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In this special episode of The Landscape, the entire Center for Western Priorities team joins us for an interview with Jennifer Rokala, CWP’s outgoing executive director, to celebrate her 11 years leading the organization. Jen reflects on key victories throughout her tenure at CWP, the organization’s evolution as a communications-driven conservation hub, and her advice for Aaron as he steps into the role of executive director.

Plus, the team talks about the best food in the West. Here are the restaurants mentioned during this episode:

• Hot Tomato Pizza – Fruita, Colorado
• Bin 707 – Grand Junction, Colorado
• Eegee’s – Tucson, Arizona
• Taco Party – Grand Junction, Colorado
• Rome Station – Rome, Oregon
• BirdHouse – Page, Arizona

News

• Emails Show How Interior Dept Delivered New Drilling Permits for Burgum’s Billionaire Ally — Public Domain
• Shared ground: Coalition forms to promote affordable housing on public lands — Deseret News
• Solar ranch aims to prove grazing cattle under the panels is a farmland win-win — Los Angeles Times

Resources

• Housing and conservation experts agree: Public lands can’t solve the housing crisis. Here’s what can — Center for Western Priorities via Substack
• Watch this episode on YouTube 

Produced by Aaron Weiss, Lauren Bogard, Kate Groetzinger, and Lilly Bock-Brownstein
Feedback: podcast@westernpriorities.org
Music: Purple Planet
Featured image: Center for Western Priorities team

The post Jennifer Rokala on 11 years fighting for public lands at CWP appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

AI image concept: A giant Shell logo-shaped cash register sitting on an oil-slicked shoreline, ringing up “$6.9bn” while distant tankers pass through a smoky, war-lit Strait of Hormuz. In the foreground, a tiny green sapling labelled “transition” is being watered with a golden petrol pump nozzle

DISCLAIMER: This article is opinion/commentary. It is not financial advice, investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. It relies on publicly available reporting, company statements, and cited sources. Site wide disclaimer also applies.

The war dividend nobody wants to call a war dividend

There are quarters when an oil major merely makes money, and then there are quarters when the geopolitical horror show performs like an unpaid member of the trading desk.

Shell’s first quarter of 2026 appears to sit firmly in the second category. The company reported adjusted earnings of about $6.9 billion, more than double the previous quarter and above analyst expectations, helped by market volatility linked to the Iran war and disruption across global energy routes. The Times reported that Shell’s adjusted profits rose 23% year-on-year and were more than double the previous quarter, with trading, refining, marketing and gas-market volatility doing much of the heavy lifting.

So there it is: another majestic chapter in the sacred corporate scripture of “operational performance”, where instability becomes opportunity, crisis becomes margin, and the planet is invited to admire the spreadsheet.

Shell’s official line, naturally, was polished to a boardroom shine. In its first-quarter release, chief executive Wael Sawan said the company delivered “strong results” in a quarter marked by “unprecedented disruption in global energy markets”.   Translation, for those without a refinery-grade euphemism filter: the world shook, prices swung, traders pounced, and shareholders got another warm bath.

The company also raised its dividend by 5% and announced a $3 billion share buyback, though that buyback was smaller than some previous rounds.   The result is a familiar tableau: public anxiety over energy security on one side, private capital returns on the other, and Shell standing in the middle looking solemn while counting.

The war dividend nobody wants to call a war dividend

Let us be precise. Shell did not cause the Iran war. Shell is not being accused here of causing the conflict. But when oil and gas markets convulse, companies with enormous trading operations can benefit from the volatility. That is not a conspiracy theory; it is the business model doing yoga.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Shell’s chemicals and products division, which includes oil trading, produced $1.93 billion in adjusted profit in the first quarter, compared with $449 million a year earlier, with trading boosted by volatile markets.   Bloomberg had already reported in April that Shell said its oil trading results were “significantly higher” than in the previous quarter as the Middle East conflict disrupted global energy markets.

This is the part where the industry asks everyone to be mature. Energy markets are complicated. Supply security matters. Traders provide liquidity. Pipelines do not run on hashtags. All true. Also true: the spectacle of a fossil-fuel giant harvesting bumper earnings from war-driven volatility while continuing to brand itself as a steward of the energy transition is the sort of thing satire struggles to improve upon.

Even Shell’s operational side took hits. Reports noted damage and disruption affecting Shell’s Middle East-linked gas operations, including the Pearl gas-to-liquids facility in Qatar, with production impacts expected to continue.   Yet the earnings machine still roared. Apparently, if one part of the fossil empire catches fire, another part can sell tickets to the flames.

The transition that keeps finding new oil and gas to love

Shell’s climate messaging remains an exquisitely engineered balancing act: one foot planted on “net zero by 2050”, the other pressing firmly on the accelerator of oil, LNG and gas expansion.

Shell says its target is to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050, and its 2024 Energy Transition Strategy says the company aims to provide energy today while building the energy system of the future.   It also says it will continue efforts to halve Scope 1 and 2 operational emissions by 2030 compared with 2016.

Fine. But the climate problem is not limited to the emissions from Shell’s own boilers, platforms and office lights. The really vast emissions come when customers burn the oil and gas. And this is where the corporate choreography gets less Swan Lake and more oil tanker reversing into a wind farm.

In April 2026, Shell announced an agreement to acquire Canadian gas producer ARC Resources, a company focused on the Montney shale basin in British Columbia and Alberta.   The Times characterised the deal as a strategic move to strengthen Shell’s shale portfolio and reserves, in a context where investors were watching reserve life and future production closely.

Shell buying more gas assets while talking about transition is not a contradiction, according to Shell. It is “energy security”. It is “resilience”. It is “value”. It is every corporate noun in the drawer except the obvious one: expansion.

This is an old Shell habit. The Reuters source supplied for this piece points back to Shell’s 2007 move to buy out minority shareholders in Shell Canada, then one of Canada’s major oil, gas and oil-sands producers and refiners. Reuters reported at the time that some minority shareholders argued the offer undervalued the Canadian unit’s prospects.   Nearly two decades later, the geography changes, the buzzwords evolve, and the gravitational pull remains the same: hydrocarbons, preferably in large quantities.

