Kate Scott, Director of the Madrean Archipelago wildlife center. Michel Marizco/KJZZ
Pieces of old vehicle barrier were pushed into canyons. Other heavy, broken pieces were left on ledges and used to form a welded together gate blocking access to the remainder of the border road. Broken and flattened culvert pipe scattered across the grasslands.
“And everywhere that this was done, there has been created what I simply call mine tailings,” Scott said.
Under former President Donald Trump, contractors built more than 20 miles of border wall in this area. The wall is just a part of the project; roads were widened, hills flattened and vegetation destroyed to reach the international border. Gaps in the fence remain. The border wall was being painted up until this year. Now, shiny black coating abuts lengths of rusting border wall.
“So you have this infrastructure leading up to the wall and all along the wall. And it’s at the same level of devastation. This is a tiny little snapshot of one,” Scott said.
Forget about waiting until Nov. 12, on my Lincoln County, Oregon Coast radio show, Finding Fringe, because DV readers get the interview here now! And I’ve written about my upbringing in the desert around Tucson, my work as a newspaper cub reporter in Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico, my crazy days diving the waters of the Sea of Cortez, and my other work along the border, in El Paso, in Chihuahua.
“Wrestling the Blind, Chasing Apache Horses, and Unpacking the Vietnam War,” Cirque Journal, by Paul Haeder
People have been dying in the desert for decades because U.S. policy deliberately funnels them there.
Unaccompanied children in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol on March 17, 2021. Jaime Rodriguez Sr./U.S. Customs and Border Patrol
The Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center is helping wildlife by restoring and preserving Birdland Ranch, a remote wildlife area and biodiversity hotspot, home locally to 154 bird species, endangered top predators, neotropical birds and more in a rich ecosystem.
“The nearby San Pedro River corridor supports two-thirds of the avian diversity of the entire United States, including more than 100 species of breeding birds and 300 migrant birds.” (R.J. Luce, pg 3, San Pedro Anthology) Wildlife infrastructure projects include maintaining and upgrading an extensive cavity nest-box trail to preserve threatened species, habitat restoration, as well as plans to restore a small historic outbuilding for community outreach events.
Questioner: So my question is how do we interrogate our savior complex, while also acknowledging these tremendous emotions of love and loss?
Tiokasin Ghosthorse It’s a great question, and thanks for that little challenge. I was kind of waiting for that. That’s great. Thank you for that Ayana. Well, you know, in the original intuition of Lakota language, intuition of all of us I would say – without any filters of what intuition is by giving a definition, from this perspective of the Western mind, which I’ve been educated in and as Robert Clemens or Mark Twain said, It took me years to get over it, right? So when I’m thinking about what happens when we lose contact, we lose relationship with the Earth, we are constantly looking for that search, for ourselves, in others, and it gives way, because of our loss of instruction, it gives way to the fact that somebody else can come and rescue us. And when I think about, the original instructions, the original intuition, is the fact that even today, people go out to the wild, go out to nature, go someplace hidden, to heal, basically to understand and usually it’s this sort of benevolence of I can go to the wild, to the Earth, to nature, to listen. And when I think about that, it’s well, I think it’s different. When we were taught as young people that we can, yes, we can go to the Earth and mother nature to listen, but in that, in the fullness of the thought, where most Indigenous peoples kind of, you know, look at that wonderment and what do you mean going to the Earth and listening for lessons actually. And then what we understand is, as one Native person, I would just say it this way, is that we usually have gone to the Earth, to find out how Mother Earth is listening to us. And that takes a lifetime, it just doesn’t come up with a cause and effect.
You know, we go we get rewarded, we come back, and then we have the answer – the solution. So I think the savior mentality is tied up in the cause and effect of, we have solutions to save, what we can have our, possessive, our environment, our climate, our Earth, our – everything is possessive. And so when it comes to the savior mentality, the salvation point mentality, it’s that there is always going to be salvation for us as long as we follow the rules and regulations of an authority figure, religion, science, or government. And all of those have authority figures, where you look at it the other way, in relational languages, and in Indigenous languages, there is no need for monotheism or authority. Because that domination does not fit authority, well, it does actually domination and authority go together, but domination does not fit relational languages, and in relational languages, everything is in scope, everything is relative, everything is related. And there’s no need to get connected, or even save that which giving you all the answers, meeting all your needs as Mother Earth does.
So Mother Earth does indeed listen to us and gives us all that we need all our cries, all our whimpers, all our prayers, she answers it, gives us food, gives us water, gives us warmth, and we learn in between those like warm and cold, we learn what the balance is, we learn what the rhythm is. And so once we are into the rhythm, you can really start questioning, what is savior mentality? What is salvation point mentality? We’re always looking for the solution. So I think rather than looking for this solution, we need to acknowledge where we are at in this consciousness, or in this continuum of being in the present and this comes through when you speak your Indigenous language and most Indigenous languages that I know of, don’t have nouns. So therefore there cannot be a savior mentality.
Now you see how the western mind tries to take all of what I just said and put it into the box of, I need to find the answer to why is this? We need a reference, we need something so that we can learn “how to”, as if how to was a manual to do something. And what we’ve forgotten is that Mother Earth is always listening to us, Mother Earth is always teaching us lessons. There’s not one time in human history, that humans can teach Mother Earth, any lesson, you see. And so that’s our arrogance to think that we can control the Earth, we can, you know, do what we want to the Earth, and even save the Earth. And so in that sense, you know, the Western mind, the Euro-Western wants to be at the top of the heap so that they can, I don’t know what it is, reward, cause and effect, take and reward, or give and reward type of mentality, a dualism. And you see that Mother Earth is not like that, very many qualities of communication she has. So I guess that’s a long way of understanding or trying to answer the question of what is savior mentality.
TUCSON, Ariz.—The Trump administration is muscling forward with plans to wall off a critical international wildlife corridor, setting up construction camps to erect a 30-foot barrier along one of the few remaining gaps on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It’s super concerning that with the technology we have available today we are using a type of border security that is so detrimental to wildlife,” said Susan Malusa, a Catholic biogeographer who heads the University of Arizona’s nonprofit Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center that detected the jaguar earlier this month.
“We have deep social responsibilities not to use and lose our Earth,” said Malusa, who also holds a master’s degree in theology. “This is not only a Catholic idea. We do not get to judge what can be expendable as a species.”
[Demonstrators on both sides of the border in the San Rafael Valley protested plans for a new wall in May with cardboard cutouts to symbolize local biodiversity.Credit…Rebecca Noble/Reuters]
As it stands, fences are piecemeal and violent. And historically, Republicans have been less inclined to build them than Democrats. There are currently 700 miles of non-contiguous fences along the 1,951-mile border. A Republican built most of those, but we cannot ignore that Democrats have also built and supported their fair share, showing bipartisan commitment to this symbol of illusory control. Biden has not made an about-face, he is simply continuing an interminable trend of border-building policies and now, like many who came before him, he has fallen into the same, familiar, repetitive pattern.
The first border fences built along the U.S.-Mexico border to curb immigration from Mexico began in earnest under Democrats Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. After building fences for decades to stop animals, the federal government shifted its focus when people began migrating in significant numbers from south to north in the 1940s and 1950s.
Treacherous Terrain: Racial Exclusion and Environmental Control at the U.S.-Mexico Border — Mary E. Mendoza
On a brisk autumn day, agents patrolling the US-Mexico border near Mexicali caught Trinidad Hernández Iglesias, a coyote, or human trafficker, who had been sneaking people across the line. At the time, Iglesias had been a target for the patrol for about four years, and his capture was an enormous victory. Over the years, he had sold a number of fraudulent American documents to Mexican citizens who had paid him to help them navigate the difficult environment of the borderlands and help them cross the border in one piece. He assured them that with his documents they would be able enter the United States as American citizens and safely “get through the fence at the international border.”1
After his capture, newspapers in Mexico covered the story, noting that the sixty-five-year-old coyote had been a well-known smuggler with “notable ingenuity and charisma.”2 Originally from Jalpa, Zacatecas, a town far to the interior of Mexico, Iglesias had moved north, learned what it took to cross the border, and then made a business out of smuggling people across it. Although he only confessed to smuggling six people into the United States, reporters had reason to believe Iglesias had sold documents and helped “many others that had entered the [United States].”3
In spite of the many people successfully smuggled by Iglesias and other coyotes, it is well known that migrants have not always made it across the line. Many cannot afford the fraudulent documents or the help of a guide like Iglesias, so they have made the journey on their own—a journey that, too often, ends fatally. Just one year before officials caught Iglesias, border agents found the body of a young boy named Nino Héctor Martínez along with the body of an unidentified Mexican woman at the Texas-Mexico line. Martínez had been trying to get across the dangerous Rio Grande with his father when something went wrong and he drowned. It is not clear whether the woman crossing the border knew Martínez and his father or not, but these two casualties—the woman and the boy—are just two among many who have died traversing the dangerous terrain along the US-Mexico divide.
These two incidents, Iglesias’s arrest and the deaths of the Mexican woman and boy, took place in 1950 and 1951, and yet they could have appeared in the newspaper this morning. Surreptitious crossing and death are nothing new along the US-Mexico boundary. They are continuous realities despite dramatic changes over the course of the last century. Once an open range, the border landscape has morphed into a series of fences, checkpoints, watchtowers, stadium lighting, and other infrastructure for policing. This growing technological management of the border has been accompanied by US immigration policies that have become more exclusionary over time, from Chinese exclusion in the 1880s to the National Origins Act in 1924 that limited the number of immigrants who could enter the United States from the Eastern Hemisphere, to the Immigration Act of 1965 that set limits for nations across the globe, to an attempted ban on Muslims in 2017. Change at the border, in other words, has mirrored the growing exclusionary policies enacted at the federal level. In spite of the massive changes made to border infrastructure, migration across the line persists, making the borderlands a place of both change and continuity.
Continuing a long trend of building up the border, Donald J. Trump proposed in June 2017 to build a solar wall along the length of the Mexican border. His planned wall has been both praised and criticized by environmentalists. Those in favor of it argue that it could help alleviate the rising need for clean energy and thus ultimately help fight climate change.4 Those who oppose it note that the clean energy it might produce will not outweigh the damage it will do to the important natural ecosystems along the border.5 However, few, if any, of the articles about the environmental impacts of this fence discuss the ways in which it would continue to force human migrants to pay coyotes like Iglesias to help them or else try to cross dangerous landscapes that threaten their lives.
In the context of this larger history of construction at the border, past and present building projects provide an opportunity to look to history to understand potential outcomes of Trump’s proposed wall: put simply, history tells us that it will not work and that it will do more damage than good. This latest fence proposal, though, the one that promises to provide clean energy while also handling the so-called immigration problems in the United States, also exposes a central, long-standing, and hidden tension between border fence construction and environmental manipulation. In every phase of construction, arguments for environmental control have consistently worked to the detriment of human migrants, hardened racial divisions, and reinforced social hierarchies. In other words, the tension between racialized exclusion and efforts at environmental control are nothing new.
The first construction projects at the border had little to do with human migration but were, at their core, attempts to control the natural environment. In 1906 the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversaw a massive eradication campaign for a tick that had caused hundreds of cattle in the northern grazing lands of the United States to become sick and die. After pushing the tick south for several years, the USDA set up quarantine stations at the US-Mexico border to screen, disinfect, and quarantine cattle to avoid the tick’s reentry. The cumbersome policies created significant controversy among cattle ranchers in the United States whose cattle wandered into Mexico. Because the USDA forced these cowboys to comply with the same quarantine measures as Mexican ranchers who wanted to export their cattle to the United States, American ranchers began to describe and conceive of “Mexican cattle” as filthy and diseased in contradistinction to their “American cattle.” American cattle, they argued, should not have to go through the same quarantine measures as Mexican cattle, even if they wandered south of the border. Put succinctly, the ranchers’ frustration with the quarantine measure created a powerful discourse about race at the border, even if humans were not those being racialized.6 This controversy also resulted in the first federally funded border fence, constructed in 1911.
Environmental concern and control, then, provided a fertile context for hardening racial categories along the US-Mexico border. With new protocol for the movement of cattle, ranchers created a discourse about Mexican animals and bugs as diseased and dangerous. To control those menaces, the USDA built fences and checkpoints along the border to search for and eradicate those threats. Later, US citizens and government officials adopted and applied earlier discourses about bugs and animals to human beings. 7 By the middle of the twentieth century, it was the Mexican human body that became the invasive pest, and fences became one of many tools for changing the nature of human migration.
The Bracero Program, a guest-worker program that facilitated the migration of Mexican workers into the United States as short-term contract laborers from 1942 to 1964, transformed the border from a place that had been relatively open to Mexican migrants to one that was increasingly closed to them. Many scholars argue that the program ultimately created two streams of migrants: one sanctioned (young healthy men who became braceros) and one unsanctioned (any person who did not qualify for the program but tried to cross the border anyway).8 South of the border, Mexican officials and landowners worried that a mass exodus of laborers would deplete the labor force and damage the economy.9 North of the border, Americans feared a virtual Mexican takeover. In January 1954, William F. Kelly, the assistant commissioner for the US Border Patrol described the influx of Mexican workers as “the growth of a social fungus that infects any who come in contact with it.” Mexican immigration, he said, was “the greatest peacetime invasion ever complacently suffered by any country.”10 Concerns north and south of the border led both Mexican and American officials to increase patrols along the US-Mexico border and look to other ways to curb unsanctioned migration. By the late 1940s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, overseen by the US Department of Justice, built the first fences along the boundary meant to control human migration. Fences previously used for cattle became tools used to control and herd humans. Since then, fences have evolved from barbed wire to chain link, then to wire mesh, large metal landing strips, and large steel bollards erupting out of the ground.11
At the same time that Congress worked to place this cap on migration, a burgeoning environmental movement began making seminal contributions to rhetoric about restricting immigration. In 1968 the Sierra Club published Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb that essentially argued too many people in the United States would place unsustainable demands on US resources.12 In the years following the publication, John Tanton, a staunch supporter of immigration restriction in the name of environmental sustainability, chaired the club.13 These views, coming from such an influential environmental organization, reframed the environmental debate from one that pitted humankind against nature to one that pitted immigrants and their migration as the antithesis to a sustainable environment.
Through the 1980s, 1990s, and into the twenty-first century, this immigrant versus nature narrative continued to permeate environmental debate in the US-Mexico borderlands. In southern Arizona, this became particularly evident in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a wilderness area that hosts “a thriving community of plants and animals.”14 The monument, designated as such in 1937, deemed an international Biosphere Preserve in 1976, and then given official wilderness status in 1978, was a place of increasing concern for environmentalists.15 As early as the 1940s, the National Parks Service (NPS) had worked with other US agencies to block access to the land in the name of conservation, specifically to keep cattle from wandering into the monument.16 But as fences and other structures sprouted all along the US-Mexico border, the NPS saw an increase in the number of human migrants funneled through parts of the monument’s 500 square miles of fragile desert ecosystems to make the trek.
By the early 2000s, concerns about the ecological health of the monument and debates about national security and immigration were inextricably linked. One so-called green activist organization, Desert Invasion, held tightly to the immigrant versus nature rhetoric seen in earlier Sierra Club publications. “Our Fragile National Monuments, National Wildlife Refuges, and National Forests along the U.S. Southern Border,” its website reads, “are being annihilated—not by natural forces or by unwitting tourists, but instead by an overwhelming number of illegal aliens.”17
The environment became central to some arguments for building up the border to stop people who walked through the desert landscape, stomping over vegetation and leaving garbage in their wake. A study from 2007 concluded that at that time, an average of fifteen hundred migrants passed through the Arizona-Sonora border daily, each leaving roughly 9 pounds of waste behind them. The study thus alleged that migrants left 13,500 pounds of garbage per day in the Arizona-Sonora region alone.18 Moreover, that study claimed that shifting migrant patterns had severely impacted vegetation growth. The limited growth increased erosion and changed runoff pathways for rainwater. Finally, it pointed out that increased human presence also disrupted animal life and likely put endangered species at risk of being killed for human consumption.19 In short, migration through the monument was destroying it, but fences could help funnel traffic elsewhere.
On the other side of the debate, organizations like The Nature Conservancy fought hard against fence construction and, by 2009, they had challenged the Department of Homeland Security in a legal case, arguing that fence construction would destroy habitats.20 In South Texas, for example, the endangered ocelot could be cut off from vital resources and become locally extinct. Curiously absent from articles covering this debate, though, was a concern for those human lives that would be funneled to more dangerous environments.
Built structures along the border have created a hybrid landscape of built and natural environments that have killed thousands of people crossing the border. Fences funnel migrants to deserts, mountains, and rivers where they are forced to fight the harsh elements of those areas. In the Arizona-Sonora desert, the area where Organ Pipe National Monument is located, the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner reported a stark rise in the number of deaths between 1990 and 2005.21 Those deaths continue.22
Whether for or against fence construction, mainstream environmental discourse about border fortification has ignored these human realities and dimensions of border policing and control. In doing so, it has reinforced racial and social hierarchies in the United States. In some instances, arguing for fence construction to save the environment fuels ongoing racialized forms of social exclusion by pushing migrants through deathscapes, where they die from exposure or drown, just as Nino Héctor Martínez did. Those who seek smugglers like Iglesias to help them also risk losing their lives. In July 2017, for instance, up to two hundred people were packed into a tractor-trailer after being smuggled across the border and driven to San Antonio, Texas. Ten of them died of heat exhaustion and thirty others were hospitalized, illustrating “the extremes that people will go to sneak into the United States.”23 In cases where environmentalists argue that fence construction is destroying critical habitats for animals, the lack of acknowledgment of human suffering and death in the borderlands reinforces the enduring notion in the United States that immigrant bodies are expendable, and it raises questions about the value of animal and plant life versus the value of an immigrant life. It also reifies the false dichotomy between nature and culture, ignoring the vast web of socioecological connections in the borderlands because projects of environmental control tend to separate nature from human realities. Rather than approaching the humanitarian crisis and the environmental crisis as one complex web of concerns, policymakers continue to view them as divorced from one another.
Examining the history of environmental control and border fortification exposes the dangers of single-minded approaches to issues related to the environment. Thinking about preserving the flora and fauna of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument or other borderlands habitats, albeit a noble and important effort, is as seductive as it is destructive when it comes to the preservation of human life and dignity. A historical analysis of these issues reveals that the tension between race and environment at the border is nothing new. Change and continuity at the border has always been deeply entangled with environmental issues, and the current political climate suggests that both the environment and the plight of the immigrant will continue to be important issues to consider, but together, not apart. Environmental work must consider who is bearing the burden of efforts at conservation, which is often much more complicated than it seems on the surface.
Notes
Mary E. Mendoza is an assistant professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of Vermont. She received her PhD from the University of California, Davis, in 2015. Her research focuses on the intersections between environmental and borderlands history and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Huntington Library.
THE SAN RAFAEL VALLEY: WILDLIFE, WATER, AND A WAY OF LIFE AT RISK
Hundreds of miles of border walls have already severed much of the Arizona–Sonora borderlands, blocking wildlife corridors, fragmenting ecosystems, and pushing endangered species closer to extinction. In the Sky Islands region — one of the most biologically rich and ecologically interconnected wildlands in North America — only a few unwalled cross-border corridors remain. One of the most important of these, the San Rafael Valley, is now in the crosshairs of the Trump administration for immediate new border wall construction.
The San Rafael Valley, a sweeping grassland basin cradled between the Huachuca and Patagonia mountains, is one of the last vital pathways for wildlife movement between Arizona and Sonora. Jaguars, ocelots, black bears, pronghorn and many other species rely on this corridor to move freely between the U.S. and Mexico. The San Rafael wildlife corridor is an ecological lifeline connecting the transboundary Sky Island Mountains.
At least 17 large wildlife species have been documented crossing through existing vehicle barriers or cattle fencing in the San Rafael Valley.This region has seen the highest number of modern jaguar detections anywhere in the U.S. and is home to 17 threatened and endangered species including Sonoran tiger salamanders and Mexican spotted owls, and 9 species with designated critical habitat.
Armed with waivers that override bedrock environmental laws, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is moving at breakneck speed to wall off the San Rafael. In June 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) awarded a more than quarter of a billion dollar contract for border wall construction across the San Rafael Valley to Fisher Sand & Gravel Co — a company with a long record of environmental and regulatory violations, including air quality infractions, criminal charges and millions in fines and settlements — raising serious concerns about the impacts to wildlife and ecosystems in this vital bioregion. The proposed wall would cut across the transboundary watersheds of the San Pedro and Santa Cruz Rivers, fragmenting the hydrology of the corridor.
A barrier here would block species movement, destroy protected habitats, and inflict irreversible damage on critical ecological linkages. It could also bring a wall of artificial light to this Dark Sky landscape — stadium bright illumination that would disrupt nocturnal pollinators like bats and insects, disorient migratory birds, and degrade the valley’s natural light-dark cycle, which governs critical behavioral and physiological processes in wildlife.
This report documents the San Rafael Valley’s biodiversity, the species it sustains, and its indispensable role in the survival of endangered wildlife. It details nine key protected areas linked by the San Rafael Valley wildlife corridor. Finally, it also outlines the severe harms posed by new border wall construction and makes the urgent case for protecting this irreplaceable corridor before it is destroyed. — Destruction of a JAGUAR CORRIDOR … Impending Border Wall Will Sever Vital Pathway for Wildlife in Arizona’s San Rafael Valley
[A black bear obstructed by the new 30-foot-high border wall at the nearby San Pedro River. Credit: Sky Island Alliance]
“People from a bunch of different groups, with different viewpoints, realize they have the power to stop the wall,” says Parker Deighan, a Tucsonan who volunteers with No More Deaths, explaining why she decided to head down to the border to protest the wall early last December.
Tucson people working with the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sky Island Alliance, the Sierra Club, No More Deaths, the Green Valley Samaritans, the anarchist BCC, found common ground to block the construction dividing the border. Community groups and concerned locals from Bisbee, Ajo, and rural parts of Pima and Cochise County joined, too.
“It wasn’t a unified political stance, but a shared goal,” Parker says.
Lest we forget the human toll:
Read Scott’s story:
+—+
A Poet, the Pacific Flyway, and a Sonora Flash Flood*
Memory –
He holds up the sands of mountain heads and tectonic fissures splayed, from peaks like a purple haze over the Old Pueblo he learned are called Madrean sky islands. His hands soothe flecks of iron ore, pulverized by plates crushing and churned into tsunamis of flash floods booming into Sonora from pine and fir quarries forty miles away.
The Oregonian smiles. There is movement all around: the cumulus clouds push shadows onto the raging seasonal river, almost class five whitewater. He smiles again, as gambler’s quail lift and squeak like bad springs on an International, as a tortoise chomps on acacia.
He lets the air take the rivulets of sand before the surge of flashflood crushes part of a cut bank across the wide arroyo where he gladly stands with students. He smiles, pointing.
There is a fragility in the 19 year old recalled, a thin membrane of memory now, 37 years later, holding onto that moment when I was with this poet the first time. Toughed like basalt after the solar blast of a million years. What is forgotten has been chipped away by sun, wind and lichen. I am going back to Stafford.
I think of him, now, this 100th anniversary of his birth, listening to his son Kim, a poet too, a sort of passenger pigeon of his father’s legacy here in Oregon. That singular idea Kim brings forth about his father’s attention to self, to the inner eye, well, it is now the shape of things to come, here in the writing room, and like a miner clanking about a shaft, remembering years ago where that vein was, I remember Stafford from a time when the world was big and ideas endless.
William Stafford, like a thousand poets (or maybe a few hundred), is refracted memory churned into the daily living of writing . . . his practice:
I put my foot in cold water
and hold it there: early mornings
they had to wade through broken ice
to find the traps in the deep channel
with their hands, drag up the chains and
the drowned beaver. The slow current
of the life below tugs at me all day.
When I dream at night, they save a place for me,
no matter how small, somewhere by the fire.
Thirty-seven years later I announce to the library audience in Tigard, Oregon, when Kim Stafford asks for questions, that I know Stafford like a million others know him, or ten thousand maybe personally, or those of us in the tens of hundreds who had a chance to hitch to that thing called the “poetry reading-slash-poetry workshop.” Three times the sound of his voice, in a room and in situ, the virtuoso of the poet teacher – Stafford – crossed paths with my own sheltering sky. That pathway then and later was impressive, an ambassador of poems, leading him to my place of latticed shadows or leveling titanium sky, Tucson, and then the endless journey away from Arizona to New Mexico, onto El Paso, other parts of Texas, on past Bhutan to Istanbul to the Great Wall to Iran.
How many intersections with youth, how many taunts to our young pugnacity, did he shepherd for only a moment in that time as traveling poet? His name is braided to the valley of Willamette, poured into the delta waters of Columbia threading loam and cedar.
The remembering goes backward to Tucson, in the 1970s. Time and dates are flotsam in my life. Was it 1979?
We all turn to the molting tattooed skin of solar blasts . . . some of us semi-wise decades later . . . the shape of his words alive upon his death. I’ve pushed past continental divides when his words locked into conversations with Neruda or Levertov . . . . Crossed equatorial sunrises caught in my own hardening cornea where W.S Merwin chatted with Lorca and Czeslaw Mislov . . . . And this vast ocean reef web I’ve touched with scabbed skin as narcosis sank into me, when the cul-de-sacs of Sappho, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton let their poems grow like dahlias.
The oddest places Stafford’s poetry eddies up from – a cay off Belize with lemon sharks; or the tipping leaves of jungle liter carried by harvester ants in the millions inside the shadow of Copan pyramid.
Yet, even reckless dusks near Hanoi on an intrepid Russian motorcycle or running through Guatemalan hills with the contraband of thieves, all of this is nothing compared to the monumental histories of what a child writes in that early gossamer light, a floating time, when we observe the world at that intersection of nascent knowledge and the wide brow of endless earth. Now, old and entranced by the child, or the stories, or the things the father and sister and mother and children brought to me then, well, he is right to say childhood is the world of the poet.
