Stand-up comic Dan Crohn is telling a joke about the first time he flew Spirit Airlines. It’s Comedy Tuesday at Night Shift Brewing in Everett, Massachusetts. Standing on a spotlit stage, Mr. Crohn forms a wishbone with his arms – elbows lifted high and hands pressed together – as he holds the microphone. 

“Imagine the Maury Povich show at 31,000 feet,” riffs the comedian. “The flight attendant comes up to me, and she’s like, ‘Got any food?’”

Mr. Crohn’s subject matter is fairly innocuous. Well, apart from an oceanic joke about cuttlefish having sex, which is probably a first in the annals of comedy. Nonetheless, in an interview prior to the show, he says comedians are suddenly hyperaware of getting in trouble for saying the wrong thing. On the same day, nearly 3,000 miles away, a small group of Netflix employees staged a high-profile walkout at the streaming service’s Los Angeles headquarters. They were protesting Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special, “The Closer,” for its subject matter about transgender people. It’s a third-rail topic. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Boston-area comedian Dan Crohn performs a stand-up routine at Night Shift Brewing in Everett, Massachusetts.

“I had a joke in before where I said, ‘Do you think transgender fetuses should get angry at gender-reveal parties?’” says Mr. Crohn, who has appeared on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing.” 

“And I go, ‘Guys, that’s not offensive. That’s pro-transgender, pro-fetus, and pro-parties.’ But I haven’t done it in a while.” 

Is it safe to laugh anymore? There’s long been a tradition in comedy of joking about taboo topics. But in recent years, comedians have either embraced or run away from making light of gender, race, and the #MeToo movement. They’re very conscious of the occupational hazards. Famous people and ordinary citizens alike have been fired from jobs, stripped of opportunities, and banished to a social-pariah wilderness for transgressing new language conventions or for expressing heterodox views. There’s some argument about just how widespread cancel culture is and whether it’s predominantly a left-wing phenomenon. But there have been sufficient examples that many people now self-censor what they say or write no matter what the political tilt of the topic. 

Mathieu Bitton/Netflix

Dave Chappelle performs in “The Closer,” a comedy special he did on Netflix, which has stirred widespread controversy because of some of his lines about transgender people.

For many comedians, freedom of expression is a fundamental value. That’s why John Cleese, Bill Maher, David Spade, Bill Burr, Ricky Gervais, and Mr. Chappelle complain that so-called wokeness has a chilling effect on comedy and societal customs. In response, critics counter that their jokes are sometimes unnecessarily cruel, are in poor taste, or even have a dangerous influence on how people think and act. They worry that these laugh merchants are undermining efforts toward social progress and the protection of marginalized groups. 

A lot of comedy causes offense. (Spare a thought for all the cuttlefish out there.) Comedy may be the closest thing society has to a Rorschach test – what people can, or should, tolerate. We often don’t know where the ever-shifting boundaries are until comedians venture out to test the edge. These days, there’s a greater risk of toppling over it. If a new Puritanism is sweeping the nation, the comedy club or Netflix special may be the place where the new cultural arbiters in their knee breeches and petticoats are being the most vociferous.

Yet humor can also be a uniter. It can help us see something from a fresh perspective, making us laugh in acknowledgment of the illumined truth. Jokes often reveal that even those wholly unlike ourselves share common experiences, reminding us that maybe we’re not that different after all. Amid the push and pull of cancel culture versus free speech, is it possible for high-toned humor to facilitate mutual respect based on recognizing our shared humanity?

“Comedians are sort of battling with what they can say, what they can get away with,” says Omotayo Banjo, an associate professor of communication at the University of Cincinnati, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Mr. Chappelle and how audiences react to racial humor. “I think it is a healthy moment. I think we really need to figure out – and I don’t know that we really will – but I think it’s still good to have the conversation of what is acceptable, what is not acceptable, and why not.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The audience reacts to a comedian doing a stand-up routine at Night Shift Brewing in Everett, Massachusetts, which regularly hosts live comedy nights.

Peter McGraw isn't a comedian, but his job entails making people laugh and then observing them when they do. As the director of the Humor Research Lab, he along with his colleagues is trying to answer a 2,500-year-old question: What makes things funny? 

