Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

Former Vice President Mike Pence speaks at a senior center in Raymond, New Hampshire, Sept. 5, 2023.

At a senior center in Raymond, New Hampshire, last week, former Vice President Mike Pence was boasting about raising military spending under the Trump-Pence administration, while stressing the need to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. Asked the next day if Russian President Vladimir Putin was a war criminal, Mr. Pence didn’t hesitate: “Without question.”

Not far away, at a picnic in Salem, candidate Vivek Ramaswamy offered a different take. “We have to get the facts before we get to the bottom of that,” the pharmaceutical entrepreneur said when asked about Mr. Putin’s status as a potential war criminal. Speaking to voters on an unusually hot September day, Mr. Ramaswamy said he would prioritize the homefront over involvement in foreign conflicts. “My job is to keep us out of World War III while advancing American interests.” 

Often in presidential primaries, candidates struggle to find ways to differentiate themselves. Largely agreeing on the main issues of the day, they wind up emphasizing slight nuances or leaning on stylistic distinctions.

The 2024 Republicans don’t have that problem.

From the debate stage to the campaign trail, whether they’re talking about Ukraine or abortion or the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, these candidates’ pitches have been so jarringly different from one another that voters might be forgiven for wondering if they’re truly from the same party.  

The kaleidoscope of views on display could help the GOP attract some new supporters – including more independents, voters of color, and a younger generation that sees Reagan-style conservatism as hopelessly passé. At the same time, analysts say, the party is running the risk of coming across as incoherent, making it hard for voters to identify what it actually stands for. And parties that are deeply divided along policy lines often struggle at the ballot box.

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks to reporters with his wife, Apoorva, at a Labor Day picnic in Salem, New Hampshire, Sept. 4, 2023.

“When political scientists for the past 20-plus years have compared the Republican and Democratic parties, a common refrain has been, ‘Well, the Democrats are this “big tent” party of different constituents who don’t have much in common – union people, highly educated individuals – but they agree to join forces for the purposes of trying to win elections,’” says David Barker, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. “By contrast, the conventional wisdom has been that Republicans are the ideological party rowing in the same boat ... which was why people used to say that Republicans had a leg up. Now we’ve really seen that turn upside down.” 

It’s the ripple effect of a realignment that started when Donald Trump captured the White House in 2016 and has yet to be fully resolved. With Mr. Trump still dominant and pushing the GOP in a more populist direction, his rivals are caught between trying to emulate him and hewing to a more traditional conservatism – or trying to somehow have it both ways.

Staking out varied positions

In her own campaign stops across the Granite State last week, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley advocated for a muscular foreign policy, similar to Mr. Pence’s pitch. But she put forward a very different message on the subject of a national abortion ban – essentially telling voters it’s not going to happen. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was in his home state dealing with Hurricane Idalia, often sounds more populist than Mr. Trump, such as in his culture war battle with Disney. He has expressed skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccine, while Mr. Trump recently told interviewer Megyn Kelly that his decision to back the vaccine’s development, according to health officials, “saved 100 million lives.”

When it comes to Mr. Trump, the candidates have differing takes – at times, even from themselves. Ms. Haley has said he would be a weak general election candidate, calling him “the most disliked politician in America,” while also saying she’d back him if he were the nominee. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has essentially made his entire campaign about the need to prevent Mr. Trump from recapturing the White House. Mr. Ramaswamy, on the other hand, calls Mr. Trump the best president of the 21st century.

There’s always a spectrum within parties, notes Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and New Hampshire native. But Mr. Trump fundamentally shifted the landscape for the GOP, so that even positions once seen as utterly heterodox are now “percolating” among the 2024 candidates.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Republican candidate and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley speaks during a town hall meeting in Claremont, New Hampshire, Sept. 5, 2023.

“We were the party of fiscal responsibility, including entitlement reform. We were the party of free trade capitalism,” says Mr. Bartlett. “Flash-forward four years: Donald Trump says, ‘No more stupid wars. You’re not going to touch Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Oh, and by the way, it’s called fair trade, not free trade.’ And what happened? He won.”  

While some candidates are calling for a return to core Republican ideas and principles, others seem to be saying, “Maybe Trump’s ideas are much closer to where voters and the base of the party is,” Mr. Bartlett adds.

As Trump leads, Ramaswamy echoes message

So far, Mr. Trump is the heavy favorite to win the nomination again, with formidable leads in most national polls. A late August poll of New Hampshire primary voters found the former president as the top choice for almost half of those surveyed. 

