Flying into southern Iraq in March, the irony felt as thick as the murk enshrouding the city of Basra below. Sickened by Russia's savage invasion of my father's homeland, Ukraine, under the asinine pretext of saving it from Nazis, I would shortly land in a country that my own had seized under no less ludicrous claims: imaginary weapons of mass destruction, and a bogus connection to the 9/11 attacks.
Yet even that prolonged atrocity paled alongside what I'd come to ponder: the havoc we Homo sapiens, the so-called wise iteration of our genus, have wreaked on our planet — and, unless we act fast, on our prospects for a future. For instance, the United States' real interest here, evidenced outside my window by constellations of flames piercing the haze below. So much crude petroleum gushes from Iraq's vast oil fields that Saddam Hussein and subsequent weak Iraqi governments never bothered with infrastructure to exploit the natural gas escaping their wells. Instead, for over half a century they've continuously flared it.