More specifically, Dr. McGraw and his colleagues are trying to understand when and why people laugh about situations that involve tragic circumstances, inappropriate situations, and immoral behavior.

“This is something that Plato and Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud each puzzled over,” says Dr. McGraw, professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We just had a tool that was unavailable to them, and that is the experiment.”

The Humor Research Lab sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch. It conjures up images of scientists in white coats who make notes on clipboards when unsuspecting human guinea pigs sit down on whoopee cushions. The research team does appear to have a sardonic sense of humor – the lab’s acronym is HuRL. And the researchers’ work is pretty sophisticated. In a series of studies, HuRL found that its subjects often laughed at potentially benign moral violations. Yet malign moral violations tended to elicit negative reactions. Joke writers have to navigate between those poles.

“You’ve got these two levers you can pull, right? Make it more benign; make it more of a violation,” says Dr. McGraw. “That’s hard to do. You have to have some natural talent. You’ve got to be smart. But you also have to be an empiricist.”

Indeed, some jokes rely on discomfort in the setup as the stand-ups venture into embarrassing or disquieting territory, explains Kliph Nesteroff, author of “The Comedians,” an encyclopedic history of comedy. Comics get a laugh when they release the tension with a punchline, especially if it takes the listener by surprise. 

In the pursuit of the biggest laugh, edgy humorists test the boundaries of subjects and conversations that are taboo. Some of them consist of topics you’re supposed to avoid over a Thanksgiving dinner: sex, politics, religion, mothers-in-law. 

Danny Moloshok/Invision for the Television Academy/AP/File

Samantha Bee, performing at the Primetime Emmy Awards, has had to offer apologies for jokes she’s done at the expense of former President Donald Trump and his family.

“Theories of humor suggest that we enjoy humor when we’re not the target,” says Dr. Banjo of the University of Cincinnati. “It’s always easier to laugh at other people, but when our group is the target, we become a little more defensive.”

In “The Closer,” Mr. Chappelle takes on transgender people (as well as many other groups). At times, the comic appears to side with the LGBTQ community by railing against the bathroom bill in North Carolina, which required transgender people to use facilities that corresponded to the sex on their birth certificates. He also tells a heartfelt story about his friendship with a transgender woman named Daphne Dorman, who died by suicide. His comedy special on Netflix is a critique of the hierarchy of victimhood. Mr. Chappelle’s contention is that some people appear to get more upset about transgender issues than they do about racism. 

“He draws a kind of proverbial line in the sand against Black people and Black communities and queer communities. That line in the sand has massive erasure for Black queer folks,” says Brandon Manning, an assistant professor of Black literature and culture at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. “Even his ability to bring in Daphne Dorman towards the end, in many ways that’s the equivalent of saying, ‘I have a Black friend, so I can’t be racist.’”

In trying to illustrate his claim that nothing should be off-limits when it comes to humor, Mr. Chappelle also makes merciless fun of the physique and pronouns of transgender people. Indeed, he seems to be following the maxim of George Carlin: “It’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.” 

But the line of what’s socially acceptable keeps shifting.

Protests of comedy shows date back at least to the early 1900s. Wayne Federman, author of “The History of Stand-Up,” recalls Roman Catholic organizations in the Midwest in 1905 being upset over vaudeville performers who trafficked in stereotypes about the Irish and drinking. 

These days, those types of jokes are frowned upon, especially if the humorist isn’t a member of that group. It’s an example of how humor has always had to adapt to changing standards in society even if, at times, it’s slower than some might wish. 

At the time of those Catholic protests, stand-up was a relatively new art form in the United States, which pioneered the genre. The first comic, Charles F. Browne, hit the lecture circuit in 1861 and adopted the pseudonymous persona of a country yokel named Artemus Ward. (Think a 19th-century Larry the Cable Guy, or perhaps we should say Larry the Telegraph Guy.) Mark Twain and others soon followed. Ethnic and immigrant stereotypes were a comedy staple in vaudeville shows.