“I like Donald J. Trump,” says David Hunt, wiping sweat and dirt from his arms as he takes a break from working outside his home in Windsor, New Hampshire. Mr. Hunt says his business drilling wells for homes has all but dried up due to rising interest rates and a difficult housing market. The farm stand that he runs with his wife, Laurie, where they sell local produce, honey, and maple butter through an honor system, has struggled as well. By comparison, Mr. Hunt says he “never made as much” money as he did during the Trump years.   

When asked if he’d consider voting for anyone else in the GOP primary field, Mr. Hunt answers, “Vik.”

Indeed, Mr. Ramaswamy has tried to position himself as the inheritor of the MAGA mantle, though many New Hampshire voters like Mr. Hunt still struggle to pronounce his name. Mr. Ramaswamy calls his campaign “the leading edge of defining where the ‘America First’ movement goes from here.” 

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

David and Laurie Hunt stand with their dog in front of their farm stand in Windsor, New Hampshire, Sept. 5, 2023.

The Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyer, who made millions as a biotech entrepreneur, has never held elected office and says he’s only voted in two presidential elections – in 2004 for a Libertarian and in 2020 for President Trump.

At the first Republican debate in late August, Mr. Ramaswamy stood in the middle of the stage, fending off attacks from almost all the other candidates and throwing punches of his own. In the 24 hours that followed, there were more than 1 million Google searches of his name.

The crowd at the Ramaswamy picnic whistled and applauded when he vowed to abolish numerous government agencies, cut 75% of the federal workforce, and battle the “new secular cults” of COVID-19 and transgender issues. The GOP primary, he told the crowd, was a choice between “incremental reform” and “revolution.” 

Mr. Ramaswamy’s rhetoric closely emulates Mr. Trump’s, and he echoes the former president’s depiction of America as in a state of decline. Indeed, one lesson other candidates seem to have taken from Mr. Trump’s political success is that style matters more than substance – and that many voters will be flexible on policy if they like a candidate’s posture.

“Right now, the Republican Party is about attitude and swagger,” says Mr. Bartlett, the GOP strategist. “Vivek has made some very inflammatory comments. It tends to resonate. It is not just what you say, but how you say it in the Republican Party.”

Can a return to Reaganism appeal?

At the other end of the spectrum is Mr. Pence, a 1990s-style politician in a blue blazer and dad sneakers, who has been calling for a return to Reaganesque Republicanism – the “three-legged stool” of religious traditionalism, foreign policy hawkishness, and free market sentiment – which he says would usher in a new “Morning in America.”

On the stump in New Hampshire, the former Trump vice president called out “Donald Trump and his imitators” for preaching a “siren song of populism” that has destabilized the GOP and aligned it with Democrats on many issues. 

“We have come to a Republican time for choosing,” Mr. Pence told a crowd of students, several of whom said they were there for class credit, at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. “The question of the hour is not just who, but what will we offer the American people a year from this November? ... I believe that choice will determine the fate of the party and the course of our nation for years to come.”

If Mr. Pence’s meager crowds last week were any indication, however, the party may have already made its choice.

“I don’t like Pence,” said freshman Isiah Chamberlain after seeing the former vice president at a town hall at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. “I’d take any populist candidate over an elitist conservative.”

Still, others saw Mr. Pence’s message as worth heeding. Freshman Matthew Cryan said he liked the former vice president’s references to Ronald Reagan and his comments about standing firm against Mr. Putin. “I want to knock him down before he has the chance to get stronger.”

During the last debate, Mr. Pence was the only candidate onstage “who reflects what a president should be,” says Deana Gagnon, a store manager speaking outside a shopping center down the road from the Pence town hall in Raymond. Ms. Gagnon voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 but says she now finds him unpresidential.

“I don’t want a president for show,” she says. “I want a president who can make some change.”

Evelyn Hockstein/AP

Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (left) shakes hand with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as U.S. President Joe Biden (right) looks on during the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment event at the G20 summit in New Delhi, Sept. 9, 2023.

At a summit of world leaders, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an ambitious new economic corridor project that will link India with the Middle East and Europe. 

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has described the project as “a green and digital bridge across continents and civilizations.” U.S. President Joe Biden called it “game-changing,” and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman praised the “historic” announcement.

This new link, Mr. Modi said at the G20 last week, “will drive sustainable development for the entire world.”

