IMPERIAL VIENNA with a dash of mod-

ern-day green living and the result is Lju-
bljana. In the heart of Slovenias capital sits
a military fortress built by the Hapsburgs.
Wide avenues boast art nouveau archi-
tecture and a robust caf culture. Tivoli
City Park, engineered by linking two grand WHERE TO SKIP
THE BEEF
estates in the early 1800s, oers access to
Slovenian cui-
numerous gardens and trails. Its also the sine is known for
3-square-mile centerpiece of Ljubljanas unusual proteins:
recent commitment to the environment: You can get a horse-
meat burger at HOT
Since taking oce in 2006, Mayor Zoran HORSE in Tivoli City
Jankovic has opened ve parks, planted Park, or bear pat
more than 2,000 trees, and banned cars at JB RESTAVRACIJA.
In the fall, villages
from several streets along the Ljubljan- around Ljubljana
ica River, which bisects the downtown. hold competitions
Today, there are 650 square yards of pub- to trap dormice,
which are then
lic green space per each of the roughly cooked into com-
280,000 residents. munal stews called
WHERE TO SEE ART Beneath its leafy, dynastic surface, the polsja obara (dor-
I am partial to mouse stew). The
city has a vibrant counterculture, accord- tradition dates
GALERIJA FOTOGRAFIJA,
a small gallery. It ing to xer Matic Zorman. The 29-year- back to the Middle
exhibits contempo- old freelance photographer has worked Ages. Theres even
rary photography, a museum about
with journalists from the Economist and dormice a short
from conceptual
to documentary. It the Washington Post. He is part of a wave drive from Ljubljana.
HOT HORSE
also has the benet of creative young people leaving a stamp
CELOVSKA CESTA 25
of being next to the on Ljubljana with avant-garde art exhibits JB RESTAVRACIJA
outdoor theater
Krizanke, so you and late-night DJ sets, some of which are MIKLOSICEVA CESTA 19

can attend a concert WHERE TO MEET

held in old warehouses. The locations are WHERE TO HEAR MUSIC
afterward. FOODIES vestiges of another chapter in the citys KRIZANKE is an
WWW.GALERIJAFO
Every Friday and history: when it was a manufacturing hub open-air venue
TOGRAFIJA.SI/EN/
Saturday, there created by archi-
are open kitchens in the former Yugoslavia. After Slovenia tect Joze Plecnik in
in the central POG became independent in 1991, the econ- the 1950s inside an
ACAR SQUARE. From
omy ceded factory jobs and many facilities abandoned mon-
lunchtime through astery. It holds a
the night, throngs were turned into studios. Those spaces few thousand peo-
gather to try food are special, Zorman says, because they ple and hosts many
at stalls. Recently, oer a venue to artists who wouldnt nec- up-and-coming
there was a festi- local bands, as well
val pairing gourmet essarily have an outlet in the mainstream as international
burgers with Slove- art world. groups. My favorite
nian microbrews. On a warm spring day, Zorman showed concert was in
WWW.ODPRTAKUHNA.SI 2014, when the
FOREIGN POLICY around his city, from lush American rock band
public spaces where visitors can partake in Queens of the Stone
Ljubljanas relaxed lifestyle to grungy digs Age performed.
WWW.LJUBLJANAFES
Photographs by DOMEN PAL where they can party until dawn. TIVAL.SI/EN/