Blackface also got its start in minstrel shows in the late 1800s. It persisted as a tool of comedy until the early years of the millennium. In 2020, Jimmy Fallon apologized for inappropriate use of shoe polish on his face two decades ago on “Saturday Night Live.” Tina Fey withdrew four episodes of “30 Rock” from circulation because various characters had worn blackface.

John Lindsay/AP/File

The late comedian Lenny Bruce, arrested several times for using obscene language in his routines, flashes a V sign as he leaves a U.S. Customs office in 1963 after being refused entry to Britain.

In the early 1960s, Lenny Bruce was arrested several times, ostensibly for obscene language. But Mr. Federman, who is filming a documentary for HBO about Mr. Carlin, speculates the real reason was that “he was a Jewish guy attacking religion.” 

By the last few decades of the 20th century, the seven words that Mr. Carlin observed you couldn’t say on television had become common in clubs and on subscription cable channels. When Andrew Dice Clay made history in 1990 by selling out two nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden, he famously recited vulgar nursery rhymes that would have made Mother Goose lay an egg. Yet Mr. Clay’s sexist and homophobic material had become so controversial that Hollywood studios wouldn’t go near him. Protesters gathered outside his shows. By 1995, even Mr. Clay opined that he’d taken his sexist alter ego persona too far and changed his act. A year later, Eddie Murphy similarly apologized for his gags about gay people and HIV in his 1987 hit stand-up comedy film, “Eddie Murphy Raw.”

Those atonements arrived during another cultural shift – one that began to play out not just on comedy stages but also on TV.

“Over the course of the ’90s this kind of popular understanding of what political correctness is, is developing,” says Philip Scepanski, author of “Tragedy Plus Time: National Trauma and Television Comedy.” “Then ‘South Park’ and ‘Family Guy’ premiered by the late ’90s and really make up an art form of being anti-PC.” 

In the 1990s, that tension between those in favor of political correctness and those who chafe at speech codes played out as skirmishes. In the early millennium, it developed into a full-blown culture war. Some comedians are still very much on the front lines, lobbing jokes from the trenches.  

Wyatt Counts/AP/File

The late comedian George Carlin once said, “It’s the duty of the comedian to find where the line [of acceptable humor] is drawn and cross it deliberately.”

Allison Gill used to feature jokes about rape in her stand-up routines. Dr. Gill is a survivor of sexual assault from her time in the Navy. (She appeared in “The Invisible War,” an Oscar-nominated 2012 documentary about rape in the U.S. military.) 

“A lot of my humor was around rape and rape culture,” says Dr. Gill, whose comedy special “Benefits of a Misspent Youth” was released in 2017. “And that helped me. It was sort of an exposure therapy, right? Talk about what had happened to me, but in a humorous way.”

But she no longer includes some quips about the issue in her comedy. She discovered that the irony was getting lost on audience members. It’s often a generational thing. Many observers say that millennials and Gen Zers don’t respond well to irony and satire anymore. “They’re very literal and straightforward,” says Dr. Gill, adding that they want you to say exactly what you mean because otherwise it can be interpreted as a microaggression. 

Younger audiences not only eschew archness in comedy but also see humor as a kind of therapeutic exercise that’s more personal, more rooted in pain. Comedy specials such as Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette,” Bo Burnham’s “Inside,” and James Acaster’s “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999” explore mental health issues in a delivery that’s highly confessional and often completely serious. 

“I’d argue that a younger millennial or younger Gen Z generation has made comedy and the stand-up stage a site of wellness and vulnerability,” says Dr. Manning from Texas Christian University. “They’re able to create humor in a way that doesn’t laugh at their pain.”

Some millennials and Gen Zers are leery of comedy that makes light of victimhood and identity – in their eyes, Mr. Chappelle’s “The Closer” probably constitutes a macroaggression. They worry that style of comedy diminishes the struggles of marginalized groups. Some believe words that cause emotional discomfort are dangerous. 

Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP/File

Kevin Hart lost his chance to host the Academy Awards in 2019 after a 2011 tweet surfaced in which he joked about worrying that his young son was gay.