It’s true that the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), if completed, will accelerate trade between the regions, and would likely help boost political cooperation and energy security. It’s also a clear challenge, experts say, to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive infrastructure corridor stretching across Asia, Africa, and Latin America that gives China considerable international influence. However, details on the IMEC remain thin. It’s not yet clear how the corridor will be built, or who will foot the bill.

“It’s significant because of the sheer scale. The number of participants and the geography covered is immense,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington. “Of course, the sheer scale could also prove to be its undoing – too ambitious and complex to see the light of day.”

The IMEC plan is broken into two segments: Through a combination of railroads, ship routes, and roadways, the eastern corridor will connect India to the Persian Gulf, and the northern corridor will connect the Persian Gulf to Europe. Hydrogen pipelines and electricity cables will also be built along the rail routes, according to a memorandum of understanding signed by India, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the European Union, Italy, France, and Germany.

The IMEC announcement comes just a month before 90 countries are expected to gather in Beijing for a major BRI conference. Since 2013, China has poured billions into the project, which has been touted as the brainchild of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and involves more than 150 countries and dozens of international organizations.

In fact, some IMEC backers, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are already part of the BRI. Others view China’s sweeping initiative as a form of “debt-trap diplomacy” – securing geopolitical influence by lending poorer nations unrepayable sums for infrastructure projects.

“Many of the countries involved in this [IMEC] scheme won’t want to approach it with a China lens, but that’s an unavoidable frame from a U.S. perspective,” says Mr. Kugelman. “U.S. officials have already depicted this project as transparent, inclusive, and noncoercive, drawing a sharp and explicit contrast with what it believes to be the BRI investment model.” 

Hussain Ali/Pacific Press/Sipa USA/Reuters/File

Construction workers move rubble on a road in Peshawar, Pakistan, May 25, 2022. The Pakistani government has decided to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a point of contention with India.

India has been at loggerheads with China on the BRI, as one of its major offshoots, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), passes through Pakistan-administered Kashmir, part of a hotly disputed Himalayan territory currently divided between India, Pakistan, and China. New Delhi considers northern Kashmir to be illegally occupied by Islamabad and says any country that participates in the expansion of the CPEC will “directly infringe on India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” 

India signed a deal with Iran in 2016 to develop its own CPEC-like corridor, but the project has faced many roadblocks and was further derailed by U.S. sanctions on Iran.

India and China have also been locked in a tense border faceoff since soldiers from both sides were killed in a 2020 clash, and Mr. Xi skipped the Delhi summit.

So far, China doesn’t seem very threatened by the IMEC, stating shortly after the summit that it welcomes the new corridor. “At the same time, we advocate that various connectivity initiatives should be open, inclusive, and form synergy, and should not become geopolitical tools,” the foreign ministry said in a statement to Indian press. 

Chinese officials know that “when it comes to infrastructure building, they are the No. 1 in the world,” says Pravin Sawhney, a journalist and expert on India’s national security, voicing concerns about the IMEC’s future. “They are the ones who have the deep pockets, and they know BRI is 10 years ahead.”

Yet the BRI finds itself on shaky ground as well. 

China’s economic growth is slowing, leading to deflation and fears of stagnation. And amid growing accusations of predatory lending, partner countries have started demanding to renegotiate the terms of their loans. Italy is poised to pull out of the BRI altogether.

Whether India can use this moment of uncertainty to shift the scales of influence depends on its ability to get the IMEC off the ground.

“As of now, we don’t know who will fund it, [and] nobody knows who will ultimately agree to it,” says Mr. Sawhney. “As far as the USA is concerned, there are so many commitments they have made in infrastructure building which remain incomplete. The latest is the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework,” an initiative launched last year and promoted as an opportunity to balance China’s influence in Asia. 

Mr. Kugelman shares some of these concerns but believes the project still carries promise.

“Despite the challenges, the geopolitics of this are too important to overlook,” he says. “Three different regions and the U.S. working together to promote connectivity, on a large scale, in a broad expanse of territory home to key land and sea routes for trade.”

Officials involved in the IMEC say they’ll have a more detailed plan for building out the corridor in the next couple of months. Meanwhile, analysts are watching the progress of this megaproject carefully, seeing it as an indicator of U.S. investment in India, as well as attitudes toward China.

“Is there any bread left?” the woman yells as she runs across the street, dodging honking and swerving cars on the busy Tunis road.

