by ProPublica

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The continents are rapidly drying out and the earth’s vast freshwater resources are under threat, according to a recently released study based on more than 20 years of NASA satellite data. Here are the report’s key findings and what they portend for humankind:

Much of the Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying,” affecting the countries containing 75% of the world’s population, the new research shows.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, examined changes to Earth’s total supply of fresh water and found that nearly 6 billion people live in the 101 countries facing a net decline in water supply, posing a “critical, emerging threat to humanity.”

Mining of underground freshwater aquifers is driving much of the loss.

According to the study, the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water at the latitudes where most people live.

Much of the water taken from aquifers ends up in the oceans, contributing to the rise of sea levels.

Mined groundwater rarely seeps back into the aquifers from which it was pumped. Rather, a large portion runs off into streams, then rivers and ultimately the oceans. According to the researchers, moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

Water From Land Has Become a Leading Driver of Sea Level Rise

Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.

Note: Glaciers refer to the parts of the continents covered in glaciers but excludes the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Drying land and aquifers refer to the water lost by the continents in areas not covered by glaciers, including river flow and evaporation. Groundwater loss accounts for 68% of the drying in those places. As droughts grow more extreme, farmers increasingly turn to groundwater.

Worldwide, 70% of fresh water is used for growing crops, with more of it coming from groundwater as droughts grow more extreme. Only a small amount of that water seeps back into aquifers. Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst.

Drying regions of the planet are merging.

The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions. One such region covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

Drying of the Earth has accelerated in recent years.

The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. Since 2002, the sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss across the planet. Around 2014, the study found the pace of drying appears to have accelerated. It is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year.

The Drying of the Earth Accelerated in Recent Years

The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.

Watch video ➜

Note: Data is for February 2003 to December 2013 and January 2014 to April 2024. The first time period contains seven more months of data than the second. Water pumped from aquifers is not easily replaced, if it can be at all.

Major groundwater basins underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including about half of Africa, Europe and South America. Many of those aquifers took millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill. The researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse the loss of water “on human timescales.”

As continents dry and coastal areas flood, the risk for conflict and instability increases.

The accelerated drying, combined with the flooding of coastal cities and food-producing lowlands, heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order, the researchers warn. Their findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

Data Source: Hrishikesh. A. Chandanpurkar, James S. Famiglietti, Kaushik Gopalan, David N. Wiese, Yoshihide Wada, Kaoru Kakinuma, John T. Reager, Fan Zhang (2025). Unprecedented Continental Drying, Shrinking Freshwater Availability, and Increasing Land Contributions to Sea Level Rise. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

Graphics by Lucas Waldron

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Abrahm Lustgarten, Graphics by Lucas Waldron, Illustrations by Olivier Kugler for ProPublica

As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.

Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.

The paper “provides a glimpse of what the future is going to be,” said Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an earth systems scientist working with Arizona State University and the lead author of the study. “We are already dipping from a trust fund. We don’t actually know how much the account has.”

The research, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, confirms not just that droughts and precipitation are growing more extreme but reports that drying regions are fast expanding. It also found that while parts of the planet are getting wetter, those areas are shrinking. The study, which excludes the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, concludes not only that Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying” in lower latitudes, but that it is the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world that now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water in those areas, which generally don’t have glaciers.

Groundwater is ubiquitous across the globe, but its quality and depth vary, as does its potential to be replenished by rainfall. Major groundwater basins — the deep and often high-quality aquifers — underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including roughly half of Africa, Europe and South America. But many of those aquifers took millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill. Instead, a significant portion of the water taken from underground flows off the land through rivers and on to the oceans.

The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

Water From Land Has Become a Leading Driver of Sea Level Rise

Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.

Note: Glaciers refer to the parts of the continents covered in glaciers but excludes the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Drying land and aquifers refer to the water lost by the continents in areas not covered by glaciers, including river flow and evaporation. Groundwater loss accounts for 68% of the drying in those places.

The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. The technique was groundbreaking two decades ago when the study’s co-author, Jay Famiglietti, who was then a professor at the University of California, at Irvine, used it to pinpoint where aquifers were in decline. Since then, he and others have published dozens of papers using GRACE data, but the question has always lingered: What does the groundwater loss mean in the context of all of the water available on the continents? So Famiglietti, now a professor at Arizona State University, set out to inventory all the land-based water contained in glaciers, rivers and aquifers and see what was changing. The answer: everything, and quickly.

Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year. “It’s like this sort of creeping disaster that has taken over the continents in ways that no one was really anticipating,” Famiglietti said. (Six other researchers also contributed to the study.) The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions spreading across the earth’s mid-latitudes. One of those regions covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

The Drying of the Earth Accelerated in Recent Years

The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.

Watch video ➜

Note: Data is for February 2003 to December 2013 and January 2014 to April 2024. The first time period contains seven more months of data than the second.

In the American Southwest and California, groundwater loss is a familiar story, but over the past two decades that hot spot has also spread dramatically. It now extends through Texas and up through the southern High Plains, where the Ogallala aquifer is depended on for agriculture, and it spreads south, stretching throughout Mexico and into Central America. These regions are connected not because they rely on the same water sources — in most cases they don’t — but because their populations will face the same perils of water stress: the most likely, a food crisis that could ultimately displace millions of people.