That’s why so many colleges that hire comedians these days contractually stipulate what they can’t say onstage. In response, comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock have said they will no longer play campuses. Having to preface each joke with a warning label does tend to put a crimp in a stand-up routine. But confining comedy to subjects that don’t make people feel unsafe isn’t just limited to college auditoriums – it’s permeated society.

An offensive joke, captured on a tweet or a cellphone camera or TV special, can lead to a headline-making furor. Sometimes protesters claim that such humor endangers marginalized groups by dehumanizing them and inviting physical attacks. The case for safety, and concern about ridicule, were invoked by some – including members of GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) – who urged Netflix to yank “The Closer” from its platform. 

In response, Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos wrote, “Violence on screens has grown hugely over the last thirty years, especially with first party shooter games, and yet violent crime has fallen significantly in many countries. Adults can watch violence, assault and abuse – or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy – without it causing them to harm others.”

Despite the blowback, Netflix hasn’t removed “The Closer.” On Rotten Tomatoes, a website that aggregates reviews, media critics gave the special a paltry 44% rating. Yet the audience score is 95%.

Mr. Chappelle’s popularity means that he can still command large crowds at shows. But he claims that film festivals have withdrawn invitations for him to screen his upcoming documentary and distributors are now steering clear of it. In the wake of the controversy, it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be invited to host the Oscars.

Justine Ungaro/Courtesy of Judy Gold

Comedian Judy Gold, a two-time Daytime Emmy Award winner, says people who don’t like a song simply switch radio stations. Why don’t they do the same with humor that upsets them – tune it out instead of trying to censor it?

Judy Gold is fond of quoting her fellow comedian, Eddie Sarfaty: “Going to a comedy club and expecting not to get offended is like going on a roller coaster, expecting not to get scared.” 

That quote appears on the first page of her 2020 book, “Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble.” But these days, umbrage at a joke – even one uttered many years ago – can have serious consequences. For Kevin Hart, it meant losing the chance to host the 2019 Academy Awards ceremony after a tweet from 2011 surfaced in which he joked about worrying that his young son was gay. For Shane Gillis, it meant getting fired from “SNL” four days after he was hired because of homophobic and racially controversial lines he had used on a podcast.

Cancel culture is predominantly a far-left phenomenon, but it also exists on the right. Samantha Bee and Kathy Griffin have had to apologize for jokes at the expense of former President Donald Trump and members of his family.

“I’m observing comedians being scared to say things they normally would say,” says Ms. Gold, who adds that some of the edgiest comedians are running jokes past her out of fear of a backlash. “It’s stifling the writing.”

The tension between cancel culture and comedy comes down to this: Should a comic be fired or ostracized for ... uttering words? 

Ms. Gold observes that when you hear a song on the radio you don’t like, you can change stations. So why do those who take offense at comedy feel the need to marshal campaigns against the comic? 

“It’s called a sense of humor,” she says. “It’s just like you have a sense of taste. You like salty food; you don’t like salty food. You like sarcasm; you don’t like sarcasm.”

Telling people they’re not allowed to laugh at something, she says, doesn’t mean we won’t find those things funny, because laughter is an involuntary response. 

In “The Closer,” Mr. Chappelle tells the audience, “Sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean. Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean: I’m saying it because it’s funny.”

Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

People rally in Los Angeles on Oct. 20, 2021, to support Netflix employees protesting the company’s streaming of Dave Chappelle’s comedy special, which they criticize for jokes about transgender people.

Mr. Nesteroff, the comedy historian, says some people think the role of the comedian is to convey truth. He counters that a comic has just one job: to make people laugh. 

“Less than 1% of the world’s population is funny,” he says. “That’s a real superpower. Any person can speak truth to power – not everyone can be funny.”

But if some find a joke hurtful, is it worth the trade-off of getting the laugh? Many comedians abide by the ethos that one should punch up, not down. 

“There’s almost a hierarchy,” says Dr. Gill, the former Navy recruit turned political podcaster. “Rule No. 1, make fun of yourself. Rule No. 2, make fun of the oppressors. And rule No. 3, never make fun of those that you would want to protect from either of those first two things.”

