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With human-driven climate disasters growing in both frequency and intensity, taking decisive steps towards climate adaptation is crucial – but politics has failed to rise to the occasion. Spain, which saw the worst of the wildfires that tore through Europe this summer, exemplifies how disinformation, political polarisation, and institutional distrust can erode unity and disrupt urgently needed disaster responses. And yet, solidarity offers hope.

My friend Alicia was in Cádiz, Andalusia, when a large fire broke out near the urban area. She was evacuated from the campsite where she was staying and headed back home to Granada, a three-hour drive away.

A few weeks later, the fields around my family’s house in Granada caught alight. The flames were extinguished before they spread. What remains is a long black scar across the hillside, a reminder of both our luck and our fragility.

Several days passed. This time, a friend who was driving across Almería, also in Andalusia, sent me a video of flames flickering in the distance. “It’s unsettling,” he wrote. I also received messages from Madrid: “I have seen houses and gardens destroyed.” But the worst fires happened in Castilla y León and Galicia, in the northwestern part of Spain, where more than 141,000 and 130,000 hectares burned, respectively.

María, another friend of mine, sent photos from Riós, Galicia, where she spent August visiting family. Some were blurred with grey smoke, others washed in sepia by the orange glow of the flames. The images showed people bundled up to their eyebrows, clutching hoses and trying to push back the fire.

When María first arrived in Riós, the heatwave smothered any chance of outdoor activities, so she escaped to Vigo for a few days to cool off in the sea. On her return, she witnessed the first signs of a looming disaster: columns of smoke over the mountains and aircraft battling spreading wildfires. By the time she reached the village, she recalls, an enormous grey cloud loomed overhead, ash was falling, and the sky had turned a burning orange that lingered for weeks.

For eight chaotic days, fires raged and fear spread. Villagers and volunteers organised to fight the flames. They wore masks and tucked their pants into their socks. “I learned that xestas [broom shrubs, pulled straight from the hillside] are the best tool to put out flames,” María notes. She still remembers the jolt in her body at the thought of losing everything. Yet above all, she recalls a deep sense of abandonment. Cut off without electricity, internet, or phone signal, the villages were isolated as roads closed, and no aircraft appeared for days. “Everywhere you looked, there was the immediate threat of fire, yet no one explained to us what we should do,” she says. “It wasn’t until three days after the fires began that the first alert finally arrived on our phones, telling us not to leave the house”.

An explosive mix

María’s experience, though extreme, mirrors what many across Spain and Europe endured this past summer, as record heat and widespread wildfires swept through the continent.

2025 has been the worst year on record in terms of land burned across Europe. According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), more than one million hectares have been scorched on the continent. Portugal suffered one of its three worst fire seasons on record, while Romania and southern Italy, despite seeing fewer fires compared to 2024, faced an increase in terms of area burned.

Spain was by far the hardest-hit EU country, with more than 400,000 hectares burned – nearly 40 per cent of the EU total. The 2025 season surpassed 2022, previously the worst year for Spanish fires since the mid-1990s. This summer was also the hottest ever recorded on the mainland, as reported by the Spanish Meteorological Agency.

At least eight people have died as a result of the fires. Emblematic local tree species have suffered severe damage, and wildlife has also been affected. The economy was also hit hard: the worst-impacted provinces experienced a decline in leisure and hospitality spending of 8 to 16 per cent.

The Mediterranean region is known for its hot and dry summers. The steep slopes that are typical of its landscapes also contribute to the rapid spread of wildfires. But climate change has greatly exacerbated the conditions for wildfires. According to a report by World Weather Attribution (WWA), human-induced climate change made the heat, dryness, and wind conditions that fuelled this summer’s blazes in Spain and Portugal up to 40 times more likely. In turn, the warming made the 10-day heatwave 200 times more probable and 3 degrees Celsius hotter.

The scale of the recent fires has also been driven by the dense vegetation accumulating in parts of Portugal and Spain – a buildup of biomass resulting from rural abandonment. Where forests go unmanaged, the risk of blazes steadily rises. “With fewer people and less traditional grazing, natural vegetation control has sharply declined,” the WWA report notes.

Luis Berbiela, director of Fundación Pau Costa, a global non-profit organisation dedicated to wildfire prevention and management through the lens of fire ecology, says rural abandonment in Spain is driven by an ageing population as well as by a decline in the consumption of forest-derived products, such as wood for heating and construction. Furthermore, second homes and recreational or tourist establishments have been introduced into these pristine areas, making fires ever more lethal. “Fires will inevitably become larger due to the continuity of vegetation; more intense because of the fuel density; and more dangerous due to the vulnerability of people living or vacationing in these areas,” he says. During this year’s crisis, the simultaneous occurrence of big fires in different parts of the country also played a big role, as it was impossible for emergency personnel to be everywhere at once.

The adaptation gap

When the fires broke out, María recalls, her grandmother told her that several people from the village had asked civil protection authorities back in winter to clear the branches around the area, but received no response. A sentence heard across Spain every summer is “Fires are extinguished in winter.” However, each summer, fires become more severe due to inadequate preventive management.

Across the globe, too, climate disasters are becoming more frequent and intense, yet climate adaptation remains largely absent. The United Nations Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report 2023 reveals that progress on climate adaptation is slowing across all fronts, attributing this slowdown to inadequate investment and planning, which leaves the world exposed to rising climate change impacts and risks.

Across the globe, climate disasters are becoming more frequent and intense, yet climate adaptation remains largely absent.

​​After the devastating 2022 wildfires, Fundación Pau Costa brought together over 55 experts, from conservationists and forest managers to shepherds and journalists, to build a technical consensus on effective wildfire management. The resulting document outlines key measures to transform how the country addresses wildfires, including revitalising rural communities, preparing for extreme future scenarios, and fostering shared governance and climate change adaptation.

“We have repeatedly issued warnings, but this risk culture has not been embraced at the political level,” Berbiela says. “A culture of risk is glaringly missing.” He mentions Japan as an example to learn from: “There isn’t a single Japanese child who hasn’t been taught how to behave on unstable terrain, nor a Japanese person who would consider buying a house without earthquake-resistant foundations. Resilience and resistance to earthquakes are built into the very cultural DNA of Japanese life.”

With climate change-driven disasters set to become more frequent in the future, what is stopping political leaders from adopting the measures needed to mitigate the damage?

Paralysed by polarisation

An article recently published in Nature concluded that today’s “marked social contestation threatens the speed, scale and viability of climate action implementation at the very time when societies cannot afford climate action to stall or fail.” Political divisions are often cited as obstacles to strong climate policy because they erode trust, reduce willingness to compromise, and make long-term planning harder. For climate policy to be inclusive and effective, cooperation across political parties, stakeholders, and levels of government is essential.

As Luis Miller, a research scientist at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), explains, “to achieve a public good, the most important thing is cooperation, both at the individual level and between administrations. Yet both in the case of the Valencia floods and this summer’s fires, we saw major coordination problems.”

This summer, in a show of solidarity, volunteers poured into fire-affected areas to help. In contrast, the central government (headed by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE), and regional administrations (mostly led by the centre-right People’s Party, PP) engaged in a blame game over political responsibilities. The PSOE accused the People’s Party of downplaying climate change, neglecting regional fire prevention policies, and rejecting a 2024 bill on forest firefighters that the PP claimed carried an “ecological and gender ideological bias”. In contrast, the conservatives largely attributed the wildfires to arson and criticised the central government for failing to deploy enough firefighters and additional forces, including the army.

This is not unique to Spanish politics. Italy witnessed a similar dynamic during the devastating floods that struck its northern regions this September. “All the unfortunate new events we are experiencing at the global level are being used by political parties, governments, and different administrations to polarise. The political landscape is increasingly fragmented, which makes this kind of confrontation easier,” explains Miller.

María recalls how frustrating it was this summer – whenever they had electricity and her grandmother would put on the TV – to see politicians play the blame game: “It felt like a slap in the face. People were burning their ankles, risking their health, putting out fires with branches and sticks, while the situation became a media debate. The whole thing was just about throwing mud from one political party to another on a talk show; it was absurd.”

Political polarisation has intensified across Europe since the 2008 financial crisis and has become a structural feature of European political systems. As noted in a 2025 study by the Bank of Spain, “In France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, public debate reflects increasingly deep ideological divides.” Politics has moved beyond the healthy disagreement and dissent that characterise democracy into an increasingly binary “us versus them” antagonism between ideological groups and parties, the report suggests.

Experts agree that polarisation is a top-down movement stemming from political elites. It starts with radicalisation or a movement towards the extremes of the political elites, which then manifests in the political stances of citizens. Disinformation is used to exacerbate disagreements. According to the Nature article, today’s polarisation is occurring against a backdrop of “post-truth” discourse, where “facts have lost their currency”.

As with last year’s floods in Valencia and the nationwide blackout earlier this year, online disinformation received widespread attention while fires burned through Spain. It ranged from claims that unaccompanied minor immigrants had started certain fires, to assertions that those behind the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development were using the wildfires to eliminate traditional activities like livestock farming. At the same time, there were claims alleging the blazes were intentionally started to enable land redevelopment, while some even put the blame on eucalyptus trees, distracting attention from factors like climate change and poor forest management.

But what is more concerning is that some prominent politicians peddled these false narratives. The leader of PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, even proposed the creation of a “national registry of arsonists”, which would use electronic bracelets to monitor people convicted of starting fires, even though official data shows that only 7.64 per cent of fires in 2023 were intentional.

Miller notes that political positions today are often marked by a high degree of strong rhetoric, with some parties more prone to disinformation than others, even to the point of opposing scientific consensus. “The far right across Europe defends positions that run counter to the broader social consensus by denying climate change,” the researcher explains. He adds that the deliberate undermining of science, which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change classified as disinformation in its 2022 report, contributes to “misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent”.

In parliaments and in political commissions, this hysterical environment makes reaching the consensus necessary for effective climate adaptation nearly impossible because even the roots of the problem are contested. “The real problem with fake news and exaggeration in politics is that they spark debate over the very definition of the issue; for example, the causes of fires. And we end up arguing about what causes these problems, rather than relying on technical expertise and proposing political solutions,” concludes Miller.

The hysterical [political] environment makes reaching the consensus necessary for effective climate adaptation nearly impossible because even the roots of the problem are contested. “

This carries consequences. A recent report co-authored by the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the International University of Valencia (VIU) found that misinformation during the Valencia floods had worsened the emergency and undermined institutional trust. Three out of four false claims were created intentionally, combining far-right rhetoric with messages traditionally associated with the Left, such as criticism of institutional power or elites. This was done with the aim of exploiting uncertainty and reinforcing distrust in the government, scientific organisations, and NGOs.

During both the Valencia floods and the 2025 wildfires in Spain, the slogan “solo el pueblo salva el pueblo” (“only the people save the people”) gained widespread traction, reflecting both the remarkable solidarity among citizens and their deep frustration with political institutions. This grassroots mobilisation, though a powerful display of civic responsibility, also highlighted a vicious cycle of distrust. As citizens witness institutional inaction, they rely more on themselves, which simultaneously reinforces scepticism toward authorities and weakens confidence in governance. Moreover, the slogan was co-opted by conservative and far-right groups as a weapon against the welfare state, with the message that “the state would not save you.”

American environmentalist David Orr, who edited the collection of essays Democracy in a Hotter Time, argues that the influence of corporations on policymaking is partly responsible for the failure to adapt to climate change. Fossil fuels companies and tech giants like Meta, Orr maintains, are especially to blame: “They have done a great job at confusing people and have indeed moved fast and broken a lot of things”, says Orr.

The case for democracy

Policy failures, disinformation, and political blame games in the aftermath of climate disasters all contribute to a decline of trust in democracy. In many parts of the world, satisfaction with democracy is alarmingly low, in particular among Gen Z and younger generations. A YouGov survey conducted for the TUI Foundation across seven European countries found that one in five young Europeans aged 16 to 26 would support an authoritarian government “under certain circumstances”.

