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MOUNT ST. HELENS NATIONAL VOLCANIC MONUMENT, Wash.* — They sit for hours, gazing across a mud-caked valley toward the rumbling mountain. Over the last week, since Mount St. Helens reawakened after almost two decades with a huge plume of steam, thousands have come here from across the West Coast and as far away as Texas. They sleep in nearby hotels or up here in cars, camper-vans and mobile homes and in sleeping bags laid across the rocky soil—all waiting for the earth to reveal its intentions. They have motored up to this mountain carting digital cameras, barbecue grills, coolers, wine, romance novels, telescopes, all in a sort of pilgrimage to the place where, they say, the earth feels more alive—and so do they. … Like so many others up here who seem content to pass entire days staring at the mostly quiet mountain—as active as it looks on television, it really only erupts once in a while, and then for at most an hour at a time—[visitors] said they had come in search of a feeling.

Related: Predicting volcanic eruptions, from Slate

• Where to start in Iraq? Should we worry about democracy first, or begin with economic development? "Economic development makes democracy possible," says the U.S. State Department's Web site. But in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (in a piece reprinted at the New York Times' Web site), the authors of The Democracy Advantage take issue with the development-then-democracy credo of American foreign policy. To begin with, according to the so-called "$6,000 benchmark"—the expectation that democracy functions best when per capita income exceeds $6,000 per year—"all but 4 of the 87 countries currently undergoing a democratic transition, including Brazil, Kenya, the Philippines, Poland, and South Africa, are unfit for democracy." Meanwhile, the efficiency of authoritarian regimes is overrated, the authors say. "Poor democracies outperform authoritarian countries because their institutions enable power to be shared and because they encourage openness and adaptability." They suggest the State Department's new policy should be to reward democratizing countries in the form of development assistance, and to separate aid provided for security purposes from aid provided for development. Article*
  Earlier:
  The global roots of democracy
  Towards a more 'realistic' foreign policy (second item) Also from Foreign Affairs:
  What went wrong in Iraq by a former U.S. official in Baghdad
  Indonesia: modernizing the right way
• No nation has cracked down on the illegal ivory trade more aggressively than the United States. Still, sales of ivory over the Internet are growing in the U.S., according to a joint program of the World Wildlife Fund and World Conservation Union, reported in the Washington Post. "There's an active ivory trade going on in the U.S.," said the program's director. Ivory was banned in 1989 when herds of African elephants had been thinned by 50 percent. Although poaching claims the lives of about 4,000 elephants every year, their numbers have stabilized in parts of Africa. But a WWF spokeswoman says, "It's still very difficult to know which ivory products are legal and which are not. And so our message is, 'Don't buy it, and don't take that chance.' " Article

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