Investors: the silent choir in very expensive seats

No discussion of Shell is complete without mentioning the institutional money standing quietly behind the curtain, applauding with spreadsheets.

MarketScreener’s shareholder data for Shell lists major holders including Norges Bank Investment Management at about 3.24%, The Vanguard Group at about 3.23%, BlackRock Investment Management (UK) at about 2.69%, BlackRock Advisors (UK) at about 1.56%, and SSgA Funds Management at about 1.54%.

These are not fringe investors. These are the heavy furniture of global capitalism: pension money, index money, sovereign wealth money, passive money that somehow manages to be very passive until dividends arrive.

This matters because Shell’s strategy is not performed in an empty theatre. It is performed for investors who have often rewarded discipline, buybacks, dividends and fossil-fuel cash generation. In plain English: Shell is not improvising alone. It is dancing for an audience that knows the steps.

And the steps are obvious: keep the oil-and-gas engine profitable, trim or discipline lower-return green ventures, talk about net zero at a safe altitude, and return cash aggressively enough that major shareholders do not start throwing chairs.

The courtroom wobble and the climate credibility gap

Shell’s climate record is not merely a matter of campaign slogans. It has been fought over in court.

In 2021, a Dutch district court ordered Shell to cut its worldwide aggregate net carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 compared with 2019 levels. In November 2024, The Hague Court of Appeal overturned that specific order. Shell welcomed the ruling, saying its 2050 net-zero target remained central to strategy and that it continued work to halve operational emissions by 2030.

Shell’s legal win, however, did not magically decarbonise its business model. It removed a specific court-imposed target. It did not remove the atmosphere, the carbon budget, the physics, or the awkward fact that “we’ll get there by 2050” has become the corporate climate equivalent of “the cheque is in the post”.

The court appeal ruling gave Shell breathing room. Shell appears to have used some of that breathing room to inhale more gas.

Energy security: the industry’s favourite magic cloak

The phrase “energy security” now performs heroic labour for the fossil-fuel sector. It can mean keeping homes heated, factories powered and supply chains functioning. It can also mean giving oil and gas companies a gleaming moral vocabulary for doing what they already wanted to do.

Shell’s 2025 Annual Report page says the report covers financial, operational, strategic and sustainability performance, and Shell’s chair said the company was becoming more competitive and resilient in a “fragmented and complex” world.   That language is not accidental. Fragmentation and complexity are now the corporate weather system in which oil majors thrive: storm clouds above, buybacks below.

The company’s defenders will say the world still needs oil and gas. They are not wrong. The world does still consume vast quantities of both. But that argument becomes rather less noble when used to justify every fresh fossil investment, every new gas basin, every LNG growth narrative, and every shareholder payout wrapped in a transition ribbon.

At some point, “meeting demand” begins to look suspiciously like preserving demand.

The green costume, the black liquid

Shell has invested in lower-carbon businesses, EV charging, biofuels, hydrogen and carbon capture. Shell itself says it planned to invest $10–15 billion in low-carbon energy solutions between 2023 and the end of 2025, and that it invested $5.6 billion in low-carbon solutions in 2023.

But the question is not whether Shell has any green spending. The question is whether the company’s overall direction is compatible with the speed and scale of decarbonisation required. A fossil-fuel giant can place solar panels in the brochure while continuing to build its future around gas, trading and hydrocarbon extraction. The brochure may be greener. The business model still smells of crude.

The Q1 2026 numbers sharpen the point. Shell’s profit surge did not come from a sudden global outbreak of wind turbines. It came from fossil markets doing what fossil markets do in crisis: spiking, convulsing, rewarding those positioned to profit from scarcity and fear.

Shell did not invent that system. It merely sits magnificently inside it, polishing the brass.

Conclusion: Shell’s transition is going exactly where the money tells it to go

Shell wants to be seen as pragmatic. In a sense, it is. It is pragmatically following the cash. It is pragmatically rewarding shareholders. It is pragmatically using “energy security” as the all-purpose password for continued fossil-fuel relevance.

The problem is that climate stability is not impressed by pragmatism measured in quarterly returns. Nor is the public likely to be charmed forever by the spectacle of oil majors banking billions from volatility while asking everyone else to admire their net-zero mood board.

Shell’s first quarter of 2026 is not just a financial event. It is a morality play with an investor deck: war volatility, bumper profits, shareholder payouts, gas acquisitions, climate pledges and a transition strategy that seems permanently stuck in the departure lounge.

Shell says it is building the energy system of the future. Perhaps. But judging by the cash register, the future still has a very large oil slick underneath it.

Spoof Shell PR Spin: “Please Stop Calling It a War Windfall, We Prefer ‘Geopolitical Value Creation’”

Shell today proudly confirmed that it remains fully committed to delivering more value with fewer awkward questions.

In a quarter marked by unprecedented global disruption, Shell’s world-class trading teams demonstrated the company’s unique ability to transform market chaos into shareholder comfort. While some observers have described this as “profiting from volatility linked to war”, Shell prefers the more responsible phrase: resilience-led monetisation of unfortunate events beyond our control.

We remain deeply committed to the energy transition, which is why we continue to say “net zero by 2050” at regular intervals while investing in the oil and gas required to keep civilisation, industry analysts, and dividend expectations functioning.

Our recent Canadian gas acquisition should not be misunderstood as fossil-fuel expansion. It is a carefully calibrated act of transition-adjacent hydrocarbon stewardship. Gas, as everyone in our investor relations department knows, is not really a fossil fuel when described in a soothing enough voice.

Shell thanks its shareholders, including major global asset managers and institutional investors, for their continued confidence in our strategy of balancing climate ambition, energy security and extremely large sums of money.

Spoof Bot-Reaction / Comment Section

@DividendDruid: Amazing quarter. Thoughts and prayers to volatility, the unsung hero of shareholder returns.

@NetZeroByWhenever: Shell’s transition plan is very clear: transition from last quarter’s profits to much bigger profits.

@FossilFuelFan1978: People complain, but without oil companies, who would bravely monetise geopolitical instability?

@GreenwashDetector: I love when companies say “lower emissions” while buying more gas. Very minimalist climate policy. Barely there.

@IndexFundGhost: As a passive investor, I passively receive the benefits and actively deny responsibility.