Polarisation is a healthy component of any democracy, but only as long as it does not erode trust and institutional capacity to act. “When facing common challenges (economic recovery, energy transition, social cohesion), it is crucial that political pluralism does not devolve into political paralysis,” writes the Bank of Spain.

Interestingly, one of the main causes of this scepticism towards democracy is that 36 per cent of Europeans do not feel their interests are well represented in their national parliaments. Orr explains that the problem with today’s democracy is that we are still living in a model that was built on the French and American example. “There are a number of features we would have to make to take democracy to the next step. One is that you can’t run democracy for long as an oligarchy. The other steps to make our democracy resilient to change have to do with honouring the rights of future generations and other species, and landforms,” he adds. “We need to have a different relationship with time. We can’t keep thinking in terms of the next election cycle, we now have to begin to think in terms of centuries.”

The alternative is deadly and mirrors what we are already beginning to experience. Ecological economics professor Julia Steinberger uses the term “climate necropolitics” to describe how those in power neglect the fact that we live in death-inducing conditions: “Every year the angel of climate death swoops down lower and lower over our houses. It’s a waiting and suffering game. This year, I think my family will survive the heat wave. Next year? The one after that? (…) It’s only a matter of time before we see the flames of forest fire crawling over our formerly green hills, coming down to smoke up our valley,” she writes.

Global warming is set to increase the pressure on democratic systems: rising temperatures and dwindling resources will make consensus harder to achieve. “Civilisation requires certain things such as tolerance, foresight, equity, competence in government. Qualities that we often take for granted. Once you turn up the thermostat, everything changes,” warns Orr.

Despite divisions, finding common ground is not impossible. Even in the highly polarised United States, Orr notes, many people who identify as right-wing still agree on basic needs: protection from climate chaos, a fair share of economic resources, and security for their families. Beneath the noise of ideology, people converge on the basic desire for security, fairness, and stability. If there is a source of optimism, it lies in the realisation that we are all connected.    

As my friend María wrote to me, “In the village, people condemned the politicians’ inability to take responsibility, yet they appreciated the help and time of their neighbours, because it was all they had.” Those in power should do their part too – before it’s too late.

I recently co-authored a new peer-reviewed study that has delivered another blow to South Africa’s controversial commercial captive lion industry, finding no solid evidence that breeding lions in captivity benefits wild populations and warning that it may be doing the opposite.

Our study, a collaboration with researchers from Blood Lions and World Animal Protection, paints a troubling picture of an industry that has exploded over the past three decades to around 350 facilities holding nearly 8,000 lions — alongside thousands of other big cats — for exhibition and breeding, tourism experiences, “canned” or captive trophy hunting, and the trade in bones and body parts.

We examined 126 scientific papers and 37 organizational reports published between 2008 and 2023, flagging three major concerns:

• • Currently there is no proof that the commercial industry aids conservation.
  • Captive breeding may increase demand for lion parts.
  • Links between legal and illegal trade could be strengthened.

Bottle feeding and cub petting are popular revenue streams for captive predator facilities. Cubs are separated from their mothers at a young age, forcing the females back into estrus while visitors pay to interact with the cubs. © Blood Lions, used with permission.

From cub-petting selfies to walking with lions, “canned” hunts, and the (now illegal) export of lion skeletons, the commercial predator industry is big business. The industry claims that commercial lion farming relieves pressure on wild lions; our study shows that it could actually fuel the demand for lion products and open the door to increased wildlife trafficking.

Can Commercial Breeding Meet Consumer Demand?

While proponents of commercial wildlife utilization assert that wildlife farming offers an effective means to meet the demand for wildlife commodities and relieve pressure on wild populations, our analysis of previous work by researchers and conservationists shows that this approach may be counterproductive.

Farming wildlife may, in fact, put increased pressure on wild populations by promoting demand for wildlife products. This increases the risk of wildlife poaching and laundering through existing legal channels.

It has also been noted that captive wildlife stock is sometimes renewed with animals from the wild to bring in fresh genes and prevent inbreeding or to breed for specific traits, such as dark manes.

Countering arguments that farming wild animals is a logical means to protect wild populations, conservationists and researchers have highlighted that such mistaken assumptions may endanger wild populations.

Other species have already demonstrated that commercial farming of wild species — such as tigers for bones and other body parts, bears for bile, and Southeast Asian porcupines for meat consumption — have all put increased pressure on wild populations. Consumer demand studies that have highlighted a preference for products sourced from wild-caught animals based on perceptions of medicinal strength or meat quality. Overall these studies highlight the faulty logic inherent in justifying the commercial breeding of wild animals as a supply-side approach.

A lion skeleton prepared for export to be used in Traditional Chinese Medicine and trinkets. © Blood Lions, used with permission.

There’s still a lot we don’t know. In our paper we highlighted the urgent need for scientific, peer-reviewed research to better understand consumer demand, economic comparisons between wild and farmed products, the genetics of captive lions, and the scale of illicit trade to get a more complete picture of the impact of commercial lion farming on wild lions.

South African Wild Lion Populations Remain Stable, But What About Other Range States?

In 2018 an assessment for African lions stated that the export of captive-bred lion trophies, live captive-bred lions for zoological or breeding purposes, and/or the trade of lion skeletons from the captive population would not harm South Africa’s wild lion population.

The commercial captive lion industry has repeatedly failed to account for severe welfare issues, including malnourishment, obesity, overbreeding, inbreeding, poor keeping conditions, and health concerns. © Blood Lions, used with permission.

But while wild lion populations in South Africa remain stable, our new research clearly highlights the risks associated with a commercial captive lion industry and the already vulnerable wild lion populations and other big cat species across other range states.

Dr. Louise de Waal, director of Blood Lions and one of the paper’s authors, says South Africa’s stable wild lion population could change if the captive industry keeps growing:

“We need to err on the side of caution globally, but in particular in African lion range states, to stop facilitating further emergence of commercial captive predator breeding and trade. This is particularly relevant when considering the increased wildlife trafficking opportunities between the African continent and Southeast Asia through, for example, the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure development strategy by the Chinese government.”

Welfare Concerns Continue

The industry also has a long record of animal welfare violations. Some of the most recent cases include a successful conviction for animal cruelty after starved lions were discovered at a farm in May 2023. In another National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA) welfare case in 2025, horrific animal cruelty and neglect were uncovered at a notorious predator facility, where at least 80 tigers were kept for commercial purposes, one of whom had resorted to self-mutilation to relieve stress and pain from untreated injuries.

Commercial captive-keeping conditions fail to provide adequate living conditions for sentient apex predators, including the ability to hunt and roam freely. © Blood Lions, used with permission.

These aren’t isolated incidents. Douglas Wolhuter, national chief inspector and manager of the NSPCA Wildlife Protection Unit, reported that they had conducted 176 inspections of captive lion facilities across South Africa from 2022 to 2024. Wolhuter outlined that in most cases, captive predators were denied even the bare basics like access to clean drinking water, proper food, shelter, environmental enrichment, hygienic living conditions, and appropriate veterinary care, including treatment of parasitic infestations. Many of the captive predator- and lion-breeding facilities required repeat visits due to unaddressed noncompliances. Their inspections resulted in 64 warnings, 10 formal Animal Welfare Notices, and 21 warrants granted in 2022 alone. That year, as a result, 23 severely compromised lions had to be euthanized.

Our research, combined with these on-the-ground realities, provides another catalyst for South Africa’s Minister of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, Dr. Dion George, to take urgent action by implementing a moratorium on breeding and a time-bound phaseout plan.

It also signals the serious need for caution: Lion farming in South Africa isn’t saving wild lions. It could even be accelerating their decline, particularly in already vulnerable lion range states across other African countries.

Previously in The Revelator:

In South Africa, Tigers and Other Captive Predators Are Still Exploited for Profit. Legislation Offers Pitiful Protection

The post Study: Commercial Lion Farming in South Africa Could Be Harming, Not Helping, Wild Lions appeared first on The Revelator.

What’s the top animal species you can’t stop dreaming about seeing in the wild?

For Brooke — one of the main characters of Tiffany Everett’s delightful new graphic novel, Diary of a Nature Nerd — the answer is a moose. She’s fascinated by them, but her attempts to observe one and document the sighting in her nature journal have been thwarted at every turn.

Brooke’s emotional quest sits at the core of the book, which sees her newly blended family — including her less-enthusiastic-about-nature best friend/stepsister — travel to Washington state’s North Cascades National Park as a combination honeymoon-slash-scientific expedition.

It’s the first full-length book both illustrated and written by Everett, who previously illustrated several science- and nature-based books for kids and who also maintains a busy YouTube channel with her partner about their full-time travel.

The Revelator sat down with Everett to talk about her new book, the excitement and value of nature journaling, and life on the road.

(This conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and style.)

So where are you calling from these days? Are you still 100% mobile or…?

No, I’m in Auburn, Alabama, but we’re getting ready to hit the road again.

Aha. Will you be using the same modified bus I saw in your videos?

No, we’re done with the bus. We’ve got a van and we’ve done a truck camper with a pop-up tent on the back. And we did a scamp, which is one of those little fiber fiberglass egg-shaped tiny campers. And we just built out another van to travel in.

Wow. Did you do this whole book while traveling around mobile?

No, funny enough. I started the book while I was mobile, and then when I got the deal, I was kind of overwhelmed with the thought of how much work was in front of me. So we got a house here in my hometown for little while. I did basically the whole book here. But now I’m itching to get back on the road.

Great. So tell me, why did you write this book, and what do you hope readers are going to get from it?

Well, there are a lot of reasons I wanted to write a book like this one. One of the main reasons is I get really excited when I see an animal in the wild. And I see that same excitement for kids and adults alike when I’m hiking and we pass somebody and they’re like, “we just saw some deer up there, be quiet and you won’t scare them away.” They just light up.

And I think as a kid, one of the most important questions is “What’s your favorite animal?” So many kids pick some faraway species, which is wonderful. But I want to remind kids that there’s some amazing animals right here in the U.S.

Courtesy Tiffany Everett

And I wanted to shine a light on nomadic life, because my partner and I have lived out of a school bus, in a van, and a camper. When we tell people that, we’re often met with a lot of confusion, especially in the east and from family and stuff. I think it’s a misunderstood way of life, but it’s a lifestyle a lot of people choose. I enjoy my time living in the campers and it has brought me closer to nature. That’s just something I want to have front and center in this book.

Cool. And this is your first book-length comics work. You described it as “an emotional experience” on your website, but at the same time it’s a progression of your other illustrative work, which is science- and nature-based. Tell me about that journey and how all this work fits together.

I always wanted to be an illustrator. I kind of thought writing was out of reach for me, because I’m a visual person. But what’s cool about graphic novels is it marries the two. It’s as much about the illustrations as it is about the text.

I love illustrating nature and science. I like to be as specific as I can. I put a lot of research into it.

When I finally got to write my own story, I naturally wanted to build this whole world around nature and science, because I knew I would learn a lot while I did it.

What was your biggest challenge doing the book?

It was nothing but challenges [laughs]. I had never written before, I had never worked on a graphic novel before, and I’d never worked on a project of this size before. At 128 pages, that’s around 600 illustrations — it’s a lot of work.

I put a lot of research into it. I tried to be careful, but I still missed some things. And I’m lucky that I had some expert reviewers look at the book and find some things.

For example, there was a panel where I illustrated a river otter floating on its back. And the expert reviewer was like, only sea otters float on their backs. And that was a cool fact that I didn’t know, so I fixed it.

There was a lot of help behind the scenes, but it was an amazing journey.

