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Wichita nurses to picket on May 1 for patient safety and safe staffing
17 April | Haiti: A global struggle against imperialism and for food sovereignty
Islanda Micherline Aduel speaks about the struggle against imperialism and for food sovereignty in Haiti at a conference on “The peasantry in Haiti today,” organized by the Haiti support platform in France.
The post 17 April | Haiti: A global struggle against imperialism and for food sovereignty appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
States can’t keep up with rising wildfire costs
Western states are running out of money to fight wildfires, according to reporting in High Country News. As climate change fuels hotter fires that occur year-round, states routinely spend well over their forecasted wildfire budgets. For example, Oregon spent more than $350 million fighting wildfires in 2024, far exceeding the $10 million it had allocated for wildfire that year.
A 2022 analysis by Pew Charitable Trusts found that most states use their general fund, or revenue from state taxes and other fees, to cover wildland fire costs, pitting firefighting and fire prevention efforts against top state priorities. Skyrocketing suppression costs have also led to a reduction in fire mitigation treatments, like prescribed burns and mechanical thinning, increasing wildfire risk on state forest land and pouring metaphorical fuel on the wildfire cycle.
Some states are tackling this issue with new taxes or wildfire-specific accounts. Oregon passed a new nicotine tax to fund wildfire prevention last year, and Utah put $150 million into a new wildfire fund. Still, costs continue to rise, and drought is driving above-average wildfire predictions for the West this summer.
Burgum struggles to defend public lands budgetInterior Secretary Doug Burgum struggled to defend the Trump administration’s disastrous public lands agenda in congressional appropriations subcommittee hearings p;last week in both the House and the Senate. Members grilled him on cuts to the National Park Service, a billion-dollar payout to kill offshore wind energy, and a $10 billion request for a NPS “beautification” program in D.C. Read more in a new Westwise blog post by CWP Communications Manager Kate Groetzinger.
Burgum appears before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this morning.
Quick hits The ramifications of record-shattering heat on the West’s ecosystems How the Lolo National Forest planners are bracing for a roadless rule repeal Trump signs bill ending protections for Boundary Waters watershed University of Utah creates critical minerals institute Energy execs push WY lawmakers to carry out Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda Colorado farmers tighten their belts ahead of summer drought NM breaks ground on Reforestation Center, with plans to plant 5 million seedlings a year Rep. Davids introduces Truth in National Parks Act to protect Native American history Quote of the dayWhat we’re seeing right now is a deliberate attempt to erase the experiences of Native communities and other marginalized groups from places that are supposed to educate and inform the public. That’s unacceptable.”
—U.S. Representative Sharice Davids, Native News Online
Picture ThisCalifornia’s ocean is not a sacrifice zone for Big Oil.
With Donald Trump plotting to sell off our beaches to his fossil fuel industry donors, we’re celebrating California Ocean Day by reaffirming our commitment to protect every inch of it.
Feature image: A prescribed burn in Oregon on Bureau of Land Management land in 2016; Source: Justin Robinson for the BLM via Flickr
The post States can’t keep up with rising wildfire costs appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.
Brazil leads “encouraging” decline in global rainforest destruction in 2025
Forest destruction in the tropics eased by over a third in 2025, thanks in large part to Brazil’s stronger environmental protection which drove forest loss not caused by fires to a record low in the country, an annual survey showed.
In 2025, the world lost 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary rainforest – an area roughly the size of Denmark, according to data from the University of Maryland hosted on Global Forest Watch. That is 36% lower than in 2024 when climate-fuelled fires pushed forest disappearance to a record high.
Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute (WRI), said the drop was “encouraging” and proved what “decisive” government action can achieve. But she cautioned that part of the decline reflected “a lull” after an extreme fire year and forest destruction remains far too high to meet international goals to protect forests and limit global warming to acceptable levels.
Deforestation was 70% higher than it needed to be in 2025 to meet a global pledge to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030, which 145 countries first committed to at COP26 nearly five years ago, the report said. Brazil, which holds the COP30 presidency, has promised to deliver a global roadmap guiding countries toward that goal before this year’s UN climate summit.
“Achieving this goal in the coming years will not be easy as forests become more vulnerable to climate change and as humanity’s growing demand for food, fuel and material sourced from forests in the land they stand on continues to grow,” Goldman told journalists.
Agriculture, fires cause most lossesPrimary tropical forests – such as the Amazon in Latin America, the Congo Basin and rainforests in Southeast Asia – are critical carbon sinks that help regulate the global climate by absorbing vast amounts of planet-heating CO2. Their loss weakens one of the world’s most important defences against planetary heating.
