17 January 2025 Judith Bueno de Mesquita, Koldo Casla, Claiton Fyock and Marina Lostal, four members of the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex, have submitted contributions to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) in response to the Committee’s consultation on the draft general comment on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Environmental […]
To help plan the inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump’s team tapped a man who was on the board of a charity accused by the Ohio attorney general of pocketing money it claimed to be collecting for victims of the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Patrick Lee, the deputy director public liaison for the inaugural committee, was a member of the board of the Ohio Clean Water Fund, an LLC formed in Ohio days after the train derailed in February 2023. Trump’s appearance in East Palestine after the disaster became a major talking point in his presidential campaign.
The Ohio Clean Water Fund claimed it was operating on behalf of the Second Harvest Food Bank of the Mahoning Valley, a group providing bottled water and other aid to those affected in East Palestine. The Ohio Clean Water Fund managed to raise over $141,000 in less than five weeks, according to a preliminary injunction and the terms of a June 2023 settlement with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.
The partnership it touted, however, was not real, the attorney general’s office charged. After the food bank said publicly that there was no relationship between the two groups, the Ohio Clean Water Fund provided the Second Harvest Food Bank with a $10,000 check, keeping the remaining $131,000, according to the attorney general’s office. Yost later declared the Ohio Clean Water Fund to be a “phony charity” run by “scammers.”
“The sham charity must turn over more than $131,000 in pocketed donations so the money truly does benefit East Palestine.”
A lawyer representing Lee said the settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing by Lee or the charity. “Mr. Lee vigorously disputes the allegations,” attorney Michael Columbo wrote in a letter threatening legal action against The Intercept.
Lee was not named as a defendant and did not answer questions about his role with Ohio Clean Water Fund, which, according to court documents, shared an address with Lee’s home in Alexandria, Virginia. The Intercept used business documents and public records to confirm Lee’s identity.
In exchange for choosing to forgo claims against Lee and his group, Yost’s settlement barred Lee from certain charitable activities in Ohio and required him and the Ohio Clean Water Fund to pay a six-figure restitution.
“Under a settlement reached with the Ohio Clean Water Fund, the sham charity must turn over more than $131,000 in pocketed donations so the money truly does benefit East Palestine residents,” Yost’s office said in a press release. “The food bank had not given OCWF permission to fundraise on its behalf, and Yost’s lawsuit revealed that the ‘charity’ had pocketed at least $131,000 of the donated funds, while sending only $10,000 to the food bank.”
In his letter to The Intercept, Columbo, of the Dhillon Law Group — helmed by Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s pick to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — noted that Lee, the Ohio Clean Water Fund, and the Ohio attorney general settled to avoid lengthy and expensive litigation with no admission of wrongdoing.
“The agreement speaks for itself,” Columbo wrote. “It appears that the Intercept will be misusing an agreement that settled allegations as evidence the allegations were true.”
As part of a subsequent investigation into the Ohio Clean Water Fund’s finances, the attorney general’s office found that the group had raised nearly $150,000 and had paid a fundraiser to collect the sum through text message solicitations.
As part of the settlement, Lee and the Ohio Clean Water Fund were jointly liable, leaving them responsible to pay over $116,000 in restitution, and another $15,000 in civil penalties.
Lee is barred from forming an Ohio charitable trust and from soliciting donations on behalf of any charity in Ohio, according to the settlement. And he is not allowed to be a director, officer, contractor, or board member of any charitable organization in Ohio for the rest of his life.
The settlement permits Lee to volunteer at an Ohio-based charity if his role does not involve donations or funds.
Donald Trump visits East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 22, 2023, with his son Donald Trump Jr., in the aftermath of the train derailment. Photo: Matt Freed/AP
The East Palestine train derailment, which released hazardous materials and toxins in the surrounding community, became a political football in the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump’s team touted his appearance — and Joe Biden’s absence — at the disaster site. And Trump invited East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway to speak at the Republican National Convention last summer.
After his victory, Trump staffers hailed his handling of East Palestine as a crucial moment in the race.
“This was the moment that really set the campaign on a trajectory to victory,” incoming White House communications director Steven Cheung posted to X last month. “The ripples from that day do not get enough attention.”
Lee has worked in national and state politics for years, including with the Republican National Committee.
He was the field director for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that was criticized for spreading misinformation. His consulting firm, LCM Strategies, contracted with the Georgia Republican Party last year.
Since the June 2023 settlement, LCM Strategies has received payments from Ohio Republican state Reps. Justin Pizzulli and Adam Mathews.
“I was not familiar with Patrick Lee, the Ohio Clean Water Fund, or the details of the alleged misuse of donations until receiving your email,” Pizzulli told The Intercept, noting that LCM had been hired as a subcontractor, rather than directly by his campaign. “These allegations are concerning, and I trust the Attorney General’s office is ensuring restitution and accountability.”
While FEC records indicate neither the Trump campaign nor the RNC directly hired Lee during the 2024 campaign season, prior reporting and sources confirm he was involved in logistics for the convention.
Lee’s duties as deputy director of public liaison for Trump’s inaugural committee were not clear.
Lee was not the only political operative involved with the alleged “sham charity.” Ohio Clean Water Fund founder Mike Peppel worked for U.S. Rep. Mike Rulli, R-Ohio, before becoming involved with the East Palestine group. As part of a separate settlement with Yost in August, Peppel was also required to pay restitution and forgo certain charitable activities. The settlement notes that Peppel disputed the allegations and reached the deal to avoid costly litigation.
Earlier this month, The Vindicator reported that Rulli had rehired Peppel. Rulli’s campaign had also contracted with Lee’s group, LCM Strategies, in 2021 and 2022.
“I have said from the beginning that we will continue to fight for the people of East Palestine, which is exactly what we did here,” Yost said in a statement after the second settlement. “These scammers preyed on generous donors to try to line their own pockets, but ultimately were stopped and shut down.”
The fossil fuel industry pumped tens of millions of dollars into President-elect Donald Trump’s successful bid for a second White House term — and it could begin seeing a return on its investment on his very first day in office. Trump pledged on the campaign trail to be a “dictator” on day one in the service of accelerating U.S. fossil fuel production, which is already at record levels as…
The author’s former home in Altadena, CA, in flames, Jan 8, 2024. Video: “Vanguard Blacklight, ” (Screenshot)
Remembrance of things lost
News about the fire arrived in fragments. First, that the blaze in Eaton Canyon was spreading rapidly, then that a few homes in the foothills were consumed, then whole neighborhoods, including my former one on the southern perimeter of the Angeles Crest National Forest. The house I owned on Jaxine Drive, designed in 1959 by Randell Makinson, burned to the ground. The loss to the current occupant is obviously much greater than mine. I hope that she finds solace in the love of family and friends, and that she may rebuild if she chooses.
I haven’t lived in Altadena for more than 25 years, and most of my friends from there have also moved on. But the place still figures large in my memory. It was there that the sweetness of life in Southern California was revealed. Of course, the distance of time and space enhances flavors, so there may be some unintentional exaggeration in what follows.
Life in Altadena felt easy — il dolcefar niento. My (former) wife Mary and I entertained friends – mainly artists and academics — on the redwood deck of our house, beneath the shade of a 400-year-old oak tree. About 200 yards up the road lived Bill (a lighting and set designer) and Joyce (a sculptor). They often invited us over to use their pool or for a barbecue. Their rambling house, cluttered with Mexican artesanias and other folk art, was often filled with the music of the Grateful Dead – Bill was a dedicated Deadhead. Their little boy Matt liked to play with our daughter Sarah, and because there was almost no traffic on our cul-de-sac, they could walk up or down without supervision.
Our neighborhood was in a shallow canyon that contained no more than about 30 houses. Updated fire regulations banned any new building in the area. We were surrounded on three sides by mountains and the national forest. The word “forest” gives a misimpression. Most of the terrain was chaparral with occasional oak thickets and pine woods. Its predominant color was not green but the tan of decomposed granite. That changed in the late winter and spring – assuming the rains came – when there was green everywhere. But much of the verdure was foxtail, a tall grass annual that when it ripens, sheds barbed seeds that stick to shoes and socks and can get lodged in the noses of dogs. (Foxtail actually describes several, similar species of grass.) In the summer and autumn, it goes from green to brown — and can easily catch fire. When it does, it races up and down hills like a lit fuse, sparking other flammable material.
From my front door, I’d could jog about 500 yards to reach a steep trail that led up into the National Forest, then down another trail to Millard Canyon campgrounds, and then up along a fire road, and down again toward Arroyo Seco Park and the Rose Bowl. But that would be about 10 miles and too far for me to run. So, I usually turned around at the top of the fire road or else took an entirely different route into the mountains, up a steep trail toward Echo Mountain, the site of the former Mt. Lowe tramway. The Alpine Tavern and other facilities at the top, including the funicular itself, were destroyed by fire and the Great Depression. But the view from up there is terrific – you can see the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island.
Along the trails in the spring were yellow/orange monkey flowers, white Matilija poppies, purple lupins, yellow tower mustard, purple nightshade, and blue California lilacs. Sometimes I bent down to snack on the abundant miner’s lettuce. In rainy years, small streams crossed the paths in several places, requiring me to leap to clear them. Still, today, when I want to fall asleep, I imagine myself bounding down the eroded trails, springing from rock to rock, and over streams without fear of falling. I still run, but it’s mostly flat here in Norfolk and muddy – in any case, my days of bounding are over.
During my decade in Altadena, I taught at Occidental College in Los Angeles, about eight miles away. It was a good job – excellent colleagues, a diverse and energetic student body, and a handsome campus, mostly designed in the 1920s by Myron Hunt. But the absence of graduate students was frustrating – one could teach up to a certain level, and no higher. Plus, I had to do all my own grading. While running down steep trails remains a recurring dream, slogging through hundreds of “bluebooks” (a blue-covered paper book used for answering test questions) is a recurring nightmare. Nevertheless, it was with regret that I left Oxy in 1998 for a position at Northwestern University. They hired Mary too, in the Department of Anthropology – the offer was too good to refuse.
In the decades that followed, successive writing and research projects brought me back to Altadena, and to the city of Pasadena, its larger, wealthier neighbor. My friends Peter (a brilliant studio musician) and Irmi (a manager at the Goethe Institute) offered me use of their guest cottage, just a block from my old house. And even when my gigs in Pasadena ended, I kept coming back — for the last decade and a half with my wife, Harriet. She’s less keen on Los Angeles than I am, but Altadena and Pasadena always pleased her. She enjoyed the sight of the mountains looming above both communities (snowcapped in the winter), the historic Craftsman and mid-century architecture, the museums, and especially the hikes in the forest, including Millard and Eaton canyons.
Robert Gordon, architect, former Maunu/Kocian residence, 1955 (additions by Fung and Blatt). Photo: Peter Maunu (with permission). Now destroyed.
There were portents of disaster. In 1993, the Kinneloa fire burned the slopes of Eaton Canyon and a few dozen homes. We could see the smoke from our house and the leaping flames from Bill and Joyce’s. At one point, Bill climbed up on his roof with a garden hose to extinguish any cinders that landed. I thought he was crazy. “The biggest risk for you is falling off the roof,” I shouted. Between the sound of branches jostled by Santa Ana winds, and the steams of water, I don’t think he heard me. Mary and I (Sarah wasn’t yet in the picture) retreated to our house, packed a few essentials, including a favorite etching by Goya, and drove off to spend a couple of days in a motel by the beach in Santa Monica. Our homes were all spared.
The neighborhood generally practiced good fire hygiene. We planted xerophytic gardens, scrupulously raked leaves in fire season, and plowed under fields covered with foxglove. (The county did this for a fee.) For several years, Bill and Joyce kept a pair of goats to munch the grasses on slopes that couldn’t be reached by their bush-hog. We all knew, however, that grazing animals weren’t the solution. If a big fire arrived, our mostly wooden, mid-century houses would go up like matchboxes.
Altadena history, in brief
It’s a silly name, a real estate promoter’s name. Alta in Spanish is the feminine form of “tall”. “Dena” signifies nothing. Put together, they were supposed to mean “above Pasadena.” Pasadena is an Ojibwe word meaning “valley”. The Ojibway tribe flourished 3,000 miles away in the Great Lakes region, and Pasadena is not a valley. But what’s in a name when there is money to be made? By the 1880s, a group of real estate entrepreneurs, including John and Frederick Woodbury, had bought up a huge tract of agricultural land and enticed some rich businessmen from the East and Midwest to plant stakes. Among them was the Chicago printing mogul Andrew McNally. His stately Queen Anne on East Mariposa Street was constructed in 1887. It burned down last week. So did the Arts and Crafts style Scripps Mansion built in 1904 for the newspaper magnate William Armiger Scripps. (For decades, it’s been used as a Waldorf School.) The 1907 Woodward home designed by Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey — a little later the residence of the popular writer of American westerns, Zane Gray — also burned.
The 1920s was a major period of residential building in Altadena, especially low-cost craftsman and Spanish revival bungalows. The developer and con man E.P. Janes built several hundred cheap houses in a mashed-up craftsman, Spanish, Tudor and Queen-Anne style. They generally had tall gables, arched doorways, trowel-swept stucco walls, cement terraces, and dormer windows. In 1926, he left town in a hurry, leaving behind several hundred unfinished (but paid-for) houses and a pile of debt. The houses were eventually finished, and “Janes Village” became a sought-after Altadena address. Last week, dozens of these houses were destroyed by fire.
In Northwest Altadena, fire damage was equally significant, consuming hundreds of homes, schools and churches, including the United Methodist Church. The fact that its congregation is primarily Black, tells another significant story about Altadena. Because it was unincorporated, the community lay outside the redlined zone established by the Federal Home Owners’ Loan Association during the New Deal. (De jure segregation was not only a Southern thing.) Nevertheless, Altadena’s Black population remained small until the 1960s and ‘70s. That’s when fair housing laws spurred white flight in both west Altadena and adjacent parts of Pasadena. The non-white population surged again a decade later with the completion of the 210 (Foothill) freeway. It destroyed or divided several, primarily Black neighborhoods of Pasadena, with many of the 3,000 displaced folks moving a half-mile north to Altadena. The Black population surged to 43% by the mid-1980s, about the time we arrived. Today, its 18%.
Overall, 58% of residents in Altadena are people of color, including 27% Latino. The Eaton fire destroyed homes that, in some cases, had been passed down for two or more generations. It also eliminated hundreds of affordable apartment rentals in a region with a severe shortage of them. But with home prices in Altadena now averaging about $1.5 million, it’s unclear whether a new generation of middle-class property owners or lower-income renters will ever again be able to move there. With little new home building and an unregulated rental market, Altadena was rapidly gentrifying. The fires will only hasten the process – the vultures of disaster capitalism have already alighted.
Why Altadena burned
The fires in Southern California, including the Eaton fire, began as forest wildfires and quickly spread into what’s called the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI) – the potentially hazardous zone where homes or other structures abut or mix with undeveloped wildland. Contrary to suggestions that fire victims bear some responsibility for their predicament by choosing to live in the WUI, residents of Los Angeles are less likely to live in a WUI than people elsewhere in the country. In California, about a third of the population (over 11 million people) live in the WUI, consistent with the national figure. In Los Angeles, the number is about 15%. While significant parts of Altadena (as well as Pacific Palisades and Malibu) do abut or reach into the WUI, the real cause of the disaster was dryness, heat, and strong, Santa Ana winds, all exacerbated by climate change. The failure of emergency responders is another factor. There were simply too few of them, and when Altadena burned, they were nowhere to be found.
2024 was globally the hottest year on record. Los Angeles experienced its warmest summer ever, following a decade of record heat. To make matters worse, a succession of stationary high-pressure systems prevented the arrival of seasonal rains. New research indicates this may be the consequence of record-high ocean temperatures disrupting or blocking the usual path of the jet stream. The same kind of perturbation may have been the cause of the excessive heat and drought that brought brush fires last year to parts of New York City. In addition, “hydroclimate whiplash” – large, sudden or frequent changes from very dry to very wet conditions – appear to be an additional consequence of global warming. Los Angeles was subject to two years of drenching “atmospheric rivers”, followed this year by drought – just four millimeters of rain have fallen this season. In California, 17 of the largest 20 fires in state history occurred in the past 18 years, with 5 of the 6 largest coming since August 2020, not including the Palisades, Malibu, and Eaton conflagrations. The recent fires may prove to be the most damaging and costly in U.S. history. Estimates are approaching $200 billion.
In addition to global warming, poor land and fire management practices have also contributed to the extent and severity of the destruction. There is considerable debate about this, but otherwise intelligent writers, including David Wallace-Wells, offer too easy and often mistaken formulas for fire prevention. Historically, the U.S. Forest Service employed fire suppression for all wildfires, including those that don’t threaten people or structures. This led to artificially high fuel loads and fires of much higher intensity than otherwise. In recent years, the Forest Service reversed course and began to use prescribed burns in areas with a more than-average fuel load. Then this year, it stopped its program of burning in California for budgetary reasons.
The best research (contra Wallace-Wells) indicates that most woodlands should simply be left alone to burn or not burn, except for areas immediately contiguous to homes. Logging and grazing in forested lands – often proposed as a means to reduce fire risk – actually increases it. The former by removing larger and more valuable trees that resist fires, and the latter by removing native grasses that burn slowly, while promoting the growth of invasive grasses – like foxtail — that burn faster and hotter. In addition, thinning forests tends to increase wind speed in woodlands, fanning any flames that erupt and carrying embers further than otherwise. Also, the fuel load in burned forests is quickly replenished, meaning that burns need to be repeated on a massive scale, and with few evident benefits. The forests surrounding Altadena (mostly chaparral) have had multiple fires in recent years – they did little, if anything, to prevent the latest blaze. More frequent burns, as George Wuerthner recently observed, would only destroy the chaparral ecology, making space for invasive species with even greater flammability. More important than prescribed burns is fortifying individual homes and neighborhoods against the flying embers from inevitable fires.
Wildfires ignite homes in three possible ways: embers, heat, and flames. Embers are the most common. Depending on the type of fuel and wind speed, embers can travel upwards of 20 kilometers, igniting new spot fires far from the original flame front. Under conditions of high wind, fuel breaks – highways, rivers, ditches, prescribed burn areas — are useless. Embers fall in a blizzard and quickly accumulate on structures or infiltrate homes through windows, vents, or other gaps. They may also inflame vegetation or other fuels around a home. Doorbell videos from Altadena show wind-blown embers raining down on houses and businesses and quickly igniting them. Once a structure starts to burn, its heat may suffice to ignite buildings within the approximately 30-meter home ignition zone. Contact with direct flame of course, whether from vegetation, piles of firewood, fences, cars, or other structures, spreads fires even more rapidly. Once a single house goes up in flames, the one next to it will go, and so on until fuel sources are exhausted, fire engines arrive, or it starts to rain.
If there had been fire trucks on the scene, many of the fires in Altadena could easily have been extinguished. Stories of homes saved by people with garden hoses prove the point. (Doing so, however, can be deadly.) As one eyewitness and videographer reported, “there were no fire personnel anywhere.” On Jan 14, The New York Times reported:
“Carlos Herrera, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department,…said that by the time the Eaton fire had broken out on Tuesday, all resources were already dedicated to the raging Palisades fire across town.”
If confirmed by further investigation, the fires in Altadena – an unincorporated community of 40,000 that is nearly 60% non-white – may have been a victim of environmental racism as well as climate change and bad luck. The irony is that the wealthier and whiter residents of Pacific Palisades fared no better. They may, however, better afford to rebuild.