82 SEPT | OCT 2016

 OBSERVATION DECK

WHERE TO HONOR
A LYRICAL HERO
The 31-foot statue
of our national poet,
FRANCE PRESEREN, is
worth seeing. His
muse was a woman
named Julija
Primic. She didnt
love him back, in
part because her
family considered
him lower class. LOGISTICS
Preseren wove his
sorrow into poems LAST CALL
more broadly For bars, its usually
about emotional around midnight,
pain and Slovenias but some clubs stay
political struggles. open until 5 a.m.
PRESERNOV TRG
SPENDING
On average, peo-
ple spend 20 to
30 euros, which is
about equivalent in
U.S. dollars, a night.
A beer is usually
about 3 euros.
TRANSPORTATION
Downtown, you
can take one of the
free kavalirs,
buggies similar to
golf carts that run
on electric batter-
ies. The cars regu-
larly loop the city
center. You can just
hop in.
WHERE TO EMBRACE WHERE TO SPOT POWER
COUNTERCULTURE BROKERS
ROG was a bicycle Youll find ministers
factory during the in one of two places:
Yugoslav days. After the subsidized
it was abandoned, government cafe-
artists squatted terias or the posh
there. In 2006, it restaurant inside
FAUX PAS
became a cultural WHERE TO Ljubljana Castle.
center run by crafts- FEEL HISTORY STRELEC is named
Many people here
people. They have The 15th-century after the medieval for the first time
workshops by day LJUBLJANA CASTLE, archers who used to talk about Yugosla-
and underground built over Roman be stationed in the via as a strong com-
parties until the and Illyrian set- fortresss central munist system, but
wee hours. The tlements on a hill security tower it wasnt like that.
graffiti-covered overlooking the city, exactly where the We were not behind
METELKOVA complex, is the place to go restaurant is today. the Iron Curtain,
once used as mili- back in time. A por- WWW.KAVAL GROUP.
because President
tary barracks, offers tion of the castle SI/STRELEC
Josip Tito broke
a few blocks worth has been converted ,,RESTAVRACIJA
with Joseph Stalin
of galleries, cafs, into a museum, and shortly after World
and nightclubs. it also offers the War II.
ROG best view of the
WWW.TOVARNA.ORG capital. You can get FP (ISSN 0015-7228) September/October 2016, issue number 220.
METELKOVA there by walking up Published six times each year, in January, March, May, July, September,
and November, by The FP Group, a division of Graham Holdings Com-
WWW.METELKOVA the hill or riding the pany, at 11 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20036.
MESTO.ORG glass funicular. Subscriptions: U.S., $59.99 per year; Canada and other countries,
$59.99. Periodicals Postage Paid in Washington, D.C., and at addi-
WWW.LJUBLJANSKI
tional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send U.S. address changes to: FP,
GRAD.SI/EN/THE LJU P.O. Box 283, Congers, NY 10920-0283. Return undeliverable Cana-
dian addresses to: P.O. Box 503, RPO West Beaver Creek, Richmond
BLJANA CASTLE
Hill, ON L4B 4R6. Printed in the USA.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 83
 the final word
by CLAUDIA RANKINE

The past decade has brought Americans a series of significant firsts:

the first black president and the first woman to lead a national party.
These achievements point to an ugly history of institutional racism
and sexismand are signs that we can outrun it. To do so, though,
we have to embrace discomfort as a resource. Americans tend to
avoid what makes them uneasy; this is a mistake. We have to look
at our cultural limits and consider why we are apprehensive to breach
them. Those who believe a woman cannot lead, for instance, might
be responding to the unease one feels when expectationsin this
case rooted in a legacy of misogynyare out of sync with reality. Only
by recognizing this fact can someone overcome its power. To appre-
hend discomfort as a matter of bias is to turn it into a vital lens,
through which we can ensure that it does not determine our future.

CLAUDIA RANKINE
IS THE FREDERICK ISEMAN PROFESSOR OF POETRY
AT YALE UNIVERSITY AND IS THE AUTHOR OF
FIVE COLLECTIONS OF POETRY.
HER LATEST BOOK, CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC,
IS THE FIRST POETRY COLLECTION TO BECOME A NEW YORK TIMES
BEST SELLER FOR NONFICTION.

84 SEPT | OCT 2016

Addressing the critical issues
facing Asia in the 21st century
We are convening the top foreign policy experts from 20 countries across Asia for closed-
door-sessions on the crucial security, political, economic, and environment issues the next
U.S. Administration will face in office. Find out what leading Asian experts are advising
the next U.S. president on military commitments, subnational conflicts, maritime security,
economic engagement, trade disputes, cyber-security, energy, environmental degradation,
human rights, and more.

ASIAN VIEWS ON AMERICAS ROLE IN ASIA

TO BE RELEASED IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 2016

asiafoundation.org