World Views

In 2016, I was asked to write a chapter for a new British book titled Conduct Risk: A Practitioner’s Guide, on the root causes of conduct risk and how it manifests itself.  I was writing primarily about financial institutions from an operational risk perspective, but my conclusions about those questions apply equally to governance issues in both the public and private sectors.  Here, I want to identify what I saw as the root causes in 2015-2016 and provide several current examples that are destabilizing our country.

Our feature this month is a quick primer on climate change. Warnings about climate change are not new. The article Climate Change is Real distinguishes what is real from what is not. Barbara Lloyd McMichael writes about the health impacts on the firefighters who are working in hellish conditions to contain massive wildfires. In War and Peace, Annie Searle writes about the first stage of the Gaza Agreement, and the award of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. This month we also offer you three book reviews with environmental themes. Our special section is a roundup of essays about the wonder of trees. Dr. Peter Corning offers a fresh look at Evolution “On Purpose,” by examining the living organisms that determine the course of evolutionary history. –Patricia Vaccarino