Dr. Gill believes that rant comedy – the sort of angry opinionated humor exemplified by the likes of Bill Hicks and Lewis Black – is dying out because fewer people find it funny anymore. Similarly, insult comics such as Gilbert Gottfried seem passé. 

“If we’re swinging the pendulum to be more conscientious than we need to be, where’s the harm in that?” asks Dr. Gill.

Instead of deploying jokes as a weapon of cruelty, the rape survivor believes comedy can be used to heal. Hope springs from humor, she says. To quote the old adage, “If we don’t laugh, we cry.”

Ultimately, if a comedian’s goal is to make as many people laugh as possible, it makes sense to be inclusive. At heart, humor springs from a desire to be social. When people laugh collectively, they bond, and that experience creates community even if it’s just for a moment in a comedy club.

Ms. Gold can attest to that. In the 1990s, she came out as a gay parent. Onstage, she found that when she started quipping about her children, audiences related to her as a parent. That common ground helped to foster acceptance. 

Back at the comedy club in Everett, Mr. Crohn is musing on what a great time it is to be a comedian, despite all the politically correct restrictions. The industry is experiencing a boom, and the comedy classes he teaches have a waiting list for the first time. Credit the proliferation of platforms available to purveyors of laughter: YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and podcasts. Mr. Crohn’s comedy album “It’s Enough Already,” which often riffs on his Jewishness, is on Spotify. (Sample joke: “I saw a bumper sticker that said, ‘Jesus for president.’ I said, ‘Who’s going to elect a Jew?’”) The parameters of what comedians can say may be narrower now, but he says it challenges them to write better jokes.

“Audiences now are so great because they do appreciate really well-crafted material that’s, like, personal and about you,” says Mr. Crohn. “That’s why everybody goes to comedy. They want to hear something about themselves said by somebody else.” 

Adrienne Surprenant/AP

Siblings settle into a new shelter in South Sudan. The country has been working to organize a national census since 2014, but conflict and migration have made data collection difficult.

When South Sudan became independent in 2011, the new country needed the world’s help.

Hollowed out by decades of war and poverty, it didn’t have enough of many things fundamental to making a country work: schools and roads, hospitals and cell towers, sewers and water pipes.

But how many of those things it needed was fuzzy, because there was no up-to-date record of how many people actually lived in South Sudan, let alone who or where they were. The Sudanese government had conducted a census in 2008, but war and migration meant its figures went quickly stale. And as another civil war roiled the new country over the next several years, those numbers became more jumbled.

So the government made a deceptively simple decision: It would count its people. The long-awaited census is currently scheduled to begin next year.

In many countries, the census is a regular and unremarkable feature of life, expected and ordinary. But in much of the world, counting people remains an extraordinary task and one with extraordinarily high stakes.

“It’s a fundamental question. You need it for almost everything,” says Chris Jochem, a geographer with the WorldPop project, which collects and analyzes global population data, who has also worked on population counts in South Sudan.

Censuses inform a wide variety of decisions, from the contentious boundaries of political districts and the number of COVID-19 vaccines a government needs to buy, to whether or not a company should build its next potato chip factory in a certain area, given available workers.

“In the absence of a census, governments have to do guesswork. Resources go to the wrong places,” says Fredrick Okwayo, a technical adviser at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) who has advised governments around the world about population counts.

But countries like South Sudan pose major challenges for the world’s people-counters. How, for instance, do you count people constantly moving around because of conflict and hunger? How does a census worker with a clipboard or an iPad move around in an active war zone? And how do you get to people living not only “off the grid” but hundreds of miles from the nearest paved road?

Earlier this year, South Sudan completed a “population survey,” a kind of mini-census designed as a stopgap measure until the real thing could be done. Census workers counted people in about 1,500 sites across the country, previewing many of the challenges of doing a full census.

Adrienne Surprenant/AP

Children fetch water in Juba, South Sudan, May 29, 2021. Experts say a national census would help needed resources make it to the most impoverished areas of the country.

“We had a lot of snakebites” among census workers, says Julius Sebit Daniel, the survey manager for the population survey at the National Bureau of Statistics in Juba. In some areas, flooding meant enumerators had to wade through chest-deep water, holding their census-taking iPads over their heads.