You could have set it anywhere. You could have set it in your home state of Alabama. But you chose North Cascades. What attracted you to that setting?

One of the main reasons is it was one of the most recent parks I had visited when I started writing the story.

When I first got to North Cascades, I was in a very raw emotional state because we had just driven days through wildfire smoke. And when we got there, we finally got a break from it. We ascended the mountain and suddenly the skies were clear and it was lush and green. We got to Diablo Lake and saw that iconic view. It was like a sigh of relief.

Diablo Lake without smoke…and with. Photos courtesy Tiffany Everett

We camped there for two weeks. And for that first week, we didn’t have any wildfire smoke. It was a week of heaven after a pretty stressful experience.

During that week the blackberries were everywhere. I saw my first banana slug, which was very exciting. It was the first time I had seen trees of that size — just mind-blowing.

It’s definitely one of my favorite national parks, and I’ve been to 26 of them.

On that note, how do you feel about all the threats to national parks right now?

I get really frustrated reading about shortsighted plans that don’t adequately protect the wild spaces we still have. I’m deeply disheartened by the administration’s decisions to cut funding for America’s best idea, national parks, and conservation as a whole. My hope is that my book inspires some kids to put nature forward and that our natural resources are worth vastly more than dollars and cents.

Tell me about the nature journal portion of the book. It both conveys information and Brooke’s character. It’s a completely different art style, while also complementary to your regular art style. How did you develop that? What were your goals with these areas of the book?

I knew I wanted the nature journal to be the heart of the book. I think it was fun to draw things in Brooke’s style. It kind of broke it up for me artistically.

The nature journal throughout the book is a place for her to record her animal observations, which is a huge part of her personality, but she also uses it like a true diary. She hides little folded pieces of paper in the notebook where she can write her personal thoughts.

Courtesy Tiffany Everett

Her drawings kind of change — she starts by putting a lot of effort into her drawings and adding cute, fun facts and stuff. And then when she’s frustrated, her drawings reflect her feelings, and they get messy and sloppy, and she doesn’t care about it anymore. That’s so unlike this character, because this is a kid who thinks anytime she gets to observe an animal in the wild, no matter if it’s a grizzly bear or a squirrel, that’s exciting. But she gets so blinded by her obsession that she doesn’t care anymore and you see that in her drawings.

That’s one of the questions I wanted to ask. She’s so obsessed with seeing her “number one mammal” and she gets upset when she doesn’t see it and when her family members do. And I can understand that feeling. I’ve had species I wanted to see, and other people say, “I just saw one…”

“And you just missed it.”

Yeah! So I found it interesting that that was what created the drama of the book and allowed you to reveal so much character. Why did you choose that as the plot element?

Well, I think because, like you, I can relate to that feeling. You know, Brooke has spent almost her entire life camping. And a moose is her number one favorite animal. Somehow it’s the one she’s never seen. And we can imagine that there’s been a lot of times where she almost saw one, where she’s on the trail and somebody was like, “we just saw a moose.” And then the disappointment she probably feels when it’s gone, when she gets to that spot.

So then her best friend-turned-sister, Jayla, sees the moose in her very first week of camping — her reaction to that is big. At first Brooke is kind of cold to Jayla. She probably doesn’t even know why, because that’s how jealousy can feel sometimes. It’s kind of a complicated emotion, and the story is all about Brooke navigating her own feelings and learning to be happy for somebody else.

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Obviously not every family can take this type of immersive experience. Are there ways kids can translate the lessons of the book to their backyard or their urban environment or their neighborhoods?

Yeah, absolutely. You don’t have to go far to have an experience in nature. You can just go to your backyard or a local park.

If you bring a notebook, and any kind of art supplies — any notebook works, any art supplies work — and can you just sit and pay attention. Squirrels and birds and chipmunks or whatever you have near you can provide endless entertainment. You just need to slow down and pay attention to it.

Some of the advice I’ve gotten from other artists is that the very process of slowing down, like you just said, and capturing an animal or plant in linework helps you see it in new light. It brings new observations that you might not have noticed otherwise.

Absolutely. One of my favorite resources for nature journaling — and I think this is a good resource for kids and adults — is John Muir Laws and the Wild Wonder Foundation’s amazing YouTube videos for cool things like how to nature journal.

I think it’s important for everybody to remember that nature journal journaling is not about making pretty pictures. If you enjoy that, that’s great, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about making you slow down and notice things. These videos point out all the kinds of things you can make notes about, and it makes you just think about what’s going on. Like, what time of day did I see this, what season is it, what kind of tree was it in — stuff like that.

And just as a side note, it’s amazing how some of those journals from maybe a century ago contained vital science that reveals how animal migration has changed, how the climate has changed. People are tapping into this stuff either from their own lives or from generations past and learning new things.

One-hundred percent. And that’s something else that I hope readers get from this book: that everybody can be a scientist. It doesn’t matter what age you are. You don’t have to be a great artist. Making these observations — it’s fun for you, and it could actually be something that somebody learns from one day.

Speaking of observations, were any of the wildlife scenes you drew in the book things you’ve seen?

Oh yeah. Brooke’s top 10 most wanted mammals list is essentially my own wish list.

I’ve seen half of the ones on her list. I’ve seen a moose, but I haven’t seen a moose swimming, which I think would be really cool.

Every time I get to see any animal in the wild, it’s an honor. Even deer and squirrels and stuff — like when you’re hiking and you get to share the space with these deer and they look at you and stop, and then they decide that you’re not a threat and they keep eating. It’s so cool just to slow down and watch them for a little bit.

The book’s been out for a few weeks. You’ve done some author events — how are kids responding?

Well, I’ve been blown away from responses. It’s humbling. I did my first author event last weekend, and it went really well. The kids were so excited and they asked great questions.

We did a draw-along, where I showed them how I draw from references and how you can break down any image into shapes and draw anything. We drew a fox together and all the kids’ fox drawings looked great — they were all so unique and they had their own style, but they were all definitely foxes.

 

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And I’ve had parents reach out and say that their kids devoured the book in one day and we’re looking for book two.

So what does come next? Are you thinking about another book for Brooke or about something else?

Well, I don’t have any official news for Brooke and her family, but I can say that I’m dreaming up some adventures and some interesting environments for them to explore. I think, fingers crossed, there might be more.

And for me personally, I missed camping while working on this, so we’re about to hit the road again. We’re packing up the van now.

The author and Tuco. Courtesy Tiffany Everett

Tuco, the dog in the book, is my real life Tuco. He’s a senior now and we’re getting the van ready to accommodate an 80-pound senior dog. We’re excited. I think he’s going to love getting one more adventure in.

Previously in The Revelator:

Comics for Earth: Eight New Graphic Novels About Saving the Planet and Celebrating Wildlife

The post <i>Diary of a Nature Nerd</i>: New Graphic Novel Celebrates Kids’ Love of Wildlife appeared first on The Revelator.

The banning of harmful pesticides is one of the most important victories for health and the environment in Europe’s recent history. Yet as the push to reauthorise neonicotinoids in France shows, there is a real risk that restricted substances could make a comeback. The agrochemical industry is pursuing productivity at all costs, and the EU’s dwindling power in enforcing limits could pave the way for further deregulation.

Once, it was believed the only thing that could break up a French protest was summer vacation. But this year, the French rallied on – at least online – and their perseverance was rewarded.

For weeks on end, citizens mobilised against a provision in the so-called Loi Duplomb (“Duplomb Law”), which sought to reauthorise acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid pesticide long banned for its suspected negative effects on pollinators and human health. The law, framed as a way to simplify rules for farmers, would have reopened the door to using acetamiprid. A citizens’ initiative against the bill received more than two million signatures, making it one of the most supported environmental petitions in France’s recent history.In response to the public outcry, the French constitutional court decided in August to strike down the controversial part of the legislation.

Nevertheless, the Duplomb Law marks a dangerous precedent: a rollback of green policies. At the European level, key pillars of the European Green Deal have been watered down, delayed, or abandoned over the past year. At the same time, national governments are pressing on with their own deregulatory agendas in the name of pragmatic reforms, which, in reality, only serve the interests of large-scale agribusiness.

This shift accompanies a change in the balance of power. The EU’s recently proposed Multiannual Financial Framework (its long-term budget plan, MFF) would grant greater flexibility to member states in how they allocate funding – including in agriculture. Although framed as a response to emergencies and inflation, the move reduces Brussels’ ability to enforce green conditionalities, weakening already fragile mechanisms for accountability.

Yet this story isn’t only one of retreat. Environmental groups, small farmers, and civil society are mounting strategic resistance. Across Europe, the future of farming is being contested. So who is shaping that future, and on whose terms?

From ambition to retreat

When the European Green Deal was launched in 2019, it marked a bold step towards environmental sustainability across all sectors, especially agriculture. Flagship initiatives like the Farm to Fork Strategy, the Sustainable Use Regulation (SUR), and the Nature Restoration Law (NRL) promised binding targets for food system transformation, pesticide reduction, and biodiversity restoration.

But five years later, the political climate changed radically. With European elections looming, the EU Commission declared a strategic pause on Green Deal regulations in early 2024. This shelved or delayed several proposals, including a directive on soil health and regulations on food waste, while promising a “simplification” of CAP compliance rules. Major farmers’ unions, including FNSEA – the largest agricultural union in France – celebrated the move as a win for “common sense.” In the run-up to the elections, environmental policies were increasingly framed as elite overreach and a threat to the livelihoods of “ordinary farmers”. The resulting public sentiment became a political boon for right-leaning parties, particularly in rural regions.

Now, in 2025, much of the ambition of the Green Deal has crumbled. The SUR, which would have made a 50-per cent reduction in pesticide use a legally binding target, was rejected by the European Parliament after a relentless lobbying campaign. Leading the charge were Copa-Cogeca, the powerful umbrella organisation representing European farmers and agricultural cooperatives, along with major agrochemical industry groups. They argued the regulation threatened yields, put farmers’ livelihoods at risk, and undermined European food sovereignty.

By the time it reached the Commission SUR had already been watered down, and if passed, it would have been largely ineffective as mandatory crop-specific rules and a legally binding framework were missing from the legislation. It was officially withdrawn by the Commission in early 2024, prompting environmental organisations to call it the symbolic collapse of the Green Deal’s regulatory backbone.

On the other hand, the Nature Restoration Law survived, but barely. Passed in a weakened form in February 2024, the law lost its teeth during negotiations between the European Commission, the Council of the EU, and the European Parliament.  Several restoration targets, including those on peatlands and farmland biodiversity, became conditional or vague. Agricultural land was granted major flexibilities, thanks in part to lobbying by member states aligned with industrial farming interests.

Over the last two years, farmer protests have repeatedly broken out across Europe, driven by economic pressure, the advancing Mercosur agreement, falling incomes, and a sense of institutional neglect. In response, politicians have sought to “simplify” regulations, framing green policies as a luxury in a time of crisis. This crisis rhetoric has been a hallmark of the Right since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion, the concept of food sovereignty has been invoked strategically – not to empower local food systems, but to justify loosening environmental standards and pushing protectionist trade measures. This shift has allowed national governments to deflect attention from systemic problems in the agri-food model by pointing fingers at Brussels.

Now, the newly proposed MFF revision gives EU members more flexibility in allocating funds under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). While framed as a way to respond to inflation and crisis, the reforms also weaken the Commission’s leverage to enforce environmental conditions. Critics warn this could create a fragmented patchwork of rural policies, where some states push ahead with agroecology while others fall back on high-input industrial models.In other words, by weakening its own enforcement power and letting national governments take the lead, the EU has opened the door to deregulation dressed up as pragmatism.

The newly proposed MFF revision could create a fragmented patchwork of rural policies, where some states push ahead with agroecology while others fall back on high-input industrial models.