That’s what William Stafford whispered to us, in three workshops: Most good poetry — maybe even most writing — comes from those first years: the uplifting loneliness in a child’s drama, inside the child’s atmosphere of patina carrying the light. A place where the girl’s take on the tornados that are the world is honored. Or the boy’s yearning to belong to some pattern or some baseball field is captured in song. That weight of poetry is tied to our own clumsy solitary otherness as juveniles, that feeling, as if a snake skin, is all itchy on us, or the wagging coiled tail of an alligator lizard inside about to cut through our belly. Cut through to youth remembered and lived.
That’s what you end up writing for the rest of your life. Those are the sparks setting the adult fire into perpetual stoking and waning.
Kim, his son, 37 years after his father guided me in Arizona, guides the Oregon audience through the shape of his father’s words and life as reconciling and reshaping youth:
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
Tucson –
William Stafford listens to us, his student hosts, Wildcats from Arizona who are let off the literary hook or leash through an act of professorial pronouncement – Go a little wild with him, but be aware Stafford, himself, can rattle sage poets and novelists who are your teachers, with his simplicity.
We newbies want our moment with the laureate, this National Book winner, this entrance into all things small and quiet but read by kings and laureates. That head strong inventiveness and our naiveté, he seems galvanized to, or at least that’s how youth remembers intersection with extraordinary literary fame and the passionate tribulations of angsty poet youngins.
The largeness of “the thing” at 19 – poets and revolution, the new coda of continental consciousness, and maybe an end to the old white man’s lament: immolation of the tweed, the pipe and patriarchal beard. We could cut it with machete, that potential paradigm shift, and the new horizons or hope for something different happening was exhilarating under a mescal moon. We were ready to rebuff it all, stoking bonfires as both homage to youth quaking the old and setting the world afire. Or at least that’s what we thought. Stafford speaks:
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
This time in my youth we are launching a new undergraduate literary magazine, Persona. We expect (want) validation, or vindication of a life young, but feeling heavy from the travails of a country left for old men and money seekers.
William Stafford takes an interest, understands the impatience of the unaccepted. He hears the clucking youth against the literary weight of teachers and national book award winners. It makes sense to him, that unchecked youth would want some small thing for us, fledglings, but big in our youth. Some time with him without the blustery literary devices of PhDs.
We watched him earlier in the day pushing the flow of that river he visited, pushing his hands into the riot of the hydro-ecology of a dry riverbed the afternoon before when he had arrived to Tucson, now a shadow of itself, furious with the glacial weight of melting snow and four days of rain.
Kim Stafford tells the Oregon audience his father always came to his hosts, wherever he was asked to be poet, with his hands cured by their river. He then flattened palms pointed to them as a form of supplication to the flow of life, river, what might also be benediction and genuflection. His dad would tell his new friends — poets one in all – the name of a river in a new country he was visiting. “You can never stand in the same river twice . . . .” Heraclitus seems to be stepping into the rivers of bold ink, into those currents where Stafford captures the light of a horizon flecked with stars and abiding rising sun. New horizons, old memories of youth.
Stafford names one of our Sonora rivers so his hosts recognize his awe of place and humbleness in the scheme of what this desert really means. He looks at my map and talks about the Santa Cruz River west of campus, reminding us that while a mostly dry wash year round, the shifting sands of Santa Cruz still echo the water coursing underground: the desiccant white-and-brown river sand hide life-affirming waters that pop up to surface some fifty miles down the line.
Stafford of Oregon is taken by the force of Sonora flash flood miles away uplifting the earth he stands on moments before his big reading on campus. El Rillito, this gaping riverbed north of town, he sees it’s flooding waters from hills and mountains and arroyos deeply etched in shadows miles away cresting fragile banks and eating away at a paved bicycle path.
He smiles.
We see it as the politics of bulldozers and cement hemming in wildness.
He studies each eddy, each roiling muddy pipeline, and sees a poem unfurling at pre-dawn. The hour of his poem building.
We try to talk about land speculators and ecology eaters stripping the desert valley.
He breathes in the swampy creosote bush aroma of wet desert and points to a swoop of buzzards lifting above the swells.
A smile. A dozen turkey buzzards, and that small crack of a smile.
There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot–air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.
We drink impatience and tequila at noon, hold broiling debates over the melting facades of a country pushed into the harsh napalm glow of Vietnam, Cambodia, United Fruit, Dow, Nixon, all the reckless killing fields of corporations and manifest destiny. Whose land is this anyway, my Jew co-editor friend asks us. Was it Tohono or Mestiza . . . the battleground of interlopers with dollar signs etched in their souls? We want to prod the Kansas poet.
Stafford listens. Thinks. Speaks.
Once you cross a land like that
you own your face more: what the light
struck told a self; every rock
denied all the rest of the world.
We announce the underground railroad intersects right smack in our Old Pueblo, Tucson. The refugees filing into piping hot desert of organ pipe cactus, that matte black tongue of the Gila monster pointing toward El Norte, el paso del norte, or paseo del muerte – trail of death. We tell him they are searching for shelter in a new land, this new undeliverable homeland, which is the promise of the enemy’s financer accepting refugees.
He nods, gets it, knows what we know, and more.
The USA versus the world, versus the Salvadorans, anchored to the killing squads. Pushed out of highlands and crawling toward El Norte. We tell Stafford there’s some big news coming from the “big time” New York market, our sanctuary movement edited and packaged for TV: The blessings and underground work of men and women lifting the tortilla curtain, bearing witness and then sheltering the travelers at the risk of bolstering the very nature of what to the government is crime and to the human is care.
He knows, he says.
We roil at the incessant bombing of Nicaragua by Carter, the peanut farmer, Navy guy. We list the crimes of Chile, the crimes of C-Ch-CIA.
He listens.
We splatter paint on the commons when our apartheid village is ransacked by brutes in the ROTC squads, football walk-ons and the security patrols on our University of Arizona campus.
He watches.
William is there, listening, watching, at the edge of the crowd, talking to the uninitiated gawkers as we help protestors put back the South African shanty resurrected on our campus 9,000 miles from Mandela and Biko. Some of us are humbled by Stafford’s attentiveness, his inquiry into the Chicanos grappling with La Raza and a new canon for American Lit in a workshop he facilitates.
He listens and then reads dead poets.
He lifts a scoop of the Rillito River bed, remembers an earlier time years before when his Tucson hosts told the Kansas “Almost an Indian” (his childhood moniker) Stafford to come back in spring. “And here I am now, watching the waves of a desert awaken the water soul man inside a dust bowl rat who like me who flourishes in wet Oregon.” Listing, surfing saguaros, entire dumped cars barreling downstream, the desert jettisoning its skin some fifty miles away.
He observes . . . a poem inside.
The violence of flash flood and the hard ice melting high into the Santa Catalinas is the joy of Bill Stafford . . . . We know some turn of light or sound of red tail hawk will be lines for a future poem wired to his vast Kansas-Oregon synapses.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
The audience is quiet, like Bill at first, his face reddened by traveling outside, like those of the foreigners’ when they see his hands open to them, this smallish poet crossing new open territory around the world. He talks of Afghanistan, Iran, and then a story of blinding snow where fence lines vanish and cows and cowpokes freeze like monuments of sacrifice with just the edge of bitterness in place to inscribe solitude into a story. Bill Stafford reads some lines from Wallace Stegner’s “Genesis: A Story from Wolf Willow,” calls it one of our country’s best, and then bows to read his own work:
The light along the hills in the morning
comes down slowly, naming the trees
white, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate.Notice what this poem is not doing.
He beckons us to hold steady the light in each morning alive, to listen to the air rustling with “small furry voles or moles . . . owls crunched up before gliding like gods for a talon swoop . . . crickets and their drumming… explosions of blossoms held in the darkness by croaking wet mating toads . . . .”
Or maybe that is a trick of youth, words recalled now at a distance. Re-appropriating, re-fabricating, retrofitting . . . . Something like what Stafford might have said: “This inching of truth away from a clear stratosphere. . . invention and imagination overcoming a poem . . . for a poem like memory is not a report on life but a painting, quiet but cinched to a fury and imagination.”
Maybe he said that, or maybe lichen-covered memory leads me away from the original source, one of Bill’s counterparts maybe, one that intersected with my youth – Galway Kinnell in El Paso, who knows. Or Bob Bly in Spokane? Garcia Marquez in Austin?
No matter how far he travels, the stints in Washington DC, or the road traversed and flights embarked upon, Stafford wants that West, the Willamette, the true angle of repose of sunlight falling onto the Pacific Northwest . . . . Where all hope is delivered to him in deciduous and pine forest gleaned by waterfalls, cataracts of tears. From an interview, Crazy Horse 7 (1971) by Dave Smith:
Smith: What do you see in your future?
Stafford: We’ll go back West and I’ll keep on writing poems. I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along. So I inhale and exhale. I experience, write poems, get now and then, great feelings of being on the edge of writing something that reverberates through my own self and that’s very interesting.
White Sky –
They come to herald in their connection to Stafford, Oregonians looking to the past in order to re-jigger the waning future. Or, to imagine an Oregon of mythical proportions. Stafford serves as a light, a beam of tungsten into the cold gray of Willamette and Lake Oswego. There is a tender trailing of the voice in that aging, remembering hardscrabble histories.
Fewer birds lift. The mountain men of Stafford have given way decades ago to entrepreneurs, speculators, builders. These people in Tigard, maybe anywhere this year where Kim and others take the Stafford Road Show, are long in tooth, gray and easy to provoke with laughter, rhyme, words.
They are old but still children trapped, looking for a new way to capture their lives moving away from a horizon gushing with fecund life, the verdant buds withered, the trick of thinking like all the earth is inside your at those tender ages of 10 or 12 now snores in a chair.
Somewhere in that slipstream, even back to Tucson, or when we met in El Paso, or was that place in San Antonio or Austin, Stafford rose up, listened and then spoke words of youth, the measure of things. He never wanted a muse, really, tapping away on his shoulder delivering what and how to say it.
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off–they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.
The poet’s poet son makes sure to jostle with that muse-concept, makes sure that people he meets and will meet on this Oregon Trail of 100 Years after His Birth do not look for a magical essence for being alive as artists, writers. He knows the routine of a father who penned 20,000 poems, daily exercises like a Zen master waiting for the grasshopper to light on water, or the master pushing hands until mountains move.
Get on with the exercise of writing, maybe that’s the coda I learned at age 19 from Bill. Just go out into the world and write it. The déjà vu of meeting him twice, or three times. That universal, the harmony of youth always jostling with one’s old fellow. Those stories and memories are the best, for sure, and Bill Stafford ramified that 37 or 40 years ago, or the last time when he was on the Palouse, when I met him, listening. Or was that Galway?
His son recalls things that never happened that are, and things that happened that will never be the inseam of a persona, nothing that will shed into a character revealed, but still, the things that matter, they haven’t happened yet. That is the poem of green earth and white sky:
The post Sky Islands: Jaguars, Apaches, Spirits, and the “Last” Emblem of a Dying Interloper Colonializing Genocidal Race first appeared on Dissident Voice.Many things in the world have
already happened. You can
go back and tell about them.
They are part of what we
own as we speed along
through the white sky.But many things in the world
haven’t yet happened
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Kate Scott, Director of the Madrean Archipelago wildlife center. Michel Marizco/KJZZ
Pieces of old vehicle barrier were pushed into canyons. Other heavy, broken pieces were left on ledges and used to form a welded together gate blocking access to the remainder of the border road. Broken and flattened culvert pipe scattered across the grasslands.
“And everywhere that this was done, there has been created what I simply call mine tailings,” Scott said.
Under former President Donald Trump, contractors built more than 20 miles of border wall in this area. The wall is just a part of the project; roads were widened, hills flattened and vegetation destroyed to reach the international border. Gaps in the fence remain. The border wall was being painted up until this year. Now, shiny black coating abuts lengths of rusting border wall.
“So you have this infrastructure leading up to the wall and all along the wall. And it’s at the same level of devastation. This is a tiny little snapshot of one,” Scott said.
Forget about waiting until Nov. 12, on my Lincoln County, Oregon Coast radio show, Finding Fringe, because DV readers get the interview here now! And I’ve written about my upbringing in the desert around Tucson, my work as a newspaper cub reporter in Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico, my crazy days diving the waters of the Sea of Cortez, and my other work along the border, in El Paso, in Chihuahua.
“Wrestling the Blind, Chasing Apache Horses, and Unpacking the Vietnam War,” Cirque Journal, by Paul Haeder
People have been dying in the desert for decades because U.S. policy deliberately funnels them there.
Unaccompanied children in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol on March 17, 2021. Jaime Rodriguez Sr./U.S. Customs and Border Patrol
The Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center is helping wildlife by restoring and preserving Birdland Ranch, a remote wildlife area and biodiversity hotspot, home locally to 154 bird species, endangered top predators, neotropical birds and more in a rich ecosystem.
“The nearby San Pedro River corridor supports two-thirds of the avian diversity of the entire United States, including more than 100 species of breeding birds and 300 migrant birds.” (R.J. Luce, pg 3, San Pedro Anthology) Wildlife infrastructure projects include maintaining and upgrading an extensive cavity nest-box trail to preserve threatened species, habitat restoration, as well as plans to restore a small historic outbuilding for community outreach events.
Questioner: So my question is how do we interrogate our savior complex, while also acknowledging these tremendous emotions of love and loss?
Tiokasin Ghosthorse It’s a great question, and thanks for that little challenge. I was kind of waiting for that. That’s great. Thank you for that Ayana. Well, you know, in the original intuition of Lakota language, intuition of all of us I would say – without any filters of what intuition is by giving a definition, from this perspective of the Western mind, which I’ve been educated in and as Robert Clemens or Mark Twain said, It took me years to get over it, right? So when I’m thinking about what happens when we lose contact, we lose relationship with the Earth, we are constantly looking for that search, for ourselves, in others, and it gives way, because of our loss of instruction, it gives way to the fact that somebody else can come and rescue us. And when I think about, the original instructions, the original intuition, is the fact that even today, people go out to the wild, go out to nature, go someplace hidden, to heal, basically to understand and usually it’s this sort of benevolence of I can go to the wild, to the Earth, to nature, to listen. And when I think about that, it’s well, I think it’s different. When we were taught as young people that we can, yes, we can go to the Earth and mother nature to listen, but in that, in the fullness of the thought, where most Indigenous peoples kind of, you know, look at that wonderment and what do you mean going to the Earth and listening for lessons actually. And then what we understand is, as one Native person, I would just say it this way, is that we usually have gone to the Earth, to find out how Mother Earth is listening to us. And that takes a lifetime, it just doesn’t come up with a cause and effect.
You know, we go we get rewarded, we come back, and then we have the answer – the solution. So I think the savior mentality is tied up in the cause and effect of, we have solutions to save, what we can have our, possessive, our environment, our climate, our Earth, our – everything is possessive. And so when it comes to the savior mentality, the salvation point mentality, it’s that there is always going to be salvation for us as long as we follow the rules and regulations of an authority figure, religion, science, or government. And all of those have authority figures, where you look at it the other way, in relational languages, and in Indigenous languages, there is no need for monotheism or authority. Because that domination does not fit authority, well, it does actually domination and authority go together, but domination does not fit relational languages, and in relational languages, everything is in scope, everything is relative, everything is related. And there’s no need to get connected, or even save that which giving you all the answers, meeting all your needs as Mother Earth does.
So Mother Earth does indeed listen to us and gives us all that we need all our cries, all our whimpers, all our prayers, she answers it, gives us food, gives us water, gives us warmth, and we learn in between those like warm and cold, we learn what the balance is, we learn what the rhythm is. And so once we are into the rhythm, you can really start questioning, what is savior mentality? What is salvation point mentality? We’re always looking for the solution. So I think rather than looking for this solution, we need to acknowledge where we are at in this consciousness, or in this continuum of being in the present and this comes through when you speak your Indigenous language and most Indigenous languages that I know of, don’t have nouns. So therefore there cannot be a savior mentality.
Now you see how the western mind tries to take all of what I just said and put it into the box of, I need to find the answer to why is this? We need a reference, we need something so that we can learn “how to”, as if how to was a manual to do something. And what we’ve forgotten is that Mother Earth is always listening to us, Mother Earth is always teaching us lessons. There’s not one time in human history, that humans can teach Mother Earth, any lesson, you see. And so that’s our arrogance to think that we can control the Earth, we can, you know, do what we want to the Earth, and even save the Earth. And so in that sense, you know, the Western mind, the Euro-Western wants to be at the top of the heap so that they can, I don’t know what it is, reward, cause and effect, take and reward, or give and reward type of mentality, a dualism. And you see that Mother Earth is not like that, very many qualities of communication she has. So I guess that’s a long way of understanding or trying to answer the question of what is savior mentality.
TUCSON, Ariz.—The Trump administration is muscling forward with plans to wall off a critical international wildlife corridor, setting up construction camps to erect a 30-foot barrier along one of the few remaining gaps on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It’s super concerning that with the technology we have available today we are using a type of border security that is so detrimental to wildlife,” said Susan Malusa, a Catholic biogeographer who heads the University of Arizona’s nonprofit Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center that detected the jaguar earlier this month.
“We have deep social responsibilities not to use and lose our Earth,” said Malusa, who also holds a master’s degree in theology. “This is not only a Catholic idea. We do not get to judge what can be expendable as a species.”
[Demonstrators on both sides of the border in the San Rafael Valley protested plans for a new wall in May with cardboard cutouts to symbolize local biodiversity.Credit…Rebecca Noble/Reuters]
As it stands, fences are piecemeal and violent. And historically, Republicans have been less inclined to build them than Democrats. There are currently 700 miles of non-contiguous fences along the 1,951-mile border. A Republican built most of those, but we cannot ignore that Democrats have also built and supported their fair share, showing bipartisan commitment to this symbol of illusory control. Biden has not made an about-face, he is simply continuing an interminable trend of border-building policies and now, like many who came before him, he has fallen into the same, familiar, repetitive pattern.
The first border fences built along the U.S.-Mexico border to curb immigration from Mexico began in earnest under Democrats Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. After building fences for decades to stop animals, the federal government shifted its focus when people began migrating in significant numbers from south to north in the 1940s and 1950s.
Treacherous Terrain: Racial Exclusion and Environmental Control at the U.S.-Mexico Border — Mary E. Mendoza
On a brisk autumn day, agents patrolling the US-Mexico border near Mexicali caught Trinidad Hernández Iglesias, a coyote, or human trafficker, who had been sneaking people across the line. At the time, Iglesias had been a target for the patrol for about four years, and his capture was an enormous victory. Over the years, he had sold a number of fraudulent American documents to Mexican citizens who had paid him to help them navigate the difficult environment of the borderlands and help them cross the border in one piece. He assured them that with his documents they would be able enter the United States as American citizens and safely “get through the fence at the international border.”1
After his capture, newspapers in Mexico covered the story, noting that the sixty-five-year-old coyote had been a well-known smuggler with “notable ingenuity and charisma.”2 Originally from Jalpa, Zacatecas, a town far to the interior of Mexico, Iglesias had moved north, learned what it took to cross the border, and then made a business out of smuggling people across it. Although he only confessed to smuggling six people into the United States, reporters had reason to believe Iglesias had sold documents and helped “many others that had entered the [United States].”3
In spite of the many people successfully smuggled by Iglesias and other coyotes, it is well known that migrants have not always made it across the line. Many cannot afford the fraudulent documents or the help of a guide like Iglesias, so they have made the journey on their own—a journey that, too often, ends fatally. Just one year before officials caught Iglesias, border agents found the body of a young boy named Nino Héctor Martínez along with the body of an unidentified Mexican woman at the Texas-Mexico line. Martínez had been trying to get across the dangerous Rio Grande with his father when something went wrong and he drowned. It is not clear whether the woman crossing the border knew Martínez and his father or not, but these two casualties—the woman and the boy—are just two among many who have died traversing the dangerous terrain along the US-Mexico divide.
These two incidents, Iglesias’s arrest and the deaths of the Mexican woman and boy, took place in 1950 and 1951, and yet they could have appeared in the newspaper this morning. Surreptitious crossing and death are nothing new along the US-Mexico boundary. They are continuous realities despite dramatic changes over the course of the last century. Once an open range, the border landscape has morphed into a series of fences, checkpoints, watchtowers, stadium lighting, and other infrastructure for policing. This growing technological management of the border has been accompanied by US immigration policies that have become more exclusionary over time, from Chinese exclusion in the 1880s to the National Origins Act in 1924 that limited the number of immigrants who could enter the United States from the Eastern Hemisphere, to the Immigration Act of 1965 that set limits for nations across the globe, to an attempted ban on Muslims in 2017. Change at the border, in other words, has mirrored the growing exclusionary policies enacted at the federal level. In spite of the massive changes made to border infrastructure, migration across the line persists, making the borderlands a place of both change and continuity.
Continuing a long trend of building up the border, Donald J. Trump proposed in June 2017 to build a solar wall along the length of the Mexican border. His planned wall has been both praised and criticized by environmentalists. Those in favor of it argue that it could help alleviate the rising need for clean energy and thus ultimately help fight climate change.4 Those who oppose it note that the clean energy it might produce will not outweigh the damage it will do to the important natural ecosystems along the border.5 However, few, if any, of the articles about the environmental impacts of this fence discuss the ways in which it would continue to force human migrants to pay coyotes like Iglesias to help them or else try to cross dangerous landscapes that threaten their lives.
In the context of this larger history of construction at the border, past and present building projects provide an opportunity to look to history to understand potential outcomes of Trump’s proposed wall: put simply, history tells us that it will not work and that it will do more damage than good. This latest fence proposal, though, the one that promises to provide clean energy while also handling the so-called immigration problems in the United States, also exposes a central, long-standing, and hidden tension between border fence construction and environmental manipulation. In every phase of construction, arguments for environmental control have consistently worked to the detriment of human migrants, hardened racial divisions, and reinforced social hierarchies. In other words, the tension between racialized exclusion and efforts at environmental control are nothing new.
The first construction projects at the border had little to do with human migration but were, at their core, attempts to control the natural environment. In 1906 the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversaw a massive eradication campaign for a tick that had caused hundreds of cattle in the northern grazing lands of the United States to become sick and die. After pushing the tick south for several years, the USDA set up quarantine stations at the US-Mexico border to screen, disinfect, and quarantine cattle to avoid the tick’s reentry. The cumbersome policies created significant controversy among cattle ranchers in the United States whose cattle wandered into Mexico. Because the USDA forced these cowboys to comply with the same quarantine measures as Mexican ranchers who wanted to export their cattle to the United States, American ranchers began to describe and conceive of “Mexican cattle” as filthy and diseased in contradistinction to their “American cattle.” American cattle, they argued, should not have to go through the same quarantine measures as Mexican cattle, even if they wandered south of the border. Put succinctly, the ranchers’ frustration with the quarantine measure created a powerful discourse about race at the border, even if humans were not those being racialized.6 This controversy also resulted in the first federally funded border fence, constructed in 1911.
Environmental concern and control, then, provided a fertile context for hardening racial categories along the US-Mexico border. With new protocol for the movement of cattle, ranchers created a discourse about Mexican animals and bugs as diseased and dangerous. To control those menaces, the USDA built fences and checkpoints along the border to search for and eradicate those threats. Later, US citizens and government officials adopted and applied earlier discourses about bugs and animals to human beings. 7 By the middle of the twentieth century, it was the Mexican human body that became the invasive pest, and fences became one of many tools for changing the nature of human migration.
The Bracero Program, a guest-worker program that facilitated the migration of Mexican workers into the United States as short-term contract laborers from 1942 to 1964, transformed the border from a place that had been relatively open to Mexican migrants to one that was increasingly closed to them. Many scholars argue that the program ultimately created two streams of migrants: one sanctioned (young healthy men who became braceros) and one unsanctioned (any person who did not qualify for the program but tried to cross the border anyway).8 South of the border, Mexican officials and landowners worried that a mass exodus of laborers would deplete the labor force and damage the economy.9 North of the border, Americans feared a virtual Mexican takeover. In January 1954, William F. Kelly, the assistant commissioner for the US Border Patrol described the influx of Mexican workers as “the growth of a social fungus that infects any who come in contact with it.” Mexican immigration, he said, was “the greatest peacetime invasion ever complacently suffered by any country.”10 Concerns north and south of the border led both Mexican and American officials to increase patrols along the US-Mexico border and look to other ways to curb unsanctioned migration. By the late 1940s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, overseen by the US Department of Justice, built the first fences along the boundary meant to control human migration. Fences previously used for cattle became tools used to control and herd humans. Since then, fences have evolved from barbed wire to chain link, then to wire mesh, large metal landing strips, and large steel bollards erupting out of the ground.11
At the same time that Congress worked to place this cap on migration, a burgeoning environmental movement began making seminal contributions to rhetoric about restricting immigration. In 1968 the Sierra Club published Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb that essentially argued too many people in the United States would place unsustainable demands on US resources.12 In the years following the publication, John Tanton, a staunch supporter of immigration restriction in the name of environmental sustainability, chaired the club.13 These views, coming from such an influential environmental organization, reframed the environmental debate from one that pitted humankind against nature to one that pitted immigrants and their migration as the antithesis to a sustainable environment.
Through the 1980s, 1990s, and into the twenty-first century, this immigrant versus nature narrative continued to permeate environmental debate in the US-Mexico borderlands. In southern Arizona, this became particularly evident in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a wilderness area that hosts “a thriving community of plants and animals.”14 The monument, designated as such in 1937, deemed an international Biosphere Preserve in 1976, and then given official wilderness status in 1978, was a place of increasing concern for environmentalists.15 As early as the 1940s, the National Parks Service (NPS) had worked with other US agencies to block access to the land in the name of conservation, specifically to keep cattle from wandering into the monument.16 But as fences and other structures sprouted all along the US-Mexico border, the NPS saw an increase in the number of human migrants funneled through parts of the monument’s 500 square miles of fragile desert ecosystems to make the trek.