Agricultural expansion, driven both by industrial agribusinesses and shifting cultivation for subsistence, returned to being the leading cause of forest destruction in the tropics last year, the Global Forest Watch analysis found. After hitting a record high in 2024, fires – which are usually started by humans – still contributed to around a third of forest destruction in those critical regions.
Climate change is increasing fire risk in the tropics by creating hotter, drier conditions that allow blazes to spread more easily.
Lula’s policies drive progress in BrazilTrends in global forest destruction are significantly influenced by what happens in Brazil, home to the world’s largest remaining rainforest. In 2025, the South American nation recorded a 42% fall in primary forest loss and its lowest-ever rate of forest loss caused by reasons other than fire.
Analysts said Brazil’s progress in tackling forest loss is a result of the stronger environmental protection and enforcement actions introduced since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to office in 2023, after years of budget cuts and policy rollbacks under his pro-business predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula’s administration revived the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm), an anti-deforestation framework that coordinates actions across federal agencies and promotes strengthened monitoring, commodities tracking and support for sustainable livelihoods.
The Brazilian government also beefed up the activities of the federal environmental agency Ibama, which between 2023 and 2025 issued 81% more infraction notices and 64% more fines than in the previous two-year period.
“Brazil’s progress shows what’s possible when forest protection is treated as a national priority,” said Mirela Sandrini, executive director of WRI Brasil, adding that the success is derived from building partnerships between the government, civil society, academia, local communities and the private sector.
Neighbouring Amazon country Bolivia recorded the second-highest amount of primary forest loss in the world last year, despite being home to a fraction of the forest held by other rainforest nations like Indonesia or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Fires, likely started by humans, were the main cause of forest destruction in Bolivia, alongside the expansion of cattle ranching and crops such as soy and maize, the WRI analysis said.
Forest loss also remained high last year in countries including Peru, Laos and the DRC.
Malaysia and Indonesia showed stable and relatively low levels of forest loss compared to the highs reached in the mid-2010, although experts said Jakarta’s plans to massively expand food and energy production risk threatening the progress seen in the past decade.
Global policies and cash neededAnalysts said protecting the world’s remaining tropical forests will depend not only on national political leadership but also on global policy and financial developments.
Those include the creation of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a major new rainforest protection fund launched by Brazil at COP30. The mechanism, which gives financial rewards to countries that keep trees standing, has been billed as an historic opportunity to finance forest production. But it is far from raising the $125 billion of public and private investment needed for it to reach a meaningful scale and is unlikely to start making payments until 2028.
After failing to secure a negotiated agreement on forest protection at COP30, Brazil promised it would deliver this year a global roadmap charting a course to end deforestation by 2030.
The COP30 presidency said it has received 177 contributions from governments, UN agencies, business groups and civil society with suggestions on what the document should include.
What countries want in the roadmapThe Coalition of Rainforest Nations, which includes 50 countries, wants the roadmap to adopt a “global carbon budget” lens, mapping out region by region where CO2 emissions cuts are most urgent and where existing forest carbon stocks must be protected.
The negotiating bloc also wants finance, including from carbon markets, to be given a prominent space in the document, which will need to obtain broad support from governments to be effective. Without it, the roadmap “risks becoming yet another [plan] collecting dust on the shelves of posterity”, its submission said.
Colombia said interventions should focus on tackling the root causes of deforestation, pointing out that forest loss in the country is concentrated in regions afflicted by deep inequalities, high levels of poverty and the widespread presence of organised crime.
Indonesia wants the roadmap to function as a collaborative platform that “strengthens partnerships”, but warns that international initiatives should “avoid unilateral measures that may undermine trust and effective cooperation”, a thinly veiled rebuke of the European Union’s deforestation regulation.
In its submission, the United Kingdom said the roadmap should focus on a small number of “critical interventions” that can unlock the greatest progress, such as securing legal land rights for Indigenous communities, encouraging sustainable land use and introducing demand-side measures to promote deforestation-free products.
Meanwhile, Russia voiced its opposition to the creation of a “universal roadmap” to end deforestation, saying it instead wants to see a “dedicated dialogue” on forests where countries just exchange best practices.
The post Brazil leads “encouraging” decline in global rainforest destruction in 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
War, Fuel, Fertiliser, and the Food System: Who Bears the Cost of Empire?
The right of peoples to define their own food systems, to grow food in ways that are ethical, ecologically sound and socially just, to not be held hostage to the Strait of Hormuz or the profit margins of Cargill or Nutrien — is not a romantic fantasy. It is a material, political project.