“This is my sixth bakery today,” she tells the line of customers in between gasps of air. “If they are out, I will go home empty-handed.”

Twelve years after a democratic revolution that demanded “bread, freedom, and dignity,” Tunisians today are preoccupied with bread. Specifically, where to find some.

The cash-strapped North African country is struggling with shortages of several imported staples: rice, pasta, sugar, coffee, and some medicines. But none is hitting citizens as hard as the shortage of wheat, the core ingredient of Tunisian cuisine: couscous, nawaser, baguettes, and pizza.

It comes as the country faces a constellation of crises: climate change-driven drought and fires, soaring public debt, Ukraine war price shocks, plummeting foreign currency reserves, and decades of bad policy.

Worsening the crisis, economists say, is a populist president who is barely at the helm, putting his personal popularity over badly needed economic reforms.

As Tunisia nears bankruptcy, President Kais Saied lashes out at scapegoats and political rivals, offering few solutions and proving that populism performs better at the ballot box than at the kitchen table.

Boatloads of wheat

The immediate cause of the bread shortage is the inability of cash-strapped Tunisia, which is struggling to repay foreign lenders a decade’s worth of loans, to pay for wheat imports.

Eight cargo ships packed with wheat are currently anchored off the port of Tunis, refusing to offload their cargo until they get paid by the government.

The import and marketing of wheat, like that of other goods in Tunisia, are highly centralized. All wheat must go through the government Cereals Office, which purchases and imports the country’s grains and distributes them to mills, markets, and licensed bakeries as flour through a quota system. 

Under current quotas and availability, bakeries are receiving 10% to 20% of their normal flour supplies.

Yet only the Cereals Office can legally import grains. Those wishing to secure their own flour or semolina must resort to the marché noir – the black market.

While restaurants, hotels, and unlicensed and upmarket bakeries are able to secure unsubsidized flour from “sources,” the vast majority of Tunisians are obliged to race around each day in search of a bakery that has bread.

Taylor Luck

A few loaves of semolina bread cool on a rack as bakers prepare the next batch at a bakery in Kairouan, in central Tunisia, Aug. 24, 2023.

They can be few and far between.

On a late August Monday, dozens of bakeries were shuttered on the main road from Tunis to Tabarka.

In a northwest Tunis neighborhood at 11 a.m., 40 customers were waiting in a line outside of a bakery in the sun, a common sight in the country. Most had been there for an hour in 98-degree-Fahrenheit heat.

“We are taking off half days from work just to buy bread,” says Faten, anxiously checking the time on her phone. She would soon have to race across town to her job as a hotel housekeeper.

“Bread dominates our lives and schedules now,” she says. “It is literally running our lives.”

A testy argument breaks out in the line over the reasons for the shortages. Some blame the war in Ukraine; others blame hoarders and monopolies. A few single out climate change. The debate over the government’s role in the crisis is interrupted by whispers that the flour is finished.

The baker comes out and delivers the bad news: no more bread. The empty-handed customers disperse and roam in search of another bakery.

Working-class and disadvantaged Tunisians – who purchase durum and soft flour to make homemade couscous, bread, and pasta for their families and to sell at markets – are being hit the hardest.

“We don’t see flour, sugar, or coffee. Fish and meat haven’t entered our house in a year,” Um Romdhane says as she picks through half a bowl of uncooked lentils on her front stoop – dinner for her family.

“Where are the officials?” she cries. “Where is the leadership?”

Tunisia’s Ministry of Agriculture declared in July that the country’s wheat harvest slumped this year by 60% due to drought and record-high temperatures, down to 250,000 tons – an amount economic and agriculture experts say is enough only to reseed for next year.

After importing 60% of its wheat needs in 2023, Tunisia is now on track to import 100% of its wheat in 2024. The country does not have enough foreign currency reserves to pay for this year’s supplies.

Populist approach

Mr. Saied has so far offered no strategy to boost food security, address climate change, compensate farmers, or boost water resources. Instead, he has favored tough stances, macho speeches, public spectacles, and arrests – often making the shortages worse.

Last year Mr. Saied imposed a law against speculators, imposing 10- to 30-year prison sentences for those convicted of speculating or manipulating food prices.

In August he fired the Cereals Office director and arrested the president of the national bakeries chamber on charges of hoarding.

Last month the president barred unlicensed bakeries and restaurants from using subsidized flour – leading to the shuttering of hundreds of bakeries and to baker protests that led him to backtrack two weeks later.