By the early 2000s, concerns about the ecological health of the monument and debates about national security and immigration were inextricably linked. One so-called green activist organization, Desert Invasion, held tightly to the immigrant versus nature rhetoric seen in earlier Sierra Club publications. “Our Fragile National Monuments, National Wildlife Refuges, and National Forests along the U.S. Southern Border,” its website reads, “are being annihilated—not by natural forces or by unwitting tourists, but instead by an overwhelming number of illegal aliens.”17
The environment became central to some arguments for building up the border to stop people who walked through the desert landscape, stomping over vegetation and leaving garbage in their wake. A study from 2007 concluded that at that time, an average of fifteen hundred migrants passed through the Arizona-Sonora border daily, each leaving roughly 9 pounds of waste behind them. The study thus alleged that migrants left 13,500 pounds of garbage per day in the Arizona-Sonora region alone.18 Moreover, that study claimed that shifting migrant patterns had severely impacted vegetation growth. The limited growth increased erosion and changed runoff pathways for rainwater. Finally, it pointed out that increased human presence also disrupted animal life and likely put endangered species at risk of being killed for human consumption.19 In short, migration through the monument was destroying it, but fences could help funnel traffic elsewhere.
On the other side of the debate, organizations like The Nature Conservancy fought hard against fence construction and, by 2009, they had challenged the Department of Homeland Security in a legal case, arguing that fence construction would destroy habitats.20 In South Texas, for example, the endangered ocelot could be cut off from vital resources and become locally extinct. Curiously absent from articles covering this debate, though, was a concern for those human lives that would be funneled to more dangerous environments.
Built structures along the border have created a hybrid landscape of built and natural environments that have killed thousands of people crossing the border. Fences funnel migrants to deserts, mountains, and rivers where they are forced to fight the harsh elements of those areas. In the Arizona-Sonora desert, the area where Organ Pipe National Monument is located, the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner reported a stark rise in the number of deaths between 1990 and 2005.21 Those deaths continue.22
Whether for or against fence construction, mainstream environmental discourse about border fortification has ignored these human realities and dimensions of border policing and control. In doing so, it has reinforced racial and social hierarchies in the United States. In some instances, arguing for fence construction to save the environment fuels ongoing racialized forms of social exclusion by pushing migrants through deathscapes, where they die from exposure or drown, just as Nino Héctor Martínez did. Those who seek smugglers like Iglesias to help them also risk losing their lives. In July 2017, for instance, up to two hundred people were packed into a tractor-trailer after being smuggled across the border and driven to San Antonio, Texas. Ten of them died of heat exhaustion and thirty others were hospitalized, illustrating “the extremes that people will go to sneak into the United States.”23 In cases where environmentalists argue that fence construction is destroying critical habitats for animals, the lack of acknowledgment of human suffering and death in the borderlands reinforces the enduring notion in the United States that immigrant bodies are expendable, and it raises questions about the value of animal and plant life versus the value of an immigrant life. It also reifies the false dichotomy between nature and culture, ignoring the vast web of socioecological connections in the borderlands because projects of environmental control tend to separate nature from human realities. Rather than approaching the humanitarian crisis and the environmental crisis as one complex web of concerns, policymakers continue to view them as divorced from one another.
Examining the history of environmental control and border fortification exposes the dangers of single-minded approaches to issues related to the environment. Thinking about preserving the flora and fauna of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument or other borderlands habitats, albeit a noble and important effort, is as seductive as it is destructive when it comes to the preservation of human life and dignity. A historical analysis of these issues reveals that the tension between race and environment at the border is nothing new. Change and continuity at the border has always been deeply entangled with environmental issues, and the current political climate suggests that both the environment and the plight of the immigrant will continue to be important issues to consider, but together, not apart. Environmental work must consider who is bearing the burden of efforts at conservation, which is often much more complicated than it seems on the surface.
Notes
Mary E. Mendoza is an assistant professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of Vermont. She received her PhD from the University of California, Davis, in 2015. Her research focuses on the intersections between environmental and borderlands history and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Huntington Library.
THE SAN RAFAEL VALLEY: WILDLIFE, WATER, AND A WAY OF LIFE AT RISK
Hundreds of miles of border walls have already severed much of the Arizona–Sonora borderlands, blocking wildlife corridors, fragmenting ecosystems, and pushing endangered species closer to extinction. In the Sky Islands region — one of the most biologically rich and ecologically interconnected wildlands in North America — only a few unwalled cross-border corridors remain. One of the most important of these, the San Rafael Valley, is now in the crosshairs of the Trump administration for immediate new border wall construction.
The San Rafael Valley, a sweeping grassland basin cradled between the Huachuca and Patagonia mountains, is one of the last vital pathways for wildlife movement between Arizona and Sonora. Jaguars, ocelots, black bears, pronghorn and many other species rely on this corridor to move freely between the U.S. and Mexico. The San Rafael wildlife corridor is an ecological lifeline connecting the transboundary Sky Island Mountains.
At least 17 large wildlife species have been documented crossing through existing vehicle barriers or cattle fencing in the San Rafael Valley.This region has seen the highest number of modern jaguar detections anywhere in the U.S. and is home to 17 threatened and endangered species including Sonoran tiger salamanders and Mexican spotted owls, and 9 species with designated critical habitat.
Armed with waivers that override bedrock environmental laws, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is moving at breakneck speed to wall off the San Rafael. In June 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) awarded a more than quarter of a billion dollar contract for border wall construction across the San Rafael Valley to Fisher Sand & Gravel Co — a company with a long record of environmental and regulatory violations, including air quality infractions, criminal charges and millions in fines and settlements — raising serious concerns about the impacts to wildlife and ecosystems in this vital bioregion. The proposed wall would cut across the transboundary watersheds of the San Pedro and Santa Cruz Rivers, fragmenting the hydrology of the corridor.
A barrier here would block species movement, destroy protected habitats, and inflict irreversible damage on critical ecological linkages. It could also bring a wall of artificial light to this Dark Sky landscape — stadium bright illumination that would disrupt nocturnal pollinators like bats and insects, disorient migratory birds, and degrade the valley’s natural light-dark cycle, which governs critical behavioral and physiological processes in wildlife.
This report documents the San Rafael Valley’s biodiversity, the species it sustains, and its indispensable role in the survival of endangered wildlife. It details nine key protected areas linked by the San Rafael Valley wildlife corridor. Finally, it also outlines the severe harms posed by new border wall construction and makes the urgent case for protecting this irreplaceable corridor before it is destroyed. — Destruction of a JAGUAR CORRIDOR … Impending Border Wall Will Sever Vital Pathway for Wildlife in Arizona’s San Rafael Valley
[A black bear obstructed by the new 30-foot-high border wall at the nearby San Pedro River. Credit: Sky Island Alliance]
“People from a bunch of different groups, with different viewpoints, realize they have the power to stop the wall,” says Parker Deighan, a Tucsonan who volunteers with No More Deaths, explaining why she decided to head down to the border to protest the wall early last December.
Tucson people working with the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sky Island Alliance, the Sierra Club, No More Deaths, the Green Valley Samaritans, the anarchist BCC, found common ground to block the construction dividing the border. Community groups and concerned locals from Bisbee, Ajo, and rural parts of Pima and Cochise County joined, too.
“It wasn’t a unified political stance, but a shared goal,” Parker says.
Lest we forget the human toll:
Read Scott’s story:
+—+
A Poet, the Pacific Flyway, and a Sonora Flash Flood*
Memory –
He holds up the sands of mountain heads and tectonic fissures splayed, from peaks like a purple haze over the Old Pueblo he learned are called Madrean sky islands. His hands soothe flecks of iron ore, pulverized by plates crushing and churned into tsunamis of flash floods booming into Sonora from pine and fir quarries forty miles away.
The Oregonian smiles. There is movement all around: the cumulus clouds push shadows onto the raging seasonal river, almost class five whitewater. He smiles again, as gambler’s quail lift and squeak like bad springs on an International, as a tortoise chomps on acacia.
He lets the air take the rivulets of sand before the surge of flashflood crushes part of a cut bank across the wide arroyo where he gladly stands with students. He smiles, pointing.
There is a fragility in the 19 year old recalled, a thin membrane of memory now, 37 years later, holding onto that moment when I was with this poet the first time. Toughed like basalt after the solar blast of a million years. What is forgotten has been chipped away by sun, wind and lichen. I am going back to Stafford.
I think of him, now, this 100th anniversary of his birth, listening to his son Kim, a poet too, a sort of passenger pigeon of his father’s legacy here in Oregon. That singular idea Kim brings forth about his father’s attention to self, to the inner eye, well, it is now the shape of things to come, here in the writing room, and like a miner clanking about a shaft, remembering years ago where that vein was, I remember Stafford from a time when the world was big and ideas endless.
William Stafford, like a thousand poets (or maybe a few hundred), is refracted memory churned into the daily living of writing . . . his practice:
I put my foot in cold water
and hold it there: early mornings
they had to wade through broken ice
to find the traps in the deep channel
with their hands, drag up the chains and
the drowned beaver. The slow current
of the life below tugs at me all day.
When I dream at night, they save a place for me,
no matter how small, somewhere by the fire.
Thirty-seven years later I announce to the library audience in Tigard, Oregon, when Kim Stafford asks for questions, that I know Stafford like a million others know him, or ten thousand maybe personally, or those of us in the tens of hundreds who had a chance to hitch to that thing called the “poetry reading-slash-poetry workshop.” Three times the sound of his voice, in a room and in situ, the virtuoso of the poet teacher – Stafford – crossed paths with my own sheltering sky. That pathway then and later was impressive, an ambassador of poems, leading him to my place of latticed shadows or leveling titanium sky, Tucson, and then the endless journey away from Arizona to New Mexico, onto El Paso, other parts of Texas, on past Bhutan to Istanbul to the Great Wall to Iran.
How many intersections with youth, how many taunts to our young pugnacity, did he shepherd for only a moment in that time as traveling poet? His name is braided to the valley of Willamette, poured into the delta waters of Columbia threading loam and cedar.
The remembering goes backward to Tucson, in the 1970s. Time and dates are flotsam in my life. Was it 1979?
We all turn to the molting tattooed skin of solar blasts . . . some of us semi-wise decades later . . . the shape of his words alive upon his death. I’ve pushed past continental divides when his words locked into conversations with Neruda or Levertov . . . . Crossed equatorial sunrises caught in my own hardening cornea where W.S Merwin chatted with Lorca and Czeslaw Mislov . . . . And this vast ocean reef web I’ve touched with scabbed skin as narcosis sank into me, when the cul-de-sacs of Sappho, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton let their poems grow like dahlias.
The oddest places Stafford’s poetry eddies up from – a cay off Belize with lemon sharks; or the tipping leaves of jungle liter carried by harvester ants in the millions inside the shadow of Copan pyramid.
Yet, even reckless dusks near Hanoi on an intrepid Russian motorcycle or running through Guatemalan hills with the contraband of thieves, all of this is nothing compared to the monumental histories of what a child writes in that early gossamer light, a floating time, when we observe the world at that intersection of nascent knowledge and the wide brow of endless earth. Now, old and entranced by the child, or the stories, or the things the father and sister and mother and children brought to me then, well, he is right to say childhood is the world of the poet.
That’s what William Stafford whispered to us, in three workshops: Most good poetry — maybe even most writing — comes from those first years: the uplifting loneliness in a child’s drama, inside the child’s atmosphere of patina carrying the light. A place where the girl’s take on the tornados that are the world is honored. Or the boy’s yearning to belong to some pattern or some baseball field is captured in song. That weight of poetry is tied to our own clumsy solitary otherness as juveniles, that feeling, as if a snake skin, is all itchy on us, or the wagging coiled tail of an alligator lizard inside about to cut through our belly. Cut through to youth remembered and lived.
That’s what you end up writing for the rest of your life. Those are the sparks setting the adult fire into perpetual stoking and waning.
Kim, his son, 37 years after his father guided me in Arizona, guides the Oregon audience through the shape of his father’s words and life as reconciling and reshaping youth:
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
Tucson –
William Stafford listens to us, his student hosts, Wildcats from Arizona who are let off the literary hook or leash through an act of professorial pronouncement – Go a little wild with him, but be aware Stafford, himself, can rattle sage poets and novelists who are your teachers, with his simplicity.
We newbies want our moment with the laureate, this National Book winner, this entrance into all things small and quiet but read by kings and laureates. That head strong inventiveness and our naiveté, he seems galvanized to, or at least that’s how youth remembers intersection with extraordinary literary fame and the passionate tribulations of angsty poet youngins.
The largeness of “the thing” at 19 – poets and revolution, the new coda of continental consciousness, and maybe an end to the old white man’s lament: immolation of the tweed, the pipe and patriarchal beard. We could cut it with machete, that potential paradigm shift, and the new horizons or hope for something different happening was exhilarating under a mescal moon. We were ready to rebuff it all, stoking bonfires as both homage to youth quaking the old and setting the world afire. Or at least that’s what we thought. Stafford speaks:
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
This time in my youth we are launching a new undergraduate literary magazine, Persona. We expect (want) validation, or vindication of a life young, but feeling heavy from the travails of a country left for old men and money seekers.
William Stafford takes an interest, understands the impatience of the unaccepted. He hears the clucking youth against the literary weight of teachers and national book award winners. It makes sense to him, that unchecked youth would want some small thing for us, fledglings, but big in our youth. Some time with him without the blustery literary devices of PhDs.
We watched him earlier in the day pushing the flow of that river he visited, pushing his hands into the riot of the hydro-ecology of a dry riverbed the afternoon before when he had arrived to Tucson, now a shadow of itself, furious with the glacial weight of melting snow and four days of rain.
Kim Stafford tells the Oregon audience his father always came to his hosts, wherever he was asked to be poet, with his hands cured by their river. He then flattened palms pointed to them as a form of supplication to the flow of life, river, what might also be benediction and genuflection. His dad would tell his new friends — poets one in all – the name of a river in a new country he was visiting. “You can never stand in the same river twice . . . .” Heraclitus seems to be stepping into the rivers of bold ink, into those currents where Stafford captures the light of a horizon flecked with stars and abiding rising sun. New horizons, old memories of youth.
Stafford names one of our Sonora rivers so his hosts recognize his awe of place and humbleness in the scheme of what this desert really means. He looks at my map and talks about the Santa Cruz River west of campus, reminding us that while a mostly dry wash year round, the shifting sands of Santa Cruz still echo the water coursing underground: the desiccant white-and-brown river sand hide life-affirming waters that pop up to surface some fifty miles down the line.
Stafford of Oregon is taken by the force of Sonora flash flood miles away uplifting the earth he stands on moments before his big reading on campus. El Rillito, this gaping riverbed north of town, he sees it’s flooding waters from hills and mountains and arroyos deeply etched in shadows miles away cresting fragile banks and eating away at a paved bicycle path.
He smiles.
We see it as the politics of bulldozers and cement hemming in wildness.
He studies each eddy, each roiling muddy pipeline, and sees a poem unfurling at pre-dawn. The hour of his poem building.
We try to talk about land speculators and ecology eaters stripping the desert valley.
He breathes in the swampy creosote bush aroma of wet desert and points to a swoop of buzzards lifting above the swells.
A smile. A dozen turkey buzzards, and that small crack of a smile.
There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot–air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.
We drink impatience and tequila at noon, hold broiling debates over the melting facades of a country pushed into the harsh napalm glow of Vietnam, Cambodia, United Fruit, Dow, Nixon, all the reckless killing fields of corporations and manifest destiny. Whose land is this anyway, my Jew co-editor friend asks us. Was it Tohono or Mestiza . . . the battleground of interlopers with dollar signs etched in their souls? We want to prod the Kansas poet.
Stafford listens. Thinks. Speaks.
Once you cross a land like that
you own your face more: what the light
struck told a self; every rock
denied all the rest of the world.
We announce the underground railroad intersects right smack in our Old Pueblo, Tucson. The refugees filing into piping hot desert of organ pipe cactus, that matte black tongue of the Gila monster pointing toward El Norte, el paso del norte, or paseo del muerte – trail of death. We tell him they are searching for shelter in a new land, this new undeliverable homeland, which is the promise of the enemy’s financer accepting refugees.
He nods, gets it, knows what we know, and more.
The USA versus the world, versus the Salvadorans, anchored to the killing squads. Pushed out of highlands and crawling toward El Norte. We tell Stafford there’s some big news coming from the “big time” New York market, our sanctuary movement edited and packaged for TV: The blessings and underground work of men and women lifting the tortilla curtain, bearing witness and then sheltering the travelers at the risk of bolstering the very nature of what to the government is crime and to the human is care.
He knows, he says.
We roil at the incessant bombing of Nicaragua by Carter, the peanut farmer, Navy guy. We list the crimes of Chile, the crimes of C-Ch-CIA.
He listens.
We splatter paint on the commons when our apartheid village is ransacked by brutes in the ROTC squads, football walk-ons and the security patrols on our University of Arizona campus.
He watches.
William is there, listening, watching, at the edge of the crowd, talking to the uninitiated gawkers as we help protestors put back the South African shanty resurrected on our campus 9,000 miles from Mandela and Biko. Some of us are humbled by Stafford’s attentiveness, his inquiry into the Chicanos grappling with La Raza and a new canon for American Lit in a workshop he facilitates.
He listens and then reads dead poets.
He lifts a scoop of the Rillito River bed, remembers an earlier time years before when his Tucson hosts told the Kansas “Almost an Indian” (his childhood moniker) Stafford to come back in spring. “And here I am now, watching the waves of a desert awaken the water soul man inside a dust bowl rat who like me who flourishes in wet Oregon.” Listing, surfing saguaros, entire dumped cars barreling downstream, the desert jettisoning its skin some fifty miles away.
He observes . . . a poem inside.
The violence of flash flood and the hard ice melting high into the Santa Catalinas is the joy of Bill Stafford . . . . We know some turn of light or sound of red tail hawk will be lines for a future poem wired to his vast Kansas-Oregon synapses.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
The audience is quiet, like Bill at first, his face reddened by traveling outside, like those of the foreigners’ when they see his hands open to them, this smallish poet crossing new open territory around the world. He talks of Afghanistan, Iran, and then a story of blinding snow where fence lines vanish and cows and cowpokes freeze like monuments of sacrifice with just the edge of bitterness in place to inscribe solitude into a story. Bill Stafford reads some lines from Wallace Stegner’s “Genesis: A Story from Wolf Willow,” calls it one of our country’s best, and then bows to read his own work:
The light along the hills in the morning
comes down slowly, naming the trees
white, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate.Notice what this poem is not doing.
He beckons us to hold steady the light in each morning alive, to listen to the air rustling with “small furry voles or moles . . . owls crunched up before gliding like gods for a talon swoop . . . crickets and their drumming… explosions of blossoms held in the darkness by croaking wet mating toads . . . .”
Or maybe that is a trick of youth, words recalled now at a distance. Re-appropriating, re-fabricating, retrofitting . . . . Something like what Stafford might have said: “This inching of truth away from a clear stratosphere. . . invention and imagination overcoming a poem . . . for a poem like memory is not a report on life but a painting, quiet but cinched to a fury and imagination.”
Maybe he said that, or maybe lichen-covered memory leads me away from the original source, one of Bill’s counterparts maybe, one that intersected with my youth – Galway Kinnell in El Paso, who knows. Or Bob Bly in Spokane? Garcia Marquez in Austin?
No matter how far he travels, the stints in Washington DC, or the road traversed and flights embarked upon, Stafford wants that West, the Willamette, the true angle of repose of sunlight falling onto the Pacific Northwest . . . . Where all hope is delivered to him in deciduous and pine forest gleaned by waterfalls, cataracts of tears. From an interview, Crazy Horse 7 (1971) by Dave Smith:
Smith: What do you see in your future?
Stafford: We’ll go back West and I’ll keep on writing poems. I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along. So I inhale and exhale. I experience, write poems, get now and then, great feelings of being on the edge of writing something that reverberates through my own self and that’s very interesting.
White Sky –
They come to herald in their connection to Stafford, Oregonians looking to the past in order to re-jigger the waning future. Or, to imagine an Oregon of mythical proportions. Stafford serves as a light, a beam of tungsten into the cold gray of Willamette and Lake Oswego. There is a tender trailing of the voice in that aging, remembering hardscrabble histories.
Fewer birds lift. The mountain men of Stafford have given way decades ago to entrepreneurs, speculators, builders. These people in Tigard, maybe anywhere this year where Kim and others take the Stafford Road Show, are long in tooth, gray and easy to provoke with laughter, rhyme, words.
They are old but still children trapped, looking for a new way to capture their lives moving away from a horizon gushing with fecund life, the verdant buds withered, the trick of thinking like all the earth is inside your at those tender ages of 10 or 12 now snores in a chair.
Somewhere in that slipstream, even back to Tucson, or when we met in El Paso, or was that place in San Antonio or Austin, Stafford rose up, listened and then spoke words of youth, the measure of things. He never wanted a muse, really, tapping away on his shoulder delivering what and how to say it.
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off–they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.
The poet’s poet son makes sure to jostle with that muse-concept, makes sure that people he meets and will meet on this Oregon Trail of 100 Years after His Birth do not look for a magical essence for being alive as artists, writers. He knows the routine of a father who penned 20,000 poems, daily exercises like a Zen master waiting for the grasshopper to light on water, or the master pushing hands until mountains move.
Get on with the exercise of writing, maybe that’s the coda I learned at age 19 from Bill. Just go out into the world and write it. The déjà vu of meeting him twice, or three times. That universal, the harmony of youth always jostling with one’s old fellow. Those stories and memories are the best, for sure, and Bill Stafford ramified that 37 or 40 years ago, or the last time when he was on the Palouse, when I met him, listening. Or was that Galway?
His son recalls things that never happened that are, and things that happened that will never be the inseam of a persona, nothing that will shed into a character revealed, but still, the things that matter, they haven’t happened yet. That is the poem of green earth and white sky:
The post Sky Islands: Jaguars, Apaches, Spirits, and the “Last” Emblem of a Dying Interloper Colonializing Genocidal Race first appeared on Dissident Voice.Many things in the world have
already happened. You can
go back and tell about them.
They are part of what we
own as we speed along
through the white sky.But many things in the world
haven’t yet happened
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Indigenous groups in Mexico opposed to the planned brewery say families already have little access to water – and that their way of life is also under threat
On a summer evening in southern Mexico, a percussion group using water bottles as instruments leads a procession through Mérida, capital of Yucatán state. Children walking alongside elderly people are guided by members of Múuch’ Xíinbal, a Maya land rights organisation. The placards they carry declare: “Water is not for sale.” A heavy chant accompanies the march: “It’s not a drought – it’s plunder!”
At a rallying point in the city, protesters read from a manifesto and accuse the government of prioritising profit over water, health and land. They denounce a wave of mega-projects imposed without their consent, from industrial-scale pig farms to the controversial Maya Train tourist expansion. But they reserve their greatest anger for the Heineken brewery in Kanasín, near Mérida, which was announced in June.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Beyond the unbearable loss of lives and the endless destruction of homes, Israel is compounding their destruction of Palestine by waging war against the land itself.
Israel’s ecocide in Gaza: the hidden siege with long-term consequences
Fields once used to grow food have been burnt. Wells and water pipes are poisoned. And, the air is filled with smoke, dust, and toxins that linger long after the bombs fall. What remains is not just rubble, but a landscape stripped of its ability to sustain life.
This destruction has a name: ecocide. It’s the deliberate killing of the environment, the tearing apart of the soil, the water, and the air that people depend on to survive.
In Gaza, ecocide means that even if the bombs were to stop tomorrow, families would still face hunger, thirst, and sickness because the very earth beneath them has been attacked.
Ecocide isn’t just a side effect of war. It’s used as a weapon, and its damage lasts long after the fighting ends, leaving the land and its people scarred for generations.
Water weaponised
UN experts expressed their concern about Israel’s water weaponisation:
Israel is using thirst as a weapon to kill Palestinians. Cutting off water and food is a silent but lethal bomb that kills mostly children and babies. The sight of infants dying in their mothers’ arms is unbearable. How can world leaders sleep while this suffering continues?
Water is at the heart of Gaza’s ecocide. Even before October 2023, access to clean water in Gaza has been systematically destroyed. Less than 3% of available water met safe standards before the war.
By mid-2024, 88% of Gaza’s water wells and all desalination plants had been destroyed or disabled. Reservoirs, pipelines, and pumping stations were deliberately stuck.
At least 1 million people in Gaza reported having less than six litres per person per day of water suitable for cooking and drinking. Before October 2023, the population in Gaza had access to the minimum recommended of 80-85 litres of water per person each day.
Children are queueing up for hours to fill a small jug. Meanwhile, hospitals report a surge in dehydration, diarrhoea, jaundice, and water-borne diseases.
Toxic runoff seeping into vital groundwater sources
Between February and August 2024, a joint study by Newcastle University and the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network uncovered alarming levels of contamination in Gaza’s soil and water. Their tests on landfill sites revealed both total and faecal coliform bacteria. In other words, clear evidence that untreated sewage and toxic runoff have seeped into the groundwater that people rely on.
A separate Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) survey painted an even grimmer picture: at least 87% of the population live within just ten metres of raw sewage or faecal waste. This daily exposure leaves communities facing not only grave health risks but also long-term damage to their already fragile environment.