It’s possible to protect homes in the WUI better than currently. In addition to having well-supported fire services, local and state governments can mandate (and support with grants where appropriate) defensible zones around properties. This entails separating houses from vegetation and any flammable attachments, such as decks and fences. Home and apartment owners should also use structural elements that are fire-resistant. Windows that are not outfitted for wildfire conditions – for example vinyl — can easily melt, break, or ignite if exposed to radiant heat, flames, or ember buildup. Roofs are one of the most vulnerable parts of a home. While any roofing material can be treated to make it fire resistant, metal or tile roofs are best, however, testing has found that the latter (common in Southern California) are vulnerable to ignition from showers of embers due to spaces between the tiles. (Homeowners can install rooftop sprinkler systems.) Vents are also common entry point for embers to flow into a home. Noncombustible mesh coverings can help slow down penetration. The exterior siding of a home, though less important than other structural features for wildfire resilience, is sometimes the weak link. Noncombustible or ignition-resistant materials such as metal, adobe, or fiber cement should be used if a house is located in a vulnerable WUI or within 30 feet of another house or combustible vegetation. There are many other ways to make homes safer, but zoning, construction, and insurance regulations have not kept up with the increased level of fire risk due to climate change.
The future in the past – Gregory Ain’s Park Planned Homes
Because I’m especially interested in art, architecture and design, I’ve been struck by the destruction of so many fine buildings in Altadena. I mentioned some earlier. Here’s another loss, the remembrance of which could offer a guide to Altadena’s successful rebuilding: Park Planned homes by Gregory Ain and landscape architect Garett Eckbo. (21 of 28 Ain houses were destroyed.)
Gregory Ain and Gerrit Eckbo, Park Planned Homes, 1947, Altadena, 21 or 28 houses destroyed. Photos: Gregory Ain papers, Architecture and Design Collection. Art, Design & Architecture Museum; University of California, Santa Barbara (Fair use).
The complex was designed and built in 1947 to solve a problem: How to provide affordable homes to returning, limited income GIs and their families at a time of housing and material shortages. Ain’s solution, developed in Altadena and then a little later in Mar Vista and Silver Lake, entailed use of standardized plans; common finishes, hardware and appliances; easy access to the outside; and privacy sufficient to affirm the American ideology of individualism while still suggesting communalism. Each house was about 1350 sf, (considered generous at the time), and contained an open plan with adjacent kitchen, dining and living rooms. A built-in closet/cabinet, separating the living and dining areas, stopped well short of the ceiling to allow the passage of light and air. Three bedrooms are accessed by a corridor.
The houses are symmetrically paired along Highview Avenue, but mirrored, creating a sense of different-but-same. Each has a shared patio/driveway in front (partly divided by a low wall) and a private garden in back; property lines are thereby both denied (in the front) and affirmed (in the back). Neighbors may be either welcomed or not, as determined by circumstance. The building type looks back at once to the formerly ubiquitous L.A. bungalow courts of the 19teens and twenties, and the much larger Siedlungen (collective housing) from the same period, made by Bauhaus architects for the Weimar Republic.
Gregory Ain, Planned Park Homes, Altadena, Google Street View.
Ain’s project was only partially realized; he originally intended to build twice as many Park Planned Homes. But the fires in Altadena suggest his plans ought to be rescued from the archives and reanimated. Or, more appropriately, new sets of architectural plans developed using modular or pre-fabricated elements that can be assembled in a factory or workshop and quickly assembled on site. They must, of course, be fire resistant. Burned public properties should be made available for the siting of attractive, new housing – a mix of rentals and low-cost owner-occupied units. Ain’s mostly destroyed Park Planned Homes, with their assertion of the value of both community and individuality, can thereby support the rebirth of Altadena as a community of mixed-income and ethnic diversity.
Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Listen carefully. Can you hear that low-pitched sound? A death rattle is descending upon Yellowstone National Park’s remnant wild buffalo population.
In the winter of 2025, death approaches Yellowstone’s at risk buffalo herds with the stealth of a hungry mountain lion wearing a Taylor Swift mask. State and federal government agencies, Indian nations, and wealthy so-called conservation NGOs are lurking, salivating with plunder in their eyes. These perennial looters relish the annual buffalo killing spree. Bulls, full-term pregnant cows, and newborns, all must die to meet Yellowstone Park’s arbitrary population cap. Euphemistically dubbed the Yellowstone Bison Conservation Transfer Program, dominion, colonization, domestication, and death aims to extinguish any wildness that hasn’t already been excised. Putting lipstick on this pig can’t hide the bloodlust for a good massacre.
The Transfer Program (A.K.A. culling) operates as a gaslighting tool to manipulate the public’s perception of buffalo management in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Buffalo genocide is shapeshifting. The risk of wild buffalo transmitting brucellosis to livestock is 0%. A new name and fancy public image campaign can’t hide The Big Lie. The story about brucellosis is 100% fabricated to conceal the ongoing range war over who controls the land and grass in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Under the authoritarian direction of Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s (APHIS-USDA) surveillance-capture-detention (“quarantine”) and extra-territorial abduction and rendition program (prison “transfer”), wild Yellowstone buffalo are being farmed (domesticated), commodified and traded on a burgeoning interstate wild meat market.
More capital means more corrals inside Yellowstone Park to imprison more kidnapped wild buffalo, break up tight-knit family groups, and condemn isolated individuals to years of quarantine and torture. From the Park penitentiary, wild buffalo are stuffed like sardines into trailers and trucked to another quarantinefacility at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation located 500 miles North of their ancestral homeland in Yellowstone National Park.
Huge injections of capital are streaming in from multiple (private and public) funding sources. Various Indian nations are being courted and bribed by multiple federal management agencies and NGOs to do the government’s deadly dirty work. If the $100 million in federal Farm Bill and Inflation Reduction Act money passes through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) the 2025 capture-quarantine-transfer (truck and trailer) program may pose the greatest threat to free-roaming buffalo since the 1800s.
Many buffalo subjected to the domestication program die in captivity or en route to fenced pastures on Indian Reservations or are slaughtered for meat. Inbreeding in captivity destroys their family structure and natural migration instinct.Last fall, Yellowstone National Park estimated a population of 5,449 animals.
The Park’s goal is to maintain a population between 3,500 to 6,000 individuals. Park biologists recently estimated the carrying capacity at close to 11,000 individuals. This year’s “magic” herd reduction number is 1,375. Go figure! Where is the compassion for America’s last wild buffalo? They are wildlife, not livestock.
Yellowstone National Park’s 2024 Bison Management Plan degrades the natural evolutionary processes foundational to the preservation of Yellowstone’s wild bison genome and the natural landscape upon which all wildlife depend.
Take action to protect habitats for all sacred lifeforms now facing the real risk of extermination – even inside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. Domestication and genocide of wild buffalo underscores just how indifferent and violent our government and culture has become. Surely, we can all dream into existence a world where greed, competition and division give way to a higher consciousness of inseparable cooperation and compassion for all life.
Help silence the death-rattle threatening Yellowstone buffalo.
A historic agreement has just been struck to settle a decades-long land-use conflict over the future of cattle and wildlife on Point Reyes National Seashore. Under the deal, most of the beef and dairy ranches on Point Reyes National Seashore will depart, and former ranch lands will be managed as a Scenic Landscape Zone according to a new General Management Plan approved by the National Park Service. Tule elk will have the freedom to roam unmolested throughout Point Reyes National Seashore, opportunities for public recreation will improve, and the land will have the opportunity to return to native coastal grassland.
The settlement was struck between three environmental groups (Resource Renewal Institute, Center for Biological Diversity, and Western Watersheds Project), represented by Advocates for the West, and the National Park Service, and a subset of ranchers who had intervened in our lawsuit that had challenged the prior General Management Plan at Point Reyes. In addition (and importantly), the Nature Conservancy provided the private funding for the voluntary ranch buyouts after being invited to join negotiations when mediation was underway.
Before the settlement, ranchers had faced constant challenges and uncertainty surrounding their leases, impacting the viability of their operations. Environmentalists pointed to the impacts of agricultural leasing on wildlife management and the protection of the park’s natural resources. The situation had become untenable for everyone. The settlement and new General Management Plan usher in a new era of healing on Point Reyes National Seashore.
On the National Seashore, 12 of the 14 ranches have accepted voluntary buyouts from the Nature Conservancy, brokered with private funds, and will depart these public lands. On Golden Gate National Recreation Area, all seven ranches will remain, with a 16% reduction in the number of cattle in this part of the Park. Remaining ranchers will be authorized to operate under longer 20-year leases.
The most controversial aspect of the package is that the new General Management Plan allows targeted grazing by domestic livestock on the Scenic Landscape Zone vacated by the departing ranchers. A plan will be drawn up in the future for targeted grazing in the Scenic Landscape Zone to assist in maintain desired conditions, enhancing native vegetation and controlling invasive plants, which will be conducted by the Park Service, the Nature Conservancy, and/or another conservation nonprofit. Numbers of livestock for targeted grazing are capped at 1,200 cow-calf pairs in the wettest years, 600 cow-calf pairs in an average year, and near zero during drought. The maximum limit represents a 75% reduction in livestock for this zone compared to previous numbers of cattle that grazed here, and for an average-rainfall year the published number of livestock represents an 87% decrease from previous authorizations. The Park Service’s plan gives the agency flexibility to manage livestock numbers to achieve ecological objectives outlined in the plan. We expect the actual cattle numbers to be much, much lower than the figures published in the new General Management Plan.
For the rare tule elk, the new plan means that they will have the opportunity to roam freely throughout all of Point Reyes National Seashore. Elk will no longer be allowed to be hazed away from ranch pastures as they were in the past. Elk populations will be allowed to expand and reach self-regulated levels. But disappointingly, tule elk will not be allowed to expand into Golden Gate National Recreation Area, or to disperse outside the Park, even though they are a wildlife species native to the region.
Other rare native species should also have a better opportunity to thrive at the Seashore under the new plan. The new plan contains helpful language to fence off streamside areas that will enhance the ability to protect spawning habitats for embattled runs of coho and chinook salmon and steelhead. Water quality should also improve, and it will be required to meet Clean Water Act standards.
As fences come down in the Scenic Landscape Zone, expanded trail systems will be developed, increasing recreation opportunities and public access. The recreational experience will be enhanced by an increase in wildlife, expanding wildlife viewing opportunities.
The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria will continue to have a say in the management of livestock management and tule elk conservation under the new plan, which commits the Park Service to incorporating traditional ecological knowledge into land management. Traditional burning could be a part of the mix to help return the land to natural conditions.
A plan is being developed to assist the transition of ranch workers, with cooperation from the conservation groups, and some of the necessary funding has already been secured to help workers find employment and housing outside the National Seashore.
Under the settlement, the departing ranchers will have about 15 months to wind down their operations and move off the land, and when that happens, the environmental groups will drop our legal challenge.
From the beginning, WWP and our allies have focused on restoring healthy native coastal grasslands and allowing the rare tule elk to recover on Point Reyes National Seashore. This package offers opportunities to achieve both of our goals. It has been a long and complex negotiation, and nobody walked away from this process with everything they wanted. But in the end, this agreement starts a new era for Point Reyes National Seashore, and we look forward to better days ahead for lands and wildlife as a result of the deal.
British director of Human Rights Watch attacks ‘dangerous hypocrisy’ of government
Britain’s crackdown on climate protest is setting “a dangerous precedent” around the world and undermining democratic rights, the UK director of Human Rights Watch has said.
Yasmine Ahmed accused the Labour government of hypocrisy over its claims to be committed to human rights and international law.
The apocalyptic wildfires that have erupted in the boreal forest in Siberia, the Russian Far East and Canada, climate scientists repeatedly warned, would inevitably move southwards as rising global temperatures created hotter, more fire-prone landscapes. Now they have. The failures in California, where Los Angeles has had no significant rainfall in eight months, are not only failures of preparedness — the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, decreased funds for the fire department by $17 million — but a failure globally to halt the extraction of fossil fuel.
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In the last years before the fires that destroyed Pacific Palisades, California, the great civic debate in my hometown was over the meaning of a shopping mall.
Some residents feared that the Palisades Village, a 3-acre archipelago of posh boutiques and restaurants that opened in 2018, was driving a gleaming stake through the heart of the place where we grew up. That “Old Palisades” was a mythologized, upper-middle-class community where people knew one another, raised happy families and tempered even the old, analog status-seeking of Malibu and Beverly Hills.
The Village, with its Gucci and Saint Laurent stores and its nouveau-McMansion architectural style, marked our final conquest by overly tanned, overly toned immigrants from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Who else would stroll into the Erewhon grocery and tap down $20 for a Hailey Bieber Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie?
But plenty of people did. They liked the “bespoke, walkable village,” as the developers advertised it, seeing it as an overdue upgrade from Mort’s Deli and the family-run stores that the developer (and later mayoral candidate) Rick Caruso bulldozed away. They seemed happy to pay $27 for a seat in the Bay Theatre, a luxury multiplex that pirated its name and iconic facade from the long-closed movie house on Sunset Boulevard where my friends and I snuck into films like “Billy Jack” and “Big Wednesday.”
On either side of the mall debate, people rarely paused to note that these were rich people’s problems.
Unlike neighboring Santa Monica, an incorporated city with a spirited government, the Palisades didn’t raise its own taxes or run its own services. We call it a town, but it’s really a neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles. Still, there is a community council and a couple of local newspapers, and none of them worried more than occasionally about the threat that catastrophic wildfires might sweep down on us as they had on so many other California towns.
We had been lucky, and we knew it.
Wildfire ravaged a building on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades.
(Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)
On New Year’s Day, a handful of my old friends from Paul Revere Junior High were texting to that effect. “We have it so good,” my lawyer friend Eric wrote. He was looking out at the Pacific from the deck of his new home, having moved triumphantly back to the Palisades after years away.
It went without saying that our blessings included having grown up in a place where we could spend blissful days at the beach, attend very good public schools, learn how to work at miserable after-school jobs and get into trouble with minimal consequences.
Homes in that bygone Palisades could still be had for less than $100,000. We didn’t want to be Malibu or Brentwood. There were many wealthy Palisadians even then, but our baroque teenage hierarchies had little to do with who had money and who had less. There were Reagan Republicans and liberal Democrats, but the prevailing political vibe was tolerant and democratic.
The Palisades was still very white. There were separate beach clubs for WASPs and Jews; for years, some did not admit Blacks. But about a third of our classmates at Palisades High were bused from heavily African American neighborhoods like Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills. Whatever its failings, that integration shared what was arguably the city’s best public high school with thousands of less-privileged students. It also taught the white kids something about living in a more diverse society.
An impressive proportion of my classmates from those varied backgrounds went on to build meaningful lives. There are professors and social workers and doctors and film people. A star defensive tackle on the football team, who also sang in the chorus, became the actor and director Forest Whitaker. The businesspeople include a couple of zillionaires. For some, the ultimate marker of success was to afford a home in the neighborhood and send their kids to our old schools.
The Palisades changed a lot after I left for college. Despite the dangers, wealthier people built bigger, fancier homes, pushing out over the canyons and higher into the hills. We had long understood that we were living our nice lives in defiance of some powerful forces. I can still see the terror on my mom’s face one afternoon in the fall of 1978, as a wildfire swept toward us from Mandeville Canyon and we frantically packed the car with the most precious possessions we could gather up.
Even as they leveled quaint, old bungalows to build lot-to-lot monstrosities, many of the Hollywood people who flocked to the Palisades came for the sort of things that had always brought us together — the 10K runs and the Fourth of July parade; the beaches and parks and schools; the great hiking trails that wove into the Santa Monica Mountains from almost every hillside in town.
On New Year’s Day, my friend Eric closed our text conversation with a photograph of the evening’s spectacular sunset. The next images in the chat came a week later, in a video shot from the other side of his deck. A wall of gray-black smoke was billowing behind the ridge, not far from the home where my family lived for almost 50 years.
Less than an hour after he took the picture, Eric, his wife and their son fled down Chautauqua Boulevard, named for the high-minded Methodist educational movement that established the Palisades in the 1920s. Their home, along with the one my parents built and those of many friends, soon burned to the ground.
In photographs, the remains of the Palisades now evoke the streets of Aleppo or Homs, in Syria. Unlike most of my hometown friends, I’ve seen streets like those before. In Mexico City and San Salvador after devastating earthquakes in the 1980s. In Gaza. In the wastelands of Kabul, where American largesse never quite bandaged the scars of the Soviet war.
The ruins of buildings on Sunset Boulevard are reflected in the window of a Saint Laurent store that is part of the largely undamaged Palisades Village mall.
(Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)
Imagery might be the only valid comparison between our tragedy and those in which tens of thousands of people were killed. Many Palisades residents displaced by the fire have enviable resources; they are reported to be filling four- and five-star hotels from Montecito to Laguna Beach. Compared with Syrians or Gazans or refugees from the Ukraine, the Palisadians have a far better shot at rebuilding their lives.
But the trauma remains overwhelming. To have our past so violently erased makes me wonder what we can really rebuild. Big developers are likely to snap up the burned-out lots of people who were uninsured or underinsured. What takes their place will inevitably be bigger and more generic construction, much of it in the nouveaux-McMansion style.
Even my friends in their early 60s have been weighing whether they will have the time and fortitude to rebuild their homes. And whose Palisades, they wonder, will be rebuilt around them? For now, the only section of the town center that stands somewhat unscathed is the Palisades Village mall, where Caruso called in private firefighters and water trucks to protect his investment.
As a young foreign correspondent, I spent a lot of time in Managua, a city that had been leveled by an earthquake in 1972. After years of war and revolution, Nicaragua was destitute; there was no money for street signs. But the Nicaraguans had a powerful collective memory, and I came to understand it as one of their great strengths.
In those days, a typical Managua address might be, “Del arbolito, tres cuadras hacía el lago,” or, “From the old tree, three blocks toward the lake.” The old tree hadn’t existed for years. But everyone remembered.
Next will be the “Big One” earthquake everyone knows is coming.
And then—unless we take immediate action—Diablo Canyon’s radioactive cloud will make this region a radioactive dead zone.
My family is now besieged by four fires raging less than four miles away. We don’t know how long our luck will hold.
We are eternally grateful to the brave fire-fighters and public servants who are doing their selfless best to save us all.
We are NOT grateful that Gavin Newsom has recklessly endangered us by forcing continued operation at two unsafe, decrepit nuclear power plants perched on active earthquake faults, set to pour radioactive clouds on us from just four hours north of here.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s resident site inspector—Dr. Michael Peck—after five years at Diablo warned that it cannot withstand the earthquakes we all know are coming.
In 2006 the NRC confirmed that Unit One was already seriously embrittled. Its fragile core makes a melt-down virtually certain to cause a catastrophic explosion, shooting a lethal apocalyptic cloud right at us…and then across the state and continent.
These wildfires make clear that these city, state and federal governments—maybe NO government ANYWHERE—can begin to cope with these kinds of mega-crises.
Imagine watching our public servants trying to cope while dressed in radiation suits, knowing everything around us has been permanently contaminated.
Imagine leaving all you own forever behind while racing to get yourself and your family out of here under the universal evacuation order demanded by radioactive clouds like those that decimated the downwind regions from Chernobyl and Fukushima, not to mention Santa Susanna and Three Mile Island, Windscale and Kyshtym.
Pre-empting such a catastrophe was a major motivation for the 2018 plan to phase out the two Diablo nukes in 2024 and 2025,
That landmark blueprint was crafted over a two-year period with hundreds of meetings, scores of hearings involving the best and brightest in energy, the economy, the ecology and the hard engineering realities of aging atomic power reactors.
It was signed by the then-Governor (Jerry Brown), Lieutenant Governor (Gavin Newsom), state legislature, state regulatory agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, plant owner (PG&E), labor unions, local governments, environmental groups and many more.
The economic and energy security goals of this plan have been far exceeded by advances in renewable generation and battery storage. California now regularly gets 100% of its electricity from solar, wind and geothermal. Battery back-up capabilities exceed Diablo’s capacity by a factor of four or more. Its inflexible baseload production unfortunately interferes with far cheaper renewables filling our grid.
The grid’s most serious blackout threats now come from disruptive malfunctions and potential disasters at Diablo Canyon.
All this has been well known since 2018, when Newsom signed the shut-down agreement.
The phase-out proceeded smoothly for four years, largely exceeding expectations.
