Grist

As Hurricane Helene roared through the mountains of western North Carolina in September 2024, Devon ran from one side of his house to the other, listening to the sound of trees snapping in the dark.

The wind whipped the steep hill his family lived on in Asheville, rattling the windows and cracking limbs. Pine trees fell like dominos, 20 in all. Five of them took the porch and a corner of the house with them. The creek behind the family’s home was rising fast, and anything caught in it was swept away.

Inside, Devon’s wife and their daughter, who is now five,  hid in a closet, crying as the house shook. Devon shouted over the wind as he tried to figure out what would fall next. He was inside the house, but also somewhere very far away, reliving memories he had been trying to put away.

“For me, it was very triggering,” he said. “I felt like I was in a war situation.”

Devon, an Iraq war veteran who moved to the mountains from Florida in 2019, asked to be identified by only his first name, as anonymity is a core component of 12-step programs. The 41-year-old had returned from the Middle East in 2006 with post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury that pushed him to numb himself however he could. It started with pills, then heroin, and eventually a combination of heroin and cocaine. “I was so physically addicted,” he said. “The sickness was unbearable. I couldn’t imagine life without drugs.”

In Asheville, he slowly found his way back from the precipice. He joined Narcotics Anonymous, attended regular meetings, and began to confront his trauma in therapy. He and his wife, who had moved to Asheville with him, had a daughter in 2020. It wasn’t always easy, but life with his family, in their house in the woods, felt like it was creeping toward stability. 

Everything changed after the storm.

Hurricane Helene fractured many of the support systems that people in recovery, like Devon, relied on to stay sober. Jesse Barber / Grist

Disasters like Hurricane Helene level communities and upend even the stablest lives. For people recovering from addiction, they can also fracture so much more: 12-step meetings, treatment programs, transportation, and the social networks that are essential to maintaining sobriety. When that scaffolding breaks down, the risk of relapse and overdose rises. 

Penn State University sociologist Kristina Brant has spent the past few years studying the long-term impacts floods can have on communities, finding “an increase in overdose deaths that persists for a decade after a flood.” Grief and trauma can linger for years, she said. “Those are significant triggers that can derail recovery.”

The threat is especially acute in the Appalachian region, a mountainous swath of the country that includes 13 states stretching from New York to Mississippi. Throughout the region, a long-running drug crisis has already taken a devastating toll. Though overdose death rates in Appalachian counties have declined slightly alongside national trends, mortality for people in their prime working years still exceeded the national average in 2023 by 52 percent. These trends are driven by limited access to health care, physically demanding work, and economic hardship. In six western North Carolina counties, including Buncombe, for example, overdose mortality was more than 36 per 100,000 residents as of 2022. 

Increasingly severe storms and flooding, fueled by a warming world, are compounding those vulnerabilities, damaging not just infrastructure but the support systems people rely on to stay alive.

For people like Devon, the weeks and months after Helene unraveled lives they’d spent years building.

Recovery from substance use disorder hinges on stability. Routine keeps people connected to the relationships and services that make long-term sobriety possible, and builds the kind of network where someone notices if a chair is empty.

Across Appalachia, that support system is already stretched thin. Rural communities don’t have the redundancies that make it easy to hit another meeting, find another clinic, or line up another therapist. Long travel distances and high poverty rates create additional barriers.

Disasters further strain the system. Annual hospitalizations for substance use disorders jumped 30 percent after Hurricane Katrina and continued rising for years afterward, especially in neighborhoods that experienced the greatest destruction and displacement. 

“When you factor in a disaster like Helene or other flooding where infrastructure is really impacted, we’re just amplifying that existing barrier a billion-fold,” said Erin Major, a doctoral candidate in health services research at Boston University who studies substance misuse in Appalachia. “It became genuinely impossible for quite a few of these patients to access their care.”

Keep reading Helene frayed the safety net for people who use drugs. This community wove it back together. Katie Myers

In Devon’s walk-up apartment in Arden, a town just south of Asheville, his pit bull, Qball, trotted across the gray carpet to meet him. Devon is tall and thin, with close-cropped hair and an understated, honest way of putting things. He said he understands how much routines matter, because he had spent years building his.

He returned from Iraq in 2006 after two years in a scout platoon. Back at a base in coastal Georgia where he enrolled in college, he began to understand what he’d brought home with him. His brain injury and PTSD plagued him with nightmares and made it difficult to hold a job. He began to self-medicate. “Once I started using, you know, the harder opiates, I would say I was using against my will at that point,” Devon said, scratching his dog’s ear. He overdosed and nearly died several times.

Devon’s formal dress jacket hangs on a door of his apartment.
Jesse Barber / Grist

His relationships frayed under the strain, and for a time he lived on the street. He and his wife separated; her job didn’t pay well, he’d lost his, and they were in debt. In a bid to save their marriage and finances, the couple moved to Asheville, where his wife’s family lived, in 2019. The city’s recovery resources, which are abundant compared to elsewhere in the South, offered the promise of support, consistency, and a fresh start. 

Over time, Devon began building a new life. He is on disability and can’t work, but he and his wife were able to buy a house. Suboxone, a daily prescription medication available at most pharmacies, eased his cravings for opioids. Twelve-step meetings allowed him to find support and celebrate progress. He and his wife welcomed their daughter into the world in 2020. While marriage and recovery were sometimes bumpy, he felt he was building something lasting.

Hurricane Helene blew all of that apart.

In the weeks and months after the storm, the routines that had anchored Devon’s recovery began to shift. His 12-step group moved its meetings online for a couple of weeks. When it resumed gathering in-person, he struggled to attend, bogged down by the demands of repairing his house. With his time consumed by cleaning up from the storm, he stopped regularly going to individual therapy. Financial worries took the place of personal goals.

“There was a huge interruption,” Devon said. Online meetings are “not the same as being in person. You know, like when I like to go in-person in my home group… I can do service like either chair a meeting, help set up literature, help greet people, help set up chairs.”

That kind of service is central to the recovery pathway that’s worked for Devon, and it had become a vital part of his life. He tried to fulfill it by helping neighbors rebuild from the storm. He spent his days clearing debris, organizing disaster supplies at community spaces, and delivering them to people in harder-hit areas. “We were just pitching in the best we can, and I feel like I was using my experience in the program,” he said.

He also met new people along the way — including church volunteers who helped remove the five trees that had fallen onto his house. At first, the spirit of cooperation brought people together. But as the months passed, that warmth faded and the losses began to settle in. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave his family an emergency stipend of $750 to cover immediate expenses, like food and water, but they’d already spent $20,000 on repairs. Even with insurance, they realized they’d have to refinance the house to keep it. 

By last summer, the strain had become too much. Devon and his wife decided to sell the house,  for $30,000 less than they’d hoped. Amid the back-and-forth with the insurance company, their own fights escalated, and they filed for divorce — not uncommon after a life-changing disaster. Because North Carolina law requires a couple to live separately for one year before a divorce can be finalized, Devon moved into a hotel. He found himself alone more often. 

He managed to avoid relapse, but that meant treading carefully with hobbies that summoned the urge to drink, like playing poker. As the summer of 2025 dragged into fall, he felt spiritually adrift. Between his divorce and the costs of the storm, he’d lost about $100,000. It was all too much. It had been years since he’d felt this hopeless. “I was suicidal,” he said.

For many people in recovery, relapse can be more dangerous than their initial drug use. After a few days of sobriety, tolerance starts to drop. Those who have gone through treatment are sometimes more likely to overdose, with the immediate first few days of relapse being the most dangerous. Over time, the mental health impacts and compounding losses of a disaster can push people further off course. 

In the early days after the storm, communities, volunteers, and recovery groups across the region sprang into action, temporarily filling the gaps left by upended routines and the slow trickle of federal help.

Researchers often observe a curious “honeymoon phase” after a disaster: A time of intense social cohesion as people united by shared loss come together to help each other. It’s months or years down the line when the pileup of trauma and loss begins to complicate that cohesion. 

John Kennedy saw that shift unfold in Buncombe County.

John Kennedy sits in front of boxes of Narcan, which his organization, Musicians for Overdose Prevention, helps distribute. Jesse Barber / Grist

Kennedy, a guitarist, and his wife Cinnamon Kennedy, a drummer, spent years distributing naloxone, which can quickly reverse an opioid overdose, to nightclubs, music halls, and other venues throughout the county. Such work is called harm reduction — providing the education and tools to help people who are actively using drugs prevent infection, illness, and death. The project began after John lost several friends and his brother to overdoses. The Kennedys rely on the tight network of musicians and venues to get those supplies to the people who need them.

John Kennedy drove me around Swannanoa, a small, largely working-class town outside of Asheville. Even a year and a half after the storm, there are reminders of how the social fabric has frayed. 

The last music venue in Swannanoa closed after the storm, and others in the area also have closed or aren’t booking bands.. One survey found that across 23 counties, small businesses lost an average of $322,000 during Helene, and many couldn’t withstand it. The closures of bars and venues has left fewer places to congregate. Kennedy worries that may mean more people are using alone. Research shows that hurricanes and tropical storms can cause excess mortality for as long as 15 years, so the region is still only at the beginning of the aftermath.

John Kennedy walks among what is left of Salvage Station outdoor music venue along the French Broad. Jesse Barber / Grist

Kennedy can’t help but reflect on what’s been lost. “Just the ability for people — like a church service, like a job — to show up and come in and be able to check on everyone, check in on everyone, see how people were doing,” he said, driving past Silverados, one of the venues he relied on to carry naloxone until it closed permanently. One after the other: shuttered, shuttered, shuttered. 

Kennedy pointed out the dozens of RVs parked along the roadways, all hosting people who lost their homes to the storm. A field where there was once a trailer park. Ossified muck and debris where there was once a gas station, a farmers market, a woodworking shop, a veteran’s clinic.  “It’s not what it was.”

Kennedy still delivers naloxone, but more often to venues in Asheville, where it’s easier to find people. The community feels battered, he said, but he hopes it is slowly regrowing.

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, many opioid treatment providers struggled to track patients and keep records up to date, said Major, the Boston University doctoral candidate. Some providers reported that the number of people in treatment remained stable, or even increased as street drugs became harder to find. Others have lost patients — one provider saw 15 patients drop out or move away. Just some eventually returned.

How to support people with substance use disorder during and after disaster 

Learn how to recognize and respond to opioid overdoses. Harm reduction groups or syringe exchanges may offer first aid and sensitivity training, as does the Red Cross.

Have naloxone (also known by the brand name Narcan) on hand and know how to dispense it. 

Understand the medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), to help reduce stigma around their availability and use. Buprenorphine is an evidence-based treatment, but requires healthcare providers and pharmacies to maintain an adequate supply to ensure access when disasters hit. 

Ask your local officials how people with substance use disorder are considered in disaster planning. Do shelters have low barriers to entry and no abstinence requirements? Are volunteers trained on how to reduce stigma and respond to overdoses? 

Grist’s Disaster 101 Toolkit — a comprehensive guide to extreme weather preparation, response, and recovery — includes a detailed section on how people with substance use disorder can stay safe during disasters and how community members, volunteers, and other responders can best support them. Read, share, and easily customize it for your community.

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FIRST at Blue Ridge, a halfway house in nearby Black Mountain, saw about 30 residents leave to deal with the aftermath of Helene, though record-keeping was difficult in the chaos. Some residents lost the homes they’d hoped to return to. Others, placed there as a condition of probation, had to navigate spotty cell service to notify court officials and get permission to go assist their families. A few simply walked off, hoping to hike home. Most eventually came back, but one or two never returned. The center administers drug tests when people come or go, and found that several had relapsed during their time away.

Similar disruptions have been reported across the mountains, especially where the legal system is involved. Cordelia Stearns, chief medical officer at High Country Community Health in Watauga County, said displacement can set off a chain of events that ends in incarceration for the patients treated at her clinic.

One had been living in a shed after Helene and accidentally burned it down trying to stay warm through the winter. He walked hours to reach the clinic and keep up with treatment for opioid addiction. “He did actually make these heroic efforts to stay in care,” Stearns said.

Despite that, he was incarcerated multiple times for nonviolent drug offenses. He’s currently out of touch again, and, she assumes, probably in jail. She hopes he’s OK, she said, choking up. “It’s always a little nerve-racking when you can’t reach people.” 

Stearns has seen similar patterns play out repeatedly, particularly among people who are unhoused. Access to medications like Suboxone or methadone often depends on the policies of individual jails, and incarceration can bring people back into environments where drugs are readily available. “I’m not totally sure who it’s supposed to be helping,” she said.

In Buncombe County, community health worker Brandi Hayes has seen how quickly this turmoil can unravel recovery. She works with the county’s Post-Overdose Response Team, which checks on people who have recently survived an overdose and steers them toward treatment. Like many in this field, she has a family history with addiction that makes the work personal.

Brandi Hayes (left) works for the Buncombe County Post-Overdose Response Team, which works with recent overdose survivors. Her organization offers treatment services, like Suboxone (right). Jesse Barber / Grist

In the weeks after Hurricane Helene, she and her colleagues slogged through the muck to check on patients, deliver essentials like food and water, and keep people connected to treatment and care. Some stayed on track. Others disappeared. One case in particular has stuck with her: A man who had been doing well in his treatment for opioid use, and had even gotten his license and a car back after a period of suspension for legal issues.

“Then the storm came,” Hayes said. “He had to take care of someone else that wasn’t in the sober mind state that he was in.” He quit going to treatment, started using drugs again, cycled through jail several times, and lost his car. 

“I don’t even know where he’s at right now or what he’s doing, ’cause he’s fallen off so bad and not going to appointments and things like that,” Hayes said. When that gets harder for the people she serves, she takes notice. “It’s very easy to backslide.”

The same pattern has played out across Appalachia before. When floods tore through eastern Kentucky in 2022, Jeremy Haney lost nearly everything: his apartment, most of his belongings, and Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company, where he built mandolins by hand. He is in recovery from addiction to painkillers and methamphetamines. A recovery-to-work program had led him to the factory in 2019, and building the instruments had become the bedrock of his life. When the floodwaters receded, the factory was temporarily closed, and it didn’t look likely to reopen soon. He wondered what he’d do next.

“My first initial thought is, ‘OK, our factory’s gone. We’ve got no job,’” Haney recalled thinking. He didn’t want to go back to where he was from in Morgan County, all the way across the state. “I’ve put all this work and effort into relocating and rebuilding my life here in Knott County, and now I’m going to have to start all over again.”

Doug Naselroad, who runs the recovery-to-work program, dreaded telling roughly a dozen men that their jobs had disappeared. Instead, he found funding from the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, a combination of state and federal Department of Labor funding, that allowed them to work in disaster relief. “Nobody missed a paycheck,” Naselroad said. “But they had to rethink what they did for a living, you know, and for months they just slogged away in the mud.”