@EnergySecurityEnjoyer: Every time someone says “energy security”, a buyback gets its wings.

@PlanetaryBoundaries: I have reviewed the quarterly results and would like to resign from Earth.

@ShellPRIntern: Please remember: it is not a fossil-fuel expansion strategy. It is a molecule-forward resilience platform.

@CashRegisterAtHormuz: Ding.

@ActualClimateScience: This comment has been delayed due to insufficient investor enthusiasm.

Shell’s War-Volatility Jackpot: Nothing Says “Energy Transition” Like $6.9 Billion and Another Fossil-Fuel Shopping Trip was first posted on May 7, 2026 at 7:46 pm.
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May 4, 2026: Read letter from San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, Greenaction, California Environmental Justice Coalition and allies demanding closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant

Click Here to Read The Letter to Senator Laird

 

If you can’t afford to live, what does democracy actually offer you?

It’s a question sitting just beneath the surface of many political debates right now. For people struggling to get by, the idea of protecting democracy can feel abstract at best, disconnected at worst. And even in more progressive spaces where democracy is treated as urgent, it’s often framed as a parallel concern — something to defend alongside economic issues, rather than through them. As Raj Patel puts it, people are increasingly being asked to accept a kind of tradeoff: focus on affordability now, and worry about democracy later. If the system hasn’t delivered for working people, it’s not hard to see why some might question whether it’s worth defending at all.

At the Bioneers Conference 2026, labor organizer Saru Jayaraman, policy expert Angela Glover Blackwell, and journalist Raj Patel took that tension head-on — and flipped it.

This Isn’t What Democracy Is Supposed to Do

For decades, Angela Glover Blackwell has worked across issues such as housing, transportation, and environmental justice, but over time, she came to see a deeper pattern behind them all. “It is the failure to understand, to lean into, and to make real the promise of democracy that has kept us from solving these problems.” For Blackwell, democracy is not just a process of voting or representation — it has a stronger purpose. “It is co-governance for human flourishing,” she says. “That’s all it is.”

That definition reframes the entire conversation. If democracy exists to support human flourishing, then it cannot be separated from the conditions in which people live. As she puts it, “You can’t have human flourishing if the people aren’t putting in their two cents…if they’re not telling you what they need.” And yet, the version most people experience falls far short. “The reason that democracy has been so feeble,” she argues, “is because it has always tried…to function for a few, not for the all.”

That gap — between what democracy promises and what it delivers — doesn’t just shape outcomes. It shapes expectations. As Patel observes, participation often becomes “an exercise in which we are being trained to expect less.”

What It Feels Like When Democracy Fails

While Blackwell frames the broader vision, Jayaraman grounds it in day-to-day realities. “We’ve been fighting on affordability for decades,” she says, “and the response we’ve gotten…from people with power is: That’s cute. That’s sweet. But we are here to save democracy.” In her work organizing restaurant workers, she has seen how economic pressure reshapes who gets to participate — and how. “Democracy doesn’t work when the majority of people are unable or terrified to come speak up, and then a minority of people are paid to come speak for their bosses.”

She describes a dynamic in which workers are often pressured by employers to attend meetings and oppose wage increases, and in some cases show up to testify in legislative hearings as well. Meanwhile, those who actually need higher wages often can’t risk being visible. “They’re working three jobs and terrified…of showing up with their name and their face.”

In that context, calls to “protect democracy” can feel hollow. Even within the Democratic Party—where support for wage increases is often assumed—Jayaraman argues that meaningful progress is frequently blocked or diluted. “My experience of democracy,” she says, “is Democrats blocking wage increases…because we have not created the consequences for those Democrats.”

The Mistake We Keep Making About Affordability

What the panel makes clear is that affordability and democracy are not separate issues; they are the same fight. Blackwell is direct: “The affordability problem is that we, as a nation, have not invested in human flourishing.” Focusing only on prices — on eggs, gas, rent — misses the deeper issue. “If we think we can separate the absence of a vibrant democracy from the suffering that is happening in this country,” she says, “we don’t understand what democracy was for.”

Jayaraman pushes the same point from another angle, noting that even progressive conversations about affordability often avoid the most obvious lever. “Why are none of even the most progressive people talking about…raising wages?” she asks. “Life will never be affordable unless people have enough money in their pockets.” And beyond economics, she emphasizes what low wages actually do: “When they are paid as little as $2 or $3 or even $15… it devalues who they are. Every worker has value and skill…And everybody…wants to feel like they are contributing to meaning.”

Across both perspectives, the argument converges: Affordability is not just about costs. It’s about dignity, participation, and whether people have the capacity to engage in public life at all. That raises a deeper question: What do we actually mean when we say something is “affordable”? As Patel points out, “There’s a difference between cheap and affordable.” Cheap, he argues, is often “a way of displacing one cost onto someone else…usually the working class and the rest of the web of life.”

What a Real Democracy Would Require

If current systems fall short, what would it actually look like to get this right? Jayaraman’s answer is simple and concrete: “In a real democracy, workers would be able to have one job instead of three. They could show up…They could overpower any lies…And they would be listened to.” That vision ties material conditions directly to political power. Without time, stability, and security, participation becomes limited to those who can afford it.

Blackwell echoes this, emphasizing that democracy must be judged by how it works for those most impacted. “Democracy only functions when it can function for those who have been most marginalized in society,” she says. “That is the mark of a great democracy.” She points to a familiar example: curb cuts in sidewalks, originally designed for people with disabilities but now used by everyone. “When we solve problems with nuance and specificity…thinking about those who have been rendered most vulnerable…the benefits cascade out to everybody.” Building a democracy that works for the most vulnerable, in other words, isn’t a niche goal. It’s the foundation of one that works at all.

Raising Expectations Is the Strategy

So what does it take to move from theory to action? For Jayaraman, it starts with refusing to accept the limits of what feels politically possible. “For so long our side has settled,” she says. “We negotiate against ourselves before we even get in the room. We need to say…what we actually need. Nobody wants less than what they need.”

That’s the logic behind the Living Wage for All campaign she describes, which pushes for significantly higher minimum wages across cities and states. But the strategy is not just about policy — it’s about participation. “If we can give people some hope…they will show up, they will participate,” she says. “Maybe it will get them to one job, and then they can engage on all the issues we want them to engage on.”