Calls for deregulation are coming from multiple fronts. In early 2024, Spanish farmers protested the EU’s pesticide bans that they said would put paella rice cultivation yields at risk. In addition, EU member states like Italy, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, and Romania called for the reintroduction of banned pesticides in the summer of 2025. But by and large, the most ambitious regulation rollback attempt so far comes from France, and its Loi Duplomb.

Enter Duplomb

In early 2024, French Senator Laurent Duplomb introduced a bill promising to “simplify administrative procedures” for farmers. Officially titled “Bill for the Simplification and Reduction of Regulations Applicable to Local Authorities and Businesses”, the so-called Duplomb Law quickly became a flashpoint in France’s agricultural and environmental debate.

The bill claimed to reduce bureaucratic burdens and restore dignity to farming. However, beneath the language of simplification, critics identified a strategic push to dismantle environmental safeguards. Although the French constitutional court ultimately struck down an article that would have allowed France to reauthorise banned pesticides, including acetamiprid, its mere inclusion signalled a willingness to test the limits.

For the director of Générations Futures, a leading French environmental NGO campaigning against pesticide use and for sustainable agriculture, the timing of the Duplomb Law is no coincidence: “The collapse of the SUR and the failure of Farm to Fork left a vacuum. Laws like Duplomb are rushing in to fill it.” François Veillerette warns that even when censured, the risk of banned substances returning remains real. “The political will is still there. The strategy is simply shifting.”

Meanwhile, the pesticide industry itself has been quietly working to adapt (and thrive). One avenue for the return of banned pesticides is reclassification as biocides. This allows certain substances banned for agricultural use to continue circulating in domestic, industrial, or public settings, where regulation is less stringent. For instance, acetamiprid is found in common household items, like insecticides for home use. Other substances include propiconazole, used to protect wood from insects, or clothianidin, thiamethoxam, and imidacloprid, which are deployed as industrial insecticides. Moreover, some pesticides like Fastac, outlawed in France in 2020, are still being produced under industrial certifications and then exported abroad.

The pesticide industry itself has been quietly working to adapt (and thrive).

Veillerette says Générations Futures is preparing to challenge these cases one by one in order to prevent the pesticide industry from finding ways to reauthorise them for agricultural use. “It makes no sense to prohibit a molecule in the fields but allow its presence elsewhere. This loophole undermines both public health and regulatory credibility.”

Another overlooked detail is the possibility of a fast-track mechanism in the original Duplomb bill, which would have allowed for ministerial derogations for neonicotinoids – including acetamiprid and possibly flupyradifurone – with limited explicit constraints on the mode or length of use. Though this provision was not included in the final legislation, environmental groups remain concerned that such procedural tricks could reappear in future proposals. The concern is not only the substances themselves, but a broader shift in regulatory philosophy. “We’re replacing the precautionary principles [of regulatory authorisations] with a logic of efficacy [of production] at all costs – even when human or environmental health is on the line,” Veillerette says.

According to Kristine de Schamphelere, a policy officer for agriculture at Pesticide Action Network, the same strategy is underway at the EU level. “A similar TINA (There Is No Alternative) narrative is indeed also being developed over the last years, trying to force the EU and national governments not to implement EU law on pesticides, playing on the fear of food security.”

By framing environmental regulation as excessive or anti-farmer, the Duplomb Law won rhetorical ground even before its articles were debated. Yet as critics have pointed out, it is not small-scale farmers who stand to benefit. A spokesperson for the Confédération Paysanne – a French farmers’ union advocating for small-scale, sustainable, and socially just agriculture – has told the Green European Journal the union supports administrative simplification. However, Thomas Gibert also added that “the deregulation of social and environmental norms doesn’t work for small farmers. We need these norms to protect us and our citizens.”

According to Gibert, the Duplomb Law risks deepening the structural inequalities in the farming sector. He argues that France is moving towards “developing an agricultural system that will squash out the small farmers, always favouring a large enterprise-controlled agriculture.”  To genuinely help smallholders, Gibert says it would be better to simplify CAP payments. “We cannot forget that what is really needed is fair livelihoods for our farmers. This is the only way our small farmers can make a decent wage, by fairly pricing their products,” he adds. “Minimum prices, as promised by Macron, are what our farmers need. All other propositions simply fall hollow.”

Lobbying and resistance

Since losing its absolute majority in the French parliament, president Emmanuel Macron’s government has relied on the support of Les Républicains, the conservative party from which Senator Duplomb hails. The Right has used this leverage to steer rural and agricultural policy towards its own priorities. Meanwhile, the government’s uneasy alliance with the powerful FNSEA has further blurred the lines between public interest and corporate influence.

In recent years, Macron has increasingly made concessions to the farming lobby in an effort to contain rural frustration. Take, for instance, the 55 million euros diverted from the organics sector to young farmers, without consulting those who were affected (although the organics sector also has young farmers of its own). However, these concessions have only given further legitimacy to the far right. Moreover, they have failed to bring stability to France, a country that has now seen five prime ministers resign or be forced out of office in three years.

But even though major national and international lobbies are pressing for deregulation under the guise of easing burdens on farmers – consistently framing green reforms as economically unviable or politically naïve – the public, courts, and scientific community remain firmly opposed to the reintroduction of banned pesticides. According to a survey conducted by the European Food Safety Authority, awareness of EU food safety systems has risen by six per cent since 2022, and 67 per cent of Europeans now consider pesticides among their top food safety concerns.

Although national and international lobbies are pressing for deregulation, the public, courts, and scientific community remain firmly opposed to the reintroduction of banned pesticides.

These sentiments culminated in the two-million-strong petition launched by 23-year-old student Eléonore Pattery. What began as a grassroots initiative quickly evolved into a broad civic movement: environmental NGOs like Générations Futures, France Nature Environnement, and PAN Europe lent organisational support, while figures like activist Camille Etienne, YouTuber Jujufitcats, and model Charlotte Lemay amplified its reach across social media. Ultimately, the petition and public outcry had a decisive impact on the Loi Duplomb.

With or without Duplomb

In the European Union, deregulatory agendas are now at the forefront of policymaking. From national laws like Duplomb to the EU’s strategic retreat from environmental ambition, the trajectory is clear: environmental protections are being reframed as obstacles to productivity, and “simplification” is increasingly a euphemism for deregulation.

The July 2025 proposal for the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) only reinforces these concerns. With cuts of more than 20 per cent to the Common Agricultural Policy, and new mechanisms giving Member States greater flexibility over how funds are spent, Brussels is relinquishing tools that once enforced green conditionalities. Critics warn it may enable uneven implementation, undermining shared goals for sustainability. France’s decision to uphold the ban on acetamiprid marked a clear victory for science and civil society. But it’s only one battle in a much larger confrontation over the future of agriculture in Europe. What is under threat is the possibility of livable societies where food is healthy and farmers are fairly paid.

A narrow road meanders through Zimbabwe’s Vumba Mountains, where sweet songs of various bird species fill the air on a sunny afternoon. The distant chatter of monkeys adds to this wildlife melody.

But one sound, once common, no longer echoes over the mountains: the calls of soaring vultures.

These majestic birds have disappeared from this part of Zimbabwe. Big game poachers despise vultures for circling over the carcasses of dead animals — a natural process that inadvertently “snitches” poachers’ illicit activities to game park rangers. Poachers have retaliated by lacing the bodies of their prey with deadly poison, which vultures consume, dramatically increasing the killers’ body counts.

That’s not the only threat these birds face. Habitat loss is a big issue. In some cases vultures are killed for their parts, which are used in traditional “medicine” in some cultures of Zimbabwe. And to a lesser extent, power lines have also killed vultures, who die from electrocution or after collisions with the structures.

The threats have all but wiped out the vultures, in this area known for its birds.

“Birding in the Vumba as well as the Burma Valley area [in Zimbabwe] is considered a shining jewel in the Eastern Highlands, and tourists travel far and wide for the very special birds found here. However, vultures are no longer a presence,” says Sue Fenwick, a trustee of the Friends of the Vumba, an organization working to protect wildlife in the area.

The group’s mission faces many challenges. In this part of Zimbabwe, illegal farming activities have decimated vast tracts of wildlife habitats.

Benhildah Antonio, who manages the Preventing Extinctions Program at Birdlife Zimbabwe, says the twin threats of farming and poisons intersect.

In addition to poachers’ poisons, Antonio says vultures are often poisoned unintentionally. This is prevalent in farming communities surrounding national parks, where lions prey on livestock.

“Farmers put poison on carcasses to target lions or any other predators but unintentionally end up poisoning vultures,” Antonio says. “The vultures will die in large numbers because of their feeding habits. One carcass can have 50 or more vultures feeding on it.”

A Loss That Echoes

Vultures’ disappearance from Zimbabwe and other African countries comes with an environmental cost.

“We call them the ‘clean-up crew,’” says Antonio. “When the vultures feed on dead carcasses, they help us with cleaning the environment; they help us with sanitation. That’s the main ecosystem service we get from vultures. They do this free service. They also reduce the spread of … rabies, anthrax, tuberculosis, and other diseases.”

When vultures eat a carcass, they can digest pathogens without getting sick. At the same time, vultures reduce the available food sources for feral dogs and other scavengers, thereby suppressing diseases like rabies.

Many Species, Similar Threats

According to Birdlife Zimbabwe, Africa is home to 11 vulture species, six of which can be found in Zimbabwe. All but one of the species in Zimbabwe are threatened or endangered.

The International Union of Conservation of Nature Red List, which assesses the conservation status of species around the world, classifies the white-backed vulture, white-headed vulture, and hooded vulture as critically endangered. The lappet-faced vulture and cape vulture are categorized as endangered and “vulnerable to extinction” respectively, while the palm-nut vulture is listed as “least concern” (although it was last assessed a decade ago).

Regardless of their conservation status, all vultures in Zimbabwe have special protection under the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Act, making it illegal to kill a vulture, even in cases of accidental harm.

 

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The six species have specific habitat niches, but many of their ranges overlap in Zimbabwe. The lappet-faced vulture breeds in Lowveld semi-arid areas like Gonarezhou National Park, while the white-headed vulture breeds in Hwange National Park and Gonarezhou. Cape vultures rely on cliffs for breeding and roosting, particularly in the central parts of the country. The hooded vulture breeds in low-lying areas of Tsholotsho and Gokwe. Palm-nut vultures, though considered rare in Zimbabwe, are seen mostly in the country’s Eastern Highlands.

But no matter where they’re found, they face the same dangers — and vultures’ declines aren’t unique to Zimbabwe.

A Worldwide Threat

José Tavares, director of the Vulture Conservation Foundation, says the major threats to vultures in Africa and globally come from the ingestion of poison baits.

“These [poison baits] are mostly put to deal with human-wildlife conflict, although in Southern Africa sentinel poisoning has also been significant,” Tavares says, referring to the poisoning to prevent circling vultures from giving away poachers’ locations. “The illegal poisoning of wildlife is a non-discriminatory measure that has a profound impact.”

Zimbabwe presents a powerful illustration of the problem. According to the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (Zimparks) 2019-2022 Action Plan, the country experienced increased vulture poisoning incidents that are causing vulture populations to decline and harming other species. Mass poisoning events cited in the report include 191 vultures in Gonarezhou National Park in 2012, 40 at a farm in Fort Rixon in 2014, 22 in Sinamatella in 2015, 43 at Sentinel Ranch in 2016, 94 on the border of Gonarezhou National Park in 2017, 24 at Sengwa Wildlife Research Station in 2017, 28 in Main Camp in 2018, and 21 in Hwange National Park in 2019. There is no recent data from Zimparks covering the post-COVID period.

According to former Zimparks director Fulton Mangwanya, a single vulture provides over US$11,000 worth of ecosystem services.

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“By halting the spread of disease, they are worth much more to society in saved health service costs, not to mention contributing significant revenue to the tourism sector as well,” Mangwanya wrote in the action plan.

