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ANCHORAGE, Alaska—The Anchorage Birding Trail is an interactive guide designed to help residents and visitors discover some of the best birding locations across the Anchorage region. From coastal...

Audubon Alaska has spent the past several years working with partners to create birding trails that make Alaska’s extraordinary birdlife more accessible to everyone. These virtual trails—curated...

The Wednesday, May 6, 2026, Climate Justice Forum radio program, produced by regional, climate activists collective Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT), features George Price, a Native and African American, organic farmer, history educator, writer, and eco-socialist advocate in Montana, talking about the critical planetary boundaries of human existence, destructive activities causing current ecological overshoot, and solutions that replace industrial capitalism with cooperative, alternative, societal and economic structures.  We also share news, videos, and reflections on indigenous direct actions and a federal lawsuit and injunction stopping exploratory graphite drilling at the Pe’ Sla sacred site near the South Dakota Black Hills, thousands of May Day strikes, blockades, and demonstrations across the U.S., growth of global electricity capacity from renewable energy sources to almost fifty percent during 2025, and Fruitland city and Idaho citizen objections to Snake River Oil and Gas plans to drill the Miller 1-15 methane well and extract their privately-owned resources via forced leasing, close to hundreds of residences and water wells.  Broadcast for fourteen years on progressive, volunteer, community station KRFP Radio Free Moscow, every Wednesday between 1:30 and 3 pm Pacific time, on-air at 90.3 FM and online at KRFP and the Pacifica Network AudioPort, the show describes continent-wide, grassroots, frontline resistance to fossil fuels projects, the root causes of climate change, thanks to generous, anonymous listeners who adopted program host Helen Yost as their KRFP DJ.

The Drills Are Gone. But the Lakota Are Still Here., May 5, 2026 NDN Collective

Breaking: Community Members Take Direct Action to Stop Drilling at Pe’ Sla, April 30, 2026 NDN Collective

Federal Judge Halts Drilling near Pe’ Sla in Black Hills, May 5, 2026 Buffalo’s Fire

‘A Moment of Reckoning’: 4,000-Plus May Day Demonstrations Across U.S., May 1, 2026 Common Dreams

Exclusive: Renewables Grew to Almost 50 Percent of Global Electricity Capacity in 2025 after Solar Boost, March 31, 2026 Reuters

Fruitland Weighs Acreage Offer as Drilling Debate Intensifies, May 4, 2026 Argus Observer

WIRT Comments and CAIA Objection with Attachments Opposing Snake River Oil and Gas Miller 1-15 Methane Well Drilling Application, April 20, 2026 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

An Indigenous Perspective on Ecological Overshoot: In Conversation with George Price, April 18, 2026 System Change Not Climate Change

Book Event at SOMOS, 108 Civic Plaza Drive, Taos, on Saturday, May 9, 4:00 pm

 

We’ll be talking about Ike DeVargas’s remarkable political life and reading passages in his own words of his many battles for justice: La Raza Unida Party’s conquest of a corrupt political machine; the struggles that ended corporate logging;  the removal of the Juan de Oñate statue; and challenging the prison industrial complex. Those who knew Ike can share their stories and others can learn about a complex history of northern New Mexico.

MERRILL, Wis. (May 4, 2026) — As forest bird populations decline, one Wisconsin maple producer is showing how working forests can be part of the solution. Nature’ly Sweet, operated by...

We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
Subscribe for free here.

Key developments Forest loss falls

DRIVER DECLINE: Tropical primary forest loss fell by more than one-third from 2024-25, according to the latest edition of the Global Forest Review. (Primary forests are those that are intact or relatively undisturbed by humans.) The World Resources Institute, which co-produced the report, noted that the loss of these forests is “still 46% higher than [it was] a decade ago”. It attributed much of this year’s decline to a decrease from last year’s “record-breaking year of extreme fires”.

