This month’s issue is about endurance – and about the quiet, often overlooked forces that hold the world together, or pull it apart. At its heart is Claire Thomas’s moving investigation from northern Ghana (see Page 34), where women accused of witchcraft are still being banished to isolated camps, punished for superstition, fear and greed. From West Africa we move east to Bangladesh, where more than a million Rohingya refugees remain trapped in vast camps as war grinds on in Myanmar and humanitarian aid collapses. Boštjan Videmšek reports from Cox’s Bazar (Page 53) on lives lived in limbo, where survival itself has become an act of endurance. Not all endurance is born of crisis alone. In the UK, Stuart Butler turns his attention to Britain’s hedgerows — some older than the Pyramids — revealing them as ancient, living networks that sustain wildlife, farming and the character of our countryside, even as neglect threatens their future (Page 44). And in the Indian Ocean, Chris Fitch follows a very different kind of resilience: injured sea turtles given a second chance at life through pioneering stem-cell treatments, a reminder that innovation, care and persistence can still bend the tide (Page 26). Taken together, these stories ask a simple but urgent question: what – and who — do we choose to protect?