But in 2022, Newsom strongarmed the legislature into trashing the transition plan. His Public Utilities Commission decimated the statewide rate structure, costing our solar industry, billions in revenues and at least 17,000 jobs.
Instead Newsom fed PG&E about $1.4 billion in public subsidies and $11 billion in over-market charges to keep Diablo running through 2030.
Neither the NRC nor state nor PG&E have done the necessary tests to guarantee Diablo’s safety, refusing to re-test for embrittlement even though such defects forced the NRC to shut the Yankee Rowe reactor in 1991.
Diablo has no private liability insurance. Should it irradiate Los Angeles, NONE of us can expect compensation.
So as we shudder amidst the horrors of this firestorm, we know that our loss of life, health and property will be orders of magnitude—literally, infinitely—more devastating when, by quake or error, the reactors at Diablo Canyon melt and explode.
Responsibility for this needless, unconscionable threat lies strictly with Gavin Newsom. There is no sane economic, electric supply or common sense reason for him to impose this gamble on us.
Governor Newsom: NOTHING can make public sense of this radioactive throw of the dice.
We respectfully beg, request, demand, beseech that you honor the sacred word you gave in 2018 to phase out the Diablo Canyon atomic reactors.
As we see the devastation engulfing us, and the inability of government to make it right, there is zero mystery as to why these nukes must shut.
Graphic: Ad Council, National Association of State Foresters, and US Forest Service.
Smokey Bear tells us “only you can prevent wildfires.” That has been Smokey’s simple message since 1944, but nevertheless he has been long associated with the policy of immediately suppressing all wildfires. This policy was called the 10 AM policy, and it meant that all wildfires should be suppressed by 10 AM of the morning after the wildfire was ignited. The 10 AM policy resulted in over-suppression of wildfires and disrupted the beneficial role of wildfire in forest ecosystems, so the policy was rightly discontinued in 1978. The fire suppression policy is sometimes known as the “Smokey Bear Effect.” In actuality, Smokey did not make any comments about fire suppression.
Smokey is correct that a greater focus on preventing unwanted human-caused wildfire ignitions will help to mitigate our wildfire management dilemma. Western forests are being heavily cut and burned for a primary purpose of moderating wildfire behavior, with substantial adverse impacts to both forests and communities. It would be much more direct and cost-effective to put greater emphasis on avoiding unwanted human-caused wildfire ignitions in the first place. This can be done while still allowing lightning strike fires to fulfill their natural and beneficial role on our forest landscapes, when safe to do so. This can be supplemented by judicious implementation of prescribed burns, only during the safest burn windows.
However, Smokey needs to clarify at whom he is pointing a rather accusatory paw. Who all needs to prevent wildfires? Does he just mean the public, or does he also include the Forest Service? The Forest Service and other land management agencies are responsible for a significant amount of wildfire ignitions and acres burned on our forest landscapes, and at times their actions have exacerbated wildfires. We need to consider all the sources of wildfire ignitions and hone our prevention strategies accordingly.
The primary ignition source of wildfire in the US is human-caused ignitions. According to a 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service, nationally 89% of wildfires from 2018 to 2022 were human-caused. According to a research paper by Balch et al., human-related ignitions have increased, resulting in larger and hotter wildfires, and the length of the wildfire season has more than tripled. University of Colorado Professor Virginia Iglesias wrote in a recent article that wildfires ignited by human activities pose a greater risk to people and cause more severe ecosystem effects than lightning-started fires. She states:
Lightning-started fires often coincide with storms that carry rain or higher humidity, which slows fires’ spread. Human-started fires, however, typically ignite under more extreme conditions – hotter temperatures, lower humidity and stronger winds. This leads to greater flame heights, faster spread in the critical early days before crews can respond, and more severe ecosystem effects, such as killing more trees and degrading the soil.
Human-ignited fires often occur in or near populated areas, where flammable structures and vegetation create even more hazardous conditions. As urban development expands into wildlands, the probability of human-started fires and the property potentially exposed to fire increase, creating a feedback loop of escalating wildfire risk.
The three primary elements that cause wildfire to ignite and spread – known as the wildfire triangle – are an ignition source. dry fuel, and hot, dry and windy weather. While all three elements are necessary, a wildfire cannot occur without an ignition. So considering ignitions of undesired human-caused wildfires, and finding ways to avoid such ignitions, is paramount for wildfire management.
Because it is now widely agreed upon to allow a certain amount of wildfire to burn on our landscapes instead of immediately suppressing all fires, the Forest Service’s focus in recent decades has been to aggressively log, “thin” and apply prescribed fire to forest landscapes in order to allow wildfires to burn more safely. This change of focus caused Smokey and his original campaign slogan, “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires,” to become obsolete, as the Forest Service itself was sometimes essentially setting forest fires during implementation of prescribed burns. As a result, the slogan was changed in 2001, to “Only you can prevent wildfires.” “Wildfires” means fires other than agency intentionally-set fires that remain within the intended containment perimeters.
The primary strategy has shifted from reducing wildfire ignitions to reducing fuels (trees and other vegetation). Since the number of forest wildfire ignitions and of acres burned at high severity have been overall steadily increasing, the fuels reduction strategy appears to not be very effective.
Additionally, the aggressive “cut and burn” strategy has caused an enormous amount of ecosystem damage in our forests, and in a few cases it has resulted in escaped prescribed fire burning entire communities, such as occurred during the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fires. Implementing much lighter and more targeted cutting and burning treatments, focusing more on genuine restoration projects that support the retention of moisture in forest ecosystems, and refocusing on reducing unwanted human-caused wildfire ignitions, may be the best route for moderating the amount and severity of fire burning in our forests. It may also be the best way to protect our communities and infrastructure. This strategy should be combined with fire hardening homes and reducing fuels in the 100 feet surrounding structures.
Forest management strategies need to be considered differently in different ecosystem types. In wetter forests, wildfire is still in a historical deficit, including high severity fire. However in some drier forests, such as the Santa Fe National Forest, there has been too much wildfire, including too much high severity fire. And post-fire conifer regeneration in this dry forest appears to be either delayed or not occurring at all in some locations. The Santa Fe National Forest could be considered the “canary in the coalmine” of climate effects on forests, and we need to learn from what is occurring in this area and quickly develop climate-appropriate conservation strategies.
The New Mexico State Forester Laura McCarthy recently authored an op-ed, “Let’s bring back a proven campaign to prevent wildfires.” In it, she calls for a New Mexico wildfire prevention campaign built on New Mexico’s Smokey Bear program and modeled after Utah’s successful FireSense Program. She states that “the [FireSense] campaign reduced human-caused wildfires by 75% within three years.” Such campaigns can be an important conservation strategy, as avoiding human-caused ignitions has fewer adverse impacts on ecosystems and communities than heavily treating millions of acres of forest to moderate the effects of such ignitions.
However, State Forester McCarthy’s op-ed and the research papers and articles referenced above do not mention that much more comprehensive measures need to be taken to prevent wildfires ignited by the US Forest Service and by other land management agencies prescribed burns escapes. In the Santa Fe National Forest during the past 25 years, the majority of acres burned by wildfire were ignited by Forest Service and National Park Service escaped prescribed burns.
Out of a total of over 784,000 acres burned by wildfire in the Santa Fe National Forest during this time period, almost 435,000 acres were burned due to escaped prescribed fire ignited by these two federal land management agencies, as opposed to just over 253,000 acres ignited by all other human-caused ignitions. Less than 97,000 acres were burned due to natural ignitions (lightning strikes). Also, the largest wildfire that burned due to a lightning strike ignition was just over 17,000 acres — a relatively small area compared with the enormous areas burned by escaped prescribed fire. None of the lightning strike fires caused significant damage to either communities or infrastructure. If the large agency-ignited wildfires had not occurred, wildfires in the Santa Fe National Forest would have occurred well within a natural range.
The Forest Service claims that nationally less than 1% of their prescribed burns escape, which amounts to about seven wildfires per year. However escaped prescribed burns often result in very large and hot wildfires, and are often ignited near communities and infrastructure. So the impacts of prescribed fire escapes can be much greater than this Forest Service statistic suggests. Much more valid and meaningful statistics would be the total acres burned due to escaped prescribed burns, and the amount of damage to human resources. It’s also necessary to consider that as the climate becomes warmer and drier, the risk of escaped prescribed burns will inevitably increase, especially in dry forests.
It’s critical to reevaluate the Forest Service and other agencies’ prescribed burn practices in order to reduce wildfires caused by prescribed fire escapes. The Forest Service has made some efforts to do so, but its analysis is limited, its assumptions are sometimes unproven and controversial, and its new policy recommendations are not nearly enough to adequately improve prescribed burn safety.
Logging and “thinning” practices need to be also reconsidered, as such practices can at times exacerbate wildfire risk, wildfire size, and burn severity, instead of reducing them. Aggressively cutting trees and opening up forest canopies often results in drier forests with more flammable fuels and can allow wind to blow more intensely and drive fire up into the tree crowns. This occurred during the 2022 Santa Fe National Forest Calf Canyon Fire which was ignited by a pile burn escape. This fire was largely fueled by windthrow of trees due to aggressive logging and “thinning” having opened up the forest canopy, along with unburned slash piles.
Promoting Smokey Bear to the forefront again in order to educate the public about prevention of human-caused wildfire ignitions is a good strategy – or to implement vigorous alternative fire prevention campaigns. However, Smokey Bear needs to get real and be more honest about what else is necessary to prevent human-caused wildfires. We all need to do what we can, but this must include a major wildfire policy shift by the Forest Service and other land management agencies.
Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire near Highway 518 in Sapello, NM Photo: Inciweb.
If anyone wonders why we’re taking the Forest Service to court over the Round Star logging project, there is one primary reason: lynx critical habitat is the worst place for clearcuts. The surest way to drive lynx to extinction is allowing the Forest Service to continue their massive deforestation of the West.
This ill-conceived project authorizes logging on 9,151 acres (more than 14 square miles), with 6,324 acres of commercial logging and clearcutting, and bulldozing almost 30 miles of new roads and trails. The logging project is not only in lynx critical habitat, but also in grizzly bear secure core habitat and elk winter range.
After months — and, for some, years — of anticipation, congestion pricing is live in New York City. The controversial policy, which essentially makes it more expensive to drive into the busiest part of Manhattan, has been floated as a way to reduce traffic and raise money for the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s subways and buses, since the 1970s.
At least 10 humans have died, thousands of homes have been burnt to rubble, and hundreds of thousands of residents have been forced to evacuate amid the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles’ history. Scores of firefighter crews are struggling to contain the massive inferno—in large part due to the tremendous pressure on the city’s water supply. Reportedly, water pressure to fire hydrants has diminished across the city—and many have run completely dry.
Why Is California Out of Water to Fight Fires?
Los Angeles’ water system is buckling under the pressure of these ongoing fires, which are mostly uncontained as of January 10. This unprecedented catastrophe begs the question: Where did all the water go?
The Link Between Animal Agriculture and Diminished Water Supply
We can’t talk about California’s water crisis without looking at animal agriculture’s tremendous use of water. According to some reports, the meat and dairy industries account for an estimated 47% of California’s water footprint. Up to 15% of California’s water is used to grow crops to feed livestock on farms. According to Food & Water Watch, California’s mega-dairies use an estimated 152 million gallons of water each day—more than enough to meet the indoor water needs for every resident of San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose combined.
In Southern California, residents are encouraged to limit their water use to 500 to 600 gallons a week—approximately the same amount of water that it takes to produce a single hamburger. You need 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef, 477 gallons of water for 1 pound of eggs, 900 gallons for 1 pound of cheese, and 1,000 gallons for 1 gallon of cow’s milk. One pound of tofu, on the other hand, requires only 244 gallons of water.
Water is used for all parts of animal agriculture—from growing feed crops and managing animal waste to cleaning massive, filthy farms and slaughterhouses and filling scalding-hot tanks used to remove animals’ hair or feathers after workers slaughter them.
This isn’t just an issue in California—animal agriculture’s egregious waste of water is occurring all over the world, accounting for an estimated 20% of freshwater use globally. In the U.S. alone, animal agriculture guzzles 36 to 74 trillion gallons of water per year.
Farming animals not only consumes massive amounts of freshwater but also pollutes it with tons and tons of animal waste. According to a report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about 68% of lakes, reservoirs, and ponds in the U.S. and more than half of the nation’s rivers and streams are considered too polluted to use—and a main culprit is animal agriculture.
Is the Climate Catastrophe Making Wildfires Worse?
Research shows that the climate catastrophe contributes to the frequency—and severity—of natural disasters like the current Los Angeles wildfires. Additionally, the drastic changes between wet and dry years in California—which scientists say is exacerbated by climate change—are amplifying wildfire risks. In other words, the vegetation that grows abundantly during “wet” seasons becomes easily flammable—and vulnerable to ignition—during subsequent “dry” seasons.
This, too, is linked to animal agriculture, which scientists agree is a leading cause of the climate catastrophe. By some estimates, animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world’s transportation systems combined. Animal agriculture is also the single largest source of methane emissions. Methane is far more potent in terms of trapping heat in our atmosphere than carbon dioxide. It has been estimated that more than 90% of all Amazon rainforest land cleared since 1970 is used for grazing livestock and that animal agriculture is responsible for the loss of over 16.4 million trees each day.
California is on fire and the meat and dairy industries are helping light the match We’re sending @GavinNewsom a “Strike Out Meat” match box as the Los Angeles wildfires continue to rage — it's past time to promote a vegan lifestyle! pic.twitter.com/PKHUL3tYOK
PETA points out that the meat and dairy industries are causing the climate crisis and the natural disasters—including these wildfires—that come with it, yet in California alone, they have collected more than $1.112 billion in taxpayer dollars from government subsidies in the last 30 years.
“While people lose their homes, you’re propping up the very well-financed industries that are killing our precious state,” said PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman in a letter to Los Angeles Gov. Gavin Newsom. “Animal agriculture may be gasoline, but you are holding the match as long as California has dairy and meat subsidies.”
How YOU Can Do Your Part
The single most effective thing you can do to reduce your environmental footprint is to go vegan. Every individual who is vegan saves 1,100 gallons of water, nearly 40 pounds of grain, and 30 square feet of forested land each day—while sparing nearly 200 animals every year. Don’t wait until a devastating disaster is in your own backyard—do your part to protect the planet today. Order PETA’s free vegan starter kit to make the compassionate switch now:
Note: PETA supports animal rights and opposes all forms of animal exploitation and educates the public on those issues. PETA does not directly or indirectly participate or intervene in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office or any political party.
It’s not a (humane) wash—it’s a win! Following a cease-and-desist letter from PETA’s attorneys and an eyewitness investigation into Oakridge Dairy LLC, the largest dairy in Connecticut, the company has removed several humane-washing, misleading, and false claims from its advertising language.
After PETA’s Push, Oakridge Dairy Removes Multiple Humane-Washing Claims From Its Advertising
Oakridge Dairy’s website used to claim that cows had an “optimal living habitat” and “plenty of elbow room” and that they “spend their days relaxing among their peers”—but after hearing from PETA’s attorneys, it removed the misleading language and took down a YouTube video that claimed that Oakridge “ensures the [cows’] well-being” and creates a “haven” for them. All the removed claims are examples of humane washing, a marketing ploy that misleads consumers into believing that they’re making kind choices when they’re actually not. In reality, the only kind choice is vegan. Oakridge confines approximately 2,600 cows inside a concrete-floored mega-shed so that their manure can be collected by a “methane digester” as part of a dubious “clean energy” scheme.
Oakridge confines approximately 2,600 cows inside a concrete-floored mega-shed so that their manure can be collected by a “methane digester” as part of a dubious “clean energy” scheme.
During the undercover investigation, PETA eyewitnesses documented the following:
Cows with swollen joints and apparent pressure sores on their legs.
Workers admitting that the animals are never allowed outdoors and are forced to use manure left over from the methane digester as “bedding”.
Cows kept in extremely crowded conditions where they appeared unable to move freely or find a comfortable spot to stand or lie down.
Oakridge staff saying they remove newborn calves from their mothers within 20 minutes of birth—so that the company can sell the milk meant to nourish them through the delivery service The Modern Milkman and distribute it through Dairy Farmers of America, which supplies dairy brands nationwide.
Oakridge Dairy Is Another Company Added to PETA’s List of Humane-Washing Wins
The PETA Foundation has been full-steam ahead for years making sure that companies like Oakridge Dairy stop misleading consumers. PETA Foundation attorneys have secured several other wins against food companies that use misleading claims in advertising:
PETA Foundation attorneys filed a lawsuit on behalf of a woman who accused Organic Valley of misleading her into buying its products at premium prices because it falsely claims to treat cows “with love”—when in reality, it separates newborn calves from distraught mothers, who sometimes run aftertrucks taking their babies away and cry for days over the loss. Organic Valley later changed its carton design and removed claims about offering “high” or “highest” standards of animal care, that cows are raised “with love,” and that cows are “happy” or “social”—as well as the word “humane.”
Following PETA’s investigation into a Nellie’s Free Range Eggs supplier, PETA Foundation lawyers filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of consumers who were misled into buying eggs sold under the company’s label. PETA eyewitness video footage of the supplier showed approximately 20,000 hens confined to a single extremely crowded shed with severely restricted access to the outdoors, despite Nellie’s claims that the chickens “roam where they please” and “have easy access to the outdoors.” In February 2020,the Southern District of New York held that a marketing campaign showing hens “frolicking in elysian pastures” could provide “enough specificity to elevate itself beyond puffery.”
Take Action Against Humane-Washing Schemes
As part of our initiative against humane washing, PETA is campaigning against the Global Animal Partnership, “humane” label marketing scheme backed by the Humane Society of the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), and Compassion in World Farming. As our undercover investigations and wins against misleading claims show, there’s nothing “humane” about factory farming, and these self-described animal welfare groups need to take immediate action in order to cut ties with the Global Animal Partnership. Sign our petition and remind these organizations through polite social media comments that the Global Animal Partnership certification is a misleading sham.
“LA is vast. It is a city and a county. It is a global place, a Pacific Rim space, a “Third World” metropolis. It has all the contradictions of the world and all the world is condensed in it. The homes of rich, poor, middle class, Black, white, Asian, Latino have burned. Fire is coming for all of us.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen
As I sit at my desk to write, the light shining through my office window is a distinct orange, and the sky outside is a murky, polluted shade of brown. The air quality is horrendous, and my eyes are dry and itchy. My throat is sore. Two major fires are still raging out of control in Los Angeles, the city I love, with little to no containment. Another has just erupted in Woodland Hills. Fortunately, we’re in a safe zone away from the infernos. Many more are not so lucky.
Scrolling through the latest fire updates on social media, I quickly read commenters who are cheering on the flames as if they’ve been ignited to smoke out the wealthy elites from their mansions. They seem gleeful. A few conspiracists I come across believe this is all a planned land grab (by whom I’m unsure), while others spread lies that the shadowy Deep State, the ones behind weather-altering chemtrails, is somehow responsible.
I gather that most of these folks don’t live in Los Angeles (or the real world?), and I’m sure very few could point out the location of Eagle Rock on a map. Yet, here they are, experts on fire ecology and the history of Los Angeles.
I see, as per usual during a big L.A. fire, that a few are passing around Mike Davis’s fantastic essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” not because of Davis’s thesis that the poor, by capitalist design, suffer most during a natural disaster but because they seem to believe he was some kind of schadenfreude. It’s all a disservice to his legacy and a twisted misreading of Davis’s important work.
A fervent critic of the conditions that lead to inequality, Mike Davis was not one to celebrate misery. He would have had nothing but empathy for those impacted by these flames (okay, maybe not James Wood). As I think about Mike, his daughter Róisín messages me. Her childhood home and school have burned to the ground.
Another friend posts a short video of a smoldering foundation, remnants of his garage/art studio. He’s lost everything, years of work. His family was lucky to escape. A GoFundMe pops up; a friend of a friend needs help. The place they rent is gone.