“This has to serve as a wake-up call,” said Aaron Salzberg, a former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the former director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved with the study.

Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst. For example, during droughts when California has enforced restrictions on delivery of surface water to its farmers — which the state regulates — the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more.

For the most part, such withdrawals have remained invisible. Even with the GRACE data, scientists cannot measure the exact levels or know when an aquifer will be exhausted. But there is one foolproof sign that groundwater is disappearing: The earth above it collapses as the ground compresses like a drying sponge. The visible signs of such subsidence around the world appear to match what the GRACE data says. Mexico City is sinking as its groundwater aquifers are drained, as are large parts China, Indonesia, Spain and Iran, to name a few. A recent study by researchers at Virginia Tech in the journal Nature Cities found that 28 cities across the United States are sinking — New York, Houston and Denver, among them — threatening havoc for everything from building safety to transit. In the Central Valley, the ground surface is nearly 30 vertical feet lower than it was in the first part of the 20th century.

Ground subsidence around the world is one of the clearest ways to identify where groundwater is overdrawn.

When so much water is pumped, it has to drain somewhere. Just like rivers and streams fed by rainfall, much of the used groundwater makes its way into the ocean. The study pinpoints a remarkable shift: Groundwater drilled by people, used for agriculture or urban supplies and then discarded into drainages now contributes more water to the oceans than melting from each of the world’s largest ice caps.

People aren’t just misusing groundwater, they are flooding their own coasts and cities in the process, Famiglietti warns. That means they are also imperiling some of the world’s most important food-producing lowlands in the Nile and Mekong deltas and cities from Shanghai to New York. Once in the oceans, of course, groundwater will never again be suitable for drinking and human use without expensive and energy-sucking treatment or through the natural cycle of evaporating and precipitating as rain. But even then, it may no longer fall where it is needed most. Groundwater “is an intergenerational resource that is being poorly managed, if managed at all,” the study states, “at tremendous and exceptionally undervalued cost to future generations.”

That such rapid and substantial overuse of groundwater is also causing coastal flooding underscores the compounding threat of rising temperatures and aridity. It means that water scarcity and some of the most disruptive effects of climate change are now inextricably intertwined. And here, the study’s authors implore leaders to find a policy solution: Improve water management and reduce groundwater use now, and the world has a tool to slow the rate of sea level rise. Fail to adjust the governance and use of groundwater around the world, and humanity risks surrendering parts of its coastal cities while pouring out finite reserves it will sorely need as the other effects of climate change take hold.

How Groundwater Becomes Ocean Water

1. The process starts when deep underground aquifers are tapped to make up for a lack of water from rainfall and rivers.
2. Worldwide, 70% of fresh water is used for growing crops, with more of it coming from groundwater as droughts grow more extreme. Only a small amount of that water seeps back into aquifers.
3. Instead, most of the water runs off the land into streams, eventually flowing into rivers.
4. The rivers ultimately drain into the ocean, where fresh water becomes salt water. For that water to be usable again, it must either be industrially treated or return to the land as rain. But with climate change, these same drying regions are seeing less rainfall.

If the drying continues — and the researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse “on human timescales” — it heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order. The majority of the earth’s population lives in the 101 countries that the study identified as losing fresh water, making up not just North America, Europe and North Africa but also much of Asia, the Middle East and South America. This suggests the middle band of Earth is becoming less habitable. It also correlates closely with the places that a separate body of climate research has already identified as a shrinking environmental niche that has suited civilization for the past 6,000 years. Combined, these findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, lauded the new report for confirming trends that were once theoretical. The ramifications, he said, could be profoundly destabilizing. “The massive overpumping of groundwater,” Gleick said, “poses enormous risk to food production.” And food, he pointed out, is the foundation for stability. The water science center he co-founded, the Pacific Institute, has tracked more than 1,900 incidents in which water supplies were either the casualty of, a tool for or the cause of violence. In Syria, beginning in 2011, drought and groundwater depletion drove rural unrest that contributed to the civil war, which displaced millions of people. In Ghana, in 2017, protesters rioted as wells ran dry. And in Ukraine, whose wheat supports much of the world, water infrastructure has been a frequent target of Russian attacks.

“Water is being used as a strategic and political tool,” said Salzberg, who spent nearly two decades analyzing water security issues as the special director for water resources at the State Department. “We should expect to see that more often as the water supply crisis is exacerbated.”

India, for example, recently weaponized water against Pakistan. In April, following terrorist attacks in Kashmir, Prime Minister Narendra Modi suspended his country’s participation in the Indus Waters Treaty, a river-sharing agreement between the two nuclear powers that was negotiated in 1960. The Indus system flows northwest out of Tibet into India, before turning southward into Pakistan. Pakistan has severely depleted its groundwater reserves — the region is facing one of the world’s most urgent water emergencies according to the Science Advances paper. The Indus has only become more essential as a supply of fresh water for its 252 million people. Allowing that water to cross the border would be “prejudicial to India’s interests,” Modi said. In this case, he wasn’t attempting to recoup water supply for his country, Salzberg said, but was leveraging its scarcity to win a strategic advantage over his country’s principal rival.

What’s needed most is governance of water that recognizes it as a crucial resource that determines both sovereignty and progress, Salzberg added. Yet there is no international framework for water management, and only a handful of countries have national water policies of their own.