“So there were many big challenges,” says Mr. Daniel, who got his own start in the field in 1983 as a high school student with a part-time job counting people for the Sudanese census. He remembers walking miles between each house, lugging jugs of water on his back.

Globally, the census is most difficult to organize in places where the results have the highest stakes because scarce government resources and international aid depend on the results. “You need to get a count of the population first and all the other work follows,” Mr. Daniel says.

Advances in satellite and cellular technology have made it easier for demographers like those from the WorldPop team to estimate populations, even when a census can’t be done. But estimates can only go so far, Dr. Jochem notes. “Counting every single person is still the most accurate way, and an important job,” he says.

South Sudan is far from the only country to have wrestled with these questions in recent years. Afghanistan and Myanmar emerged from decades of conflict, with donors knocking on their doors, only to find out they didn’t know how many people they had. In northern Nigeria and eastern Congo, meanwhile, ongoing conflict has meant demographers have had to get creative with their methods, using satellites, mathematical models, and even cellphone usage to shape their best guess at who lives where. And then there is Eritrea and North Korea, where governments simply refuse to count their people.

In South Sudan, multiple challenges are stacked on top of each other. The country is still wracked by violent conflict. It has only a few hundred miles of paved roads. For large sections of the calendar, whole regions are simply inaccessible due to rain. Censuses cost money, a lot of it. And even figuring out where people are to count them can be difficult, given the churn of migration because of other crises.

“You have these zones from the 2008 census, and then you go there and there are no people there anymore,” says Mr. Daniel.

South Sudan has been trying to hold a complete census since 2014, but war, funding, and a pandemic have stood in its way, Mr. Daniel says. The timeline of next year’s census remains murky.

“People here have been waiting for a census,” hoping it will mean more resources in the poorest places, says Wellington Mbithi, a UNFPA technical specialist who worked on the population estimation survey in South Sudan.

Of course, having data doesn’t always translate to changing lives. But it’s a start, Mr. Daniel says.

He still remembers what it was like to stop and sit with residents of each house he visited as an enumerator back in high school, asking them about the fundamentals of their lives: Where do you come from? Are you married? Do you have kids? Did you go to school?

The work changed his life. Before that, he’d been thinking of studying engineering. Instead, he studied statistics and became a demographer. He’d seen what the lives of South Sudan residents looked like close up, and he wanted to figure out what they looked like as a whole.

“For the benefit of our people, we need to do this,” he says.

The straw is still soft enough to sleep on. Scraps of newspaper remain legible. Buttons cling to still-intact uniforms. These items are among a hoard of artifacts recently found in the dark recesses of a World War I military bunker high in the Italian Alps.

The bunker was occupied by Austro-Hungarian soldiers in what was known as La Guerra Bianca or the White War, the highest theater of conflict in the world, where soldiers on opposing sides battled freezing cold, avalanches, and lack of food as much as each other.

Entombed in ice and snow for more than a century, this bunker and others like it are now coming to light as a result of global warming.

The effects of climate change are often hard to discern for the average person. It is difficult to know if the storm that sweeps across your hometown is more intense than previous ones. What responses can be made are mostly incremental, sweeping, and long term.

But that is not the case among the long-abandoned trenches and sniper positions of the high Alps.

Here, as the snow and ice melt as a result of rising temperatures, historians and archaeologists must take immediate action to preserve invaluable evidence before it is destroyed from being exposed to air and water. Artifacts made from perishable materials like wood, leather, and paper are particularly at risk from the damp conditions created by the melting ice.

Nick Squires

Stelvio National Park, where the bunker was found, was once the front line between Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces during World War I between 1915 and 1918. The front was known as La Guerra Bianca, or the White War, and was the highest theater of conflict in the world.

“We have an opportunity, but it is an opportunity that must be grasped very quickly. These places not only conserve all sorts of artifacts, but scientific traces of how life used to be from a botanical, entomological, and glaciological point of view 100 years ago,” says Giovanni Cadioli, a military historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua in northern Italy.