The post War, Fuel, Fertiliser, and the Food System: Who Bears the Cost of Empire? appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
Populism vs. Oligarchy: Prof. Charles Derber on How to Reclaim America from the Billionaires
Borderlands part 1: The threats to public lands at the border
- Pearce on a list of candidates Senate hopes to confirm soon — E&E News
- Trump Just Withdrew Scott Socha to Lead the National Park Service — SFGate
- White House completes review of BLM public lands rule — E&E News
- Trump used Park Service to funnel millions to ballroom construction firm — New York Times
- President’s Budget Proposal Slashes National Park Service Funding Amid Ongoing Attacks on National Parks — National Parks Conservation Association
- Border wall map disappears from government website — Big Bend Sentinel
- Find Laiken Jordahl on X, Bluesky, Threads, TikTok, and Instagram
- Center for Biological Diversity
- No Big Bend Wall
- Mission Creep: How Trump is using the border to militarize our public lands — Westwise blog
- Watch this episode on YouTube
Produced by Aaron Weiss, Kate Groetzinger, Lauren Bogard, and Lilly Bock-Brownstein
Feedback: podcast@westernpriorities.org
Music: Purple Planet
Featured image: San Rafael Valley border wall construction. Russ McSpadden, Center for Biological Diversity
The post Borderlands part 1: The threats to public lands at the border appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.
UCSF nurses to hold rally for safe patient care at Birth Center at Mission Bay
Regional Rail in Crisis: How Metrolink’s governance holds back service, ridership, and growth
Metrolink faces permanent cuts amid rolling stock troubles, budget deficit
Approval Deadline Set For Caltrain Railyards Mega-Project, San Francisco
Midtown Sacramento passenger train station approved for Central Valley service
NNU, nation’s largest nurses union, supports May Day actions
Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels
Ist Conference Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels 1st Conference April 24-29 Santa Marta, Columbia A Just Transition is grounded in the effective respect of our right to self-determination and must be based on the guarantee of our internationally recognized inherent and distinct collective rights over our territories, land and waters. It is not limited to […]
The post Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels first appeared on Indigenous Environmental Network.Climate Change Has Two Drivers. We’ve Been Largely Ignoring One.
We often talk about climate change as a problem of carbon emissions rising and the technologies needed to bring them down. But that framing leaves out something fundamental.
Brett KenCairn, founding director of the Center for Regenerative Solutions and a longtime leader in community-based climate initiatives, has spent decades advancing nature-based solutions grounded in land restoration and local action. In his keynote at Bioneers 2026, he reframes the crisis as one rooted not only in emissions, but in the widespread degradation of living systems — and points toward restoration as a path forward.
This is an edited transcript of his talk.
Brett KenCairn:
I come from Boulder, Colorado, a community with a unique relationship to climate change. We have 11 federal research labs, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research, established there in 1967. Our community takes climate science seriously, probably because around 3,000 climate scientists actually live there. There’s a bit of an inside joke in Boulder that we have more climate scientists than therapists and personal trainers.
Boulder was also one of the first communities in the world to step up when our federal government chose not to sign onto early international agreements to reduce emissions. We said we would. We committed to reducing emissions as a community, and then we started organizing — working with other cities across the country and helping build a broader global movement.
When I joined in 2013 to help shape the next generation of our climate action plans, I was given the opportunity to collaborate with teams all over the world: Helsinki, Stockholm, Rio, Sydney, New York, Seattle, Toronto. It was an exuberant time.
But many of those cities are now quietly stepping back from this work. There’s a real sense of despair and hopelessness among many of us who’ve been at it for years, because we can see that our strategy isn’t working.
What I’ve come to understand is that it was doomed from the beginning, built on a false premise and a half-truth. The premise was that this problem was purely about technology — about machines, about energy sources. That if we just changed those sources — built more wind farms, installed more solar, deployed more electric vehicles and heat pumps — we could solve it.
That’s the half-truth.
Climate Change Has Two DriversThe other half is something we’ve known for more than 50 years. If you go back to the early days of global climate conversations in the 1970s, they all pointed to the same thing: Climate change has two legs. Yes, one of those legs is fossil fuel emissions. Nothing I’m saying diminishes the importance of reducing them. But even then, we knew there was a second leg: the degradation of land, the desecration of living systems.
Because the atmosphere isn’t just a geochemical machine governed by CO₂ in and CO₂ out. It’s a life-mediated system. Life created our atmosphere — for life. And the breakdown of these living systems is what’s been driving instability within them.