Blackwell points to a broader shift that has to happen alongside it. “What we need is transformative solidarity.” Not a transactional version — “you sign my petition, I’ll show up for your march” — but something deeper. “Your issue is my issue,” she says, “because I can’t have the world that I want to live in if all of these things are not addressed.”

Participation Depends on Capacity

Throughout the conversation, there is a clear push to expand what counts as democratic participation. “I get so tired of democracy being either vote or run for office,” Jayaraman says. She points to how, in many places throughout the world, democratic participation extends well beyond voting alone. Ballot initiatives, organizing, public debate — these are all part of democratic life. But they depend on something more fundamental: people having the capacity to engage.

And that brings the conversation full circle. “The glimpse of what happened during the pandemic is the answer,” Jayaraman says — not as a model to replicate, but as a moment that revealed what becomes possible when people have more time, stability, and leverage. During that period, even amid widespread disruption and loss, millions of workers left their jobs, wages rose in some sectors, and many people had more space to organize and engage. “It gives us a glimpse of what could happen if Americans could have one job.”

The post What’s Standing in the Way of Civic Participation — and How to Change It appeared first on Bioneers.

Invest In People Not War & Impeach Convict Remove.

War Is Not The Answer.

Healthcare Not Warfare

Introduction by bryant terry, artist, chef, publisher and author.

The right to food and the right to land are fundamental to human freedom, dignity, and self-determination, but locally and globally, land and food have been leveraged as tools of oppression. Fortunately, they can also be portals for liberation. Renowned groundbreaking Black Kreyol farmer and food justice activist, Leah Penniman, founder of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black, offers us living proof that when Land is reunited with her people, mutual thriving can flourish in the form of solutions to climate chaos and food apartheid. Even in this era of intense state repression, community self-determination and solidarity can be foundational to building a powerful movement for land and food sovereignty.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Leah Penniman will be teaching a Bioneers Learning course in December 2026: Children of the Land: Soul Fire Farm’s Approach to Raising and Mentoring Young People. Learn more and register.

Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol farmer, author, mother, and food justice activist who has been tending the soil and organizing for an anti-racist food system for 25 years, currently serves as founding Co-Executive Director of Farm Operations at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a Black & Brown-led project that works toward food and land justice. She is the author of: Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018) and Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023).

EXPLORE MORE The Food Web Newsletter

Dive into the Food Web with Bioneers and learn more about how a transformed food system can be a source of community wealth, creative culture, and individual health, as well as a way to fulfill our sacred calling as humans for environmental stewardship.

‘The Seed Was Their Most Precious Legacy’: Why Black Land Matters

Leah Penniman tells how the ancestral grandmothers in the Dahomey region of West Africa braided seeds of okra, molokhia, and Levant cotton into their hair before being forced to board transatlantic slave ships. As expert agriculturalists, the seeds and the ecosystemic and cultural knowledge they represented were their most precious legacy

The post Leah Penniman – Free the People! Free the Land! appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Cara Romero, Executive Director, Bioneers and Director, Indigeneity Program.

In many North and Central American Indigenous peoples’ oral traditions the “Trickster Coyote” is a crucially important mythic ancestor, and the stories surrounding him illuminate vital truths. Julian Brave NoiseCat, activist, journalist, champion powwow dancer, co-director of the award-winning film Sugarcane, author of We Survived the Night, and multi-hyphenate storyteller and artist from the Secwépemc and St’at’imc nations, dramatically makes the ancient but ever potent “Coyote Story” archetype, one of the most significant oral traditions in human history, come to vivid life to shed light on our current situation and possible paths forward in these trying times.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Julian Brave NoiseCat (member, Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen, and descendant, Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie), formerly a political strategist, policy analyst and cultural organizer who played a major role, in, among other achievements, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Alcatraz Occupation and getting Deb Haaland appointed Interior Secretary (the first Native American cabinet secretary in U.S. history), is a writer, journalist, and the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Academy Award (for his co-direction of Sugarcane). NoiseCat’s journalism has appeared in dozens of leading national publications and has been recognized with many awards. His first book, We Survived the Night, was a national bestseller in Canada and an indie bestseller in the U.S., and Julian is also a champion powwow dancer who played hockey for three of the oldest teams in the game: Columbia University, the Oxford University Blues and the Alkali Lake Braves.

EXPLORE MORE “Remembering Who We Are and Our Relations” with Julian Brave NoiseCat

In this episode of the Indigeneity Conversations podcast series, Julian Brave NoiseCat explores the importance of connection and relationship, to family, to history, to place and to culture, threading his own story throughout a larger narrative about the deep trauma Indigenous people have experienced through colonization and the resilience and power that is emerging as individuals, tribes and nations work to reclaim their own stories and landscapes.

Indigenous Rising: From Alcatraz to Standing Rock

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. From the historic Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 to the fossil fuel fights throughout Canada and the U.S. today, Indigenous resistance illuminates an activism founded in a spiritual connection with the web of life and the human community. This podcast features Julian NoiseCat, Dr. LaNada War Jack and Clayton Thomas-Müller.

The post Julian Brave NoiseCat – The Epic Misadventures of the Trickster Coyote appeared first on Bioneers.

Kyle Trefny was 18 years old in 2020 when skies in the San Francisco Bay Area and much of the Pacific Coast turned orange with wildfire smoke. He shares how that moment led him to become a wildland firefighter and to join other youth in creating FireGeneration Collaborative (FireGen), dedicated to imagining and building a future beyond intense wildfires and their devastating health impacts, a future of healthy communities and livelihoods that recenters Indigenous leadership in land management. Kyle reflects upon the power of questions, of friendship, of breaking negative cycles, of art, of mentors and elders, and of taking leaps of faith in life.

This Young Leaders talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Kyle Trefny is an organizer, artist, wildland firefighter, and co-founder of FireGeneration Collaborative (FireGen), which started out with a GoFundMe campaign and a petition and became a dynamic, influential youth-led organization that has helped bring about the historic involvement of firefighters and Indigenous fire management practitioners in governance processes and engaged hundreds of young people in fire research. A faculty research assistant at the University of Oregon’s Ecosystem Workforce Program, Kyle is also active in movements for Indigenous sovereignty, queer rights, and climate justice and was a recipient of a 2025 Brower Youth Award.