This poses direct threats to humans. In India, for example, one study reveals that between 2000 and 2005, the loss of vultures caused around 100,000 additional human deaths annually, resulting in more than £53 billion per year in mortality damages, or the economic costs associated with premature deaths. These deaths, experts say, were due to the spread of disease and bacteria that vultures could have otherwise removed from the environment.

Has the decline in vultures caused similar problems in Zimbabwe?

Kerri Wolter, chief executive officer of VulPro, a South African nonprofit organization devoted to safeguarding Africa’s vulture species, says it’s impossible to link the recent outbreak of anthrax in Gonarezhou National Park to the massive poisoning deaths of 280 vultures in the park in the past few years. The anthrax outbreak last year killed more than 120 animals, including four elephants, 75 buffaloes, and 38 kudus. However, more studies are needed on the possible link between the declining vulture population in Zimbabwe and rising cases of anthrax in the country’s national parks.

But Wolter says the future of these birds is dire and the threat of vulture species’ extinctions is a very real possibility.

“If we cannot get a grip on poisonings, I fear we will continue to see losses and some species disappearing,” she says.

Saving Zimbabwe’s Vultures

With an understanding of these threats, local and international groups have mobilized several efforts in Zimbabwe that aim to save the country’s last vultures.

Birdlife Zimbabwe, for example, is working with communities to resolve human-wildlife conflict issues so they don’t end up causing vulture deaths as collateral damage.

“We have created vulture support groups in [Zimbabwe’s] Gwayi area, where community members do vulture monitoring and educate other community members about vulture conservation,” Antonio says. “We are also educating and building capacity for law-enforcement agents so that they are conscious about vulture conservation and crimes against vultures. We also work with traditional healers because of belief-based use of vultures in traditional medicines.”

And Tavares says the Vulture Conservation Foundation is fighting illegal poisoning through engaging with the competent authorities for the proper enforcement of the law and adequate investigation of illegal poisoning incidents to reduce impunity.

Wolter says their work impacts the whole Southern Africa region.

“We lead by example and have assisted, trained, and worked with Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust and Jabulani Safaris [in Zimbabwe] and continue to do so,” she says.

Other efforts, including one funded by tourism, help vultures by giving them what they need most: safe food. The Victoria Falls Safari Collection, operated by the Africa Albida Tourism hospitality group, runs the Vulture Culture Experience at Victoria Falls Safari Lodge, where the birds are provided with food, typically animal carcasses, to support their survival and well-being.

 

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“Our … conservation initiative has been highly successful in providing a safe food source for hundreds of vultures every day and reducing the risks of poisoning they face in the wild,” says Anald Musonza, head of sales and marketing at Victoria Falls Safari Collection.

Musonza says the program has also become a powerful educational platform, where thousands of visitors learn about the plight of these highly endangered raptors and turn into ambassadors for vulture conservation.

“Even when our hotels stood still during COVID, the Vulture Culture Experience never stopped — that’s how seriously we take conservation,” Musonza says.

He says they work with VulPro as well as the Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust on this project.

“While the activity is free of charge, guests may make donations towards vulture research, and $1 from selected dishes at our MaKuwa-Kuwa Restaurant is donated to vulture conservation programs,” he says.

Musonza says their biggest challenges have been in constantly raising awareness of the threats vultures face and the significant role they play in the ecosystem.

“The poisoning of these birds is also of great concern, which is why education plays a crucial role in this conservation initiative,” Musonza says.

Previously in The Revelator:

Newest Flock of Wild California Condors Faces an Old Threat: Lead Poisoning

The post Saving Zimbabwe’s Vultures appeared first on The Revelator.

Russia has exploited Ukraine’s centralised, fossil fuel-dependent energy system to weaken Kyiv’s defensive capabilities. But while the war continues to devastate public infrastructure, it also provides an opportunity to spur a green transition that will make Ukraine more resilient in the long term.

More than three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an end is nowhere in sight. At least that is the mindset of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who in a recent interview said: “I’m mentally preparing myself for the fact that this war could drag on for a long time.” Despite Ukraine fighting an asymmetric war against a stronger enemy, the strength of its resistance, coupled with the weapons’ systems it has received from Western allies, has enabled the country to regain large parts of territory occupied since February 2022. However, Russia is again slowly advancing.

To the surprise of many, this conflict has descended into trench warfare, with no significant territorial gains. Despite being the most technologically sophisticated war in history, one that is dominated by drones, both sides are using strategies of attrition to slowly deplete the other’s morale, manpower, economy, and political will, as was the case in World War I. But this time, the endgame may look very different.

Under current circumstances, neither a military solution nor a long-lasting peace settlement may be a realistic scenario. In many respects, the war in Ukraine is unprecedented, fusing modern technologies such as drones with traditional military strategies: to maintain an edge in the attritional war, the authoritarian Russian state treats its population as an infinite supply of cannon fodder, as old regimes did. Geopolitically, everyone is watching closely, trying to learn their lessons because the future of warfare is being written on the Ukrainian frontlines.

According to Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian minister of defence, there may not be a “day after” the war for his country. Regardless of any possible peace settlement and security guarantees, it is expected that Ukraine will live under “constant military pressure” for the foreseeable future. While the conflict may change form over time — from hot to cold, to hybrid warfare and back — the security threat will persist, as will the need to contain it. Zagorodnyuk further argues that when neither a military nor diplomatic solution is viable, Ukraine (and its Western allies) need to shift their efforts towards “strategic neutralisation” of Russia.

One idea he puts forward in pursuit of this is to turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine” — a heavily defended, militarised, impenetrable fortress that will aim for “functional defeat” of the Russian military. Compared to the attrition strategy that attempts to deplete the enemy, or the conventional military success that follows destruction of the opposing side, functional defeat aims to create a situation “where a military capability is not completely destroyed but rendered irrelevant.” In other words, it “ensur[es] that Russia’s presence, though intact, yields no strategic gain.”

The green porcupine

That has profound implications for Ukraine’s approach to climate goals and the green transition. First, acknowledging the likely prolongation of the conflict cannot be postponed indefinitely to a “day after” that may never come. Second, although sustainability and climate ambitions may not feel like the most pressing issues to many Ukrainians, they may surprisingly help to deal with the security threats their country faces. In fact, in many cases, the security and climate issues are intertwined.

Making the environmental and climate agendas relevant for Ukraine means finding ways to integrate them into the “strategic neutralisation” pathway. Rebuilding damaged Ukrainian infrastructure, as well as decarbonising military technologies, can be a vital part of it.

For example, the steel porcupine strategy requires making Ukrainian defences nearly impenetrable. Ukraine’s flat topography means that most fighting happens on terrain that lacks natural defences. As a result, defensive structures – trenches, minefields, basements in abandoned villages, or more recently, bogs and marshes – often need to be sought out or artificially created by both sides.

At the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion in 2022, a dam on the Irpin river north of Kyiv was blown up. As a result, the river basin flooded and the area became a vast plain of muddy terrain that slowed down the advance of Russian heavy machinery.

This tactic has served as an inspiration for wider defensive strategies not just for Ukraine but for NATO’s eastern flank, with countries like Poland and Finland reportedly considering the restoration of their dried-up marshes to deter potential Russian invasion. Importantly, bogs and marshes are also great natural carbon sinks, and their restoration would thus play a role in meeting Europe’s climate targets.

Rebuilding from debris

At the same time, there are many damaged sectors of the Ukrainian economy and society for whom the green transformation would also mean improving their resilience in wartime. Among the many broken things that need to be repaired — from energy infrastructure to public utilities — are the very buildings to live in.

According to the Low Carbon Ukraine initiative, residential buildings have suffered more than 54 billion euros’ worth of damage since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion. Whole villages and cities have been flattened and turned from once flourishing centres to piles of rubble.

But this war debris can be upcycled and reused in reconstruction efforts, thus making it a sustainable building material. This is the goal of the Safe, Sustainable, and Swift Reconstruction of Ukraine project. Transforming war debris into a building material for future use helps to mitigate the impacts of Russian aggression while at the same time providing the foundation for sustainable and resilient construction practices.

The war has also exacerbated Ukraine’s energy insecurity, reinforcing the case for energy-efficient buildings in place of energy-intensive Soviet-era buildings. In this context, green reconstruction becomes a matter of pragmatic policymaking: apart from reducing reliance on fossil fuels and enhancing energy resilience, it can provide improved living conditions for Ukrainians displaced by war, by reducing their energy poverty and their reliance on centralised, vulnerable energy systems.

Green reconstruction can provide improved living conditions for Ukrainians displaced by war by reducing their energy poverty and their reliance on centralised, vulnerable energy systems.

In a country devastated by war and economic decline, fighting energy poverty is of crucial importance. Poor insulation, high energy prices and outdated heating systems are among the key challenges here. The combination of better insulation that reduces heat loss, energy-efficient windows and doors that prevent drafts, and smart heating controls optimising energy use can significantly help to lower energy bills for Ukrainians.

There are many promising examples already, such as the energy-saving renovations in the cities of Zaporizhia, Kamianske and Lutsk, funded by the European Investment Bank. Or the reconstruction of a multi-family building in Trostanyets powered by geothermal and solar energy, as well as heat pumps. Similarly, a project funded by Finland through the Green Recovery Programme for Ukraine rebuilt several war-damaged schools as nearly-zero energy buildings.

Such thermal modernisation of Ukrainian buildings, combined with their integration into renewable energy infrastructure, also supports Ukraine’s accession to the European Union and integration into the European energy grid. It aligns with key EU building legislation such as the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). This is also confirmed by last year’s approval of Ukraine’s Building Thermal Modernisation Strategy 2050, developed by the Ministry for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development.

Resilient renewables

Another vulnerability of Ukraine is its fossil fuel energy infrastructure, which is centralised and hard to defend against attacks, the consequences of which are significant (Russia suffers from this vulnerability too). The shift from centralised fossil fuels to a decentralised power grid based on renewables would provide Ukraine with not only clean energy but also the resilience to withstand continuous military pressure.

There are already promising examples. The collaboration between UK-based Octopus Energy Group and Ukrainian energy company DTEK seeks to raise 100 million euros to fund up to 100 solar and battery projects in Ukraine. These technologies are also important in a decentralised grid, powering key infrastructure such as hospitals or schools. Here, the Ray of Hope project, where solar energy powers hospitals in Kyiv, serves as another example of building energy resilience through decentralisation.

Last but not least, making local communities more self-sufficient through new energy infrastructure and less vulnerable to missile attacks, sabotage, or cyberattacks through improved defence capabilities could give Ukraine a strategic advantage over Russia, whose centralised energy system, largely reliant on gas power plants, is an easy target for Ukrainian deep strikes and sabotage.

Making local communities more self-sufficient could give Ukraine a strategic advantage over Russia, whose centralised energy system is an easy target for Ukrainian deep strikes and sabotage.

Challenges on the path

Needless to say, Ukraine faces specific challenges to make such a transformation a reality. The shortage of skilled workers is a severe issue, given that a significant part of the country’s workforce has either been drafted into the military or has left the country. As a result, the construction sector currently lacks adequately trained professionals specialising in energy-efficient technologies and sustainable building materials. While educational programs and retraining may help in the long run, it is increasingly obvious that Ukraine can’t make it without foreign assistance, investment, and skilled workers.

Here, the legislative framework for green (re)construction is crucial for attracting international financial institutions as well as private investors. Key institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank have already expressed interest in supporting green construction initiatives and aligning their goals with the Paris Agreement.

According to the think-tank BPIE, which is focused on the energy performance of buildings, if Ukraine is to build back better (and greener), it needs multilateral investment in its green reconstruction efforts. There are positive examples in European countries like Germany, Italy, and Croatia, which rebuilt damaged buildings in a sustainable way in the aftermath of major natural disasters, thus speeding up their energy transition and decarbonisation.