The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) has warned that Gaza’s coastal aquifer, the main source of groundwater, is on the brink of irreversible collapse. Salinisation and sewage infiltration have rendered much of the aquifer undrinkable, endangering not only human survival, but also agriculture.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) water and sanitation coordinator Paula Navarro said:
For those who have endured relentless bombings, the suffering is made worse by a water crisis – many are forced to drink unsafe water, while others don’t have enough.
Soil without life
More than 86% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been destroyed, with only 1.5% accessible and not damaged.
Orchards of olive and citrus trees, tended by families for generations, have been bulldozed or burned. Irrigation wells have been bombed, leaving the soil either dry or poisoned.
For farmers, the devastation is not only material, but spiritual. For Palestinians, olive trees passed down through generations are a symbol of heritage, and a connection to the land.
Scientists warn that contamination from white phosphorus, heavy metals, asbestos, and other hazardous materials have seeped into the soil, threatening future harvests and impacting food security.
UNEP reported that soil was significantly contaminated with total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) and aliphatic hydrocarbons, levels which surpassed the threshold requiring intervention.
A report in the American Journal of Public Health warned that crops grown in Gaza may carry harmful levels of toxicity for years, and possibly decades to come, raising deep concerns about the long-term safety of food supply and its impact on human health.
Air that kills
The air over Gaza is filled with toxins. Clouds of dust hang over neighbourhoods filled with asbestos, pulverised gas, and chemicals from explosives.
UNEP has estimated that more than 39m tonnes of hazardous rubble fill the Strip. Breathing this dust carries risks of cancer and chronic illness that will impact survivors for decades to come.
Researchers have also measured the war’s invisible toll on the climate. In the first three months of the bombardment, greenhouse gas emissions exceeded the annual output of 26 countries, producing between 400,000 and 600,000 of CO₂. The study, led by Frederik Out-Larbi and colleagues, found that in the first 60 days alone, 281,000 tonnes of CO₂ were emitted, more than the yearly footprint of 20 nations.
This war has undoubtedly caused an environmental catastrophe with irreversible consequences to the region and beyond.
Debris, waste, sewage, and disease
Waste has become another weapon. Bombing has destroyed 70% of sewage pumps and wastewater treatment plants. Untreated sewage now seeps into streets, farmland, and the sea.
Piles and piles of uncollected garbage attract disease-carrying insects. Medical waste, hazardous chemicals, and munition debris further poison the land, water, and the population of Gaza.
The result is an environmental and public health disaster. Outbreaks of diarrhoea 25 times higher than before the war, a resurgence of polio, surging cases of scabies, lice, and respiratory infections. Disease, like hunger, is part of this environmental war.
Epidemics don’t respect borders, and disease spreading from Gaza threatens the wider region and beyond.
The environmental catastrophe taking place in Gaza won’t disappear with a ceasefire. Aquifers poisoned with sewage can’t be stored overnight. Children inhaling asbestos fibres today may not show symptoms for decades. Fields covered with phosphorus may take generations to heal.
Ecocide as elimination
Human rights groups, environmental scientists, and UN agencies argue that Gaza’s environmental destruction isn’t a tragic accident.
Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights has documented how Israel’s military systematically targets environmental infrastructure: water pipelines, reservoirs, and sewage plants. Its 2024 report calls it by its name: ecocide.
The logic is as cruel as it’s clear: destroy the environment and you destroy the conditions for life. Turn water into poison, farmland into ash, air into a weapon, and survival becomes impossible. International law recognises this.
The Genocide Convention lists the creation of living conditions intended to destroy an entire population as an act of genocide. In Gaza, ecocide and genocide are intertwined.
This is Gaza’s catastrophe, and unless it’s named for what it truly is – a crime against the environment and humanity – it risks being forgotten beneath the rubble.
Featured image via Al Jazeera English/Youtube.
This post was originally published on Canary.
Image by Aakash Malik.
In the sharpest possible contrast to the US approach to climate change, in a very grown-up adult fashion, the EU has publicly stated: “EU officials warn climate breakdown and wildlife loss are ruining ecosystems that underpin the economy.” (Environmental Damage is Putting European Way of Life at Risk, Says Report, The Guardian, Sept. 29, 2025)
Whew!!! The world is still sane.
Like a cool refreshing late afternoon breeze, a great sense of relief has spread across the Continent. With a remarkable pitch-perfect admission, the EU informs its citizens of the truth no matter how much it hurts. The upside to this admission is an understanding by the citizens that something horrible is wrong. Ipso facto, they must pull together to do something about it. Definitively, this pulls everybody into the mix to be aware, be prepared, make sacrifices, if necessary, to make it right.
Not only has the EU warned about environmental degradation but also warned against “… weakening green rules… as far-right parties that deny the science of climate change gain ground across the continent. The US has also put pressure on EU leaders to buy its fossil fuels and ditch pollution standards that affect imported goods,” Ibid.
It’s even worse than that: “In a speech at the UN on Wednesday, Donald Trump claimed without evidence that many European countries were on the ‘brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda’. The US president blamed a 37% drop in EU emissions since 1990 for lost jobs and factory closures,” Ibid.
Clearly, the way forward for climate change mitigation measures is truly and literally the fight of a lifetime as right-wing interests, which are rapidly gaining a foothold, adhere to anti-science conjecture sans evidence. Even Greta’s green Sweden is retreating from its commitments: “Last year, its fossil fuel emissions saw their biggest increase in 15 years. During that time period, carbon uptake by its vast forests have halved. And since the country swung to the right in its last general election, the government has slashed its investments in climate action. Researchers say Sweden’s policy shifts, and its evolving role as a frontrunner, is now contributing to the weakening of Europe’s climate agenda.” (Sweden, an Early Climate Leader, Is Retreating From Its Environmental Commitments, Part of an EU Trend, Inside Climate News, August 3, 2025)
The timing for withdrawals from climate change mitigation efforts and abandonment of national commitments to the Paris 2015 climate agreement could not possibly be worse. Evidence is ubiquitous that the climate system has morphed into the equivalent of a runaway freight train barreling down a mountainside with severely weakened brake linings.
And climate scientists are uniformly warning that disaster is right around the corner unless CO2 emissions are halted. Recent statements by climate scientists: “I am scared… Unless immediate action is taken, catastrophic sea level rise will hit during current lifetimes… We do not yet understand this abrupt 10-fold shift in global mean temperature in only one year; it’s never happened before… Global ecosystems are starting to fail… Earth is losing its resilience… This is the first time in human history we are forced to seriously consider we are destabilizing the entire planet, etc.”
The scientific community is speaking out at the highest levels like never before, warning that we are treading on dangerous levels of climate change, spewing CO2 into the atmosphere at all-time record amounts, well over +200% annualized rate since the turn of the century. Nobody in the year 2000 thought it was possible for annual CO2 emissions of 1.25 ppm in 2000 to skyrocket to 3.75 ppm in 2024, marking the largest yearly increase on record since measurements began in the 1950s. Indeed, given enough time, excessive CO2-heat-generation becomes a surefire destroyer of precious ecosystems that support life, e.g., the EU warning discussed herein.
It’s almost as if the Curse of Oblivion has overtaken sensibility. This curse erases identification of events from existence. It’s a preamble to an extinction event. But of course (wink-wink) extinction is not realistically possible, or is it? After all, in the real world, civilizations do go extinct, e.g., the Indus Valley Civilization went extinct around 1900 BCE because of environmental factors, as drought caused Saraswati River to die with widespread drought-caused agricultural failure; the Mayan Civilization Classic Period went extinct from overpopulation, environmental degradation, and prolonged drought (sounds too familiar). According to fact-based science, at least eleven (11) civilizations have gone extinct. Extinction is always in the cards; it’s just a matter of who’s dealing.
The recent European Environment Agency 7th report, published every five years, unintentionally endorses the onset of extinction; (1) 80% of protected habitat in poor or bad condition (2) the EU’s carbon sink has declined 30% due to logging, wildfires, and pests damage (3) transport and food emissions have barely budged (4) water stress is affecting 33% of Europeans (5) the entire EU is struggling to meet 2030 emissions targets. The EU report only found two of twenty-two specific policy targets for 2030 on track. Of major concern, the state of the natural environment was judged to be extremely worrying as no biodiversity indicators are on track to meet 2030 targets.
At issue is abrupt change in policy directions by EU leaders that have clearly shifted focus “from climate action to economic competitiveness,” thus weakening green policies as part of “simplification” that campaigners claim as “deregulation.” Oh My! climate change mitigation policy is now beholden to “deregulation,” which is the soft term for “elimination.” America has taken the leading role in deregulation, as the EU, in puppy dog fashion, follows along.
In simplest of terms, right-wing anti-science policy shifts as well as EU leadership shifts of climate action to economic competitiveness are derailing climate change mitigation and undercutting any chance to meet 2030 emissions targets as Net Zero 2050 looks like a distant apparition. The Curse of Oblivion never had it so good.
The post EU Climate Breakdown appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Before I begin relating my four-decade tale about Andy Mahler and Me, I want to share an observation from my granddaughter Raina, which I know you all will intuitively appreciate.
A month before he passed, I brought her and her brother Vale down to the Lazy Black Bear, I guess, to say goodbye. A few months before that, Rain had spent an afternoon exploring this hidden fantasyland in the woods with her bff Ayturk, while Andy and I talked. As we were leaving that last time, she proclaimed with an unforgettable smile on her face:
“This is the most magical place I’ve ever been.”
We’re all here because of our experiences with Andy Mahler. I’m going to share the one that led he and I to this book collaboration, a journey that began in 1985 and ended at his bedside just hours before he passed.
But I want to cut to the jump here and say something about Andy the man.
I’m a journalist. I’ve spent the past 45 years seeking out the most compelling people I could find so I could tell their stories.
By the time I left the Bloomington Herald-Times in 1996, I had written 2,000 to 3,000 byline stories. So the number of charismatic, dynamic, magnetic, brilliant, talented, powerful, influential people I’ve known likewise numbers in the thousands.
Andy is the only one that I wrote an entire book about.
Andy and I were born two months apart in 1951, but aside from tracing our love of trees to climbing them as kids, we couldn’t have been any different.
Grandpa Mahler hailed from Vienna. Grandpa Higgs hailed from Little Rock.
Andy spent his childhood on the professor-class east side of Bloomington. I spent mine on the working-class east side of Indianapolis.
Andy summered on Cape Cod, visited family in Manhattan, and spent a year each living in Paris and Sao Paolo. I summered on East 18th, and aside from one trip to Florida I can barely remember, Moline, Ill., was as far as I ever ventured.
Andy was charismatic, dynamic, magnetic, brilliant, talented, powerful, and influential. He also had movie star good lucks.
Me, well, not so much.
I knew from the times we spent hanging, walking, and talking that Andy was the most remarkable human being I had ever encountered.
What I didn’t know about until this book was his equally remarkable family life. It’s all there in the book, so I’ll just hit a couple highlights here.
Andy grew up in Bloomington as a first-generation American, with no idea how to play that role. His parents escaped Hitler’s Vienna in 1938. Each came to America alone as teenagers; father Henry was 17, mother Annemarie just 13.
Henry worked with Nobel Laureates and, had he not died at 62, may have earned the world’s most prestigious scientific honor for his work that earned him the nickname Mr. Mitochondria.
My path to Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National began 50 years ago last May, when I moved to the woods by Lake Monroe and discovered photographer Eliot Porter’s In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.
I would later learn that In Wildness was the first coffee table book ever published. And since the moment Porter’s images stole my breath in the IU Fine Arts library, I’ve been working on this, my first coffee table book.
Indeed, I captured the first three images in Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National in 1975.
The shack where I lived and discovered Porter’s color photography sat on a forested ridgetop overlooking Lake Monroe. From my kitchen window, I could see the Hoosier’s wild and rugged Miller Ridge due east in Brown County.
A 20-minute drive down Knight Ridge Road passed one of the northernmost Hoosier National welcome signs.
From that Depression-era, five-room hovel – tin roof; no insulation; a single, oil-burning space heater in one room – I spent three years hiking and photographing the Hoosier, from Pate Hollow to what is now the Deam Wilderness.
After we moved to an apartment in the city in 1980 and I went stir crazy, my wife Judy told me I needed to go to a Sierra Club meeting or something.
I did. And that meeting of the Uplands Group of the Sierra Club set me down the path to Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National.
That night at the Monroe County Library, I encountered a college kid named Jeff Stant, who spoke passionately about the fight to establish a federally protected Wilderness Area on the Hoosier.
Jeff recruited me to be the group’s newsletter editor, after which I decided to become a journalist and entered the Masters Program at the IU School of Journalism, which is how I met Andy.
Toward the end of my studies, the Forest Service announced plans to clearcut 81% of forest in 30-acre blocks, and to put ORV trails down in Orange County and up my way in Brown County.
That’s what got Andy and I both involved in Hoosier National politics and formed the basis of our 40-year personal and professional relationships.
As our book explains, in 1985, Andy and wife and life partner Linda Lee, Bob and Kathy Klawitter, and their neighbors formed the seminal forest protection group Protect Our Woods to fight the ORV and clearcutting plans.
That same year, I took a job as an environmental writer at The Bloomington Herald-Times, as I finished my final masters project: Clearcutting the Hoosier National Forest: Professional Forestry or Panacea?
That project became my first Sunday Centerpiece in the H-T, and it prominently featured Andy Mahler, alongside Stant from the Hoosier Environmental Council, Jeffrey St. Clair from Brown County’s ForestWatch, and Bob Klawitter from Protect Our Woods.
My first trip to the Lazy Black Bear was with Stant, St. Clair, and Denise Joines.
Talk about a profound, magical experience.
Within seven years of our first day together at the Lazy Black Bear, Andy and Co. had achieved remarkable, unprecedented success in their efforts to save their beloved Hoosier National.
Because of their activism:
+ The Hoosier became the first national forest in the country to permanently ban off-road vehicles. The very first.
+ The Forest Service withdrew the 1985 clearcutting plan entirely.
+ Every Indiana Senator and Congressman, save one Republican banker, sent a letter to the Forest Service saying they wanted the Hoosier National managed Andy’s way.
A poll commissioned by Congressman Frank McCloskey found 70% of his constituents opposed any logging on the Hoosier National.
The Forest Service ultimately adopted the Conservationists Alternative, which was written by St. Clair through a grant from Stant and the Hoosier Environmental Council.
While it’s been weakened and despoiled by the Forest Service over the past 33 years, the Conservationists Alternative remains the framework under which the Hoosier National is managed.
The Conservationists Alternative is the reason the woods surrounding the Lazy Black Bear tonight wasn’t clearcut 40 years ago.
As Andy told me for the book, Hoosier activists instinctively knew that practically eliminating logging on their national forest would increase pressure on others nearby. So in January 1991, Heartwood formed right here at the Lazy Black Bear, adopting an innovative, bioregional approach to forest protection to help activists in surrounding states confront that increased pressure to cut.
As POW had been at the state level in Indiana, Andy and Heartwood were in the forefront of a national, grassroots forest protection movement to compliment the efforts of national groups like the Wilderness Society and Sierra Club, which were focused on Alaska and the great forests of the West.
And they were just as successful as POW, ForestWatch, and HEC had been. They effectively shut down logging on millions of acres of national forests from Missouri to Pennsylvania to Alabama for extended periods of time.
As we note in the book, Heartwood-inspired activism shut down logging on Illinois’s Shawnee National Forest for 17 years.
Also for the book, Andy told me that, following the Heartwood success, he had been comfortably retired from activism for 20 years when he heard about Buffalo Springs in 2021, which I knew wasn’t totally true.
I used to listen to him on WFHB, where he hosted a cutting-edge public affairs interview program called Interchange. He served on the board of directors for Bloomingfoods and was instrumental in establishing the Lost River Coop & Deli in Paoli.
In the inaugural print edition of The Bloomington Alternative in 2005, I featured a front-page photo of Andy leading a meeting between activists and Forest Service officials.
Through the Alternative, I hosted a panel discussion in City Hall on state forest management that featured Andy and then-DNR Director and future Indiana Republican Party Chair Kyle Hupfer.
Still, I hadn’t seen or talked to Andy much when I learned in April 2024 that he had untreatable, Stage 4 cancer and asked if he’d be interested in talking about this sad news.
Nine months later, when I proposed we collaborate on the book, he instantly agreed, saying: “We have both been preparing for it our entire professional lives.”
From Day 1, Andy and I agreed on three things.
1/ Even if the book turned out to be a vanity project, it would be worth it for the time we spent together.
2/ Our primary purpose was to spread Andy’s message and story after he was gone.
3/ We would use any proceeds beyond basic costs and compensation for my time to support groups that fight for the forest and other worthy causes, like Heartwood and Protect Our Woods.
In June 2024, Andy, his little dog Wagner, and I walked through the woods surrounding the Lazy Bear and talked about his diagnosis and imminent demise. That turned into Metaphor of the Cicadas, a piece published by St. Clair in CounterPunch and the first chapter of our book.
“Every second is an opportunity for extraordinary depth and fulfillment of purpose,” he told me that afternoon.
Over the next 15 months, we corresponded regularly. I spent nine days talking with or watching him lead protests and play music.
I’m almost positive I took Andy for his last walk in the woods on July 7, when I brought Limestone Postwriter Anne Kibbler down for a tour of Buffalo Springs and an article she wrote titled Andy Mahler: Folk Hero of the Forest. All he could manage was a short walk from a backcountry road to a pioneer cemetery.
Andy had just started having pain, and we dropped him off at the doctor on our way out of town. Ten days later he texted to say he was in Bloomington Hospital. He entered Hospice that day.
I never let myself accept the reality that Andy’s time was about up, but I knew the day would come when I would spend my time with him at his bedside. That eventuality materialized on my visit with Raina and Vale on July 26, when we just talked.
Andy said that day he wanted to live long enough to hold our book in his hands. Three weeks later, I shot my next-to-last photo of Andy holding the full, first draft of the book, his radiant smile and cover image filling the frame.
My Buddhist friend Michael accompanied me that day, as Andy and I talked about the people he worked with his entire career. He burst into tears when Michael presented him with a Tibetan scarf called a khata that had been blessed by the Dalai Lama.
Four decades after I interviewed Andy for the first time, nine days before he passed, I recorded him for the last time. Fittingly, the subject was Linda, Andy’s life love and inspiration.
I shot my last photo of Andy during that visit, and visitor Tamara Lowenthal took the only photo of Andy and I together that exists.
His last words to me that day, as we ended our final hug: “I love you brother.”
When a mutual friend messaged me that Andy had stopped responding and his prognosis was gloomy, I drove down to say goodbye on Aug. 29. I got home at 5 p.m. Kathy Klawitter told me the next morning that Andy passed.
I wasn’t feeling particularly creative that day, and when his caretakers Paul, Maggie, Kare, and Brad left us alone for a few minutes, I echoed Andy’s words back to him.
“I love you, too, brother.”
All photos by Steven Higgs.
Higgs’ book, Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves, can be purchased here.
The post Andy Mahler and Me appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Tory leader also claims the party was close to bankruptcy when she took over last year
Voters trust the Green party most … on green issues, is the rather unsurprising finding of a poll by YouGov looking at how voters view the party, which starts its autumn conference tomorrow. The Greens are least trusted on the economy and on defence.
But there is something remarkable about this. In his write-up for YouGov, Dylan Difford says:
Unsurprisingly, Britons have a particular degree of confidence in the Greens when it comes to the environment. What’s notable, though, is that a majority of Britons (54%) say they have at least a fair amount of trust in the party on the issue. Out of the 18 areas polled, which have been asked about all five major parties, this is the only issue for any of the parties for where most people express confidence in a given party.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
ACalifornia bill now awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) signature would set a pathway to eliminate the state’s trailblazing moratorium on pipelines used to transport carbon dioxide. The fossil fuel industry lobbied to shape the Democrat-sponsored legislation, which could allow such pipelines to be constructed without strict distance requirements around communities and sensitive wildlife habitats…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Janine Jackson interviewed MediaJustice’s Jai Dulani and Vivek Bharathan of the No Desert Data Center Coalition about data center opposition for the September 26, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
MediaJustice (9/9/25)
Janine Jackson: Many people still think vaguely of digital technology as something that happens inside your phone, or your computer. It seems divorced from physical nature; it’s in the ether. In reality, technology requires massive environmental and economic resources localized in real communities.
The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South is a new report from the group MediaJustice that explores with research and case studies how tech corporations are, as it says, “quietly draining the South,” while media coverage talks in terms of growth and progress toward an inevitable future.
We’re joined now by Jai Dulani from Media Justice, and with Vivek Bharathan from the No Desert Data Center Coalition in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome, both of you, to CounterSpin.
Jai Dulani: Great to be here.
Vivek Bharathan: Thank you for having us.
JJ: I saw this quote from an Oklahoma representative:
I think if you ask your average person on the street, “How much water does a data center use to operate every day,” or “every year,” the vast majority of people would say, “What’s a data center?”
And she added, “I think that this industry is so far ahead of where the knowledge that Oklahomans currently have [is] that we’ve got to catch up.”
Now, she’s talking about Oklahoma, of course, but this is a key idea, that something is already well-launched, and packaged up very shiny and futuristic, before the general public understands, not just the costs, but even what’s happening—much less why it’s happening where it’s happening.
So in simply connecting the airy talk about AI, for example, to real earth and water, this report is filling a void, but it’s also very much about whose earth and water we’re talking about. So what would you say, in general terms, this report is trying to do? What’s it trying to say?
JD: Absolutely. So this report is uplifting how Black, brown and working-class communities in the South are bearing the brunt of the environmental and economic costs behind data centers. We look at how Big Tech is draining the South, even in drought-prone areas; how the South is paying more for electricity; and how the South is getting locked into decades of fossil fuel infrastructure, because of the energy demands of data centers.
JJ: And I think it’s important that the report grounds this data center boom in the history of the South, and regions in the South, being used as testing grounds or dumping grounds in the past. Talk a little bit more, if you could, about the political and historical context here.
JD: Absolutely. So this year marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and that was a devastating example of climate crisis and structural racism. And it showed state abandonment, combined with criminalization, that essentially led to so much preventable death and displacement.
And also Big Oil has been decimating the South for decades, and the South has been facing so much industrial pollution in water and air for decades. And so Big Tech is essentially following these footsteps, and compounding so much environmental racism that the South has been disproportionately facing for a long time.
And that context and history is so important when we look at how Big Tech is coming into towns and cities that have higher rates of asthma and cancer already, and now are being faced with even more air pollution that compounds these harms.
JJ: All right. Well, Vivek, for many people, this is a new connection of dots, but it’s not new for you. You’ve been working on this locally. Tell us about the state of resistance, because we’re talking about informational voids, but obviously many communities perforce actually do understand what’s going on here. What have you learned from your experience in Tucson?
Vivek Bharathan: “It’s kind of like they came back with a redesigned and crappier Death Star, and we have to fight it for a second time.”
VB: What we’ve learned from this is that, essentially, these giant data centers come in, brought in by multi-billion-dollar corporations that are really here to extract resources, and they find cooperation from local representatives who have administrations in support of economic development. But this local economic development often looks like taking these big projects that chase big money, but also come with a lot of blood.
And what we found was that our local representatives were only listening to these corporations. They were put in a position by their administrations at both the county and city levels to really only hear the pro side. And the counter-arguments only came from the public at these meetings. So they just weren’t equipped to make an informed decision about whether or not these data centers are good for us. And they went ahead and voted on them anyway.
So what we had to do, really, was mobilize as a community, and this was really a multiracial, multigenerational effort to come together and say no to this data center. And, fortunately for us, even though the county sale went through, the city council also had to approve a portion of it, and they said no to that. Unfortunately for us, it’s back in the county’s hands, because the corporation still owns the property, they still own the land, and they’re planning to go ahead with this project anyway, despite this overwhelming community turnout against it.
So we’re still in the fight. It’s back to round two. It’s kind of like they came back with a redesigned and crappier Death Star, and we have to fight it for a second time.
JJ: I know that MediaJustice, in general, is about centering the voices of communities who are most harmed by inequities in media and technology, and who share the idea that those people should be in leadership in the resistance. And there is, as Vivek is just telling us, plenty of resistance. But, Jai Dulani, there’s plenty of resistance across the South as well, isn’t there?
JD: Absolutely. Wanda Mosley, who is founder of My Vote Matter, has been organizing in Atlanta, where Atlanta has seen a 211% increase in data centers’ development since 2023. And that’s the fastest rate of growth in the country.
And Atlanta’s water supply is among the smallest of any major US metro area. So water supplies are really vulnerable to drought there. And Meta‘s data center in Newton County, Georgia, is taking up 10% of the county’s total water use on a daily basis, which is putting Newton County on track to be in a water deficit by 2030.
And so Wanda has been going to town hall meetings, and has been saying that what she’s seeing is only the companies and developers are getting airtime at these town halls. And so it’s been really hard to be given a voice at these town halls, but she and others are organizing across the South.
Jai Dulani: “This is because of community pushback, communities that are saying, this is not worth the environmental threat that these data centers pose.”
And that is making a difference, by being relentless, by demystifying the economic development propaganda, and talking about the reality that these data centers don’t create jobs, and, actually, through tax breaks, they are taking money away from states. Georgia is projected to give up $296 million in tax revenue this year because of data centers.
And so in terms of wins, we’re seeing in Bessemer, Alabama, communities have successfully paused a $14.5 billion proposed data center, so we have to keep paying attention to that site, and supporting it. In Warrenton, Virginia, residents voted out all town council members who were supporting an Amazon data center, and now they newly elected a town council that voted to ban data centers for Warrenton.
And in Georgia, we’re seeing a lot of moratoriums being passed in different counties. The Monroe County Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to deny a data center proposal that was going to rezone 900 acres of land. And this is because of community pushback, communities that are saying, this is not worth the environmental threat that these data centers pose.