WIDESPREAD COLLABS: Although Brazil had the largest loss in terms of area, deforestation in the country fell by 42% compared to the previous year, reported Agência Brasil. It noted that this was made possible by a governmental task force, “with the participation of civil society, academia, local communities and the private sector”. In Indonesia, Malaysia and Colombia, progress “reflected improved governance, recognition of Indigenous land rights and corporate commitments to deforestation-free production”, said EnviroNews Nigeria.

EXCEEDING THE LIMIT: Despite the decline, the amount of deforestation “still remains ‘far above’ the level required to put the world on track to meet international targets to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030”, said BusinessGreen. It added that “fires present a growing threat that could reverse recent gains”, despite the declines from 2024. Reuters noted: “Agricultural expansion continued to be the biggest driver of forest loss around the world.”

EU deforestation law watered down

UNDER PRESSURE: Following industry pressure, the European Commission decided to “exclude imports of leather from its anti-deforestation law”, according to Reuters. The newswire said: “Leather industry ​groups have argued that as a by-product of the meat industry, with a relatively low value, leather’s production does not incentivise the cattle farming that drives deforestation.” It added that imported beef is still covered by the law.

‘LONG-OVERDUE’: Meanwhile, a group of UK Parliament members released an open letter calling for “long-overdue regulations to end UK imports linked to illegal deforestation”. Although the forest-risk regulation was introduced in 2021 as part of the Environment Act, “lawmakers have spent the last four years delaying the implementation” of the anti-deforestation rules, according to a Mongabay report from last year.

PROVISIONAL DEAL: The EU-Mercosur deal – a trade agreement between the European bloc and four South American countries – provisionally came into force on 1 May “after 25 years of negotiations”, said Euractiv. The application of the agreement is provisional because members of the European Parliament “referred the deal to the European Court of Justice for a legal review” in January, it added.

News and views

• PACKAGING PLANTATION: Asia Symbol, a China-based pulp and paper company, cleared “vast tracts of Indonesian rainforest home to endangered orangutans…for plantations supplying a maker of ‘carbon-neutral’ packaging”, according to an investigation by Agence France-Presse and the Gecko Project. The company told AFP that it is “committed to its no-deforestation policy”, while the newswire noted that the plantations supplying the paper mill have permits from the Indonesian government.
• SODA MOUNTAIN SOLAR: The California Energy Commission approved a proposed $700m solar power plant in the Mojave Desert after “nearly 20 years” of challenges, reported the San Bernardino Sun. Last month, climate journalist Sammy Roth dove into the history of – and current debate over – the Soda Mountain project on his Substack, Climate Colored Goggles.
• POSITIVE TIPPING POINTS: In a Nature Sustainability perspective piece, Prof Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter argued for the existence of “positive tipping points” – ecological, social or socio-ecological states where feedback loops that “suppor[t] self-propelling nature-positive change can help” achieve nature-recovery goals.
• ‘ACUTE HUNGER’: Nearly eight million people in South Sudan are at risk of “acute food insecurity” in coming months, “fuelled by ethnic conflict, climate change and the spillover of fighting from neighbouring Sudan”, according to Al Jazeera coverage of a new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analysis. Meanwhile, a UN-produced global food crises report showed that “acute hunger” has doubled over the past decade, with two famines declared last year for the first time since the reports began a decade ago.
• SUMMERTIME SADNESS: Production of India’s prized Devgad Alphonso mango “has dropped by 70-90%” this summer, due to both “climate shock” and “ineffective pesticides”, reported the Print. Rich mango farmers in western India staged a “rare protest” demanding compensation for their losses, the outlet added, while a Print comment called for a “shift from compensation to climate-adaptation policies”. 
• SEED SUIT: A judge at the Kenyan High Court “declared unconstitutional parts of a law that prohibited farmers from sharing and selling Indigenous seeds” – although the government has appealed the decision, reported Devex. The lawyer who represented the farmers in the suit “said that the ruling could have ripple effects worldwide”, it added.

Spotlight Saving ‘India’s Galapagos’  Tree fern forest of Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve. Credit: Prasun Goswami / Wikimedia Commons

This week, Carbon Brief follows the uproar around the Great Nicobar project, after India’s opposition leader visited the biodiversity hotspot, which is at imminent risk of deforestation.