I do get it, though. Many people do not empathize with Los Angeles or those who live here, even though L.A. is one of the country’s most culturally significant, diverse, and fascinating cities. It’s almost a natural reaction to hate this place. The city has been relentlessly portrayed in the media, magazines, film, and television as vapid – a bastion of rich, self-obsessed Hollywood liberals, freeways, and smog. It’s an easy city to despise if you are afraid of what you do not know, and no single person knows everything about Los Angeles.
L.A. is endlessly complicated, and the reality of what’s behind these fires, which will forever reshape the city’s battered landscape and our charred souls, is no different.
The totality of the destruction of these flames is impossible to comprehend right now. They’ve destroyed museums, schools, mobile home parks, senior centers, stores, restaurants, encampments, apartment buildings, fire stations, countless homes, and many historical and cultural landmarks. It’s nearly impossible to keep track of what’s gone. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. The historic Black community of Altadena has been decimated. People have died, animals have suffocated, and families across the economic spectrum have lost everything.
Yes, Mike Davis and others predicted much of this, but never at this scale or this ferocity. Like much of the West, Southern California has long been shaped by wildfires. We know the extent of these disasters could have been mitigated had the city instituted stricter building codes decades ago, restricting the development of homes in the more fire-prone areas of Topanga, Malibu canyons, and the foothills of the San Gabriels. And yes, as Mike Davis rightly pointed out, native California plants adapted to the region’s wildfire were replaced by invasive grasses brought by European settlers looking to “green” the browning landscape, only to increase fire risk. These fires, in part, are colonial blowback.
Of course, this is essential to understanding what’s happening now, but it doesn’t explain everything. It is, in part, an oversimplification.
What caused these flames is still unknown. Arson is suspected, and there are worries that downed powerlines initiated the first spark, more casualties of California’s faltering electric grid. What is known, however, is that these fires, Eaton and Palisades, are the worst the city has witnessed in terms of size and damage. We also know that the prime culprit, which mainstream media almost universally refuses to address, is our rapidly warming climate.
Los Angeles has not had significant rainfall in over eight months, and the plants and soil are excruciatingly dry and ripe to burn. This is all part of a turbulent pattern that none of us can escape. Four of the driest ten years since the city began keeping tabs in 1877 have occurred in the last decade. The summer of 2024 was the hottest ever; eight of the warmest summers on record have happened since 2014. We live amidst the most radical climate upheaval in human history, full of fury and unpredictability.
The fire season in Los Angeles typically ends in November. When the warm Santa Ana winds kick up at this time of year, as they do, they don’t usually cause much fuss, as we’ve traditionally had enough rain to temper the risks that go along with them. This year, however, dry, hurricane-level Santa Anas blowing in from the Great Basin were the strongest we’ve experienced in over a decade, exceeding 100 mph. Of course, fire loves wind, and wind spreads fire. While these winds may not be linked directly to climate change (there is some debate), they are now occurring well into the winter, prolonging and intensifying Southern California’s already worsening fire seasons.
To say these flames are unprecedented in the modern era would be an understatement. Alone, the Eaton fire is the worst Los Angeles has ever experienced; combined with the fire in the Palisades, it is all unfathomable. Over 5,000 structures have burned in the Palisades alone. The number of homes destroyed in Altadena and Pasadena remains unknown, but 8,000 are still at risk. Combined, these fires are the most costly in U.S. history.
One thing is for sure: L.A. was utterly unprepared for the mayhem, and Mayor Karen Bass, with her cutting over $17 million from the Fire Dept. budget, must absorb some blame. But the saga is much larger than Bass’s ugly missteps. Like so many cities across the country, Los Angeles was not ready for this singular climate calamity (water running out?), of which we know many more are to come. Will lessons be learned, or will mistakes be repeated? My money is on the latter.
Once the ashes cool, the smoke recedes, and the sun shines, Los Angeles will again look to rebuild what has been lost, as has followed many other disasters of its past. I fear there will be little debate, and when these fires strike again, internet trolls will contend that L.A. deserves its fate while failing to expose the fossil fuel cartel for fanning the flames. I understand it’s easier to blame Angelenos than face the truth that our world is forever changing, but please, for the sake of this fire’s victims (and my social media feed), leave the collective punishment rationale to those committing genocide in Gaza.
Anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss are the most pressing issues for our planet. Carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere continue to rise due to the burning of fossil fuels and land use change, with the latter occurring primarily in the form of animal agriculture and growing crops to feed livestock. Biodiversity loss is greatly enhanced by these climate changes, causing catastrophic threats to nature. Because these unprecedented climate changes make modeling future scenarios relatively impossible, region-by-region data is the only reliable tool, so conservation efforts must begin regionally.
A failure of justice, and draconian Tory law, put Gaie Delap in prison. A failure of government is keeping her there
Gaie Delap will turn 78 on Friday, in Eastwood Park prison, Gloucestershire. Sentenced to 20 months last August for climbing a gantry over the M25 for Just Stop Oil, she was released in November to serve the rest of her sentence on a home detention curfew. But the electronic tag that she was required to wear couldn’t go round her ankle because she has deep-vein thrombosis and it might have risked causing her a stroke. It couldn’t go round her wrist because they couldn’t find a tag small enough, which people keep saying is because she’s frail. Delap hates being called frail. Her wrist is a perfectly reasonable size, 14-and-a-half centimetres. It’s the wrist-tag design that’s wanting. The topsy-turvy world where a government contractor, Serco, can fail and fail again, while a citizen with a social purpose gets called back to prison five days before Christmas to atone for that failure, isn’t even the most absurd thing about this story.
Delap was engaged in direct action to raise awareness about the climate emergency, and the day citizens stop doing that is the day that progressive politics might as well give up and go home. Whatever pretzel twists Labour ministers have to perform to sound as if they’re on the side of the decent, honest commuter, while simultaneously signalling that they understand the scale of the climate crisis, they must surely remember this: the trade union movement, the peace movement, the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, the climate justice movement; every known movement of change has relied on non-violent action to disrupt the status quo.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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Less than 12 hours after a massive fire began ripping through the Pacific Palisades on Tuesday, the Los Angeles Fire Department made a rare request. All LAFD firefighters, including those off-duty, were asked to phone in their availability. Stoked by high winds, the blaze was growing quickly, and the LAFD was already fighting a losing battle. Such a summons hadn’t been issued in nearly two decades.
As of January 8, the Palisades Fire is 0 percent contained. Two additional wildfires, the Hurst Fire and the Eaton Fire, are also currently at zero containment as they scorch greater Los Angeles County, burning thousands of acres, destroying over 1,100 structures, and killing at least five people. As hundreds of firefighters race to stop the spread, gusting Santa Ana winds and a landscape desiccated by a bone-dry winter — an anomaly linked to broader climate change trends — aren’t the only obstacles the LAFD is facing.
The LAFD makes up about 6 percent of the city’s expense budget; the LAPD receives 15 percent.
In June, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an adopted $12.8 billion budget that cut the fire department’s funding by more than $17.5 million, or around 2 percent of the previous year’s budget of $837 million. It was the second-largest departmental operating cut to come out of the city’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget, which shaved funding from the majority of city departments — but not the police. The Los Angeles Police Department received a funding bump of nearly $126 million. The LAFD makes up about 6 percent of the city’s expense budget; the LAPD receives 15 percent of the funds.
“What is currently happening and unfolding is what we have been warning about,” said Ricci Sergienko, a lawyer and organizer with People’s City Council LA. “The consistent defunding of other city programs in order to give the LAPD billions a year has consequences, and these elected officials do actually have blood on their hands. The city is unprepared to handle this fire, and Los Angeles shouldn’t be in that position.”
Other departments that received major cuts included the Bureau of Street Services, the Bureau of Sanitation, and General Services, for an overall budget decrease of nearly $250 million. Funds for rental support, homelessness services, and street lighting were also reduced.
Only three city councilmembers — Hugo Soto-Martínez, Nithya Raman, and Eunisses Hernandez — voted against the budget last May, noting in a press release that it allocated tens of millions of dollars to fund LAPD positions that would likely remain vacant. That’s because the LAPD has struggled to recruit officers in recent years, even as it continues to request and receive funding for those empty positions.
An LAPD spokesperson reached by The Intercept said that they could not respond to questions by the time of publication.
The controversial cuts were ostensibly made to help close the city’s budget deficit. Critics, however, have noted that defunding the fire department is a recipe for disaster as the climate crisis brings increasingly devastating fires to the drought-stricken region. While it’s unclear that any amount of staffing could have fully contained the fires raging across Los Angeles this week, the call for help — and the firefighters traveling in to assist from across California and nearby states — shows that any additional capacity could have been useful.
A spokesperson for Los Angeles’s chief auditor, City Controller Kenneth Mejia, said that the most recent LAFD budget cuts included a reduction in sworn payroll, reduced funds for operating supplies, and cuts to 58 positions. In December, the Board of Fire Commissioners sent a report to Bass and the City Council outlining how the funding cuts had adversely impacted the department’s crucial services.
“The Los Angeles City Fire Department (LAFD) is facing unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing Hours,” wrote Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. “These budgetary reductions have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention, and community education.”
The LAFD’s Fire Prevention Bureau, for instance, had six of its roles cut and its overtime hours reduced. Crowley wrote that the decrease in overtime hours created an “inability to complete required brush clearance inspections, which are crucial for mitigating fire risks in high-hazard areas.”
While most departments received cuts, LAPD’s budget continues to bloat, and Mejia has pointed to overspending on police liability claims as one major source of the city’s deficit. The city spent more than double its annual liability payouts budget in the first six months of this fiscal year, with the LAPD leading the spending at more than $100 million in legal settlements. Recent payouts include a $17.7 million settlement with the family of a mentally disabled man who was fatally shot by an off-duty officer inside a Costco, and a $11.8 million payout to a man who sustained a traumatic brain injury in a car accident when an LAPD detective ran a red light.
Diana Chang, Mejia’s communications director, highlighted two forces that are driving a rise in liability payouts, most of which are made from the city’s General Fund rather than department-specific appropriations. Departments are either “not held accountable for liabilities they give rise to,” Chang wrote, or they are “underfunded / understaffed and cannot keep up with the necessary demands and needs of the City.”
“We just give more money to the police, who then end up costing us more money, due to all of these settlements. It’s a never-ending loop.”
Sergienko, of People’s City Council LA, bristled at the use of taxpayer money to fund police abuse settlements. “We’re paying for state-sanctioned violence instead of having money to deal with the climate crisis,” he said. “We just give more money to the police, who then end up costing us more money, due to all of these settlements. It’s a never-ending loop.”
Looking ahead, the LAPD has already requested another increase for the 2025-26 fiscal year. In November, the LA Board of Police Commissioners approved a spending package that included a request for an additional $160.5 million from the city’s budget — an increase of more than 8 percent. Bass is currently reviewing the proposal; she’s expected to unveil the city’s next budget plan in late April.
Bass’s office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has publicly clashed with Mejia over his criticism of the city budget. Last spring, after Mejia called the deductions to public services “short-sighted,” Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl dismissed the remarks as “theatrical exaggeration and doomsday projections.”
For many Angelenos, that doomsday is now here. The fires burning across the county are already the most destructive in modern LA history, forcing more than 80,000 evacuations with no signs of abating. Whole blocks in the Palisades are leveled. The Eaton fire is eating its way through Altadena, Pasadena and the surrounding communities, taking at least five lives so far.
Los Angeles is no stranger to wildfires, but a January disaster is unusual. Studies show that climate change is contributing to longer, more destructive fire seasons. Still, in 2020, LA’s then-Mayor Eric Garcetti cut another $500,000 in funds set aside for a Climate Emergency Mobilization Office.
“The impact of this catastrophic event will be felt by our community well past today, but we hope that our City’s coordinated efforts will provide assistance to ensure the smoothest recovery possible,” Chang wrote in a statement. “As always, we support putting resources and meaningful investments toward saving lives through emergency preparedness, wildfire prevention, and serious climate action, and encourage the City’s decisionmakers to prioritize these resources and investments.”
Fire along Pacific Coast Highway near Pacific Palisades, video by Aaron Giesel.
Beyond Mike Davis’s provocative title to his classic essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” is the thesis that resources and attention are disproportionately allocated to save the rich and their property at the expense of the poor. While this is historically the case in Los Angeles, the raging fires here are far worse than even the great Mike Davis could have foreseen.
Schools are burning, libraries, restaurants, stores, churches, state parks, mobile homes, apartment complexes, horses, mountain lions. People will die. Lives are being destroyed.
As I write in the early morning hours, fire crews aren’t working to stop Malibu from burning. Or the Palisades, Topanga, Pasadena or Altadena. They can’t. There is not time and no way to do so. They are attempting to save lives as the winds howl and embers fly through the canyons.
I just got word that an artist friend’s home is on fire, many more are under evacuation orders.
Gusts of hurricane-level winds of up to 100 mph make the flame’s path almost impossible to predict. I smell smoke in our home, even though we aren’t in a danger zone. A collision of climate factors – a record-hot summer and bone-dry winter are worsening matters. Fire season here typically ends by November, but it’s January, and we’ve had no significant rain in nearly eight months.
This is shaping up to be a firestorm that will forever alter this city. Not just the wealthy in their coastal enclaves, but all of us. The scars will run deep and be long-lasting, and of course, as Mike Davis would have pointed out, the poorest among us will suffer the most.
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Elon Musk’s Boring Company spent years pitching cities on a novel solution to traffic, an underground transportation system to whisk passengers through tunnels in electric vehicles. Proposals in Illinois and California fizzled after officials and the public began scrutinizing details of the plans and seeking environmental reviews.
But in Las Vegas, the tunneling company is building Musk’s vision beneath the city’s urban core thanks to an unlikely partner: the tourism marketing organization best known for selling the image that “What Happens Here, Stays Here.”
The powerful Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority greenlit the idea and funded an 0.8-mile route at its convention center. As that small “people mover” opened in 2021, the authority was already urging the county and city to approve plans for 104 stations across 68 miles of tunnels.
The project is also realizing Musk’s notion of how government officials should deal with entrepreneurs: avoid lengthy reviews before building and instead impose fines later if anything goes awry. Musk’s views on regulatory power have taken on new significance in light of his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump and his role in a new effort to slash rules in the name of improving efficiency. The Las Vegas project, now well under way, is a case study of the regulatory climate Musk favors.
Because the project, now known as the Vegas Loop, is privately operated and receives no federal funding, it is exempt from the kinds of exhaustive governmental vetting and environmental analyses demanded by the other cities that Boring pitched. Such reviews assess whether a proposal is the best option and inform the public of potential impacts to traffic and the environment.
The head of the convention authority has called the project the only viable way to ease traffic on the Las Vegas Strip and in the surrounding area — a claim that was never publicly debated as the Clark County Commission and Las Vegas City Council granted Boring permission to build and operate the system beneath city streets. The approvals allow the company to build and operate close to homes and businesses without the checks and balances that typically apply to major public transit projects.
Meanwhile, Boring has skirted building, environmental and labor regulations, according to records obtained by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas under public records laws.
In June, a Clark County official documented water spilling onto a public street from a Boring Company worksite near the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The county issued a cease-and-desist letter.
(Clark County Public Works)
It twice installed tunnels without permits to work on county property. State and local environmental regulators documented it dumping untreated water into storm drains and the sewer system. And, as local politicians were approving an extension of the system, Boring workers were filing complaints with the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration about “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and severe chemical burns. After an investigation, Nevada OSHA in 2023 fined the company more than $112,000. Boring disputed the regulators’ allegations and contested the violations.
The complaints have continued.
“The Boring company is at it again,” an employee of the Clark County Water Reclamation District wrote to the agency’s general manager and legal counsel in June, after video showed water spilling from a company-owned property into the street near the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Tyler Fairbanks, a Boring Company manager, emailed the county official, saying “we take this very seriously and we are working to correct what is going on.” In August, a Las Vegas Valley Water District staffer documented a similar issue. On both occasions, the county issued cease-and-desist letters but did not fine Boring.
Financial penalties wouldn’t put a dent in the company’s bottom line, John Solvie, a Clark County water quality compliance manager, told county Public Works Director Denis Cederburg in an email. Still, the concerns were significant enough that Solvie asked if the department would “consider revoking permits (essentially shutting down their operations until they resolve these issues).”
A county spokesperson declined to answer how the incidents were resolved, or whether the Public Works Department had ever revoked any of Boring’s permits. Solvie and Cederburg declined to comment.
Boring did not respond to repeated requests to comment for this story.
As Boring begins hauling passengers beyond the convention center in the first-ever test of an underground road network using driver-operated Teslas, it has successfully removed yet another layer of county oversight. Last year, Boring requested that the county no longer require it to hold a special permit that, among other things, mandates operators of private amusement and transportation systems to report serious injuries and fatalities, and grants the county additional authority to inspect and regulate their operations to protect public safety.
The result is that key questions about the operation and maintenance of an unproven transportation system are unanswered. The county declined to respond to detailed questions about its oversight role since the special permit ended. It provided a statement saying that Boring is “responsible for the safe operation of its system and retaining a third-party Nevada registered design professional to conduct annual audits of their operations.” The county can review those audits and inspect the system “as deemed appropriate.”
Ben Leffel, an assistant professor of public policy at UNLV, said in an interview with ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas that the private project’s ability to expand without the same scrutiny required of public projects is a major gap in oversight. Vegas Loop customers will expect Boring to follow the same standards as a public transit system, Leffel said, and it “should receive the same amount of oversight and maintenance,” more so because of the company’s construction and labor citations.
Former Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, who completed her third and final term in December, said she too is concerned about safety, as well as accessibility for riders with disabilities. She had questioned whether the tunnel project was the best transportation option for the city. “I have been totally opposed to it from the beginning and still remain so,” she said.
Other elected and appointed officials have offered nearly unanimous support.
Given Musk’s role advising Trump on ways to slash regulations and government oversight, Boring and the Vegas Loop might be a harbinger for the country.
“A Real Get-It-Done State”
In 2014, Musk stood on the steps of the Nevada Capitol with a man named Steve Hill, who was heading the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. They were celebrating a deal to build a Tesla Gigafactory outside Reno.
From left: Brian Sandoval, then-governor of Nevada; Steve Hill, then-executive director of the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development; and Elon Musk speak at a news conference to announce a deal to bring a Tesla battery factory to the state. Hill has been instrumental in advancing Musk’s Boring Company project in Las Vegas.
(David Calvert/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Hill, as the state’s negotiator, had worked feverishly on the agreement, which provided $1.25 billion in tax incentives to Tesla. Musk would later praise Nevada as “a real get-it-done state.”
Residents, however, weren’t as eager to turn Boring loose. When neighborhood groups in West LA sued the city over the lack of environmental review, Boring settled with them and looked to build elsewhere.
Musk has frequently railed against government scrutiny of his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX, and claims excessive government oversight has made it nearly impossible to build big projects in parts of the country.
“Environmental regulations are, in my view, largely terrible,” he said at an event with the libertarian Cato Institute in June. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective. To say, ‘Look we’re going to do this project; if something goes wrong we’ll be forced to pay a penalty.’ But we do not need to go through a three- or four-year environmental approval process.”
Everywhere Boring tried, it struggled to start digging. In Chicago, where then-Mayor Rahm Emmanuel was a supporter, local leaders expressed skepticism about whether Boring could build an airport loop without public funding. In Maryland, where Boring and federal officials completed a draft environmental review in 2019 for a high-speed link between Baltimore and Washington, the company never started tunneling.
That was, until it got to Las Vegas.
In 2018, an executive who’d met Hill during the Tesla Gigafactory negotiations called him to discuss potentially bringing Boring to Las Vegas, Hill said. (Hill said Musk himself had previously pitched Hill on a Boring Company project in Northern Nevada.) Hill, now a leader at the convention authority in Las Vegas, was in a position to help. Funded by about $460 million in annual revenue from hotel room taxes and conventions, the authority is a force in local politics, channeling the influence of the gaming and tourism industry.