When the world came together in the 1990s at the Rio Earth Summit, we understood that there were three existential threats we needed to address. Climate was one, and we created the Convention on Climate Change — the IPCC we’ve heard so much about.
But there were two other conventions established at that summit. Biodiversity was one. The other was meant to be called the Convention on Land Degradation, but that didn’t sound compelling enough, so it became the Convention to Combat Desertification. Unfortunately, that framing led many of us to think, well, that’s a problem somewhere else; maybe Africa, but not here.
But I can show you places right outside Boulder that are desertifying right now. Because even then, we understood that this crisis was also about land degradation.
But then we started to forget. We need to understand why we made those choices. But what I will say is this: It’s time to change our strategy, because the one we’ve been using doesn’t offer much hope.
Let me summarize this in a way that might feel familiar.
If I asked many of you what’s causing climate change and how we solve it, you’d probably describe it something like this: Over the past few centuries, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been rising. And as fossil fuel use has increased, emissions have risen right alongside it.
Those two trends line up so closely that it feels obvious, like clear cause and effect. It’s easy to say: There’s your answer. The smoking gun — or in this case, the smoking stack.
When you understand climate change through that relationship, it naturally leads you to believe the solutions are technological. And if you’re a financier, if you like technology, that’s a very appealing frame to work within.
But we’re starting to learn that there’s another driver here. The science is finally beginning to catch up.
A 2017 report by Jonathan Sanderman and others looked at soil loss over the past 12,000 years. For most of that time, soil loss was minimal. But with the rise of early empires and the expansion of agriculture, you start to see it increase. And then, in the last century, it accelerates dramatically.
What Sanderman and his colleagues found is striking: Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the excess carbon in the atmosphere didn’t come from burning fossil fuels. It came from the loss of soil carbon — from degrading the land itself. And it’s not just about carbon.
When we lose soil, we also lose the capacity of living systems to hold water. We’ve forgotten that the most abundant greenhouse gas driving warming isn’t CO₂. It’s water vapor. So as we degrade the land, we’re not only releasing carbon, we’re also releasing vast amounts of water that would otherwise be held in healthy ecosystems. And that, too, intensifies climate instability.
There’s another relationship here, too: how fossil fuels, used through machinery, have reshaped the land itself. You don’t have to look far to see it. Just look at our own backyards. Take the Great Plains, once one of the most extraordinary ecological systems on the planet. In the span of just 10 years, we plowed up 30 million acres.
And it wasn’t just in the United States. This was happening all over the world. So while we’ve told ourselves the story that climate change is about industry and fossil fuel combustion, it’s also about the widespread degradation of the living world.
And the scale of it is immense.
The UN estimates that around 70% of the Earth’s terrestrial systems are degraded. A report last year suggested that roughly half of the planet’s biological capacity has already been compromised.
We’re living on a planet operating at roughly half its basic photosynthetic capacity — what scientists call “net primary productivity.” We don’t even know what it feels like to live on a fully functioning planet anymore. Although we’ve heard the stories.
We’ve Recovered Before, and We Can AgainRemember the stories about the passenger pigeons? Wow, when they took flight, the sky would go dark? That the rivers were so full of salmon you could walk across them? That you could stand on the Plains, look in any direction for miles, and see the land moving with millions of buffalo?
That’s what this planet looked like when it was operating at its full capacity. And that’s what we have to bring back. It’s the only real hope we have to address the climate crisis.
Now, it can feel hopeless. But there have been other moments when it felt that way. If you haven’t watched documentaries about the Dust Bowl, you should. Try to imagine what it was like on the Great Plains after we plowed up 30 million acres and turned it into a monoculture of wheat, and then the dust storms began. At first, just a few each year. Then dozens. People describe walls of dust, miles high, rolling toward them — like hell itself descending. It must have felt hopeless.
But we lived in a time when we still believed we could do something about it. When we believed we could return to the land and repair what we had broken. Millions of people went back to work restoring it. We made a living putting the world back together. And we did it.
In the span of a decade, we stopped the destruction. Within another decade, we began to restore what had been lost.
What happened during the Dust Bowl affected nearly a third of this country, but it also showed what’s possible at scale. The work people did together was extraordinary. Billions of plants were put back into the ground. Thousands of miles of contouring and check dams were built. It was simple, practical work, but deeply impactful. And it’s exactly the kind of work we need to be doing again.
I recently heard a presentation from Elizabeth Heilman at Wichita State. She shared that in parts of Kansas, regenerative agriculture has now been adopted at a remarkable scale — something like 70% of a county has returned its land to living cover, to deep-rooted systems. Do you know what they’re seeing? They’re changing weather patterns.
