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File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

Deirdre Macnab was reading her local newspaper this spring when she learned that Rio Blanco County, where she lives in northwest Colorado, had taken the side of oil companies in a major lawsuit before the Supreme Court. Suncor and Exxon Mobil were trying to get out of standing trial — the city and county of Boulder had sued them, seeking damages for the rising costs of adapting to heat waves, wildfires, and floods.

After ranching for a decade, Macnab had seen those costs firsthand. During one of the worst fires in Colorado history last year, 60 of her neighbor’s cows burned to death. Record heat and drought this year parched the land so thoroughly, ranchers had to pay thousands of dollars to haul in feed and water for their animals. Some ranchers, headed toward bankruptcy, had to sell part of their herds or put their land up for sale. 

“It really disturbed me that the county was taking sides,” Macnab said, “and in particular, supporting oil companies whose operations, we now know, are putting the human population and wildlife, livestock, everything, at risk.” Rio Blanco County spent thousands of taxpayer dollars in legal fees to join the brief alongside other Colorado counties where the oil industry has a large presence.

Macnab rallied ranchers around Colorado to join her in urging the Supreme Court to side with Boulder. They wrote that local governments can’t keep absorbing the increasing costs from worsening heat, drought, fires, and flooding and still provide the resources — disaster relief, grants, infrastructure repairs — to keep ranchers in business. The oil companies argue that federal law not only protects them from needing to defend their actions in state courts, but also shields them from being liable for damages. 

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in the case on Monday. The court’s decision could have huge ramifications for efforts to hold companies accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels — and the larger question of who pays for the costs of adapting to a hotter world. Oil majors have pulled out all the stops to stymie the dozens of climate lawsuits that local and state governments have brought against them, with billions and billions of dollars on the line. With a conservative-dominated Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s Department of Justice as a powerful ally, oil companies saw their chance to stop these suits, said Alejandro Camacho, a professor at UCLA School of Law.

That calculus changed slightly this week when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a strong conservative with financial holdings in oil companies, recused himself from the case. His withdrawal makes it harder for oil companies to get at least five justices — a majority of the court — on their side.

The city and county of Boulder, Colorado, originally sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in 2018. The lawsuit slowly wound its way through the court system. Oil companies tried to dismiss it or move it to federal court, a more industry-friendly venue, but Boulder won at every stage. In May 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the case should proceed in state courts.

Much of the support for Boulder and the oil companies falls along familiar, partisan lines. Republican states and business associations tend to side with the oil companies; Democratic states and environmental advocates typically back Boulder. A watchdog organization found that 25 of the 38 briefs filed to the Supreme Court in support of Exxon and Suncor were written by groups with financial ties to the fossil fuel industry or foundations opposing climate science and regulation. But Colorado ranchers aren’t the only surprising source of support for Boulder’s case — some conservative thinkers are challenging oil companies’ arguments.

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To understand why, it helps to know that the case before the Supreme Court isn’t really about the substance of the lawsuit: if oil companies should pay damages for climate change. The first question is whether the Supreme Court can take the unusual move of stepping in before the case has gone to trial in state court. If the justices decide that they can, then they’ll consider oil companies’ arguments. Suncor and Exxon’s lawyers argue that Boulder’s suit is essentially a backdoor attempt to regulate emissions through state courts. They also say that the Clean Air Act and broader constitutional limits on state power should prevent Boulder’s claims from proceeding.

“If someone has harmed you, you should be able to go to court and make the case that they harmed you and that they need to pay you for it,” Camacho said. “It’s a centuries-old common law principle. And these companies are basically trying to say, ‘You shouldn’t be able make the case in court.’”

Some conservative legal scholars argue that there’s nothing in the federal law or the Constitution that would prevent the lawsuit from moving forward in state court. That includes Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary Law School. Two former heads of the EPA under Republican presidents, Christine Todd Whitman and William Reilly, are other prominent proponents of that argument. 

The oil companies appear to have recognized that their arguments about the Clean Air Act aren’t very strong, Adler said, because they’ve moved away from them over time, toward other arguments about the limits of state power. In his view, courts generally shouldn’t override claims brought under state law “unless there is a clear basis for doing so.” Adler sees why some conservatives argue that the litigation in state courts is an improper way to drive climate policy, but he thinks it’s possible that skepticism about the merits of the lawsuit might have influenced some of their views on the narrower questions before the court.