The authority happened to be looking to build a people-mover to link exhibit halls at the 4.6 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center. Hill said he already had a sense that the Boring Company’s concept “would work pretty well here.” Nine companies submitted bids, and two were finalists. Boring’s bid was about a third of the cost of the other credible proposals, Hill said. A week before the board was to select the winner, Hill called a news conference and announced the Boring partnership. He pointed to a map of a tunnel system extending far beyond the convention center — to the airport and toward Los Angeles.
The authority boasted that news coverage of its Boring partnership was picked up by 1,200 outlets, providing $1.3 million in free publicity for Las Vegas.
The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada is the planning agency for the Las Vegas metropolitan area, overseen by local elected officials. But because Boring’s project started so small and didn’t use federal funding, the commission wouldn’t have a say. The convention authority’s governing board, which focuses more on supporting tourism than transportation for local residents, took the lead. Nearly half of the authority’s 14-member board represents private interests, primarily the gaming industry. Goodman and two others voted against the partnership.
To fund the convention center loop, the authority committed $52.5 million in bonds that will be paid back by the agency. Since it opened in April 2021, Hill said the authority has paid Boring about $4.5 million a year to operate the convention center loop, which provides free rides to conventioneers. The authority also spent $24.5 million to purchase the Las Vegas Monorail out of bankruptcy, giving Boring the right to tunnel in the monorail’s noncompete territory.
Hill has repeatedly claimed, to elected officials, to local environmentalists and in an interview with ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas, that the loop is the only viable way for Las Vegas to address its traffic congestion. “It’s not really a debate. There’s no reason to explore the other options,” he told members of the Sierra Club during a meeting to discuss public transit, according to Vinny Spotleson, volunteer chair of the environmental group’s regional chapter.
Hill acknowledged to ProPublica and City Cast, however, “that’s a prediction. That’s not a mandate. I don’t have the standing to make that decision. I think people listen to what I have to say periodically.”
The Clark County Commission — which governs the Las Vegas Strip and surrounding areas — was listening when, just a few months after the convention center loop opened, Hill told them that Boring had already proven “how great a system this is, that it can be done, and I think provided confidence for this community to move forward.”
At the urging of Hill, casino executives and labor union leaders, the County Commission approved a 50-year agreement giving Boring the right to operate a “monorail” above and below ground on county property. The 2021 vote was unanimous.
In Las Vegas, Boring had achieved what it could not in Maryland, Chicago or LA.
“All of their company, it seemed like, was dependent on Vegas working out,” said Spotleson, who first met company representatives around 2019 when he was district director for U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas. “That we were the test case that they wanted to take to the Chicagos and Bostons and other cities of the world and say, ‘Look at what we did in Vegas. We can do that here.’”
An Expanding System
The Boring Company has completed more than 5 miles of the 68-mile system. Despite the proposal’s massive scale, it has been approved with little public input.
When the County Commission considered the expansion plans, they were listed on agendas under the obscure names of limited-liability companies, making it difficult for anyone but the company and its supporters to track. For example, the county approved a roughly 25-mile expansion and 18 new stations at a 2023 zoning meeting through a notice that gave no indication it was related to the Vegas Loop: UC-23-0126-HCI-CERBERUS 160 EAST FLAMINGO HOTEL OWNER L P, ET AL. In 2021, the commission approved an extension for Caesars Entertainment hotels under the name UC-20-0547-CLAUDINE PROPCO, LLC, ET AL, and about 29 miles of tunnel under UC-20-0547-CIRCUS CIRCUS LV, LLC, ET AL.
Clark County and the City of Las Vegas Approved 68 Miles of Tunnels Between 2019 and 2024
In nearly six years, the company has built about 5 miles of tunnels, with even fewer miles in use.
The Boring Company does not make available geographic data about its system. Maps were created based on publicly available reports. Locations may not be exact.
(Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)
Boring uses a machine known as Prufrock to excavate its 12-foot-in-diameter tunnels, applying chemical accelerants during the construction process. For each foot the company bores, it removes about 6 cubic yards of soil and any groundwater it encounters, according to a company document prepared for state environmental officials. It is required to obtain permits to ensure the waste does not contaminate the environment or local water sources.
Public records — including emails, notices, photos and videos, and other documentation — obtained from Clark County, the Clark County Water Reclamation District and Nevada Division of Environmental Protection through public records requests show the company has been less than meticulous in handling the waste.
In June, an employee with the county road division tailed a Boring Company truck that spilled mud onto city streets, according to the records. The trucks “have no marking and no license plates,” wrote Dean Mosher, assistant manager for the roads division. A truck route that the company had reported to the county must have been “totally false,” Mosher concluded.
A few months later, a truck hauling waste from the project spilled gravel, rock and sand onto Interstate 15, slowing traffic for more than four hours during rush hour. The driver was fined $75 for an unsafe or unsecured load, according to court records.
Last year, without the county’s knowledge, a Boring contractor relied on a permit held by a county contractor to store muck near apartment buildings and the Commercial Center shopping plaza, along one of the busiest thoroughfares in central Las Vegas, a county spokesperson said. The county fined the contractor $1,549. A county spokesperson would not disclose other locations where the company stores waste and directed “operational questions” to the company.
Photos taken by a Clark County official show a truck hauling waste from a Boring Company worksite on June 6, 2024. The official observed mud spilling from the vehicle. The photos were obtained through a public records request.
(Credit: Clark County Road Division)
Boring must also remove groundwater as it digs — including near an area where the aquifer is polluted with a dry cleaning chemical known as tetrachlorethylene, or PCE, which can be toxic in large amounts. Boring is required to filter the water before discharging it into storm drains, which flow to Lake Mead. But regulators documented cases where Boring had started work without permits or bypassed their water treatment system, government records show.
In 2019, the company discharged groundwater into storm drains without a permit, resulting in a state settlement and a $90,000 fine. In 2021, state officials sent a cease-and-desist letter to prevent Boring from taking actions that could “cause unpermitted discharge of groundwater,” prompting Davis, Boring’s CEO, to complain to the head of the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection that the state was “being fairly aggressive and that this was starting to hurt” the company, according to an email the head of the agency sent to several staffers.
That year, Boring tunneled without permits required to work in public rights of way, prompting the Public Works director, Cederburg, to note, “They are in violation of the franchise agreement,” records show. A Boring official responded that once the county notified the company of the issue, it had immediately filed the two permits. The county approved them retroactively, tacking on a $900 fee for each permit.
Untested, Unstudied, Private
On a recent Friday at a Vegas Loop station at the Resorts World hotel, an attendant directed riders to Teslas parked in a waiting area. An all-day pass to ride between the Las Vegas Strip hotel and a MagicCon event at the convention center cost $5. (Trips within the convention center are free.)
A Tesla sedan enters a Vegas Loop tunnel during a media preview of the Las Vegas Convention Center loop in 2021.
(Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Inside the narrow tunnels, which glow green, magenta and orange, the driver navigated shoulderless roadways at 35 mph, which felt fast. At the first convention center stop, the driver halted, and three additional riders squeezed into the five-passenger sedan before the trip continued.
About a dozen Sierra Club members toured the Vegas Loop in June and were impressed, Spotleson said: no carbon emissions; neon everywhere; “It’s very Vegas.” Yet while it might be faster than walking, he said, “it just isn’t the actual mass transit solution” the city needs for its busiest places, like the airport.
The lack of alternatives has made Boring an easy sell to politicians, Spotleson said. “They understand that we need transit solutions. They’re being presented with a free option that is also carbon free. That is as simple as it gets.”
Hill acknowledged skepticism of the company’s claim that the Loop will transport up to 90,000 people an hour. “People poke at this all the time,” he said, adding that he thinks the company will be proven right. “I am completely willing to take that bet. Let’s just wait and see.”
M.J. Maynard, who leads the Regional Transportation Commission, said that because the Vegas Loop is private, her agency did not have information to evaluate Boring’s ridership claims. “As a public agency, we have to be very transparent and accountable with the [ridership] numbers that we publish,” she said. “I can’t speak to the numbers that Steve Hill or his team have posted or talked about.”
Marilyn Kirkpatrick, the only county commissioner to vote against Boring’s 2023 expansion, said she opposed giving the company permission to build beneath miles of public roads when it had completed only a small portion of the system. “Why would we give something away if we didn’t know it was going to work?” she asked.
The public might know even less about whether it’s working, thanks to removal in May of the “amusement and transportation system” permit, a designation also used for enclosed systems like the airport tram and the Strip’s High Roller Ferris wheel.
Over the past three years, county inspections of Boring’s operations under the permit identified numerous issues, including speeding drivers and an unauthorized SUV entering one of the above-ground stations. Since 2022, there have been at least 67 incidents in which the tunnel system was breached, including by outside vehicles, a skateboarder and a curious pedestrian, Fortune reported in October.
But the company convinced Clark County to remove that layer of oversight by arguing the system “did not fit squarely into the requirements” of the regulation, which “greatly complicated” matters for Boring and the county.
The company outlined an alternative oversight plan in a letter obtained by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas. The company will continue to submit structural, civil, fire, electrical and plumbing studies, as well as emergency plans and other planning documents, according to the letter. But Boring’s letter did not address what would replace ordinances that required multiple layers of inspection and the immediate notification of injuries and fatalities.
A Clark County spokesperson did not answer questions about potential gaps in accountability created by removal of the permit. In a statement, the county said “safety is the top priority for all county departments and agencies” as they review projects.
Kirkpatrick said she worked to include additional fire-safety and security measures in a 2021 franchise agreement, which she supported. Still, she remains concerned about Boring’s operations, including the potential for price-gouging if it becomes the “only game in town.”
In an interview with ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas, a Nevada transportation industry expert who has closely observed the system’s development said it’s concerning that Boring’s plans, including basic transportation safety protocols, haven’t been vetted like a public project.
“What’s the traffic control system going to be like down in those tunnels? How are they going to make sure that none of those cars crash into each other when they’re going at 35 mph from one tunnel into an intersection with another tunnel?” said the expert, who requested anonymity because of concerns about professional repercussions. “All their answers are completely evasive. So there are significant operational concerns.”
Going to the Airport
Soon after the Boring Company arrived in Las Vegas, Hill approached airport leadership about connecting the Vegas Loop to the airport. The reasons are obvious. More than 50 million people landed at Harry Reid International Airport in 2023. On busy weekends, congestion at the airport can trap casino customers for almost an hour as they wait for rides.
Passengers crowd a baggage carousel at Harry Reid International Airport in October. The Boring Company hopes to eventually connect the Vegas Loop to the airport.
(Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
But tunneling there requires compliance with Federal Aviation Administration regulations and federal environmental reviews. For now, Boring plans to end its tunnels near the airport and use surface streets to carry passengers the last mile to the terminals, said Rosemary Vassiliadis, Clark County’s director of aviation. An airport spokesperson later clarified that no plans have been confirmed.
Using surface streets for its airport connection — at least initially — won’t alleviate gridlock like mass transit could. Vassiliadis acknowledged it won’t “give us any [traffic] relief. It’s just supplanting how people are getting here” by car, but said she supports efforts to build a more direct tunnel line to the airport.
With casino and tourism industry support — and their help paying for the project — politicians, including its most vocal critics, like Goodman, have found little reason to challenge Boring’s plans. For some, the airport factored into the decision.
When a large expansion into the city of Las Vegas came before the City Council in 2023, Goodman criticized the project as unsafe, inaccessible and inefficient, but said she would still vote in favor of it “because of the plea of the hotels and the private sector to move more and more people easily around our Southern Nevada community.”
She said she had asked the casinos and hotels if they wanted to connect to the Vegas Loop. “Every one of them said, ‘We’re scared not to, because if it succeeds and if it gets to the airport, we want to connect,’” Goodman told ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas.
With Goodman’s vote, the council approved the extension unanimously.
Michael Squires and Anjeanette Damon contributed reporting.
A fault line runs between labor and environmental movements, or so we’re told.
Labor unions have been criticized for focusing on jobs without considering environmental consequences, with some unions supporting controversial projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, and others opposing bans on fracking. Meanwhile, environmental groups are accused of being divorced from working-class realities, sometimes neglecting lost employment and wages related to the energy transition. The urgency of cutting emissions and phasing out fossil industries to mitigate climate change has brought the seemingly contentious relationship between labor and environment into sharp focus.
United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) provisional government interim president Benny Wenda has warned that since Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto took office in October, he has been proven right in having remarked, after the politician’s last February election, that his coming marks the return of “the ghost of Suharto” — the brutal dictator who ruled over the nation for three decades.
Wenda, an exiled West Papuan leader, outlined in a December 16 statement that at that moment the Indonesian forces were carrying out ethnic cleansing in multiple regencies, as thousands of West Papuans were being forced out of their villages and into the bush by soldiers.
Prabowo coming to top office has a particular foreboding for the West Papuans, who have been occupied by Indonesia since 1963, as over his military career — which spanned from 1970 to 1998 and saw rise him to the position of general, as well as mainly serve in Kopassus (special forces) — the current president perpetrated multiple alleged atrocities across East Timor and West Papua.
According to Wenda, the incumbent Indonesian president can “never clean the blood from his hands for his crimes as a general in West Papua and East Timor”. He further makes clear that Prabowo’s acts since taking office reveal that he is set on “creating a new regime of brutality” in the country of his birth.
Enhancing the occupation “Foreign governments should not be fooled by Prabowo’s PR campaign,” Wenda made certain in mid-December.
“He is desperately seeking international legitimacy through his international tour, empty environmental pledges and the amnesty offered to various prisoners, including 18 West Papuans and the remaining imprisoned members of the Bali Nine.”
Former Indonesian President Suharto ruled over the Southeast Asian nation with an iron fist from 1967 until 1998.
In the years prior to his officially taking office, General Suharto oversaw the mass murder of up to 1 million local Communists, he further rigged the 1969 referendum on self-determination for West Papua, so that it failed and he invaded East Timor in 1975.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (left) and West Papuan exiled leader Benny Wenda . . . “Foreign governments should not be fooled by Prabowo’s PR campaign.” Image: SCL montage
Wenda maintains that the proof Prabowo is something of an apparition of Suharto is that he has set about forging “mass displacement, increased militarisation” and “increased deforestation” in the Melanesian region of West Papua.
And he has further restarted the transmigration programme of the Suharto days, which involves Indonesians being moved to West Papua to populate the region.
Wenda considers the “occupation was entering a new phase”, when former Indonesian president Joko Widodo split the region of West Papua into five provinces in mid-2022.
Oksop displaced villagers seeking refuge in West Papua. Image: ULMWP
And the West Papuan leader advises that Prabowo is set to establish separate military commands in each province, which will provide “a new, more thorough and far-reaching system of occupation”.
West Papua was previously split into two regions, which the West Papuan people did not recognise, as these and the current five provinces are actually Indonesian administrative zones.
“By establishing new administrative divisions, Indonesia creates the pretext for new military posts and checkpoints,” Wenda underscores.
“The result is the deployment of thousands more soldiers, curfews, arbitrary arrests and human rights abuses. West Papua is under martial law.”
Ecocide on a formidable scale Prabowo paid his first official visit to West Papua as President in November, visiting the Merauke district in South Papua province, which is the site of the world’s largest deforestation project, with clearing beginning in mid-2024, and it will eventually comprise of 2 million deforested hectares turned into giant sugarcane plantations, via the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands.
Five consortiums, including Indonesian and foreign companies, are involved in the project, with the first seedlings having been planted in July. And despite promises that the megaproject would not harm existing forests, these areas are being torn down regardless.
And part of this deforestation includes the razing of forest that had previously been declared protected by the government.
A similar programme was established in Merauke district in 2011, by Widodo’s predecessor President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who established rice and sugarcane plantations in the region, aiming to turn it into a “future breadbasket for Indonesia”.
However, the plan was a failure, and the project was rather used as a cover to establish hazardous palm oil and pulpwood plantations.
“It is not a coincidence Prabowo has announced a new transmigration programme at the same time as their ecocidal deforestation regime intensifies,” Wenda said in a November 2024 statement. “These twin agendas represent the two sides of Indonesian colonialism in West Papua: exploitation and settlement.”
Wenda added that Jakarta is only interested in West Papuan land and resources, and in exchange, Indonesia has killed at least half a million West Papuans since 1963.
And while the occupying nation is funding other projects via the profits it has been making on West Papuan palm oil, gold and natural gas, the West Papuan provinces are the poorest in the Southeast Asian nation.
Indonesian military forces on patrol in the Oksop regency of the West Papua region. Image: ULMWP
And part of the agreement was that West Papuans undertake the Act of Free Choice, or a 1969 referendum on self-determination.
So, if the West Papuans did not vote to become an autonomous nation, then Indonesian administration would continue.
However, the UN brokered referendum is now referred to as the Act of “No Choice”, as it only involved 1026 West Papuans, handpicked by Indonesia. And under threat of violence, all of these men voted to stick with their colonial oppressors.
Wenda presented The People’s Petition to the UN Human Rights High Commissioner in January 2019, which calls for a new internationally supervised vote on self-determination for the people of West Papua, and it included the signatures of 1.8 million West Papuans, or 70 percent of the Indigenous population.
The exiled West Papuan leader further announced the formation of the West Papua provisional government on 1 December 2020, which involved the establishment of entire departments of government with heads of staff appointed on the ground in the Melanesian province, and Wenda was also named the president of the body.
But with the coming of Prabowo and the recent developments in West Papua, it appears the West Papuan struggle is about to intensify at the same time as the movement for independence becomes increasingly more prominent on the global stage.
“Every element of West Papua is being systematically destroyed: our land, our people, our Melanesian culture identity,” Wenda said in November, in response to the recommencement of Indonesia’s transmigration programme and the massive environment devastation in Merauke.
“This is why it is not enough to speak about the Act of No Choice in 1969: the violation of our self-determination is continuous, renewed with every new settlement programme, police crackdown, or ecocidal development.”
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A long-awaited report from the Environmental Protection Agency has found that formaldehyde presents an unreasonable risk to human health. But the report, released Thursday, downplayed the threat the chemical poses to people living near industrial plants that release large quantities of the carcinogen into the air.
The health risk assessment was published weeks after a ProPublica investigation found that formaldehyde, one of the most widely used chemicals in commerce, causes more cases of cancer than any other chemical in the air and triggers asthma, miscarriages and fertility problems.
Our analysis of the EPA’s own data showed that in every census block in the U.S., the risk of getting cancer from a lifetime of exposure to formaldehyde in outdoor air is higher than the goal the agency has set for air pollutants. The risk is even greater indoors, where formaldehyde leaks from furniture and other products long after they enter our homes.
In its report, the EPA evaluated 63 situations in which consumers and workers encounter formaldehyde and found that 58 of them contribute to the chemical’s unreasonable risk to health — a designation that requires the agency to mitigate it. Among the products that can emit dangerous levels of formaldehyde in these scenarios, according to the report, are automotive-care products like car waxes, along with crafting supplies, ink and toner, photographic supplies and fabrics, building materials, textiles and leather goods.
While a note accompanying the EPA’s report stated that workers have the greatest exposure to the chemical, the agency’s risk assessment adopted weaker standards for protecting workers from formaldehyde than had been proposed in a previous draft. The move was decried by some environmentalists, including one who said it would affect hundreds of thousands of people whose jobs require them to come into contact with the chemical.
By law, the EPA should now begin the next stage of regulation: drafting restrictions to mitigate the risks it identified. But even before the agency released the report, House Republicans urged the administration to invalidate it. And a chemical industry group immediately attacked the report as flawed, accusing the EPA of “pursuing unaccountable lame duck actions that threaten the U.S. economy and key sectors that support health, safety and national security.”
How — and whether — to rein in the risks of formaldehyde promises to be one of the first tests of the EPA under a second Trump administration. The relatively inexpensive chemical is ubiquitous, used for everything from preserving dead bodies to making plastics and semiconductors. On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly said he supports clean air. But he has also vowed to roll back regulations he views as anti-business — and industry has rallied around formaldehyde for decades.