Taylor Luck

Mohammed Ibrahim, manager of a bakery in Kairouan, in central Tunisia, crunches numbers with a stack of flour behind him, Aug. 24, 2023.

At the Gourgabiya Bakery in Kairouan, in central Tunisia, workers churn out loaves of traditional semolina-aniseed taboon bread as the line of customers grows longer.

Thanks to its black market semolina, it is one of the few bakeries operating in the town of 190,000 – albeit at a quarter of their usual output.

Police raided the bakery the previous week and shuttered it for three days.

“We have to keep working; this is our livelihood and families are counting on our bread,” baker Mohammed Ibrahim says as a customer purchases a loaf. “You can fine us, penalize us, jail us. But at the end of the day, people have to eat. That need is stronger than fear.”

Fear of reforms

Experts say solutions to the current crisis are clear.

“The solution is simple,” says Tunisian economist Ezzeddine Saidane, “if you as the state cannot provide bread and cereals for your people, let someone else who can.”

Experts say that to avert disaster, the government must loosen its grip on the economy and undertake economic reforms that post-revolution leaders avoided, such as selling off or restructuring government-owned companies, whose collective debt stands at 40% of the country’s gross domestic product.

State employees’ salaries account for 20% of GDP.

Consumer price subsidies, which have remained untouched for nearly 50 years, also need reform, many economists argue.

Thanks to a subsidy set by President Habib Bourguiba in the 1970s, a baguette costs just 0.20 Tunisian dinars, or $0.06, well below the actual cost.

Yet since Tunisia’s revolution, few politicians – whether Islamists, neoliberals, or hard-line nationalists – have been willing even to talk about economic reforms for fear of hurting their electoral support.

The trade unions, which helped bring down dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, have constantly threatened strikes over proposed reforms.

Yet Mr. Saied’s 2021 power grab, in which he suspended parliament, dismissed the prime minister, and assumed executive authority, has put Tunisia in a quandary: For the first time in 12 years, all the powers necessary to push through the economic reforms to save Tunisia are in the hands of one person.

Mr. Saied has proven unwilling to change the country’s unsustainable policies, especially when so many are integral to his populist image.

“For years we have had leaders who were more scared of their political future than of the economic situation of the country,” says Mr. Saidane. “This has not changed. Kais Saied talks but does not listen.”

A year ago, the government won a short-term reprieve when the International Monetary Fund agreed in principle to a $1.9 billion loan. The government promised to cut subsidies and sell off a few debt-ridden state companies.

Yet in April, Mr. Saied torpedoed the reforms and the IMF loan, lambasting his government’s plan and declaring that he would “not hear foreign diktats” from the IMF.

Now without an IMF loan or an alternative lender, Tunisia is racing toward default, economists warn.

Meanwhile, Tunisians scramble for small victories.

“It feels like an accomplishment,” Mohammed, a government clerk, says as he walks away from a Tunis bakery with a bag of baguette bounty – three loaves for him, his wife, and his daughter.

“You feel so relieved; it’s a kind of euphoria,” he says before a weariness spreads over his face, “until the next day when you have to do it all over again.”

Ahmed Ellali contributed to this report from Tunis.

Growing up on the west coast of Florida, Joanna Banks-Morgan had become blasé to hurricanes and tropical storms. They were a part of life. But in October 2018, when Hurricane Michael jumped from Category 2 to 4 in just hours in the middle of the night, and her daughter’s home was destroyed, her perspective began to shift. 

Less than a month later – and all the way across the United States – Ms. Banks-Morgan’s father lost his home in California to a wildfire. Her daughter, who had temporarily moved in with him, was evacuating once again. This time, alligators lurking in washed-out streets were replaced by fires blazing on either side of the road that they traveled from Malibu to Los Angeles. 

“It was such a wake-up call,” Ms. Banks-Morgan explains. To dodge such risks, she and her husband moved to Sudbury, Vermont, in February 2019. Nestled between mountains and farmland, the town of 500 is idyllic and far from warming ocean waters. 

But Vermont had its own wake-up call in July as massive rains caused bridge washouts, flooding, and damage to roads and properties in the state. 

“We were supposed to be in a safe place, and this huge storm comes through and our safe place is suddenly not safe anymore,” says Ms. Banks-Morgan. 