And there are already promising examples of sustainable construction in Ukraine. The Energy Map project, a data resource developed by Ukrainian and international partners, provides valuable insights into the energy performance of buildings across the country.

Among many others, a pioneering project that can pave the way for Ukrainian green resilience is the invention of “post-frame construction”, which dramatically reduces the use of very carbon-intensive brick and cement materials, and emphasises wooden materials. According to Transform Ukraine, such buildings can also serve as carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) if the wood used for them is harvested sustainably.

Greening the military?

Of course, reconciliation between ecology and defence will not always be easy. Militaries are still among the largest consumers of fossil fuels, while their emissions are largely exempt from international climate reporting (it has been estimated that military activities account for almost 5.5 per cent of annual greenhouse gas emissions globally). The best way to decarbonise the army is by downscaling – and that will not happen anytime soon.

Instead, as a response to the Russian threat, NATO is moving rapidly in the opposite direction. In June this year, NATO countries declared their commitment to increasing their spending on defence to 5 per cent by 2035. Some 3.5 per cent is reserved for core defence (such as troops, weapons and overall readiness), and 1.5 per cent for defence infrastructure and resilience.

That leaves the project of military decarbonisation with two options: technological transformation and carbon offsetting. The use of both is the most likely scenario for now: to evolve military technologies into their low-carbon alternatives wherever possible, and to seek ways to offset the remaining emissions for areas such as military aviation or heavy machinery.

And there is no other place in the world where military technologies are evolving more rapidly than on the Ukrainian battlefield. Here, the electrification of military technologies (for instance, Ukrainian drones are connected to operators via fibre optic cables, meaning Russia is unable to sabotage drone capabilities via the jamming of radio frequencies) is happening alongside the expansion of drone usage, which is radically transforming the character of modern war. However, in its current form, it also leaves Ukrainian land covered with tangled cobwebs of cables, leading to significant plastic pollution and long-term threats to wildlife.

Needless to say, there is no war that is not damaging to the environment. In fact, destroying the environment is oftentimes part of military tactics, which has led to initiatives calling for legal recognition of the crime of ecocide. Although it may sound absurd to demand decarbonisation of warfare rather than to simply stop warfare altogether, the geopolitical situation does not seem to be in favour of peaceful disarmament anytime soon.

If supported with green investments and policies, Ukraine’s reconstruction could set a precedent by demonstrating how security and sustainability go hand in hand.

War ecology of Ukraine

Ukraine may pursue a path that is a variation of what French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier labelled as “war ecology”. Here, the green transformation does not compete with defence spending over a constrained state budget. Instead, it plays a vital role in achieving defensive resilience and making one’s country impenetrable to enemy forces.

Decentralising the energy grid through renewables, upcycling of debris, low-energy buildings, electrification of warfare or restoration of marshes are just some examples of how a state can pursue war ecology as its defensive strategy, and in the process gain an advantage over an aggressive petrostate.

The war has already reshaped Ukraine’s energy and economic landscape, forcing a rethink of its development trajectory. If supported with green investments and policies, its reconstruction could set a precedent — well beyond its borders — by demonstrating how security and sustainability go hand in hand.

Out of the ashes of war, a new, green Ukraine has the potential to rise — one that not only rebuilds what was lost but lays the foundation for the new and better life that Ukrainians deserve: green, European and safe.

One of my earliest journalism jobs involved researching and updating obituaries for public figures who had not yet died.

This macabre task is common in news circles. Newspapers and other publishers want the ability to publish obituaries for celebrities or politicians as quickly as possible, so they write them ahead of time, leaving the date, cause of death, and a quote from the deceased’s representatives or friends to be plugged in at the last minute.

That assignment only lasted a few weeks — I think I was filling in for someone on leave — but it sticks with me decades later. It taught me to keep looking at today through the lens of history and to keep details of the recent past at hand so I can return to them when they become timely or relevant again.

That said, I didn’t have an obituary prepared for Jane Goodall.

Hell, I wasn’t emotionally prepared for Goodall’s passing.

When word of her death last week at the age of 91 began spreading through social media and the news, I spent a few hours in deep, reflective melancholy.

But then I dusted myself off and got to work, preparing a new batch of conservation articles.

I could do that because of the lessons I took from Goodall’s legendary career: Never stop trying to make the world a better place. Every interaction you have makes a difference. And there’s always room for hope.

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you,” she famously said. “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

I never got a chance to interview Goodall, but her work has been present in everything I’ve done for the past 20-plus years. And it will remain present in the years to come — not just for me but for the whole conservation community.

That community has spent the past few days reflecting on Goodall’s passing and her legacy. Conservation writer Michelle Nijhaus wrote about Goodall’s talent at using fame to protect animals; fellow primatologist Mireya Mayer reflected on her legacy as a “gentle disruptor;” author Jill Filipovic reflected on how Goodall inspired generations of girls and women, and countless people posted photos and memories on social media. Here are just a few samples:

 

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Meanwhile there were the praise-filled obituaries — some of them obviously prepared in advance, but often written with heart and deep appreciation. And many news sites collected inspiring photos of Goodall through the years.

I took those in and returned to some of Goodall’s recent interviews, like this rare long-form discussion with musician Moby on his podcast:

…and this fun one with comedian Stephen Colbert:

I also turned to my bookshelves, which are filled with books by or about Goodall. Here are some of my favorites:

Through a Window: My Thirty Years With the Chimpanzees of Gombe by Jane Goodall

Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued From the Brink by Jane Goodall with Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson

In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall

Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants by Jane Goodall with Gail Hudson

Me…Jane by Patrick McDonnell

The Jane Effect: Celebrating Jane Goodall edited by Dale Peterson and Marc Bekoff

Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey by Jane Goodall with Phillip Berman

I Am Jane Goodall and I am Caring: A Little Book about Jane Goodall by Brad Meltzer, illustrated by Christopher Eliopoulos

#EATMEATLESS: Good for Animals, the Earth & All by the Jane Goodall Institute

Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas by Jim Ottaviani, illustrated by Maris Wicks

Pangolina by Jane Goodall, illustrated by Daishu Ma

Local Voices, Local Choices: The Tacare Approach to Community-Led Conservation by the Jane Goodall Institute, introduction by Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall: 50 Years at Gombe by Jane Goodall (out of print, but readily available)

These books, these interviews, the innumerable people she touched in her travels…these are the things that will keep Jane Goodall alive in a world that often feels bleak and hopeless. Her lessons and life remind us to keep striving, and that everyone can make a difference, every day.

So let’s skip the prepared remarks, the melancholy, and the solastalgia. Let’s keep doing things — small things, big things, and everything in between — to make this a better planet for humans and other animals alike.

That’s a legacy all of us can share.

The post Jane Goodall Will Live Forever appeared first on The Revelator.

In 1993, when my career took our family to Waterton Lakes National Park, in the very southwestern corner of Alberta, Gail and I sold our home in Okotoks and had to decide what to do with the money that remained after the mortgage was paid off. We would be renting park accommodation in Waterton, so we decided to look for land. We wound up buying 56 acres at the mouth of a canyon, on the Oldman River. Two years later we built a small cabin there. Wolf Willow has been the center of our family’s existence ever since.  That’s where I wrote most of Understory: An Ecologist’s Memoir of Loss and Hope (an excerpt from which follows). Its wild prairie, cottonwoods, wind and river remain the center of my personal universe. This is where I finally began to come to terms with the abuses and flawed thinking that have taken away so many of our possibilities — and to learn how to know the world in a better way.

Glaciers vanished from the headwaters of the Oldman River hundreds of years ago. I try to picture those northern rivers running as low and clear as the Oldman does each summer and I can’t make the picture work. That’s not how I know them. But that’s what my grandson will see when he reaches my age.

Even without glaciers, the Oldman is becoming a different river. As snowpacks in the high country dwindle, the summer flows diminish as well. Upstream from the Oldman reservoir the stream has grown wider and shallower, so the summer sun penetrates to the riverbed and heats the water faster.

I used to sit beside the river during summer’s long, calm evenings and watch the valley breathe. Lately, I put my lawn chair in the middle of the river instead and feel warm water caressing my legs.

I no longer fish the river in summer, not because the fish aren’t there — so far, trout have been able to survive in spite of near-lethal water temperatures — but because those fish don’t need added stress when their water world has become so nearly intolerable. I’m content to watch them rise for caddis flies while shadows work their way out from the cliffs and the cooling evening breeze comes snuffling through the cottonwoods to send me back inside and give the fish a few hours’ reprieve until the sun returns.

There are fewer birds in the cottonwood forest now than there used to be. Back in 1970 I turned my back on birds for a while and tried out being a hippie. It didn’t work. I should have paid more attention instead, because Breeding Bird Survey data analyzed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology show that there are at least three billion fewer songbirds in North America now compared to when the Canadian Wildlife Service first hired me to count them.

Prairie songbird numbers have declined by two-thirds. I thought those longspurs, kingbirds, sparrows, and others would always be as much a part of the world as they still are a part of me, but I was wrong. The long quiet pauses during the evening birdsong chorus weren’t there before; they announce to me that I am a diminished person in a diminished world.

There is more than one way to lose one’s hearing. When the sounds of life vanish on their own, that’s the worst. Gordon Ruddy, a Jasper friend, wrote me a note one day: “I’m getting old enough to see that there are a lot of birds just missing. That some birds were plentiful, but are rare now. I try very hard not to get down. It’s hard.”

I know that grief. It’s how I felt as I watched my mother’s final breaths; the same sorrow washes over me sometimes even now when fishing one of Dad’s old streams. The difference is this: we expected them to go, but we expected the world that made them to carry on.

Now we grieve a far greater loss.

© Kevin Van Tighem, used with permission.

Still, there is that yellow warbler who feeds busily in the sandbar willows across from my evening chair. He breaks into song from time to time, taking me back to the first time I heard that cheerful tune in the backyard of a long-ago Calgary home. Cedar waxwings perch on tilted trees at the edge of the river cliff and dart out over the water to pluck mayflies out of the breeze. Their soft voices offer a promise of continuity that I hope will be kept. Robins sing lustily; they seem more abundant than before.

And the river still flows. For all that it’s a living thing, it’s also a metaphor. If one’s life experiences are lived stories about the meaning of things, a river is more than running water. It’s where the stories and spirits in the land come together and find their voice. Especially, perhaps, this river: the Old Man’s river — Napi’s river.

From where I sit, the water comes into sight up by the big midstream rock, swamper of canoes. It tumbles out of a long, boulder strewn riffle, piles up in a big eddy near a sandstone cliff, and then sorts itself out before coursing down a long run to where I watch. It’s constantly arriving, bringing stories from farther upstream where some of its waters rested in beaver ponds or spilled off mountain walls while other tributary streams carved slot-like shadows into conglomerate cliffs or wide, curving sinuousities through green fen meadows. It arrives confident in its knowledge of where it’s been and busy with purpose, carrying those gathered waters, stories, and spirits down from the mountains where, even now, its waters are still in the process of being born.

Passing my chair, chuckling and whispering in the way that rivers do, the water pushes against the near bank before spilling into a downstream riffle and, a few dozen meters further, sweeping in against another sandstone cliff. The evening sun is golden there, unlike the shadows that enfold me. At the last, only the sparkling tops of waves show briefly through willows before the river is gone.

That river must have endless faith, because those waters have no knowledge of where they are going, yet they flow unquestioningly towards that unknown destiny. The river is always arriving and always departing, yet it’s always there. We sit together each warm evening, and become part of the same moment, for all that we both have different ways of being. It’s a relationship that only one of us thinks about.

Perhaps I should think less, but that’s my contribution. The river’s contribution is faith.

© 2025 Kevin Van Tighem. All rights reserved.