Haney spent that time cleaning and reorganizing the luthiery and its instruments, determining what could be kept and what had to be thrown away. But the flood had upended the rest of his life. He received $1,800 from FEMA to replace his lost possessions. But after his landlord opted into a FEMA program designed to reduce future disaster risk, the building was cleared and everyone had to move out. Haney spent months searching for a new place to live. The factory eventually reopened, allowing him to return to his usual job as a luthier, but much had changed.

Nearly 9,000 houses and apartments were destroyed in the Kentucky flood, and about 31 percent of the homes in Knott County were damaged. Rental housing was scarce. Even after being approved for federal homeowners’ loans, he struggled to find something within his budget. “There just ain’t that many homes around here that would be cheap enough for me to be able to afford the payment,” he said. His landlord had another apartment come open, but the situation felt unstable.

He worried he might have to return to Morgan County, where he could fall back into addiction. The cleanup job helped keep him grounded. He eventually qualified for an unusual state post-disaster housing program for flood survivors that allowed him to buy his first home last year. He moved in just before Christmas, more than three years after the flood. He credits his support network with helping him get through the long stretch in between — helping him move, find new furniture, and giving him social support.

“That’s a big thing in recovery,” Haney said. “Asking for help.”

For Devon, community connections have made all the difference. He has struggled with depression and long bouts of hopelessness over the last year and a half, but he hasn’t gotten high. 

The waning afternoon light moved across the gray carpet of Devon’s apartment as he tried to recall a time when he really felt tempted to use again.

“I’ve thought about it, but very rarely,” Devon said. “If I do, I have a support system where I can call somebody. I would really have to be in a bad place to use.”

Devon sits in his apartment. Jesse Barber / Grist

He leans on people who’ve survived their own crises — divorces, bankruptcies, other disasters. While some friends have returned to drug use, he’s been grateful for his sponsor and fellow members of Narcotics Anonymous. “This is, like, why we do what we do — when shit hits the fan,” he said. 

His life now is quieter. He keeps up with appointments and stays in touch with friends in recovery. He attends weekly meetings, which he sometimes leads. He’s also returned to individual therapy, which helps him cope with lingering anxiety from the hurricane.

It isn’t the life he once imagined, but for now he has made peace with it. “I try to focus on my daughter,” Devon said. “I’m just doing the best I can.”

Being with her gives his days purpose. He looks after her while his ex-wife is at work, and he’s structured his life and routines around her activities — ballet, gymnastics, kickboxing. For Devon, the structure helps him keep moving forward.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Helene shattered lives — and the systems that keep people sober on May 4, 2026.

Kimberly Treadaway hoped she was prepared for the storm. Hurricane Helene was heading right for her home in Weaverville, North Carolina, and she worried about having enough food and water, and about her 5-month-old son. But something else weighed on her — access to Suboxone, a prescription medication she must take daily to reduce the cravings and withdrawal symptoms associated with opioid use.

“If I didn’t have my medication, I wouldn’t feel OK,” she said.  

Treadaway is about a decade into her recovery. Maintaining sobriety depends upon a great many things remaining consistent: relationships, housing, employment, and, especially, access to the treatment she needs to avoid a relapse.

She wasn’t just concerned for herself. Her partner was also on Suboxone, as were “a lot of our friends.” Many had a stockpile, or a plan to taper their dosage if they suddenly lost access. Withdrawal is always unpleasant and often dangerous. The thought of navigating the aftermath of a natural disaster with fever, chills, vomiting, and other symptoms was frightening.

 “Helene just made it really, really real,” she said.

Treadaway recounted the story in the office of Holler Harm Reduction, alongside fellow staffer Hush Sinn and volunteer Oscar Smith. The grassroots organization in Marshall, often known simply as “Holler,” strives to meet people who use drugs where they are, providing clean needles, naloxone, and other supplies to minimize the threat of an overdose or infection. Treadaway joined the staff in November 2024, right after Helene hit. In the wake of the storm, Holler was part of a loose network of similar organizations that mounted an ad hoc but essential response — to ensure that people who use drugs or are maintaining sobriety got the care and supplies they needed.

Kimberly Treadaway, left, and Oscar Smith, sit beside a stack of needle boxes at Holler Harm Reduction in Marshall, North Carolina.
Jesse Barber / Grist

As the initial barrage of rain and wind gave way to isolation and infrastructural breakdown, the systems Treadaway and so many others rely on remained interrupted for weeks. 

But something else took their place. Across western North Carolina and beyond, people like Treadaway joined doctors, nurses, and others on ATVs, in trucks, and occasionally on foot in delivering care and supplies. They did so in ways that official emergency responders, constrained by training, resources, logistics, or mandate, could not. They did what they felt was urgent and right, and in that, they revealed what disaster response might look like if it were designed with those realities in mind.

For people in recovery or still actively using drugs, survival depends on a connection to care, routine, and the people and systems that make such things possible: pharmacies; clinics, rehabs, therapists, and 12-step meetings. 

Across Appalachia and the South, that web is already strained. A flood of prescription opioids, followed by heroin, fentanyl, amphetamines, and other drugs, brought skyrocketing addiction rates and death in the early 2000s. Though efforts to combat overdose have reduced death rates since 2022, rural areas hit by hospital closures and dwindling access to basic health care still see high rates of these and other so-called “deaths of despair.” With climate-fueled disasters growing more frequent, the same fragile system is tested again and again.

Keep reading Hurricane Helene shattered lives — and the systems that keep people sober Katie Myers

Treadaway, who is 33, grew up in a rural area outside Boone, near the Tennessee state line. Shy and raised on an abstinence-only education, she had been taught to avoid drugs at all costs without ever learning how they differed or how they affected the body. All she knew was that they felt good and made her more at ease in life and at parties. She began using opiates and other substances in high school, alongside friends and romantic partners. She eventually dropped out of school, and stopped doing other things she loved, like art, theater, and dance. One day, when she was 19, she awoke to find her partner lifeless in bed next to her. It shook her into seeking help.

She went back to school and tried to bring balance to her life. It wasn’t until around 2017 that she found a welcoming place in the harm reduction community, where she could share her experiences and wisdom. Harm reduction aims to reduce the risks associated with drugs — infection, illness, death — and promote understanding, respect, and compassion for people who use them. She found its philosophy of helping people without judgment appealing. Treadaway felt accepted for sometimes existing in a gray area between active use and recovery, a process that’s rarely linear. 

“It wasn’t a clear-cut journey,” she said. “But after that, I let go of certain substances and then let go of some others, and worked my way into a place in life that felt good.”

Treadaway first volunteered with The Steady Collective, a harm-reduction group based in Asheville, and later served on its board. There, she found like-minded people who embraced her first-person perspective on complex health and social issues. She now works as the organizational director for Holler.

Holler Harm Reduction distributes supplies like Naloxone and drug testing kits (left), comfort items like lip balm (center), which treats dry-mouth symptoms caused by withdrawal medications like Suboxone, and clean supplies to prevent infection (right).

Many of her friends navigate the same space between use and recovery, occasionally moving back and forth between the two. In the harm reduction community, Treadaway said, they find forgiveness, patience, and love that the greater world doesn’t always have for them.

She and others in the community brought that approach to the aftermath of Helene, seeking to show their neighbors that they were there, loved them, and wouldn’t let them fall. The organization, along with other western North Carolina groups like Steady Collective and Smoky Mountain Harm Reduction, quickly mobilized. As soon as the roads were passable, truckloads of basic supplies arrived from all over. A region’s worth of people, increasingly accustomed to the disruptions of flooding, got to work distributing them.

“The scope of mutual aid is just like harm reduction,” said Hush Sinn. “The norm in mutual aid is that we show up for each other. That nobody says, ‘That’s not my problem.’”

Flooding had washed out roads and cut communications, making it difficult or impossible to reach clinics or refill prescriptions. Those who could often found drugstores and clinics closed, or unable to verify insurance because of internet outages. For people in treatment for opioid addiction, the consequences were dire: Methadone typically must be dispensed daily at a clinic, while Suboxone is tightly regulated as a controlled substance.

“It was like hundreds of dollars” that people had to pay if they couldn’t apply insurance, Treadaway said. Most couldn’t afford that. With supplies uncertain, she reduced her own dosage. Some people pooled what they had and shared it with friends — helping each other through a crisis felt more important than following laws that prohibit such actions.

How to support people with substance use disorder during and after disaster 

Learn how to recognize and respond to opioid overdoses. Harm reduction groups or syringe exchanges may offer first aid and sensitivity training, as does the Red Cross.

Have naloxone (also known by the brand name Narcan) on hand and know how to dispense it. 

Understand the medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), to help reduce stigma around their availability and use. Buprenorphine is an evidence-based treatment, but requires healthcare providers and pharmacies to maintain an adequate supply to ensure access when disasters hit. 

Ask your local officials how people with substance use disorder are considered in disaster planning. Do shelters have low barriers to entry and no abstinence requirements? Are volunteers trained on how to reduce stigma and respond to overdoses? 

Grist’s Disaster 101 Toolkit — a comprehensive guide to extreme weather preparation, response, and recovery — includes a detailed section on how people with substance use disorder can stay safe during disasters and how community members, volunteers, and other responders can best support them. Read, share, and easily customize it for your community.

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Treadaway ended up leaving for her son’s safety. Others, like Sinn and Smith, remained. They found people were doing surprisingly well, given the circumstances — not because the system was holding, but because many were accustomed to its failures. They were used to interruptions in electricity, water, or housing.

“People who use drugs are scrappy,” Treadaway said. “They are used to having to fight for their basic needs, which isn’t a good or correct thing, but I had this really deep sense of faith and trust in their survival skills that maybe other community members haven’t had to ever use.”

Sinn, who is on the staff at the Steady Collective and has a history of substance use, was drawn to harm reduction not only to save lives but to ensure no one faces the crushing loneliness that can come with substance use. That seemed particularly important in the wake of Helene. “There’s nothing worse than feeling like nobody gives a shit about you,” Sinn said.

State health officials also found themselves scrambling to meet urgent needs. Tyler Yates, the state opioid coordinator for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, watched treatment centers across the state suddenly also become depots for first aid supplies, clean water, and gasoline, filling the community’s basic survival needs.

Yates, like many in his line of work, comes to the job with personal experience: He started using opioids and other substances when he was 11. He went to treatment in 2017, for what he said may have been the eighth time. It was around then that he found a home in harm reduction work. 

After the storm, Yates knew what people who use drugs needed to survive, and was frustrated by how bureaucracy stood in the way. For instance, he wanted to quickly get sterile water to intravenous drug users, fearing that without it, they could face infection, sepsis, or death from water containing bacteria and other contaminants. But the request went nowhere. According to Yates, state emergency officials were reluctant to fund supplies beyond the usual disaster checklist. “When we submitted the order, it was denied by the emergency response folks because they didn’t think that FEMA would reimburse them,” he said.

North Carolina Emergency Management declined to comment and referred all questions to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Summer Tonizzo, a spokesperson for that agency, told Grist in an email that it collaborates with local jurisdictions, health departments, and community organizations to assist those with substance use disorder during disasters by helping provide naloxone and offering crisis counseling in shelters.

“The State Emergency Response Team makes decisions regarding the distribution of emergency health supplies based on the immediate public health needs and circumstances at hand,” wrote Tonizzo. “The reimbursement process occurs after the response phase has ended and involves separate processes.” 

After a month of back and forth, Yates and his team ended up receiving supplies donated by local and regional harm reduction groups and delivering them throughout western North Carolina. “There’s so much red tape,” he said. His team did its best to fill supply and training gaps, like distributing naloxone to rural volunteer fire departments and first responders who often lacked the training and supplies. 

The state also saw more contamination in the illicit drug supply, driven by a drop in availability of fentanyl and other opioids due to damaged roads and landslides. In places like Haywood County, health providers said xylazine — a cheap, widely available tranquilizer that slows breathing and can cause severe tissue damage — flooded the supply. Health care professionals and harm reductionists scrambled to warn people of the risk, and provide test strips to keep them safe.

Training and preparation were also an issue when it came to longer-term disaster relief volunteers. Several health providers in western North Carolina told Grist they saw people who used drugs — or even those taking medications for opioid use disorder — being turned away from shelters by volunteers who believed they were keeping others safe.

Tonizzo said her agency received no reports of people being wrongfully ejected from shelters for being on medications used to treat opioid use disorder, but that use of illegal drugs “can be restricted” and is grounds for removal.

Buncombe County officials said the county’s response plan prioritizes access to water, sanitation, and shelter for everyone, and it works with harm reduction groups to maintain access to safe use supplies. Although the county handled the initial coordination of emergency shelters, it handed that task off to the Red Cross, which did not respond to written questions, in the weeks after the storm. “Coordinating the various needs of the shelter population was no small challenge,” a Buncombe County spokesperson said in an email. “As the needs of shelter residents became more apparent, the Red Cross and our teams worked to relocate individuals needing specialized support to a more appropriate shelter setting.”

Wreckage from Hurricane Helene in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Jesse Barber / Grist

The storm’s overall effect on public health was mixed. Hospitalization data showed some illnesses worsened, particularly chronic illnesses such as diabetes and mental health conditions like anxiety. Emergency room visits for overdoses and alcohol use also rose, with opioid overdoses up about 21 percent in the three months after the storm, according to an analysis by Appalachian State University geographer Maggie Sugg and environmental epidemiologist Jen Runkle, who works for the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, a research arm of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Because ER data reflects only those who needed and could access care, the real impact may have been greater.

Still, more than a dozen health care providers, harm reductionists, and peer counselors told Grist they were astonished that things weren’t worse, given the multitude of health risks the people they care for face. Some even said they saw fewer overdoses and cases of severe withdrawal than they expected.

“Some of my patients fared way better than they had in years,” said Cassie York, a peer support counselor at a Mountain Community Health Partnership clinic in rural, low-income Mitchell County. “Because there was food available, there were resources available, no questions asked.” 

After disasters, a safety net of free emergency health clinics blooms and fades. But between those moments lies what many described as a glimmer of possibility — a kind of equality in access to care among people caught in addiction or early recovery, who are often uninsured or avoid seeking medical care due to fear of stigma and arrest.

Red Cross workers distribute supplies at Asheville-Buncome Technical Community College after Hurricane Helene. Jesse Barber / Grist

Doctors worked out of community centers and churches, writing prescriptions more freely as patients bypassed the usual restrictions on access. The state Board of Pharmacy, acting on Governor Roy Cooper’s declaration of an emergency and Drug Enforcement Agency approval, allowed doctors and pharmacists to provide emergency refills of regulated medications , including some of those used to treat opioid use disorder.

People came in with chronic infections, injuries, and diseases like AIDS — conditions that can arise from intravenous drug use — and were treated, free of charge. For a brief moment, many experienced what it meant to have free, nonjudgmental care. “Word of mouth spreads fast, you know? ‘Hey, there’s a doctor at the church, go get your prescription,’” York said. 

But if that access was easier than usual, it was because there were people who made the decision to make it happen, and local and state officials willing to provide the resources. In other states throughout the Appalachian region, communities with high overdose rates and growing disaster risk face a very different set of political circumstances.

