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A mango tree in your backyard -- but at what cost?

Plus: A TikTok ban. Putin the gangster. Remembering Oct. 7.

By Drew Goins | 2024-03-13

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(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

Here in Hawai'i, I have in my backyard a mango tree, a lychee tree, three stands of ti plants and a whole row of naupaka -- a shrub that folklore says has borne only half-flowers since the long-ago separation of two forbidden lovers.

Want these in your Wisconsin garden? Just wait!

For the first time since 2012, the Agriculture Department updated its Plant Hardiness Zone Map, which shows what can grow where across the country, with extreme-low winter temperatures as the limiting factor. Unsurprisingly, things have heated up.

Nature writer Tove Danovich and Post Opinion graphics reporter Yan Wu have put together a fabulous interactive essay exploring the consequences; seriously, I sent this newsletter to my editor late because I was playing with it too long. You can plug in any Zip code in the United States to see how its hardiness zone has changed since 2012, then read Danovich's explanation for what that means.

Unfortunately, it's not all tropical fruit. The news is mixed for hobby gardeners who can experiment with new plants but might struggle with old mainstays. It's downright bad for native-habitat restoration. Danovich writes: "If native sugar maples no longer thrive in New York state, what does that mean for the ecosystem that has come to rely on them?"

As she often does in her Post pieces, Danovich gets a little lyrical toward the end. She explains the term "solastalgia," or "missing an environment that no longer exists." The world is changing around us, she writes, and there might be certain nice things in the future.

But now is the time to appreciate it as it is, before we're left with only half a flower.

Yulia Navalnaya should not have had to write an op-ed in The Washington Post. She should not have needed to politick or to push the international order on anything.

But Russian leader Vladimir Putin "left me no other choice," Navalnaya writes, when he ordered the murder of her husband -- imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

So listen to what Navalnaya has to say, what Navalny was trying to say before he was jailed and killed, beginning with this: "Putin is not a politician, he's a gangster."

Navalnaya dismantles Putin's claims of actual governance and reveals him as nothing more than a brutal, cynical mafia boss. It's through this lens, she writes, that we discover "how to punish him and hasten his end": deprive him of his status and his money.

That begins, she urges, with the international community refusing to recognize the results of this weekend's presidential elections in Russia.

Chaser: Don't lose sight of the "other Navalnys," the Editorial Board writes -- the thousands of deprived political prisoners across the world.

From Megan McArdle's column on the difficulty Congress faces in getting Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok. For starters, 100 million is a lot of users to mobilize with in-app banners urging them to call their members of Congress to stop any ban.

Unfortunately, Megan writes, "all these passionate demands to leave TikTok alone reinforced lawmakers' fears that Commie psy-ops were shaping vulnerable American minds." The real trouble with a sale comes after legislation is passed.

It would have to clear the courts, then ByteDance would have to find a buyer for TikTok willing to stomach an enormous price tag -- hundreds of billions of dollars, Megan imagines. Perhaps a Big Tech player? But then -- boom -- antitrust issues.

Should a sale get hung up on any of these snags, the legislators who demanded it might end up asking, "All that work and what did it get me? Why did I do it?"

Chaser: The Editorial Board writes that TikTok's ostensible threats haven't materialized in the United States. Lawmakers go too far by trying to ban it.

Wander the clearing near Kibbutz Re'im in southern Israel, as associate op-ed editor Mark Lasswell recently did, and you will walk through a forest of hundreds of metal posts, each bearing a portrait of one of the young people killed in Hamas's Oct. 7 attack at a music festival there.

"So many are smiling and hopeful -- beautiful," Mark writes, "that sometimes the thought of what happened to them makes you look away."

His column is an account of the stillness that now marks the site in person, as well as of the chaos captured in the new documentary "#NOVA," a narration-less film "composed almost entirely of evidence from the phones of festivalgoers and video taken by the terrorists."

It's hard to watch, Mark reports, especially knowing the quiet clearing to which what's on screen eventually leads.

Chaser: Perry Bacon profiles the savvy activist movement that is pushing President Biden on his Gaza policy.

It's a goodbye. It's a haiku. It's ... The Bye-Ku.

A mango leaf's sheen

Reflecting the Green Bay sun

Strange-fruiting future

***

Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!


This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/13/climate-change-hardiness-zone-navalny-tiktok/


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