The United States has taken stabs at regulating its groundwater use, but in some cases those attempts appear to be failing. In 2014, California passed what seemed to many a revolutionary groundwater management act that required communities to assess their total water supply and budget its long-term use. But the act doesn’t take full effect until 2040, which has allowed many groundwater districts to continue to draw heavily from aquifers even as they complete their plans to conserve those resources. Chandanpurkar and Famiglietti’s research underscores the consequences for such a slow approach.

Arizona pioneered groundwater regulations in 1980, creating what it called active management areas where extraction would be limited and surface waters would be used to replenish aquifers. But it only chose to manage the water in metropolitan areas, leaving vast, unregulated swaths of the state where investors, farmers and industry have all pounced on the availability of free water for profit. In recent years, Saudi investors have pumped rural water to grow feed for cattle exported back to the Arabian Peninsula, and hedge funds are competing to pump and sell water to towns near Phoenix. Meanwhile, four out of the original five active management areas are failing to meet the state’s own targets.

“They like to say, ‘Oh, the management’s doing well,’ but when you look out at the end of the century, there’s no water left. We drained it, and no one talks about that,” Famiglietti said. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s an existential issue for cities like Phoenix.”

Both California and Arizona grow significant portions of America’s fruits and vegetables. Something has to give. “If you want to grow food in a place like California,” Famiglietti asked, “do you just bring in water? If we deplete that groundwater, I don’t think there’s enough water to really replace what we’re doing there.” The United States might not have much choice, he added, but to move California’s agriculture production somewhere far away and retire the land.

Chandanpurkar, Famiglietti and the report’s other authors suggest there are ready solutions to the problems they have identified, because unlike so many aspects of the climate crisis, the human decisions that lead to the overuse of water can be speedily corrected. Agriculture, which uses the vast majority of the world’s fresh water, can deploy well-tested technologies like drip irrigation, as Israel has, that sharply cut use by as much as 50%. When California farms reduced their take of Colorado River water in 2023 and 2024, the water levels in Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, jumped by 16 vertical feet as some 390 billion gallons were saved by 2025. Individuals can reduce water waste by changing simple routines: shortening showers or removing lawns. And cities can look to recycle more of the water they use, as San Diego has.

A national policy that establishes rules around water practices but also prioritizes the use of water resources for national security and a collective interest could counterbalance the forces of habit and special interests, Salzberg said. Every country needs such a policy, and if the United States were to lead, it might offer an advantage. But “the U.S. doesn’t have a national water strategy,” he said, referring to a disjointed patchwork of state and court oversight. “We don’t even have a national water institution. We haven’t thought as a country about how we would even protect our own water resources for our own national interests, and we’re a mess.”

Data Source: Hrishikesh. A. Chandanpurkar, James S. Famiglietti, Kaushik Gopalan, David N. Wiese, Yoshihide Wada, Kaoru Kakinuma, John T. Reager, Fan Zhang (2025). Unprecedented Continental Drying, Shrinking Freshwater Availability, and Increasing Land Contributions to Sea Level Rise. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

Visual editing by Alex Bandoni. Additional design and development by Anna Donlan.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Mark Olalde

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith grew up in a community that was deeply involved in the fight for Indigenous rights, protesting broken treaties and other mistreatment of Native American people. Members of the movement, she said, understood that law enforcement agencies were surveilling their activities.

“I’ve been warned my entire life, ‘The FBI’s watching us,’” said Farrell-Smith, a member of the Klamath Tribes in Oregon.

Government records later confirmed wide-ranging FBI surveillance of the movement in the 1970s, and now the agency is focused on her and a new generation of Indigenous activists challenging development of a mine in northern Nevada. Farrell-Smith advises the group People of Red Mountain, which opposes a Canadian company’s efforts to tap what it says is one of the world’s largest lithium deposits.

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have for years worked alongside private mine security to surveil the largely peaceful protesters who oppose the mine, called Thacker Pass, according to more than 2,000 pages of internal law enforcement communications reviewed by ProPublica. Officers and agents have tracked protesters’ social media, while the mining company has gathered video from a camera above a campsite protesters set up on public land near the mine. An FBI joint terrorism task force in Reno met in June 2022 “with a focus on Thacker Pass,” the records also show, and Lithium Americas — the main company behind the mine — hired a former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism to develop its security plan.

“We’re out there doing ceremony and they’re surveilling us,” Farrell-Smith said.

“They treat us like we’re domestic terrorists,” added Chanda Callao, an organizer with People of Red Mountain.

All told, about 10 agencies have monitored the mine’s opponents. In addition to the FBI, those agencies include the Bureau of Land Management, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Nevada State Police Highway Patrol, Winnemucca Police Department and Nevada Threat Analysis Center, the records show.

Andrew Ferguson, who studies surveillance technology at the American University Washington College of Law, called the scrutiny of Indigenous and environmental protesters as potential terrorists “chilling.”

“It obviously should be concerning to activists that anything they do in their local area might be seen in this broad-brush way of being a federal issue of terrorism or come under the observation of the FBI and all of the powers that come with it,” Ferguson said.

The FBI did not respond to requests for comment. The Bureau of Land Management, which coordinated much of the interagency response, declined to comment. Most of the law enforcement activity has focused on monitoring, and one person has been arrested to date as a result of the protests.