Not every county, or state, in the region provides harm reduction programs with the same level of support found in Buncombe County. Some actively inhibit it. West Virginia, for instance, passed restrictions in 2021 that threaten needle exchange programs, and a bill banning them is under judicial review. In Tennessee, state laws prohibit these exchanges, which help intravenous drug users avoid infection and disease by providing sterile injection supplies, from operating near schools or parks. Such restrictions limit how many syringe exchanges can operate, and often push them into less accessible areas. Many people in rural Tennessee drive across the state line seeking help, further straining services in western North Carolina.

The myriad challenges of meeting immediate needs make it difficult for harm reductionists to plan for the next crisis. Health workers in West Virginia, which has the nation’s highest overdose rate, described feeling as though their heads are being held underwater. “It can be hard to think about climate emergency, because so many people who I see are in a state of emergency all the time,” said Lake Sidikman, who coordinates harm reduction programs at the Charleston Women’s Health Center.

Even in Buncombe County, widely cited as a lodestar for substance use services, gaps remain. Helene highlighted the lack of a concrete plan for providing services during a crisis. 

That gap has sparked efforts to rethink disaster planning. Harm reductionist Kathryn Humphries works with others in her field and officials at all levels of government and grassroots groups on disaster response. She said such plans often overlook people who use drugs and the unhoused, despite their heightened vulnerabilities and overlapping needs. She is among those helping lead a national conversation about how to better draw community organizations and those with direct experience with drug use into preparedness efforts.

To Dr. Shuchin Shukla, a physician and addiction medicine researcher who previously practiced family medicine in Buncombe County, disaster preparedness starts with the pillars of overdose prevention: naloxone to reverse overdoses, medications and supplies such as Suboxone and clean needles, and peer support from trusted people in the community. Strangers cannot arrive after a disaster and expect people in active addiction or early recovery to trust them. “You have to bring a ton of support to the people they already know and rely on,” he said.

He’d like to see family members, trusted neighbors, and others with firm connections in the community trained to be first responders and given the necessary resources. Such methods worked after Hurricane Helene; the challenge is institutionalizing and funding these programs, which are just as important as access to food, water, and shelter when disaster strikes, at the state and federal level. “People will go through withdrawal from medication and fentanyl before they’ll go through withdrawal from food,” he said.

A medical professional with Respite at Haywood Street Congregation gives wound care to a community member in Asheville, North Carolina. Addiction researcher Shuchin Shukla thinks organizations with strong community ties should be included in disaster response plans.
Jesse Barber / Grist

He also wants states to maintain emergency reserves of medications and safe-use supplies, and to provide basic first aid and medical resources. Ideally, he’d like to see trained staff, volunteer organizations, and federal emergency response teams prepared to distribute these resources.

Shukla sees this as increasingly urgent. Opioid settlement funds — more than $57 billion that drugmakers, distributors, and pharmacy chains paid to all 50 states for their role in the overdose crisis — are abundant now, but annual disbursements will decrease each year and expire in 2038. Federal support for substance use services has fluctuated under the Trump administration. After the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration saw as much as $1.9 billion in grants cut and later reinstated, the agency faced a wave of layoffs and resignations; the 2027 federal budget proposes further consolidation and reductions. 

“We can’t predict what’s going to happen,” he said, “but we can make sure that if stuff were to happen, we have various levels of resilience.”

For people who work in harm reduction, the long tail of Helene has been hard to watch. The people they rushed to serve, and who benefited from the sudden abundance of free health care, have begun to fall back into isolation.

“When all of that finished, it was like, not only did they go back to being uncomfortable, but it was even harder because they’d kind of gotten used to having needs met as we all should, you know?” Treadaway said.

As quickly as a health care safety net unfurled, it began to fray.

“There are now folks where their living situations with like five to seven people are falling apart, and they’re just ending up with nothing,” Smith said. “Now they have to pick up the pieces and figure it out.”

The donations have slowed, but the need hasn’t. Last winter, the Holler crew and other nonprofits delivered propane and water alongside harm reduction supplies. A year and a half after the storm, they are still meeting basic needs for survivors even as they brace for the next disaster. They can only hope they’re ready when it comes.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Helene frayed the safety net for people who use drugs. This community wove it back together. on May 4, 2026.

Since 2018, when it bought the chemical manufacturer Monsanto, the German conglomerate Bayer has set aside billions to settle legal claims that the active ingredient in the company’s weedkiller Roundup has caused cancer and other health issues among its users. More than 100,000 plaintiffs across the U.S. have filed lawsuits alleging a cancer link, and in February, the company agreed to settle a class action lawsuit for $7.25 billion.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in one case that didn’t reach a settlement. John Durnell first sued Monsanto in 2019, arguing that he developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma because of persistent exposure to glyphosate in Roundup, which he had regularly sprayed throughout his neighborhood for 20 years. In 2023, a Missouri jury found Monsanto liable for failing to warn users of the cancer risk from glyphosate, and awarded Durnell $1.25 million in damages. The company has denied the claims and issued a series of appeals ever since.

Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act — known as FIFRA — the Environmental Protection Agency is authorized to govern the sale and labeling of pesticides. The federal law bars pesticides that are “misbranded,” or lack warnings that may be necessary to protect health and the environment. According to the law, states cannot impose labeling requirements that differ from or go beyond what federal law already mandates for these products. Manufacturers must register pesticides and herbicides with the EPA before selling them, and when a product is registered, the agency signs off on its labels. 

Durnell’s case rests on a Missouri law that bans the sale of dangerous products without adequate warnings. Monsanto argued those claims should have been preempted by FIFRA, since the company registered its product with the EPA and received approval for its label. The central legal question before the Supreme Court, then, is whether the EPA’s approval of that label overrides the Missouri state law. 

The justices appeared divided on the case during oral arguments. Several, including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, pressed attorneys on whether preemption would block states from responding to changing research. “Could we have a world in which a product that has been registered, the label is consistent with what the agency has said is appropriate at the time of registration, but let’s say a new research study comes out at some point between when the EPA is statutorily required to look at it again that casts doubt on the safety of this product?” Jackson asked Paul Clement, a former solicitor general and a lawyer for Monsanto, appearing skeptical of the company’s claim.

Clement responded by saying, “I think the way that you deal with that and the way the agency deals with that is either through some amended registration or some cancellation process which could be subject to judicial review.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett then put a finer point on Jackson’s inquiry: “But could the agency come after you for misbranding if you didn’t comply with your statutory obligation to give the updated information to the EPA?” 

“Absolutely,” Clement responded. “But it wouldn’t be a misbranding action.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to side with Monsanto’s argument that varying state requirements undermine federal uniformity. “Do you think it’s uniformity when each state can require different things?” Kavanaugh asked Ashley Keller, the attorney representing Durnell. 

The EPA’s handling of pesticides has been fraught and shapes the stakes of the case considerably. Glyphosate is America’s most-used herbicide on agricultural crops — more than 280 million pounds of the chemical are applied to roughly 300 million acres of farmland every year, according to the EPA. In 2021, the EPA did a biological evaluation on glyphosate and found 1,676 endangered plant and animal species are likely to be harmed by the chemical. J.W. Glass, a senior EPA policy analyst at the conservation nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, which contributed to an amicus brief filed in support of Durnell, said the sheer scale of glyphosate use is the problem, and the ripple effects can show up not only in the environment, but in people’s bodies. Farmworkers face some of the most acute exposure risk, a byproduct of working on farmland where the use of herbicides like Roundup is a routine part of crop production, according to Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, a senior grassroots advocacy coordinator at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. 

“The indiscriminate use of it, and how much we use it, is the environmental issue,” said Glass. “You have these cases where people are spraying it directly into waterways for weed control.”  

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Glass said there are “plenty of issues” in the EPA’s pesticide labeling process. Two analyses his organization co-released with the Center for Food Safety in March found that the EPA has routinely left cancer warnings off pesticide products even when its own assessments have identified cancer risks. “Does EPA actually label pesticides when they are found to be a carcinogen? And the answer is, it’s very rare. But that’s only one part of it. There are all sorts of, I would say, loopholes that have been exploited within the pesticide law,” he said.

As reported by Mother Jones, the EPA spent more than a decade reviewing Roundup before clearing the herbicide in 2020 under the federal standard that its agricultural benefits outweighed its societal harms — only for that assessment to be swiftly challenged in court by environmental groups. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the EPA’s assessment in 2022, finding serious “errors in assessing human-­health risk.” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told Congress last Tuesday that a new ruling on the herbicide is coming by the year’s end. 

At that same hearing, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat in New York, cited internal EPA emails that noted Bayer promised to “provide a small thanks” to Zeldin for the agency updating its webpage on glyphosate after an appeals court struck down a California label warning against the chemical’s cancer risk. The emails, according to Ocasio-Cortez, also show that the company “wanted to thank you and your agency for removing support for California’s warning because their case before the Supreme Court right now hinges on you not warning the American people and withdrawing your support on glyphosate.” 

“Do you understand the conflict of interest that is before the American people right now, Mr. Secretary?” Ocasio-Cortez asked the EPA administrator. According to transcripts of the hearing, Zeldin did not explicitly respond.

The Durnell case has become a national flashpoint for environmentalists, public health advocates, and Trump voters who consider themselves a part of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Some of that friction can be traced back to last year, when the administration urged the Supreme Court to take up Bayer’s case. Then, in February, the president issued an executive order deeming glyphosate-based herbicides key to national security and calling for more domestic production of the chemical, which was met with serious backlash within the MAHA coalition. Trump’s administration also sent a lawyer to argue last Monday on behalf of the chemical company. 

As justices heard oral arguments, a crowd of protesters gathered outside of the Supreme Court for what they called “The People vs. Poison” rally. At the same time, members of the U.S. House of Representatives debated provisions of the farm bill that would have blocked states from passing pesticide label requirements that differ from federal labels. Those provisions were stripped in a House amendment vote last Thursday, and the Senate is expected to vote in the coming weeks on the farm bill.

Kelly Ryerson, the prominent MAHA activist and founder of the website Glyphosate Facts who helped organize “The People vs. Poison” rally, said the Durnell case amounts to a litmus test for whether the administration is truly serious about the MAHA agenda. 

A ruling that strips people’s ability to file state-level failure-to-warn claims would be “catastrophic for public health,” said Ryerson. “It would be entirely because of this administration, and it will be unforgivable.” The Supreme Court is expected to render its decision this summer, giving voters just months to reckon with the ruling before heading to the midterm polls. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Supreme Court is deciding whether Roundup, America’s most-used herbicide, needs a cancer warning on May 4, 2026.

The new data center proposed for a quiet city about 115 miles east of San Diego came across people’s radars in different ways.

For patrons of the deli on West Aten Road, it was the white “Not In My Backyard” signs jutting out of lawns.  

For local irrigation district workers, it was something called an “electric service application.” 

For Margie Padilla, it was a rant on Facebook.

The 43-year-old mom came across a post online while she had a few minutes to scan social media last spring after a day spent tending her garden and taking care of her two boys.

“Somebody was complaining about this center,” Padilla said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’” 

What’s going on is the second-largest new data center being considered statewide, which would be less than half a mile from Padilla’s stucco home in the center of Imperial Valley. If finished by 2028, as the developer expects, the at least 950,000-square-foot, two-story data center could be the largest operating statewide, taking up 17 football fields’ worth of land. 

The roughly $10 billion, 330-megawatt data center would require 750,000 gallons of water a day to operate, said developer Sebastian Rucci, who insists electricity and water costs won’t rise due to the data center. 

The proposed 330-megawatt data center in Imperial, Calif., is slated to take up 17 football fields of land and needs 750,000 gallons of water a day. Courtesy of Sebastian Rucci

“We have studies on the air. We have studies on the water. The electricity could be handled,” Rucci said. “We did our homework.” 

Imperial officials haven’t quelled local concerns, only noting that the project is facing litigation and that the center’s long-term impacts on utilities haven’t been determined. 

On top of the financial burden of maintaining her family’s health, gas and grocery expenses strain Padilla’s budget, and she’s worried a new data center will only increase water and power costs. Padilla, who first heard of the data center a year ago, has only grown more concerned, and she’s not alone. 

Some residents would see it from their backyards.

“I can only imagine the rates going up once that data center is up and running,” she said, shading her eyes from the beaming sun.

This is one of two dozen data centers expected to open in California in the next few years.

Growing concern and regulatory gaps

A majority of respondents to a nationwide poll by the US Water Alliance’s Value of Water campaign share Padilla’s worries, with 54 percent extremely or very concerned about the effect data centers will have on water quality, water supply, and costs in their area. 

In its first question about data centers since the poll began in 2016, two-thirds of voters said it was important for their state to have a plan for the effects of data centers on water in the coming years.

“I suspect that as data centers continue to be part of the broad conversation, then these numbers will probably continue to go up as people are more concerned about the impacts they have on the things that affect them and their communities, like supply, quality and cost,” said Scott Berry, the senior advisor on policy and external affairs at the US Water Alliance, from Water Week in Washington D.C. this month.

More than 90 percent of data centers in the U.S. get most of the water they need for cooling from municipal systems, estimated Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. 

During the hottest summer days, a large 100-megawatt facility can use about 1 million gallons of water for evaporative cooling. That amount is the same as about 10,000 people’s daily water use at home, Ren said. 

But those centers require “zero water for many days of the year when it’s cool outside,” he said.

Some data centers are exploring alternatives like treated wastewater or graywater for cooling instead of drinkable water, providing residents and officials with options that could reduce strain on local water supplies.

California doesn’t require AI data centers to report water usage, and the state’s Water Resources Control Board does not maintain a specific list of water rights held by data centers. Although residents are working to require more transparency about water use from data centers, recent efforts to require the facilities’ owners to report how much water they use to the state have faltered.

On top of the data center boom in California, the hundreds of water districts, a deepening Southwestern megadrought and the diminishing of the Colorado River increasingly complicate water issues. 

Also, while data centers can take as little as two to three years to build, developing new water sources can take as long as 20 years, said Ren.

Plans for the steep increase in water demand from California data centers inevitably focus on infrastructure, experts said.

“Water is not purely an environmental issue,” Ren noted. “In many places, it is fundamentally an infrastructure challenge.”

Across the country, water infrastructure upgrades are estimated to cost between $10 billion to $58 billion, Ren’s research team found. How many more facilities are built and where will be a big factor in future infrastructure costs.

The site of the proposed data center in Imperial, California. Steven Rodas / Inside Climate News

The amount of electricity a data center uses, to some degree, determines how much heat it produces, and consequently how much cooling it requires and, in turn, how much water it needs.

The Imperial County data center is one of 24 planned for completion across California by 2030, according to the latest information gathered by analysts at Cleanview, a market intelligence platform. 

Based on the about 1.7 GW of electricity the proposed data centers would use, with at least two projects for which there aren’t energy consumption figures, water infrastructure upgrade costs just for the demands of the centers in the state could run from about $200 million to $800 million, Ren said.