She describes the floods and related tornado warning as traumatic. And, although her home didn’t experience water damage, her normally 12-minute commute slowed to 45 minutes in the aftermath.

The weather of 2023 seems to have dealt a harsh blow to the notion that some areas can be havens from climate change. Extreme conditions have been popping up everywhere all at once, from wildfires in Hawaii, to floods in Libya and elsewhere, to persistent global heat waves this summer. Here in New England, soils are saturated this week by another big rain, even as Hurricane Lee threatens to swipe parts of the region this weekend. Climate scientists have cited human-caused warming of Earth’s air and oceans as a likely intensifier of these events. 

Some areas really are more insulated than others from the harshest risks of climate change, they say. It’s just that no place is truly isolated from the global trend. People who have migrated partly for climate reasons are having to cope with this, even if they don’t regret their moves.

“I still feel safer here than in other parts of the country because I believe Vermont and its government will do something to make changes, whether it’s to infrastructure in some of these towns or putting regulations in place that will help the environment,” says Ms. Banks-Morgan.

Steven Senne/AP/File

A passerby walks near a street damaged by floodwaters in Ludlow, Vermont, July 11, 2023.

Sheltered from climate effects? 

In the past few years, Vermont has earned high rankings for its relatively low climate risk. A 2020 ProPublica report classified four Vermont counties as part of the top 10 across the country that are least likely to suffer from climate change effects like wildfires, extreme heat, and sea level rise. In April 2022, a real estate professor at Tulane University told CNBC that Burlington, Vermont, is a “safe haven” for Americans fleeing extreme weather. 

But “there’s no such thing as a climate safe haven anywhere on the planet. Every place is going to experience some form of an effect, whether it is extreme acute events or the long-term chronic events. There’s going to be change,” says Carlos Martín, who researches the intersection of housing and climate change at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. 

Some communities like Buffalo, New York, and Duluth, Minnesota, have advertised themselves as havens to buoy declining populations. In Vermont, too, several counties have been losing population, he says. 

“They have a declining population, and they see themselves as relatively lower [in climate effects] than Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and California. So I think that it makes sense from a political standpoint to say, ‘We want more population,’” says Dr. Martín. 

Earlier this year, some Vermont state lawmakers told NBC5 that they’re expecting and preparing to harbor growing numbers of people displaced by droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods. 

The state saw a major jump in population in 2021, but experts say it correlated with the pandemic and not climate migration. Even so, real estate agents across the state have testified to helping climate migrants find homes. Sources told the Monitor that anywhere from 10% to 25% of their clients move in part to get away from fires and because of Vermont’s “more predictable weather patterns.”

Elizabeth Fussell, a demographer and sociologist at Brown University, believes these movers are part of an emerging trend – one that reflects a changing rationale among Americans. 

“When people in the U.S. see a destructive event like a wildfire, hurricane, tornado, or a flood, they typically use the tools that we have at hand – FEMA money and insurance – to rebuild and restore themselves to their pre-disaster condition,” she says. But “that logic is being reconsidered at the federal and individual levels where people are questioning whether it makes sense to continue rebuilding when they’re living in a repeat hazard area.” 

This trend is not widely studied yet. “Climate migration” in academic research typically refers to migrants from places that become uninhabitable. 

In the emergence of preemptive migration, climate is usually one of several factors behind a household’s decision, experts say. It’s also about housing, community, job opportunities, schools, and other costs. 

Dr. Martín notes the high insurance rates in California and Florida, which are indirectly related to climate change and could actually be the driving force behind migration. 

The climate resiliency factor

For those with the resources and a degree of climate anxiety, Vermont is an appealing destination. 

Erika Faulkner, an organizer at the environmental activist group Vermont Conservation Voters, moved to Vermont in 2020. Climate change has guided her decision-making since second grade, she remembers. “I have this vivid memory of learning about global warming and asking my dad if all the adults were aware that it was happening and when our home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, would turn into a beach,” she says. “So I have always had this climate anxiety that bad things are going to happen as climate change gets worse.”

After graduating from Dickinson College, Ms. Faulkner was weighing job opportunities. “I researched all of the states and towns I was considering, and the biggest thing for me was how they were doing on climate issues, and on resiliency,” she says. 

She paid attention to other factors, too, but climate change was “definitely the main one.” Vermont was far less polluted than other states and, at the time, did not suffer from wildfire smoke. And, importantly, she could find a job. Ms. Faulkner majored in environmental science, with a specialization in resilience. “Vermont is well known for their climate policy, and so I could actually find a climate resilience-focused job,” in contrast to her home state of Pennsylvania, she explains. 