Mike Allen, who served as Humboldt County’s sheriff until January 2023, said his office’s role was simply to monitor the situation at Thacker Pass. “We would go up there and make periodic patrol activity,” he said.

Allen defended the joint terrorism task force, saying it was “where we would just all get together and discuss things.” (The FBI characterizes such task forces, which include various agencies working in an area, as the front line of defense against terrorism.)

In this May 2022 email, an FBI special agent invites Nevada’s Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office to a joint terrorism task force meeting focused on Thacker Pass. (Records obtained by Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica.)

Tim Crowley, Lithium Americas’ vice president of government and external affairs, said in a statement: “Protestors have vandalized property, blocked roads and dangerously climbed on Lithium Americas’ equipment. In all those cases, Lithium Americas avoided engagement with the protestors and coordinated with the local authorities when necessary for the protection of everyone involved.”

Crowley noted that Lithium Americas has worked with Indigenous communities near the mine to study cultural artifacts and is offering to build projects worth millions of dollars for the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, such as a community center and greenhouse.

But individuals and the community groups opposed to the mine don’t want money. They worry mining will pollute local sources of water in the nation’s driest state and harm culturally significant sites, including that of an 1865 massacre of Indigenous people.

“We understand how the land is sacred and how much culture and how much history is within the McDermitt Caldera,” Callao said of the basin where Thacker Pass is located. “We know how much it means to not only the next generation, but the next seven generations.”

First image: Construction at Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass mine near Orovada, Nevada. Second image: Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, center, and Rep. Mark Amodei, left, tour the site of a future housing facility for miners in Winnemucca, Nevada. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent) A Familiar Conflict

Indigenous groups are increasingly at odds with mining companies as climate change brings economies around the globe to an inflection point. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are contributing to increasingly intense hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires and droughts. The solution — powering the electrical grid, vehicles and factories with cleaner energy sources — brings tradeoffs.

Massive amounts of metals are required to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable energy infrastructure. Demand for lithium will skyrocket 350% by 2040, largely to be used in electric vehicles’ rechargeable batteries, according to the International Energy Agency.

The U.S. produces very little lithium — and China controls a majority of refining capacity worldwide — so development of Thacker Pass enjoys bipartisan support, receiving a key permit in President Donald Trump’s first administration and a $2.26 billion loan from President Joe Biden’s administration. (Development ran into issues in June, when a Nevada agency notified the company that it was using groundwater without the proper permit. Company representatives have said they are confident that they will resolve the matter.)

Many minerals needed to produce cleaner energy are found on Indigenous lands. For example, 85% of known global lithium reserves are on or near Indigenous people’s lands, according to a 2022 study by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia, the University of the Free State in South Africa and elsewhere. The situation has put Indigenous communities at odds with mining industries as tribes are asked to sacrifice land and sovereignty to combat climate change.

Luke Danielson is a mining consultant and lawyer who for decades has researched how mining affects Indigenous lands. “What I fear would be we set loose a land rush where we’re trampling over all the Indigenous people and we’re taking all the public land and essentially privatizing it to mining companies,” he said.

If companies or governments attempt to force mining on such communities, it can slow development, noted Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh, a professor emeritus of Australia’s Griffith University and author of “Indigenous Peoples and Mining.”

“If there are bulldozers coming down the road and they are going to destroy an area that is central to people’s identity and their existence, they are going to fight,” he said. “The solution is you actually put First Peoples in a position of equal power so that they can negotiate outcomes that allow for timely, and indeed speedy, development.”

Environmental activists Will Falk, left, and Max Wilbert led early opposition to the mine, after which the Bureau of Land Management fined them tens of thousands of dollars for the cost of monitoring them. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent) “We’re Not There for an Uprising”

Most of the documents tracing law enforcement’s involvement at Thacker Pass were obtained via public records requests by two advocacy groups focused on climate change and law enforcement, Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. They shared the records with ProPublica, which obtained additional documents through separate public records requests to law enforcement agencies.

Given the monitoring of mining’s opponents highlighted in the records, experts raised questions about authorities’ role: Is the government there to support industrial development, protect civil liberties or act as an unbiased arbiter? At Thacker Pass, the documents show, law enforcement has helped defend the mine.

Protests have at times escalated.

A small group of more radical environmentalists led by non-Indigenous activists propelled the early movement, setting up a campsite on public land near the proposed mine site in January 2021. In June 2022, a protester from France wrote on social media, “We’ll need all the AR15s We can get on the frontlines!” Tensions peaked in June 2023, when several protesters entered the worksite and blocked bulldozers, leading to one arrest.

That group — which calls itself Protect Thacker Pass — argued that its actions were justified. Will Falk, one of the group’s organizers, said that, in any confrontation, scrutiny unfairly falls on protesters instead of companies or the government. “As a culture, we’ve become so used to militarized police that we don’t understand that, out of the group of people gathered, the people who are actually violent are the ones with the guns,” he said.

Falk and another organizer were, as a result of their participation in protests, barred by court order from returning to Thacker Pass and disrupting construction, and the Bureau of Land Management fined them for alleged trespass on public lands during the protest. The agency charged them $49,877.71 for officers’ time and mileage to monitor them, according to agency records Falk shared with ProPublica. Falk said his group tried to work with the agency to obtain permits and is disputing the fine to a federal board of appeals.