JJ: Well, thank you. And Vivek, just to kick it back to you for a second, you talked about, in the Tucson example, a kind of fight between various levels of government, which is just encouragement, if we needed it, that if you might “lose at one front,” it does not mean that there might not be another point of intervention.
But what I’m hearing from both of you is that one of the key points of resistance is information. So if I could ask you, Vivek, what were the kind of myths that organizers needed to address in order to push back on this data center? What was the big information that was coming through that needed to be interrogated and challenged?
VB: There was one term, “water positivity,” the idea that you could reclaim water, push it through this thing, and that somehow you’d end up with more water at the end of it. And the myth of water positivity is two things. One is, there’s this absurd terminology, “wet water” versus “paper water,” where wet water is what we think of as water, which is what’s sitting in this water bottle next to me, and paper water is the right to water.
And so, essentially, what they’re trying to say is that they can be “water positive” by generating paper water, and that can look like anything from incentives to communicate with communities to reduce water consumption, which is absurd, to essentially getting water from other places. And that just means stealing other communities’ water to replenish ours. And we weren’t having any of that.
I do want to go back to one thing that Dulani said earlier about just the processes, and how these town halls did propaganda sessions. That was our experience as well. At the city level, the city manager basically set up what they were calling, I forget the term, but it was essentially town halls, but they really were just propaganda sessions for these projects.
And what ended up happening is once we saw that the only people who had seats at the table were proponents of the project, including our private electric company, GEP, the corporation itself, and our public water utility, all speaking for the project. And once we realized that these sessions were going to be just like that, we got loud and we got disruptive.
And if anyone’s listening to this and wondering how to resist these sessions—just don’t accept the term of the argument. Don’t accept the term that they set forward, even in the process. Make sure that everyone in your community is there, as many people as you can turn out, and really just make it clear that you oppose it, and that you even oppose the terms in which the case is being presented.
JJ: I love that, because the questions of who gets to speak extend from the town halls, of course, to the journalism around these questions. And so I would like to ask you, finally, if you have thoughts on media.
I will say, I’m starting to see stories take a frame of “developers are saying this is going to be great, but communities have questions.” And we’re kind of at the “can communities put in some studies in advance, and can we get some more information?” And I’m seeing local leaders and state level leaders saying, “Wait, wait, hold on a second.”
But I wonder, still, the community leaders are not the lead in the story: They’re kind of below the fold; they’re critics. I just wonder, from either of you, what would you look for media coverage that would actually fill a void here, and what would you like them to stop doing? And that might be too long a list, but in the time we have left, what would you hope for from reporters? Dulani, you can start, whichever of you.
JD: Yeah, I think what you mentioned is so important. When a story is simply regurgitating the press release from a big tech company or developer, that’s not helpful. There is research out there that says for every permanent full-time job at an operational data center, that’s amounting to more than $2 million in terms of a tax break for every job. And so it’s not worth it. It’s a wealth transfer from taxpayers to shareholders of these companies. Communities are losing out. And so it is important to look at the lies around economic development and prosperity, and to really look at the environmental costs.
We’re really being put in a position to compete with corporations around water. Farmland is being rezoned for these data centers. So you can’t eat AI, you can’t drink AI. This is the future that is being built before our eyes. And so media need to report on the reality of what the real cost of data centers is, and not just say communities have questions, but there’s more and more data out there about the negative impact of data centers. So that has to be amplified.
JJ: Vivek, if you have something you’d like to add about what you’d hope to see at local or national level from media, please.
VB: I’ve found that when we’re interviewed by local media, especially TV, there’s a common framing where it’ll kind of start with the electeds, and then they’ll interview us for maybe five minutes, and we’ll get maybe a sentence or two in about our position. And they really treat us like any, I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m trying to say here, but basically….
JJ: It’s like “color,” like person on the street, is how I think of it.
VB: Exactly. And our coalition does actually have a lot of experts in it, and we have informed opinions, and we have information that really should be out there more. And I feel like we’re never treated—like, there’s the experts, there’s the electeds, and then there’s us, and we get zero, close to zero time. They just kind of show our faces to say we’re there.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, I’m going to end there. We’ve been speaking with Vivek Bharathan and Jai Dulani. Thank you both very much for being with us today on CounterSpin.
VB: Thanks so much.
JD: Thank you for having us.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Between frenzied claims about Tylenol and disparaging remarks about autism, the voices of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement empowered by President Donald Trump have directed criticism at the country’s massive food, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries — still-too-rare targets for the leaders of either political party in the U.S.
When the White House unveiled its comprehensive report on how to “Make Our Children Healthy Again” in May, it slammed “corporate capture” of regulatory bodies and argued that companies responsible for making children less healthy wield undue influence in Washington. A subsequent strategy report, released last month, called to “protect public health from corporate influence.”
“It was one of the first times I saw the federal government actually call out corporate capture and how chemical companies influence regulation,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy.
But the Trump administration’s political marriage of unbridled crony capitalism and fringe health conspiracism is not without its contradictions.
While the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement preaches a healthy utopia for the nation’s children free of real and imagined toxins, public health experts say the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive deregulation campaign that has opened the floodgates for toxic chemicals in our food, water, and air — while also defunding vital medical research and spreading dangerous medical misinformation.
“There’s a lot of rhetoric about problems that they’re solving,” Minovi said. “But when I’m looking at the actual actions that the administration is taking, largely, these actions are not making any kids or families healthier.”
A glaring tension between the MAHA movement’s purported goals and the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulatory strategy is the issue of environmental toxins, particularly PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, found in many household items.
These chemicals, which can disrupt liver, kidney, and thyroid functioning, are especially harmful to children.
The strategy report, drafted by the Make America Healthy commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid out a series of recommendations to “end chronic childhood disease,” which included studying the cumulative effect of chemicals in the environment. But in May, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was rolling back restrictions on the acceptable levels of these forever chemicals within drinking water, which were put in place during the Biden administration. And in the spring, the agency ended a grant to research children’s exposure to chemicals from soil and dust, according to the KFF Health News.
“When it comes to actually taking action, we’re not really seeing policies that are getting ahead of corporate capture and holding the chemical industry responsible,” Minovi said.
Over the coming months, the EPA has announced it will take 31 separate deregulatory actions, including loosening restrictions on power plants that emit air pollution and eliminating safeguards put in place during the Biden administration for petrochemical accidents.
Alongside pursuing a deregulatory strategy that experts predict will introduce more chemicals into the air, water, and food supply, the administration has also moved aggressively to cut research, including on childhood diseases.
For example, in August, the Trump administration announced it was cutting federal funding to a network researching pediatric brain cancer.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai denied cutting cancer research funding, saying HHS canceled grants supporting “DEI and other ideological pet projects,” and that the money was reallocated.
“President Trump made a pledge to Make America Healthy Again by restoring accountability, transparency, and Gold Standard Science in public health decision-making,” wrote Desai. “The President and White House maintain complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and the rest of the HHS team to deliver on this pledge.”
The Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Food assistance and educational programs have also come under fire during the Trump administration. Earlier this year, Republicans enacted the most significant cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in history. The program provided food assistance to roughly 1 in every 5 children in the United States, as well as nutrition education.
“A lot of this movement is designed to benefit privileged people who have the resources to access certain healthier foods or a community with clean air,” said Minovi, as opposed to “everyday people who might actually depend on public policies to ensure they have healthy food, clean air, clean water in their community.”
“A lot of this movement is designed to benefit privileged people who have the resources to access certain healthier foods or a community with clean air.”
The recommendations emerging from HHS and the MAHA movement about vaccines and autism are particularly troubling, said Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress. “It’s a matter of promoting a personal agenda that RFK has rather than following decades of good science,” she said.
Riddled throughout the MAHA strategy and separate report are concerns over vaccines and the vaccine schedule, which is used to determine the timing for childhood vaccinations.
Both RFK Jr. and Trump have peddled pseudoscientific conclusions connecting autism to vaccination, suggesting that the vaccine schedule needs to change. During the press conference last week, Trump advised against vaccinating children for Hepatitis B until they’re 12 years old, which runs at odds with medical guidelines.
“They’re making it more difficult for children to get routine childhood vaccinations. We know that vaccination has saved millions of lives, and so any efforts that make it harder for children to access vaccines are really, really jeopardizing kids’ health,” said Rosenthal. “Instead of following the science and believing what evidence we already have, we’re just creating a lot of distrust and making it harder for people to keep their kids healthy.”
The recent recommendations that pregnant women avoid Tylenol also carry risk for pregnant people and their future children.
“In the near term, I think that pregnant patients are going to be worried enough that they seek alternate forms of medication to treat their pain,” said Dr. Mariana Montes, a former pediatrician and obstetric anesthesiologist. “That’s extremely concerning, because there is nothing that’s been proven safe for pregnancy except for acetaminophen.”
Ibuprofen, the active ingredient in Advil, has been known to lower amniotic fluid — the liquid in utero that surrounds and protects the fetus — and can have negative effects on kidney and heart development, said Montes.
“Patients might choose to take ibuprofen without knowing the effects, and then unknowingly actually harm a healthy pregnancy because they’re so worried about taking Tylenol,” she said.
Left with fewer options they believe are safe, Rosenthal warns that pregnant people might forgo medication altogether, even when they have a fever. “If women avoid taking Tylenol, for instance, when they have a fever, it can increase the risk of birth defects,” she said. “So by scaring women away from taking needed medication, it can actually impact their health and the health of their developing babies.”
The stigma these types of pronouncements cause for people with autism is also a serious concern.
“It’s necessary to point out the ableist language in this whole autism debacle,” said Minovi. “Of course, it’s a condition that needs to be understood and studied, and obviously impacts families significantly, but the way in which the administration, particularly RFK, talks about it is dismissive and negative about people’s lived experiences.”
Republicans, who once denounced former First Lady Michelle Obama for attempting to make school lunches moderately healthier, now inhabit a coalition whose purported goals would have instantly launched “nanny state” accusations just a few years prior.
But the MAHA movement has been so successful despite its inherent contradictions, Rosenthal said, because there’s a “kernel of truth” to what it’s preaching.
“For instance, ultra-processed food is not the first choice for how we want to take care of our bodies,” Rosenthal said, “but at the same time, is that the best way to use limited resources and protect or promote child health? Not when we have kids who don’t have enough to eat, right?”
Minovi said it’s understandable that people are drawn to this movement — which only heightens culpability for people like RFK Jr. and Trump.
“These are families that are just trying to do right by their kids, and the concerns that folks are raising are valid,” said Minovi. “The behavior of the leaders in this movement is nothing short of predatory.”
The post MAHA Slams “Corporate Capture” by Food and Pharma Giants — While Trump Strips Regulations appeared first on The Intercept.
This post was originally published on The Intercept.
The youth-led climate activist group Sunrise Movement is expanding its mission to battle “authoritarianism” as the Trump administration targets left-leaning organizations and puts one of the group’s major funders in the crosshairs.
“There is no serious way to think about stopping the climate crisis under a fascist government,” Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay told The Intercept. “The path to climate lies through getting rid of the authoritarian government we’re in.”
The move comes as President Donald Trump furiously dismantles the green energy initiatives that Sunrise fought to see enshrined in President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Recovery Act. In a striking success for the climate group, the law contained parts of Sunrise’s top priority: the Green New Deal.
The group, now eight years old, has decided that it cannot continue to fight climate change without fighting Trump, Shiney-Ajay told The Intercept. Delegates from the nonprofit’s more than 100 local hubs voted by a wide margin last month approve its expanded mission, Sunrise announced Thursday.
Sunrise is making the change public just a week after Trump sent a chilling message to activists who oppose him: In a memo, he directed cabinet officials to investigate nonprofits and their funders for supposed links to terrorism.
In the Crosshairs
While the Sunrise Movement has received no official word that it is under investigation, the group has ample reason to believe that it may be targeted.
The Justice Department has directed local prosecutors to investigate billionaire financier George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which gave $2 million to Sunrise between 2019 and 2013, according to a grant database. In doing so, the Justice Department cited the right-wing Capital Research Center, which recently published a report claiming that the Sunrise Movement supports “Antifa-associated anarchist terrorists.”
That report is fashioned as a road map for Trump officials as they follow through on the crackdown he promised after the September 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk. The day he released his domestic terror memorandum, Trump called Soros a “likely candidate” for prosecution.
The Open Society Foundations and the Sunrise Movement both say they reject violence. The Capital Research Center report focuses on Sunrise’s support for a legal defense fund associated with Stop Cop City, a decentralized effort to halt the construction of an Atlanta police training facility inside a forest.
The prosecution’s case against dozens of Stop Cop City protesters collapsed last month when a judge dismissed most of the charges against them. While she stands by her group’s support of the bail fund, Shiney-Ajay said that it was limited in practice.
“When I look at that report, what I see is a desperate attempt to paint what is ultimately a large youth protest movement in negative terms, because they are really looking to villainize and crack down on protests,” Shiney-Ajay said. “That is a strategy with authoritarians.”
Work in Progress
Standing up to elected officials is nothing new for members of the Sunrise Movement — but for years, they focused more on embarrassing Democrats into action.
The group, which restricts membership to people under the age of 35, became famous for acts of political theater such as storming former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018 to pressure her on climate change. An appearance from then Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped catapult the New York Democrat to national prominence.
Sunrise’s decentralized structure has sometimes led to fractures between national and local leaders, but it remained a force in progressive politics after Biden’s election. The group’s relationship with the White House alternated between productive and contentious before its members soured on him over Israel’s war on Gaza. It was the first major environmental group to call on Biden to quit last year’s election.
Sunrise’s latest pivot, which 74 percent of delegates approved in a September 5 vote, is a work in progress.
The group has already organized a walkout of Washington, D.C., university students in response to Trump’s military crackdown. New projects could include responses from local chapters to deployments of the National Guard or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents, municipal campaigns to support mayors standing up to Trump, and pushback against university administrators rolling over for the White House, Shiney-Ajay said. At the national level, the organization hopes to furnish anti-authoritarianism training to tens of thousands of people.
While one long-standing critique of Sunrise is that it has been distracted by “diffuse non-climate causes of the activist left,” in the words of a 2021 Politico article, Shiney-Ajay said she isn’t worried about mission creep.
“We are pretty clear that we are doing this so that we can get on track to win federal climate legislation. That has always been the mission of Sunrise,” she said. “The reason I joined Sunrise in the first place is because it felt like Sunrise was one of the very few organizations that was honest about the conditions of the world, and had a plan to meet the conditions of this world.”
The post Sunrise Movement, Founded to Fight Climate Change, Pivots to Fighting Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
This post was originally published on The Intercept.
New research suggests that feeding your dog a plant-based diet could be the most sustainable choice for the planet.
A study from the University of Nottingham analyzed the environmental impact of 31 different dry dog foods, measuring factors such as greenhouse gas emissions, land use, soil and water pollution, and freshwater consumption.
Unsplash
The results? Plant-based diets had the lowest overall footprint. Poultry-based and veterinary-renal diets fell in the middle, while red meat-based diets had the largest environmental impact by far.
In fact, the researchers found that over the course of nine years, feeding a 20-kilogram dog a beef-based diet would use the equivalent of 57 football fields of land, compared with just 1.4 football fields for a plant-based diet.
“Our findings show that there is a much greater environmental impact when producing meat-based pet food,” said lead author Rebecca Brociek of the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science.
The study adds to a growing body of research linking pet diets to planetary health. In 2022, for example, another study found that meat-based wet food in a pouch or can is responsible for seven times the emissions of dry foods.
Is a plant-based diet healthy for dogs?
It might be better for the planet, but is a plant-based diet actually good for a dog’s health? In short: the research says yes.
Just last month, Brociek’s team released separate findings on the nutritional quality of different dog diets, again analyzing 31 products available in the UK. The researchers found that plant-based dog food provided similar nutrition to meat-based food. When properly formulated, a plant-based diet can be a healthy option for most dogs. This is because, like humans, dogs require specific nutrients, not meat itself.
“Our study found that plant-based diets, when properly formulated, can be a healthy and viable alternative to meat-based options,” said Brociek. “Ideally, the next step is long-term feeding studies, but as we begin to rethink pet nutrition, perhaps the alternative isn’t only better for the planet, but also beneficial for our four-legged companions.”
Brociek’s view is shared by many, including the team behind vegan pet food brand Wild Earth.
“Even though domestic dogs are members of the order Carnivora, they are technically omnivores,” Tiffany Ruiz Dasilva, VMD, and Professional Services Veterinarian at Wild Earth, previously told VegNews.
“What’s important is that the food is nutritionally complete,” she added. “The ingredients should be digestible and bioavailable, and the food needs to be nutritionally complete and balanced.”
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
The theme of this year’s Women By Women exhibition, Rooted in Resistance, is to showcase images of women defending their land and communities from destruction – by powerful people and corporations or the climate crisis. The pictures, taken by female photographers from Nepal, Cambodia, Brazil and Nigeria, will be on show at the Oxo Gallery in London from 9 to 12 October
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Effluent pipe from a pulp mill on the Willamette River, West Linn, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
As Congress faces a Sept. 30, 2025, deadline to fund the federal government, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has put the EPA on the chopping block. But even before Congress decides about the administration’s recommendations to slash its staff, the EPA’s political leaders have made even more significant cuts to the agency’s workforce.
And a look at past efforts to cut EPA staff shows how rapidly those changes can affect Americans’ health and the environment.
Using publicly available government databases and a collection of in-depth interviews with current and former EPA employees, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a group of volunteer academics that we are a part of, has begun to put some numbers behind what many have suspected. Zeldin’s cuts have diminished the EPA’s staffing levels, even before Congress has had a chance to weigh in, affecting the environment, public health and government transparency.
How many people are being let go?
Precise numbers of staffing cuts are hard to pin down, but their historic scale in the first eight months of this administration is unmistakable. Released in May, Zeldin’s budget proposal for the fiscal year starting October 2025 proposed to cut 1,274 full-time-equivalent employee positions from a total of 14,130 in the year ending Sept. 30, 2025 – a 9% drop.
A July 18, 2025, press release from the EPA said the agency had already cut 23% of its personnel, terminating the employment of 3,707 of 16,155 employees. Using employees – the number of people – rather than full-time equivalents makes these numbers difficult to compare directly with EPA’s budget proposals.
Combining EPA data on staffing changes with conservative estimates of the pending cuts, the initiative has calculated that 25% of EPA staff are already out of the agency.
That calculation does not include other announced cuts, including a third round of deferred resignations taking effect at the end of September 2025 and December 2025. Those cuts may see the departure of similar numbers of full-time equivalents as in the past two rounds – approximately 500 and 1,500.
The agency has also reportedly planned to be cutting as much as two-thirds of research staff.
With those departure figures included, the initiative estimates that approximately 33% of staffers at the agency when Trump took office will be gone by the end of 2025. That would leave, at the start of 2026, an EPA staff numbering approximately 9,700 people, a level not seen since the last years of the Nixon and Ford administrations.
These cuts are deeper than past efforts to shrink the size of the agency. In his first term, Trump proposed eliminating 21.4% of staff at the EPA, though Congress made no significant changes to the agency’s staffing. The largest actual cut to EPA staffing was under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s: He advocated for a 17.3% drop in staffing, although Congress held the cuts to 10%.
Effects of past cuts
In the past, cuts to the EPA caused problems and were reversed – but it took years.
The staffing and budget cuts that came during the first two years of the Reagan administration generated problems with meeting the agency’s responsibilities.
For instance, rather than prosecute industry for polluting, Reagan’s EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch told business leaders she would ignore their violations of environmental laws. Remaining staff were convinced that working on enforcement cases would be a “black mark” on their records.
Another top political appointee at Reagan’s EPA, Rita Lavelle, who headed the Superfund effort to clean up toxic sites, faced prison time for her official acts. She was convicted of perjury and obstructing a congressional investigation because she lied about her ties to a former employer who had polluted the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a Superfund site near Riverside, California.
In the wake of the scandal, Lavelle was fired and Gorsuch and more than a dozen other political appointees resigned.
In a later report on the issue, Congress accused Gorsuch, Lavelle and others of poor job performance, noting that after four years of Superfund work, “only six of the 546 … of the most hazardous sites in the Nation have been cleaned up.” The Stringfellow site, a focus of the investigation, was “threatening the health and safety of 500,000 people,” the report noted.
With anger over the scandals from both Americans and Congress, Reagan reversed course and spent the remaining six years of his presidency building the EPA back up in both staffing and budget. Staffing, for example, increased from a low of 10,481 full-time-equivalent employees in 1982 to 15,130 in 1989. Reagan’s EPA budget, which had fallen to US$4.1 billion in 1984, increased to $4.9 billion in 1989.
The existing Trump cuts, and those proposed – if enacted by Congress – would be deeper than Reagan’s, reducing the number of people doing important research on environmental harms and the health effects of dangerous chemicals; suing companies who pollute the environment; and overseeing the cleanup of toxic sites.
Elizabeth Blum, Professor of Environmental History, Troy University and Chris Sellers, SUNY Distinguished Professor of History, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The post Trump Administration is on Track to Cut 1 in 3 EPA staffers by the End of 2025 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
On 1 October 2025, the Senedd will be debating Swift Bricks as a possible solution to the iconic bird’s plummeting numbers.
Swifts are incredible birds that sleep, eat, drink, and mate on the wing. Historically, these birds have nested in healthy numbers in cavities within older housing stock. However, with renovations and modernisation these cavities have disappeared over time, causing a gradual decline in population.
The solution to plummeting Swift numbers
Amy Nicholass, lead list Green Party candidate in Ceredigion Penfro for next year’s Senedd Elections, reckons the answer to the Swifts’ problems is simple.
She said:
We need to incorporate Swift Bricks into all new builds. These bricks are cheap and extremely easy to incorporate.
Green Party MP for North Herefordshire, Ellie Chowns, has introduced a bill to the Westminster parliament on Swift Bricks. It would require the compulsory addition of Swift Bricks to all new builds in England. As Ellie has pointed out:
Swift populations have declined 60% over the past 30 years. For just £30, we could put a Swift Brick in every new build to make it a home for this iconic species too.
Housing and planning are devolved issues, so fall under separate legislation in Wales. A petition before the Senedd regarding these red-listed birds gathered more than 10,000 supporting signatures.
Senedd to debate Swift Bricks thanks to the Green Party
Greens are urging all MS’s ahead of the debate to get behind these Swift Brick proposals. The party is calling on them to push for meaningful legislation which will help to save the population of this iconic and elegant species.
Amy concluded:
The answer is really simple; make it compulsory to add a few Swift Bricks to every new built home, not just social housing, not just where and when developers feel like it, but make it compulsory. Together we can start making our patch of planet Earth a bit better. It’s a small start but significant for Swifts. I want to show how many of such simple solutions can improve lives, not just for our fellow creatures but for our residents too.
Featured image via the Canary
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
I have to share with you good news. In his video speech to the United Nations Climate Summit 2025 held in New York on Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced China’s 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions. He said that China will, by 2035, reduce economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent to 10 percent from peak levels, and will strive to do better.
He also announced that China will increase the share of non-fossil fuels in total energy consumption to over 30 percent, and expand the installed capacity of wind and solar power to over six times the 2020 levels, striving to bring the total to 3,600 gigawatts.
China will also scale up the total forest stock volume to over 24 billion cubic meters. China’s current forest stock is more than 20 billion cubic meters with forest coverage rate having reached more than 25 percent. So this goal means China will increase the forest stock by 20% in ten years.
Other targets he mentioned include making new energy vehicles the mainstream in the sales of new vehicles, and expanding the National Carbon Emissions Trading Market to cover major high-emission sectors.
He said that by 2035, China will basically establish a climate-adaptive society. China issued the “National Climate-Adaptive Strategy” in 2013 and released the “National Climate-Adaptive Strategy 2035” in 2022. According to the Strategy 2035, by that time, China’s capabilities of climate change monitoring and early warning, risk management and prevention, and the whole society’s ability to adapt to climate change will be significantly enhanced.
Currently, Guangdong, Hongkong and Macao are experiencing super typhoon Ragasa. We saw that the whole society had made a lot of preparations for the disaster. No casualty reported up to now.
Xi said, these targets represent China’s best efforts based on the requirements of the Paris Agreement, adding that meeting these targets requires both painstaking efforts by China itself and a supportive and open international environment, and China has the resolve and confidence to deliver on its commitments.
The post Xi Announces China’s 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Image by María Fuentes.
A dangerous myth is brewing in the US: Gen Z isn’t interested in protesting.
Hundreds have taken to social media sites to question and scold young people’s lack of appearance at recent anti-Trump protests like “Hands Off” and “No Kings.” The theories for why Gen Z is “checked out” range from the keen observation that Gen Z can’t afford rent to snarky remarks about social media-induced apathy.
We might not be at some of the recent large anti-Trump marches en masse. But Gen Z sure as hell is still organizing. We’re the generation that brought strikes for climate and encampments for Palestine to the mainstream. In the face a polycrisis of economic instability, fascism, and climate change, protests are on the rise – and are increasingly led by youth.
The difference between Gen Z’s activism and the recent large anti-Trump marches is this: we’re not simply calling for a return to Democratic party leadership. The Democratic Party is the one that ignored our calls for climate justice and charged students with terrorism for begging their schools not to profit from genocide. Over 3,000 college students were arrested or detained while protesting the genocide of Palestinians – all under Democratic leadership.
“Young people are feeling really frustrated with the political process,” Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University, told Newsweek in June. “They’re feeling really frustrated with the two-party system in America, and they have lost confidence in the notion that democracy in America can work for them.”
We are disillusioned with democracy as it stands in the U.S. That doesn’t mean we don’t vote – when a candidate excites us and promises to prioritize people over profit, our generation will show up. This is evident in the massive youth turn-out of canvassers and voters for socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York City.
But in the face of the Trump administration, and in the aftermath of brutal police repression of our protests against genocide, Gen Z’s activism is primarily focused on grassroots organizing that relies on one another, rather than a politician.