Learn more about FireGen.

EXPLORE MORE Putting the Land First: A Candid Conversation on Climate, Conservation, and California’s Future

Three changemakers working at the intersection of policy, land, and climate share their perspectives on what it takes to scale nature-based solutions. Together, they explore the progress being made, the roadblocks still ahead, and why putting land first is essential to securing a just, livable future.

Nature’s Phoenix: Fire As Medicine

In this podcast episode with fire ecologists Chad Hanson and Frank Kanawha Lake, we learn how contemporary Western fire science is integrating what Indigenous Peoples discovered over thousands of years of observation, and trial and error: fire is key to optimizing forest vitality and biodiversity.

The post Kyle Trefny – When Orange Skies Clear appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Anna Lappé, Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

As we today once again face the aggression of authoritarian oligarchy, there is a great deal we can learn from how food workers confronted fascism a century ago. Socialist and anarchist movements around the world gave birth to innovative solidarity strategies that permitted them to survive a fascist onslaught, care for their communities, and put food on the table in times of disease and war. Raj Patel, one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable food systems and a tireless advocate for food justice, shares what his research about these inspiring movements tells us about how we too can draw on the best human impulses to build economic systems built on solidarity and mutual aid.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Raj Patel, an award-winning author, film-maker and academic, is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin who has worked for the World Bank and WTO but also protested against them around the world and testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US, UK and EU governments. A member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and of the council of Progressive International, he has written extensively for a range of scholarly journals in economics, philosophy, politics and public health and also contributes frequently to a range of other publications, including The Guardian, Financial Times, New York Times, and Scientific American. He is the author of: Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and The Value of Nothing, and co-author of: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things and (with Rupa Marya) of: Inflamed: Deep Medicine and The Anatomy of Injustice. His first film, co-directed with Zak Piper, is the award-winning documentary The Ants & The Grasshopper. He also co-hosted the food politics podcast The Secret Ingredient.

EXPLORE MORE The Food Web Newsletter

Dive into the Food Web with Bioneers and learn more about how a transformed food system can be a source of community wealth, creative culture, and individual health, as well as a way to fulfill our sacred calling as humans for environmental stewardship.

Young Leaders Champion Food Sovereignty and Economic Equity in BIPOC Communities

Explore how young leaders are driving food sovereignty and economic equity in BIPOC communities, transforming lives and inspiring change.

The post Raj Patel – Food Solidarity vs Fascism appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Manuel Pastor, Director of the Equity Research Institute at USC.

With federal incursions tearing through communities from coast to coast and huge new detention centers coming online, it is understandable that many of us could feel overwhelmed and powerless in the light of such frightening, massive shows of force, but, as we’ve seen, some communities are courageously rising up to defend their neighbors. According to the nationally-recognized community organizer, bestselling author, Director of the Shared Future initiative, and co-founder of the national network of immigrant youth, United We Dream, Cristina Jiménez Moreta, this is a tipping point moment, and we need to draw from examples of historic change that started in the margins of society before conquering the mainstream to inspire us to join together and build a new consensus in our nation that celebrates immigrants’ enormous contributions and supports their rights.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference. Read a transcript of this talk here.

Cristina Jiménez Moreta, who came to the U.S. from Ecuador in 1998 and grew up undocumented in Queens, New York, is an award-winning community organizer, bestselling author, and leading social justice activist. Co-founder and former Executive Director of  United We Dream (UWD), the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country, she has led multiple national and local campaigns for immigrant justice, including playing a leadership role in the campaign to win and implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA). A distinguished lecturer at the City University of New York, Jiménez was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and named one of Time 100’s most influential people. She is the author of a bestselling debut memoir Dreaming of Home (2025).

EXPLORE MORE Bioneers Interview with Cristina Jiménez Moreta

Cristina Jiménez Moreta discusses her life and work with Anneke Campbell.

The post Cristina Jiménez Moreta – Mass Deportations: A Tipping Point Moment for All of Us appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers Co-Founder and CEO.

Brett KenCairn, founding Director of the Center for Regenerative Solutions, an early leader in community-based living systems regeneration, challenges the conventional understandings of the causes and solutions of climate change and its fixation on carbon and technology. He illustrates through both recent science and our own direct experience that it is the degradation of the living world that is at the center of both how we have destabilized the climate, and how we can solve not only the climate crisis, but also reverse biodiversity loss and regenerate healthy human communities. He shows that we are living on a planet operating at half its photosynthetic capability—illustrating both the dire reality of our current situation but also the foundation of hope. 

Pointing to numerous examples of human communities reversing large scale landscape degradation—including the reversal of the Dust Bowl in the U.S. in the 1930s, the restoration of the Rhode Island-sized Loess Plateau in China in the 1990s, and examples of similar activities taking place around the world now—Brett points to our ability to build a global movement, community-by-community, to harness nature’s power to regenerate landscapes at a scale.  Through coordinated community-based action, these efforts can stabilize climate, generate hundreds of millions of jobs, generate trillions of dollars in economic opportunity, reverse biodiversity loss, and reboot the biosphere’s productive capabilities.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference. Read a transcript of this talk here.

Brett KenCairn, founding Director of the Center for Regenerative Solutions and Senior Division Manager for Nature-based Climate Solutions for the City of Boulder’s Climate Initiatives Department, has throughout his career supported community-based initiatives across the western U.S., particularly in rural, Native American, and other marginalized communities. He also co-founded several organizations, including: the Rogue River Institute for Ecology and Economy; Indigenous Community Enterprises; Veterans Green Jobs; and Community Energy Systems.

EXPLORE MORE Urban Forests: A Nature-Based Solution to Climate Breakdown and Inequality

In this podcast episode with Brett KenCairn and Samira Malone, learn how urban forestry is a nature-based solution that simultaneously addresses the parallel crises of climate change and wealth inequality.

The Restorative Revolution: How Indigenous Leadership and Allyship Catalyzed the Biggest River Restoration in US History

In this podcast episode, Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history.

The post Brett KenCairn – Nature-based Climate Solutions—Centering Life to Heal the Planet appeared first on Bioneers.