“This number assumes that California data centers’ water use intensity is the same as the national average,” he explained.

There is no central permitting authority for data centers in California, and most are overseen by city and county governments, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. Data Center Map shows 286 of the facilities currently operating in California.

While California’s size and tech focus lead some to expect many more data centers here, the cost and availability of power and land, as well as the general tax and regulatory climate, have been hurdles to building them out, according to the Data Center Coalition, which represents big corporations like Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft.

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Nonetheless, California trails only Virginia and Texas in the number of individual data center locations, but its centers have much lower total new electricity capacity, which may also indicate lower water demand.

A research team at the University of California, Riverside, recently found that data centers could collectively require 697 to 1,451 million gallons per day (MGD) of new water capacity nationally through 2030. New York City’s average daily supply is about 1,000 MGD.

Currently, data centers are estimated to use about 39 billion gallons of water nationally each year, Khara Boender, the senior manager for state policy at the Data Center Coalition, said, citing market research from Bluefield. 

“I know when we start to talk about billions of gallons of water in a year, that sounds absolutely crazy,” Boender said. “Looking at how that falls into context with some of these other large water users, I think that that kind of contextualization could be surprising to folks.”

Alfalfa irrigation in California’s Imperial Valley alone uses more than 800 billion gallons a year, an April essay in Outside highlighted. The beverage industry uses 533 billion gallons of water a year, and the semiconductor industry uses 59 billion gallons, Boender noted.

But spikes in water needs for data centers can lead to bottlenecks in small community water systems, Ren, at the University of California, Riverside, noted. “Only comparing the annual totals can obscure the real water challenge,” he said.

There is no single fix for the pressure data centers are placing on water supplies across the state, which will be different depending on the location and water systems where each facility is built, said Shivaji Deshmukh, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — the largest supplier of treated water in the U.S. The district serves 19 million people in six California counties.

“Every community — even within our service area — is different in terms of costs, what type of supply they have. Some regions have access to groundwater. Some have access to treated wastewater or recycled water somewhere along the coast,” Deshmukh said.

So industries, most of which require water for cooling, will look to satisfy that thirst from different sources, depending on their location. 

“Imperial Irrigation District is one where I know they’re discussing … installation of data centers in their area,” Deshmukh said.

The Imperial dilemma

The plot of dirt on West Aton Road betrays nothing of the colossal data center that could one day sit on the land. Owner Sebastian Rucci hopes to have the facility up and running by the summer of 2028, he said.

Rucci, who is also a lawyer, has purchased 235 acres for his data center so far. He says the data center will allow Google to train its Gemini artificial intelligence, although Google denies any involvement “in a data center project in Imperial County.”

Before he can begin building on the site, a judge will weigh in on the city of Imperial’s lawsuit against the project, which demands that it clear higher environmental hurdles, including the California Environmental Quality Act — which often draws ire from developers who claim it can needlessly stall proposals. The local water district also has to complete its review of the project.

Rucci is determined, though, citing a series of studies conducted by survey and consulting groups, and by the district itself, which manages water and provides power. He posted those reports online to show the data center made sense — in part because water and power could be effectively provided to the data center, and the land was permitted for industrial use. 

Margie Padilla tours her garden on April 16, where she holds a carrot that she thinks hasn’t grown well due to drier temperatures in the Imperial Valley. Steven Rodas / Inside Climate News

The debate between supporters and opponents of the facility has escalated, with the next court date set for the end of April.

With that date in mind, Padilla, the Imperial mother, set out to work in her garden on a balmy Thursday morning. 

Donning a green, short-sleeved shirt and flip-flops, she checked on her squash, poked at her cherry tomatoes, and dug in her spade to move periwinkle to a better spot for watering. And through it all, she wondered what the thirst of the proposed data center would do to her garden. And her monthly water bill.

Her payment for water, sewer, and trash services currently ranges from $90 to $130 a month — more than double what she paid six years ago. 

“I’m also afraid they’re going to put [water] restrictions for us, for the residents,” said Padilla, who estimates her family of four uses about 300 gallons of water a day. “That’s going to be harsh on me, particularly, because of my garden. I grow my own food, my own vegetables.” 

Worries over power and water price surges are misguided, Rucci said. He has been considering power and water needs for the 18 months he has worked on the project, he said, and outlined how it would bring various economic benefits to the region, including about 100 permanent jobs post-construction. 

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Still, Padilla is thinking about other things. She says her two sons were anemic when they were younger, requiring them to eat fresh produce to supplement the iron their bodies needed. Even after treating the condition, the Imperial mom keeps her sons’ diet filled with veggies and fruits. She needs her garden for that.

The Imperial Irrigation District declined to be interviewed for this story but, in a written statement, noted that it has yet to receive a formal request for water for the project.

The District, which provides water and power to all of Imperial County as well as parts of Riverside and San Diego counties, did not have specific estimates of how demand from the data center could impact its costs.

“Water was very concerning to us from the beginning,” Rucci said.

He’s spoken with city officials in Imperial and El Centro to arrange a water deal for the facility, he said, and proposed getting 6 million gallons per day of reclaimed water from both cities.

“Our plan was we would do all the municipal upgrades at our cost, and then we would take the excess water and run it clean to the Salton Sea,” he said. 

Those conversations have not paid off, although Rucci said he remains hopeful municipal officials will help him get water for his facility. 

“We first tried to do reclaimed water. I still prefer that, but that seems to be taking months, and I don’t know if that … will happen,” Rucci said. “Probably we’ll just get it from the [Imperial Irrigation District]” by purchasing it for industrial use.

How the center obtains its water may change as its plans are updated, he added. 

Through it all, he remains confident the data center will be built in Imperial County and be good for the area.

Carolina Paez disagrees.

The 46-year-old mother’s backyard abuts the data center site. She says she’d be able to hit it with a rock from her property. 

Both she and her son have asthma, and she’s worried about the construction dust, potential pollution, and noise from the data center. And higher bills.

“I’m not just thinking about the expenses that are going to increase, but also about the things that are going to lose value — for instance, my house,” Paez said in Spanish.

“What am I going to do with this property? Who would even want to live here?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California will soon have more than 300 data centers. Where will they get their water? on May 3, 2026.

In March, a month traditionally known for heavy mountain snows and dreary lower-elevation weather, a heat wave settled across the West, shattering temperature records from Tucson, Arizona, to Casper, Wyoming.

The heat wave’s intensity and early arrival shocked many climate scientists. “It is exceptionally difficult for the Earth system to produce temperatures this warm so early in the season,” wrote Daniel Swain, a climatologist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources who runs the Weather West blog.

Yet not only did Western locations set new March highs; many exceeded temperature records for May. And those high temperatures kept hanging on, said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at the nonprofit science center Climate Central, for nearly two weeks.

While heat waves are a natural phenomenon, this was the earliest and most widespread one ever recorded in the Southwest. And it was caused by climate change, which is making intense heat waves much more likely. Researchers say this means understanding their fallout is even more important.

Scientists are just now beginning to understand the ramifications of a devastating 2021 heat wave, when a massive heat dome brought 120-degree temperatures to the Pacific Northwest, causing widespread ecological damage. Tens of thousands of trees died. Baby birds that could not yet fly plummeted to the ground as they tried to escape the heat. Salmon and trout suffocated in small streams. Millions — perhaps even billions — of mussels and barnacles cooked.

Number of daily record highs broken in March 2026

This year’s heat wave may not have had the same immediate ecological impacts, but it comes on the heels of an already record-breaking hot, dry winter. Researchers say 2021 holds lessons about what lies ahead for both vulnerable and resilient species. Ecosystems, they warn, are likely to permanently change as some species simply can’t handle the heat.

Fully understanding the impact that events like heat waves have on long-lived tree species takes time. Research is now trickling out from places like Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, and it’s not good.

The 2021 heat wave either killed or otherwise harmed more than three-quarters of species surveyed, including by limiting their reproductive success, according to Julia Baum, a professor at the University of Victoria who co-wrote a recent paper on the long-term impacts. The hardest hit, perhaps unsurprisingly, were those unable to move to seek shade or cooler temperatures. Marine species like acorn barnacles and green rope seaweed fared the worst, as did kelp, surfgrass, and rockweed.

“The rocky shorelines they live on heated up to [122 Fahrenheit]. Think of being glued to hot concrete on the most scorching summer day: They essentially baked and died,” said Baum. “On land, wildflowers wilted and died, preventing entire populations from reproducing that year, and there was widespread leaf scorch and death in forests.”

Some species that could move modified their behavior: Ferruginous hawks reduced their flight time by about 81 percent, while wolves moved around more, perhaps seeking hunkered-down prey like mule deer and moose.

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Meanwhile, species already adapted to hotter or more variable temperature ranges adjusted better than others.

The heat wave’s timing also mattered, said Adam Sibley, a remote sensing scientist and co-author of a 2025 paper that examined the impact on trees and forests. Plants tend to acclimate to heat throughout a season, so the triple-digit temperatures that struck in June hit harder than they would have in August.

So many tree needles died, in fact, that when Sibley drove to the Oregon coast with friends a few days after the heat wave ended, the tree canopy looked as though it had been dusted with orange snow.

New buds and needles are fragile for a number of reasons, said Christopher Still, a forest ecology professor at Oregon State University. Many contain fatty membranes that, when super-heated, will melt and cause the leaf to fall apart. Young leaves and needles also lack “heat hardening” mechanisms like specialized proteins that stabilize mature leaves and needles when it’s hot.

Many larger, more well-established trees, such as Douglas fir, lost a growing season: Their needles fell off, but grew back the following year. Other trees died, especially younger ones and species like Sitka spruce and western red cedar that require cooler, wetter temperatures.

The 2021 heat wave also rapidly dried grasses, flowers, and other fine fuels, leading to record-breaking wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, according to a 2024 paper in the journal Nature.

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While the timing of this year’s heat wave surprised many climatologists, the fact that it arrived in March may have ultimately saved some Southwestern plants, said Osvaldo Sala, a professor and director of Arizona State University’s Global Drylands Center.

During the hottest period, he explained, many plants were still dormant. Desert plants tie their growing cycles to rain and moisture instead of heat or sun duration. That means that, unlike in places like Wyoming, where cherry trees started blooming in March instead of May, desert plants were still waiting for rains to come.

Unfortunately, that early blooming has left the cherry trees and other flowering plants particularly susceptible to spring frosts, Still said.

The effects of this year’s heat dome have only exacerbated the winter’s record-setting heat and drought, Still added. Snowpack across much of the West was abysmal; in many places, it was the worst in recorded history. 

“The heat dome put an exclamation point on the worst winter in a century,” said Still. “It was the worst possible way to end the winter that was already worse than normal.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ramifications of record-shattering heat on the West’s ecosystems on May 2, 2026.

For almost half a century, the vast majority of climate experts have agreed on a solution to global warming: stop burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas. But despite the political efforts of governments across the world to promote replacing these fuels, fossil sources have remained a stubbornly large share of global energy — around 80 percent at last count.

But the war in Iran, which the United States and Israel launched two months ago this week, may turn out to be the push that dislodges fossil fuels’ place atop the world’s energy system. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway near Iran through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas supplies flow, has been blocked since early March, with no relief in sight. This has created the biggest energy crisis in modern history. Twenty-five countries are now reporting critical road fuel, jet fuel, or heating oil shortages. 

But unlike the oil shock of the 1970s, which occurred in a time when substitutes for fossil fuels were not yet powerful or cheap enough to build at scale, this disruption is happening as renewable energy sources are beginning to outcompete fossil fuels, providing countries with new energy options at costs that have plummeted in recent years.

“We now have a viable alternative,” said Selwin C. Hart, a special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General, at a first-of-its-kind international conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels in Colombia this week. “Renewables have changed the equation.” 

But even though this calculus has changed, it’s too soon to say where the chips will fall as the world’s energy system evolves. While the reliability of a huge chunk of the world’s oil and natural gas is now perhaps permanently in question, it’s not certain that renewables will fill all or even most of the gap. Coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, is taking on a renewed appeal in a world desperate to replace natural gas for electricity, and it remains difficult for solar and wind to replace the around-the-clock power provided by both of those fossil fuels.

“It’s hard to say which direction things will go,” Daan Walter, a lead researcher at the energy think tank Ember, told Grist.

Still, two months after the war began it’s becoming clear which sources of energy stand to win and which stand to lose as the world changes in response to the conflict. As prices rise and supplies dwindle, countries around the globe are reevaluating their energy futures. While some have fallen back on dirty fuels to fill the gaps caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, others have announced significant investments in clean energy to chart a path away from the sources of energy they have relied on for more than a hundred years. 

Iraq has begun exporting oil by sending tanker trucks through Syria. An official said oil revenue dropped more than 70 percent in March.
Bakr ALkasem / AFP / Getty Images Losers: Oil and natural gas

The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint through which more than 20 percent of the world’s oil supply passes, including exports from major producers such as Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The small nation of Qatar produces around one-fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which it exports on boats in superchilled tanks. Iran’s drone attacks have damaged Qatar’s major gas infrastructure and prevented all the nations in the region from sending both oil and LNG shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.

The main buyers of this oil are in Asia, but tankers from the strait travel all over the world, including to the U.S. The first month of the war set off a scramble to replace this lost supply. Major buyers like China and Japan started hoarding refined oil products they would normally export and began rationing their strategic fuel reserves. Rich importers like Australia and California paid more to secure seaborne oil from other countries.

Most nations don’t have the same luxuries; they simply have to use less oil. In Asia, the loss of LNG compounds the problem tremendously. Several major Asian economies including Japan, Korea, and Singapore rely on LNG to run their power plants and factories. Many LNG shippers sign long-term contracts with importing countries, meaning there weren’t any spare shipments floating around, as was the case with crude oil after the start of the war. If they wanted to keep the lights on, these countries had to turn back to dirtier coal power.

Nepali consumers line up to receive partially-filled liquefied petroleum gas cylinders at a depot of the Nepal Oil Corporation in Kathmandu, Nepal, on March 14, 2026.
Sanjit Pariyar / NurPhoto / Getty Images

The loss of LNG from Qatar was a big win for the United States, which is the world’s other biggest exporter of liquefied gas. The LNG exporters who did have spare capacity available could command eye-watering prices from countries that needed the fuel. But there’s a limit to how much more gas the U.S. can send to fill the gap: liquefying natural gas requires the construction of massive factories on the coast, which can take years, and existing plants are already running at full capacity. In the meantime, the disruption has dampened enthusiasm for what had been a very popular fuel, said  Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and the former head of gas analysis at BP. 

“If you are an LNG importer and you are looking at the global market, you’re thinking, ‘do I want to be exposed in that way?’” she said.

Meanwhile, governments across Asia have rolled out a host of policies intended to cut down on the consumption of oil and natural gas: They lowered speed limits, mandated remote work, set thermostats higher despite hot weather, and asked employees to take the stairs rather than using the elevator. They have also waived fuel taxes and banned price increases to prevent an affordability crisis. These measures have contained unrest and economic collapse for now, but further warning signs are emerging. Airlines in Europe, Africa, and New Zealand have cancelled hundreds of flights, and small carriers in the U.S. are facing bankruptcy as the price of jet fuel rises.