“None of us are armed. We’re not there for an uprising,” said Gary McKinney, a spokesperson for People of Red Mountain, which parted ways with Falk’s group before the incident that led to an arrest.

McKinney, a member of the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Tribe, leads annual prayer rides, journeying hundreds of miles across northern Nevada on horseback with other Native American activists to Thacker Pass. He described the rides, intended to raise awareness of mining’s impact on tribes and the environment, as a way to exercise rights under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects tribes’ ability to practice traditional spirituality. Still, the group feels watched. A trail camera once mysteriously appeared near their campsite along the path of the prayer ride. They also crossed paths with security personnel.

Beyond the trail rides, the FBI tracks McKinney’s activity, the records show. The agency informed other law enforcement when he promoted a Fourth of July powwow and rodeo on his reservation, and it flagged a speech he delivered at a conference for mining-affected communities.

“We’re being watched, we’re being followed, we’re under the microscope,” McKinney said.

First image: Then-Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Allen questioned whether Raymond Mey, a Lithium Americas security contractor, had a state private investigator’s license in a June 2021 email. Second image: Mey pushed the Bureau of Land Management, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and others for a coordinated law enforcement strategy to address protests at Thacker Pass in a June 2021 email. (Records obtained by Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. Highlighted, redacted and excerpted by ProPublica.)

The records show security personnel hired by Lithium Americas speaking as if an uprising could be imminent. “To date, there has been no violence or serious property destruction, however, the activities of these protest groups could change to a more aggressive actions and violent demeanor at any time,” Raymond Mey, who joined Lithium Americas’ security team for a time after a career with the FBI, wrote to law enforcement agencies in July 2022.

Mey also researched protesters’ activities, sharing his findings with law enforcement. In an April 2021 update, for example, he provided an aerial photograph of the protesters’ campsite. Law enforcement agencies worked with Mey, and he pushed to make that relationship closer, seeking “an integrated and coordinated law enforcement strategy to deal with the protestors at Thacker Pass.” The records indicate that the FBI was open to him attending its joint terrorism task force.

Mey is not licensed with the Nevada Private Investigators Licensing Board, which is required to perform such work in the state, according to agency records.

Mey said that he didn’t believe he needed a license because he wasn’t pursuing investigations. He said that his advice to the company was to avoid direct conflict with protesters and only call the police when necessary.

First image: Gary McKinney, spokesperson for People of Red Mountain. Second image: Members of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, People of Red Mountain, the Burns Paiute Tribe and others march in Reno, Nevada, to oppose the Thacker Pass mine. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent) “We Shouldn’t Have to Accept the Burden of the Climate Crisis”

The battle over Thacker Pass reflects renewed strife between mining and drilling industries and Indigenous people. Two recent fights at the heart of this clash have intersected with Thacker Pass — one concerning an oil pipeline in the Great Plains and the other over a copper mine in the Southwest.

Beginning in 2016 and continuing for nearly a year, a large protest camp on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation sought to halt construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. Members of the Indigenous-led movement contended that it threatened the region’s water. The protest turned violent, leading to hundreds of arrests. Law enforcement eventually cleared the camp and the pipeline was completed.

Law enforcement agencies feared similar opposition at Thacker Pass, the records show.

In April 2021, Allen, then the local sheriff, and his staff met with Mark Pfeifle, president and CEO of the communications firm Off the Record Strategies, to discuss “lessons learned” from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Pfeifle, who helped the Bush administration build support for the second Gulf War, had more recently led a public relations blitz to discredit the Standing Rock protesters. This involved suggesting using a fake news crew and mocking up wanted posters for activists, according to emails obtained by news organizations. Pfeifle sent Allen presentations about the law enforcement response at Standing Rock, including one on “Examples of ‘Fake News’ and disinformation” from the protesters. “As always, we stand ready to help your office and your citizens,” he wrote to the sheriff.

The department appears not to have hired Pfeifle, although Allen directed his staff to also meet with Pfeifle’s colleague who worked on the Standing Rock response.

Around July 2021, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office held a meeting “to plan for the reality of a large-scale incident at Thacker Pass” similar to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Police referred to the ongoing protests on public land at Thacker Pass as an “occupation.”

Allen said he didn’t remember meeting with Pfeifle but said he wanted to be prepared for anything. “We didn’t know what to expect, but from what we understand, there were professional protestors up there and more were coming in,” he said.

Pfeifle didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Members of People of Red Mountain have also traveled to Arizona to object to the development of a controversial copper mine that’s planned in a national forest east of Phoenix. There, some members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe oppose the development because it would destroy an area they use for ceremonies. (In May, the Supreme Court handed down a decision allowing a land transfer, removing the final key obstacle to the mine.)

On these trips, Callao and others have frequently found a “notice of baggage inspection” from the Transportation Security Administration in their checked luggage. She provided ProPublica with photos of five such notices.

An agency spokesperson said that screening equipment does not know to whom the bag belongs when it triggers an alarm, and officers must search it.

To Callao, the surveillance, whether by luggage inspection, security camera or counterterrorism task force, adds to the weight placed on Indigenous communities amid the energy transition.

“We shouldn’t have to accept the burden of the climate crisis,” Callao said, “We should be able to protect our ancestral homelands.”