Previously in The Revelator:

Feeling Anxiety About Climate Change and Other Environmental Threats? These Five New Books Can Help

The post In <i>Understory</i>, An Ecologist Reflects on the Grief of Losing Nature appeared first on The Revelator.

Once the motor and binding force of European integration, the CAP has become a tool for standardisation that showers large farms with subsidies and punishes those that practise sustainable agriculture. This is particularly evident in the Po Valley, Italy’s breadbasket, where the mantra of productivity at all costs clashes with the impact of both climate change and urban sprawl. 

“If you really want to understand what is happening in the Po Valley, or at least part of what is happening, you should come to me.” Giuseppe Trecate doesn’t talk much, but when he does, he gets straight to the point. I meet him in February, among the tractors that were gathered to protest against the European Union. The valley is in turmoil: the farmers, at their breaking point, have decided to take action. Under the banner of Riscatto agricolo (Agricultural Redemption), they organise roadblocks and drive their farm vehicles through the cities. They have surrounded the headquarters of the Lombardy Regional Council on several occasions, demanding to be heard. 

So, what exactly is happening? How is it possible that the breadbasket of Italy, the most productive agricultural area in the country, is in crisis? According to a press release, “if things go on like this, 30 per cent of farms will close by next year.” Which farms are they talking about? And where does the data come from? 

These are the questions that cause me to travel across the plain, which appears uniform at first glance but hides subtle differences, unique stories and diverse experiences within its folds.  

Corn fields in the Crema area (10 July 2025). ©Michele Lapini 

Giuseppe Trecate’s farmstead is the first stop on this journey. It is located in Lomellina, on the extreme south-western border of the gigantic Po basin. Nestled between the provinces of Pavia and Novara, never knowing whether it belongs to Piedmont or Lombardy, it is an area overflowing with water, with rice being produced here for centuries.  

To reach the Trecate farm, you have to leave behind the straight roads that cross the plain like rulers, abandon the safety of road signs, and rely on ditches, field boundaries and remembered names that no longer appear on maps. Satellite navigation is useless here: it leads you along routes that end in a canal, or in the middle of a rice field. That’s why Giuseppe prefers to pick me up at Novara station. “That way you won’t risk taking a dip,” he jokes. 

He arrives in a pick-up that says a lot about its owner: the bodywork covered in scratches, the lingering smell of hay and diesel, the flatbed bearing the marks of a thousand days in the fields. Even Giuseppe’s worn-out baseball cap and dry handshake convey the same message: a straightforward man, no frills, more comfortable with practical matters than words. 

Giuseppe’s farm is not a farm in the traditional sense of the word. It is more like a living organism. There are courtyards that smell of dust and mud, corners filled with iron scrap and bolts, a workshop that looks like an alchemist’s laboratory. And then there’s the silence of the countryside, interrupted only by the cries of herons and the gurgling of water flowing through the canals. 

Giuseppe sows rice as they did in the old days: by flooding the fields. No dry cultivation, as almost everyone does now. “It’s more laborious,” he explains, “because you have to drive the tractor into the water. But it uses fewer chemicals. Water is a natural weedkiller.” 

The next morning, at dawn, Giuseppe takes me with him to sow. The slanting light of the rising sun reflects off the water covering the fields. Giuseppe loads a sack of seeds onto the back of the tracked tractor, drives into the flooded field and moves forward in a straight line. From behind, the machine throws the rice grains into the air like tiny sparkling arcs. “Once upon a time, you needed two men with two poles, one at each end of the field, to make sure you were going straight. Today, GPS is enough.” 

Number of agricultural holdings in Italy (2000-2020):

Giuseppe does not use water from the reclamation consortium for this process, but rather spring water that rises naturally from the aquifer. Very few people still use this method, which is more laborious due to the necessity of constantly maintaining the canals. “But then in 2022,” Giuseppe reflects, “when there was a drought, we had water and our colleagues were dry.” 

Giuseppe takes me to see an embankment. He points it out with restrained pride, like someone showing off a family heirloom. This is no ordinary embankment, but a collective construction: Giuseppe and four other farmers – “the last madmen in the area who use the springs” – built it with their own hands. They brought large boulders from the Alps by lorry and used them to reinforce the embankments at the outlet of the aquifer, which was in danger of being buried by mud. “We spent twenty thousand euros on it, but it was worth it.” When I ask him why they didn’t build a concrete embankment, he looks at me as if I’d said a dirty word. “Because it was ugly. I don’t want ugliness where I live.” 

Giuseppe Trecate, rice farmer between Pavia and Novara, inside his warehouse (16 May 2025). ©Michele Lapini  Conservation Agriculture 

Between Giuseppe’s plots of land – his farm covers over a hundred hectares, which is average for this area – there is a forest. A real forest, not the usual ornamental rows of trees found at roundabouts. It seems almost out of place in this endless plain, where trees are seen as intruders, obstacles to be removed. Other farmers would probably have cut it down, ploughed it, levelled it, perhaps planted maize right up to the edge. Instead, he takes care of that wood. He enters it slowly, as if entering a church. “There are badgers, wild rabbits…” he says. “There’s even a pair of little bitterns.” 

“Little bitterns?” I ask.  

“Go and see what they are on the internet”, he replies like someone keeping a secret.  

There is no glyphosate at the edges of his fields. There is no catalogue perfection. There are weeds, but there are also wings: wings that migrate, return and nest. There are frogs, salamanders, sounds that are no longer heard in the neighbouring fields due to everything being perfectly weeded. Smooth. Silent. Odourless. 

Giuseppe Trecate, rice farmer (16 May 2025). ©Michele Lapini 

We walk between the furrows and see other farmers on their tractors. Engines running, they sow in dry conditions, on well-ploughed fields. It is fast, efficient and clean. Giuseppe watches them without judgement. “If you intensify, you work less,” he says. “But I want to leave my son land that is at least as fertile as the land my father left me. I may be old-fashioned, but conservation farming is the one for me.” 

Giuseppe lets wild grasses grow along the edges of his fields, he uses groundwater and tends to a forest that he sees not as a hindrance but as a treasure. He wants his farm to remain a living ecosystem, not a sterile expanse governed solely by the logic of yield. This is a way of doing things he learned from his father, and which he instinctively carries on. For Giuseppe, cultivating the land also means protecting it.   

“Do you earn any more with conservation farming?” I ask. 

“Zero. Not a single penny.” No one pays him for his services to the ecosystem: the biodiversity he protects, the aquifer he cares for, the soil he regenerates. He could request subsidies from the European Union, as part of the so-called environmental eco-schemes. “But there’s too much paperwork, and besides, I think this way of farming should be part of our job. We should just do it. The gentlemen in Brussels don’t have to tell us.” 

Giuseppe Trecate in front of the water source he uses to flood his fields for rice cultivation (16 May 2025). ©Michele Lapini 

Like all tractor drivers, Giuseppe hates the European Union. He says that every year there is a new acronym to learn, a new form to fill in, a map to redraw. He argues that the suits who work for the Commission have no idea how to cultivate the land, and that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) – the subsidy mechanism through which the EU supports agriculture – is a flawed system that should be dismantled. 

Giuseppe does not call himself an agricultural business-owner, but rather a direct grower. He doesn’t run a business with operating margins, business plans or three-year projections. Every year, he does his accounting his own way, by simply looking at his bank statement. That’s where he finds the numbers that really matter. “When things go well, I take home twenty thousand euro,” he says without any sign of resentment. That is the economic value of his work: twenty thousand euro for 365 days of work, on a farm of over one hundred hectares. 

Giuseppe’s rice – grown in spring water, cultivated with minimal chemicals and a great deal of patience – is not worth much on the market. Not because it is not high quality, but because the price is set by others. The arrival of Asian rice, which costs significantly less, has lowered the bar, and then there are the rice mills and large retailers, which squeeze margins to the bone. 

“Once upon a time,” recalls Giuseppe, “it was divided up like this: one third went to the producer, one third to the industrial processor, one third to the distributor.” Today, the producer is left with barely 10 per cent: enough to cover sowing, fuel and maintenance. His existence is a searing paradox: it is not the fruits of Giuseppe’s labour that keep him going, but European subsidies. He detests the EU, but survives thanks to the CAP, which guarantees him around 300 euro per hectare through so-called direct payments. 

View of the rice fields between Pavia and Novara (16 May 2025). ©Michele Lapini 

For Giuseppe, it’s all wrong: “We’ve created a world of freeloaders who produce no value and try to grab subsidies in whatever way they can.” And so agriculture is on its knees. Only the largest farms survive, those that can manage economies of scale. Since the CAP pays by area, the more hectares you have, the more money you have. And the more money you have, the more chance you have of buying more land.  

Giuseppe is a rare breed, and he knows it. He continues to grow rice the way it was done in the old days, even though it pays very little. But around him and throughout the plain, the landscape is changing. Small and medium-sized farmers are disappearing. Many are giving up, selling to large businesses or energy multinationals that replace agricultural fields with expanses of solar panels. According to the latest census data, the number of farms in Italy has more than halved in the last twenty years. This is a generalised change in the country’s landscape, more marked in the hills and mountains, but now also affecting the most productive areas of the plains.  

The responsibility of the CAP 

“At the root of this development lies a history of poor choices,” declares Franco Sotte, a professor of agricultural economics who has devoted his life to studying the CAP. Since retiring, he has lived in a small villa on the outskirts of Pesaro, where he cultivates a small orchard in his garden: ancient apple varieties, forgotten pears, cherry trees saved from oblivion.  

Walking among the trees, which he describes with such affection that they might be his children, he reconstructs the history of the Common Agricultural Policy. “The CAP played a fundamental role in the birth and consolidation of the European Union. For decades, it was the only truly common policy. And its merits are undeniable: in just a few years, it guaranteed food security for a continent emerging from war and famine.” Then, over time, it changed. What was supposed to be a lifeline turned into a tool of standardisation, rewarding quantity over quality, land area over history, large farms over small ones.  

Sowing rice in water with a tractor (17 May 2025). ©Michele Lapini 

The hardest hit is the kind of agriculture that concentrates more labour into smaller plots, producing high-quality, high added value goods. This is what is happening in Italy, a country that carries little weight in Europe in terms of hectares, but leads in agricultural employment and value created per unit of land. “One study has estimated that if funds were allocated not just based on hectares but also employment and the number of farms, Italy should have received – and should still receive – about 46 per cent more resources.” 

The result, Sotte notes, is a system that has prompted many to “cultivate the subsidy” rather than the field. “The truth is that CAP subsidies are like a drug,” he says. “Especially when taken for many years, they are addictive and dampen the entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of innovating, diversifying and upgrading, people grow accustomed to receiving support.” 

“We tried to become the Holland, Germany, or France of wheat and milk,” Sotte adds, “forgotting that we were the country of a thousand vegetable gardens, vineyards climbing the hills, figs, aubergines, basil and oil. A fragile but precious mosaic, which over the years has been levelled and converted into an open-air assembly line.” 

Sotte insists that agriculture isn’t just about production; it’s also about preserving landscapes, biodiversity, and communities. “We’ve abandoned the hinterlands and prioritised vast expanses.” 

Today, the system is showing cracks even in its beating heart, the Po Valley. Not only because CAP subsidies are dwindling, but because that agricultural model, built on the idea of maximum productivity, is now hitting its structural limits. 

Climate hotspot 

Agriculture in this region also has to contend with an increasingly unstable climate. The Po Valley, a naturally flood-prone plain, is particularly vulnerable to atmospheric shocks. Sudden hailstorms destroy crops, while invasive insects attack plants that are already weakened. Drought alternates with torrential rains that wipe out weeks of work in a matter of hours. In Emilia-Romagna, the pear sector, which was once the pride of the region, has dwindled to the bare minimum: production has fallen by 70 per cent in ten years. Peaches have suffered the same fate. 