In the long term, the oil crisis may accelerate a preexisting shift to electric vehicles and hybrids, which had already begun to outsell gas cars in many countries in Europe and Asia. In the first month of the war, electric-vehicle sales jumped by more than 50 percent in big European economies like France and Germany, and by almost 200 percent in Brazil. While gas cars still make up the vast majority of vehicles on the road today, a fast shift to EVs — juiced by government mandates such as Indonesia’s — could cause oil demand to plateau or decline in the coming years.

Winners: Coal, solar, nuclear

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel; it produces far more carbon dioxide than oil or natural gas to generate the same amount of energy. Although some major economies like China and India still burn tremendous amounts of it, many world powers have been shifting toward liquefied natural gas and renewables over the past decade, cutting emissions in the process.

Even so, most of these coal-to-gas switchers never decommissioned their old coal plants — they just stopped using them. Since the beginning of the war, the availability of this legacy coal fleet has allowed countries across Asia to ramp up coal capacity to fill the gap in lost LNG imports. South Korea lifted a previous emissions limit that barred coal plants from running at more than 80 percent of total capacity, allowing the coal fleet to generate as much power as possible. On the other side of the globe, some European countries like Italy are extending the lifespans of their coal plants, in some cases by more than a decade. 

“The real question is how governments balance short-term energy security with long-term climate commitments,” said Dinita Setyawati, a Jakarta-based analyst for Ember who studies decarbonization in Asian economies.

Japan’s government plans to temporarily lift restrictions on coal-fired power plants like the Isogo Thermal Power Station.
Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP / Getty Images

Although most experts believe coal power will continue its decline as a major source of primary energy, Corbeau said that the crisis could prolong its lifespan in Asia, breaking natural gas’s role as a so-called “bridge fuel” between coal and renewables.

“They could definitely keep coal, add more renewables, and do less LNG in the end,” said Corbeau. “It may be that a lot of countries say that coal is a lot less subject to geopolitics, therefore we are going to use more coal.”

No renewable source is in a better position to surge than solar. Solar farms already made up the vast majority of new power plants even before the war, and Chinese exports of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles hit records in March, according to recently-released export data. (China is by far the world’s most prolific exporter of renewable energy technology.)

The countries most affected by the Iran War are among the areas seeing the “sharpest increases in demand” for these products, according to Ember. Exports of Chinese batteries rose 44 percent; the European Union, Australia, and India were top customers. The flow of solar components to India rose by 6.6 gigawatts between February and March, a nearly 150 percent increase. Solar exports to Africa rose 176 percent over the same time frame. Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia led the way with more than a gigawatt of growth each. All told, 50 countries set records for Chinese solar imports in March. 

After Europe saw its solar market contract slightly last year, demand for rooftop solar in countries across the continent is surging as electricity bills rise, according to a report from Reuters. Three major energy equipment wholesalers interviewed for the report have seen their sales spike more than 30 percent, with one company’s net sales tripling in March. The European Commission, which released a document last week calling for more electrification, renewables, and energy efficiency measures to counteract the ongoing energy shortage, will present energy ministers with proposals for how to reduce short-term fossil fuel exposure at a meeting in Greece next month.

Solar panels on a residential building’s balconies in Germany.
Martin Schutt / picture alliance / Getty Images

In Vietnam, a company that planned to build a 4.8-gigawatt liquefied natural gas plant — which would have been the country’s largest — has axed those plans and now aims to build a wind, battery storage, and solar facility instead. South Korea recently announced a fast-tracked plan to deploy 100 gigawatts of renewables by 2030, a plan that includes 400 billion won, or roughly $270 million, for low-interest loans for village solar projects. (One hundred gigawatts is roughly enough electricity to power Ho Chi Minh City 10 times over.)

While solar is a clear winner in light of the new bottleneck in the Middle East, the outlook for wind power is less clear. On the one hand, the German wind turbine maker Nordex saw its shares reach a 24-year high in the first quarter of 2026, as demand for clean energy in Europe continues to rise. But the Iranian and American blockades of the Strait of Hormuz could stymie the delivery of wind turbine components such as foundations and substations, many of which are manufactured in the Persian Gulf. This could have a depressive effect on wind growth even if countries in Europe and the United Kingdom wish to boost development. 

There’s a chance, however, that the biggest winner may be the most controversial form of climate-friendly power. For decades, the growth of nuclear energy has been constrained by high prices and long development timelines; it can take over a decade to get a plant licensed and built. Disasters like the 2011 tsunami that damaged the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan further dampened nuclear’s growth. In Europe, pressure from anti-nuclear environmental groups led many countries to decommission their nuclear power fleets. As a result, the share of power coming from nuclear reactors globally reached its lowest point in four decades in 2022.

Anti-nuclear sentiment was starting to soften before the war in the Middle East began, but the Iran War is speeding up this trend, prompting countries that shunned nuclear for decades to reevaluate the role that around-the-clock carbon-free energy plays on their grids. Early evidence for a nuclear surge is strongest in Asia, which is most reliant on Middle Eastern oil and natural gas. In Taiwan, a country that gets a third of its liquefied natural gas from Qatar, the state utility formally submitted a restart plan for its Maanshan nuclear plant a month after the war began.

South Korea, which already gets about 30 percent of its power from nuclear, signed a cooperative agreement with Vietnam to jointly develop new nuclear capacity, building on talks that began last year. After restarting Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, which is the world’s largest nuclear plant, in January, Japan inked a$40 billion deal to build advanced small nuclear reactors in the American south during a visit to the White House in March. Japan also signed a 5-year “memorandum of cooperation” with Indonesia aimed at advancing nuclear power and critical minerals development around the same time.

Construction at the Penly nuclear power plant in Petit-Caux on the English channel coast. France’s nuclear recovery program provides for the construction of six new reactors.
Ludovic MARIN / POOL / AFP via Getty Images

Elsewhere, countries are delaying nuclear phase-outs and talking about how to boost capacity. “I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in March this year as she announced a $232 million fund to galvanize private investment in new nuclear technologies. The Commission warned member states like Spain and Belgium against prematurely phasing out nuclear power plants. In Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa reaffirmed their support for nuclear; nearly half of the countries on the continent had long-term nuclear development plans before the war began. This week, the government of Belgium began negotiations to take over a fleet of nuclear reactors that the utility Engie had been planning to shut down.

“All decommissioning activities are being halted with immediate effect,” said the country’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, in a statement.

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Two months in, the Iran war has changed the global energy system forever on May 1, 2026.

I caught a raccoon almost literally red-handed the other day. The night before, it (and presumably the comrades in its pack, technically known as a “gaze” of raccoons, because sure why not) had assaulted my garden, digging holes willy-nilly and uprooting seedlings I’d just put in the ground. In my three years of gardening, I’ve never actually seen the critters I’ve been at war with, on account of their nighttime raids. I’ve only found their aftermath. But now I had solid evidence: A muddy paw print on a watering can the invaders had tipped over to get a drink. 

You might wonder, then, why in his new Netflix docuseries, This Is a Gardening Show, Zach Galifianakis gushes about the joys of adding water and nutrients to a plot of land, hoping something actually grows, and then further hoping that it doesn’t get uprooted by omnivorous nocturnal bandits. “I honestly think for human beings and for the world itself, the only future is agrarian,” says Galifianakis, himself a gardener, in an episode about composting. “We should all know how to garden. It’s a better hobby than jetskiing.”

It’s exactly because gardening can be so frustrating and seemingly arbitrary — though, admittedly, much safer than jetskiing — that it is, in fact, joyful. Visiting various farms across six short episodes, Galifianakis finds that gardeners seem happier and funnier than most folk. Maybe it’s because they get to be outside all the time, or they’ve got balanced diets, or because they’re reliving their childhoods as they search for earthworms wiggling in compost. Or, more likely, it’s because raccoons have somehow vanished from that part of the world. 

Damning evidence left by the critters ravaging my garden. Courtesy of Matt Simon

This is not the Galifianakis of Between Two Ferns fame, in which he eviscerates celebrities who are in on the joke. His new show is still funny, of course, though in a sweeter, bucolic way. (A good chunk of the humor comes from not-especially-insightful — at least as far as gardeners are concerned — segments in each episode in which he asks school children about food.) When Galifianakis is traipsing around gardens, the biting, sardonic wit of Ferns gives way to genuine awe of what these farmers can accomplish. 

I identify. While I’m walking around the garden in the morning, watering and assessing the damage, I’m also cutting flowers to hang inside and dry. I’m watching bumblebees bumble around, fertilizing my native plants. I’m snapping new spears from my asparagus plants and eating them raw. (You haven’t lived until you’ve had asparagus straight out of the ground — they’re unbelievably tender, and mine have a somewhat peppery, garlicky taste.) Unlike the masterful producers profiled in This Is a Gardening Show, I’m not generating nearly enough sustenance even to feed myself, true enough. But in my experience, that’s not the point.

A glimpse into their operations stands in stark contrast to modern industrial agriculture. Food prices are skyrocketing as farmers struggle to pay for fuel and fertilizer, especially after Iran closed the Straight of Hormuz. People are freaked out about ultra-processed fare. Droughts are exhausting water supplies as the world gets too hot to feed itself. While humble gardens can’t feed the world on their own, they can certainly help with food security, especially when tucked into cities. Heck, you can even grow crops on top of buildings, under the shade of solar panels, thus generating both nutrition and clean electricity. 

Whereas industrial farms grow monocrops, like vast fields of wheat, gardens are more diverse and adaptive to a changing planet. Galifianakis, for instance, visits Royann Petrell and Sylvain Alie, founders of Steller Raven Ecological Farm, who’ve developed a variety they call the “future of tomatoes,” in that it “doesn’t mind 140 degrees in a greenhouse.” They say its taste improves the hotter it gets, in fact. Compare that to the industrial, perfectly formed, perfectly tasteless tomato you’ll find in the supermarket. 

Asparagus spears grow out of the ground like this, ready to eat. Courtesy of Matt Simon

Even though it was released on Earth Day, this is not a show centered on climate change, which is a massive threat to farmers big and small. We can imagine that these gardeners might be struggling with water shortages or extreme heat waves withering their crops, or growing seasons getting thrown out of whack. But more often, Galifianakis jokingly predicts a kind of generalized civilizational collapse. “There will be mass population decline, and there will be a small group of people that will be able to continue on, and their lineage will be able to continue on,” he says. “But a lot of us are gonna die.” 

Apocalypses aside, This Is a Gardening Show is a charmer, much more about triumphs of gardening than its many lows. A garden abhors arrogance — one thing after another lies in wait to humble you. From your many struggles, you realize the futility of struggling: Pests will come and go, weeds will grow even in the event of a nuclear winter, and a carefully tended vegetable will simply give up and die on you. Sometimes it’s your fault, and sometimes a plant is just trying to be difficult. Living in San Francisco, our infamous microclimates mean one species might grow big and strong in someone’s backyard a mile away, but struggle to survive in my own. I’m still learning, and will probably always be learning. And I’m very jealous of the masterful gardeners in the series.

As the seasons come and go, you find a rhythm in gardening, and things click into place. You learn that as much death as life visits a garden, and that’s OK. You problem-solve and improvise not just because you have to, but because it’s fun. Share a garden with someone and you forge a unique bond, like Petrell and Alie strolling hand-in-hand among their tomatoes. “Can I just say, off the record, seeing you guys hold hands through the garden, that’s what does it to humans, right?” Galifianakis says. “The garden is good for us. It can be a lifesaver.”

But then, inevitably, return the frustrations, which we don’t see too much of in the show, and the adaptations they demand from the gardener. For my part, I imagine raccoons are digging up my garden to find earthworms, grubs, and other invertebrates. (To be fair to raccoons, I can’t rule out an opossum as the culprit, or they might even be co-conspirators that trade off nights. But living near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, raccoons are absolutely everywhere in my neighborhood.) But I drew the line when they repeatedly dug up my sugar pea seedlings last year, which I had for weeks grown from seed, then transplanted into the ground. So this year, instead of providing a single A-frame trellis for the plants to climb, I locked the seedlings inside by breaking a second frame in half and zip-tying the two pieces to either end of the structure. Irony among ironies, though: Research suggests that raccoons love solving puzzles for the fun of it, so they’ll get the same pleasure breaking the cage that I enjoyed improvising. 

But back to the show. The quaint farms that Galifianakis visits are as much producers of sustenance as they are of knowledge. You’ll learn a lot from the series, like where apples came from, how to graft a fruit tree, how corn will develop weirdly if not pollinated properly, and what you shouldn’t add to your compost bin (if you think plastic utensils are OK, maybe gardening isn’t for you after all). 

The short series won’t turn you into a master gardener. But it doesn’t have to, because much of the thrill of gardening is figuring it out for yourself through trial and error, when dealing with raccoons or otherwise. “Very pompously, if I were to offer a remedy to the human condition, it would be a garden,” Galifianakis says. “Or acid.”

So Zach, the next time you’re in San Francisco and want to lend me a hand, let me know. With the raccoons, not the acid.  

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline While Zach Galifianakis finds peace in gardening, I’m at war with raccoons on May 1, 2026.

Abigail Spanberger won a landslide victory in the Virginia governor’s race last November with a platform that focused on reining in rising electricity costs. Virginia is home to the world’s largest concentration of artificial-intelligence data centers, and the state’s biggest utility is straining to meet an expected surge in power demand. Spanberger, a Democrat, promised on the campaign trail to “make Virginians’ bills more affordable.”

It might seem surprising, then, that the new governor signed a bill last month that would return Virginia to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, a carbon pricing program that covers electrical utilities in states across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. Spanberger’s Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, pulled out of the program in 2022.

“Cap-and-trade” programs like RGGI put a ceiling on the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide that utilities are allowed to emit when they generate electricity, and they require utilities to pay for every ton of carbon they emit below that cap. These programs can help drive utilities toward cleaner fuels, but they also increase costs, and those costs get passed on to consumers.

As a result, cap-and-trade programs have come under scrutiny as Democrats pivot to a focus on lowering costs for voters concerned about inflation. Democrats in California have called for relaxing the state’s cap-and-trade system this year, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has tried to punt on launching a cap-and-trade system that would apply to emissions from cars and buildings, on top of the state’s membership in RGGI. 

Supporters of RGGI (pronounced “reggie”) say that rather than driving bills up for Virginia households, re-entering the carbon price alliance could protect many families in the state from shouldering the costs of the data center boom. The revenues from selling pollution permits could eventually lower energy bills in many households and speed up Virginia utilities’ shift away from fossil fuels.

“Of course [RGGI] imposes costs on ratepayers, because we’re trying to internalize the costs that pollution is causing on everyone else,” said William Shobe, an original architect of the RGGI program who is now an emeritus professor of public policy at the University of Virginia. “But…if you design it right, it’s another tool for reallocating the costs that data centers are imposing on ratepayers.” 