When Trump first assumed office in 2017, the agency was preparing to publish a report on the toxicity of the chemical. But one of his EPA appointees, who was given a high-ranking role in the agency’s Office of Research and Development, was a chemical engineer who had worked to fend off the regulation of formaldehyde as an employee of Koch Industries, whose subsidiary made formaldehyde and many products that emit it. The report was not released until August 2024, long after Trump’s appointee left the agency.
According to ProPublica’s analysis of the EPA’s 2020 AirToxScreen data, some 320 million people live in areas of the U.S. where the lifetime cancer risk from outdoor exposure to formaldehyde is 10 times higher than the agency’s ideal. ProPublica released a lookup tool that allows anyone in the country to understand their outdoor risk from formaldehyde.
Still, the EPA decided in its finalized assessment that those health risks are not unreasonable, echoing a draft the agency released in March. Back then, to determine whether formaldehyde posed an unreasonable risk of harm, the EPA compared levels in outdoor air to the highest concentrations measured by monitors in a six-year period. The ProPublica investigation found that the measurement the draft report used as a reference point was a fluke and had not met the quality control standards of the local air monitoring body that registered it.
That explanation was absent from the final version released this week. Instead, it offered several new rationales, including that some formaldehyde degrades in the air and that levels vary over people’s lifetimes, but it came to the same conclusion as the draft had: that formaldehyde in outdoor air isn’t a threat that needs to be addressed.
That decision leaves people living near industrial plants — known as fence line areas — with little hope of protection, according to Katherine O’Brien, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, who has closely followed the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde.
“Despite calculating very high cancer risks for people in their homes and also fence line community residents, EPA has completely written off those risks, and set the stage for no regulation to address those risks,” said O’Brien. “That’s deeply disappointing and very hard to comprehend.”
Compared to the draft published in March, which was heavily criticized by industry, the final version contained weaker standards for protecting workers. The acceptable levels of workplace formaldehyde exposure set in the final version of the assessment were significantly higher than the levels in the earlier draft of the report.
Maria Doa, senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, expressed alarm over the decision. “This is a less protective standard that would leave workers at risk,” said Doa, a chemist who worked at the EPA for 30 years. She noted that the report’s figures show an estimated 450,000 workers could be left vulnerable to the effects of formaldehyde as a result.
The EPA press office did not immediately respond to questions about its determination for outdoor air or the change it made to the value set to protect workers.
It’s unclear what parts, if any, of the new report will be allowed to stand.
Last month, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, urged the incoming administration to make revisiting the Biden EPA’s work on formaldehyde “a top priority for 2025.” In a letter to Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Sessions derided this week’s report as “based upon unscientific data that was utilized by unaccountable officials at the EPA to tie the hands of the new Administration and hamper economic growth.” (The letter was first reported by InsideEPA.)
Sessions, who is a co-chair of the new Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency caucus and a staunch ally of Trump, recommended scrapping the EPA’s assessments of formaldehyde and reversing course on “broader Biden policies” on chemicals.
With the door now shut on 2024, many will heave a sigh of relief and hope for better things this year.
Decolonisation issues involving the future of Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua – and also in the Middle East with controversial United Nations votes by some Pacific nations in the middle of a livestreamed genocide — figured high on the agenda in the past year along with the global climate crisis and inadequate funding rescue packages.
Asia Pacific Report looks at some of the issues and developments during the year that were regarded by critics as betrayals:
The assembly passed a resolution on December 11 demanding an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which was adopted with 158 votes in favour from the 193-member assembly and nine votes against with 13 abstentions.
Of the nine countries voting against, the three Pacific nations that sided with Israel and its relentless backer United States were Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Tonga.
The other countries that voted against were Argentina, Czech Republic, Hungary and Paraguay.
Thirteen abstentions included Fiji, which had previously controversially voted with Israel, Micronesia, and Palau. Supporters of the resolution in the Pacific region included Australia, New Zealand, and Timor-Leste.
Ironically, it was announced a day before the UNGA vote that the United States will spend more than US$864 million (3.5 billion kina) on infrastructure and military training in Papua New Guinea over 10 years under a defence deal signed between the two nations in 2023, according to PNG’s Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko.
Any connection? Your guess is as good as mine. Certainly it is very revealing how realpolitik is playing out in the region with an “Indo-Pacific buffer” against China.
However, the deal actually originated almost two years earlier, in May 2023, with the size of the package reflecting a growing US security engagement with Pacific island nations as it seeks to counter China’s inroads in the vast ocean region.
Noted BenarNews, a US soft power news service in the region, the planned investment is part of a defence cooperation agreement granting the US military “unimpeded access” to develop and deploy forces from six ports and airports, including Lombrum Naval Base.
Two months before PNG’s vote, the UNGA overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding that the Israeli government end its occupation of Palestinian territories within 12 months — but half of the 14 countries that voted against were from the Pacific.
Affirming an International Court of Justice (ICJ) opinion requested by the UN that deemed the decades-long occupation unlawful, the opposition from seven Pacific nations further marginalised the island region from world opinion against Israel.
Several UN experts and officials warned against Israel becoming a global “pariah” state over its 15 month genocidal war on Gaza.
The final vote tally was 124 member states in favour and 14 against, with 43 nations abstaining. The Pacific countries that voted with Israel and its main ally and arms-supplier United States against the Palestinian resolution were Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Palau, Tonga and Tuvalu.
Flags of decolonisation in Suva, Fiji . . . the Morning Star flag of West Papua (colonised by Indonesia) and the flag of Palestine (militarily occupied illegally and under attack from Israel). Image: APR
In February, Fiji faced widespread condemnation after it joined the US as one of the only two countries — branded as the “outliers” — to support Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory in an UNGA vote over an International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion over Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.
Fiji’s envoy at the UN, retired Colonel Filipo Tarakinikini, defended the country’s stance, saying the court “fails to take account of the complexity of this dispute, and misrepresents the legal, historical, and political context”.
However, Fiji NGOs condemned the Fiji vote as supporting “settler colonialism” and long-standing Fijian diplomats such as Kaliopate Tavola and Robin Nair said Fiji had crossed the line by breaking with its established foreign policy of “friends-to-all-and-enemies-to-none”.
Indonesian military forces on patrol in the Oksop regency of the West Papua region.
2. West Papuan self-determination left in limbo For the past decade, Pacific Island Forum countries have been trying to get a fact-finding human mission deployed to West Papua. But they have encountered zero progress with continuous roadblocks being placed by Jakarta.
Pacific leaders have asked for the UN’s involvement over reported abuses as the Indonesian military continues its battles with West Papuan independence fighters.
A highly critical UN Human Right Committee report on Indonesia released in May highlighted “systematic reports about the use of torture” and “extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of Indigenous Papuan people”.
But the situation is worse now since President Prabowo Subianto, the former general who has a cloud of human rights violations hanging over his head, took office in October.
Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka and Papua New Guinea’s James Marape were appointed by the Melanesian Spearhead Group in 2023 as special envoys to push for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ visit directly with Indonesia’s president.
Prabowo taking up the top job in Jakarta has filled West Papuan advocates and activists with dread as this is seen as marking a return of “the ghost of Suharto” because of his history of alleged atrocities in West Papua, and also in Timor-Leste before independence.
Already Prabowo’s acts since becoming president with restoring the controversial transmigration policies, reinforcing and intensifying the military occupation, fuelling an aggressive “anti-environment” development strategy, have heralded a new “regime of brutality”.
And Marape and Rabuka, who pledged to exiled indigenous leader Benny Wenda in Suva in February 2023 that he would support the Papuans “because they are Melanesians”, have been accused of failing the West Papuan cause.
Protesters at Molodoï, Strasbourg, demanding the release of Kanak indigenous political prisoners being detained in France pending trial for their alleged role in the pro-independence riots in May 2024. Image: @67Kanaky /X
3. France rolls back almost four decades of decolonisation progress
When pro-independence protests erupted into violent rioting in Kanaky New Caledonia on May 13, creating havoc and destruction in the capital of Nouméa and across the French Pacific territory with 14 people dead, intransigent French policies were blamed for having betrayed Kanak aspirations for independence.
While acknowledging the goodwill and progress that had been made since the 1988 Matignon accords and the Nouméa pact a decade later following the bloody 1980s insurrection, the French government lost the self-determination trajectory after two narrowly defeated independence referendums and a third vote boycotted by Kanaks because of the covid pandemic.
This third vote with less than half the electorate taking part had no credibility, but Paris insisted on bulldozing constitutional electoral changes that would have severely disenfranchised the indigenous vote. More than 36 years of constructive progress had been wiped out.
“It’s really three decades of hard work by a lot of people to build, sort of like a future for Kanaky New Caledonia, which is part of the Pacific rather than part of France,” I was quoted as saying.
France had had three prime ministers since 2020 and none of them seemed to have any “real affinity” for indigenous issues, particularly in the South Pacific, in contrast to some previous leaders.
In the wake of a snap general election in mainland France, when President Emmanuel Macron lost his centrist mandate and is now squeezed between the polarised far right National Rally and the left coalition New Popular Front, the controversial electoral reform was quietly scrapped.
New French Overseas Minister Manual Valls has heralded a new era of negotiation over self-determination. In November, he criticised Macron’s “stubbornness’ in an interview with the French national daily Le Parisien, blaming him for “ruining 36 years of dialogue, of progress”.
But New Caledonia is not the only headache for France while pushing for its own version of an “Indo-Pacific” strategy. Pro-independence French Polynesian President Moetai Brotherson and civil society leaders have called on the UN to bring Paris to negotiations over a timetable for decolonisation.
West Papuan leader Benny Wenda (left) and Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . “We will support them [ULMWP] because they are Melanesians.” Rabuka also had a Pacific role with New Caledonia. Image: Fiji govt/RNZ Pacific4. Pacific Islands Forum also fails Kanak aspirations
Kanaks and the Pacific’s pro-decolonisation activists had hoped that an intervention by the Pacific Islands Forum in support of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) would enhance their self-determination stocks.
However, they were disappointed. And their own internal political divisions have not made things any easier.
On the eve of the three-day fact-finding delegation to the territory in October, Fiji’s Rabuka was already warning the local government (led by pro-independence Louis Mapou to “be reasonable” in its demands from Paris.
Rabuka and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown and then Tongan counterpart Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni visited the French territory not to “interfere” but to “lower the temperature”.
But an Australian proposal for a peacekeeping force under the Australian-backed Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI) fell flat, and the mission was generally considered a failure for Kanak indigenous aspirations.
Taking the planet’s biggest problem to the world’s highest court for global climate justice. Image: X/@ciel_tweets
5. Climate crisis — the real issue and geopolitics
In spite of the geopolitical pressures from countries, such as the US, Australia and France, in the region in the face of growing Chinese influence, the real issue for the Pacific remains climate crisis and what to do about it.
Controversy marked an A$140 million aid pact signed between Australia and Nauru last month in what was being touted as a key example of the geopolitical tightrope being forced on vulnerable Pacific countries.
This agreement offers Nauru direct budgetary support, banking services and assistance with policing and security. The strings attached? Australia has been granted the right to veto any agreement with a third country such as China.
Critics have compared this power of veto to another agreement signed between Australia and Tuvalu in 2023 which provided Australian residency opportunities and support for climate mitigation. However, in return Australia was handed guarantees over security.
The previous month, November, was another disappointment for the Pacific when it was “once again ignored” at the UN COP29 climate summit in the capital Baku of oil and natural gas-rich Azerbaijan.
The Suva-based Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) condemned the outcomes as another betrayal, saying that the “richest nations turned their backs on their legal and moral obligations” at what had been billed as the “finance COP”.
The new climate finance pledge of a US$300 billion annual target by 2035 for the global fight against climate change was well short of the requested US$1 trillion in aid.
Climate campaigners and activist groups branded it as a “shameful failure of leadership” that forced Pacific nations to accept the “token pledge” to prevent the negotiations from collapsing.
Much depends on a climate justice breakthrough with Vanuatu’s landmark case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) arguing that those harming the climate are breaking international law.
The case seeks an advisory opinion from the court on the legal responsibilities of countries over the climate crisis, and many nations in support of Vanuatu made oral submissions last month and are now awaiting adjudication.
Given the primacy of climate crisis and vital need for funding for adaptation, mitigation and loss and damage faced by vulnerable Pacific countries, former Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Meg Taylor delivered a warning:
“Pacific leaders are being side-lined in major geopolitical decisions affecting their region and they need to start raising their voices for the sake of their citizens.”
Electric Peak, Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
While millions around the world tuned in to watch Kevin Costner’s sensationalized depiction of western history in the mini-series ‘Yellowstone,’ the real story of Yellowstone goes way beyond the dramatized miniseries.
The story of Yellowstone isn’t about cowboys or ranchers. Yellowstone National Park was founded in 1872 through an act of Congress, signed into law by President Ulysses S Grant, a former general of Civil War fame. But there were no cowboys involved – the West was still controlled by its original inhabitants. Four years later the Seventh Cavalry, led by General George Armstrong Custer, wend down in a decisive defeat when the Lakota and Cheyenne peoples avenged Custer’s incursion into their sacred Paha Sapa – the Black Hills. Custer’s actions had opened the region to gold mining, culminating in the massive Homestake Mine that built the fortune of magnate George Hearst, forming the backstory for another popular miniseries, ‘Deadwood.’
While there were a handful of ranches in Montana back then, there were no cattle and no ranches in Yellowstone– it was too high and cold. Indigenous tribes lived there – Shoshones known as the Sheepeaters inhabited the high peaks, pursuing a subsistence lifestyle of hunting and gathering that stretched back not just five or six generations, but a thousand at least.
It was a place where humans lived in balance with the natural world. There were elk and bison, wolves and grizzly bears, lakes teeming with native cutthroat trout and birds beyond number. It was high and cold in the winter, and most inhabitants – wild and human alike – migrated downvalley to milder climes, or did their best to hibernate through it. The Park held only summer range and wild herbivores grazed in the lush subalpine meadows. The ecologically critical winter habitats were left out of the Park, unprotected in the surrounding low country. Pronghorns traced a dozen migration routes down from the high country. All but one of these migrations was wiped out by ranching development and overhunting in the valleys surrounding the Park.
When Yellowstone was established as the world’s first National Park, there was no Park Service to manage it. The tourists of that day drove down in buckboards from the train depot in Bozeman, Montana to see the steaming fumaroles and geysers that erupted periodically, marking thin spots in the Earth’s crust above a massive plume of magma marking what would eventually come to be understood as a supervolcano hidden underground. The tourists back then weren’t any brighter than the visitors of today who heedlessly approach wild bison – they threw chairs and barrels and other debris into the geysers to watch them get blown into the sky. They hacked off hunks of travertine from the thermal features to carry home as souvenirs. The chronic vandalism compelled Congress to step in, to rein in the worst of the stupidity and destruction. They put the U.S. Army in charge of Yellowstone, chiefly to regulate the tourists.
As the original locals were wiped out by foreign diseases and chronic warfare, and the survivors were swindled of their lands by a disingenuous federal government doing the bidding of greedy locals, the native wildlife was wiped out, too. Bison were killed off first to deprive the Tribes of the sustenance they needed to keep resisting the expansion of EuroAmerican empire. The elk and mule deer were overhunted to the point of extirpation by market gunners to keep the mining camps fed. Pronghorns, once numbering in the millions, were shot for target practice and left to rot out on the plains. At one point, an elk migration thirty thousand strong once coursed down from the Yellowstone high country to winter ranges in the Red Desert. In 1897, the League of American Sportsmen proposed to expand Yellowstone National Park to protect the migration, but Congress unwisely ignored the campaign. Instead, the elk migration was severed by the development of cattle and sheep ranches, and 30,000 wintering elk were bottled up in Jackson Hole to starve. The ecological crisis precipitated the formation of the National Elk Refuge in 1911, and the elk deprived of their winter ranges had to be fed with hay hauled in at taxpayer expense to keep them alive.
Wolves, mountain lions, and grizzly bears found a price on their heads, bounties that the bloodthirsty newcomers justified as the price of what they called “progress.” Driven by the livestock industry’s ambition not only to take over every inch of land that could be grazed by a cow or a sheep, but also to wipe out any wildlife that competed for grass, inconvenienced ranching operations, or had the temerity to dine occasionally on beef or lamb. That privilege was to be reserved for paying customers.
Wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions fared little better within the “protected” confines of Yellowstone National Park, where Army detachments hunted and trapped wolves to extinction and depleted grizzlies and mountain lions to a scattered remnant. All of this in a misguided effort to prop up remaining populations of elk and bison inside the Park. The founding of Wildlife Management as a topic of study was still fifty years in the future.
The surrounding landowners – and Yellowstone was besieged by them – were often the adventure-seeking second or third sons of royalty with no hope of inheriting landed estates in Europe. They built sprawling cattle empires through swindles, using the 1872 Mining Law to patent public land into private ownership, fraudulent Homestead Act claims, and through bullying smallholder immigrants out of their lands (hiring mercenaries to do their dirty work when necessary). They used their influence to set up territorial governments – and later state legislatures and agencies and county commissions – to do their bidding. They thought of themselves as landed royalty and expected to be treated that way. It’s a social phenomenon that continues to this day, dramatized by the series ‘Yellowstone.’
Eventually, the federal government formalized the war against native wildlife by establishing Animal Damage Control (which today is cynically-named USDA Wildlife Services), a taxpayer-funded death squad founded to kill off wolves, bears, coyotes, and mountain lions at the livestock industry’s request. The government agents set traps and hunted down the last of the wolves in every western state. Over time, technology allowed ever-more-deadly methods of killing, from aerial gunning using airplanes and helicopters to dumping gasoline into wolf dens to burn the pups alive, and using cyanide-deploying land mines that could be scattered across the West and left unattended to kill coyotes, pet dogs, and rockhounds. Even Aldo Leopold, the founder of wildlife management and an early proponent of ecology, was a government trapper. He came to realize how senseless and destructive this approach really was, and canonized his condemnation in the famous essay, ‘Thinking Like a Mountain.’
Animal Damage Control was one of the first in a long line of taxpayer subsidies for wealthy ranch owners that continue to this day. The overgrazing that fueled the Dust Bowl spawned the Soil Conservation Service (today’s Conservation Districts), founded to maximize the livestock industry’s long-term survival and profitability. There were federal research branches specially dedicated to Promoting agriculture. There were taxpayer subsidies for landowners when it rained too much (“disaster relief”) or rained too little (“drought payments”). The West was divided up like spoils and fenced off with ‘No Trespassing’ signs and overgrazed with abandon on public and private lands alike.
Having subjected the West to ethnic cleansing and wildlife decimation, the cattle and sheep ranchers in the states surrounding Yellowstone fell to warring with each other. Herds of domestic sheep tended by “tramp herders” wintered in the sagebrush basins and were pushed into fragile alpine meadows for the summer, eating everything in their path in annual migrations spanning hundreds of miles. Ranch-based cattlemen were outraged when the sheep herds trailed through, decimating the forage, but they had no legal recourse because most of the land they claimed as part of their ranches was public land that by law could be grazed for free without limit or management by anyone. The cattlemen tried to control the public lands by homesteading all the streams and the watercourses to prevent others from watering their livestock, but the strategy broke down because the massive herds of sheep, unlike cattle, could travel vast distances between watering stops. So, the cattlemen lobbied Congress to pass the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which set a nominal grazing fee and required stockmen to own a “base property” to gain permission to graze their livestock on public lands. This put an end to the tramp herders, who owned no land of their own, and cemented the cattlemen’s stranglehold on grazing on western public lands.
In Yellowstone, the U.S. Army’s management gave way to Park Rangers with the formation of the National Park Service in 1916. But the wildlife-killing continued, with the last pack of wolves in Yellowstone killed in 1926. It wasn’t until 1933 that the Park Service finally put an end to the practice of killing native wildlife, fostering the eventual recovery of mountain lions and grizzly bears within Park boundaries. But wolves remained extirpated.