Some Republican-dominated jurisdictions have also found themselves challenging oil companies. Coastal parishes in Louisiana are suing Chevron and other oil majors, seeking compensation for restoring coastal lands. “There are going to be conservative communities, or predominantly conservative communities, who see that they are being forced to pay millions of dollars to protect their towns because of the actions of fossil fuel companies,” Camacho said. 

Colorado ranchers, not exactly known for their liberal views, are left with few options for dealing with the environmental changes that are bankrupting them. Macnab said she hopes the Supreme Court sends Boulder’s case back to state court where it belongs, so that oil companies will be forced to face accountability.

“Until they’re held responsible for the consequences that they have known about for decades, they are not going to be part of the solution,” Macnab said. “They need to be brought to the table, because humankind and our food production is what’s at stake.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The surprising allies backing Boulder’s climate case before the Supreme Court on Oct 1, 2026.

This story is published through the Indigenous News Alliance.

After retiring from a long career as a conservation officer with the Canadian government, Derrick Pottle devoted himself to guiding people on the land, carving, hunting, and training bear guards.

Pottle, an elder and skilled guide from the Inuit community of Tikigâksuagusik in Nunatsiavut, founded BearSafe Planning in 2005. The program trains and certifies students to guard against the polar bears and black bears found throughout northern Labrador. The three-day course is advertised as offering “safety, protection, confidence in bear country.”

More than two decades later, that work has taken on renewed urgency. As climate change reshapes the Arctic — particularly the sea ice polar bears rely on to travel and hunt — Inuit are seeing the animals at different times of year and in places they rarely encountered before. Pottle says those changes are increasing the need for people who know how to keep people and bears safe. That, he said, is “the whole objective of the course.”

Graduates of the program keep watch for bears to prevent encounters and learn to recognize signs that a bear is not comfortable. “They may feel threatened, they may feel intimidated, and they may even charge or attack you,” Pottle said. He teaches students “how to recognize those signs, how to prepare yourself for them, the tools you have to use to do your job.”

Canadian officials say encounters between people and polar bears are becoming more likely as a lengthening ice-free season keeps bears on land longer. Inuit and Cree communities have reported polar bears appearing more frequently and in places where they were once rare. Researchers have linked the increase to several factors, including longer ice-free periods, changes in bear abundance and condition, and growing human activity in polar bear habitat. 

Pottle developed BearSafe Planning’s training program with input from groups that included Parks Canada, conservationists, Inuit elders, and academics. It started “out of a necessity,” Pottle said, after the creation of Tongait KakKasuangita SilakKijapvinga, (Torngat Mountains National Park) under the 2005 Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement. 

“They needed bear guards,” Pottle said. We didn’t have trainers in Nunatsiavut at the time. Somebody had to do it.”

Inuk elder Derrick Pottle founded BearSafe Planning in 2005 to keep people and bears safe. That work has taken on renewed urgency as climate change reshapes the Arctic and encounters with bears grow more common. Frey Blake-Pijogge / IndigiNews

The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet. As climate change remakes landscapes across the North, the need for guards is only for “all species of bears,” Pottle said. 

“We’re seeing more and more bears now in this time of our lives than we ever saw before,” he said.  “People are seeing polar bears in this part of Inuit Nunangat — where polar bears used to travel north late in the spring — and now are staying all summer long.”

The province’s Endangered Species Act lists polar bears as “vulnerable,” while the federal government deems them a “species of special concern.” Sixty to 80 per cent of the world’s polar bear population lives in Canada, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. The massive carnivores, which can weigh as much as 1,400 pounds, rely upon sea ice to travel, mate, and hunt. “Climate change is the main threat to polar bears,” the agency notes.

Becoming a bear guard can offer employment opportunities, but also can be used for personal safety. “Lots of people just use the bear guard course for their own personal protection when they’re out on the land with their families fishing, hunting and participating in Inuit lifestyle.”

Sherri Wolfrey, a mother of four, is a trained bear guard in Tikigâksuagusik. She recounted how, in 2015, she became “interested in the program and just thought ‘OK, maybe someday I might want to try for a job that involves bear monitoring.’”