The 10 other states in the RGGI program agree by consensus to lower the cap on emissions every few years, which should encourage utilities to get more power from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Since the program launched in 2009, utilities in the Northeast have reduced their overall emissions twice as fast as the rest of the United States, mainly by replacing dirty coal power with natural gas.

More than half of Virginians get their electricity from a giant utility called Dominion, which serves the state’s populous coast. In the past, Dominion has dealt with RGGI costs by imposing a surcharge on all customers. It came out to around $4.50 a month for the average household. Some have argued that the utility never needed to pass on these charges, but now that Virginia is rejoining RGGI, a representative from Dominion told Grist it will seek to reimpose them.

The price of a RGGI pollution permit has doubled in the past five years — from $8 to $16 for every ton — as member states have tried to ratchet down carbon emissions. At the same time, energy consumption in Virginia has increased by around 15 percent due to the AI boom. Data centers now consume around 20 percent of the state’s electricity, a number that could increase to more than 50 percent by 2030, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent research firm. 

That surge in demand means that Virginia’s utilities will have to purchase more carbon permits from RGGI, which will make it more expensive for them to burn natural gas. Even though Virginia left the alliance for a few years under Youngkin, it will have to keep up with the pace of decarbonization across the rest of the Northeast.

“[Virginia] is coming back at the allocation where they would be if they had not left,” said Andrew McKeon, the head of the nonprofit that manages RGGI, during a talk earlier this month at the BloombergNEF energy summit in New York City. 

But returning to RGGI might not harm Spanberger’s affordability agenda as much as opponents claim. States spend the revenue raised from permits on projects that help reduce energy bills. Before it left the program, Virginia spent about $250 million in RGGI funds to make low-income households more energy efficient by, for instance, weatherizing homes against temperature swings and upgrading HVAC systems. These improvements even benefit customers who don’t receive them because using less energy tamps down prices. That’s not to mention the future health benefits of reduced pollution from coal and gas plants.

Data centers themselves will likely foot a large share of the bill for rejoining RGGI, since they use such a big share of the state’s electricity. Late last year, Dominion rolled out a new rate structure for “large load” users, requiring them to pay for most of the cost of generating and distributing the power they need, an effort to ensure those costs didn’t get spread onto ordinary homeowners. Shobe said that Virginia legislators are weighing whether to change the way they spend RGGI’s revenues so that some of the money gets funneled to help low-income families pay their electric bills. 

“It [would be] an automatic mechanism for recovering some of those increased costs and giving it back,” he said. Some low-income households that don’t use much energy would see their bills go down compared to if Virginia wasn’t in RGGI. (Shobe has been appointed to Virginia’s state air pollution control board, though he doesn’t have an affiliation with the Spanberger administration.)

A coal power plant owned by Dominion Energy in Saint Paul, Virginia. The utility must replace all its fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy in the coming decades. Mike Belleme for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Even if RGGI doesn’t threaten Spanberger’s promise to lower energy bills, experts disagree about how much the cap-and-trade program will do to speed Virginia’s shift off fossil fuels. The state legislature has already ordered Dominion to phase out all its fossil fuel plants by 2045, although the utility is allowed to keep them open if it’s necessary to avoid blackouts. Dominion has brought around 2 gigawatts of solar power online over the past decade, and plans another 16 gigawatts over the next decade, at a cost of around $8 billion. In 2024, fossil fuels made up about 60 percent of Virginia’s energy mix, with the rest coming from nuclear and some solar.

Dominion will also soon begin taking power from the country’s largest offshore wind farm, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, which is nearing completion despite interference from the Trump administration. But the company is also seeking to expand a large gas power plant over the objection of environmentalists and community groups. Dominion plans to spend even more money on gas development than on solar, and it has met data center demand by importing power from dirtier coal and gas plants in West Virginia and Ohio. The utility said last year that phasing out its use of fossil fuels to meet the state’s law would cost $270 billion. (Environmental groups have disputed these estimates.)

Given the existing Virginia Clean Economy Act mandate and the high cost of maintaining reliable round-the-clock power without fossil fuels, some doubt that RGGI will push Virginia off natural gas any faster. 

“I don’t see a magic wand, we’re hitting the ceilings everywhere,” said Shuting Pomerleau, an energy analyst at American Action Forum, a center-right think tank. “I will be very skeptical if all these things combined could accelerate the decarbonization much faster than it currently already is.”

But supporters of Virginia’s rejoining RGGI argue that it will influence decisions made by Dominion and other utilities. These companies will soon need to spend tens of billions of dollars to meet surging demand, and that power has to come from somewhere. The financial nudge of RGGI will make investment in solar and batteries look more appealing compared to holding on to fossil fuels, said Jamie Dickerson, a senior policy analyst at the Acadia Center, a climate policy think tank.

“RGGI will be a direct price signal,” Dickerson said. 

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can a carbon price lower power bills? Virginia is betting yes. on May 1, 2026.

Since President Donald Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has made it harder for small and activist investors to raise concerns through the government filing system known as EDGAR. Now they’re pushing back with their own alternative platform, which they call the Proxy Open Exchange — or POE. 

Literary puns aside, the initiative is aimed at bringing greater transparency to an increasingly restricted space. In January, the SEC said it would no longer allow investors with less than $5 million in shares to use EDGAR to send communiqués called exempt solicitations to fellow shareholders. Such documents are often used to lay out an investor’s stance on a given issue, including climate action, board accountability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“We believe a free market requires communication,” said Andrew Behar, CEO of the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, which spearheaded the new site. “If they’re going to take away EDGAR, we’re going to give them POE.”

The response has been swift. In less than a week, POE has 63 filings, with dozens more expected. EDGAR shows just 39 exempt solicitations so far in 2026. 

The SEC declined to comment about POE, but has previously told Grist that limiting access to the system is an attempt to rein in the scope of government, ease burdensome regulation, and curtail the “large volume” of requests that often require prompt attention. “Over the years, companies have expressed concerns that this misuse has caused confusion among their investor base,” an SEC spokesperson said at the time. “Shareholders can continue to conduct exempt solicitations through other commonly used means, such as press releases, emails, websites, and social media, and electronic shareholder forums.”

Critics of the move see it as an attempt to silence irksome investors.

The work-around is not the only attempt at an alternative to the official platform. The nonprofit Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, for instance, recently started putting exempt solicitations and proxy memos it receives about issues relevant to its members on its website. Still, POE is the most robust effort yet to fill the gap the government created.

It is designed to mimic EDGAR, Behar said. It even relies on the same set of codes — known as central index keys — to identify individuals and companies making posts. Although As You Sow reviews submissions for basic errors, it doesn’t filter content, making POE, like EDGAR, open to all viewpoints. 

“POE is a new and adventurous approach to try to set up a large public website that people of all persuasions can post their solicitations on,” said Tim Smith, senior policy advisor for Interfaith Center, who applauded the idea. “It could be an investor that’s filing a resolution on climate. It could be a conservative investor who decides to push a resolution that’s challenging diversity, equity, or inclusion.” 

Any filings are subject to the same anti-fraud legal provisions required by EDGAR, says Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at the University of Pennsylvania. “The postings have to be accurate, so that doesn’t change,” she said. What is new is that POE’s interface is much more user-friendly, she said, calling the government’s site “kind of old and glitchy.” 

Not everyone, however, is embracing the system. According to Behar, one of the world’s largest proxy advisors — which helps its clients research shareholder proposals — won’t consider any information that’s not on the official platform. The company, ISS, declined an interview request and did not respond to written questions. Still, Fisch said the pool of potential users of the new system is vast. 

“The great thing about these being public websites is that they’re available to mutual funds, to smaller institutions, to universities, and so forth,” she said. She’ll be curious to see data on who uses the site in the coming weeks and months. So far, though, “it’s way too early to tell.”

Fisch will also be watching how corporations respond. Some, like Exxon Mobil, which has often opposed shareholder advocacy, could see it as a threat (the company did not respond to an interview request) and start their own platforms. Or, perhaps, the existence of unregulated alternatives will encourage companies to ask the SEC to push people back to EDGAR, where everything will be in the same place. 

Whatever the rationale, it would be relatively easy for the government to reverse course. “Any new administration or new SEC could change this in a moment,” said Smith. That, in many ways, would be an ideal outcome for Behar, who hopes that POE will be temporary.

“We do not want this to be a necessary platform into perpetuity,” he said. “This is hopefully short-lived. When the administration changes and the SEC returns to its core mission, we expect EDGAR to be restored because transparent information sharing is essential for the free market.”

More often, though, Fisch finds that platforms like POE are one-way streets. Even if EDGAR is loosened back up, she expects people to continue finding the alternatives useful. “Once investors figure out how cheap and easy and convenient it is to use the internet and social media to communicate, I don’t think they’re going to stop,” she said. “The cat’s out of the bag.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The SEC tried to silence activist investors. Now they’re fighting back. on Apr 30, 2026.

In February, the United States Department of Agriculture announced two proposed changes to federal rules governing the rate of production in meat processing plants — a move advocates say would endanger workers, public health, and the environment. One proposed amendment would raise the maximum line speeds in poultry slaughter from 140 birds per minute to 175 for chicken and from 55 birds per minute to 60 for turkey. For swine slaughter, the agency is proposing there be no cap on line speed at all. 

Last week, the public comment period for the proposed amendments came to a close. If finalized, these changes would “lower production costs and create greater stability in our food system” as well as help “keep groceries more affordable,” said Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins back in February.

The proposals are in line with other Trump administration policies that encourage higher meat consumption among Americans — like the revised food pyramid with its emphasis on eating more protein. But despite the promise of lower costs and higher efficiency, experts say these proposed rollbacks pose more risks than benefits to the public. 

“This is doubling down on an already broken and polluting food system,” said Dani Replogle, staff attorney at Food & Water Watch, an environmental nonprofit that submitted public comments against the proposed rules. 

The USDA will need time to review the tens of thousands of comments submitted, but the United Food and Commercial Workers, or UFCW, a union that represents workers along the food supply chain, estimates that over 22,000 comments oppose the poultry rule, along with over 20,000 oppose the pork rule. 

The union — which successfully sued and blocked the USDA from enacting a similar change to swine line speeds in 2021 — stresses that increasing line speeds in meat processing will result in more injuries for workers. While various parts of the line in these facilities are automated, the beginning of the line — where animals are corralled into the plants — is notoriously backbreaking and dangerous work. For chickens, workers who hang the birds by their feet often end up covered in fecal matter; in swine slaughterhouses, workers on the “kill floor” move pigs into stunning chambers. In both scenarios, unlike climate-controlled segments of the line, workers are exposed to the elements and face heat stress on very hot days. 

Read Next American farmers bet on solar. Then Trump changed the rules. Ayurella Horn-Muller, Melina Walling, Clayton Aldern, & M.K. Wildeman

Further down the line, workers handle knives and often labor shoulder-to-shoulder. They make repetitive motions for hours at a time, making the same cuts over and over to process hundreds or thousands of birds and swine. This workforce already runs the risk of developing carpal tunnel syndrome and enduring lacerations and amputations. Research has shown injury rates go up when line speeds increase.

The USDA contests this finding. In its proposed rule for poultry slaughter, the USDA states that a study funded by the agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service determined that increased line speeds during the evisceration segment of the line — where internal organs are removed from dead animals — “are not associated” with a higher risk of musculoskeletal disorder. The study’s authors, however, have since said that the proposed rule “fundamentally misunderstands and mischaracterizes the scope and results” of their research. 

“The potential for injury to these workers, it’s just something people can’t deny,” said Mark Lauritsen, who leads UFCW’s food processing, packaging, and manufacturing division. “Quite honestly, line speeds are too fast now.”

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson from the USDA said, “Decades of data prove that plants can run at higher speeds while maintaining process control and meeting every federal food safety standard.” They also added that federal inspectors in meat processing plants are still able to slow lines down if they discover a problem. 

Ultimately, the spokesperson said, “The USDA’s legal authority is strictly limited to ensuring food safety and process control; we do not have the power to regulate piece rates or how private companies manage their staff.” (Piece rate refers to the number of items — such as whole birds or parts — handled by a worker per minute.)

When it comes to meat processing, going faster “is not good for the environment either,” said Lauritsen. 

Packages of chicken at a supermarket in Texas. Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP via Getty Images

Slaughterhouses are incredibly water-intensive operations, due in part to the need to regularly spray down these facilities in order to maintain sanitary conditions while processing animals. In turn, they also produce a lot of waste — in the form of, yes, contaminated water, but also blood, guts, and fecal matter from animal carcasses. Both labor and environmental advocates argue that increasing the line speeds in slaughterhouses will necessarily increase the amount of water used and the amount of waste discharged into local ecosystems. 

In written comments submitted to the USDA, the Center for Biological Diversity stated: “Increasing line speed slaughter rates will increase slaughter capacity […] and lead to further damage to the environment, wildlife, animal welfare, worker safety, and public health (including food safety).” 

Replogle, the attorney at Food & Water Watch, also believes that if slaughterhouses go faster, then factory farms will decide to raise more animals. These farms, known as confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are “another gigantic source of water pollution in particular and nitrate pollution,” said Replogle, as well as greenhouse gas emissions. Across the U.S., CAFOs are also linked to higher levels of air pollution in uninsured and Latino communities. 

In its proposed rule for poultry slaughter, the USDA states that increasing line speeds “would not affect consumer demand for the establishments’ products,” and that only “expected sales of poultry products […] would determine production levels in establishments.” But demand for meat in the U.S. is already quite high, with most Americans eating more than 1.5 times the daily protein requirement. 

It’s also unclear that increasing line speeds would actually lower the price of chicken and pork at the grocery store. Agricultural economist David Ortega, a professor at Michigan State University, said increasing slaughter capacity would only result in lower poultry and pork prices at the grocery store if slaughterhouses pass on their savings “through the supply chain.” That outcome, Ortega said, would run counter to the slaughterhouses’ economic incentives. 

For some workers, the proposition of increased line speeds has already been made real. Magaly Licolli is a labor organizer based in Springdale, Arkansas, where Tyson Foods, the largest U.S. meat corporation, is headquartered. She said that poultry workers in Northwest Arkansas, at companies she did not name, say they have already been told to work faster. “We had a meeting with workers from different companies. And all of them stated that the line speed had increased,” said Licolli. 

The USDA spokesperson said, “The safety and well-being of the workforce are essential to a stable food supply; however, worker safety is overseen by the Department of Labor, not USDA. The law is very clear on this.” They also added that meat processing plants have long been able to receive line speed waivers, which allow the facilities to operate at higher speeds — and that this may explain what workers are reporting to Licolli.

Debbie Berkowitz, a worker safety and health expert at Georgetown University, argued that increasing line speeds ultimately puts profits above all else. “I think the line speed issue is not about selling more chicken or pork, but being able to exploit workers and get them to work even harder and faster. That is how the companies save money,” said Berkowitz. In cases like this, Berkowitz argues that workers and the environment are treated as expendable. “It’s just churning through workers,” she said. In other words: “Exploitation 101.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s plan for ultrafast meat processing would be a disaster for workers and the environment on Apr 30, 2026.