According to environmental economist Austin Anaya, Vermont ranks 11th on climate policy in a comparison of all 50 states. 

The politics in Florida also contributed to Ms. Banks-Morgan’s move away from the South. She has more confidence in legislators in Vermont than in Florida to act, and “these disasters terrify me,” she says. “They make me think that we have to get across to our politicians that we have to do something about climate change. ... You know, this is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.” 

With a film festival as huge as the one held in Toronto this month, it’s folly to attempt to connect the dots and discern global cinematic trends. But several films about the Holocaust loomed large, centering primarily on stories about rescue missions, and there was at least one first-rate documentary on Ukraine.

I had not attended the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in four years, during which time the pandemic, until last year, had rendered it mostly virtual.

The reunion was both gratifying – films were back on the big screen, with movie-mad audiences – and somewhat disorienting. The event, after all, was taking place amid two major Hollywood labor union strikes, as both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists are embroiled in a monthslong faceoff with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers – with no end in sight.

What these strikes meant for the festival, which ends Sunday, was that unless a specific film obtained a waiver from the unions involved, no member actors or writers could appear at TIFF to promote their films. The red carpets were in no danger of being frayed.

As a film critic, I don’t regret the lack of glitz and glamour. It made it much easier to focus on what I was in Toronto for in the first place: the movies. I carved my way through more than 20 of them, out of several hundred representing 43 countries.

And there were some terrific offerings, along with the usual overhyped, underachieving entries. At the very least, seeing films from all over the world provided a kind of cinematic passport: If the international fare was not always excellent, the ethnography was.

Courtesy of TIFF

Sandra Hüller stars in two films featured at Toronto's film festival, including "Anatomy of a Fall" (above), from director Justine Triet. The movie, about a novelist who is a suspect in the death of her husband, won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

Maciek Hamela’s “In the Rearview” brought the war in Ukraine to life with devastating immediacy. The Polish-born Hamela, making his debut feature, bought a van at the start of the war against Russia and began evacuating mostly women and children out of the war zone and into Poland. Most of the documentary is simply a rearview video recording of the van’s inhabitants as they crowd into the seats and, in many cases, pour out their hopes and woes. We see bombed-out houses along the road, and sometimes we hear rockets in the distance.

The movies about the Holocaust were made before the Ukraine conflict, but their depicted rescue efforts, as well as the experience of bearing witness to atrocity, nevertheless struck a contemporary chord.

“One Life” stars Anthony Hopkins as the real-life Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who in 1938 saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish children in Prague. The film moves between the 1930s sequences, conventionally shot, and the scenes with Hopkins as the self-effacing older Winton recalling those years. Hopkins’ scenes are by far the best. What a versatile actor he is. But there was a particularly poignant moment at the conclusion of the public screening of the film, when the festival moderator asked audience members who were the offspring of the saved children to stand up. I counted over a dozen people. 

“Lee,” a directorial debut for Ellen Kuras and starring Kate Winslet as the American photojournalist Lee Miller, also features powerful Holocaust sequences. Except for Winslet’s ferocious performance, though, the movie overall disappoints. Miller was a former model who became a photographer for Vogue and shot the death camp photos that the American edition of the magazine ran during the war, among the first such photos to be published. It was Miller who talked her way into entering Hitler’s abandoned Berlin home and photographed herself bathing in the Führer’s tub, an iconic moment reproduced in the movie. 

One Holocaust movie decidedly not in the savior mode is Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” loosely drawn from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel. Set in the waning days of the war, it centers on the commandant of Auschwitz, played by Christian Friedel; his wife Hedwig, played by Sandra Hüller; and their children. They reside right across from the death camp, and their quotidian domestic goings-on are backdropped by the clangor of the camp and the smoke rising from the crematoria. Nothing of the prisoners is shown from inside Auschwitz. The winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it was by far the most chilling movie I saw in Toronto and one of the very best. (Unrated, releases Dec. 8.)

Wayne Lawrence/Amazon Studios

Members of the Reels family of North Carolina chronicle their battle with developers over waterfront property in the documentary "Silver Dollar Road."