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Abe Streep

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Despite the Trump administration’s public pronouncements that it has hired enough wildland firefighters, documents obtained by ProPublica show a high vacancy rate, as well as internal concern among top officials as more than 1 million acres burn across 10 states.

Less than a month ago, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the Trump administration had done a historically good job preparing the nation for the summer fire season. “We are on track to meet and potentially exceed our firefighting hiring goals,” said Rollins, during an address to Western governors. Rollins oversees the wildland firefighting workforce at the U.S. Forest Service, a subagency of the Department of Agriculture. Rollins had noted in her remarks that the administration had exempted firefighters from a federal hiring freeze, and she claimed that the administration was outdoing its predecessor: “We have reached 96% of our hiring goal, far outpacing the rate of hiring and onboarding over the past three years and in the previous administration.”

Since then, the Forest Service’s assertions have gotten even more optimistic: The agency now claims it has reached 99% of its firefighting hiring goal.

But according to internal data obtained by ProPublica, Rollins’ characterization is dangerously misleading. She omitted a wave of resignations from the agency this spring and that many senior management positions remain vacant. Layoffs by the Department of Government Efficiency, voluntary deferred resignations and early retirements have severely hampered the wildland firefighting force. According to the internal national data, which has not been previously reported, more than 4,500 Forest Service firefighting jobs — as many as 27% — remained vacant as of July 17. A Forest Service employee who is familiar with the data said it comes from administrators who input staffing information into a computer tool used to create organization charts. The employee said that while the data could contain inaccuracies in certain forests, it broadly reflects the agency’s desired staffing levels. The employee said the data showing “active” unfilled positions was “current and up-to-date for last week.”

The Department of Agriculture disputes that assessment, but the figures are supported by anecdotal accounts from wildland firefighters in New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, California and Wyoming. According to a recent survey by Forest Service fire managers in California, 26% of engine captain positions and 42% of engineer positions were vacant. A veteran Forest Service firefighter in California characterized the Trump administration’s current estimate of the size of its firefighting workforce as “grossly inaccurate.”

Last week, Tom Schultz, the chief of the Forest Service, circulated a letter to high-ranking officials in the agency that underscored the dire moment. “As expected, the 2025 Fire Year is proving to be extremely challenging,” wrote Schultz in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We know the demand for resources outpaces their availability.” Schultz at once directed staff to employ full suppression — stomping out fires as quickly as possible, instead of letting them burn for the sake of landscape management — and acknowledged that the resources necessary to pursue such an aggressive strategy were lacking. All options were on the table, he wrote, including directing human-resources employees to fight fires and asking recently departed employees with firefighting qualifications to return to work.

When asked about the discrepancy between Schultz’s memo and Rollins’ public statements on firefighting staffing at the Forest Service, an agency spokesperson said that Schultz was referring to employees who can be called on to bolster the agency’s response “as fire activity increases,” while Rollins was pointing only to full-time firefighters. “The Forest Service remains fully equipped and operationally ready to protect people and communities from wildfire,” the spokesperson said, noting that “many individuals that have separated from the Agency either through retirements or voluntary resignations still possess active wildland fire qualifications and are making themselves available to support fire response operations.”

The federal government employs thousands of wildland firefighters, but the precise number is opaque. Throughout the Department of the Interior, which is overseen by Secretary Doug Burgum, there are about 5,800 wildland firefighters in four agencies that have been impacted by cuts. An employee at a national park in Colorado that is threatened by wildfire said that they were “severely understaffed during the Biden administration on most fronts, and now it’s so much worse than it’s ever been.”

But the Forest Service is by far the largest employer of wildland firefighters, and it has long used gymnastic arithmetic to paint an optimistic picture of its staffing. Last summer, ProPublica reported that the Forest Service under President Joe Biden had overstated its capacity. Robert Kuhn, a former Forest Service official who between 2009 and 2011 co-authored an assessment of the agency’s personnel needs, recently said that the practice of selectively counting firefighters dates back years. “What the public needs to understand is, that is just a very small number of what is needed every summer,” he said. Riva Duncan, a retired Forest Service fire chief and the vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a labor advocacy organization, said staffing is a constant frustration for managers on the ground. “We have engines that are completely unstaffed,” said Duncan, who remains active in wildland firefighting, having worked in temporary roles this summer. “We have vacant positions in management.”

That said, there is a difference this fire season from years past. Officials in the previous administration publicly acknowledged the danger presented by an exodus of experienced wildland firefighters. The Trump administration has taken a different approach — claiming to have solved the problem while simultaneously exacerbating it. When asked about the staffing cuts, Anna Kelly, a White House deputy press secretary, wrote, “President Trump is proud of all Secretary Rollins has accomplished to improve forest management, including by ending the 2001 Roadless Rule for stronger fire prevention, and Secretary Burgum’s great work protecting our nation’s treasured public lands.”

In March, Congress finally codified a permanent raise for federal wildland firefighters via the appropriations process, a change that advocates have sought for years. In her remarks in June, Rollins credited the president: “Out of gratitude for the selfless service of our Forest Service firefighters, President Trump permanently increased the pay for our federal wildland firefighters.”