We can do this. We’ve done this. We are doing this right now.
The Real Shift: An Economy That Repairs the PlanetThis won’t happen just because we shift consciousness, or do more education, or launch another communications campaign for the planet. It will happen because we change the economy. We have to make it possible to make a living repairing the planet.
There’s promising research showing that if we restored just a third of degraded land globally, we could stabilize the climate while also reversing biodiversity loss. And according to the World Economic Forum, that kind of effort could generate 190 million jobs and $3.5 trillion in economic activity.
That’s the future we need to demand. So where do we start?
- First, we have to prepare and plan, just like in the 1930s. When systems begin to unravel, it’s too late to start from scratch.
- Second, we need to test and prove what works. Pilot these approaches now. Get them underway.
- Third, we need partnerships at every level — across neighborhoods, jurisdictions, countries. And we have to learn quickly and scale what works.
- And finally, we have to remember: This is a political process. I know it’s more fun to talk about whales and growing things — I like that too — but this is political.
Yes, this is daunting. I know, especially for younger leaders, it can feel overwhelming. But you can start now.
In my own community, we’re starting with a simple idea: Remove the barriers to participation. We have to de-professionalize land stewardship. This isn’t complicated work. It’s something many of us can do. But when only professionals are allowed to participate, most people are left out.
First, we need to move beyond volunteerism. That was a 20th-century model. People’s time and knowledge deserve to be paid. Even modest support — 10 to 15 hours a month at a living wage — can sustain these systems. Water the trees, mulch, care for the plants. That’s enough to keep things going.
Second, we need the infrastructure to do this at scale. We’re training local contractors, especially small and minority-owned businesses, in things like wildfire-resilient landscaping, rain gardens, and biodiversity restoration. Then the public sector can seed that capacity through small contracts.
Third, we need to fund this work at scale. Through partnerships, we’ve seen how communities can generate tens of millions of dollars through local funding measures to invest in restoration.
That’s what we need to be doing everywhere. And we can. So join in.
Start by growing something. A flower, a medicinal plant, food. Then learn how it grows alongside other plants — what it needs, what it supports. And then start to see how that small system fits into something larger. Before long, you’ll find yourself part of a much bigger community — one that’s ready to welcome you and help you find your way.
The post Climate Change Has Two Drivers. We’ve Been Largely Ignoring One. appeared first on Bioneers.
New Orleans nurse prepared for five-day strike against LCMC’s surface bargaining
Tell City Council: Keep Philly’s Trails Safe and Usable
Philadelphia’s trail network is one of the city’s greatest assets.
With more than 80 miles of trails, these spaces connect neighborhoods, schools, parks, and local businesses. They provide safe places to walk, bike, commute, and spend time outdoors. For many residents, they are some of the most accessible and welcoming public spaces in the city.
But that safety and accessibility don’t happen automatically.
Trails require regular maintenance to stay usable. That means clearing debris, repairing damaged surfaces, trimming overgrowth, and making sure paths remain visible, clean, and safe.
Right now, much of that work is being done by a small trail maintenance crew funded through a temporary grant. Thanks to that support, progress has been made. But without permanent, dedicated funding, that progress is at risk.
If funding disappears, the trails can quickly become harder to use, less safe, and less welcoming.
Philadelphia has an opportunity to get ahead of that.
City Council can invest in a long-term solution by funding a dedicated trail maintenance crew and supporting trail development across departments. The current proposal includes:
• $300,000 in new funding for trail maintenance (FY28–FY30)
• $500,000 in sustained funding through the Streets Department
• $250,000 in sustained funding through Parks and Recreation
These investments would ensure that Philadelphia’s trails remain safe, clean, and accessible for years to come.
Philadelphia’s trails already connect the city. With the right investment, they can continue to serve everyone.
Tell City Council: invest in trail maintenance now.
17 April | CLOC (Caribbean) commemorates the 30th anniversary Peasants’ Struggle Day
The Caribbean region of CLOC–Vía Campesina commemorates April 17 struggle and calls for comprehensive agrarian reform, while upholding food sovereignty as the central banner of the peasantry’s struggle.
The post 17 April | CLOC (Caribbean) commemorates the 30th anniversary Peasants’ Struggle Day appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
National Nurses United endorses Abdul El-Sayed to represent Michigan in U.S. Senate
17 April | MST receives Berta Cáceres Award on International Day of Peasant Struggle
At a ceremony in Spain, Kallen Oliveira received the award on behalf of the MST and commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Eldorado dos Carajás Massacre.
The post 17 April | MST receives Berta Cáceres Award on International Day of Peasant Struggle appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
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