On a Tuesday night in April, beneath a sky mottled with clouds, a slick stretch of road in Cumberland, Maine, erupted in sound. It started with a few high-pitched chirps, like the coos of chicks. Within minutes, dozens, then hundreds more joined a chorus punctuated by low clucks. By the time the sun dipped below the horizon and rain began to splatter the pavement, the sound had risen to a din. Cars stopped on the shoulder and people spilled onto the road wearing neon vests and waving bright flashlights. They fanned out, and raised their voices as they spoke, like guests at a bustling cocktail party.

“I got a big one!” called a youngster in a yellow raincoat. She held out her hand for other volunteers who crowded around her. A yellow-spotted salamander about 9 inches long stretched across her gloved palm, its slick tail draped between her fingers.

Each year in New England, on the first warm, wet night of spring, when the ground has thawed, and the temperature is just right, armies of frogs and maelstroms of salamanders emerge from the woods. They hop and undulate through the night, following the same routes their ancestors traveled to the vernal pools of their birth, where they lay their eggs, chirping and clucking all the while.

“They’re calling to the ones that are still in the woods, telling them to come,” said Penny Asherman, who leads the Chebeague and Cumberland Land Trust.

For the past decade, “Big Night” has drawn dozens of people who drop everything at a moment’s notice to help the amphibians migrate safely. But climate change is scrambling that ancient trek. The journey begins less predictably, has grown deadlier, and become more tenuous as the seasonal wetlands they depend on are transformed by climate change. That has prompted the volunteers to become citizen scientists, tracking when the animals emerge and how many survive. Coordinated by Maine Big Night, the effort, which came on April 14 this year, is generating data that is reshaping how communities think about culverts, road maintenance, and other infrastructure.

Volunteers hold a yellow spotted salamander after ferrying it across the road. Grace Benninghoff

In the past, these amphibian protectors were little more than crossing guards, shepherding the tiny creatures to safety. But a nonprofit formed in 2018, Maine Big Night, has asked them to meticulously document what happens along these migration paths. This year, more than 1,200 observers at 650 migration sites statewide submitted observations.

Tim Kaijala has been a regular for seven years along with his children, Theo, 10, and Kai, 8. “The data side is pretty cool,” he said. “When we first came, it was just bringing frogs and salamanders over, but the last couple years it’s been more about counting and keeping track.”

As he spoke, Theo and Kai peered into a pool, watching a wood frog they’d helped across the road kick through the clear water. “Remember that one time, Theo,” Kai said, looking at her brother.

“Oh yeah,” he said.

“Tell it,” she urged.

“One time there was a car coming down, and I ran out and saved the peeper,” he paused, solemnly. “I do not want any peepers to die. If I stepped on one, I would never forgive myself.”

When data last year showed that eight out of 10 amphibians were hit by motorists in Orono, at the state’s most ecologically diverse migration site, Big Night worked with city officials to secure a grant for cameras and fencing that guide the animals toward an existing culvert beneath the road. When the group also saw rising numbers with edema linked to road salt runoff, it pushed for alternative deicing methods, including pickle juice.

Greg LeClair founded Maine Big Night. By day, he’s a municipal planning biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. He started the organization because he knew data collection would be essential for protecting the amphibians he’s adored since childhood.

A wood frog considers taking a leap into a vernal pool after being helped across the road. Grace Benninghoff

It’s easy to see why. Wood frogs are palm-sized, dappled brown creatures with dark markings smattering the skin around their wide eyes. Spring peepers are the size of a thumb and camouflage so well with the leaf litter of the forest floor that they’re nearly invisible until they unleash calls that echo through the night. 

But loving them and saving them are two different things.

“I knew that in order to make change, you needed data, especially when we’re talking about critters folks aren’t as keen on,” LeClair said. Conserving land and installing culverts, two effective ways to protect the amphibians, aren’t cheap. “Nobody will give you the money unless you have data,” he said. “That money for infrastructure and conservation is not just floating around.”

Trouble is, little data exists on amphibian migration patterns. They’re small, spend most of the year burrowed in the woods, and are hard to track. “Any time anyone has a collision with a deer or moose and an insurance claim is filed, a data point is collected, but nobody files an insurance claim when they hit a frog.”

Good data does more than help amphibian advocates win protections. It ensures conservationists spend limited resources where they’ll do the most good. The fencing project in Orono is one example. For years, scientists thought specialized culverts were the only reliable way to get the hoppers and creepers off roads. But cameras there have already captured frogs and salamanders using an existing crossing. If the new fencing the town recently installed proves nearly as effective, it could save tens of thousands of dollars.

Protecting amphibians matters far beyond frogs and salamanders themselves. They are foundational to New England’s food web. Eggs, larvae, and adults all sustain a surprising range of animals from owls and herons to foxes and even moose. “If you remove one piece of the puzzle or two, you don’t know which piece could kick the whole system out of whack,” said Sally Stockwell of Maine Audubon. “But there are huge trickle-down impacts when you lose the base of the food chain.”

Amphibians are also particularly vulnerable to climate change. They can’t regulate their body temperature, and they need moisture to move. In the winter, when they burrow into the soil to stay warm, dwindling snowpack can leave them without enough insulation, and they freeze to death. Unusually warm winter days can draw them out of their hiding places, and the return of freezing temperatures kills them. A dry spring or sudden heatwave can dry out the vernal pools where they lay their eggs, killing the next generation.

As the climate warms, fungi adapted to warmer, drier conditions are becoming a greater threat. Among them is the deadly chytrid fungus, which grows on amphibians’ skin, impairs their ability to breathe, and has been seen more frequently in recent years.

Yet we remain their greatest threat. Development eliminates their habitat, and cars kill untold numbers of them. That is why data is so important: It reveals what would otherwise go unseen. In Cumberland this year, volunteers counted 10 species crossing, including more than 100 spring peepers, 34 wood frogs, and 18 spotted salamanders. Just nine amphibians were found dead. “Anything we can do to reduce mortality is a benefit,” said Stockwell.

And on that rainy night in April, volunteers did all they could. Until nearly midnight, children and parents, college kids, and retirees patrolled the road and forest beyond, jotting notes on clipboards and ferrying frogs to safety in Tupperware. They paused only to watch as the tiny cold-blooded critters stretched their limbs and swam, sometimes bobbing at the surface to call — at shocking volume — to the ones still in the woods.

A father and son look for amphibians to assist. Grace Benninghoff

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One night a year, humans command this march of frogs and salamanders on Apr 29, 2026.

Billions of dollars have been pledged to fight the climate crisis, but almost none is reaching Indigenous peoples, even as world leaders credit them as essential to solving it. “From the Amazon to Australia, and Africa to the Arctic, you are the great guardians of nature, a living library of biodiversity conservation, and champions of climate action,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City last week. 

But global funding hasn’t followed those words. Multi-billion-dollar financial institutions set up to address the climate crisis have largely failed to deliver money to Indigenous communities, or even track whether they’re benefiting. At the Permanent Forum, Indigenous advocates described how their communities have been devastated by flooding and wildfires and called on governments and global funds to provide direct access to climate finance. 

“The demand for direct access to finance by Indigenous peoples is a matter of right. It’s actually explicitly mentioned in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that because of the historical injustices and the need for us to develop, we need direct access to finances,” said Joan Carling, who is Indigenous Kankanaey Igorot from the Philippines, a former expert member of the Permanent Forum and executive director of the organization Indigenous Peoples Rights International. 

An analysis by the Rainforest Foundation Norway estimates that between 2011 and 2020, Indigenous peoples and local communities involved in land tenure and forest management received less than 1 percent of global funding for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Indigenous peoples are often combined with “local communities” in conservation spaces, despite calls from Indigenous U.N. experts to distinguish them. 

“We are not asking for charity. We are not asking for privilege,” Carling continued. “This is a matter of right for us because it’s a matter of social justice. It’s just enabling us to adapt to the impacts of climate change that we did not create in the first place.”

The climate crisis is forcing many Indigenous leaders to make painful choices: rebuild homes after major disasters or relocate entire villages from ancestral lands. Those decisions are made harder by a lack of financial resources and despite international court rulings affirming the right to reparations for those harmed by climate change.

“We are protecting forests, we are protecting biodiversity,” said Deborah Sanchez, who is Indigenous Miskito from Honduras. Sanchez is the director of the Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative, which was created in 2021 to address the need for more direct climate financing. “Once the rights are realized for the communities, that’s the basis where everything can really be sustainable over time.”

The Green Climate Fund, or GCF, the official global climate fund designated by the Paris Agreement, has a portfolio of $20 billion. But not a single Indigenous peoples organization has been accredited to receive money from it, according to Helen Magata, who is Indigenous Kadaclan Igorot and serves on the fund’s Indigenous advisory committee, established in 2022. “That goes without saying that access to the fund by Indigenous peoples is near to nil,” said Magata.

Getting accredited involves meeting stringent criteria — financial management and accounting standards, environmental and social safeguards — and can take years. The fund’s minimum grant of $10 million can also be difficult for smaller communities to manage. “We have to jump through hoop after hoop in order to even qualify,” said Janene Yazzie, who is Diné and a member of the climate finance working group of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change. “They literally created a problem that is on us to prove our capacity to solve.” 

A 2025 report by the fund’s Independent Evaluation Unit found that “the Green Climate Fund has not actively pursued a portfolio with Indigenous peoples” and that its processes lacked the flexibility to serve them. “For Indigenous peoples, this challenge is often compounded to the point of being insurmountable,” the report concluded, recommending the fund create a dedicated funding window for Indigenous peoples.

Magata said the fund also lacks a mechanism to track how much money Indigenous peoples actually receive. Funding recipients may claim their projects will serve Indigenous peoples, but it’s often unclear what percentage of the money reaches those communities. “If you don’t have a framework like that, then how could you say how much Indigenous peoples are really benefiting or not?” she said. 

Rebecca Phwitiko, a communications specialist for the Green Climate Fund, acknowledged in an email that the fund does not yet have “a dedicated marker to track funding flows specifically to Indigenous Peoples’ organisations.” She said the fund has revised its accreditation process and supported projects benefiting Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, Australia, and the Pacific.

“Strengthening tracking, reporting, and accountability around Indigenous Peoples-related finance is an area GCF recognises as important and is continuing to work on,” she said. The fund recently held its first-ever Indigenous peoples conference in South Korea and last year accredited the International Land and Forest Tenure Facility, which works to secure land tenure rights for Indigenous peoples and local communities.

The Global Environment Facility, another major international climate fund, has disbursed more than $27 billion over three decades, including $50 million in dedicated funding for Indigenous peoples and local communities over the past eight years. Adriana Moreira, the fund’s head of partnerships, said it plans to increase that to $100 million for the next four-year funding round and intends to partner with five Indigenous-led trust funds. “We are constantly seeking to learn and improve,” she said.

Unlike the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility doesn’t require an extensive accreditation process and offers $75,000 capacity-building grants to Indigenous-led organizations. It has also set a goal of directing 20 percent of all its funding to Indigenous peoples and local communities. But like the Green Climate Fund, it is still working on ways to verify whether money actually reaches those communities. Sarah Wyatt, a senior biodiversity specialist at the fund, said it recently tested a new tracking method within one program and plans to expand it. “It is admittedly not going to be an exact science,” Wyatt said. “But still, if you don’t count, you can’t try to improve, right?”

Even if both funds improve their processes, neither can reach Indigenous peoples in the Global North. Both rely on governmental contributions classified as “official development aid” — funding that flows exclusively from wealthy countries to developing ones. At the U.N.’s annual climate conference in 2022, Yazzie was part of a caucus of Indigenous peoples who called on states to recognize the “false dichotomy of developed and developing countries in regard to funding initiatives and actions directed to Indigenous Peoples.”

At the Permanent Forum, delegates from Indigenous nations in North America described how melting ice and rising seas are causing irreversible harm to their traditional homelands — communities excluded from the current global climate financing structure. “We are dealing with the same issues and same forms of disenfranchisement across those global barriers,” said Yazzie. “It actually invisibilizes the way that the so-called ‘developed North’ profits from the theft of lands of Indigenous peoples within their own territories. To demand that those flows only go to the South is a continuation of those same colonial policies.”

Yazzie also criticized the widespread use of the phrase “Indigenous peoples and local communities,” which U.N. experts have called on climate treaties to abandon. Representatives from the Global Environment Facility said they use the description of local communities in the Convention on Biological Diversity, which describes local communities as embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. “So you see how much more narrow that truly is,” said Wyatt from the Global Environment Facility. “But I would give the example actually in the Pacific, where folks may not always call themselves Indigenous, but they would fit that type of definition.” She added the term also helps channel funding to communities in countries that don’t formally recognize Indigenous peoples — but acknowledged they don’t know what share of their grants go to Indigenous communities specifically versus local communities more broadly. 

The challenge of receiving global climate finance is pushing some groups to build alternatives. “We were in the communities, we saw that the funding didn’t go to the ground,” said Sanchez from the Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative, whose organization draws mostly from private philanthropy to provide grants to Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant organizations.

Magata remains hopeful that the major funds can change. “At the end of the day, the ultimate objective is we want to bring as much money as near to the ground as possible,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous peoples bear the brunt of climate change — and get almost none of the money to fight it on Apr 29, 2026.

In the creeks and rivers of southern Illinois, a school of bigeye shiners darting along the edge of a stream is a sign of healthy water. The freshwater fish, which is on the state’s endangered species list, has managed to survive despite habitat loss driven by decades of construction and industrial farm runoff. But an ongoing dispute between two state agencies over state species protections is testing how the tiny fish will endure. 

Last summer, the state’s top wildlife regulators faced resistance from the Illinois Department of Transportation, or IDOT, when trying to protect the shiner. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources, or IDNR, recommended that the transportation agency crews mapping out construction at a site in Union County should first survey the area and find out if the shiner was present. If so, IDNR would ask them to apply for a permit to minimize impacts to the paper clip-sized fish before proceeding.

IDOT declined. The department’s reason, among others, was simple: “Fish swim away.” 

The standoff between the two agencies, outlined in internal documents obtained by WBEZ and Grist, is at the center of an ongoing clash that broke out last year after the transportation department repeatedly ignored recommendations from state experts to pursue permits designed to protect imperiled species during road, bridge, and other transportation work. The transportation department, which is the state’s largest public landowner, may have overridden Illinois’ Endangered Species Protection Act in 11 cases in the past year, according to public records.

Endangered species laws are meant to shield imperiled animals and plants from publicly funded projects. The federal Endangered Species Act, which was passed in 1973, currently safeguards nearly 1,700 species in the United States and has saved close to 300 species from extinction. Almost every state has its own version of the law for protecting critters within its borders. The Illinois Endangered Species Act, which predates the federal act, operates similarly, protecting 513 species, including federally listed species like the rusty patched bumblebee, piping plover, and gray wolf. The safeguards, often criticized as slow and pricey, block crews from breaking ground on nearly any project until they first minimize harm to listed species. 