On 30 April, Rahul Gandhi – the head of India’s opposition and grandson of former prime minister Indira Gandhi  – posted an Instagram video from the evergreen rainforest on Great Nicobar island, the southernmost point of India’s territory. 

The island is the site of a proposed $10bn infrastructure project called the Great Nicobar Island Project, which includes a transhipment port in Galathea Bay, an international airport, a township and a gas and solar-based power plant.

Completion of the project would require the felling of more than a million trees – nearly 130 square kilometres of forest.

Speaking to the camera and dwarfed by gigantic tree trunks, Gandhi said:

“I’m in the middle of what is easily the most beautiful forest I’ve seen in my life.”

As drone footage showed viewers the lush forest canopy, Gandhi told viewers that the primary forest here is so dense, there was simply no way through. He continued by claiming:

“Now I understand why the government did not want me to come…because this is the largest theft of Indian ecological property in history.”

(In February, India’s National Green Tribunal upheld environmental clearances for the project, stating that the government had “considered all possible damage to the ecology and had taken efforts to compensate it”, according to the Hindu. A challenge is pending in the Calcutta High Court. In March, India announced it was raising its forest carbon target in its 2035 climate pledge.)

The provocative video calling for a halt to large-scale deforestation on “India’s Galapagos” has garnered more than 1.4m views and has sparked media debate, smear campaigns and government pushback, defending its strategic importance.

Paradise almost lost?

Barely hours after Gandhi’s video was posted, the Indian government published a press release detailing how environmental and tribal welfare safeguards have been met, despite more evidence to the contrary emerging this week.

Several media outlets – particularly print and independent outlets – have gone to Great Nicobar since 2024 to investigate the project’s impacts on biodiversity, assess its economic viability and corroborate the government’s claims of receiving Indigenous consent. 

However, many of the project’s details have been shrouded in secrecy and restrictive conditions, including “gag orders” on scientists, rebuffed right to information requests and missing maps of tribal lands and coral colonies, media investigations have alleged.

For many mainland Indians, Gandhi’s video was a first glimpse of the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve and its 1,800 species, many of them endemic to the islands.

Turtle walker

Among the most charismatic and vulnerable are Great Nicobar’s sea turtles: leatherbacks, hawksbills and Olive Ridleys. 

In an era before Instagram, biologist Satish Bhaskar surveyed over 4,000km of India’s coastline on foot from 1977-96 to document sea turtle nesting sites. Bhaskar laid the groundwork – and established the baseline – for Great Nicobar’s biodiversity and turtle conservation in India.

With only a transistor radio for company, Bhaskar would “maroon himself” on these islands for months at a time to measure tracks in the sand, count eggs and nests and wait for sightings of leatherback sea turtles, which can grow up to 2.7 metres long and weigh up to half a tonne. 

From 1991-92, Bhaskar recorded more than 800 leatherback turtle nests on Great Nicobar Island alone. He identified Port Campbell Bay – where Gandhi met Nicobarese leaders last week – as a critical, irreplaceable turtle-nesting beach during his surveys.

“I’m glad I did what I did,” said the soft-spoken biologist in the 2025 documentary Turtle Walker, which recreates his early years on the island. Sadly, this new footage of Nicobar’s coastal reefs, mangroves and evergreen forests – is still only accessible to film festival audiences in India.

Can more visual, vocal and felt evidence shift the debate on deforestation in India? Experts told Carbon Brief that remains to be seen, but Gandhi’s video has brought “tremendous attention” back to the project, and brought in unlikely allies asking important questions. 

Watch, read, listen

GO FISH: BBC News explored how climate change is “threaten[ing] the economic backbone” of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati – its tuna fisheries.

LIFE AFTER COWS: The New York Times profiled Butter Ridge’s dairy farmers selling their generations-old Pennsylvania farm in the face of looming tariffs and “surging” input costs.

C FOR COMMODITY: On the Wilder podcast, Sue Pritchard – chief executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission – explored the “invisible forces” shaping modern food systems.