But in February, the Trump administration laid off about 700 employees who support wildland fire operations, from human-resource managers to ecologists and trail-crew workers. Those employees possess what are known as red cards — certifications that allow them to work on fire crews. Many were subsequently rehired, but the administration then pushed Forest Service employees to accept deferred resignations and early retirements.

Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to combine their firefighting forces. For the moment, it’s unknown what form that restructuring will take, but many Forest Service firefighters are anticipating further staffing cuts. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior wrote, “We are taking steps to unify federal wildfire programs to streamline bureaucracy.”

Administration officials have maintained that employees primarily assigned to wildland fire were exempted from the resignation offers this spring. But according to another internal data set obtained by ProPublica, of the more than 4,000 Forest Service employees who accepted deferred resignations and early retirements, approximately 1,600 had red cards. (A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture wrote that the actual number was 1,400, adding that 85 of them “have decided to return for the season.”)

Even those figures don’t account for all the lost institutional knowledge. The departures included meteorologists who provided long-range forecasts, allowing fire managers to decide where to deploy crews. One of the meteorologists who left was Charles Maxwell, who had for more than 20 years interpreted weather models predicting summer monsoons at the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an interagency office. The thunderstorms can fuel wildfire, with lightning and wind, and extinguish them, with great rains. Lately, according to Maxwell, the monsoons have become less and less reliable, and understanding their nuances can be challenging. Maxwell said that he’d already been planning to retire next year. But he also said he “was concerned with the degree of chaos, the potential degradation of services and what would happen to my job.”

Maxwell noted that his work had been covered by knowledgeable fill-ins from out of state. But another firefighter who worked on blazes in New Mexico said that Maxwell’s understanding of the monsoon had been missed. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees the interagency office where Maxwell worked, wrote, “We do not comment on personnel matters.”

The monsoon season is now here and has brought deadly flash flooding along old burn scars in Ruidoso, New Mexico, while distributing sporadic rain in the state’s Gila National Forest.

It is shaping up to be a severe fire season. On Monday, federal firefighters reported 86 new fires across the West; by Tuesday, there were 105 more. And there’s already been some criticism of the federal response. Arizona’s governor and members of Congress have called for an investigation into the Park Service’s handling of a blaze this month that leveled a historic lodge on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. Last month, Rollins acknowledged, “Fires don’t know Republican or Democrat, or which side of the aisle you are on.” This much, at least, is true.

Ellis Simani contributed data analysis.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Sixteen months had passed since Hurricane Harvey tore through the Texas coast in August 2017, killing more than 80 people and flattening entire neighborhoods. And when Texas lawmakers gathered in Austin for their biennial session, the scale of the storm’s destruction was hard to ignore.

Legislators responded by greenlighting a yearslong statewide initiative to evaluate flood risks and improve preparedness for increasingly frequent and deadly storms. “If we get our planning right on the front end and prevent more damage on the front end, then we have less on the back end,” Charles Perry, a Republican senator from Lubbock who chairs a committee overseeing environmental issues, said at the time.

In the years that followed, hundreds of local officials and volunteers canvassed communities across Texas, mapping out vulnerabilities. The result of their work came in 2024 with the release of Texas’ first-ever state flood plan.

Their findings identified nearly $55 billion in proposed projects and outlined 15 key recommendations, including nine suggestions for legislation. Several were aimed at aiding rural communities like Kerr County, where flash flooding over the Fourth of July weekend killed more than 100 people. Three are still missing.

But this year, lawmakers largely ignored those recommendations.

Instead, the legislative session that ended June 2 was dominated by high-profile battles over school vouchers and lawmakers’ decision to spend $51 billion to maintain and provide new property tax cuts, an amount nearly equal to the funding identified by the Texas Water Development Board, a state agency that has historically overseen water supply and conservation efforts.

Although it had been only seven years since Hurricane Harvey, legislators now prioritized the state’s water and drought crisis over flooding needs.

Legislators allocated more than $1.6 billion in new revenue for water infrastructure projects, only some of which would go toward flood mitigation. They also passed a bill that will ask voters in November to decide whether to approve $1 billion annually over the next two decades that would prioritize water and wastewater over flood mitigation projects. At that pace, water experts said that it could take decades before existing mitigation needs are addressed — even without further floods.

Even if they had been approved by lawmakers this year, many of the plan’s recommendations would not have been implemented before the July 4 disaster. But a ProPublica and Texas Tribune analysis of legislative proposals, along with interviews with lawmakers and flood experts, found that the Legislature has repeatedly failed to enact key measures that would help communities prepare for frequent flooding.

Such inaction often hits rural and economically disadvantaged communities hardest because they lack the tax base to fund major flood prevention projects and often cannot afford to produce the data they need to qualify for state and federal grants, environmental experts and lawmakers said.

Over the years, legislators have declined to pass at least three bills that would create siren or alert systems, tools experts say can be especially helpful in rural communities that lack reliable internet and cell service. A 2019 state-commissioned report estimated flood prevention needs at over $30 billion. Since then, lawmakers have allocated just $1.4 billion. And they ignored the key recommendations from the state’s 2024 flood plan that are meant to help rural areas like Kerr County, which is dubbed “Flash Flood Alley” due to its geography.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, left, and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, right, look on as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signs an emergency proclamation during a press conference in Kerrville. (Ronaldo Bolaños/The Texas Tribune)

Spokespeople for Gov. Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, did not answer questions about why the plan’s recommendations were overlooked but defended the Legislature’s investment in flood mitigation as significant. They pointed to millions more spent on other prevention efforts, including flood control dam construction and maintenance, regional flood projects, and increased floodplain disclosures and drainage requirements for border counties. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not respond to questions.