Since 2021, the region has experienced two years of intense drought and several floods, including those that devastated Romagna in May 2023. 

From her farm in Boncellino, in the province of Ravenna, Maria Gordini experienced the disaster first-hand. Just turned 70, she recounts what happened by her orchard, which is still buried in mud. “At first, it seemed like a normal storm. We’re used to them here. When it rains, we stay inside and wait.” But this time it was different. The Lamone River, flowing just a hundred metres away, burst its banks. The water rose quickly. Maria and her husband helped their son and daughter-in-law, who live with them, get the children to the upper floor. Rescue services were already tied up: in Ravenna, Faenza, all of Romagna. They waited for four long hours, which they spent playing games and drawing to keep the children from panicking. Finally, a small motorboat – “the swamp boat,” Maria calls it – took them to safety. Her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren chose to relocate, and never returned. Maria and her husband stayed. 

The warehouse where Giuseppe Trecate’s rice harvest is stored (17 May 2025). ©Michele Lapini 

In the months that followed, they were hit by two more floods: another cyclone just two weeks later, and then again in October 2024. On both occasions, they managed to escape in time; the warning system had worked. When they returned, however, they found their house gutted and the fields covered in mud. Maria shows us her devastated orchard: fallen tree trunks, brushwood everywhere. Maria tells us of her apple trees, planted one by one, supported by old wooden poles, and uprooted by the fury of the deluge.  

Common Agricultural Policy (2021 – 2027): main beneficiaries.

Today, Maria is still here, removing the mud by hand, waiting for a clean-up that she cannot afford and that should be the state’s responsibility. Maria doesn’t cry when she talks about the destruction, but she comes close when I ask her if she has the strength to replant. She insists that she does, but the fatigue, the weight of age, is evident. 

Maria is one among thousands: one voice among many, symbolising a wider tragedy. The flood that submerged Romagna destroyed crops, fields and lives. It caused fourteen deaths, and it reminded us that, under the blows of climate change, those with fewer resources pay the highest price. 

The ugliest landscape in the world 

Floods and droughts don’t come out of the blue. Arriving from afar, driven by a changing climate, they find a vulnerable body here in the Po valley, an organism with no defences. “We’ve made fields as sterile as sheet metal, all identical, incapable of retaining, breathing, or mediating between heaven and earth,” says Duccio Caccioni, agronomist and director of marketing and quality at the Bologna Agri-Food Centre (CAAB). “We’ve transformed the Po Valley into the ugliest landscape in the world.” 

Today, the Po Valley – which was once a succession of marshes, floodplain forests, rice fields and canals – increasingly resembles a mechanical desert, where water, when it arrives, finds nothing to welcome it. It flows, it destroys, and it overwhelms. Or it simply does not arrive, in which case everything crumbles, stops and becomes barren. 

Maria Gordini lives in Boncellino (Bagnacavallo) and has endured four floods and the destruction of her orchard. ©Michele Lapini 

Caccioni rattles off figures that clearly illustrate the process. “Over the last sixty years, Italy has not only lost many hectares of cultivated land: it has lost its landscape. In 1960, crops covered 20.9 million hectares; today, only 12.4 million remain. Eight and a half million hectares have disappeared, representing an area equal to Lombardy, Piedmont and Sicily combined. Of these, 1.3 million – the size of the whole of Campania – have literally been covered with concrete.”  

Behind these figures lies the metamorphosis of a space. The plains have been invaded by urban sprawl: following the US model, city suburbs have stretched into the countryside, and industrial warehouses, shopping centres and logistics hubs have colonised every free space. Meanwhile, agricultural spaces have become standardised: the lowlands have been turned into large monocultures of maize to feed the intensive livestock farming system. Land on mountains and hills has been gradually abandoned. “Today, Italy seems to move along two parallel planes. Below: overpopulated, polluted, chaotic territories; and above: depopulated mountains and hills, uncultivated fields, abandoned villages.” And this abandonment leads to fragility. “Inexorably, those unguarded mountains, those neglected territories, are collapsing. There’s an urgent need to repopulate them, to ensure that CAP subsidies do not reward large surfaces at the expense of the heroic agriculture of the mountain areas, the small farmers who guard the territory.” 

Beer against hornets 

Gianni Fagnoli is one of these mountain heroes, and one of the few who remain. Wearing a Metallica T-shirt, walking slowly, with a calm gaze, he is not a hermit, but a man who has chosen solitude as a matter of consistency. For years he worked as a porter, living in a warehouse and waking up at dawn. In 2015, he decided to leave everything behind. He found refuge in Rocca San Casciano, in the Apennines, an hour’s drive along winding roads from Forlì. 

It may be only three hectares, but Gianni treats it like a sacred garden. Hundreds of trees of ancient varieties, protected using traditional methods, such as bottles filled with beer hung from the branches to attract and stun hornets. A small but loyal clientele supports his work, attracted by his radical vision: “My fruit is not just zero kilometre, but zero day. You receive it on the same day I pick it.” 

Gianni gradually built up his business, and things were beginning to take off until the flood hit in 2023. Non-stop rain, landslides, streams bursting their banks. For two weeks, he couldn’t even get out to the field. When he was finally able to reach it, there was nothing left: his little Eden was buried in mud. But he didn’t give up: using his hands and a wheelbarrow, he replanted and rebuilt. Two years later, the trees are slowly starting to bloom again. But around him, the hills are emptying. Houses are closing, fields are being abandoned, friends are leaving. After the flood, a colleague from a nearby farm gave up everything and started working as a street cleaner. Gianni persevered, but he did so alone. 

A bottle filled with beer to attract stun hornets. Gianni Fagnoli grows fruit in the Forlì Apennines (16 June 2025). ©Michele Lapini 

The state provided no assistance: no compensation, no reimbursement. He received nothing from AgriCat, the national mutual fund created to compensate farmers affected by catastrophes. Satellites detected no standing water on his sloping land and rejected his request, as if there had been no flood. Gianni could only rebuild thanks to donations from his most loyal customers. And what about Europe? “Yeah,” he says with a bitter smile. “I get 1200 euros a year from the CAP. Plus 128 euros in compensation.” 

The paradox is striking. Gianni conserves biodiversity, supports a territory, and propagates agricultural knowledge that is at risk of extinction, and yet he receives a paltry sum from the Common Agricultural Policy. This is a concrete example of what Professor Franco Sotte had told me: the CAP has become a mechanism that rewards land area rather than values. It favours those with large areas of land and penalises those who work on a few hectares and produce quality products. 

Gianni is the living embodiment of a stronghold, one that holds firm against landslides, market pressures, and the indifference of institutions. Through stubborn determination, one farmer shows just how fragile – yet vital – the agriculture sidelined by the CAP truly is. 

In this plain that was once productive and is now gasping for breath, the Common Agricultural Policy is showing cracks. European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen announced in Brussels a 20 per cent reduction in overall funding for the CAP for 2028-2034. There is also the intention to give national governments more leeway to decide on the disbursement of funds.

In this plain that was once productive and is now gasping for breath, the Common Agricultural Policy is showing cracks. There is talk of reducing it by 20 per cent, and having national governments manage it. “This would be a disaster,” Sotte explains. “We would have 27 different agricultural systems competing with each other. But there’s no doubt the CAP needs reform, and the current model isn’t working. It’s crumbling due to its inability to keep up with the times and the inadequacy of the institutions and organisations tasked with implementing it.” 

Gianni Fagnoli, farmer and activist (16 June 2025). ©Michele Lapini 

The CAP, with its 386.6 billion euros for the 2021-2027 period, represents 29 per cent of the European budget. But the distribution of subsidies is highly unfair: 20 per cent of beneficiaries currently receive 80 per cent of the contributions. Those with more land receive more funds. This encourages land concentration, with large farms swallowing up small ones. Across Europe, and in Italy too. According to data from the National Institute of Statistics, the number of agricultural holdings in Italy halved from 2000 to 2020. 

As Brussels debates the future of European agriculture, the Po Valley remains immense yet weary. On the surface, it may appear eternal, but inside it bears the marks of disease: farms closing, orchards swept away by water, the desertion of the surrounding hills. Yet, amidst this wounded landscape, there are still men and women who resist: Giuseppe with his flooded fields sown as they were in the old days; Maria defending the memory of her submerged orchard; Gianni rebuilding his hill piece by piece. 

They make no fuss, they have no lobbies, they have no electoral influence; but they show that another kind of agriculture is possible, with the right support. But without an adequate political framework, these are likely to remain isolated stories. 

“We are hearing the last warning cry of a farming culture that is dying out,” says agronomist Duccio Caccioni. For Caccioni, the crisis is not cyclical, but systemic: “A change of direction is essential, otherwise the loss will be twofold: cultural and environmental wealth on the one hand, and our food sovereignty on the other.” 

So the question remains: will the CAP of the future open its eyes to this crisis and change course, or will it continue to support a model that risks engulfing itself?  

Stefano Liberti is a 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellow. This is the third article in a four-part investigation coordinated by Internazionale with the support of the Bertha Challenge fellowship. The Italian version of this article is published by Internazionale. 

 Translated by Ciaran Lawless | Voxeurop 

Species name and description:

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are medium-sized primates with long arms, black or dark-brown hair, and bare skin on their faces, hands, and feet. Their facial features and physical characteristics vary from individual to individual, much as humans’ do, due to a rich genetic diversity that makes each chimpanzee truly unique.

Where they’re found:

Chimpanzees have four recognized subspecies, each native to different regions of Africa. These include:

• • Central chimpanzee: Found mainly in Central African countries like the Congo Basin.
  • Western chimpanzee: Native to West Africa.
  • Eastern chimpanzee: Found in East African regions, including Uganda and Tanzania.
  • Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee: Found in Nigeria and Cameroon.

IUCN Red List status:

Endangered — and the population is constantly decreasing.

Why they are at risk:

Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, are crucial for maintaining Central Africa’s diverse forests. However, all four subspecies are endangered due to habitat loss, disease, exploitation, and hunting for bushmeat or for animal trafficking. Their slow reproductive rate makes it hard for them to recover from these threats.

What you can do to help:

The most important tip is to educate yourself about this species. In doing so you equip yourself with the knowledge needed to inform, educate, and inspire others to take action. Once you’re informed you can become an advocate, helping others understand the challenges chimpanzees face and encouraging change.

A great way to contribute is by supporting and visiting organizations such as your local zoo, the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance, African sanctuaries like Chimp Eden (run by the Jane Goodall Institute), or U.S.-based sanctuaries that care for retired laboratory chimpanzees. These organizations work around the clock to ensure the chimpanzees in their care can live out the rest of their lives in peace and comfort.

My favorite experience:

One of my most meaningful experiences was choosing to center my master’s in photography project around volunteering and photographing my time at Chimp Eden, the chimpanzee sanctuary run by the Jane Goodall Institute in South Africa. I wanted to fully immerse myself in an environment dedicated to advocating for chimpanzees and helping those rescued from traumatic pasts.

Rescued chimpanzee at Chimp Eden. Photo: Larissa Wiencek, used with permission.

Before arriving at the sanctuary, I conducted extensive research on primate behavior, personalities, diet, etc. I also reviewed existing photographic work to ensure my images would bring a new perspective rather than replicate what had already been done. My goal was to create original photographs that could be used to educate and inspire others wanting to learn about this species.

After returning to school, I curated an exhibition based on my experience at the sanctuary, using my work to share the stories of these incredible animals.

I continue to advocate for chimpanzees because, sadly, they cannot speak for themselves. As humans, it’s our responsibility to be their voice, to fight for their rights, protect their habitats, and work toward a future where they can live in peace and comfort.

Share your stories: 

Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Save This Species. 

Previously in The Revelator:

The Challenges of Studying (and Treating) PTSD in Chimpanzees

 

 

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