As a Gen Z organizer in NYC, I have witnessed this first-hand. Very few young people attended 50501’s anti-ICE march in July, which I criticized after for being a performative display of solidarity with kidnapped immigrants.
But when several Gen Z organizers started Liberty City, a mutual aid pop-up in a park near the NYC immigration courts, it was primarily younger people who volunteered to staff the daily space for immigrants and their families.
“Not all activism is flashy. It doesn’t always make for a compelling video or photo. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work,” Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something, told Newsweek in June.
Gen Z is markedly known for being the online generation – which also plays a huge factor in our style of organizing. Social media was integral to the rise and spread of the Black Lives Matter movement. As Gen Z faced violent repression for speaking up about Gaza, social media was an effective alternative to organize and educate people about the US’s complicity in genocide.
Gen Z’s social and political engagement is also reflected in consumer research. According to a 2021 consumer report from Edelman, 70% of Gen Z reports being engaged in a social or political cause, and are thus more likely to boycott companies against their values and select employers who are aligned with their values.
And Gen Z does show up for in-person protests. During Climate Week in NYC, several youth-led climate groups collaborated to blockade the entrance to private equity giant Blackstone, which is currently proposing a purchase of PNM, New Mexico’s largest electric utility. Youth organizers from New Mexico planned the protest because of Blackstone’s history of prioritizing profit over people’s livelihoods.
Gen Z is responsible for many other direct actions like this, which directly confront those in power for endangering our future. Elites can easily ignore a big march with vague demands and police permits. It’s much harder for them to ignore your demands when you disrupt their business.
Our generation isn’t a monolith. Just as there are many Gen Z organizers on the left who are fighting for our future, there are also plenty of disengaged people and conservatives supportive of Trump. But that can be said for every generation.
The viral video that observed Gen Z’s absence at an anti-Trump march was right: Gen Z isn’t showing up to those protests. But we are still fighting for our future – just in many more creative and grassroots ways that don’t always appear on camera and don’t rely on the politicians who have failed us.
The post Is Gen Z Really Apathetic to Climate Chaos and Trump’s Fascist Creep? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
The battle between industrial polluters and public health advocates has intensified in recent years. As communities near manufacturing plants report higher rates of respiratory illness and contaminated water sources, the need for accurate environmental monitoring has become increasingly urgent.
At the heart of this scientific struggle sits an unassuming laboratory instrument: the titrator. These precision devices measure chemical concentrations in water, soil, and air samples with remarkable accuracy. When deployed by community scientists and environmental watchdogs, titrators provide essential evidence that can either confirm safety standards or expose dangerous violations.
The evolution of titration technology has widened access to scientific testing, allowing even small activist groups to gather legal-grade data that can support environmental claims. What was once confined to corporate laboratories can now serve as a powerful tool for ordinary citizens seeking environmental justice in their communities.
How industrial polluters evade detection through testing limitations
Industrial facilities often report emissions that appear to meet requirements while actual pollution continues harming the environment. Companies exploit weaknesses in testing protocols to conceal their true environmental impact, a form of disguised pollution that helps industrial facilities bypass scrutiny. These tactics form part of a broader pattern where regulatory gaps undermine public health protections.
Many facilities strategically schedule testing during low-production periods, producing artificially low emissions results. Testing locations are carefully selected to avoid known contamination hotspots. This allows companies to pass inspections without reflecting typical operating conditions.
Periodic monitoring can create oversight gaps in environmental protection systems. Regulations sometimes require only occasional sampling, leaving long intervals without supervision. Emissions may fluctuate between scheduled tests, which can affect community trust in monitoring systems.
Some regulations set detection thresholds at levels that allow certain pollution to remain technically “legal” while still posing potential health risks. This can result in chemicals persisting in water or air without triggering reporting requirements.
For affected communities, proving direct links between pollution and health problems remains challenging. Without extended long-term data, companies can dispute causation claims. This evidence gap allows polluters to avoid responsibility for community health impacts.
The science behind measuring industrial contamination in water sources
Accurate water quality assessment requires precise analytical methods. Reliable titrator equipment measures specific chemical concentrations through controlled reagent addition. This process identifies contaminants even at very low concentrations.
Potentiometric titration offers particular advantages for environmental monitoring. This technique measures voltage changes as chemicals react, providing detailed concentration data. The method works effectively for detecting metals, acids, and other industrial pollutants in water samples.
Manual titration methods often introduce human error through inconsistent reagent addition or endpoint determination. Automated titrators eliminate these variables by controlling reagent flow precisely and using sensors to detect reaction endpoints. This standardization improves both accuracy and reproducibility.
Continuous monitoring systems provide more complete data than spot testing approaches. While spot tests capture only single moments, continuous systems track pollution patterns over time. This reveals intermittent discharges that periodic testing might miss entirely.
Community science movements transforming environmental justice
Across the UK, citizen science initiatives have gained influence in environmental accountability efforts. These grassroots movements equip ordinary people with professional-grade testing tools. Communities can now gather independent evidence rather than relying solely on corporate or government data.
In Yorkshire, continuous monitoring by residents near a chemical plant uncovered pollution events missed by quarterly official testing. Documented in 2019, these community efforts compelled authorities to tighten discharge controls and implement remediation requirements.
Volunteer campaigners in England have worked with laboratory scientists to test for sewage pollution. Access to reliable titrator equipment has enabled groups to independently verify pollution levels and contribute to local environmental monitoring efforts.
Key indicators of industrial water contamination
Several visual signs may indicate industrial pollution in local water sources. Unusual water color or odor often signals chemical contamination. Recurring fish deaths or excessive algae growth suggest nutrient or toxin presence in the water system.
Oil films or chemical sheens on water surfaces can indicate petroleum or solvent contamination. Persistent health complaints among residents who use the water source may suggest exposure to industrial pollutants. These observations may help communities identify potential problems before formal testing begins.
Automated titration technology is designed to produce consistent results and can be particularly useful for detecting low-concentration pollutants. Automation helps reduce operator errors that can occur in manual titration procedures.
When ordinary citizens are equipped with reliable tools, rigorous data and the courage to act, environmental justice is no longer out of reach. From identifying pollution in their own backyards to presenting court-admissible evidence, communities are reclaiming power once reserved for labs and regulators. The story of titration is not just about chemistry, it’s about clarity, accountability, and people who refuse to be silent witnesses.
This post was originally published on Canary.
The media are often slow to catch up with reality. In decades past we could talk about addressing global warming as a trade-off where we would spend more on energy and cars, in order to avoid destroying the planet. This meant that people who didn’t care about the planet we leave to future generations could argue that it was not worth paying the costs associated with slowing global warming.
But that was in the past. The cost of solar and wing energy has plummeted, as has the cost of electric cars. The cheapest and quickest way to get new energy online is now solar and wind, not building new coal or gas fired power plants. Also, contrary to what our energy secretary seems to believe, there is something called a “battery,” that allows wind and solar energy to be stored for use at times when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. And new electric cars can be purchased for less than $10,000.
While most folks may be aware of these facts, Donald Trump does not seem to be, or at least chose to ignore them, in his UN rant on Tuesday. He warned the countries of the world away from wind and solar power and told them to use more oil and natural gas.
Trump has never cared much for reality. He may just be looking to pay back his campaign contributors from the fossil fuel industry. But for those interested in the real world, here’s the relative cost of electricity in the United States and China.
We are currently paying more than twice as much for our electricity as China and the gap is likely to increase in the years ahead. Our electricity costs seem almost certain to go higher as Donald Trump’s campaign contributors use massive amounts of electricity for AI and crypto.
The increased demand for these purposes would pose a problem in any case, but with Trump working hard to shut down wind and solar power, the gap between growing demand and stagnating supply is likely to worsen. Meanwhile, China is building up its wind and solar generating capacity at an incredible pace. They already account for more than a quarter of the country’s electricity production. The cost of these clean energy sources is already low and getting lower, as is the cost of battery storage.
The point here is that if we want cheap energy, we want clean energy. This may all be over Donald Trump’s head, but it should not be over the heads of the ostensibly serious people who tell us that people care about “affordability,” not climate change.
Clean energy is affordability and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that fact should be assumed to be on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry or looking for a job in the Trump administration.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
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Slogging through a thick slop of mud and rock, Brian Hill passed the roof that Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters had just ripped off someone’s barn and dumped into his yard. Then he peered into the unrecognizable chaos inside what had been his family’s dream home.
The century-old white farmhouse, surrounded by the rugged peaks of western North Carolina, sat less than 15 yards from the normally tranquil Cattail Creek. As Helene’s rainfall barrelled down the Black Mountains last September, the creek swelled into a raging river that encircled the house. Its waves pounded the walls, tore off doors, smashed windows and devoured the front and back porches.
Brian and his wife, Susie, had just bought the house a year earlier. They had a 30-year mortgage — and, now, no house to live in. Because their home didn’t sit in the 100-year floodplain, they had not purchased flood insurance.
Across Helene’s devastating path through the Southeast, people like the Hills turned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA doles out financial help after a major disaster for everything from home repairs to rental assistance. Once she could get a cell signal, Susie applied.
It took months of persistence, but eventually the Hills were among the lucky ones. They received close to $40,000, just shy of the maximum amount FEMA provides for rebuilding and repairs.
But farther up Cattail Creek, a man whose wife was killed in floodwaters said he checked his FEMA application one day and noticed it was marked “withdrawn,” a surprise since he’d received no explanation. Elsewhere in Yancey, another man said he realized FEMA had denied him aid because his birthdate was a year off on his application. A third man said his application — which he filled out just days after hiking down a mountain severely injured — seemingly vanished from the system.
FEMA’s application process can be onerous, particularly for people who’ve lost their homes. And it can be especially daunting for those with lower incomes who may have fewer resources.
An analysis by ProPublica and The Assembly found that among the more rural counties hardest hit by Helene, the households that got the most housing assistance tended to have the highest incomes. The income disparity is especially stark in Yancey County, where the Hills live.
In North Carolina’s Hardest-Hit Rural Counties, the Highest-Income Homeowners Typically Received the Most FEMA Housing Assistance Notes: Applicant income is self-reported to FEMA. Charts depict the median amount of assistance. The hardest-hit counties are the 10 counties with the highest per-capita rates of homeowners receiving housing assistance. The more rural counties are Ashe, Avery, Haywood, Henderson, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Watauga and Yancey. The chart does not include Buncombe County, which is classified as urban, is the area’s most densely populated county, and is home to many regional and local nonprofits that assisted with FEMA applications and appeals. (Chart: Ren Larson, The Assembly. Sources: Federal Emergency Management Agency Individuals and Households Program, U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Classifications.)A ProPublica investigation earlier this year found that despite dire warnings from the National Weather Service, many people in Yancey were unaware of the enormity of danger Helene posed. The storm killed 11 people there, the highest per-capita loss of life for any county in North Carolina.
The Hills, who are both public school teachers, do not fall in the highest-income brackets FEMA identified. Households in the middle range tended to get about as much FEMA housing assistance money as the lower-income ones, or even a little less. But experts say the Hills did have something in common with the highest-income households: They had the luxury of time to pursue every dollar of federal aid that they were qualified to receive. That’s because they received full pay for seven weeks while schools were closed. That allowed them to navigate FEMA’s bureaucracy during a crucial time when, for many others, pursuing the aid felt insurmountable.
Our analysis looked at counties with the highest per-capita rate of households receiving FEMA aid for housing assistance, an indicator of where Helene hit people the hardest. Housing assistance includes separate buckets of money that cover both rental assistance and home repairs and rebuilding. Apart from Buncombe County — home to Asheville and by far the most urban county in the region — lower- and middle-income households overall got lower amounts of this aid compared to the highest-income earners.
In some counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much housing assistance as those with lower incomes.
Yet income isn’t supposed to play a role. FEMA aid for home repairs and rebuilding is intended to help begin replacing a primary home or make it safe and habitable again, not restore one to its prior state. In theory, a couple living in a million-dollar home and another in a starter house should be eligible for the same level of assistance. For instance, couples who live alone generally would qualify for aid to cover one bedroom, one bathroom and one refrigerator, even if they had three of each.
FEMA did not respond to ProPublica and The Assembly’s requests for comment. The agency previously told the Government Accountability Office, according to a 2020 report, that it encourages all survivors with property damage to apply, and those with minimal damage are “driving down the average award amount.”
Disparities in who receives FEMA aid have long been known to researchers, including Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies and writes about disasters and publishes the Disaster Dollar Database.
“Disasters pull back the curtain on inequity,” Labowitz said. “It’s a vicious combination of things that make it so much harder for people without a lot of money to get what they need from FEMA.” She pointed to FEMA inspectors who undervalue damage to more modest homes, FEMA’s onerous documentation requirements and a “brutal and discouraging” appeals process.
The agency itself has also known about the problems. Several years ago, NPR obtained an internal FEMA analysis showing that the poorest homeowners received about half as much to rebuild their homes compared with higher-income homeowners. The 2020 GAO report noted that homeowners in communities with the most socioeconomic vulnerabilities, like being below the poverty line and not having a high school diploma, received significantly less assistance than those in less vulnerable communities.
The Hills’ home was destroyed outside, first image, and inside, second image. (Courtesy of the Hills)The disparity we found in Yancey was equally striking in Haywood County, where water flows down 13 peaks towering above 6,000 feet. Households there making more than $175,000 typically received $11,000 in housing assistance; households below that threshold received about $5,000.
Michelle and Jeff Parker, who live about 70 miles southwest of the Hills, in Haywood, had evacuated during the storm. Like the Hills, they returned to find their house had been filled with water. They too had lost virtually everything, down to their wedding photographs.
Michelle Parker has struggled to get FEMA to cover her rent after her home was flooded by Helene. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)But the Parkers had been here before. In 2023, they finished repairing their 936-square-foot home after Tropical Storm Fred’s floodwaters filled it with 4 feet of water in 2021. That time, their house had been rebuilt by a state-run program. They received $50,000 from their flood insurance and just $1,644 from FEMA for rental assistance.
When Helene hit just a year after they got back into their home, they decided the risk of rebuilding was too great. Jeff, a former wastewater treatment plant operator, was on disability. Michelle was working as a medical assistant and could take only a couple of weeks off after Helene. They applied for a hazard mitigation buyout, another program offered through FEMA, instead. It would pay them the property’s appraised value before the storm and turn it into green space.
But that process could take years, and their home was unlivable. They figured they would at least get rental assistance from FEMA in the meantime.
The couples’ situations diverged in important ways, and they applied for different pots of FEMA housing assistance. But their journeys underscore how disaster survivors with varying resources are able to navigate FEMA’s application process.
Susie and Michelle spent hours plodding through FEMA’s online system, uploading documents, deciphering bureaucratic letters and making myriad phone calls to the agency.
After weeks of pestering FEMA, the Hills received just under the maximum $42,500 for home repair and rebuild assistance for damage to things like the home’s walls, windows and doors, plus about $9,000 from other FEMA aid programs. The money played a critical role in helping them start rebuilding.
The Parkers received $2,210 for the first two months of rental assistance to help pay for temporary housing. Michelle continued to nag FEMA for months seeking longer-term help; the agency will pay rental assistance for up to 18 months, which could translate to an additional $7,500.
Then Jeff died from cardiac arrest in June at age 56. Michelle felt like she was operating in a fog. She couldn’t handle another stressor.
So when FEMA’s call wait times soared to two to three hours after the deadly Texas floods on July 4, she gave up on pursuing additional rental assistance from FEMA.
“I got tired of calling,” she said.
First image: Michelle’s husband, Jeff, with their Chihuahuas, Cloey and Sweet Pea. Second image: Inside Michelle’s camper. (First image: Courtesy of Michelle Parker. Second image: Jesse Barber for ProPublica.) Michelle’s memorial to her husband and their Chihuahua, Sweet Pea, includes a stuffed animal that plays a recording of Jeff’s voice, a box with the Corvette emblem containing Jeff’s ashes and a box with Sweet Pea’s ashes. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica) The Daunting ProcessAfter disasters strike, households with lower incomes can face major challenges, beginning with the early steps of the rebuilding process, which include finding temporary housing and transportation. Some residents lack reliable internet access or cell service. They have less money to pay professionals for estimates or attorneys for advice. Throw in the added hurdles of rugged topography, and western North Carolina posed particular challenges to those faced with rebuilding after Helene.
Alicia Edwards, who directs the Disaster Relief Project for Legal Aid of North Carolina, said she wasn’t surprised by our analysis, which found that in six of the 10 counties most impacted by Helene, the lowest-income households got less in FEMA’s housing assistance than those at the highest income level.
“People with lower incomes are at a huge disadvantage,” Edwards said.
The application process can be onerous and overwhelming, particularly for people who just survived raging floodwaters and the destruction of their homes and communities. And it can feel downright impossible to navigate for those with less money or other resources.
In Buncombe County, our analysis found the opposite trend. The lowest-income families there typically received more housing assistance than those with higher incomes. It’s also where residents tend to have better access to resources, as many regional nonprofits are based there. Pisgah Legal Services has had an office in Asheville for decades.
Several of the counties with pronounced income disparities are among the most rural counties heavily impacted by Helene. Yancey, Mitchell and Polk all have populations under 21,000.
The region also is home to both higher-income retirees, who can have more free time and more experience navigating complicated finances, and lower-income multigenerational families. In more rural areas, many of the latter tend to distrust the federal government and are reluctant to pursue assistance, said Morgan Monshaugen, disaster recovery program director with the Housing Assistance Corp., a nonprofit that serves Henderson, Polk and Transylvania counties.
A vacant apartment complex, first image, and a mobile home park, second image, in Haywood County, North Carolina, that were damaged by Helene. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)The month before Helene struck, Tulane University researchers released a literature review of 25 years of research on barriers to equitable disaster recovery. They noted common themes, including the confusing aid process and challenges navigating bureaucracies. They also pointed to research that shows inspectors’ biases and time pressures can play a role.
Before 2020, inspectors would go through a long checklist of items that could qualify for repair or replacement money. Someone with more things could therefore get more aid.
After FEMA changed that system, inspectors now record notes about standardized factors such as roof damage and the height of flood marks inside. The amount of damage puts a household into one of several levels, each of which determines how much and what type of repair and rebuild assistance it can get. Some households get additional money for things like heating, venting and air conditioning or septic systems.
“It shouldn’t have to do with anything other than what was damaged and what was repaired,” Edwards said. But she worries biases can still creep in. “If they feel you are a credible person, they could give you a little more assistance, even subconsciously,” she said.
The agency’s decisions come in the form of mailed letters, each regarding a different pot of money. Some letters might have a dollar amount granted. Others might announce denials. It isn’t always obvious that survivors can appeal — an even more arduous process for many.
“It makes it impossibly hard for people to navigate,” Edwards said.
Four months after Helene hit western North Carolina, debris still remained in Yancey County. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica) Hills of ChallengeSusie Hill knew her family would need every dollar they could get to rebuild. So she filled out a FEMA application online and talked to someone at the agency by phone.
Slowly, aid from FEMA started arriving in their bank account — $3,514 first, a set amount for people displaced, then an initial $13,687 for home repair. In October, it reached about $22,000, roughly half of the $42,500 maximum in 2024 for home repair and replacement.
Then the money stopped.
As hope for more aid began to fizzle, Susie pestered FEMA. “I was anxious about getting lost in the mix of so many people across the region in need,” she said. The Hills’ application was one of nearly 1.5 million that FEMA received across the six-state region devastated by Helene.
The Hills got more estimates, uploaded more documents. They set up a GoFundMe campaign that raised more than $53,000. And finally, in late November, they came close to reaching the maximum $42,500 payout from FEMA for home repairs, along with smaller amounts from the agency’s other aid buckets.
“Unfortunately,” Susie said, “I think it is a bit of a socioeconomic situation where we have jobs, where we know people that know people, that maybe have money or that are able to help us, or that have the skills to help us, where other people are just trying to make it day to day.”
Susie Hill (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)Yancey is home to the most families per capita — about 175, or roughly 1 in 36 homeowners — who got the top amount of FEMA home rebuild and repair assistance. Our analysis of more than 75,000 North Carolina homeowners who applied for the assistance in the counties hardest hit by Helene found roughly 1,300 homeowners, or just 1.7%, received the maximum payout.
The Hills had decided to relocate their historic house to a spot on their property farther back from the creek. The FEMA money would cover most of that cost, a critical first step toward gutting it and rebuilding.
On an icy cold day in mid-January, house movers put I-beams underneath the water-damaged structure and used hydraulic lifts to raise it. Then, they hauled it to safer ground.
A family in Tennessee donated a camper for the Hills to live in. After three months of bouncing around, they parked it near the shell of their house. Standing at the front door, to the right, they could see the vast destruction along Cattail Creek. To the left, they could watch their home slowly come back to life.
Susie had to wash their clothes at the elementary school where she works. For other things, they used water carried from a neighbor’s well. Brian had to haul the contents of the toilet to the septic tank. But it was a home.
Cattail Creek, now calm, flooded during Helene and destroyed the Hills’ home. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)An hour’s drive away, the Parkers had sought refuge during the storm at Michelle’s mother’s house. Jeff had fractured his ankle two months before the storm and used a wheelchair. They weren’t taking chances after fleeing their home under darkness — Michelle carrying their two Chihuahuas, one under each arm — when Tropical Storm Fred hit three years earlier.
When they returned home after Helene, their shed was gone. Instead, other people’s structures lay in their yard. Inside, the contents looked like everything had been spun around. Their refrigerator lay on its side. The washing machine sat wedged on top of the dryer.
“It ruined everything — everything,” Michelle said. “I was ready to just die right there. I was like, I can’t go through this again.”
First and second images: Michelle’s home shows signs of destruction from Helene almost a year later. Third image: A vacant house near Michelle’s home. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)A friend set up a GoFundMe, which raised $1,875. The Parkers’ flood insurance paid out $80,000, far below the $209,000 the home had been appraised for a year before. Michelle remembers FEMA offering a free hotel, more than 60 miles away in Tennessee, a distance made farther as Helene’s waters took out parts of Interstate 40. Michelle and Jeff were grateful to receive a donated camper to live in. But their property still had no water or electricity, and they had to rent a place to park it.
The rent for that gravel parking space is $900 a month. Donors paid half, but Michelle has to come up with the rest.
Michelle turned to FEMA. She requested more rental assistance and uploaded an employer letter, a rental agreement, utility bills and a rent receipt. She called FEMA repeatedly.
Michelle and her friend Krista Shalda outside Michelle’s camper. Michelle has struggled to pay the rent for the lot where the camper is parked. (Jesse Barber for ProPublica) “They Are All Gone”FEMA has faced years of criticism from people applying for assistance. Chief among their complaints: inconsistent payouts, the onerous application process, incomprehensible communication and confusing rules.
Jeremiah Isom lost his home and work tools in the Yancey County floodwaters and has since been living here and there. He’s struggled to find a job and has grappled with a FEMA application, complicated by deaths in his family and property ownership issues. It doesn’t help that he’s reluctant to ask for help, much less aggressively seek it from the federal government. Just plowing through each day is hard enough.
“Everyone is so eaten up with PTSD,” Isom said. “It’s got your head so scrambled.”
FEMA has been working on improving its application process. From 2021 to 2024, it announced changes aimed at improving access and equity, including making home repair money available to underinsured households. Another change cut an onerous rule requiring applicants to first apply for a U.S. Small Business Administration loan, which approved less than 4% of all applicants from 2016 to 2018.
Before President Donald Trump took office in January, FEMA also had spent more than a year hiring a team of engineers, designers and product managers to help modernize the online application process. They faced a key challenge: The back-end system that runs much of the process at disasterassistance.gov is 27 years old.
A key problem is that when survivors check their application status, they often see simply that it’s pending. They get no indication of where the application is in the process or why. The FEMA team was working to change that.
Michael Coen, the agency’s chief of staff when the team was formed, noted that people are used to going on Amazon and getting updates about when their order is out for delivery and when it’s about to arrive. Coen said survivors wonder, “Why can’t FEMA do that?”
Volunteers cut firewood in Swannanoa, North Carolina, four months after Helene hit the region. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)Yet since the Trump administration began slashing the agency’s workforce, the team focusing on improvements to the online application process has disintegrated. In January, the team had at least 10 people. Now, it’s down to two. The rest took the deferred resignation offer or were pushed from their posts, current and former FEMA employees told ProPublica and The Assembly.
“They all are gone,” said Alexandra Ferčak, who until May was chief of service delivery enhancement, part of a relatively new office at FEMA. Her team worked closely with the digital team. “We had so much knowledge and expertise, it was unprecedented,” she said.
Without that in-house expertise, major changes are “not going to be effective,” said a FEMA employee who worked with the team but asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.
FEMA did not respond to questions about the team. But in late August, more than 180 current and former FEMA employees signed a public letter to Congress warning that cuts to the agency’s full-time staff risk kneecapping its disaster response capabilities.
In response, Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA, said she is working hard to “streamline this bloated organization into a tool that actually benefits Americans in crisis.” The agency then suspended most who had signed their names to the letter.
One Year LaterThe Hills had their house moved back from Cattail Creek and temporarily propped up until they could get a new foundation laid. But the foundation work depended on the weather, which was varying degrees of terrible all winter.
Heavy rain triggered flashbacks to Helene, and in February it poured. But one Sunday morning, the Hills turned on the gas fireplace in their camper as the temperatures plummeted and the gray rain turned to snowflakes. Despite the gloom outside, they were gleeful.
A retired contractor from Texas volunteering his skills had become the guiding force in their rebuilding. Volunteers from other states also showed up to help. A group from a church in Georgia who work in construction had just visited. They asked what the Hills wanted in their house.
The Hills mostly wanted to add a bathroom so that their daughter, Lucy, who was 9 at the time, would have her own. The men would try to add one. When they left, the Hills went out to dinner using a gift card and declared it the best day ever, or at least something that had been hard to come by since the storm: a great day.
A few months later, a feeling of hope spread across western North Carolina as the dogwoods and redbuds bloomed in puffs of purple and white. Dandelions dotted patches of grass amid the persistent brown muck of mud and fallen trees. Friends and volunteers became fixtures at the Hills’ house. They depended on so much kindness from people. Brian spent every spare minute working on repairs as well.
With help from FEMA and their community, the Hills are rebuilding their home. Signs of normalcy have slowly returned, including a neighbor’s horses coming by to graze. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)Without that initial FEMA money, the Hills’ wrecked house might still be sitting in the moonscape of mud and destruction that persists along Cattail Creek. Instead, as summer waned, the house had electricity, siding, floors, insulation, drywall — and a bathroom for Lucy.
On this one-year anniversary of Helene’s destruction, the Hills expect to move back in any day. Thousands of others aren’t even close.
Michelle now lives alone in the camper. For the past year, donors have been paying half the rent for the lot where she parks the camper. In November, that assistance will come to an end. Michelle has a job working with autistic children but cannot afford the $900 a month on her own.
“It’s just a gravel spot,” she said.
Like the Hills, Michelle credits friends and nonprofits for getting her through the last year. “They just swarmed in and started helping — and lots of them,” she said.
In the spring, Mountain Projects, a local nonprofit that provided the camper, offered her a discounted modular home and a plot of land. Other nonprofits like United Way and Salvation Army have offered to help cover some of the home’s expenses, but Michelle still must come up with $81,000 not yet covered by her insurance or donations.
The buyout program she applied for would pay her the fair market value of her home before the storm, minus her insurance payout. But if she is approved, it could be years before she sees that money. “I’m worried,” she said.
She and Jeff were preapproved for a mortgage loan, but without his income, she isn’t sure she will still qualify. Michelle is thankful for so much help. But a year after Helene, moving into a permanent home feels more unreachable than ever.
The home offered to Michelle by Mountain Projects (Jesse Barber for ProPublica)ProPublica and The Assembly know recovery in western North Carolina is far from over, and so is our reporting. If you have applied or thought about applying to the state housing recovery program, RenewNC, fill out this form. You can reach us with questions or other stories at helenetips@propublica.org.
Mollie Simon contributed research, and Nadia Sussman and Cassandra Garibay contributed reporting.
This post was originally published on ProPublica.
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When Brian and Susie Hill bought a historic house on Cattail Creek in Yancey County, North Carolina, in 2023, they planned to stay forever. Their daughter, Lucy, would chase fireflies in the evenings across their wide expanse of grass.
“It’s that feeling that you always wanted of going home,” Susie said. “Your little family and your little dog and your big yard and the chickens.”
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene upended their lives. After days of rain that saturated the mountains, Helene arrived, turning little streams into raging rivers hundreds of miles inland. The swollen Cattail Creek churned through the Hills’ home, leaving logs in place of furniture and taking porches, doors, windows, appliances and parts of the floor with it.
The Hills watched it all, huddled in their truck parked up a gentle slope. When the water receded, they found the house was uninhabitable.
Suddenly displaced, the Hills began the arduous process of seeking disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The almost $40,000 in federal aid they received allowed them to take critical first steps toward rebuilding. It wasn’t nearly enough money to complete the enormous project. The rest would have to come from their own efforts and an outpouring of community support. Yet it was more than most others in their community managed to muster from the federal disaster aid system.
ProPublica and The Assembly examined federal data, looking at the 10 counties in North Carolina hardest hit by Helene. We found income disparities in the way the agency had distributed housing assistance, even though that aid is supposed to be independent of income. Among the more rural counties hardest hit by Helene, households that got the most FEMA aid tended to be the highest-income ones. In some counties, including Yancey, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money to repair and rebuild their homes as those with lower incomes.
In rural areas, residents can face barriers to seeking assistance ranging from poor access to cellphone and internet service to rugged topography to a lack of money to pay for services.
The reverse was true in urban Buncombe County, home of Asheville, where lower-income homeowners typically received higher FEMA awards for housing assistance. Buncombe is also home to many of the region’s nonprofits that helped low-income residents navigate the FEMA application and appeals process.
For the Hills, it’s been an exhausting year. They’ve been camped in a trailer since January with a view of their former home, working on the house until dark after days of teaching public school. They long for simple comforts of their former life — just sitting in their living room as a family and watching a movie. As the Hills prepare to move back in, we learn in their journey why so many other families may never be able to do so.
Watch the short documentary “Rebuilding After Helene” here.
This post was originally published on ProPublica.
ProPublica and The Assembly have been reporting on the impact of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, and we know recovery is far from over.
We want to hear from North Carolinians whose homes were damaged or destroyed to better understand how well the state housing recovery program, RenewNC, is working for those who need it. If you’ve applied for funding to repair or rebuild your home, let us know what the process has been like, the challenges you’ve experienced and the impact that’s had on your life. We’d also like to hear from you if your home was damaged but you haven’t applied to understand why.
Filling out the form below is the easiest way to share information with us. If you have anything else you would like to share, let us know at helenetips@propublica.org. After you submit your response, Assembly reporter Ren Larson or ProPublica reporter Cassandra Garibay may follow up for more details.
This post was originally published on ProPublica.
Seven of the 18 penguin species are held in captivity at 46 zoos and aquariums across the UK. But questionable living conditions and excess deaths are raising questions about the true purpose of captivity.
Map: HG via Google My Maps. It shows the 46 locations in the UK where Penguins are held in Captivity. Note: Button in top left opens map key.
Of the species kept in the UK, only the African Penguin is critically endangered.
The Northern Rockhopper is endangered, whilst Humboldt and Macaroni Penguins are ‘vulnerable’, which means their numbers in the wild are decreasing.
The others — Gentoo, Magellanic, King and Little — are all of least concern, meaning numbers in the wild are stable.
Infographic: HG via Flourish. Chart shows each penguin species that is held in captivity in the UK, its IUCN status, and how many facilities hold that species. Note: Some facilities hold more than one species so the total number is more than the 46 facilities.
Excess deaths
Licensed zoos in the UK must legally provide captive animals with conditions that meet their physical, psychological, and social needs.
Despite this, a recent Freedom for Animals campaign has highlighted the terrible conditions that SEA LIFE is keeping its Gentoo Penguins in.
Similarly, the Aspinall Foundation has published research that showed that many UK zoos were breaching basic animal welfare standards.
What started as an enterprise of Western colonialism and conquest — menageries displaying the exotic — is now harder to sell.
Zoos didn’t begin under the guise of conservation. It was about control and capitalist profits. They exhibited exotic fauna and made money in the process.
Now, zoos still have profit motives, but they also have a conservation narrative woven effectively into their publicity campaigns.
For example, the Gentoo Penguins held at SEA LIFE are of ‘least concern’, as numbers in the wild are stable. However, SEA LIFE claim its colonies:
Act as crucial ambassadors for threatened penguin species in the wild.
It claims captivity is about conservation and education. However, this appears to be coming at a cost, and some facilities are putting their animals at needless risk in unsuitable living conditions.
The Canary recently revealed excess deaths at Birdland, including 13 critically endangered African Penguins, which were moved there when Bristol Zoo closed in 2022. Compared to other facilities that hold African Penguins, this was excessively high.
Stocklists obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests show that all of Bristol’s penguins died at Birdland. This means they survived less than 6 months at their new home.
Even now, Birdland staff have been elusive with the public about the birds’ whereabouts.
African Penguin informational video. Some stock videos used. From Adobe Stock, under (paid membership, enhanced license - includes commercial and social media.) 1 - Jean van der Meulen, 2 - Andreas, 3 - GoPro. Other clips: HG.
In the same year at Birdworld, there were only three deaths in a colony of 52. Similarly, Whipsnade zoo experienced six deaths out of 47, along with one birth and acquiring the second half of Bristol’s colony (17). Finally, at Natureland in Skegness, there were four deaths, two of which were chicks.
Infographic: HG via Flourish. The chart shows the locations in the UK where African penguins are held for which we were able to obtain stocklists. Note: We were not able to obtain stocklists for Banham Zoo or Combe Martin Wildlife & Dinosaur Park and are therefore not included. Birdworld did have a population of African Penguins in 2021; however, we were not able to obtain a stocklist for that year to confirm precise numbers, and so numbers are not illustrated on the graph. From a previous stocklist, we know the zoo had 41 African Penguins in 2018. Figures for 2025 show only the number of African Penguins each facility held at the start of the year, since stocklists for the year are not yet available.
Experts at both Freedom for Animals and the Born Free Foundation have suggested that something in the environment at Birdland is causing excess deaths.
Captivity-induced diseases
Penguins International emphasises that there are benefits to keeping penguins in captivity. It allows scientists to learn about their life cycles, biology, and how the climate crisis impacts them.
However, keeping them in captivity introduces new problems. Penguins are not well adapted to a sedentary lifestyle, and captivity also exposes them to new diseases and infections that they otherwise would not be exposed to.
Video: HG via VideoScribe. Copyright-free.
Bumblefoot
The Born Free Foundation is an international wildlife charity which rescues and protects wild animals from exploitation. It also conserves threatened species and their natural habitats.
Chris Lewis, Captivity Research & Policy Manager, pointed out that the enclosure floor at Birdland is predominantly concrete. This increases the risk of the birds suffering from bumblefoot, or pododermatitis. This is when the foot pads become infected due to pressure sores from inappropriate flooring. He said that concrete flooring “prioritises cleanliness” over optimal living conditions.
Unlike aspergillosis, wild penguins do get bumblefoot. However, that is due to human influence. As the climate crisis intensifies, wild penguins spend more time on damp, harsher surfaces — just like those in captivity.
Whilst not as bad as in 2022, the footage the Canary obtained recently still clearly shows unclean concrete.
Images: HG. Images show the concrete surface in Birdland’s penguin enclosure. They also show the dirt, mould and stick (foreign object). They show the differences between enclosure conditions in 2022 and 2025.
This video from 2021 shows the concrete in an even worse state.
Species-specific behaviour
In the wild, Humboldt penguins dive up to 150m deep and swim at speeds of 30km/h. They are known to travel up to 35km from their nests in search of food. Similarly, King Penguins dive up to 343m and travel up to 500km in search of fish. Obviously, that cannot be replicated in captivity.
Infographic: HG via Flourish. The graph shows the diving depths of each penguin species that is currently kept in captivity in the UK.
Lewis also pointed out some problems with the penguin pool at Birdland. Whilst it meets the current Standards of Modern Zoo Practice for Great Britain, he suggests that the pool will not meet the new standards, which come into force in May 2027. Section A5.1 states:
Ponds must be of sufficient size to ensure that the available surface area and volume provide for the specific welfare needs of all individuals of the species held within an enclosure. Allowing, where appropriate, swimming, diving, wading, and feeding or foraging according to species-specific behavioural and ecological needs.
The Canary contacted the company that designed the pool at Birdland, and it confirmed:
The pool at Birdland was approx 16.5m long x 3.6m and 1.2m deep.
Considering that King Penguins reach up to 1m tall, Birdland’s pool does not appear to meet this requirement.
Video: HG. Footage from Birdland in Bourton-on-the-Water in July 2025.
Numerous studies on animal welfare have suggested that limiting species’ natural behaviour is a significant source of stress in captivity, which in turn can lead to further health complications.
‘Breaching the Animal Welfare Act’
Footage obtained recently shows baby Humboldt Penguins segregated from the rest of the colony, clearly in distress, without food or water.
Video: HG. Footage from Birdland in Bourton-on-the-Water in July 2025.
When shown the footage, Lewis said:
The conditions provided within the footage of Birdland raise serious questions as to whether legal requirements are being met.
They are demonstrating clear signs of distress by attempting to jump through/over the bars and repeatedly pacing up and down the side of the pens. They also appear to have no water or shelter, thus indicating potential breaches of the Animal Welfare Act 2006.
Finally, at Birdland, the public can get within touching distance of the penguins, which raises questions about both the safety of the birds in terms of disease transmission and the safety of the public should the birds bite. The current Modern Standards of Zoo practice states:
Barriers around pools and land areas should take this into account.
Birdland did not respond to the allegations by the time of publication.
Both Cotswold District Council, the local authority responsible for inspecting Birdland, and the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA), said they are investigating the allegations.
‘Poor hygiene’
Flamingo Land in North Yorkshire is home to a colony of Humboldt Penguins.
The latest inspection report noted the penguins had high mortality rates, along with:
Poor levels of hygiene in part due to design and maintenance of the facility.
The inspector gave them three months to implement a mortality review of the last ten years, and six months to improve the penguins’ living conditions or rehome them.
Through FOI requests to North Yorkshire County Council, the Canary obtained a copy of the mortality review. It was undertaken by the veterinary team at Flamingo Land, which included an approved veterinary surgeon.
It painted a shocking picture. In a decade, Flamingo Land lost 149 penguins. Chicks made up the majority of these deaths (92), with mortality rates soaring to chronic levels over 81%.
Atrociously, the park had failed to keep post-mortem records for the majority of its penguin deaths in 2015 and 2016. However, the review identified an overall pattern of primary causes of death. These included infectious diseases like avian malaria, aspergillosis, and necrotising gastroenteritis.
It also listed trauma and “foreign material ingestion” as leading causes, the latter of which involved consuming grass, twigs, sticks, and in one instance, even a “metal” object.
‘Systemic and environmental contributors’
Amid the litany of damning findings, the review highlighted some extremely worrying causal factors. Among them were damp nest boxes with poor ventilation, rodent infestations in nesting rooms, and standing water, creating the conditions for disease to proliferate.
It also pointed to the poor, unvaried diet Flamingo Land was providing the penguins, which had triggered nutritional imbalances. Other problems with hygiene and water monitoring provided “implausible” results. It also noted how the enclosure’s unclean substrate had led to penguins swallowing foreign materials, which ultimately led to a number of deaths.
The review concluded that there were:
Systemic and environmental contributors to Humboldt penguin mortality over the last decade
‘It is a much easier life for them’
A Flamingo Land staff member told the Canary:
They almost always get up into their twenties, which for penguins is quite fortunate. In the wild, they get to 15 or 20 if they’re lucky. But we have had some individuals get to 27, 28 years old, because it is a much easier life for them. They’ve always got enough food, nothing is trying to eat them, and we do have permanent vets on site.
He then reiterated:
The penguins almost always get to quite a ripe old age here, providing they do survive their first few months. Now chicks is always a higher mortality.
Given the inspection report and the mortality review the Canary obtained, this may not be accurate.
When questioned specifically about preventing aspergillosis and similar infections that may come from the environment, he said:
Every time we’re going into a new enclosure we are cleaning our hands, we’re getting a fresh pair of gloves, we are making sure that anything that we’ve got with us isn’t coming from one bird enclosure to another because then if we do unfortunately have an outbreak of something in one enclosure we’re not spreading it to absolutely everything else.
However, as Chris Lewis of the Born Free Foundation pointed out, no amount of hand cleaning, gloves, or cross-contamination will prevent the infection if the enclosures contain mould, damp, or dirt.
Finally, the Canary raised the question of protecting the birds from Bird flu:
Video: HG. Interview and footage taken at Flamingo Land Zoo in North Yorkshire, July 2022.
In an official response to both the mortality review and the interview, an Executive at Flamingo Land said:
Allegations about lying are a serious comment to make and can have serious consequences. For the record we refute this.
We do not recognise the document you are referring to. We would advise caution in referring to this in any publication you may make.
At the time of publication, North Yorkshire County Council — the local authority responsible for both inspecting and licensing Flamingo Land — had not responded to the allegations.
Is conservation working?
The benefits to modern zoo keeping — whether it’s educational, academic, or conservation — are not really playing out for the animals. Lewis, said:
What you have to assess is what benefit the species gains from being kept in captivity?
Genuine conservation efforts would be tackling those threats in the wild so that they are either reduced or eliminated.
Lewis would also question whether seeing a penguin in a zoo brings any educational benefit. Whilst there is “no question” that people like penguins, does seeing them in an artificial environment really lead to “meaningful behaviour change”? He added:
Keeping species in zoos is almost a distraction. It lures people into a false sense of security that these species are fine because they’re in a zoo, they’re being protected.
Ultimately, zoos are places of entertainment
Addressing the issues which threaten these species in the wild is real conservation.
The attitude of conquest has been transformed into liberal preservation, but ultimately is failing its own standards. Money still talks, and zoos are limited in how altruistic they can actually be for animals. Profit is being placed above the welfare of animals — and will reform ever happen in an inherently exploitative system?
Should animals be kept in zoos and aquariums in the UK?
— HG (@wordsbyHG) August 12, 2025
Isobel McNally, Campaigns Officer at Freedom for Animals, said:
Zoos have been around for hundreds of years now, and the animals that are being kept in zoos, so-called conservation programmes, are not being released to the wild; the wild populations aren’t recovering as a result of what zoos are doing.
Real conservation happens in the wild; it’s in the form of protected areas where fishing isn’t allowed, for example, in the case of penguins. Penguins are struggling to access food because of overfishing in the areas that they are trying to hunt, so you can help penguins by protecting them from having their food resources depleted.
Feature image – Flamingo Land — © [2025] Google, Map Data © [2023] [Google Earth]”, other images: HG.
By HG
This post was originally published on Canary.
Image by Chester Ho.
The truck wheel’s inner tube was right in front of me, no longer half-submerged in the pond’s late summer muck. After so many hot weeks without rain, the water had dried up and the garbage was completely exposed.
My feet barely sank into the mud as I pulled the inner tube free. It was heavier than I expected, full of leftover pond water. I tipped it to drain the water, so I could carry it away. But that water just kept dribbling out.
It was dark and smelled of rotten leaves. As I shook the tube, I tried to keep the muck from getting on my shoes. There must have been three or four gallons of it. Contorted in an uncomfortable crouch and harassed by bugs as the water glugged slowly out of the little hole, I felt impatient. I was ready to share my grubby prize with my friends, but the hole was so small and I was still far from the road. So, I waited, watching the water continue to trickle out.
But I couldn’t just wait. Instead, my mind drifted to catastrophe, and I began imagining a near future where I could no longer take water for granted. Such a thought was in my head not just because I’m prone to binge on dystopian novels but because I read the newspaper and watch the TV news at night. So, there I was, crouching at the no-longer-pond’s edge, cradling that huge inner tube, and wondering how long it would be in our overheating future before the dark, fetid water I was pouring onto the ground would seem like a precious resource for my family and me. Extended drought? The collapse of our water infrastructure? War? None of those nightmare scenarios is remote enough anymore that I can simply dismiss them as figments of my overactive imagination.
Meanwhile, I continued to think about that gross water. How would I clean it if I needed to? I recalled my survival-skills training between 8th and 9th grade and decided I would first have to filter it, then boil it, and finally treat it with iodine. And no, it wouldn’t be delicious or refreshing, but it probably wouldn’t kill us either. Then I thought about how it might have been inside that inner tube for years and realized that life would have to be brutish indeed before I considered such a last resort water source.
Is our water infrastructure here in New London, Connecticut, old? It sure is. Sometimes there are even black flecks in the water that pours out of our faucets. But no worries now. After all, I had a big bottle of fleckless water in my backpack, and I certainly wouldn’t need to drink that ancient inner-tube pond water. Not today, anyway.
Better yet, rain was forecast for later in the weekend! And so, the moment passed — but not completely because I suddenly remembered some water I drank 30 years ago that had been boiled over a wood fire in a small town in Guatemala when I was part of a peace delegation there. All these years later, my tongue could still feel the eerie dryness, the woodiness of that water, and suddenly I wondered whether that feeling would be in my future, too.
Water Wars — For Real
The kids in New London had gathered in this park just a few weeks earlier for “Water Wars,” a beloved community institution where, on a hot summer morning, kids and grown-ups arm themselves with water guns and soak one another. That day, there was also a dunk tank, a deejay, and dozens of people running around with big, brightly colored Super Soakers.
In truth, I’ve never liked the event, perhaps because I’m a grumpy old person who just doesn’t care for guns of any sort, even play ones. And now, contemplating the future loss of water and the violence that could come with it, those Water Wars suddenly seemed like fin de siècle madness to me. As I — excuse the image — immerse myself ever more deeply in the current and impending water crises, I find myself increasingly troubled by the very real water wars to come.
The Pacific Institute, which has tracked water-related conflicts for three decades, never counted more of them than the 347 in 2023 (the last year for which it had complete data). Its report distinguished between water as a trigger for war, a weapon of war, and a casualty of war. In Burkina Faso, Mexico, Ukraine, and elsewhere globally, civilians now all too often find themselves going without water, as its sources and treatment facilities are destroyed, while groups fight over who controls what water remains.
Dr. Peter Gleick, cofounder of the Pacific Institute, wrote The Third Age of Water in which he argues that everyone deserves the “human right to water.” And at this moment, nowhere on earth is water more a cause for and casualty of war than in Palestine. As he notes, that is “partly a reflection on the scarcity of water in the region. It’s partly a reflection on disputes over control of land in the West Bank. And it’s partly a reflection of the massive destruction of Gaza after the Hamas attack in October, where infrastructure of all kinds has been targeted — civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, water systems, energy systems. It’s a reflection of the broad violence in the region.” In short, there is no longer any human right to water in Gaza or parts of the West Bank either.
And believe it or not, even as such realities came to my mind, the water was still dribbling out of that inner tube, while my arms hurt ever more from holding it up. Still, when I placed my minuscule discomfort alongside that of all those people in Gaza, waiting in vain for both water and food in a manmade famine of genocidal proportions, I felt ashamed.
All Wars Are Resource Wars
Even before the complete leveling of all infrastructure there in an almost two-year massive bombardment, the lives of Palestinians were violently controlled and curtailed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). An IDF Military Order had long forbidden Palestinians from building any new water installations without a permit from the Israeli army. Since that order was issued in 1967, almost no one has gotten such a permit. So, Palestinians weren’t able to drill new water wells, install pumps, or even deepen existing wells. And now, many of them don’t have access to fresh water springs at all and are cut off from the Jordan River.
In a Big Brother twist that boggles the mind, they aren’t even allowed to collect rainwater in cisterns. As writer Ta-Nehisi Coates observed in his book The Message, “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.” And if anyone is still on the fence about that one-sided war of dominion, such a piece of information should knock you to the side of the suffering, starving, thirsty, dying Palestinians.
Of course, on some level, all wars are resource wars. Military scholar Michael Klare made exactly that point as early as 2001. For nearly two years, Israel has used Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, attack on civilian and military targets as its excuse to destroy as much of Gaza as possible — mission (almost) complete. Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East” fever dream of Gaza as a casino-state built to Atlantic City levels of gaudiness might never be realized, but Israel’s long game certainly includes complete control over Palestinian natural resources, including oil and gas. Americans are propagandized to think of the “poor Palestinians” (if we think of them at all), even though Palestine is rich in natural resources.
Trump Doesn’t Drink Water
The rumor is that Donald Trump drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day (the best argument against “Just for the Taste of It” I’ve ever heard). His aversion to drinking water is well known; and his antipathy toward the basic building blocks of life seems to come right out of a Mad Max movie, but it’s consistent with his administration’s assault on the water system infrastructure in the United States.
The 2024 Report Card of the American Society of Civil Engineers gives our water infrastructure a C-. Worse yet, they project a $309 billion chasm in funding between the drinking-water-infrastructure needs of this country and what the federal government is allocating in investments. And that chasm is expected to grow into a gulf of $620 billion by 2043. In short, we’re losing the equivalent of 50 million Olympic-sized swimming pools of water through leaks and cracks every year, more than enough to meet the needs of the 2.2 million Americans who don’t have running water or basic indoor plumbing, according to Dig Deep, a water access organization. That’s one hell of a lot of people in the richest nation on earth, even if not that many in a population of 340 million.
While you might imagine that it’s just back-to-the-landers and old White hippies who like to chop wood and haul water, more than 44 million of us are served by inadequate water systems that recently had Safe Drinking Water Act violations — one of every seven Americans. My black-flecked water might be among that number.
President Trump, of course, is hardly bending over backwards to address such a gulf in water access. For him, undoubtedly, the problem doesn’t even register, not like railing against apocalyptic city hellscapes, deputizing brutes to muscle immigrants out of the country, or selectively mourning some victims of gun violence and not others.
Rain Barrel Resistance
I collect rainwater in three big olive barrels with spigots drilled into the bottom and mesh stretched over the top to try to keep mosquitoes from setting up residence there. Earlier this year, I even bought a dozen goldfish after the Internet assured me they would eat mosquito larvae. I freed them into those barrels and encouraged my kids to name them. Within a week, unfortunately, they turned up dead at the top of the barrels.
I use the water to keep my weedy garden alive and give it to my chickens (assumedly with tasty mosquito larvae for extra protein). I got the rain barrels after reading that unchlorinated, untreated rainwater is better for plants. In light of everything, can I now see those barrels as an act of resistance on this distinctly overheating planet of ours? How long before someone tries to regulate rainwater collection? How long before the tech bros figure out a way to put a price tag on what falls from the sky? (That’s anything but far-fetched if you consider how everything else is being privatized.)
How long can I depend on the relatively clean water from my tap? It flows in a big underground pipe from a reservoir less than 10 miles from my home and is filtered by my local water company. That system has provided New London, a town established in the 1600s, with water for a good long time, but will it keep doing so for the foreseeable, ever hotter future? In fact, is there a foreseeable future?
Sometimes, I pay my water bill in person. I asked once if there was anything I could do to be more efficient and steward my water resources better. The woman behind the counter looked at my bill and then said, “For a single person, you’re doing pretty good.”
“Oh,” I replied, “I’m actually a family of five.” (I wondered then if I looked like a single lady or if she was just basing her statement on my water consumption.)
“What!?” she exclaimed and added, “You are not a very good water customer then. You should get a pool or wash your car more or something!”
I realized that she was joking and we laughed together. Then, she commended me on my family’s good water savings.
And it’s true that here in the northeast, I might still be able to lull myself into complacency. It’s raining, in fact, as I write this. But I can’t act so naively when we’re clearly heading off a weather cliff. A recent headline in my local newspaper still haunts me. “Scientists tap ‘secret’ fresh water under the ocean, raising hopes for a thirsty world.” What could go wrong? After all, there’s evidently a vast freshwater aquifer beneath the ocean floor off the eastern coast of the United States and, amid a massive and growing water crisis, the world needs water. However, Woods Hole geophysicist Rob Evans offers caution: “If we were to go out and start pumping these waters, there would almost certainly be unforeseen consequences.”
Will that aquifer and others like it become the United States’ strategic reserves, alongside oil reserves and the nuclear weapons we keep in “reserve” to protect our wealth? Might countries like ours someday go to war to defend any edge they might have in dwindling water reserves? Trump’s saber-rattling at our neighbor to the north was at least partially water-related, wasn’t it? In his usual fantasy-filled fashion, he imagined a “large faucet” directing Canadian water to California’s needy orchards and fields.
Preparing for — Responding to — All the Bads
Which will get us first? Forest fires or fascism? Misogyny or microplastics? Global warming or the paramilitary/ICE take over? Obviously, we’re in an age of polycrisis, of multi-headed, interconnected catastrophes that we need to confront all at once.
Talk about drinking from a fire hose! But at least we have to keep trying.
I suffer from brief spells of wanting to just sink into the leftover muck in the park where I found that old inner tube and let all the change — the good and bad, but mostly the bad — just wash over me.
Instead, I shouldered that still heavy (but by now empty) inner tube, put one small foot in front of another, and hauled it out of the pond bed. As I dragged it along the path, I toggled between despair, hopelessness, and a steadfast grind of resolute, teeth-gritting effort to do good.
I can’t change the gutting of federal institutions or the assault on science. But I can pick up trash in a public park. I can’t end the Israel Defense Forces assault on Gaza, but I do boycott (no SodaStream for me). I have divested (my paltry nest egg) and I still support sanctions.
I can’t keep Donald Trump from building up ICE as a paramilitary goon squad or stop the polar ice caps from melting, but I can smile at my neighbors, network with friends into rapid response whenever ICE shows up, and do my best not to use too much water.
It’s all so small, given everything we face, that it’s almost not worth mentioning. Still, that drying pond bed is at least a little cleaner, my community a little friendlier, and I am at least witnessing (and trying to alleviate) the suffering in Palestine. Shouldn’t that matter at least a little?
This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.
The post Water, Water, Everywhere? (Not Anymore!) appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Power plant near Point of Rocks, Wyoming. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a proposed rulein the Federal Register that would eliminate reporting requirements for 46 types of sources under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. If finalized, oil and gas facilities, suppliers, and injection sites wouldn’t have to report emissions data to the EPA after 2024. While the action aligns with the administration’s efforts to undermine climate action and ease regulations for corporations, it is facing pushback from an unexpected source: the oil and gas companies.
EPA’s move ties back to an executive order in January, titled “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” that aimed to reduce the costs for companies in complying with federal regulations. In this case, the administration’s target is greenhouse gas reporting for oil and gas producers, processors, and operators mandated under “Subpart W” of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which was revised by the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.
Congress initially created the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule with the passage of the 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which stated that “greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere are causing average temperatures to rise at a rate outside the range of natural variability and are posing a substantial risk of rising sea-levels, altered patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation, and increased frequency and severity of floods, droughts, and wildfires.” Data collection was made official under section 114 of the Clean Air Act. Later, the Inflation Reduction Act amended the Clean Air Act to add reporting requirements for “methane emissions and [a] waste reduction incentive program for petroleum and natural gas systems.”
Dealing with emissions from oil and gas production has been a challenge in achieving both US and international climate goals, especially as countries try to transition to cleaner energy. Based on 2023 Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program data, oil and gas producers are the second-largest contributors of CO₂ emissions behind power plants (Figure 1).
Figure 1
The change to the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program reporting requirements and other climate actions under the Biden administration were seen as a step forward. But like in other areas of the government, the Trump administration is removing the data to hide the problem. One potential snag in Trump’s plan is the oil and gas producers themselves. According to Politico, no major trade associations have requested that the EPA end the reporting requirement. That’s because beginning in 2027, companies importing gas into the European Union will be required to provide the very same emissions data.
To comply with the EU’s new policy, the emissions data must be verified by a third party, which in the past has been the EPA. Without EPA monitoring, companies will have to rely on outside certification through third parties, which will increase costs for those looking to transport oil and gas on global markets, as well as for climate-conscious purchasers within the US. Ironically, the new EU policies are linked to Trump’s pressure on European nations to stop importing Russian gas, instead favoring US suppliers.
Ultimately, oil and gas companies could be the ones to stop the EPA’s plan to end reporting requirements, even though their goals are different from a clean energy transition. That’s because, much like with his tariffs, Trump’s actions will end up costing these companies more, highlighting the complex and often counterintuitive consequences of deregulation. While ultimately an environmental justice movement should be based on the dismantling of the fossil fuel industry, we’ll take what we can get right now.
This first appeared on CEPR.
The post EPA Eyes End to Emissions Reporting, Raising Concerns for US Gas Exporter appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
In October 2023, Manaus vanished behind a suffocating wall of smoke. The capital of Amazonas woke up to one of the worst air pollution crises the Amazon has ever seen.
The sky turned the colour of ash, more like a dystopian film set than the world’s largest tropical forest. The air grew so heavy and toxic that residents dug out their old covid masks just to breathe.
For weeks, the population of Manaus, over two million people, endured a suffocating haze, with pollution so severe it matched, and at times exceeded, the levels of the world’s dirtiest megacities.
The Amazon’s BR-319 smoke pollution crisis: a health emergency
The Amazon has always swung between wet and dry seasons, but in 2023, things aligned in the worst possible way. An El Niño in the Pacific collided with an Atlantic dipole, a pattern of warmer water in the north Atlantic and cooler water in the south. The result was a brutal drought priming the forest to burn.
Burning forests release smoke filled with microscopic particles (PM2.5), which act strangely in the atmosphere: instead of forming raindrops large enough to fall, they create tiny droplets that just hang there. In other words, smoke keeps rain from falling, drought drags on, and more fires ignite.
According to a recently-published study in the Discover Sustainability journal, on 12 October 2023, air quality monitors in Manaus registered PM2.5 levels of 314 micrograms a cubic metre (µg/m3), more than twenty times the World Health Organization’s safety limit.
To put it into perspective, that number beat even Delhi’s infamous pollution peaks that year. For a city like Manaus, accustomed to relatively clean air, it was like being plunged into a health emergency overnight.
The smoke crisis in Manaus happened under president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government.
An enormous health hazard
We often think of water and food as our most basic needs, but we take in far more air every day, about 14 kilograms of it, compared to just 2 kilograms of water and 1.5 kilograms of food. Every breath in Manaus during the crisis was filled with toxins.
The dangers of prolonged exposure to polluted air the population of Manaus were under, can cut months, even years, off life expectancy. Doctors have long warned that breathing PM2.5 damages the lungs, strains the heart, and weakens the immune systems.
In the Amazon, the crisis landed hardest on children, older people, and people already living with fragile health. What should have been a season of heat and river breezes, turned into weeks of coughing, burning eyes, and the smell of ash.
Who lit the match?
At first, state officials, including the governor of Amazonas, Wilson Lima, and the state’s secretary of the environment, were quick to blame the neighbouring state of Pará as the source of fires. However, the study and its data tell a different story.
The study revealed that satellite imagery, air quality sensors, and field inspections identified the southern area of Manaus, particularly the municipalities of Autazes, Careiro, and Manaquiri, located along the BR-319 and AM-254 highways, as the main sources of smoke emissions.
Vast areas of forest weren’t lost to accident; they were burned on purpose to make way for cattle pasture. After the fires, bulldozers moved in, water buffalo spread across the fresh clearings, and illegal side roads crept further into once-intact rainforest.
The lead author of the study, Lucas Ferrante, a researcher at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), mentioned:
This study shows that Brazil is heading in the opposite direction of its commitments for COP30, with millions of tons of emissions turning Manaus into a city under smoke. The forest is burning while public officials such as the governor of Amazonas, Wilson Lima, deflect attention away from the fires, even as they endorse laws that benefit those who use fire to clear land and illegally expand cattle ranching.
Fires weren’t just an unfortunate by-product of drought; they were tools in a land-grabbing playbook.
BR-319: the road that lights the fire
At the heart of the crisis lies the BR-319 highway, linking the capital of Amazonas, Manaus, to the capital of Rondônia, Porto Velho.
First built in the 1970’s, abandoned in the 1980’s, the road is now at the heart of a heated debate: should it be rebuilt and paved?
Supporters call the reconstruction of the BR-319 highway ‘development’, but critics call it destruction.
Studies show that deforestation rates within 40km of the BR-319 are already more than double the Amazon average. The mere promise of reconstruction of the highway has triggered waves of illegal occupation.
If fully rebuilt, the BR-319 would connect Manaus, still surrounded by vast intact forest, to the “arc of deforestation” further south, dragging the chaos of frontier expansion straight to the heart of the central Amazon.
Supporters argue that paving the road is about development and connection, but the evidence suggests otherwise. More roads mean more illegal side roads, more land grabbing, more illicit activities, more fire, and more smoke choking cities like Manaus.
Ferrante highlighted the lack of coordination and accountability among different levels of government in addressing the issue. He stressed that the situation reveals deep contradictions in Brazil’s leadership on climate and infrastructure:
There is no effective command or control, and negligence is evident across municipal, state, and federal authorities. Right now, President Lula is paving ‘Lot C’ – a 52-kilometer section of the BR-319 highway – without environmental studies or licensing, a contradictory move for someone who presents himself as a climate leader.
The 2023 smoke crisis wasn’t an isolated event; it was a warning of what’s to come if this road is allowed to go ahead.
A governance failure
Beyond the weather patterns and the bulldozers, what really fuelled the smoke crisis was weak governance.
State and federal authorities failed to act quickly and effectively. Requests for federal help came late, long after the skies had turned toxic. Local agencies looked the other way and cattle ranchers carved up Indigenous lands.
Instead of tackling the root cause, some leaders doubled-down on roadbuilding and laws that make it easier to legalise deforestation after the fact.
For the people of Manaus, this went beyond politics, it was personal, a reminder that failures in policy ultimately reach the the very air they breathe.
It’s easy to view Manaus’ smoke crisis as a purely local issue, but the Amazon is interconnected, and its problems resonate far beyond one city.
The forest generates moisture that flow south, the so called ‘flying rivers‘, feeding crops, rivers, and water reservoirs across Brazil and beyond. Its role in stabilising climate is critical.
Burning and replacing the forest with pasture in the BR-319 region threatens all of that, risking tipping the central and western Amazon toward ecological collapse, accelerating biodiversity loss already driven by the climate crisis. It also compromises the water and climate systems that millions of Brazilians, and the world, rely on.
A shift in mindset is required, away from the idea that roads equal progress, and toward a vision where the Amazon’s values lie in its standing forest, flowing rivers, and thriving communities.
A warning of what’s to come
The 2023 smoke crisis was a warning, an unforgettable sign of what happens when climate extremes, fire, and governance failures collide.
It showed that the reconstruction of the BR-319 highway isn’t just an infrastructure project, it’s an environmental gamble with stakes that include public health, biodiversity, and climate stability.
The people of Manaus, who lived under toxic skies, deserve better leadership and policies that protect their air, their health, and their future.
The Amazon is often called the lungs of the planet. But in 2023, those lungs wheezed. The question now is whether Brazil, and the world, will take the warning seriously, or whether we’ll allow the next crisis to arrive, heavier, darker, and harder to breathe through.
Feature image via Channel 4 News/Youtube.
This post was originally published on Canary.
What if there were a technology that could help to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, air pollution and environmental degradation, while improving health, reducing social inequality and boosting economic growth? There is, and this month it turns 200. The opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in northeast England on 27 September 1825 is generally considered to be the birth of the modern railway — an event that set in motion a revolution in human mobility and social organization.
Initially, the railways enjoyed breakneck expansion, but since the mid-twentieth century, railway development in most countries has hit the buffers, and been overtaken by growth in road and air travel.
The post Make Trains Great Again For The Sake Of People And The Planet appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Fireweed in burnt forest, Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, Montana. Photo: George Wuerthner.
I attended the University of Montana as an undergraduate back in the 1970s. I had many professors who I felt were exceptional. The common denominator in the teachings of all my professors was to look at things from an ecological and evolutionary perspective.
Of all my professors, Richard (Dick) Hutto had the greatest influence on my thinking about ecology.
I took ornithology and several other ecology courses from Hutto. His enthusiastic lectures on evolutionary biology often ended with a smile and his signature exclamation, “Isn’t this cool?”
Yes, it was cool.
A good professor provides a new way to view the world. From Hutto, I learned to see things from an evolutionary perspective and to question traditional assumptions about ecology.
I was already beginning to confront my original assumptions about fire ecology and how the only “good fires” were low-severity and frequent, when the 1988 Yellowstone Fires occurred. At that time, I was residing in Livingston, Montana, just north of the park, and almost every day that summer, I was in the park observing the fires.
In part due to the worldview I gained from Dick’s classes, I have come to understand that many animals and plants live in mortal fear of green forests—they are so dependent on the dead snag forests and downed wood that results from these high-severity blazes, where most trees are killed.
Challenging traditional wildfire assumptions is central in Richard Hutto’s new book, A Beautifully Burned Forest: Learning to Celebrate Severe Fire. He’s among the few who study the unique, necessary role of severely burned forests in western conifer ecosystems. Hutto explains why negative views of burnt forests are misplaced, arguing for a new paradigm that values them as critical ecological elements and calls out misguided policies like post-fire logging and thinning.
His book, like his classes, is a superb overview of ecology and ecological thinking using wildfire to illustrate how to “think” about natural processes.
However, his book is more than a scientific thesis on wildfire. He tells his story in a first-person narrative, explaining how many experiences from growing up in southern California, with its frequent chaparral blazes, to his wide-ranging research specifically on birds from Mexico to the Northern Rockies influenced his thinking and understanding of wildfire.
Through the stories related in his personal narrative, we gain a great deal of insight into fire ecology.
Hutto’s insights into burnt forest were initiated by the Black-backed Woodpecker, a species almost entirely dependent on the snag forests resulting from high-severity fires. Like the sage grouse’s association with sagebrush, the Black-backed Woodpecker relies on an ephemeral ecological habitat—the severely burnt forest.
That a species could become dependent on such ephemeral habitat demonstrates that severe burnt forests were not some aberrations, but common enough that the woodpecker evolved to depend on these kinds of environments.
What his ongoing research demonstrated is that numerous species reach their greatest abundance in post-fire forests. Not only woodpeckers, but bluebirds, tree swallows, Townsend Solitaires, and Robins, among others.
Another discussion in Hutto’s book is the problems created by the use of fire scars to generalize about fire regimes or what Hutto calls the “forests are out of whack” narrative. I’ve discussed these problems in past commentary, though Hutto does a much better job of explaining how the use of fire scars skews our thinking. It’s worth the price of the book to understand the issue, since fire scars are almost universally used to determine the “historic” fire regime and management designed to “restore” or “fix” forests, usually through logging, but are full of methodological problems that distort interpretation. Most western forests naturally experience major wildfires only every few decades to centuries, so they do not require intervention or restoration.
Hutto suggests we must get over the idea that succession or plant and animal communities move towards some predetermined “climax” condition. In many ecosystems, the transitional stages are as critically important to the diversity of life as some “end state.”
Hutto laments that the story of the “beautifully burned forest” is a hard sell to the public since far too many agencies, companies, and even conservation organizations depend on promoting the idea that green forests are the ideal, and anything that threatens trees, from bark beetles to wildfire, is undesirable. We are inundated with the “good fire” (low severity) and “bad fire” that kills individual trees. However, this is a failure to see the forest through the trees.
The forest ecosystem depends on the occasional death of its trees (and associated shrubs). As Hutto rightly observes:
…we need to stop inundating the public with warlike language when it comes to severe fire and with images that play on a ‘good fire/bad fire’ theme designed to spread the falsehood that any burned-forest condition other than one following thinning and prescribed burning is undesirable.
Hutto observes that:
Despite the explosion of interest in forest fires these days, there is still surprisingly little ecology associated with the fire science literature. Instead, fire scientists are focused on understanding fire behavior so we can better control that behavior, primarily through timber harvesting and prescribed burning. Simply put, fire scientists undervalue ecology in their studies of fire.
Because of the natural public aversion to blackened forests, agencies promote policies like thinning (read logging) and prescribed burns to reduce (they claim) the occurrence of high-severity blazes. But as Hutto goes to great lengths to explain, these management strategies are not ecological analogues to natural high-severity wildfire. Logging removes the physical structure (potential snags and downed wood) common in severely burnt forests. He also notes, as I have, that the idea that Indian burning shaped most western ecosystems ignores the fact that such fires were primarily local, thus not a major ecological force across the western ecosystems.
Hutto articulates why these policies fail. Most high-severity wildfire events occur during extreme fire weather events—and under such conditions. As he suggests: “fuels play a trivial role under extreme weather conditions, which is when fires tend to burn severely across 98% of forested lands that do burn in the West, thinned or not.” And he argues, as others have said, that the way to protect homes and communities is to reduce the flammability of the home and surroundings.
He also challenges the idea that fire suppression prevents large blazes. In particular, he holds back nothing when he critiques post fire logging: “I am hard-pressed to find any other example in wildlife biology where the effect of a particular land-use activity is as close to 100% negative as the typical post fire salvage-logging operation tends to be.”
I recall skiing up Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone the winter after the 88 fires and seeing the gray snags left after the blazes against the snow, creating a beautiful black and white image and thinking to myself, “Why, this looks just like a New England winter forest scene.
Hutto asks us to see the burnt forest through new eyes. “With ecological education, the public can come to view a newly blackened hillside not as a scar, but as a beauty mark on the landscape!”
I think it would be difficult after reading Hutto’s book to see the burnt forest landscape as anything but wonderous and beautiful.
The Beautifully Burned Forest is a book that I wish I could get into the hands (and, of course, hope they read it) of every politician, agency land manager, and conservation organizations. It will surely make you exclaim as Hutto did every day in class—”Isn’t this cool!”
The post Finding Beauty in a Burnt Forest: Toward a Paradigm Shift on Wildfire appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Leucistic Long-Finned Oscar. Photograph by Kurt Auerbach. Public Domain
Tropical fish are among the most popular pets in the world, with millions sold every year to brighten aquariums in homes, offices, and even car dealerships. Yet behind their vibrant colors lies a hidden crisis. Most buyers don’t realize that fish are sentient animals who can feel pain, remember, and form social bonds—and that caring for them properly is far from simple. The result is an industry built on misinformation and suffering, one that harms not only individual fish but also fragile ecosystems. The story of Wilde, an oscar fish rescued from a New York car dealership, reveals why the way we treat tropical fish deserves far more scrutiny.
Wilde’s Story
The first 12 years of Wilde’s life are mostly unknown, but based on the condition he was found in, we can only imagine that those years were hell for him. What we do know is that those years were spent in a bare 55-gallon fish tank in the waiting room of a New York car dealership.
To understand why this was excruciating for Wilde, let’s consider how tricky it is to mimic nature in a glass box. Fish food and fish waste produce ammonia, which is harmful to fish even in small amounts. The tanks require a method to convert this ammonia into a safer compound. Typically, they use “nitrifying bacteria” to convert it to nitrite and then nitrate, which is only bad for them in high quantities. Unfortunately, Wilde’s water at the dealership had traces of ammonia, burning his gills and skin, and high levels of nitrate, which can cause nitrate poisoning.
Another major problem: oscar fish like Wilde are very large. The width of a 55-gallon tank is 13 inches, and Wilde measures 13.5 inches long. This meant he had to contort his body just to be able to turn around. His tank only gave him 48 inches to swim across, meaning his body already took up a third of the tank’s length. Just imagine living in a broom closet for a dozen years, while the air is burning your skin and slowly making you sicker. That was life for Wilde, the oscar fish.
Luckily, a member of a New York-based animal sanctuary happened to be at this car dealership and noticed Wilde. Even without knowledge of aquatic animals, it was clear to this person that this fish was not in good shape. Wilde’s entire body was strewn with open lesions—hexamitiasis, commonly referred to as hole-in-the-head disease. His scales were all black; not one speck of a tiger oscar’s classic orange-gray color scheme could be seen. What’s more, Wilde’s left eye did not match his right. It was smashed in and severely deformed. While we don’t know precisely what caused this, it likely started as a minor eye injury, increasing in severity over time as Wilde’s constantly stressed body and weakened immune system were unable to heal the injury. Wilde lost all sight in this eye, which would never return.
Concerned, the sanctuary person talked to the dealership’s owner, who agreed to surrender Wilde. They ended up reaching out to someone else in the sanctuary community, who then reached out to us at Still Water Microsanctuary. Our place here in Ohio didn’t have the space and resources to properly care for an oscar fish at the time, but luckily, we found a foster in Michigan who agreed to hold on to him for a few months while we got set up. With a plan in place, we rented a car, drove eight hours to NYC to pick Wilde up, and then drove eight hours back. The fact that Wilde survived that journey, in as rough a shape as he was in, is a testament to his resilience against all odds.
Wilde’s healing process was slow, but consistent. He lived in a 90-gallon tank at his foster—not ideal, but a significant upgrade nonetheless—and he made friends with two large common plecos while he was there. Meanwhile, back in Ohio, we secured a tank, a heavy-duty filter, and other necessary supplies—but even then, establishing a healthy nitrogen cycle in a brand-new fish tank has complicated steps. It takes a lot of time and patience, contrary to what most pet stores claim. It took two and a half months to get the 150-gallon tank ready for Wilde, but as soon as it was, we drove out to Michigan and brought Wilde—plus his two new friends, Pitter and Patter—home to Ohio.
After finding his final home with us, Wilde blossomed into the spunkiest, most beautiful, most outgoing fish I’ve ever met. His skin and eye healed (though he remained blind in it), and his orange colors returned (or came in for the first time). Wilde still had lots of scars that would never fade entirely, but he showed them off proudly. They were a part of his story and who he was. Though Wilde was very happy in his 150 gallons, we had planned to upgrade him to even more space eventually. That is, until we took an unexpectedly bloated Wilde to the vet one day to discover a tumor. Despite our best efforts to find a blood donor and fundraise for his surgery, the tumor turned out to be too connected to vital organs. We said goodbye to Wilde in August 2023.
Celebrating his life with a tribute video of all our fondest memories, we wanted to remember Wilde for who he was, not the misfortune he went through. He was a big, silly, carefree grump with a whole lot of likes and dislikes of his own. He played with ping pong balls and loved digging trenches and making hills in the sand—a typical behavior undertaken by cichlids (the family of fishes containing oscars like Wilde) to establish territory, make nests, or simply redecorate their surroundings. Wilde also had a mischievous side. He’d often sneak up on Pitter and Patter to steal their veggies, and he’d throw temper tantrums if he wasn’t getting his way. (Oscars are known for their hair-trigger tempers.) These tantrums would often involve Wilde opening his mouth as if screaming while aggressively shaking his butt from side to side. His fins would even turn bright orange during his fits. But most of the time, Wilde remained a gentle giant. That’s what I included in the video—how he deserves to be remembered.
The Bigger Picture of Keeping Tropical Fish
Most of these fish will never get the second chance that Wilde got. And while Wilde’s rescue was rare, his suffering is common—countless tropical fishes endure similar fates every day.
What seems like a peaceful hobby often hides a trail of harm. The tropical fish trade is massive: the global ornamental fish market was estimated at $5.9 billion in 2022 and is projected to surpass $11 billion by 2030. About 55 million marine animals—including fish, corals, and invertebrates—are sold annually, worth more than 2.1 billion. In this trade, up to 30 million marine fish may be removed from coral reefs each year.
Mortality rates throughout the supply chain are staggering. Some studies estimate that up to 80 percent of marine aquarium fish die between capture and final sale, and in the Philippines, as many as 98 percent perish within one year.
“For every fish sold, six others died from reef to retail,” Rene Umberger, founder of For The Fishes, an organization that advocates for the protection of wild fish, told The Dodo in 2017. “What we’ve learned is that people just don’t know that these animals are captured to begin with.” Scientific evidence also shows that fish experience pain (up to 22 minutes of intense pain when taken out of water), recognize individual human divers, and form social bonds—making their mistreatment all the more troubling.
A Call to Compassion
Wilde’s story is a reminder that fish are not ornaments, but living beings with personalities, preferences, and the capacity to suffer. He should never have spent 12 years in a tank that could barely contain his body. Yet millions of other tropical fishes endure the same fate, sold as decorations under the false promise that they are “easy pets.”
The most powerful way to break this cycle is simple: refuse to buy fish, speak up when you see them mistreated, and share the truth about what proper care really involves. Supporting sanctuaries and advocates working to protect aquatic animals is another way to make a difference. One honest conversation, one informed choice, can help ensure that fewer fish endure what Wilde went through—and that more of them are recognized for what they truly are: individuals who deserve compassion.
This adapted excerpt is from The Dog Who Wooed at the World: Laughing Through Severe Anxiety With My Soul Pup and More Tales of Courage From the Every Animal Project, compiled by Laura Lee Cascada (2004, The Every Animal Project). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from The Every Animal Project. It is adapted and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
The post Trapped in a Tank: The Hidden Cruelty of the Tropical Fish Trade appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.