This week, the Legislature will convene for a special session that Abbott called to address a range of priorities, including flood warning systems, natural disaster preparation and relief funding. Patrick promised that the state would purchase warning sirens for counties in flash flood zones. Similar efforts, however, have previously been rejected by the Legislature. Alongside Burrows, Patrick also announced the formation of committees on disaster preparedness and flooding and called the move “just the beginning of the Legislature looking at every aspect of this tragic event.” Burrows said the House is “ready to better fortify our state against future disasters.”

But Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, a Democrat from Richardson, near Dallas, said state lawmakers have brushed off dire flood prevention needs for decades.

“The manual was there, and we ignored it, and we’ve continued to ignore these recommendations,” said Rodríguez Ramos, who has served on the House Natural Resources Committee overseeing water issues for three sessions. “It’s performative to say we’re trying to do something knowing well we’re not doing enough.”

One recommendation from the 2024 flood plan would have cost the state nothing to enact. It called for granting counties the authority to levy drainage fees, including in unincorporated areas, that could fund local flood projects. Only about 150 of 1,450 Texas cities and counties have dedicated drainage fees, according to a study cited in the state assessment.

Kerr, a conservative county of 53,000 people, has struggled to gain support for projects that would raise taxes. About a week after the flooding, some residents protested when county commissioners discussed a property tax increase to help cover the costs of recovery efforts.

The inability to raise such fees is one of the biggest impediments for local governments seeking to fund flood mitigation projects, said Robert R. Puente, a Democrat and former state representative who once chaired the state committee responsible for water issues. Lawmakers’ resistance to such efforts is rooted in fiscal conservatism, said Puente, who now heads the San Antonio Water System.

“It’s mostly because of a philosophy that the leadership in Austin has right now, that under no circumstances are we going to raise taxes, and under most circumstances we’re not even going to allow local governments to have control over how they raise taxes or implement fees,” he said.

Another one of the flood plan’s recommendations called for lawmakers to allocate money for a technical assistance program to help underresourced and rural governments better manage flood prone areas, which requires implementing a slew of standards to ensure safe development in those hazardous zones. Doing this work requires local officials to collect accurate mapping that shows the risk of flooding. Passing this measure could have helped counties like Kerr with that kind of data collection, which the plan recognized is especially challenging for rural and economically disadvantaged communities.

Insufficient information impacts Texas’s ability to fully understand flood risks statewide. The water board’s plan, for example, includes roughly 600 infrastructure projects across Texas in need of completion. But its report acknowledged that antiquated or missing data meant another 3,100 assessments would be required to know whether additional projects are needed.

In the Guadalupe River region, which includes Kerr County, 65% of areas lacked adequate flood mapping. Kerrville, the county seat, was listed among the areas identified as having the “greatest known flood risks and mitigation needs.” Yet of the 19 flood needs specific to the city and county, only three were included in the state plan’s list of 600. They included requests to install backup generators in critical facilities and repair low-water crossings, which are shallow points in streets where rainwater can pool to dangerous levels.

At least 16 other priorities, including the county’s desire for an early warning flood system and potential dam or drainage system repairs, required a follow-up evaluation, according to the state plan. County officials tried to obtain grants for the early warning systems for years, to no avail.

Trees uprooted by floodwaters lie across a field in Hunt in Kerr Country on July 5. (Brenda Bazán for The Texas Tribune)

Gonzales County, an agriculture-rich area of 20,000 people along the Guadalupe River, is among the rural communities struggling to obtain funding, said emergency management director Jimmy Harless, who is also the county’s fire marshal. The county is in desperate need of a siren system and additional gauges to measure the river’s potentially dangerous flood levels, Harless said, but doesn’t have the resources, personnel or expertise to apply for the “burdensome” state grant process.

“It is extremely frustrating for me to know that there’s money there and there’s people that care, but our state agency has become so bureaucratic that it’s just not feasible for us,” Harless said. “Our folks’ lives are more important than what some bureaucrat wants us to do.”

For years, Texas leaders have focused more on cleaning up after disasters than on preparing for them, said Jim Blackburn, a professor at Rice University specializing in environmental law and flooding issues.

“It’s no secret that the Guadalupe is prone to flash flooding. That’s been known for decades,” Blackburn said. “The state has been very negligent about kind of preparing us for, frankly, the worst storms of the future that we are seeing today because of climate change, and what’s changing is that the risks are just greater today and will be even greater tomorrow, because our storms are getting worse and worse.”

At a news conference this month, Abbott said state committees would investigate “ways to address this,” though he declined to offer specifics. When pressed by a reporter about where the blame for the lack of preparedness should fall, Abbott responded that it was “the word choice of losers.”

It shouldn’t have taken the Hill Country flooding for a special session addressing emergency systems and funding needs, said Usman Mahmood, a policy analyst at Bayou City Waterkeeper, a Houston nonprofit that advocates for flood protection measures.

“The worst part pretty much already happened, which is the flooding and the loss of life,” he said. “Now it’s a reaction to that.”

Misty Harris contributed research.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.