WAR FALLOUT: From oil spills to contaminated soil, Wired took a closer look at how the war on Iran is impacting the environment in “unseen ways”. 

New science

• Commercial bottom-trawling fishing costs Europe nearly €16bn per year, mainly due to the release of carbon from ocean sediments | Ocean & Coastal Management
• A combination of global warming of 1.5-1.9C and deforestation of 22-28% could drive the Amazon to “system-wide changes” | Nature
• By 2050, 74% of the current habitats of all land mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians could be exposed to heatwaves under a high-emissions scenario | Nature Ecology & Evolution

In the diary

• 11-15 May: 21st session of the UN Forum on Forests | New York City
• 11 to 15 May: Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) regional conference for Europe | Dushanbe, Tajikistan
• 13 May: Webinar on the State of Forests report from the World Resources Institute | Online
• 22 May: International day for biological diversity

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyerand Yanine Quiroz.  Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org

Cropped 22 April 2026: Global food ‘catastrophe’ | BECCS emissions | UK solar farm controversy

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22.04.26

Cropped 8 April 2026: Iran war drives up food prices | Two nature talks conclude | Return of UK’s tallest bird

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08.04.26

Cropped 25 March 2026: Seabed mining talks stall | ‘Blueprint’ for land use | India feels Iran war impacts

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25.03.26

Cropped 11 March 2026: Iran water worries | Seabed-mining treaty progress | Women farmers and climate change

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11.03.26

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The post Cropped 6 May 2026: Forest loss falls | Deforestation regulations | Saving ‘India’s Galapagos’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.

By: Anne Hedges During the last several months, NorthWestern Energy has vehemently denied that data centers are behind its desire to “merge” with another South Dakota utility, Black Hills Energy. However, when company executives announced the deal to investors, they repeatedly pointed to data centers as a top reason for the two utilities’ efforts. NorthWestern …

The post NorthWestern’s mega-monopoly merger is all about data centers appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.

Ask most Americans what they know about the Arctic, and you’ll likely hear something like, “It’s far away.” Or “I’ll probably never get to go there.” Or even “I have no idea where that is.” And they’re mostly right. The Arctic is vast, wild, and remote. Most people will never stand on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge, never watch the Porcupine Caribou herd migrate across the tundra, never hear the silence of a landscape untouched by roads or cities or noise. 

And yet, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. 

Whether you live in upstate New York or the Deep South, the Midwest or the mountains of Colorado, the coast of California or somewhere in between, the Arctic is connected to you. And right now, the policies being made in the stuffy halls of Congress in D.C. about that distant, breathtaking place are policies that affect every American who cares about public lands, clean water, wildlife, and the wild places that belong to all of us. 

Learn More Why the Arctic? 

It’s a fair question. The Arctic Refuge alone spans more than 19 million acres of wilderness in northeastern Alaska. There are no roads, no trails, and no campgrounds. It’s one of the last truly wild places left on Earth. The coastal plain, a 1.6-million-acre stretch along the Beaufort Sea, is the calving ground of the Porcupine Caribou herd and home to polar bears, musk oxen, wolves, and hundreds of species of migratory birds that travel to all 50 states and six continents. For the Gwich’in people, it’s sacred, they literally call it “the sacred place where life begins.” 

But the Arctic isn’t just a place for those who can reach it. It’s a place that belongs to every American, and what happens there matters to every American. The birds that nest on the coastal plain in summer return to backyards, wetlands, and flyways across the country. The caribou that have sustained the Gwich’in for millennia are part of an ecosystem that influences climate and biodiversity far beyond Alaska’s borders. And the decisions being made about the Arctic, about whether to drill it, protect it, lease it, or preserve it, are being made through policies that touch public lands from Minnesota to Montana to Wyoming and beyond. 

The policies that shape what happens to the Arctic aren’t Alaska policies. They’re American policies, written by Congress, signed by presidents, implemented by federal agencies that manage hundreds of millions of acres of public land from coast to coast. 

