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DRAGUIGNAN, France — After Phoenix went dark in daylight the other day, blotted out by a monster sandstorm, a deluge of online wags joked about the word haboob, a desert phenomenon still new enough in Arizona to be pun-worthy.

The term is painfully familiar in North Africa and Arabia, where blasting sands and freak pounding rains worsen by the year. They strip arable land, uproot oasis palms and flatten makeshift shelters. Villagers and nomadic bands suffer through one, then await another.

Wars used to be how most Americans learned geography. Today, countless overlapping conflicts confuse people half a world away. Many just tune them out. Yet conflicts are linked to what now impacts everyone, everywhere: weather. Climate chaos is real.

Haboob is a Sudanese Arabic word meaning a big blow. My first taste of bad ones was in 1985, a year after Ethiopia's biblical famine. Four decades later, Sudan is the worst-case scenario of what is happening in a heedless world.

Comparing Sudan to Arizona is a stretch until you consider the big picture. Societal sectors fight for political dominance. That gives them control over dwindling water, food supply and natural resources. Those with the most money, if not the biggest guns, tend to prevail.

At the rate we are going, all sectors risk the same fate. A government that plunders a fragile environment for immediate profit, hailing essential regulations as "radical left lunacy" that obstructs progress, is a shortcut to uninhabitable wasteland.

In the 1980s, I reported across Africa from Senegal to Somalia when drought and freak floods began pushing desperate families northward for refuge in Europe. Sudan brought that big picture into sharp focus. I see reflections of it now in the American Southwest.

The country, as big as Arizona and Mexico combined, is dominated by 70 percent Sudanese Arabs, who regards themselves as a cut above darker-skinned African Bantu tribes in the south and in the east.

As famine threatened, an Associated Press photographer and I crisscrossed Darfur in a Toyota Land Cruiser and on short bush-plane flights. The military dictator in Khartoum blocked relief to starving Bantu tribes, whose sunbaked fields produced next to nothing.

It was the sort of avoidable crisis that happens when election outcomes are predetermined in backrooms or barracks. Pro-government provinces got aid and investment. Those seen as recalcitrant — call them blue states — were targets for federal intervention.

By 1985, Arab bands on horses and camels began raiding Bantu settlements to carry off what food stocks remained. As their numbers grew, they became the dreaded Janjaweed, murdering and raping with abandon with complicit government support.

Then, Sudan headed into serial coups and civil strife. Comparisons to Arizona stop here except for one overriding reality: once politics turn hostile and rule of law erodes, all bets are off.

Islamist leaders in Khartoum cracked down on minority tribes. Osama bin Laden moved in for a while after he left Afghanistan. Army officers fought for power. And in 2009, George W. Bush wanted access to South Sudan's oil reserves.

At the White House, he gave a Bantu leader a black cowboy hat and set the enclave on a path to independence. In 2014, a New York Times headline on a Nicholas Kristoff piece reported on the result: "South Sudan: Where the Soldiers Are Scarier Than the Crocodiles."

South Sudan, likely now the worst hellhole on Earth, is a Trump destination of choice for what he considers to be "bad hombres."

All-out war began in 2023. Sudan's deputy dictator enlisted the Janjaweed into his Rapid Support Force to oppose the army. Atrocities by both sides forced 12 million people to flee their homes. A half-million children died of malnutrition. And there is no end in sight.

This is a hardly a comparison to a divided United States. But consider an 1887 warning by Lord Acton, a Catholic parliamentarian in Britain who admired America's protection of individual liberties: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Authoritarianism is a matter of degree. I avoided evoking Hitler when Donald Trump descended his 5th Avenue escalator to spew blood libel generalities about Mexicans and Muslims. But I had watched for years. Nazi Germany immediately came to mind.

As time went on, psychiatric clinicians saw malignant narcissism, a condition that entered their lexicon after Hitler's rise. It defines a man who delights in vengeance and others' pain, impervious to any truth that does not feed an insatiable ego.

We can only guess what he might do as the immediate future plays out. But we already see his slavish aides fall in between his every whim, and a handpicked White House "press" corps cheer him on.

Time remains for Americans to act. Polls and protests suggest that enough of them might. A reversed balance in Congress could block attempts to rig or delay by a bogus "national emergency" the 2028 presidential election.

Many depredations to America's environment and ecosystem cannot be undone. For decades now, destructive mining has squandered water, devastated biodiversity and destroyed natural splendor that belongs to new generations.

Responsible politicians and citizens' groups push hard to curb the Republican juggernaut on fragile land for sprawling development and unsustainable industries that create jobs now but condemn the future.

An 11th-hour U.S. 9th Circuit Court stay on the Resolution Copper mine project at Oak Flag under Apache Leap offers a glimpse of hope. Tribes are making a land stand to protect ancient land they have held sacred for millennia. A victory could spark a public backlash.

Trump's outraged reaction was typical distortion. In a "truth" on his own partisan X-Twitter, he wrote: "It is so sad that Radical Left Activists can do this, and affect the lives of so many people. Those that fought it are Anti-American, and representing other Copper competitive Countries.�

In fact, Resolution is owned by British and Australian companies that would pay only token taxes and no royalties because of an 1872 law meant to protect American miners. Profits would go directly to foreign bank accounts.

Trump's reaction came soon after he met with chief executives of the two companies, along with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

Bill McKibben's books, articles and activism have sounded alarms since the 1980s. His new book, "Here Comes the Sun," is a user's manual for Arizonans. In 2022, he wrote, solar and wind energy became cheaper to produce than burning petroleum or coal.

Europe and much of Asia are fast converting to renewable energy. So is California. But Trump is heading America in the opposite direction.

The planet's ecosystem is a single closed circuit, and Nature is only clearing her throat. Dust, ocean currents, carbon pollution, pathogens, carbon pollution, monster storm and desperate humans on the move do not stop at borders.

Vulnerable places are hit hard. At least 800 people have died since June in Pakistan's monsoon season. Much of the country is underwater. And in other parts of it, arable land is blown away by ferocious winds.

We had better get used to that funny-sounding word, haboob. The storms are here to stay, and if we cannot mitigate the factors that create them, we hapless humans may not be.