Despite massive popularity, the federal law, which has been credited with resuscitating the bald eagle, grizzly bear, and gray wolf populations, is under attack by Congress and the Trump administration. On Earth Day last week, House Republicans tried and failed to pass a bill that would’ve shredded those protections at the federal level. Weeks earlier, after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump convened the “God Squad,” a committee of high-ranking officials across his administration to bypass the Endangered Species Act entirely and open the Gulf of Mexico for oil drilling. The Trump administration also recently unveiled a proposed rule to revoke the federal law’s definition of “harm” to species.

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Species protections aren’t just breaking down on the federal level. States like Illinois are also failing to keep up with local rules to protect species from disappearing forever.

In response to the transportation department’s handling of species protections, IDNR ended a decade-old agreement with the agency last fall that allowed it to fast-track environmental reviews. The agency’s impact assessment manager, Bradley Hayes, pointed to “IDOT’s apparent automatic response to decline ITA recommendations” in his cancellation letter obtained by WBEZ and Grist.

An ITA, or incidental take authorization, is a permit that allows for the accidental harm of a protected species during the construction of an approved project, such as building a road or fixing a bridge. These permits involve lengthy reviews in which applicants must outline potential impacts to listed species, require a public comment period, and incorporate feedback from conservation specialists. The entire process can take at least five to six months. 

Still, experts say these permits are crucial because they minimize harm to protected species and provide legal cover from criminal charges that can accompany the unintentional killing of a state-listed species. 

IDOT’s Jack Elston responded to the termination letter at the end of last year disputing the  initial allegations from the environmental regulators, saying that the agency “does not make automatic responses regarding the IDNR recommendation for an ITA.” 

In a joint statement from IDOT and IDNR to WBEZ and Grist, IDOT spokeswoman Maria Castaneda said, “IDOT continues to consult with IDNR and considers recommendations from IDNR along with multiple other factors, including known information about the species, other environmental surveys, engineering, costs, and public safety.”

Castaneda added that the agencies are currently drafting a new agreement and that the agreement on file was outdated. “Updated language was needed,” she said.

Despite the agreement expiring at the beginning of 2019, IDOT continued to conduct environmental reviews until lDNR stepped in to stop them last fall. 

Email exchanges between IDNR officials obtained by WBEZ and Grist show concern about how IDOT was conducting its environmental reviews.

Last December, IDOT’s Elston wrote that “fish swim away from construction noise” as justification for several projects that could harm fish and molluscs, like the harlequin darter and the American brook lamprey, which are found in rivers and streams in southeastern and northeastern Illinois, respectively. In another instance, Elston wrote that the relocation of state-endangered mussels in White County was unnecessary and would delay a project by at least a construction season and add about $2 million in costs.

But internal emails show that IDNR officials were increasingly concerned by that rationale. The American brook lamprey, for example, spends much of its life burrowed in sediment, dies not long after spawning, and is unlikely to simply swim away

“We are the experts,” wrote Todd Strole, IDNR assistant director, in an email earlier this year preparing for a meeting with IDOT. “Fish are not the same, some don’t swim away.”

In another email, Ann Holtrop, head of IDNR’s division of natural heritage, wrote: “We are open to professional dialogue with IDOT, but planning and engineering needs don’t negate or override the recommendations by scientists.”

The Illinois dispute reflects a broader erosion of species protections nationwide, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Rebecca Riley. During his first term, President Donald Trump advanced new guidance that undercut species protection. The Biden administration undid the Trump-era rules, but the Trump administration has yet again proposed a new rule to weaken the federal law.  

WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times reached out to Governor JB Pritzker’s office for comment on how the state’s internal dispute fits into the Trump administration’s ongoing rollback of federal species protections; however, the Governor’s office offered no comments beyond the statement from IDOT and IDNR.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Illinois is feuding with itself over endangered species protections on Apr 29, 2026.

Kim Booker never thought much about lead during her roughly 27 years living in Trenton, New Jersey. Born and raised in the once-industrial powerhouse, she first heard about the heavy metal at community meetings organized by the East Trenton Collaborative, a local nonprofit that works on environmental health and safety issues. There, she learned that the prevalence of lead-laden pipes and paint, a legacy of the city’s industrial past, could have contaminated the drinking water in her home and the soil around her property. 

She knew that her three-bedroom home was old, making it likely it had lead pipes. Booker noticed the paint on the walls chipping off. And she realized, too, that her late grandmother and sister were both diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, which researchers have tied to lead exposure. She wanted to know if she was being poisoned by the lead in her environment. 

With few free, comprehensive testing resources available to her, Booker turned to Shereyl Snider, one of the leaders of the collaborative, who in turn connected her with Sean Stratton, a doctoral student in public health at Rutgers University in late 2023. At the time, he was taking samples of lead to get a clear picture of how lead had contaminated Trenton homes for his dissertation work. Once Booker agreed, Stratton was soon at her home, testing for lead in her paint, yard, and water.  

Stratton visits Amber DeLoney-Stewart’s home in October to provide a full inspection with Shereyl Snider, a community member with East Trenton Collaborative. Anna Mattson

When the results came back, Booker learned that her home was — as she’d suspected — contaminated with lead and that she had low but detectable levels of lead in her bloodstream. Stratton’s testing revealed that lead levels in her yard were more than 450 parts per million, above the Environmental Protection Agency’s hazard level. If not for Stratton, she would not have known. 

“The city shouldn’t rely on a student to do this work,” Stratton said.

Comprehensive lead testing of the kind that Stratton provided costs upwards of $1,000. Over the past two years, Stratton has tested the soil, water, or paint in more than 140 Trenton homes and has been assembling the clearest, most cohesive picture yet of a crisis that permeates the state. Last July, the EPA added the entire neighborhood of East Trenton to the Superfund National Priorities List after testing found widespread soil contamination in residential yards, schools, and parks. Despite the designation, there has been no comprehensive door-to-door testing effort, leaving residents like Booker to rely on Stratton.

But Stratton’s project is coming to a close. He defended his dissertation in February and will graduate in May, leaving uncertain who — if anyone — will continue the work. Community groups like East Trenton Collaborative worry the neighborhood could lose its only accessible source of household testing.

“We don’t want to stop working together,” Snider said. “I don’t see it ending, but I don’t know how we can continue unless we have big supporters to help support our future endeavors together.”

Stay safe from lead exposure

There is no safe level of lead exposure. Children under 6 and pregnant people are particularly vulnerable to health risks.

You’re more likely to have a lead service line providing your water if your home was built before 1986, when lead pipes were banned nationwide.

Filtering your water can greatly reduce your risk of exposure through tap water. Look for the NSF/ANSI Standard 53 mark, which means a filter meets EPA standards. Boiling water does not remove lead.
Run water for several minutes — at least 5, if not longer — before using for cooking or drinking.

Other common sources of lead exposure include paint in older homes and playgrounds, which can be ingested as chips or dust, and soil contaminated by industrial pollution or leaded gas exhaust (lead can linger in soils for hundreds of years).

Look for your city or state’s resources for testing water, household, and soil contamination, as well as blood testing to assess exposure. Some cities offer clean soil for covering lead-contaminated dirt, free filters if testing reveals lead in water, or even service line replacement.

Source: Lead pipes are everywhere. Here’s how to protect yourself. (Grist)

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New Jersey has some of the highest legacy lead burdens in the country. The state has an estimated 350,000 lead service lines — placing it among the top 10 states, behind Illinois and Texas. It has received more than $100 million in federal funds for lead pipe replacements, but it doesn’t address legacy soil contamination, interior lead paint, or proactive household-level screening.

Despite the patchwork of testing options available — blood lead screening through the health department, water sampling through Trenton Water Works, and occasional environmental assessments from state or federal agencies — Stratton said the system rarely functions as a coherent whole. 

The state health department conducts home paint surface inspections, but only after a child has been poisoned, which is often first detected by mandatory lead testing. In New Jersey, children are required to test for lead at 1 and 2 years of age. Testing is free from local health departments for kids who are underinsured or uninsured. But older children and adults have to pay their own way.

Trenton Water Works provides lead water test kits for homes built before 1986, but residents must coordinate testing with a private lab and pay for the cost of the analysis, which can run from $20 to $100. No agency reliably tests for lead in soil unless the EPA steps in to investigate. 

Each test only addresses a narrow slice of the problem, leaving families with fragmented or incomplete information. Results can take weeks to arrive, if they arrive at all. One resident, Amber DeLoney-Stewart, said she never received her home inspection results from the city, even after blood tests revealed her child was lead-burdened. 

Stratton takes his vials of samples back to his lab at Rutgers University for processing. Anna Mattson

Without coordination, door-to-door outreach, or a mandate for proactive household-level screening, the burden falls on residents to navigate a maze of programs — and too often, Stratton said, people who need the information most don’t receive it. 

“It just doesn’t ever seem to be enough,” Stratton said. “It’s very siloed.”

Stratton’s work reflects a broader pattern in environmental health research across the United States. In some communities concerned about pollution, residents turn to university researchers for help testing soil or water when government monitoring is limited. In Atlanta, for example, a soil-testing project launched by a graduate student at Emory University and community partners uncovered elevated lead levels in residential yards, prompting a federal investigation. And last year, the University of California, Los Angeles, offered free soil testing to residents affected by wildfires. Efforts like these often depend on temporary research projects, meaning they can end when students graduate or grant funding runs out. 

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Stratton’s research in East Trenton has been supported by two grants — one from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and another directly from the federal government. As the Trump administration cuts billions of dollars of grant money, Rutgers’ Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute saw some grants rescinded entirely. Other projects remain in limbo. But Stratton’s grants somehow made the cut, even with “environmental justice” in their titles. Brian Buckley, the institute’s executive director, said further budget cuts mean far fewer opportunities to continue future research.

“We’ve been playing dodge the bullet,” he said. 

Stratton didn’t originally set out to investigate lead contamination. After graduating from Rutgers University with a bachelor’s degree in environmental science in 2015, he worked in environmental consulting in New Jersey, sampling soil, air, and water and designing remediation strategies for contaminated sites. Around that time, Flint, Michigan, switched its water supply from Detroit to the Flint River, and triggered a public health crisis when corrosive water from the river caused pipes to leach lead, exposing more than 140,000 people to dangerous levels of the metal.

A friend who was concerned about the events asked Stratton to sample water at his New Jersey home and send it to a lab to test for lead. The results came back extremely high: more than 78 parts per billion of lead — more than five times the EPA’s action level. 

Confused, Stratton began digging through public records, water reports, and federal regulations. He noticed that his own town of East Brunswick was not testing the correct location type. Federal rules require that cities test homes that are most likely to have lead service lines, but Stratton said the agency was largely testing homes less likely to have them. Alarmed at the discrepancy, he began filing public records requests with water utilities across the state to see whether similar gaps existed elsewhere. 

“I started arguing with the DEP,” Stratton said, referencing the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. “And then I decided I needed to go back to school, because I felt like I needed to get more credibility.” 

A spokesperson for the state agency said in a statement that East Brunswick’s lead testing plan follows federal rules that require water systems to prioritize homes most likely to have lead service lines. It added that when there are not enough of these higher-risk homes available or willing to participate, utilities can test lower-risk homes to meet the required sample sizes. 

Spurred by what he’d learned about the prevalence of lead contamination, Stratton ran for State Assembly as the Green Party candidate for East Brunswick in 2017. His candidate profile says that he will “continue to fight to ensure that our water is suitable to drink.” Stratton lost the race, but he returned to Rutgers three years later to earn a master’s degree in public health and then continued into a doctoral program.

Stratton has sampled more than 100 New Jersey homes for traces of lead in pipes, soil, and paint. Anna Mattson

Stratton’s doctoral project had three main objectives: verify whether Trenton residents are exposed to lead, determine where the exposure was coming from, and uncover how residents can reduce exposure. In his testing, Stratton used an X-ray fluorescence gun to scan every wall in a willing volunteer’s home to see how much lead was in the paint. He dropped off water vials for residents to fill in the morning from the kitchen sink — first thing in the morning, before using any water. Out in the yard, he took a small vial and filled it with soil.

Then he packed up his bag, put it all in the trunk of his car, and made the drive back to the cluttered Rutgers lab, where he would run tests. Afterward, Stratton provided residents with full results, information on what to do next, medical information about where to get blood lead checked, and his phone number, along with his supervisor’s at Rutgers, to call if they had questions. 

In late February this year, Stratton presented his findings to a team of Rutgers professors during his official dissertation defense. His findings were stark. Most homes he tested had lead, whether it be in the dust, paint, or pipes. All homes measured for floor dust had detectable levels of lead, with 86 percent of them exceeding the EPA’s action level. 

He also found that homes without lead-based paint in Trenton are still at risk of elevated levels because of the legacy lead dust outside. That outside dust in Trenton comes from a myriad of sources, including gasoline, atmospheric aerosols, and coal and soil contamination from its history of lead-based ceramics manufacturing.

He also found that running the tap for five minutes before using the water — a common recommendation from public health experts — was still not an adequate amount of time to flush traces of lead. He suggested, in his results, that lead safety guidelines should expand to include reduction strategies, like using a water filter. 

A week later, he welcomed more than 30 people into a Rutgers classroom for a presentation of his findings. He wanted collaborators and community members to celebrate with him. As gifts, he handed out little square 3D printed urban maps of East Trenton, with streets and raised buildings, to those he’d worked with over the years. Among those in attendance were partners who helped connect Stratton with residents, including Snider of East Trenton Collaborative and Anthony Diaz of the Newark Water Coalition. 

In early March, more than 30 friends, family, and colleagues gathered in a Rutgers conference room to celebrate Stratton’s work on lead contamination in New Jersey. Anna Mattson

The EPA’s decision this summer to list East Trenton as a Superfund site means a cleanup is coming — but slowly, and only for the soil, not the pipes or the paint. The designation triggers more sampling, long-term soil removal plans, and years of federal oversight. Still, none of that has started yet. A remediation plan hasn’t been developed. And in a state dotted with Superfund sites that have languished for decades, residents know what a long wait can look like. 

For now, Stratton’s research has offered immediate answers for concerned residents. Since learning about the lead in her home, Booker has tried to reduce her exposure. 

“I use a vacuum to clean my floors and carpets instead of stirring up dirt and dust particles by sweeping,” Booker said. “When my nieces come over and want to run around in the yard, I make sure they remove their shoes when they come inside and wash their hands.”

She said Snider, Stratton, and the East Trenton Collaborative have sounded the alarm on the lead issue in Trenton. Now, she hopes that the community will continue to fight so that the city can be a place where children and families can be healthy and thrive.

“Knowledge is only powerful and beneficial if its effects change,” Booker said. “We can know there is a problem, but without action, the problem simply remains.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline He’s the only lead tester in this contaminated neighborhood. He graduates next month. on Apr 28, 2026.