South of Yellowstone, a different story of conservation unfolded in Jackson Hole. Congress established Grand Teton National Park in 1929. It was only a postage-stamp of protection applying to the peaks themselves, but not the forelands of the valley. John D. Rockefeller, an oil magnate who built his fortune on the Standard Oil Company empire, founded the Snake River Land and Cattle Company to quietly buy up almost 36,000 acres of private ranches in Jackson Hole for eventual preservation as part of the Park. In 1943, President Roosevelt established Grand Teton National Monument to bring National Forest lands at the base of the Tetons into Park Service management. As the locals began to realize that ranches were being bought out to be shut down and shifted instead to conservation, the expansion of Grand Teton National Park was decried as marking the end of Jackson’s economy. A Wyoming Senator rose on the floor of Congress to condemn it as “a foul, sneaking Pearl Harbor blow” in the midst of World War II. Eventually, and after Rockefeller threatened to sell the land for development, a compromise was struck. Congress approved an expansion of Grand Teton incorporating the Rockefeller ranch lands, but in exchange the Wyoming delegation extracted a special exemption that prevents any President from establishing a National Monument in Wyoming. Meanwhile, Wyoming politicians’ fears that preserving public lands would decimate the local economy were fulfilled by the reality that today, Teton County Wyoming has more wealth per capita than any other county in the United States. That’s what you get when you trade ranching for preservation and tourism.
As time marched forward, the elk population in Yellowstone and Grand Teton recovered, enough so that elk could be exported to lands throughout Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado where elk had been driven extinct by excessive hunting. The eradication of wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions had no effect on plummeting big game populations. Instead, strict limits on trophy hunting – coupled with a ban on the game-meat trade – had to be put in place to allow elk transplants to take root. In Yellowstone and in the absence of wolves, elk populations expanded to the point where elk died by the thousands each March, starving to death on inadequate winter ranges stripped bare of edible forage. I remember cross-country skiing from carcass to carcass during my freshman year in college in 1985, guided by a wildlife biology professor warning us all against upsetting the natural balance.
In 1993, the Park Service embarked on a bold plan to restore the natural balance of Yellowstone by reintroducing wolves. The fiercest opposition came from local ranchers, the same families that had driven wolves extinct in the first place. They protested, complained bitterly, and did everything they could to block the return of “giant Canadian wolves,” even filing lawsuits. But the wolves were released before a court order could halt it and as wolf populations grew, they helped bring down the excessive elk numbers. Wolf activity pushed elk out of the bottomlands and into steeper, more forested terrain. This allowed a regrowth of streamside vegetation and aspen groves, some of the most important wildlife habitat, fostering a resurgence of wildlife from beavers to songbirds and even changing the course of streams and rivers. Scientists studying the phenomenon labeled it a “trophic cascade,” underscoring the importance of apex predators to the health of native ecosystems.
The livestock industry and its allies have been trying to discredit the success of wolf reintroduction ever since, even though the establishment of wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming has had no detectable effect on the extent or profitability of ranching in the region. Elk populations and hunter success in the states surrounding Yellowstone also remain at pre-wolf levels.
Even so, wolf populations inside Yellowstone remain vulnerable to depredations by ranchers, hunters, and trappers, as the miniseries highlighted. The bloodthirsty anti-wolf management policies in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming keep wolves on the brink of disappearing, which is exactly what these state governments always intended, having failed to block their return.
The livestock industry’s entanglements with Yellowstone wildlife didn’t just involve wolves and other predators. During the early years, livestock allowed into Yellowstone transmitted a cattle disease called brucellosis to the Yellowstone bison herd. Fearing a return of brucellosis to Montana’s commercial livestock (which might trigger a ban on exporting cattle to out-of-state feedlots and slaughterhouses), the cattlemen raised the alarm and state governments pushed the Park Service to block the natural migrations of bison from summer ranges inside the Park to winter ranges outside its boundaries. Today, instead of treating bison like other native wildlife with the freedom to migrate to their appropriate native habitats, the cattle industry has bullied state and federal agencies into bottling them up inside the Park using a controversial system of captures, killings, and carefully choreographed hunts along the boundary to block the bison from leaving the Park and re-establishing their habitat use in surrounding states.
In one of those ironies you can’t script, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine completed a study on bison and brucellosis around Yellowstone in 2017. The scientists found not one single case of bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle in the states surrounding Yellowstone, at any time in history. Instead, each case of brucellosis contracted by cattle came from elk. While the Academies suggested the possibility of a program to test and slaughter infected elk, elk inhabit steep and heavily-timbered terrain, making eradication of brucellosis functionally impossible. Wolves and other predators are known to selectively prey on diseased elk and deer, representing the best chance of cleansing the wild herds of diseases. But only if wolves, mountain lions, bears, and other predators are allowed to recover to natural population levels, and the ranchers won’t have it.
Today, the largest private landowner around Yellowstone these days doesn’t raise cattle – he raises bison and wolves. Ted Turner’s ranch near Gallatin Gateway, the Flying D, was founded on the principle that ranching could be regenerative, by getting rid of the non-native, invasive cattle in favor of ecologically appropriate (and native) bison, allowing a thriving assemblage of native wildlife from elk to wolves to prairie digs, and marketing the food for fine dining at Ted’s Montana Grill locations. It’s a version of ranching that works for the land, instead of against it.
The cattle industry is dwindling nationwide, and as real estate prices increase (perhaps fueled in part by Hollywood promotion of the region), more ranchers are cashing out. The Paradise Valley, where the miniseries is set, has few large ranches anymore. Like many resort areas, these ranches were carved up into ranchettes during real estate booms in decades past, and the ranchers that sold out were able to profit handsomely. Today, tthe American people are actually the biggest landowner in the region, thanks to federally-owned public lands managed by the Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.
Yet, the livestock industry continues to have a warped influence on the management of public lands outside the National Parks and federal agencies are still renting public lands for commercial livestock grazing – typically at levels that promote overgrazing and land health problems. As a result, grizzly bears that should be protected by the Endangered Species Act are struggling to recover and are routinely killed by federal agents in response to conflicts with livestock that ranchers leave unattended in grizzly habitats – often in the backcountry – on public lands.
In the series ‘Yellowstone,’ the ranchers are the protagonists, and the story is told from their perspective. The miniseries, lauded by some and vilified by others, portrays them as heroes and antiheroes by turns, touching on some important issues along the way. In the real West, the ranchers are the root of a great many problems, arguably the single most widespread bringer of negative impacts across one of the last best places in the world. This tiny, insular good old boys’ club insists that every state and federal policy reflect their interests and advance their agendas. Just like in the show. The real environmentalists are the conservation professionals, who work for the public interest, and speak for the best interest of the lands and their native species. With deep knowledge of lands and wildlife, they know the West as well or better than anyone. Where ranching has ended for good – inside Yellowstone National Park for example – the land recovers, and nature flourishes. And the locals reap massive economic rewards, generating jobs and wealth far outstripping those from mineral booms and busts and economically trivial cattle operations. And still some ranchers rail against the “evils” of preservation.
Since the start of the 21st century, major planetary ecosystems, like the Amazon rainforest and Antarctica have consistently deteriorated, but within only the past two years, these two major ecosystems have deteriorated much faster than ever before. This is happening at geological breakneck speed. Nothing is normal any longer. What’s going on?
The Amazon rainforest experienced a horrific drought event in 2024. Paradoxically, global warming is attacking its own most significant counterweight. A major study found over one third of the Amazon is struggling to recover from four supposedly “one-in-a-century” dry spells in less than 20 years. (Critical Slowing down of the Amazon Forest After Increased Drought Occurrence, PNAS – National Academy of Sciences)
The scientific literature for 2024 focused on some very big issues: (1) record global heat, above the IPCC-warning of 1.5°C above pre-industrial (2) Amazon rainforest rapid deterioration amidst the most brutal drought conditions ever, major rivers dried-up (3) alarming Antarctic conditions prompting an emergency meeting of 450 polar scientists: “Runaway ice loss causing rapid and catastrophic sea-level rise is possible within our lifetimes.” (Emergency Meeting Reveals the Alarming Extent of Antarctica’s Ice Loss, Earth.com, Nov. 24, 2024)
These events are interconnected determinate factors of a global climate system that’s turned unstable. This is not normal. It is erratic and volatile.
For starters, the Amazon rainforest is in terrible condition. Climate scientists would likely agree that loss of the Amazon will be “game over” for civilization in many respects. Based upon current data, they would also likely agree the rainforest is dying.
“A major question is whether a large-scale collapse of the Amazon forest system could actually happen within the twenty-first century… The Amazon stores an amount of carbon equivalent to 15–20 years of global CO2 emissions and has a net cooling effect from evapotranspiration that stabilizes the Earth’s climate. (Critical Transitions in the Amazon Forest System, Nature, February 14, 2024)
In other words, the Amazon has the biggest job on the planet, stabilizing the climate system. It’s telling that, as the Amazon deteriorates, the climate system turns wackier with massive storms, heat, drought, and floods. No more once in 0ne-hundred-year events. They’re once every other year nowadays.
Evidence of serious Amazon deterioration is prevalent. The world’s leading Amazon authority Carlos Nobre (University of São Paulo) was recently interviewed, November 14, 2024: “Carbon Sink to Carbon Source?”
In 1975, 0.5% of the rainforest was deforested.
Today, 18% is deforested.
Today, 38% of the remaining forest is degraded to a vulnerable condition.
For the first time in recorded history extreme drought has become a regular feature of the rainforest, like clockwork every couple of years. This is not normal. According to NASA, the frequency eliminates natural recovery.
In some regions of the forest, the Amazon emits more carbon than it stores, similar to cars, planes, trains, and industry. This is one more first in climate history, a net carbon CO2 emitter directly into the atmosphere, joining human forces.
But it’s not only the Amazon that’s in deep trouble. Recently, scientists discovered impending Antarctic collapse in some regions, like West Antarctica, more advanced than anybody ever thought possible, necessitating an emergency meeting of 450 polar scientists in Australia only a few weeks ago.
These two major ecosystems have powerful impact on the overall world climate system and by all appearances are in early stages of coming apart at the seams, couched in mystery as to “when” and “how earth-shattering” it will be. Alas, “business as usual,” given enough time, and the world will sit up and take notice and declare an emergency. How to fix it? But when and what to do? And why wasn’t it addressed much sooner?
There are no answers to those questions. The Amazon rainforest, Antarctica, and climate change are not highly ranked in public polls, e.g., according to a Gallup Poll, Dec. 12, 2024, the top concerns include immigration, inflation, the economy, healthcare, and poor government leadership. Climate change didn’t make a showing. It’s of little surprise there is not an effective effort to quantify the risks and recommend what should be done, assuming anything is actually possible, probably not, re anthropogenic destruction of life-supporting ecosystems. But scientists know all about it. Just ask them. Oh yeah, almost forgot, the incoming administration doesn’t believe in science.
In today’s world of politics, especially right-wing, science is ignored or denigrated, as it interferes with cooked up conspiracy stuff that motivates ignorant people to vote for whatever flashes on a TV screen. This results in the greatest dumbing-down of society ever witnessed in human history within a strong science legacy traced back to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia 3000 to 1200 BCE. Only brief intervals of modern human history have witnessed political denigration of science like today, other than occasional bouts with religion, e.g., centuries ago, Earth as the center of the universe mayhem, ahem! Could we be going back to that? Maybe.
Meanwhile, threatening, the Amazon is at the most vulnerable of its remarkable history of stability. A key study was posted in the prestigious publication Nature, finding that 75% of the Amazon rainforest is losing “resilience,” or the ability to recover from droughts and fires. (Pronounced Loss of Amazon Rainforest Resilience Since 2000s, Nature).
That chilling fact is the product of global warming and forest-clearing/burning. This is not normal. Quite the opposite, as the mighty rainforest has 55 million years under its belt; it’s a strong survivor, until now.
Four years ago, Princeton held a special Amazon Conference: A World Without the Amazon? Stephen Pacala, the Frederick D. Petrie Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University: “We face four major environmental crises in the world now: climate, food, water, and biodiversity. The Amazon is at the center of all of them.”
“The Amazon is the biggest in a belt of forests that wraps the planet’s midsection. It is a jungle so hot and humid it makes its own rain. Its web of rivers is the largest in the world and contains about one-sixth of the world’s fresh water.” (The Amazon is the Planet’s Counterweight to Global Warming, Inside Climate News).
“The trees in the Amazon release 20 billion tonnes of water into the atmosphere per day, playing a critical role in global and regional carbon and water cycles.” (WWF) Where else could 20B tonnes of water per day come from for the global hydrology system? Answer: Nowhere.
Alas, “Up to half of the Amazon rainforest could transform into grassland or weakened ecosystems in the coming decades, a new study found (A Collapse of the Amazon Could Be C0ming Faster Than Thought, New York Times, Feb. 14, 2024).
According to the World Wildlife Fund: “The largest jungle on our planet, the Amazon, is in danger of drying out. If we lose just 5% more to deforestation, it may never be the same again.” (The Amazon is Dying, Our Planet, WWF, Netflix).
That film is five years old. The 5% is nearly gone.
A world climate system not regulated by Antarctica, crumbling, and the Amazon rainforest, which is already wobbly, will turn dangerously erratic in a reign of climate terrorism that takes lives and livelihoods while destroying megacities from coast-to-coast.
Solutions: Stop deforestation and fires that are 95% human-caused and stop CO2 emissions. But nobody wants to hear this.
As 2024 came to a close and we have stepped into a new year overshadowed by ongoing atrocities, have you stopped to consider how these events are reshaping your world?
Did you notice how your future — and that of generations to come — is being profoundly and irreversibly altered?
The ongoing tragedy in Palestine is not an isolated event. It is a crisis that reverberates far beyond borders, threatening your safety, the well-being of your children and family.
Palestinian advocate Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab . . . a powerful address in Auckland last weekend about how people in New Zealand can help in the face of Israel’s genocide. Image: APR
Even fragile ecosystems and creatures have been obliterated and affected by the fallout from Israel’s chemicals and pollution from its weapons.
The deliberate targeting of civilians, rampant violations of international law, and the obliteration of the rights of children are not distant horrors. They are ominous warnings of a world unravelling — consequences that are slowly seeping into the comfort of your home, threatening the very foundations of the life you thought was secure.
But here’s the hard truth: these outcomes don’t just happen in a a vacuum. They persist because of the silence, indifference, or complicity of those who choose not to act.
The question is, will you stand up for a better future, or will you look away? And how could Palestine possibly affect you and your family? Read on.
Israel acting with impunity for decades
Israel has been acting with impunity for decades, flouting the norms of our legal agreements, defying the United Nations and its rulings and requests to act within the agreed global rules set after the Holocaust and the Nazis disregard for humanity.
The Germans, under Nazi rule, pursued a racist ideology to restructure the world according to race, committing crimes against humanity and war crimes that resulted in a devastating world war and the deaths of millions of people, including millions of Jews. A set of rules were formed from the ashes of these victims to ensure this horror would never happen again. It’s called international law.
However, after the Nazis defeat, it took less than a few years before atrocities began again, perpetrated by the very people who had just been brutally massacred and targeted.
European Jews, including holocaust survivors, armed by Czechoslovakia, funded by the Nazis (Havaara agreement), aided militarily by Britain, the US, Italy and France among others, arrived on foreign shores to a land that did not belong to them.
Once there, they began to disregard the very rules established to protect not only them, but the rest of humanity — rules designed to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust, safeguard against the resurgence of ideologies like Nazism, and ensure impunity for such actions would never occur again.
These rules were a shared commitment by countries to conduct themselves with agreed norms and regulations designed to respect the right of all to live in safety and security, including children, women and civilians in general. Rules that were designed to end war and promote peace, justice, and a better life for all humankind.
Rules written to ensure the sacred understanding, implementation and respect of equal rights for all people, including you, were followed to prevent us from never returning to the lawlessness and terror of World War Two.
But the creation of Israel less than 80 years ago flouted and violated these expectations. The mass murder of children, women and men in Palestine in 1948, which included burning alive Palestinians tied to trees and running them over as they lay unable to move in the middle of town squares, was only the beginning of this disrespectful dehumanisation.
Terrorised by Jewish militia
Jewish militia terrorised Palestinians, lobbing grenades into Palestinian homes where families sheltered in fear, raping women and girls, and forcing every man and boy from whole villages to dig their own trenches before being shot in the back so they fell neatly into their graves.
Pregnant Palestinian women had their bellies sliced open, homes were stolen along with everything in it — including my families — and many family members were murdered.
This included my great grandmother who was shot, execution style, in front of my mother as she carried a small mattress from our home for her grandchildren when they were forcibly displaced. I still don’t know what happened to her body or where she is buried. I do know where our house is still situated in Jerusalem, although currently occupied.
These atrocities enabled Israel’s birth, shameful atrocities behind its creation. There is not one Israeli town or village that is not built on top of a Palestinian village, or town, on the blood and bones of murdered Palestinians, a practice Israel has continued.
As I write, plans to build more illegal settlements on the buried bodies of Palestinians in Gaza have already been drawn up and areas of land pre-sold.
These horrific crimes have continued over decades, becoming worse as Israel perfected and industrialised its ability to exterminate human souls, hearts and lives. Israel’s birth from its inception was only possible through terrorist actions of Jewish militia. These militia Britain designated as terrorist organisations, a designation that still stands today.
Jewish militia such as (Haganah, Irgun and Stern Gang) formed into what is now known as the Israeli Defence Force, although they aren’t defending anything; Palestine was not theirs to take in the first place.
There was never a war of independence for Israel because the state of Israel did not exist to liberate itself from anyone. Instead, Britain illegally handed over land that already belonged to the Palestinians, a peaceful existing people of three pillars of faith — Palestinian Christians Muslims and Jews. If there were any legitimate war of independence, it would be that of the Palestinian people.
Free pass to act above the law
Israel continues to rely on the Holocaust’s memory to give it a free pass to act above the law, threatening world peace and our shared humanity, by using the memory of the horrors of 1945 and the threat of antisemitism to deter people from criticising and speaking out against the state’s unlawful and inhumane actions.
Yet Israel echoes the horrors of Nazi Germany and its destruction with its behaviour, the difference being the industrialisation of mass killing, modern warfare and weapons, the use of AI as a killing machine, the creation of chemical weapons and huge concentration and death camps which far surpass Germany’s capabilities.
Jews around the world have been deeply divided by Israel’s assertion that it represents all Jewish people. Not all Jews religiously and politically support Israel, many do not feel a connection to or support Israel, viewing its actions and policies as separate from their Jewish identity. For them, Israel’s claims do not define what it means to be Jewish, nor do they see its conduct as aligned with Jewish values.
This is not a “Jewish question” but a political one and conflating the two undermines the diverse perspectives within Jewish communities globally and is harmful to Jewish people. It is important to maintain a clear distinction between Judaism and the political actions of Israel.
How does a genocide across the world affect you? The perpetration of genocide and gross violations of human rights, facilitated or supported by Western powers, erodes the very foundations of the global legal framework that protects us all. This assault weakens democracy, undermines international law, and destabilises the structures you rely on for a secure future.
“The perpetration of genocide and gross violations of human rights, facilitated or supported by Western powers, erodes the very foundations of the global legal framework that protects us all.” Image: Al Jazeera headline APR
It leaves your defences crumbling, your safety compromised, and your vulnerabilities exposed to the chaos that follows such lawlessness as a global citizen of this world under the same protections and with the same equality as the Palestinians.
Palestinian children are no less deserving of safety and rights than any other children. When their rights are ignored and violated, it undermines protections for children worldwide, creating a precedent of vulnerability and injustice. If violations are deemed acceptable for some, they risk becoming acceptable for all.
Sitting safely in Aotearoa does not guarantee protection. The actions of Israel and the US, Western countries — massacring and flattening entire neighbourhoods — send a dangerous message that such horrors are only for “others”, for “brown people” who speak a different language.