“The traces must be preserved before the ice melts and it becomes impossible to scientifically analyze all the data that these places gift us.”

The White War, unfrozen

The bunker, which was found last summer, is located in the vast Stelvio National Park, on the slopes of Monte Scorluzzo. It was once on the front line between the Italians and their Austro-Hungarian adversaries. A century ago, the bunker overlooked a vast glacier. Not anymore.

“During the First World War, there was a huge glacier called the Platigliole glacier. Now, it has totally disappeared,” says Stefano Morosini, a mountaineer and a professor of history at the University of Bergamo.

Bunkers and shelters made of rocks and slabs of timber are slowly collapsing as the permafrost melts, he says.

“This is possibly a positive side effect of climate change in that 100 years ago, this mountain was part of a glacier,” says Mr. Cadioli. “You would glimpse rocks only during the warmest days of August. This is no longer the case. The glacier has retreated, the ice is melting, and so places like this, which were frozen in time for 100 years, are coming back to life.”

Nick Squires

Mr. Cadioli leaves the bunker through its entrance, a small box-shaped hole in the rock and ice.

The bunker was home to a group of around 15 Austro-Hungarian troops, who slept on straw-stuffed mattresses, ate food from tins, tried desperately to keep warm, and made regular forays to take potshots at the Italian trenches.

The work of preserving these time capsules is already underway. A similar bunker, which was found close to the 3,094-meter summit of Monte Scorluzzo, has been dismantled and brought down the mountain to the Alpine town of Bormio, where the constituent pieces are being stored in a warehouse.

Once put back together again, it will form the centerpiece of a new €3.2 million ($3.6 million) museum, dedicated to the White War, which is due to open in 2023 in a medieval tower in the historic heart of Bormio.

The military positions and artifacts that are emerging from this part of the Alps are testament to one of World War I’s least known but most unforgiving combat zones. The conflict began in 1915 when Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies. The Austro-Hungarians quickly occupied the highest peaks and ridges, with the Italians expending much blood and effort to try to take them over the next three years.

Living conditions were appalling – in winter, the temperature fell to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Positions were manned year-round. The highest point that was occupied by troops was Monte Ortles, at a staggering 12,800 feet (2.4 miles). The forces of nature were as dangerous as bombs and bullets. Men died of frostbite, avalanches, and lightning strikes, some of which blew up ammunition dumps.

Nick Squires

Relics from Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces from World War I are on display in Stelvio National Park, having been recovered from the ice.

“On no front, not on the sun-scorched plains of Mesopotamia, nor in the frozen Masurian marshes, nor in the blood-soaked mud of Flanders, does the fighting man lead so arduous an existence as up here on the roof of the world,” wrote a correspondent for the New York World in 1917.

A captain in the Alpini, Italy’s mountain troops, wrote in his diary: “When, after the war, someone climbs these mountains and finds the roads, the houses, the trenches dug by these wonderful soldiers of ours, they will be amazed to think that here an army lived and fought.” He survived the White War only to die in France in 1918.

The thawing Alps

In the years to come, more historical material is likely to emerge from this once frozen landscape, providing a treasure-trove of information for historians.

Even so, few in the Italian Alps would actively wish for the demise of glaciers. “Every summer, more artifacts emerge from the ice as the glaciers melt. But of course if we could choose, we would want the glaciers to remain,” says Massimo Sertori, a regional politician who is involved in financing the new museum in Bormio.

Scientists say that the majority of the 4,000 glaciers in the Alps could be lost by the end of the century unless climate change is checked.

“For glaciers in countries like Switzerland, Austria, and France, we have seen a retreat rate of 1.2% per year over the past decade. It’s worse in Italy because our mountains face south and catch more sun. The average rate of retreat for Italian glaciers is 1.6%,” says Davide Fugazza, a postdoctoral researcher, as he measured glacial meltwater flows from a bridge spanning a mountain stream.

“The way things are going now, 90% of glacier mass in the Alps will be lost by 2100. Some will disappear altogether.”

For decades, Samburu women cut down trees in the Kirisia Forest to make charcoal, their only source of income. Today, 550 of them have teamed up to help safeguard the forest in this dense, mountainous ecosystem, which provides water to more than 150,000 people. With climate change, drought is driving the men of this lowland herding community to leave for months on end in search of water and pasture for their animals.