Hüller is also the star of Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, that festival’s highest honor. The film garnered her major attention for her role as a German novelist accused of possibly murdering her husband. It’s always bracing to encounter an explosive international talent in multiple festival offerings, and Toronto is an ideal place for such finds. Seeing Hüller in such disparate roles is a reminder of how chameleonlike the art of acting is. (Rated R, releases Oct. 13.)

The art of acting was also on full display with director Anand Tucker’s “The Critic.” Ian McKellen plays a 1930s English drama critic who, faced with dismissal from his newspaper, engineers a dastardly plot to reclaim his job. It’s a deliciously vinegary performance, and I, for one, take no personal offense at the swipe at such an august profession. 

I’ve saved some of the best for last: Documentaries are always standouts at TIFF.

“Silver Dollar Road,” directed by Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro”), is drawn from a 2019 reported piece by Lizzie Presser published by ProPublica and The New Yorker. It details how a North Carolina waterfront property owned for generations by an African American family, the Reels, was taken over by developers, who sought to drive them out – with two of the descendants choosing to go to jail rather than relinquish their homes. (Rated PG; released in select theaters Oct. 13, streaming on Amazon Prime Video Oct. 20.)

Courtesy of TIFF

“In Restless Dreams,” a 3 1/2-hour documentary, is an in-depth portrait of Paul Simon (above), ranging from his high school days with Art Garfunkel to the production of his new album, “Seven Psalms.”

“In Restless Dreams,” Alex Gibney’s 3 1/2-hour documentary, is an in-depth portrait of Paul Simon, ranging from his high school days with Art Garfunkel to the production of his new album, “Seven Psalms.” Simon’s music is so expressive that it’s fascinating to note just how recessive a camera subject he is. He’s also, unsurprisingly, not a fan of celebrity. “Fame,” he says, “is a poison.” 

Errol Morris’ “The Pigeon Tunnel” (rated PG-13, releases Oct. 20) reveals David Cornwell, aka author John le Carré, as an enigma as great as any single or double agent he ever penned. It was the last full interview Cornwell gave before his death in 2020, and he revels in tales of spies, his con man father, and how one can become addicted to betrayal.

His thoughts reflect what some in the work-halted film industry may be feeling as well: “Without the creative life,” he concludes, “I have very little identity.”

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. Movies listed above without release dates are currently up for sale and are not yet rated. 

Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

The main sanctuary at Riverside Church in New York City.

Every few months, a new survey offers another snapshot of the state of Christianity in the United States. Taken separately, the surveys invite different conclusions. Yet together, they point to a stirring of spiritual thought – particularly in regard to the role of church in racial reconciliation.

Indeed, even as millions of Americans have stopped going to church over the past 25 years, churches have become more multiracial during the same period. Earnest wrestling to uproot legacies of racial division coincides with a broadly shared hunger among churchgoers for unity and inclusivity. A Lifeway Research poll earlier this year found that large majorities of American Christians, across denominations, want their churches to do more to promote ethnic diversity.

That may reflect the unique capacity of religious institutions to emphasize shared values, notes Daniel Williams, author of a 2021 book on Christianity and politics in America. “Being part of a religious community often forces people to get along with others – including others with different political views,” he wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month.

Several signs point to the churn taking place within American Christianity over race. The Southern Baptist Convention this week elected a Black pastor to lead its ethics and religious advocacy for the first time. In June, the archbishop of Philadelphia, Nelson Pérez, issued a pastoral letter calling on Catholics to salve racism with love. “That means that whatever wounds one, even if unintentional, is everyone’s responsibility to heal,” he wrote.

Much of the work taking place is happening without much notice. “From theology, small group bible studies, fellowship activities, honoring and recognizing different cultural heritage months, learning about each other, sparking dialogue,” Yolanda Johnson, a diversity trainer who works with churches, told Colorado Public Radio in August. “I’ve seen leadership evolve and change and become more diverse. I’ve seen people change.”

In the three years since the summer of protests for racial justice, a growing number of church leaders have tried to break away from harmful racial legacies. “If we are truly allowing Jesus to shape us, and we’re truly growing in grace, we’re going to desire the best for our brothers and sisters,” the Rev. Derwin Gray, pastor of Transformation Church near Charlotte, North Carolina, told The Washington Post. “We’re not going to deny the impact of the past. We’re not going to live in the past. We’re going to join hands together to move forward to a better future.”

That unity – and Christianity’s enduring relevance – says Kris Dillard, pastor of Marked Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, is grounded in more than human resolve. “The truth of God’s word always trumps race and culture,” he said in a sermon last weekend.