But Western countries are the global minority. Many nations now view the West with growing disdain, especially in light of Israel and America’s actions, coupled with the glaring double standards and inaction of the West, including New Zealand, as they stand by and witness a genocide in progress.
When children become a legitimate target, the safety of all children is compromised. Your kids are at risk too. Just because you live on the other side of the world does not mean you are immune or beyond the reach of those who see such actions as justification for retaliation.
If such disregard for human life is deemed acceptable for one people, it will inevitably become acceptable for others. Justice and equality must extend to all children, regardless of nationality, to ensure a safer world for everyone.
But why should you care? Because Israel and the US are undermining the framework that protects you. Israel’s violations of International and humanitarian law including laws on occupation, war crimes and bombing protected institutions such as hospitals, schools, UN facilities, civilian homes and areas of safety, undermines these and sets a dangerous precedent for others to follow. Israel does not respect global peace, civilians, human rights nor has respect for life outside of its own. This lawlessness and lack of accountability is already giving other states the green light to erode the norms that protect human rights, including the decimation of the rights of the child.
The West’s support for Israel, namely the US, the UK, Canada, much of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, despite its clear violations of international law, exposes a fundamental hypocrisy. This weakens the credibility of democratic nations that claim to champion human rights and justice.
The failure of institutions like the UN to hold Israel accountable erodes trust in these bodies, fostering widespread disillusionment and scepticism about their ability to address other global conflicts. This has already fuelled an “us versus them” mentality, deepening the divide between the Global South and the Global North.
This division is marked by growing disrespect for Western governments and their citizens, who demand moral authority and adherence to the rule of law from nations in the East and South yet allow one of their “own” to brazenly violate these principles.
This hypocrisy undermines the hope for a new, respectful world order envisioned after the Holocaust, leaving it damaged and discredited.
Israel, despite its claims, has no authentic ties to the Middle East. What was once Palestinian land deeply rooted in Middle Eastern culture, has been overtaken and reshaped into to an artificial state imposed by mixed European heritage. It now stands as a Western outpost in stark contrast and isolated from surrounding Eastern cultures.
The failure of the West and the international community to stop the Palestinian genocide has begun a new period of genocide normalisation, where it becomes acceptable to watch children being blown up, women and men being murdered, shot and starved to death.
This acceptance then becomes a part of a country’s statecraft. Palestinian genocide, while it might be a little “uncomfortable” for many, has still been tolerable. If genocide is tolerable for one, then its tolerable for another.
Bias and prejudice
If you can comfortably go about your day, knowing the horror other innocent human beings are facing then perhaps it might be time to reflect on and confront any underlying biases or prejudices you hold.
An interesting thought experiment is to transform and transfer what is happening in Palestine to New Zealand.
Imagine Nelson being completely flattened, and all the inhabitants of Auckland, plus some, being starved to death.
Imagine all New Zealand hospitals being destroyed, Wellington hospital with its patients still inside is blown up. All the babies in the neonatal unit are left to die and rot in their incubators, patients in the ICU units and those immobile or too sick to move are also left to die, this includes all children unable to walk in the Starship hospital.
Electricity for the whole country is turned off and all patients and healthcare workers are forced to leave at gunpoint. New Zealand doctors and nurses are stripped down to their underwear and tortured, this includes rape, and some male doctors are left to die bleeding in the street after being raped to death with metal poles and electrodes.
Water is then shut down and unavailable to all of you. You cannot feed your family, your grandchildren, your parents, your siblings, your best friends.
Imagine New Zealanders burying bodies of their children and loved ones in makeshift mass graves, while living in tents and then being subjected to chemical weapon strikes, quad copters or small drones’ attacks that drop bombs and exterminate, shooting people as they try to find food, but targeting mostly women and children.
Imagine every single human being in Upper Hutt completely wiped out. Imagine 305 New Zealand school buses full of dead children line the streets, that’s more than 11,000 killed so far. Each day more than 10 New Zealand kids lose a limb, including your children.
This number starts to increase with the hope to finally ethnically cleanse Aotearoa to make way for a new state defined by one religion and one ethnicity that isn’t yours, by a new group of people from the other side of the world.
These people, called settlers, are given weapons to hurt and kill New Zealanders as they rampage through towns evicting residents and moving into your homes taking everything that belongs to you and leaving you on the street. All your belongings, all your memories, your pets, your future, your family are stolen or destroyed.
Starting from January 2025, up to 15 New Zealanders will die of starvation or related diseases EVERY DAY until the rest of the world decides if it will come to your aid with this lawlessness. Or maybe you will die in desperation while others watch you on their TV screens or scroll through their social media seeing you as the “terrorist” and the invaders as the “victims”.
If this thought horrifies you, if it makes you feel shocked or upset, then so too should others having to endure such illegal horrors. None of what is happening is acceptable, as a fellow human being you should be fighting for the right of all of us. Perhaps you might think of our own tangata whenua and Aotearoa’s own history.
What could this mean for New Zealand?
We are not creating a bright future for a country like New Zealand, whose remote location, dependence on trade, and its aging infrastructure, leaves it vulnerable to changing global dynamics. This is especially concerning with our energy dependence on imported oil, our dependence on global supply chains for essential goods including medicine (Israel’s pager attack against Hezbollah has compromised supply chains in a dangerous and horrific violation that New Zealand ignored), our economic marginalisation, and our security challenges.
All of this while surrounded by rising tensions between superpowers like the US and China which will affect New Zealand’s security and economic partnerships. Balancing economic and political ties is complicated by this government’s focus on strengthening strategic alliances with Western nations, mainly the US, whose complicity in genocide, war crimes, and disrespect for the rule of law is weakening its standing and threatens its very future.
Targeting marginalised groups
The precedent set in Palestine will embolden oppressive regimes elsewhere to target minority groups, knowing that the world will turn a blind eye. Israel is a violent, oppressive apartheid state, operating outside of international law and norms and has been compared to, but is much worse than the former apartheid South Africa.
This will have a huge impact felt all over the world with the continued refugee crisis. Multicultural nations such as New Zealand will struggle to cope with the support needed for the families of our citizens in need.
An increase of the far right reminiscent of Nazi ideology and extremism
Israel is a pariah state fuelled by radicalisation and extremism with an intolerance to different races, colour and ethnicity and indigenous populations. This has created a fertile ground for extremist ideologies, destabilising regions far beyond the Middle East as we have seen in Europe with the rejuvenation of the far-right movement.
Israel’s genocidal onslaughts will continue to be the cause for ongoing instability in the region, affecting global energy supplies, trade routes, and security. The Palestinian crisis will not be answered with violence, oppression and war. We aren’t going anywhere, and neither should we.
Weaponising aid and healthcare
Israel’s deliberate restriction of food, water, and medical supplies to Gaza weaponises humanitarian aid, violating basic principles of humanity. A new weapon in the arsenal of pariah states and radical violent countries and a new Israeli tactic to be copied and used elsewhere. Targeting hospitals, healthcare workers, distribution centres, ambulances, the UN, and collectively punishing whole populations has never been and will never be acceptable.
If it is not acceptable that this happens to you in Aotearoa, then nor is it acceptable for Palestinians in Palestine. It is intolerable for other “terror regimes” to commit such acts, so why is it deemed acceptable when carried out by Israel and the US?
Undermining the rights to free speech, peaceful protest and freedoms
During the covid pandemic, many New Zealanders were concerned with government-imposed restrictions that could be used disproportionately or as pretexts for authoritarian control. This included limitations on freedom of movement, speech, assembly, and privacy.
And yet Palestinians endure military checkpoints, curfews, restricted movement within and between their own territories, and the suppression of their right to protest or voice opposition to occupation — all due to Israel’s oppressive and illegal control. This is further enabled by the political cover and tacit support provided by this government’s failure to speak out and strongly condemn Israel’s actions.
Through its failure to take meaningful action or fulfil its third-party state obligations, this government continues to maintain normal relations with Israel across diplomatic, cultural, economic, and social spheres, as well as through trade. Moreover, it wrongly asserts on its official foreign affairs websites and policies that an occupying power has the right to self-defence against a defenceless population it has systematically abused and terrorised for decades.
The silencing of pro-Palestinian activists and criminalisation of humanitarian aid also create a chilling effect, discouraging global solidarity movements and undermining the moral fabric of societies. The use of victimhood to shroud the aggressor and blame the victim is a low point in our harrowed history. As is the vilification of moral activism and those that dare to stand against the illegal and sickening mass killing of civilians.
The attempt to persecute brave students standing up to Zionist and Israeli-run organisations and those supporting Israel (including academic and cultural institutions), by both trigger-happy billionaire Jewish investors and elite families and company investors whose answer to peaceful resistance is violence, demonstrates how far we have fallen from democracy and the rights of the citizen.
I find it completely bizarre that standing up against a genocide of helpless, unarmed civilians is demonised in order to protect the thugs, criminals and psychopaths that make up the Israeli state and its criminal actors, and the elite families and corporations profiting from this war.
Even here in Aotearoa, protesters have been vilified for drawing attention to Israel’s war crimes and double standards at the ASB Classic tennis tournament. Letting into New Zealand an IDF soldier who is associated with an institution directly implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity should be questioned.
These protesters were falsely labelled as “pro-Hamas” by Israeli and Western media. They were portrayed negatively, seen as a nuisance. Their messages about supporting human rights and stopping a horrific genocide from continuing were not mentioned.
The focus was the effect their chants had on the tennis match and the Israeli tennis player, who was upset. Exercising their legal rights to demonstrate, the protesters were not a security issue. Yet Lina Glushko, the Israeli tennis player, claimed she needed extra security to combat a dozen protesters, many over the age of 60, who were never in any proximity of the controversial player nor were ever a threat.
No mention that Lina Glushko lives in an illegal settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or that she was in service from 2018-2020 during the Great March of Return. Or that this tennis player has made public statements mocking the suffering of Palestinians, inconsistent with Aotearoa’s commitment to combating hate speech and promoting inclusivity and respect.
Her presence erodes the integrity of international sports and sends a dangerous message that war crimes and human rights violations carry no meaningful consequences despite international law and the recent UNGA (UN General Assembly) and ICJ (International Court of Justice) resolutions and advisory opinions.
Allowing IDF soldiers entry into New Zealand disregards the pain and suffering of Palestinians and the New Zealand Palestinian community, dehumanising their plight. It sends a message of complicity to the broader international community, one that was ignored by most Western media.
Similarly, Israel’s attempts to not just control the Western media but to shut down and kill journalists, is not only a war crime, but is terrifying. Journalists’ protection is enshrined in international law due to the essential nature of their work in fostering accountability, transparency, and justice. They expose corruption, war crimes, and human rights abuses. Real journalism is vital for democracy, ensuring citizens are informed about government actions and global events.
Israel’s targeting of journalists undermines the rule of law and emboldens it and other perpetrators to commit further atrocities without fear of scrutiny or consequences.
The suffering of Palestinians is a human rights issue that transcends borders. Allowing genocide and oppression to continue undermines the shared humanity that binds us all.
Israel’s actions reflect the dehumanisation of an entire population and our failure to enforce accountability for these crimes weakens international systems designed to protect your family and you.
Israel’s influence is far reaching, and New Zealand is not immune. Any undue influence by foreign states, including Israel, threatens New Zealand’s sovereignty and ability to make independent decisions in its national interest. Lobbying efforts by organisations like the Zionist Federation or the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the Jewish Council and the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand push policies that do not align with New Zealand’s broader public interest.
Aligning with a state that is violating rights and in a court of law on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, leaves citizens wide open to the same controls and concerns we are now seeing Americans and Europeans face at the mercy of AIPAC and Israeli influence.
Palestine is a test of the international community’s commitment to justice, human rights, and the rule of law. If Israel is allowed to continue acting with impunity, the global system that protects us all will be irreparably weakened, paving the way for more injustice, oppression, and chaos. It is a fight for the moral and legal foundations of the world we live in and ignoring it will have far-reaching consequences for everyone.
So, as you usher in 2025, don’t sit there and clink your glasses, hoping for a better year while continuing to ignore the suffering around you. Act to make 2025 better than the horrific few years the world has been subjected to, if not for humanity, then for yourself and your family’s future. Start with the biggest threat to world peace and stability — Israel and US hegemony.
What you can do
You can make a difference in the fight against Israel’s illegal occupation and violations of human rights, including the deliberate targeting of children by taking simple yet impactful steps. Here’s how you can start today:
Boycott products supporting oppression:
Remove at least five products from your weekly supermarket shopping list that are linked to companies supporting Israel’s occupation or that are made in Israel. Use tools like the “No Thanks” app to identify these items or visit the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) website for detailed advice and information.
Hold the government accountable:
Write letters to your government representatives demanding action to uphold democracy and human rights. Remind them of New Zealand’s obligations under international law to stand against human rights abuses and violations of global norms. Demand fair and equitable foreign policies designed to protect us all.
Educate yourself:
Learn about the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict, especially the events of 1948, to better understand the roots of the ongoing crisis. Knowledge is a powerful tool for advocacy and change.
Seek alternative news sources:
Expand your perspective by accessing a wide range of news sources including from platforms such as Al Jazeera, Double Down News, and Middle East Eye.
Be a citizen, not a bystander:
Passive spectatorship allows injustice to thrive. Take a stand. Whether by boycotting, writing letters, educating yourself, or raising awareness, your actions can contribute to a global movement for justice for us all.
Together, we can challenge systems of oppression and demand accountability for crimes against humanity. Let 2025 not just be another year of witnessing suffering but one where we collectively take action to restore justice, uphold humanity, and demand accountability.
The time to act is now.
On a sticky day in January, dozens of nannies and aunties from Tainui shook and waved fronds of greenery as they called manuhiri onto Tuurangawaewae Marae.
More than 10,000 people had responded to a rare call for unity from the Māori King to discuss what the new government’s policies meant for Māori. It set the scene for what became a massive year for te ao Māori.
The agreements included either rolling back previous initiatives considered progressive for Māori or creating new policies that many in Māoridom and beyond perceived to be an attack on Māori rights and te Tiriti o Waitangi.
So as the rest of the country wound down for the year, te ao Māori went to work, planning for the year ahead.
This year saw everything from controversial debates about the place of New Zealand’s founding document to mourning the loss of the Māori king, and a viral haka.
A call for unity — how 2024 started The Hui-aa-motu in January was the first sign of the year to come.
Iwi from across the motu arrived at Tūrangawaewae, including Ngāpuhi, an iwi which doesn’t typically follow the Kiingitanga, suggesting a growing sense of shared purpose in Māoridom.
At the centre of the discussions was the ACT Party’s Treaty Principles Bill, which aims to redefine the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi and enshrine them in law.
Māori also expressed their concerns over the axing of Te Aka Whai Ora, (the Māori Health Authority), the re-introduction of referenda on Māori wards, removing references to Tiriti o Waitangi in legislation, and policies related to the use and funding of te reo Māori.
The day was overwhelmingly positive. Visitors were treated with manaakitanga, all receiving packed lunches and ice blocks to ward off the heat.
Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau te Wherowhero VII addresses the crowd at Hui-ā-Motu last January. Image: Ella Stewart/RNZ
Other than the sheer number of people who showed up, the hui was memorable for these words, spoken by Kiingi Tuheitia as he addressed the crowds, and quoted repeatedly as the year progressed:
“The best protest we can make right now is being Māori. Be who we are. Live our values. Speak our reo. Care for our mokopuna, our awa, our maunga.
“Just be Māori. Be Māori all day, every day. We are here. We are strong.”
The momentum continued, with the mauri of Hui-ā-Motu passed to Rātana pā next, and then to Waitangi in February.
The largest Waitangi in years Waitangi Day has long been a place of activism and discussion, and this year was no exception.
February saw the most well-attended Waitangi in years. Traffic in and out of Paihia was at a standstill for hours as people flocked to the historic town, to discuss, protest, and commemorate the country’s founding document.
Māori activist and former MP for Te Tai Tokerau, Hone Harawira. Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ
Veteran Māori activist Hone Harawira addressed David Seymour, the architect of the controversial Treaty Principles Bill and ACT Party Leader, directly.
“You want to gut the treaty? In front of all of these people? Hell no! You and your shitty-arse bill are going down the toilet.”
A new activist group, ‘Toitū te Tiriti’, also seized the moment to make themselves known.
Organisers Eru Kapa-Kingi and Hohepa Thompson led two dozen protesters onto the atea (courtyard) of Te Whare Rūnanga during the pōwhiri for government officials, peacefully singing over David Seymour’s speech.
“Whakarongo, e noho . . .” they began — “Listen, sit down”.
Hīkoi organiser and spokesperson for activist group Toitū te Tiriti, Eru Kapa-Kingi at Waitangi commemorations in February 2024. Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ
It was just the start of a movement which led to a nationwide hīkoi from the top of the North Island to Wellington.
Record number of urgent Waitangi Tribunal claims In the past year, the government’s policies have faced significant formal scrutiny too, with a record number of urgent claims heard before the Waitangi Tribunal in such a short period of time.
The claims have been wide-ranging and contentious, including:
the disestablishment of the Māori Health Authority,
ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill,
limiting te reo Māori use,
reinstating referendums for Māori wards, and
the repeal of smokefree legislation.
Seymour has also criticised the function of the tribunal itself. In May, he argued it had become “increasing activist”, going “well beyond its brief”.
“The tribunal appears to regard itself as a parallel government that can intervene in the actual government’s policy-making process,” Seymour said.
The government has made no secret of its plan to review the tribunal’s future role, a coalition promise.
The review is expected to refocus the tribunal’s scope, purpose and nature back to its “original intent”. While the government has not yet released any specific details about the review, it’s anticipated that Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka will oversee it.
Te Kiingi o te Kōtahitanga — mourning the loss of Kiingi Tuheitia In August, when the seas were choppy, te ao Māori lost a rangatira.
Once again, thousands arrived outside the bright-red, ornately-carved gates of Tuurangawaewae, waiting to say one last goodbye.
The tangi, which lasted five days, saw tears, laughter and plenty of stories about Tuheitia, who has been called “Te Kiingi o Te Kōtahitanga”, the King of Unity.
Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII’s body is transferred to a hearse. Image: Layla Bailey-McDowell/RNZ
On the final day, led by Kaihaka, his body was driven the two blocks in a black hearse to the banks of Waikato River. He was placed on a waka specially crafted for him, and made the journey to his final resting place at the top of Taupiri Maunga, alongside his tūpuna.
At just 27 years old, the new Kuini signals a societal shift, where a new generation of rangatahi who know their whakapapa, their reo, and are strong in their identity as Māori, are now stepping up.
The new generation of Māori activists An example of this “kohanga generation” is Aotearoa’s youngest MP, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke.
Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke won the Hauraki-Waikato seat over Labour MP Nanaia Mahuta in 2023. Image: Samuel Rillstone/RNZ
Maipi-Clarke and several other opposition MPs performed the Ka Mate haka in response to the Treaty Principles Bill, a move that cost her a 24-hour suspension from the debating chamber.
At the same time, another up-and-coming leader within Māoridom, Eru Kapa-Kingi, led a hīkoi from the top of the North Island to Wellington, in what is believed to be the largest protest to ever arrive at Parliament.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has announced that he will not be travelling to the Treaty grounds in Northland for Waitangi Day commemorations in February next year, opting to attend events elsewhere.
Māori met the decision with mixed emotions — some calling it a missed opportunity, and others pleased.
Even before Election Day, environmental groups were suggesting ways that the Biden administration could protect the president’s climate agenda from an incoming president who has vowed to increase fossil fuel production and repeal major climate initiatives. Since then, Biden has taken many of those steps — backing a proposal to curtail public financing for oil and gas projects around the…
We’re sending @GavinNewsom a “Strike Out Meat” match box as the Los Angeles wildfires continue to rage — it's past time to promote a vegan lifestyle! pic.twitter.com/PKHUL3tYOK