The women’s stewardship of the 226,000-acre national forest is part of a broader shift in thinking among governments in places like Kenya and Tanzania toward entrusting communities with local resource management.

At the same time, a shift is occurring in gender roles: Samburu women are not only conserving the forest but also working to earn money for their families, which face extreme poverty and hunger. 

Elisa Lesilele has breakfast at base camp before departing for a morning patrol. She has been a scout volunteer of the Kirisia Community Forest Association since 2019. “In our culture, women are usually not involved in decision makings,” she explains as the sun rises above the mist-covered forest. “But now things are changing, and we are directly involved in protecting these trees.”

As climate change disrupts pastoralists’ traditional way of life, projects like beekeeping have the potential to lift communities out of poverty. “I am proud to know that I can make a difference in protecting this forest,” says Zeinab Leboiyare, a beekeeper. “Before, we did not know the importance of taking care of these trees. But now we are starting to understand that we have to take matters in our own hands, if we want to protect our environment.”

Still, ending illegal charcoal burning is a challenge, one that Ms. Lesilele says is best resolved by raising awareness. “When we see someone cutting trees ... we try to ... explain the importance of protecting this forest,” she says. “People have to understand that this forest has the potential to save the generations to come.”

Siegfried Modola

Women herd goats toward one of the few sources of water in the drought-stricken region of northern Kenya.

Siegfried Modola

Smoke rises from illegal charcoal burning, once the only source of income.

Siegfried Modola

Scouts join a team debriefing before a joint patrol. Kirisia is a critical ecosystem for people living in the lowlands.

Siegfried Modola

Samburu women not only serve alongside Kenyan forest rangers, but also participate in community decision-making concerning the forest.

Siegfried Modola

Zeinab Leboiyare tends hives. The Kirisia project is supported by BOMA, a nongovernmental organization. Samburu women can earn money from sustainably managed products.

Siegfried Modola

A Samburu woman milks her cow at her home on the edge of the forest. Drought conditions are making it harder to keep livestock alive. Some herders have sold off their animals.

Siegfried Modola

From left: Ms. Lementilla, Naisulla Letiwa, and Ms. Lesilele inspect a fallen tree during a patrol with rangers from the Kenyan Forest Service.

AP

Presidential candidate Xiomara Castro acknowledges her supporters after general elections in Honduras Nov. 28.

The flashy headline coming out of a Nov. 28 election in Honduras could be that the Central American nation appears set to have its first female president. Xiomara Castro of the leftist Libre Party holds a commanding lead in the vote count. Yet for a country in which 3% of the population has emigrated in just the past year, her tentative victory over a corrupt ruling party sends a deeper message: Hondurans have not given up hope for honest governance.

Voter turnout in the election was more than 68%, compared with an average 57%. And that is in a country where confidence in democracy is the lowest in Latin America, according to a recent Latinobarómetro poll, and one with the second-highest poverty rate in the region after Haiti.

A big part of Ms. Castro’s allure was that she promises to invite the United Nations to help root out corruption in what has become a narco-state during the 12-year rule of President Juan Orlando Hernández and his right-wing National Party. In the United States, Mr. Hernández has been cited as a co-conspirator in various drug trafficking trials, with his brother having been sentenced to life in a U.S. prison last March. In 2018, an estimated 12.5% of the country’s gross domestic product was siphoned off by corruption, according to the Honduran Social Forum on Foreign Debt and Development.

“Never again will the power be abused in this country,” Ms. Castro told supporters.

In an election widely seen as a referendum on corruption, the outcome could also spell hope for curbing the exodus of Hondurans. Nearly half of Central Americans apprehended at the U.S. southwest border this year are from the country, many of them arriving as families.

The Biden administration has created two task forces to curb corruption in Central America. It is also focusing much of a $4 billion aid package for the region on fighting high-level graft. If Ms. Castro can make good on her proposed anti-corruption reforms, that U.S. money might be well spent in Honduras. Its people have chosen hope over despair.