This commentary by Stephan Faris originally appeared in GlobalPost. The views expressed are his own.

Most people wouldn’t consider an earthquake to be an environmental issue. But while the tremors that shattered Haiti early this month have nothing to do with the island’s degradation, the extent of the suffering they unleashed is a direct result of the country’s ecological woes.

The reason can be seen from the sky. The devastated nation shares its island with the Dominican Republic, but misfortune always seems to strike on its side of a border that is demarcated by an abrupt shift from lush green to bare brown. While the Dominican Republic has largely managed to preserve its trees, Haiti has lost 98 percent of its forest cover.

In 2004, Hurricane Jeanne struck the Dominican Republic, and killed 18 people. In Haiti, where the storm didn’t even make landfall, more than 3,000 lives were lost under floodwater and mudslides. Deforestation had left the slopes too weak to be able to retain the downpour. But while some of the extra body count can be attributed to barren hillsides giving way, the true cause goes deeper. The country’s environmental troubles have become entangled in its economic and political problems, making all of them harder to fix.

It’s no coincidence that Haiti is both the poorest country in the western hemisphere and the most environmentally devastated. Decades of poverty, population growth and near anarchy have stripped the countryside of its forests and split farms into small, infertile plots. “What you see in Port-au-Prince — the concentration of people in the slums, which creates violence, which creates disease — it’s because the people cannot produce more in the countryside,” Max Antoine, executive director of Haiti’s Presidential Commission on Border Development, told me when I visited the country in 2007.

If deforestation has made the country poor, the resulting destitution exasperates the environmental degradation. Forests disappear. The slopes lose their soil. Farm land slips away. Entire villages disappear under mudslides. Roads and bridges are wiped away. The slums continue to swell. The country sinks deeper into poverty. Pressed to survive, another farmer chops down another tree to sell in the city as charcoal. “It’s not a vicious circle,” said Philippe Mathieu, the Haiti director for the Canadian charity Oxfam-Quebec. “It is a spiral. Each time you make a turn, you have less space.”

Looking for a fabulous place to retire on a budget? GlobalPost picked 10 intriguing overseas locales where you can stretch every dollar.

Are you one of the Americans struggling to save for retirement who President Barack Obama mentioned in his State of the Union address? GlobalPost has put together a slideshow of some of the best places to settle down when you need to make your dollar last. We favored countries that not only have low costs of living but also offer beautiful, relaxing settings; access to good medical care; and a range of activities to keep you busy.

Notes on methodology:

The Cost of Living Index, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, compares the cost of maintaining a typical international lifestyle in a foreign country with that of  New York City. New York prices are the base at 100. The figures come from the Economist’s Pocket World in Figures 2009 Edition.

The United Nations Human Development Index measures a country’s adult literacy, life expectancy and income levels. The figures here, which come from the U.N. Human Development Report 2009, are scaled from 0 to 100. Countries scoring over 80 are considered to have high human development and those scoring under 50 have low human development. The United States has a human development index of 95.6.

Costa Rica

C.M. Sennott serves as a GlobalPost correspondent, where this article first appeared.

BOSTON — In Peshawar, Pakistan, the sermons of radical imams are carried on loudspeakers atop the minarets of mosques, and the words echo in the narrow streets.

The Pakistani Taliban is strong in Peshawar. In recent months, the Taliban leadership has used these radical sermons to step up recruitment of young fighters in their jihad against the Pakistani government and across the border in Afghanistan.

The Taliban recruiters are playing off bitter resentments over the Pakistani military’s offensive that left millions displaced. The Taliban also exploit anger over America’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, using it to search for young men willing to kill in the name of God.

A 16-year-old boy from a small village in the Khyber Agency near Peshawar answered the Taliban’s call and the militants set about grooming him to be a suicide bomber.

He underwent a rigorous indoctrination and was trained to “accept martyrdom,” to borrow the language used by the ready to detonate a belt bomb to kill themselves and as many Pakistani soldiers and civilians as possible.

– This opinion piece was written by C.M. Sennot for GlobalPost. The views expressed are his own. It was originally published here on GlobalPost. –

The last time America had to borrow money to finance a war was during the Revolution and a cash-strapped Continental Congress took loans from France to fund a surge against the British.

That worked out pretty well.

But it’s hard to feel the spirit of 1776 in President Obama’s journey to China. He went as a representative of a borrowing nation to its primary lender amid a call for yet another costly military surge in the Long War that is escalating in Afghanistan even if it is hopefully winding down in Iraq.

As the president completes his journey to Asia, he returns to Washington to face what is the most consequential foreign policy decision of his presidency, a decision that this administration has not yet fully thought through.

That is whether to heed the counsel of his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, and call for a surge of 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan.