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.

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Paradise Valley, Montana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Sitting between two towering mountain ranges, Montana’s Paradise Valley is aptly named. Cradling the mighty Yellowstone River that flows from Yellowstone National Park, the valley provides critical habitat to all the native species still present 200 years after Lewis and Clark’s expedition, including grizzly bears, wolves, and wolverines.

In recent decades, grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem have experienced a drastic decline in two of their main food sources, whitebark pine nuts and Yellowstone cutthroat trout. That’s led to an increase in meat consumption by grizzly bears, including livestock that continue to be grazed in areas where conflict is virtually certain.

It’s well-known that new born calves make an easy and irresistible meal for hungry grizzly bears just waking up from their long winter hibernation. In fact, that’s the primary reason cattle are normally not allowed to graze on Montana’s national forests until July.

Yet, ignoring both the science and the obvious reality of the predator-prey relationship between grizzly bears and livestock, the Forest Service tried to expand cattle grazing on six federal allotments on the east side of the Paradise Valley, inexplicably including grizzly bear recovery zones. The agency not only expanded the grazing area, it also lengthened the livestock grazing season, which puts bears at an even greater likelihood of being killed due to absolutely foreseeable conflicts with cattle.

It’s a sure-fire formula for conflict that will result in dead wolves, bears, and private cattle, which is why United States Magistrate Judge Kathleen DeSoto issued her Findings and Recommendation Order in favor of the Alliance, Native Ecosystems Council, Western Watersheds Project, and six other wildlife and ecosystem protection advocacy groups in March. The good news is that Federal Judge Molloy just followed that with an Order adopting her decision, rejected the agency’s environmental assessment and decision notice and sent it back to the Forest Service to “address the deficiencies”

The six grazing allotments lie just north of the Park, including in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, within an important habitat connectivity zone. Providing secure travel corridors between the Yellowstone ecosystem to the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem is essential to grizzly bear recovery. Increased grizzly bear mortality in this area on the edge of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will not only slow grizzly bear range expansion, it will keep the Yellowstone grizzly bear population genetically isolated, leading to irreversible inbreeding.

Our lawsuit also named the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a defendant because the agency failed to adequately consider the impacts of the grazing decision on grizzlies. This despite the fact the agency is legally required to protect and recover endangered species.

The Court ruled in our favor on four out of five of our National Environmental Policy Act claims including failure to:

+ analyze the effects of putting cattle on the allotments early in the spring;

+ analyze habitat connectivity, which is an “important factor” for grizzlies;

+ analyze the cumulative effects related to activities on private lands in the area;

+ prepare an Environmental Impact Statement.

Rest assured, there’s no shortage of cattle – Montana alone has more than two million cows. Grizzly bears, on the other hand, have long been listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, with the legal mandates to be protected and restored to healthy populations throughout the Northern Rockies.

Thanks to our court victory, the Magistrate Judge’s findings and the Federal Court’s Order, the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service must now follow the law and ensure that grizzlies are protected and recovered, not slaughtered by private ranchers grazing public lands.

We would like to thank Western Environmental Law Center for representing us.

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Climate change today is all about a massive dislocation of the climate system, not unlike the loss of ozone molecules 40 years ago. Image by Wolfgang Hasselmann.

It May Be Too Late is a climate change idiom that is gaining recognition because global warming is bringing the threat of irreversible climate system collapse to reality as nightly TV news broadcasts flash floods and record-setting temperatures year-by-year with increasing intensity, but that’s just for starters.

Along the way, Earth is regurgitating decades of climate system abuse as glacial lake outbursts bury entire villages, Blatten, Switzerland and more telling yet, the world’s leading insurance companies, e.g. Allianz (the world’s largest) warn of uninsurable mortgages because of a lashing climate system. They foresee an upcoming systemic breakdown of the financial system, which is climate change’s payback, unless, as stated by insurance executives, CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are stopped.

Nobody has warned of the dangers like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) who on September 9, 2025 delivered his 301^st Time to Wake Up speech to the US Senate, warning of a collapsing socio-economic future because of a whacky climate system fed by the fossil fuel industry’s excessive CO2 emissions, but as he explains in some detail, horror of horrors, fossil fuel interests are now on ‘the inside’ with a complacent Trump administration as global warming’s new partner working in its best interests to exceed +2°C above pre-industrial, With the full power of the US government as an ally, global warming should be able to achieve much hotter temperatures much sooner. Then, in due course, Climate Armageddon will have its own nightly TV news show, for the full hour.

Senator Whitehouse has brought out in the open for all to hear: “It may now be too late to prevent it. It may now be too late to wake up. But I hope not… We are on the verge of a major economic shock. But Congress is lost in the moment, not paying attention. When that economic shock hits, I want people to know how and why we failed to protect them. The shock is simple: Climate change makes property insurance unpredictable. So, insurance prices soar. Insurers withdraw from high-risk regions. And fake or flimsy insurance populates the market. As the insurance market goes, so goes the mortgage market… as mortgage markets fail, property values fall.”

Indeed, it’s already happening, for example, in Florida: “Many insurance companies are leaving the state entirely or staying and revoking policies, limiting coverage and raising premiums by double digits. The Florida homeowner’s insurance market is on the brink of a collapse. As thousands of homeowners are in the lurch, the situation is highly problematic.” (Florida is Undergoing an Insurance Crisis, The Zebra, June 24, 2025)

Moreover, the home insurance affordability crisis extends far beyond Gulf Coast states prone to hurricanes and flooding or California’s areas vulnerable to wildfires. Extreme thunderstorms with wind, rain, and hail are also causing billions of dollars in losses in states between the slopes of the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains. Disasters are  driving up insurance premiums and forcing insurance companies to scale back coverage in risky areas or drop coverage altogether. Most Americans can’t get a mortgage without home insurance, and areas deemed too risky to cover will see property values drop.

America’s Government – the Epicenter of CO2 Emissions

As for America’s CO2 emissions, Senator Whitehouse’s speech walks through the various stages of fossil fuel industry control over energy policy that has suddenly leapt frontstage into the White House following hundreds of millions in donations to Trump at his request so he’d “do anything they want.” Effectively, the US government and fossil fuel producers have gone into an informal partnership to: (1) destroy renewables (2) cut regulations (3) open public lands to development. This guarantees nearly unregulated CO2 emissions blasting away like never before in the face of record-setting massive heatwaves on land and in the oceans as wildfires consume enormous swaths of land on every continent for the first time on such a large scale. (World Resources Institute)

Interestingly, in contrast to today’s failure of world leaders to effectively tackle climate change in the face of an avalanche of warnings by science, the world community came together quickly, effectively in 1987 with the Montreal Protocol to protect the stratospheric ozone layer (10-30 miles up) by phasing out ozone depleting CFCs. The British Antarctic Survey team at Halley Research Station discovered the ozone hole in 1985 and published their findings in a scientific journal. This groundbreaking discovery led to the connection of human-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to ozone depletion.

Today, the Trump administration budget proposal calls for cutting overall polar science funding by up to 70%. Fortunately, the UK didn’t cut polar funding in the 1980s. PM Thatcher, in a 1981 speech to the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee said that successful nations prioritize science not as a luxury but as “vital to national prosperity and international standing”. President Ronald Reagan, Feb. 27, 1985: “Despite the constraints of federal spending, our budget for the next fiscal year calls for a 6.7% increase for basic research in the physical sciences. I should add that we’re also planning to increase funding for science and technology and basic research through the end of the decade, and that’s because what you do is that important.”

The Montreal Protocol is widely considered one of the most successful environmental agreements of all time. And it is worthwhile mention of the fact that loss of ozone molecules (O3), creating an ozone hole in the atmosphere, in due course, would burn up life on the planet. Ozone serves as the planet’s sunscreen by blocking out harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

The Near Miss Extinction Event

Forty years ago, the expanding ozone hole would have caused human extinction if not for a handful of scientists who went up against Dupont, for decades denying that CFCs destroyed ozone molecules (O3), like fossil fuel industry denials today. But loss of the protective ozone layer collapses the food chain and destroys DNA via unfiltered ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Similarly, CO2 fossil fuel emissions today are starting to negatively dislocate the world’s climate system.

Indeed, climate change today is all about a massive dislocation of the climate system, not unlike the loss of ozone molecules 40 years ago. But there’s a difference in world leadership. Back then, Margaret Thatcher, who trained as a chemist, immediately responded to scientists’ warnings, and Ronald Reagan, who as a Hollywood star exposed himself to too much sun, experiencing a bout of skin cancer, also jumped on scientist’s suggestions to ban CFCs, ASAP. Thus, two strong Western nations led the world to accept the Montreal Protocol of 1987 banning CFC production. Human extinction was thus averted because persistent scientists identified the danger and demanded nation/state action to save civilization. To this day, it’s the biggest extinction “near miss” of all human time. Thanks to vigilant scientists.

Now, scientists are saying almost identical things about banning fossil fuel CO2 emissions. In a word, the consequences of failure are chilling. Meanwhile, the world’s strongest nation, the United States, decimates funding for science and destroys science data centers, and attacks academia. Additionally, of equal concern, where are the strong leaders needed to fight climate change à la the Montreal Protocol? They are missing in action. By all appearances, the extinction event has been granted a ‘free pass’.

Addendum, according to Bloomberg/Green: “The Trump administration is going to war with established climate science. Mass firings, regulatory rollbacks, program closures, and funding cuts across agencies have compromised the nation’s ability to gather and assess data on climate change, reducing the amount of high-quality information that policymakers and business leaders can use to guide their decisions, potentially for years to come. The assault has left hundreds of federal scientists out of work, but its impacts reach much further. Datasets that industries and policymakers depend on have gone dark.” (Lights Out: How Trump’s War on Climate Science is Weakening the US, Bloomberg Green, Sept. 8, 2025)

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The Trump administration is plotting to undo a quarter-century of policy for the protection of national forests against new road building. Image by Laura Adai.

The Trump administration is plotting to undo a quarter-century of policy for the protection of national forests against new road building. This is a terrible turn for our public lands and needs to be stopped.

When I lived in the little town of Moab, Utah, my habit on hot summer days was to drive into the nearby La Sal Mountains, a mostly roadless island of pines and firs and freshwater streams floating over the oven of the red rock desert. The La Sals, public land overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, include vast stretches of woods accessible only by foot. The thing to do there was to dump your car on one of the few dirt roads that cross the mountains, shoulder your pack and give oneself over to the habitat of the cougars, lynx, black bears and elk, none of whom like roads (or, for that matter, people who go backpacking).

Much of the forest of the La Sals was designated to be protected from new development under the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Policy issued in the final days of the Clinton administration. The roadless rule, as it became known, ended road construction, logging and coal, gas, oil and other mineral leasing on 58 million acres of some of the wildest remaining undeveloped national forest lands — an area equal in size to all of Pennsylvania and New York State combined. The roadless rule happened not because the federal government happily opted to stop giving public land to industry for private profit. It was the result of a decade of conflict between the federal government and mainstream environmental groups and enviro direct actionists who engaged in tree sits and blockades and other forms of civil disobedience. Some 600 public hearings were held across the nation to discuss the roadless rule, with the public providing more than 1.6 million comments over two years. The proposed rule received more comments than any other environmental rule on public lands in U.S. history.

In June, the Trump administration announced that it intended to rescind the roadless rule, and this month it instituted an accelerated three-week public comment period, set to end on Sept. 19. What had taken two years to put together would now be put asunder in three weeks.

The most important thing to understand about President Donald Trump’s endeavor is that every new road blazed into a previously unroaded landscape is a disaster for wild landscapes and the creatures who live in them. In two decades reporting on the exploitation of American public lands, I’ve found that the most important first effort in destruction of habitat and the fouling of clean air and water is the building of a road.

A road cut through wilderness is a wound that won’t stop bleeding. It doesn’t matter if it’s paved or unpaved, though a paved road always brings more traffic. Then again, it doesn’t matter whether a road is heavily trafficked or lightly used. The very presence of a road alters the environment around it. This is especially true in high-altitude forested landscapes, such as the La Sals, as roads divert the natural downstream flow of precipitation, producing heavier runoff and more erosion that disrupts the hydrology and sedimentation of nearby waterways. Road runoff carries the poisons that automobiles drip from their chassis. The grinding engines and the sound of rattling metal terrify wildlife. From the tailpipes comes carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, heavy metals. You get more roadkill. You get more hunting and poaching. Roads scare off the cougars and wolves and bears, who learn that death awaits on roads.

Reed Noss, one of the premier conservation biologists in the United States, writes that the cumulative effect of roads blazed into previously unroaded ecosystems is “nothing short of catastrophic.” For the sake of wild things, Noss recommended that most existing roads on public lands “should be closed and obliterated.” He especially liked the idea of keeping out road-attracted humans who “bring along their chainsaws, ATVs, guns, [and] dogs,” who “harass virtually every creature they meet, and leave their mark on every place they visit. The more inaccessible we can keep our remaining wild areas to these cretins, the safer and healthier these areas will be.”

Noss is one of a host of conservation biologists to come to this conclusion. Biologists publishing in the journal Science found that roads “fragment landscapes and trigger human colonization and degradation of ecosystems, to the detriment of biodiversity and ecosystem functions.”

In the American West, even a few dirt roads built near streams on public lands where native trout spawn can produce terrible damage. The fish depend on a properly functioning riparian system, with its panoply of vegetation, its resistance to erosion. The fish rely on intricate gravel substrates where eggs lodge in nests called redds, and on clean, cold water that carries off the waste discharge of the embryos and oxygenates the eggs. Now a road comes through. The water is clouded with eroded soils. Fish eggs suffocate in the fine silt and clays and sand. They rot in their waste, as the smothering cloud prevents it from being washed away. The fine sediment, like a wave of glue, cements the gravels, impeding construction of the redds. The available light in a trout stream must be just so.

+++

The Trump administration is plotting to undo a quarter-century of policy for the protection of national forests against new road building. This is a terrible turn for our public lands and needs to be stopped.

When I lived in the little town of Moab, Utah, my habit on hot summer days was to drive into the nearby La Sal Mountains, a mostly roadless island of pines and firs and freshwater streams floating over the oven of the red rock desert. The La Sals, public land overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, include vast stretches of woods accessible only by foot. The thing to do there was to dump your car on one of the few dirt roads that cross the mountains, shoulder your pack and give oneself over to the habitat of the cougars, lynx, black bears and elk, none of whom like roads (or, for that matter, people who go backpacking).

Much of the forest of the La Sals was designated to be protected from new development under the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Policy issued in the final days of the Clinton administration. The roadless rule, as it became known, ended road construction, logging and coal, gas, oil and other mineral leasing on 58 million acres of some of the wildest remaining undeveloped national forest lands — an area equal in size to all of Pennsylvania and New York State combined. The roadless rule happened not because the federal government happily opted to stop giving public land to industry for private profit. It was the result of a decade of conflict between the federal government and mainstream environmental groups and enviro direct actionists who engaged in tree sits and blockades and other forms of civil disobedience. Some 600 public hearings were held across the nation to discuss the roadless rule, with the public providing more than 1.6 million comments over two years. The proposed rule received more comments than any other environmental rule on public lands in U.S. history.

What had taken two years to put together would now be put asunder in three weeks.

In June, the Trump administration announced that it intended to rescind the roadless rule, and this month it instituted an accelerated three-week public comment period, set to end on Sept. 19. What had taken two years to put together would now be put asunder in three weeks.

The most important thing to understand about President Donald Trump’s endeavor is that every new road blazed into a previously unroaded landscape is a disaster for wild landscapes and the creatures who live in them. In two decades reporting on the exploitation of American public lands, I’ve found that the most important first effort in destruction of habitat and the fouling of clean air and water is the building of a road.

A road cut through wilderness is a wound that won’t stop bleeding. It doesn’t matter if it’s paved or unpaved, though a paved road always brings more traffic. Then again, it doesn’t matter whether a road is heavily trafficked or lightly used. The very presence of a road alters the environment around it. This is especially true in high-altitude forested landscapes, such as the La Sals, as roads divert the natural downstream flow of precipitation, producing heavier runoff and more erosion that disrupts the hydrology and sedimentation of nearby waterways. Road runoff carries the poisons that automobiles drip from their chassis. The grinding engines and the sound of rattling metal terrify wildlife. From the tailpipes comes carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, heavy metals. You get more roadkill. You get more hunting and poaching. Roads scare off the cougars and wolves and bears, who learn that death awaits on roads.

Reed Noss, one of the premier conservation biologists in the United States, writes that the cumulative effect of roads blazed into previously unroaded ecosystems is “nothing short of catastrophic.” For the sake of wild things, Noss recommended that most existing roads on public lands “should be closed and obliterated.” He especially liked the idea of keeping out road-attracted humans who “bring along their chainsaws, ATVs, guns, [and] dogs,” who “harass virtually every creature they meet, and leave their mark on every place they visit. The more inaccessible we can keep our remaining wild areas to these cretins, the safer and healthier these areas will be.”

A road cut through wilderness is a wound that won’t stop bleeding.

Noss is one of a host of conservation biologists to come to this conclusion. Biologists publishing in the journal Science found that roads “fragment landscapes and trigger human colonization and degradation of ecosystems, to the detriment of biodiversity and ecosystem functions.”

In the American West, even a few dirt roads built near streams on public lands where native trout spawn can produce terrible damage. The fish depend on a properly functioning riparian system, with its panoply of vegetation, its resistance to erosion. The fish rely on intricate gravel substrates where eggs lodge in nests called redds, and on clean, cold water that carries off the waste discharge of the embryos and oxygenates the eggs. Now a road comes through. The water is clouded with eroded soils. Fish eggs suffocate in the fine silt and clays and sand. They rot in their waste, as the smothering cloud prevents it from being washed away. The fine sediment, like a wave of glue, cements the gravels, impeding construction of the redds. The available light in a trout stream must be just so.

The roadless area nearest my house in the Catskill Mountains is the Slide Mountain Wilderness, some 50,000 acres of forest, hills, cliffs, peaks and clean water. It’s the place people around here go if they wish to escape the machines of industrial Homo sapiens. There are no roads and no mechanized travel, in keeping with the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” Lands designated as wilderness under the act retain their “primeval character and influence.” Not only are roads prohibited in wilderness areas, so is extractive industry, and there are severe restrictions on commercial activity. No business, no money making, also no cars, no motorcycles — hell, you can’t even ride a bicycle in designated wilderness because it’s considered a form of mechanized transport.

The 2001 roadless rule was an extension of the wilderness protection ethic of the 1964 law. For an administration hell-bent on exploiting land to make as much money as possible, the roadless rule is anathema. If our last wild places are to stand a chance of surviving this century, it must remain in place.

This piece first appeared on Truthdig.

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The potentially hot shrimp was available from July 17 to August 8, 2025, at dozens of stores. Image by Monika Grabkowska.

In a story unprecedented in my memory, multiple cargo containers carrying shrimp from Indonesia to U.S. grocers were found contaminated with dangerously radioactive cesium-137 (Cs-137).

None of the dozens of reports I reviewed explained how the cancer-causing isotope Cs-137⸺ a human-made radionuclide only produced inside nuclear reactors ⸺ spread to multiple cargo containers and some frozen shrimp.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) alerted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on August 19 about the contamination of the containers and shrimp products processed in Indonesia. The FDA reported that tainted containers and shrimp were found at the U.S. ports of Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and Savannah (Georgia), and delivered to Walmart and Kroger stores.

The cesium scare was then expanded broadly. The FDA’s August 19 Import Alert and recall recommendation focused on frozen raw shrimp, but the agency later added cocktail shrimp and cooked medium peeled tail-off shrimp to its list. Initially applied to 13 states, the FDA later expanded its recall recommendation to 29 states.

The Wall St. Journal reported August 29 that the recall included 26,460 packages of Great Value cocktail shrimp sold at Walmart stores between July 28 and August 16, and 18,000 bags of Kroger’s Mercado frozen cooked shrimp.

California-based Southwind Foods recalled frozen shrimp bagged and sold under the brands Sand Bar, Arctic Shores, Best Yet, Great American Seafood Imports, and First Street, or Walmart’s Great Value brand.

Tens of thousands of packages of imported shrimp sold at Mariano’s were also recalled. Other affected stores include AquaStar, Baker’s, Gerbes, Jay C, Metro Market, Pay Less Supermarkets, Pick ‘n Save and Beaver Street Fisheries, according to the FDA, which told consumers to dispose of shrimp purchased at specific times in July and August. “If you have recently purchased raw frozen shrimp from Walmart that matches this description, throw it away,” the FDA said in a statement. The FDA did not recommend any special disposal system for radioactively contaminated material.

The FDA notification said, “All containers and product testing positive or alerting for Cs-137 have been denied entry into the country.” Neither the FDA nor the CBP have reported how many containers were found to be contaminated.

All the recalled shrimp came from Indonesia’s giant seafood processor PT Bahari Makmur Sejati, doing business as BMS Foods. The FDA has now targeted the firm with a new “import alert” to stop all its products from coming into the U.S.

The potentially hot shrimp was available from July 17 to August 8, 2025, at dozens of stores in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Is the cesium permitted in U.S. food safe?

The legally permitted level of Cs-137 contamination in U.S. food is 1,200 Becquerels per-kilogram (Bq/kg) ⸺ even for children. Japan’s permitted level for children is 50 Bq/kg, and 100 Bq/kg for adults. A Becquerel is a standard measure of radioactive decay.

In the United States, the same level of cesium contamination in food is allowed for women, girls, and infants, in spite of the well-established fact that they are far more vulnerable to radiation harm than men and boys.

Radiation and health expert Cindy Folkers of Beyond Nuclear in Tacoma Park, Maryland, reported in 2013 that, “As cesium passes out of your body, its radioactivity starts to damage your kidneys and your bladder, which in turn damages your body’s ability to rid itself of the cesium.” Folkers also noted that Cs-137 and Cs-134 do not occur in nature but are only created in nuclear reactors operated by the military, by industry, and by university researchers.

The FDA’s Import Alert warned about the Cs-137:

[R]adionuclides such as Cs-137, a radioisotope of cesium, can be present in many places around the world as a result of contamination produced high in the atmosphere during nuclear testing. Cs-137 is created via nuclear reactions, such as occurring in nuclear power plants and is also commonly used in medical and other industrial applications. Elevated amounts of Cs-137 can be present at locations where contamination settled from accidents such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011.

The Import Alert also described the health risks created by exposure to low doses of Cs-137:

Cs-137 emits beta particles and gamma radiation that are associated with adverse health effects. Potential for health concerns following Cs-137 exposure depends on the dose and the duration of exposure. High doses lead to acute radiation syndrome. However, exposure to low doses spread out over a period of time may not cause immediate apparent adverse effects but may still be harmful. The primary health effect of concern following longer term, repeated low dose exposure (e.g., through consumption of contaminated food or water over time) is cancer, resulting from damage to DNA within living cells of the body.

Where’d the cesium-137 come from?

The FDA is still investigating, but, as the advocacy group Beyond Nuclear noted, “in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns, [we] have warned about radioactive contamination of food for over a decade.”

Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), wrote on September 10, 2025, “It is possible that the cesium-137 contamination came from a ‘food irradiation’ plant, as the two radioactive substances most used in ‘irradiation’ facilities are cobalt-60 and cesium-137.

Both cobalt-60 and cesium-137 are powerful gamma radiation emitters and are used to sterilize medical equipment and to sterilize certain food items in irradiation facilities. These plants use “very large quantities of cobalt-60 or cesium-137. Shrimp is one such food item,” Edwards wrote. (For background on food irradiation, See this CCNR web page, and congressional testimony here.

Kimberly Robertson, Program Director for the Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN), wrote August 26: “UK-based marine biologist Tim Deere-Jones stated, ‘Given the very low reported levels of Cs-137 in Indonesian marine environments, there is a strong possibility that the food fed to the [fish farmed] shrimp is the source of elevated cesium-137…. I consider it likely that such material, often harvested by ‘pirate fishers,’ could be contaminated with Fukushima-derived Cs-137, at endemically high levels in some Pacific Sea areas. It is strongly advised that the source/origin of the foodstuffs fed to the shrimps is investigated with the utmost rigor.”

It is also possible that the contaminated shipping containers came into close contact with radioactive waste being shipped in other containers on the same ship. And, although it is highly unlikely, completely speculative, and extremely scandalous, the same containers used to ship the shrimp could have been used earlier to transport radioactive waste.

Robertson’s FFAN letter closes urging: “Regardless of the exact source of the radioactive contamination, [R.F.] Kennedy, as Secretary of the Dept. of Health and Human Services, must direct the FDA to lower the current allowable levels of cancer-causing Cs-137 in food. The shrimp radiation levels detected were 68 Bq/kg, which would not have been allowed in Japan [due to its] 50 Bq/kg limit for kids. U.S. kids, however, are allowed 1,200 Bq/kg, the same as adults. That must change.”

You may sign and share a sign-on letter widely here, and call the FDA at 1-888-SAFEFOOD to voice your concerns.

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The starting assumption about wildfire that dominates public policy is that “fire suppression” has created abnormal “fuel build up” in forests, leading to large, uncontrollable blazes.

Recently, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told a House hearing that the nation’s forests are in a state of crisis, driven by a precipitous decline in logging that’s increased the risk of bigger and more dangerous wildfires. The solution Schultz proposed is to do more logging and prescribed burns on public lands to reduce “fuel.”

During the same hearing, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) suggested: “An untended forest is no different than an untended garden.” It’s going to grow and grow until it chokes itself to death, and then it’s going to fall victim to disease, pestilence, drought, and ultimately catastrophic fire.

The solution promoted by logging advocates to cure what they perceive as sick forests is “chainsaw medicine.” Photo by George Wuerthner

Logging proponents support the euphemistically named Fix Our Forest Act. Of course, one must wonder how forests survived for millions of years before humans were around to “save” our forests from these alleged blights, including Indians who colonized North America only in the last 15,000 or 16,000 years.

Proponents of active forest management frequently misinterpret ecology so they can justify the goal of more logging.

Schultz blames fire suppression for the reason for large, uncontrollable blazes. He and most logging supporters repeat a common myth that, historically, wildfires were frequent (occurring every 1–20 years) and kept fuels low.

Furthermore, climate largely influences wildfire. In the early 1900s, when there were major droughts, we had massive wildfires like the 1910 Big Burn that burnt over 3–3.5 million acres of Idaho and Montana. In the late 1920s (remember the Dust Bowl?), as much as 50 million acres were charred by wildfire annually. Then, between the 1940s and 1980s, it was cool and moist, and there were far fewer ignitions and fewer acres burned. This is the same time when many suggest fire suppression was successful, but Nature was successful at suppressing wildfire.

Second, logging forests does not protect them from wildfire. Forests under “active management” (read logging) frequently burn more severely than protected landscapes such as parks and wilderness areas. Some studies show that logging can increase fire risk and burn severity.

Logging tends to increase solar penetration (reduce shade), which leads to drying and high winds—both factors that contribute to wildfire ignition and spread.

A third problem seldom discussed is that such “fuel treatments,” whether logging or prescribed burns, have a short effective window of 5–20 years, to the degree they are effective at all. And the probability that a wildfire will encounter treated (read logged) areas during this time period is minuscule.

A fourth problem with the present policy of logging forests is that the most significant home loss is the result of grass and shrub fires, not forest fires. The Eaton Fire that blackened Altadena, CA, the Marshall Fire that destroyed more than a thousand homes in Colorado, the inferno that consumed more than 2000 homes in Maui, and the Almeda Drive Fire in the communities of Talent and Phoenix, Oregon, that destroyed 2,600 homes were all non-forest blazes.

These fast-moving fires easily overwhelmed firefighting responses.

Rather than logging forests in the backcountry, a better public policy would be to focus on home hardening and reducing the flammability of structures. Photo by George Wuerthner.

Rather than wasting money on logging (thinning) and random prescribed burns, communities should invest in home hardening, strategizing evacuation routes, and reducing the flammability of structures.

Beyond the fact that thinning (logging) and prescribed burns are often ineffective, there are economic and ecological costs to these “solutions.” The cumulative tree mortality resulting from logging and thinning, when combined with the trees that may subsequently die due to wildfire, is often greater than the loss from wildfire alone.

Old-growth forests store an enormous amount of carbon. Even burnt forests have residual carbon in snags, soil, and logs on the ground. Photo by George Wuerthner.

Logging contributes to carbon emissions more than wildfires. Since forests store a tremendous amount of carbon, the removal of trees by logging reduces this carbon storage, releasing it into the atmosphere. This exacerbates the ongoing climate warming that is ultimately contributing to wildfires.

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“The continents are drying, freshwater availability is shrinking, and sea level rise is accelerating… Combined, they send perhaps the direst message on the impact of climate change to date.” (Unprecedented Continental Drying study, see below)

Human-generated climate change, the result of enormous quantities of CO2 spewing into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels (in 2024, the CO2 annual rate set a new all-time record of 3.75 ppm or an 18,600% increase over natural variability of 0.02 ppm per annum, according to paleoclimate pre-industrial data) causing widespread interconnectivity merging of dry regions of the planet. This is a new feature of global warming.

“Our entire infrastructure and civilization are based around a climate that no longer exists.” (John Marsham, professor Atmospheric Science, University of Leeds)

Dry areas of the planet are merging into massive mega-dry behemoth regions reflective of how far advanced climate change has progressed, with global warming turning hotter, and hotter, especially 2023-24 when global mean temperature increased by 0.3°C or 10-fold in one year, ushering in a full year of 1.5°C above pre-industrial. According to Johan Rockström of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact, this kind of big increase in only one year has never happened before. Scientists are still bewildered.

Recent studies show mega-drying mergers advancing at alarming rates. Huge swaths of the planet are starting to resemble the science fiction world of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) with its desert ecosystem and water scarcity central to the plot, as actual climate change in today’s world adopts a science fiction veneer.

“We use NASA GRACE/GRACE-FO data to show that the continents have undergone unprecedented TWS (terrestrial water storage) loss since 2002. Drying areas of the planet increased by twice the size of California annually, creating ‘mega-drying regions’ across the Northern Hemisphere.” (Famiglietti, et al, Unprecedented Continental Drying, Shrinking Freshwater Availability, and Increasing Land Contributions to Sea Level Rise, Science Advances, July 25, 2025)

Multi-dimensional factors are found within mega-dryness: “Since 2002, 75% of the population lives in 101 countries that have been losing freshwater. Furthermore, the continents now contribute more freshwater to sea level rise than the ice sheets, and drying regions now contribute more than land glaciers and ice caps. Urgent action is required to prepare for the major impacts of results presented,” Ibid.

Alarmingly, four continental-scale mega-drying super-regions have formed a new feature for the planet. These super regions are all in the Northern Hemisphere (1) northern Canada (2) northern Russia (3) a contiguous region inclusive of southwestern North America and Central America (4)  the massive, tri-continental region spanning from North Africa to Europe, through the Middle East and Central Asia, to northern China and South and Southeast Asia, which owes its expansion to the recent European drought.

In short, like The Blob (1958) of film fame, mega-dryness is spreading across the Northern Hemisphere. The consequences are only too obviously a fundamental shift in the foundations of civilization. Thousands of years of foundational development are now at risk from a measly couple of hundred years of burning fossil fuels.

Areas of the planet “getting wetter” and experiencing “wet extremes,” are another new feature but decreasing in size (area) while increasing intensity. This decrease in area, or size, of wetness but increase in intensity paradoxically serves to complement dryness leading to extreme mega-dry regions with serious vulnerability to wildfires. For example, the years 2023 and 2024 were record-setting for forest fires, burning more than double the annual average of the previous two decades. Last year was the first time that major fires raged across both tropical and boreal forests (NASA and World Resources Institute).

“The implications of continental drying for freshwater availability are potentially staggering. Nearly 6 billion people, roughly 75% of the world’s population, live in the 101 countries that have been losing freshwater over the past 22 years,” Ibid.

Scientists say this challenges world leaders to take immediate steps to curb fossil fuel burning emissions at any and all costs. After all, it’s burning up the planet.

“The expansion of continental drying, the increase in extreme drying, and the implications for shrinking freshwater availability and sea level rise should be of paramount concern to the general public, to resource managers, and to decision-makers around the world. The robustness of the trends reported here, along with a critical shift in the behavior of TWS and continental drying following the major El Niño beginning in 2014, may well mean that reversing these trends is unlikely. Combined, they send perhaps the direst message on the impact of climate change to date. The continents are drying, freshwater availability is shrinking, and sea level rise is accelerating,” Ibid.

According to another journal, Science/Alert d/d August 18, 2025: Earth’s Continents Are Drying Out at an Unprecedented Rate: “This means terrestrial water is, on the whole, diminishing with devastating effects worldwide. That includes freshwater sources on the surface, like lakes and rivers, and also groundwater stored in aquifers deep below Earth’s surface. The majority of the human population, 75% of us, live in the 101 countries where fresh water is being lost at increasing rates.”

A significant part of this issue is where the water goes… mostly into the ocean, and it exceeds meltwater from the world’s ice sheets. In continents without glaciers, 68% of loss of terrestrial water is attributed to human groundwater depletion. Extreme droughts in Central America and Europe have contributed considerably. Scientists believe these events will become more frequent and more severe with the ongoing climate crisis.

According to another science journal, LiveScience, December 2024: ‘An Existential Threat Affecting Billions’: Three-quarters of Earth’s Land Became Permanently Drier in Last 3 Decades: Drylands now cover 40.6% of the land on Earth. According to the study, aridity is now impacting 40% of the world’s agricultural land with intensified wildfires, and agricultural collapse in areas hard hit, including a lot of Europe, the western US, Brazil, eastern Asia, and central Africa.

Scientists say fossil fuel CO2 emissions must be reduced as quickly as possible to zero to halt the continent-wide creeping devastation of the dryness peril, as well as adopting much better uses of land and water resources.

The merging of drying regions into mega-dry super regions has been largely unrecognized by society on a local level and may be the least recognized yet most damaging impact of climate change on a global scale. Scientists believe it demands the earliest attention via (1) governmental science agencies (2) mitigation policies (3) academic advice for major developed nations that most directly impact global warming, especially the US, China, Russia, India, and the EU, which are the top CO2 emitters.

The leadership of science has never been more essential than it is today.

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Old-growth forest in the Dark Divide Roadless Area, Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington Cascades. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

Back in June, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins would begin the process of revoking the 2001 Roadless Rule. The rule, which was enacted at the end of the Clinton administration, prohibits road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting on 58.5 million acres of roadless areas within the National Forests. You can read about why revoking the rule is a bad thing here.

Flash forward to August 29,  the USDA announced in the Federal Register its initiation of an environmental impact statement (EIS) and rulemaking concerning the management of roadless areas on National Forest System lands, with public comments due by September 19. That makes the public comment period 21 days, or three weeks. The original roadless area rule was a two-year process that involved more than 600 public hearings across the US and more than 1.6 million public comments.

Understanding the process is key to understanding why this is an issue. When a federal agency determines whether a new rule is necessary, it proposes a regulation — in this case, the rescission of the 2001 Roadless Rule. These proposals are published in the Federal Register. According to the federal eRulemaking Program Management Office, “In a typical case, an agency will allow 60 days for public comment. However, in some cases, they provide either shorter or longer comment periods.” The Federal Register states that complex rule-making processes, however, can lead to extended timeframes, potentially exceeding 180 days, and shorter comment periods may be implemented if adequate justification exists.

The USDA press office defended the decision to Inside Climate News, saying, “Regulations do not specify the length of public comments. For the notice of intent to development (sic) an environmental impact statement, the 21 days was determined to be efficient to notify the public and seek comment. The comment period for the draft environmental impact statement and the proposed rule will be longer.”

How this works with Trump’s June 30 executive order targeting environmental reviews and Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which rescinded $100 million from the Chief of the Forest Service’s budget to conduct environmental reviews, is unclear. What is clear is that the agency’s March 2026 deadline for a draft EIS and a final rule, as well as a record of decision, by late 2026 is either incredibly optimistic or intentionally rushed. According to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, which requires agencies to assess the environmental impact of major projects, impact statements “should generally be completed within two years.” USDA believes it can have a draft ready in five months on an incredibly complex issue that affects tens of millions of acres of forest land and watersheds across the US.  To get a sense of how quick that is, the Council on Environmental Quality found in 2024 that the median time from notice of intent to final impact statement was 2.2 years.

It’s inescapably clear that with an incredibly compressed timeline, the environmental impact statement’s recommendations are a foregone conclusion —one that will almost certainly favor the president’s corporate backers over the environment, wildlife, and communities that will be affected. On the bright side, the mishandling of the process is more than likely to trigger lawsuits from conservation and environmental groups, potentially tying up the decision in the courts for an extended period of time. During this period, states — particularly those in the West — aiming to conserve forest land ought to start thinking about how to enact roadless area regulations specifically adapted to their unique landscapes and ecological features, so that a future, more environmentally friendly administration can help protect these areas in the long term. Again, local action is the most effective response to federal abuses.

This first appeared on CEPR.

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