Wolfrey is the secretary of Northern Lights Academy and uses her training when she’s out on the land. Last year, she put her certification to work professionally for the first time, when she was contracted as a bear guard in Akami-Uapishkᵁ-KakKasuak (Mealy Mountains National Park Reserve). “Especially up in that area in the bottom of the Mealy’s, it was so beautiful up there,” she told IndigiNews.

She finds the skills valuable even when she isn’t working as a bear guard. “It’s good to have the training,” she said, “because when you do what I like to do, especially being at the cabin … you could know what to expect and what to do if you came upon a bear.”

Read Next Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis Matt Simon

Pottle’s experiences started “before there were bear guards.” People in his community would ask him to escort them on outings with boats, dog teams or snowmobiles because he knew the land. 

BearSafe Planning offers its course on demand, and has taught as many as 30 students at a time. And though he is an instructor, Pottle also considers himself a student, drawing from the experiences of others. 

“I talk to the Elders, I talk to the hunters, I talk to the students,” he said. “A lot of these people live on the land all their lives, so they have lots and lots of experiences and stories. So we learn from one another.”

Employment opportunities for certified bear guards vary by season and can range from day trips to longer-term, full-time work, Pottle said. Cruise ship operators, for instance, hire guards to keep tourists safe when they visit the North, while group outings and land-based programs in Nunatsiavut and elsewhere across Inuit Nunangat also rely on them. Inuit governments and agencies employ trained guards for outings as well.

Pottle sees professionally trained bear guards as “no different than any other aspect of the workforce.”

“It’s not always easy to find employment in the North, and bear guarding can give people — if they choose to — an opportunity to make a good living from it.”

Two decades of teaching students about bear safety has been personally rewarding, Pottle said.

“You’re doing something you love, and you’re going into communities, and you’re … bringing knowledge,” he said. “Our role is to keep people safe, and make sure people enjoy the land and enjoy the surroundings — and get the job done and come home safe at the end of your work day.”

This story was originally published by IndigiNews and updated with additional information by Grist.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a warming Arctic, Inuit bear guards protect communities on Oct 1, 2026.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) extends its warmest congratulations to the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA), one of its core members, on being named a 2026 Right Livelihood Laureate. The Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” honours RWA “for organising rural women across Southern Africa into a united force defending land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate and patriarchal dispossession.”

The recognition belongs to a movement built from the ground up. Since 250 rural women founded it in Limpopo Province, South Africa, in 2009, RWA has grown into a self-organised movement of more than 178,000 small-scale farmers in eleven countries: Angola, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Through its flat, volunteer-led structure and its Agroecology and Feminist Schools, RWA advances feminist agroecology and food and seed sovereignty across the region. It has established 24 seed multiplication sites and documented hundreds of Indigenous seed varieties, protecting farmer-managed seed systems from commercialisation and strengthening communities’ resilience to climate shocks. The movement’s collective voice helped secure Zambia’s 2016 law mandating equal land allocation to women and Eswatini’s landmark 2018 Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Bill.

Dr Million Belay, General Coordinator of AFSA, said:

“Our hearts are full today. We congratulate our sisters of the Rural Women’s Assembly on this richly deserved recognition. For years, RWA has shown all of us what food sovereignty looks like when it is built by the women who grow Africa’s food, save its seeds and hold its communities together. This Award honours every woman farmer who has stood her ground for land, seed and dignity. It also sends a message to social movements across Africa: our struggles for agroecology, for justice and for control over our own food systems are seen, they matter, and they are bearing fruit. The future of African food is being sown, patiently and collectively, by rural women.”

For AFSA and its members, this Award affirms a conviction we share: food sovereignty is inseparable from women’s rights to land, seed and bodily autonomy, and lasting change grows from people organising together.

RWA’s journey, in the words of its Regional Coordinator Mercia Andrews, shows that   “no single voice moves a mountain; it is the patient, collective weight of thousands of rural women organizing together that has shifted what was once thought immovable.”

AFSA is proud to stand alongside RWA and joins the global community in celebrating this achievement. The 2026 Laureates will be honoured at the Award Presentation in Stockholm on 1 December 2026.

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