A Wave of Policy Changes 

Across the country, there’s been a rapid restructuring of how public lands are managed, who has a say, what gets prioritized, and who benefits. 

On day one of the current Trump administration, an executive order titled “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential” directed federal agencies to reverse protections across Alaska, including the Arctic Refuge, the Western Arctic, and the Tongass National Forest. Interior leadership followed with orders rolling back climate priorities and removing limits on energy development. 

Source: X / Sen. Dan Sullivan

Then came massive budget cuts. A proposed 35% reduction to key land management agencies, including the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management. Thousands of staff positions have been eliminated or left unfilled, including rangers, scientists, and land managers. 

The result is visible on the ground, from closed ranger stations, unmaintained trails, reduced scientific monitoring, to fewer people responsible for overseeing hundreds of millions of acres of public land. 

Public lands without the people to steward them aren’t really protected, they’re just waiting. 

The “One Big Beautiful Bill”  

A sweeping budget package passed in July 2025 reshaped federal land policy across the country, not just in Alaska. 

While proposed land sales in the West were removed after public pushback, the final law still dramatically expanded fossil fuel leasing and reduced environmental protections. 

It mandates quarterly oil and gas lease sales across more than 200 million acres of public land, removing agency discretion to protect sensitive areas. It requires millions of acres in the Western Arctic to be opened for leasing and mandates drilling in the Arctic Refuge coastal plain while limiting public input and judicial review. 

Source: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee budget reconciliation bill text (as of June 16, 2025); BLM, USFS. Map by The Wilderness Society

It expands coal leasing, increases fees on renewable energy development on public lands, and reduces funding for national parks. 

These decisions don’t just stop in Alaska. They affect Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California, and beyond, shaping wildlife habitat, water systems, recreation economies, and public access nationwide. 

The CRA: One Tool in a Much Bigger Toolbox 

Outside the halls of Congress, few people are familiar with something called the Congressional Review Act (CRA), but they should because it’s one of the most powerful and consequential tools in American politics, and it’s increasingly being used to dismantle protections for the public lands and waters that belong to all of us. 

The CRA was originally designed to allow Congress to review major federal regulations. Historically, it was used sparingly, only once in its first 20 years. But in recent years, it’s been expanded, weaponized, and stretched far beyond its original intent.  

In 2017, the Trump administration used it to invalidate 17 Obama-era rules. In 2025 alone, 22 CRA repeals were signed into law. And each repeal carries a particularly alarming consequence because once a rule is overturned by the CRA, a future administration is barred from issuing anything “substantially similar” without an act of Congress. A single vote can permanently foreclose future protection, shutting the door not just for today, but for generations. 

Now, since 2025, it’s been used to overturn land management plans across Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota.  

It took years of public input, environmental review, and collaboration to build these protections. It takes one vote to erase them, and another act of Congress to restore them. 

From the Arctic to Your Backyard 

If you thought some of these policies, like the CRA, were just an Alaska problem, think again. 

In January 2026, the House passed a CRA resolution to overturn a 20-year mining ban protecting the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota. In April 2026, the Senate followed, voting to open more than 225,000 acres of the Superior National Forest to sulfide-ore copper mining, even though the U.S. Forest Service had concluded such mining would cause irreversible harm to the ecosystem. 

Canoeing the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Northern Minnesota. (Brad Zweerink / Earthjustice)

The Boundary Waters is a 1.1-million-acre designated Wilderness Area, one of the most visited wilderness destinations in the country, with roughly 250,000 visitors each year. The 20-year mining ban at its headwaters was put in place in 2023 after years of extensive public input. That process, that democratic, science-based process, was undone in a matter of months by a simple majority vote using a tool that was never intended for this purpose. 

The same playbook. The same tool. The same consequences. Whether it’s the Arctic Refuge’s coastal plain in Alaska or the birch forests of northern Minnesota, policies are being used to dismantle public land protections across the country, one resolution at a time. 