Born of resistance, resilience, and ancestral strength, Indigenous women are rising, reclaiming leadership, re-aligning with nature, and challenging the imposed dysfunctions of colonial patriarchy. Jasmine Smith, 16, a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee and founder and Chair of NAIWA Daughters, has lived this movement since birth, appearing before tribal and state legislatures all the way to the UN, embodying her refusal of the exclusion of Indigenous youth voices in the struggle for our collective future. She issues a bold call to restore Indigenous youth to their rightful place as valued leaders, knowledge-holders, and essential advocates for the living world.

This Young Leaders talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Jasmine Smith, 16, a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is an internationally recognized Indigenous youth leader, poet, and Founder and Chair of NAIWA Daughters, a youth-led nonprofit advancing Indigenous young women’s leadership, advocacy, and civic power. Jasmine has delivered keynote addresses at the Model United Nations Conference, working with Italian ambassadors, spoken before the Tennessee State Senate, working with Knox County representatives, and introduced the nation’s first all-female, second youth-led Rights of Nature resolution. A two-time Tennessee Civic Essay Award winner, she is a guest lecturer at the University of Tennessee, United World College in Costa Rica, and other academic institutions. Through her work, Jasmine bridges Indigenous knowledge, youth leadership, and environmental justice.

EXPLORE MORE Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Pass Historic Youth-Led Rights of Nature Resolution

An Eastern Band of Cherokee Tribal Council resolution affirms the rights of the stream system in the Great Smoky Mountains. Young Cherokee women representing the NAIWA Daughters testified before the Council about the challenges of witnessing the simultaneous erosion of culture and the decimation of the natural world, and urged the Council to trust the youth, who understand what is at stake.

The Restorative Revolution: How Indigenous Leadership and Allyship Catalyzed the Biggest River Restoration in US History

In this podcast episode, Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history.

The post Jasmine Smith – Living Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams, While Being the Voice of the Voiceless appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Suzanne Simard, the Project Lead for The Mother Tree Project and Program.

Western science has long resisted and even ridiculed the idea that our planet is alive, but many scientists now recognize that Earth and life continually coevolve and that, together, they form a single, interconnected, living system. Ferris Jabr, NYT bestselling author and one of our most celebrated scientific writers, explains how, over billions of years, microbes, plants, fungi, and animals radically altered the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, transforming what was once a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis. Life breathed oxygen into the atmosphere, dyed the sky blue, made fire possible, converted barren crust into fertile soil, and perhaps even helped construct the continents. Over time, life became critical to the planet’s capacity to regulate its climate and maintain balance. Life is Earth and Earth is life.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Ferris Jabr, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of the bestselling Becoming Earth, which reviewers have described as an “infectiously poetic” “masterwork” that “earns its place alongside the best of today’s essential popular science books.” Ferris has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Scientific American and has received fellowships and grants from Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, the Pulitzer Center, and the Whiting Foundation. His work has been anthologized in four editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing series.

Learn more at ferrisjabr.com

EXPLORE MORE Nature’s Genius

A Bioneers podcast series exploring how the symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. We can learn from the time-tested principles, processes, and dynamics that have allowed living systems to flourish during 3.8 billion years of evolution. 

The post Ferris Jabr – Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life appeared first on Bioneers.

After the largest dam removal project in U.S. history in which four out of six dams were removed from the Klamath River, an intertribal cohort of Indigenous youth became the first people in over a century to descend a 310-mile stretch of the river. In this talk, Coley shares her personal story of participating in that journey as one of the paddlers from the Klamath Tribes, while also raising the alarm about the imminent environmental issues facing her community, animal relatives, and sacred waters.

This Young Leaders talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Coley Kakols Miller, a citizen of the Klamath Tribes, is a Modoc and Klamath youth born and raised at the headwaters of the Klamath River watershed. A high school freshman living on her tribal territory in Southern Oregon and Northern California, Coley was among more than 30 young people who participated in the historic first descent of the Klamath River after the largest dam removal in history. She remains a passionate advocate for removing the last two dams on the Klamath River, working to ensure the Klamath Tribes’ treaty-protected resources are restored to provide for future generations.

EXPLORE MORE The Restorative Revolution: How Indigenous Leadership and Allyship Catalyzed the Biggest River Restoration in US History

In this podcast episode, Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history.

Amy Bowers Cordalis – The Water Remembers: Year Zero

Amy Bowers Cordalis highlights the Indigenous values and lessons from the Klamath dam removals, showcasing nature-based solutions that heal the land, waters, and people while benefiting the economy.

The post Coley Kakols Miller – Undam the Klamath: The Fight Isn’t Over Yet appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Zephyr Teachout, Professor of Law at Fordham Law School.

Renowned science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022 to describe the degradation of online platforms. Drawing from his most recent nonfiction book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he assures us that it’s not our imaginations: the internet does indeed suck now. And this isn’t the result of great historical forces or iron laws of economics: it’s caused by specific policy choices made in living memory by named individuals, but Cory argues that we aren’t helpless prisoners of the depraved foolishness of early 21st century policymakers. We can – and we must – break free of the prison they built for us, consigning their terrible ideas to the scrap-heap of history, so we can create a new, good internet that is fit to serve as the digital nervous system of this fraught young century.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

Cory Doctorow, a renowned, award-winning science fiction author, activist, and journalist, is the author of dozens of books, most recently, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, (nonfiction); and the novels Picks and Shovels and The Bezzle. His other notable books include the “solar-punk” novels Walkaway and The Lost Cause, and the tech policy books The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism. Cory also: maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net; works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and is: an AD White Professor at Cornell University; an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate; a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University; a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science; and a co-founder of the UK Open Rights Group.

EXPLORE MORE The Great Enshittening: How the Internet Got So Bad — and How We Can Fix It

Read an excerpt from Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

This Will All Be So Great If We Don’t Screw It Up

In this 2019 interview, Cory Doctorow dives deep into how monopoly power and deregulation paved the way for Big Tech’s dominance — and why restoring fairness and pluralism in technology begins with reclaiming public control.

The post Cory Doctorow – The “Enshittification” of Everything appeared first on Bioneers.

