Agriculture

If you’re like me, you’ve been glued to the news of Ukraine for the last 10 days. We all know wars are great for news station ratings. And undoubtedly each of us reads or listens to that news through the prism of our own fixed ideas of how the world is ordered. Of course I’m inspired by stories of valiant resistance by the Ukrainians, horrified by the disingenuous and reckless cruelty of Vladimir Putin, and betting on the results -- that yet another dictator with too much power and insulated from perspective has set into motion his own destruction. These are tried and true themes when we tell the story of our society. But the stories I give priority to, the ones I find most intensely engaging, are the ones that recount the beginnings of yet another saga of human migration, of refugees seeking refuge. The idea that it’s intrinsic to the human condition to have one’s life upended, and to have to seek safe places to go in an intrinsically unstable and unsafe world, is a bedrock theme in my life. That I’d