Introduction by Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers Co-founder and CEO.

John Warner, one of the co-founders of the entire field of “Green Chemistry” who co-authored its defining text and co-articulated its core principles, works to create commercial technologies inspired by nature. An inventor with over 300 patents who has received countless prestigious awards, he has also been, with his wife, Amy Cannon, a thought leader and prime mover of green chemistry education. In this talk, he shares his vision of how we can draw from the molecular design genius of nature, which has been running countless rigorous chemistry experiments for nearly 4 billion years, to create benign products and technologies that provide for human needs without contaminating the biosphere and endangering our health.

This talk was delivered at the 2026 Bioneers Conference.

John Warner and Amy Cannon are teaching a Bioneers Learning course from May 5 – 26, 2026:
Green Chemistry: Nature’s Molecules, Materials and Methods. This course is for anyone curious about how the world works at a molecular level — no science background required. Registration will remain open through May 11. Learn more and register.

John Warner, Ph.D., one of the founders of the field of Green Chemistry who co-authored its defining text “Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice” (with Paul Anastas), is a chemistry inventor and entrepreneur who works to create commercial technologies inspired by nature consistent with the principles of green chemistry. He holds over 350 industrial chemistry patents, and his inventions have served as the basis for several new companies in photovoltaics, neurochemistry, construction materials, water harvesting, and cosmetics. John, who has received many prestigious awards from within the chemistry industry, government, academia and civil society organizations, has had a distinguished academic career, including as a tenured full-professor at UMASS Boston and Lowell. In 2007 he co-founded (with Amy Cannon) Beyond Benign, a non-profit dedicated to sustainability and green chemistry education. He holds academic appointments at Monash University in Australia, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, Somaiya University in India, University of Birmingham in the UK, Rochester Institute of Technology in the US, and Technical University of Berlin in Germany where they have named the “John Warner Center for Start Ups in Green Chemistry.” John also currently serves as CEO and CTO of Technology Greenhouse.

EXPLORE MORE Nature’s Genius

A Bioneers podcast series exploring how the symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. We can learn from the time-tested principles, processes, and dynamics that have allowed living systems to flourish during 3.8 billion years of evolution.

Deep Dive: Biomimicry

Biomimicry celebrates our kinship with life, unearthing untold treasures from nature’s playbook that we can emulate for our technological and industrial recipe book. Explore our media collection of fascinating examples from leaders in the field.

The post John Warner – Biomimicry at the Molecular Level—Inventing a Sustainable Future appeared first on Bioneers.

TORONTO — Countries across Asia and Europe are accelerating their shift to clean energy—a transition hastened by the war in Iran. But with the Ottawa–Alberta memorandum of understanding on climate and energy policy more than a month overdue, Canada is risking locking in policy signals that leave it out of step with this rapidly restructuring global energy economy, warn Clean Energy Canada’s Rachel Doran and other climate and clean energy experts.

In a joint letter sent today, the leaders of the Pembina Institute, Clean Energy Canada, Climate Action Network, Environmental Defence, Equiterre, and International Institute for Sustainable Development urge Prime Minister Mark Carney to finalize key elements of the agreement, warning that failure to do so risks a “consequential miscalculation” that would place too great a focus on the oil and gas industry at the expense of clean growth sectors.

“While countries across Asia and Europe engage in short-term energy rationing and longer-term restructuring of their economies away from oil and gas dependence and towards domestically produced clean electricity, here in Canada, we are stuck in an unhelpful feedback loop of discourse about the need for more oil and gas infrastructure and the loosening of environmental regulations on multi-billion dollar oil and gas companies,” reads the letter.

“Nowhere is this more evident than in the delay to the promised resolution of the Alberta-federal MOU on energy and climate policies.”

The letter urges specific outcomes on four key aspects of the MOU: industrial carbon pricing, clean electricity development, and methane rules for oil and gas producers. It refers to these, and the MOU more broadly, as the prime minister’s “most consequential opportunity” to turn “words into action” on building a strong, future-proofed Canadian economy.

KEY FACTS ON THE IRAN WAR AND ENERGY TRANSITION 

• Several countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, South Korea, Germany, and Malaysia, have reported spiking sales or signs of elevated consumer interest in EVs since the war began. The surge has been particularly marked in Asia, where consumers are most exposed to the current oil supply shock.
• 1.75 million electric vehicles were sold globally in March 2026, a 66% increase on the previous month.
• Energy rationing is underway across the world, with the International Energy Agency tracking more than 40 countries where governments are urging citizens to take steps to conserve energy, such as limiting use of air conditioning in tropical climates or minimizing daily commutes.
• There are signs of countries rethinking previously approved oil and gas projects in light of the crisis. For example, plans for the construction of Vietnam’s largest-ever LNG import project are on pause, with investors citing the Iran war’s impact on global LNG supplies as a reason to consider switching to a renewable energy project instead.

Read the letter

The post New joint letter: We can’t ‘build Canada strong’ without robust Alberta MOU outcomes, warn Canadian clean energy experts appeared first on Clean Energy Canada.

This article The Global Sumud Flotilla is a mission of mercy, met with cruelty was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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After a symbolic launch in Barcelona on April 12, the Global Sumud Flotilla set out across the Mediterranean Sea to bring aid to Gaza in what proved to be the largest civilian maritime convoy of its kind: 58 vessels, more than a thousand participants from over a hundred countries. Amnesty called on governments to guarantee safe passage. Greenpeace sent the Arctic Sunrise. And in the early hours of April 30, off the coast of Greece, Israeli naval forces moved in. 

There is something deeply affecting in the sight of everyday people rising to perform the simplest offices of mercy while states and institutions, created for hours of peril such as this, withdraw behind procedure and delay. Across the Mediterranean, men and women gathered what aid they could carry, along with the inward resolve such a voyage demands, and turned themselves toward Gaza. Great structures, swollen with authority and self-protection, were suddenly made to look small beside a few fragile boats moved by fellow feeling.

That, for me, is the true subject here. The values-led flotilla and the light of humiliation it casts upon the official power structures. When private citizens must hazard sea and reprisal in order to bring food and medicine to the trapped, the failure has entered the marrow of public life. Whole systems, immense in apparatus and loud in self regard, stand exposed by a handful of human beings willing to cross water for strangers. The Greeks gave us words for it: demos, the common people, and kratos, their strength. A flotilla is democracy at its source.

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In a relentless news cycle of death and destruction, there is something almost scriptural in the image of small craft setting out to relieve the besieged. A boat is a modest thing, rising and falling with the sea, vulnerable to delay, interception and fear. Perhaps that is why it can bear mercy so well. Mercy is among the most beloved names by which God is remembered in Islam, and these volunteers carried aid in their hold along with a quality of heart that official life has steadily thinned out.

The word sumud deepens the meaning further. For Palestinians, it has long meant steadfastness, a staying put in the face of erasure, a fidelity to land, memory and the human shape of one’s life. Here, steadfastness took to the sea. It left the olive grove and entered the waves. One remains steadfast by moving toward the wounded. One keeps faith by refusing distance.

By getting on those boats, the volunteers insisted that strangers are still our concern. A flotilla closes distance in the oldest human way, by drawing near, by consenting to inconvenience and risk because another people’s hunger has become unbearable to the soul.

To set out under such conditions is already a kind of testimony. One imagines the small practical gestures that attend such a voyage: the checking of ropes and provisions, subdued talk, private negotiations of fear, inward glances toward loved ones who would be left behind for a time. Heroism appears in a humble guise, the simple refusal to let danger relieve one of this duty. Those who boarded these vessels consented to exposure, and that consent lent the voyage its moral splendor.

There is something else that stirs the heart in such gatherings. The people who come together for a mission of mercy bring different languages, prayers and burdens of memory. Yet, for a brief and difficult passage they agreed to become answerable to one another and to those waiting beyond the horizon. This, too, is part of the beauty. A world daily instructed in difference and division still contains people capable of forming, under pressure, a fellowship. The boats carried supplies, certainly, though they also carried a living refutation of the lie that people are finally ruled by self-interest or tribe or fear.

Perhaps that is why maritime images can carry such spiritual force. The sea strips away illusion. No one sets out upon open water and remains wholly enclosed within self-regard. One enters a domain older than empires, where frailty and dependence are undeniable. To cross such waters in order to relieve the afflicted is to recover something ancient in the story, something older than diplomacy. It recalls the old belief that mercy is a labor asking something of the body. It must travel and bear fatigue and uncertainty. It must keep watch.

The greatness of the souls on this journey lies precisely in the fact that they remain recognizably human. They will be tired and perhaps seasick, maybe even afraid. They will carry their private griefs with them, along with the larger grief that summoned them to sea. Yet hope does not wait until the heart is free of trembling. It makes use of trembling and gathers what courage it can from love and shame, from prayer and the stubborn unwillingness to let the brutal terms of politics become the final measure of what is possible between us. Amid the daily grief, this is a welcome ray of light.  Hope as an act of resistance, with wet sleeves and a steady hand on the rope. Hope that has looked at the world and, despite every inducement to resignation, continues to choose the human bond.

Those who sailed in April had already paid for this cause. In October 2025, Israeli forces arrested over 450 participants from the last flotilla attempt, among them the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Mandla Mandela, grandson of Nelson Mandela. Those survivors set out again, undeceived about what might await. Their willingness to return lent the voyage a grave authority. Events confirmed its cost.

The answer came in the early hours of April 30, in international waters west of Crete, 600 miles from Gaza. Israeli naval vessels surrounded the fleet, ordering activists to their knees at gunpoint. Twenty-two of the 58 boats were seized. One hundred and seventy-five people were held aboard an Israeli frigate for up to 40 hours, denied adequate food and water, the floor beneath them repeatedly and deliberately flooded. They were punched, kicked and dragged across the deck with hands bound. Shots were fired, live and rubber both. Thirty-four people were hospitalized in Crete with broken ribs, broken noses and serious neck injuries. Sixty went on hunger strike, before being released.

Two steering committee members were then taken separately to Israel: Saif Abu Keshek, a Spanish-Swedish Palestinian who had been on an observer boat that never planned to sail to Gaza, and Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila. Abu Keshek was forced to lie face-down from the moment of his seizure, kept hand-tied and blindfolded, his face and hands bruised. Ávila was dragged face-down across the floor and beaten so severely he lost consciousness twice. The Brazilian embassy, visiting under glass, observed visible marks on Ávila’s face and noted his significant pain. Both are in Shikma Prison in Ashkelon and still on a hunger strike. A court has now extended their detention until May 10.

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Spain called the detention illegal; Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez addressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly, saying his country would always protect its citizens and defend international law. Brazil stood with Spain. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry called the interceptions an act of piracy. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani called them a brazen violation of international law. The Trump administration called the flotilla pro-Hamas and threatened consequences for any who had offered support.

Power has answered mercy with boots and bound hands. One wants to call this a surprise, but it is more precisely a revelation: something that was always there, now brought into the open. What the interception has laid bare, beyond the suffering of those detained, is the shape of the blockade itself. What kind of order must travel 600 miles from shore to intercept civilian vessels that are carrying bandages? What does a law protect when it meets unarmed people at sea with firearms and drags them face-down across wet decks?

Thirty-two boats remain anchored in Crete, where the organizers are regrouping and considering their next steps. The flotilla was seized in part. It was not silenced. And that refusal has done what no press release could: made the condition of Gaza impossible to look away from, at a cost borne by those who were willing to bear it.

The boats are small enough to be dismissed by cynics, and large enough to shame the world. They carry the old lesson that power does not hold a monopoly on reality. Power cannot produce the moral beauty that appears when human beings gather themselves for the sake of others. That beauty remains one of the last unpurchased things.

I think, in these dark years, about the difference between authority and worth. The first may be conferred by the world; the second is earned in the secret place where the heart decides whether it will remain human. Those who set out from Barcelona hold no office at all. Even so, they carry more of the world’s honor than many governments assembled beneath their flags. They carry it at sea, in the dark, with their hands bound, still keeping watch.

The lantern is still on the water. Mercy has been met with force, and answered the force with the deeper testimony of the body’s willingness to remain. Thirty-two boats sail on. The heart still knows the way.

This article The Global Sumud Flotilla is a mission of mercy, met with cruelty was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.