The Stakes for Every American 

Public lands belong to every American. Every acre of the Arctic Refuge, every mile of the Boundary Waters, every stretch of BLM land in Wyoming or Montana or central Alaska, these places are held in trust for all of us. And the decisions being made about them right now are decisions about who gets to use those places, and for what, and whether future generations will have them at all. 

When policies are used to overturn a resource management plan in Buffalo, Wyoming, it affects the ranchers and hunting outfitters and outdoor recreation businesses who depend on balanced, responsible management. When it’s used to repeal a leasing plan in the Arctic Refuge, it cuts the Gwich’in people out of their own future and opens sacred calving grounds to industrial drilling. When it’s used to erase a mining ban at the Boundary Waters, it threatens the clean water that communities across northern Minnesota rely on and sets a precedent that every protected landscape in America is vulnerable. 

What’s happening is a coordinated shift in how public lands are defined, managed, and valued. Executive orders. Budget cuts. Large-scale leasing mandates. Legislative overrides of long-standing protections. Together, they form a pattern, faster approvals for extraction, fewer protections, reduced public participation, and diminished agency capacity.  

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Photo Credit: BLM / Tarpley

And the Arctic is often the front line because it’s remote, symbolic, and easy to overlook.

But it reflects a larger question: Who are public lands for? 

Everything is Connected 

So, sure, you may never set foot in the Arctic. You may never paddle the Boundary Waters or drive through the open range of the Powder River Basin. But the birds that nest in these places pass through your sky, in your backyard. The water that flows through these watersheds feeds rivers and ecosystems that stretch across the continent. The policies that strip them of protection are the same policies, written by the same hands, using the same tools, that could one day come for the public lands near you. 

From upstate New York to the Deep South. From the Midwest to the Rockies to the Pacific Coast. The Arctic isn’t a faraway problem. It’s the frontline of a much larger fight, a fight about who gets to make decisions about public lands, how fast and with how little accountability, and whether the voice of Americans who say “protect these places” still means anything in D.C. 

We believe the Arctic belongs to all of us, and so does the responsibility to defend it. Because everything is connected. And the decisions being made today will determine what kind of country, and what kind of wild places we leave behind. 

Will you go beyond your backyard?

  By donating and/or signing, you will join Alaska Wilderness League’s Activist Network and receive communications from both Alaska Wilderness League and affiliate Alaska Wilderness League Action. We will keep you informed with the latest alerts and progress reports.

 

More than 25 years after the uncontacted Indigenous Kawahiva people’s existence was officially confirmed, the demarcation of the Kawahiva do Rio Pardo Indigenous Territory in central Brazil began this week. #

Carbon Brief is offering an exciting opportunity for students, or recent graduates, to work with the team for three weeks this summer. This journalism internship will be paid the London Living Wage, with an additional travel bursary.

Job description

Carbon Brief’s award-winning journalism and analysis is respected by scientists, journalists, policymakers and campaigners around the world. We write articles and create data visualisations, infographics and videos to explain the latest climate science and related policy issues.

You’ll spend time shadowing members of staff and helping out with the different tasks carried out by each part of the team. This includes journalists working on topics ranging from climate science through to China’s emissions, as well as specialists working on visuals and social media.

If you’re interested in whether carbon offsets are a viable climate solution, or how climate change is driving human migration, then this is the placement for you.

.innerArt>ol { font-family: 'PT Serif'; font-size: 18px !important; } What you will do

• Have the opportunity to research, write and publish an article for Carbon Brief.
• Promote your article using visuals and social media.
• Assist with the research and writing of Carbon Brief’s award-winning newsletters.
• Help decide how Carbon Brief covers the latest developments in climate change, by helping to find stories in scientific papers and policy documents.
• Create and discuss content for social media.

What you will learn

• Experience how a small, independent but global journalism team works in practice.
• See how Carbon Brief puts together articles step by step.
• Learn how we interrogate news, data and reports.
• Pick up skills on how to make best use of visuals in your journalism.

Your skills

• Interest in climate change.
• Some experience of writing on a technical topic for a general audience, which can include self-publishing.
• Interest in journalism and a commitment to the integrity of journalism.
• Competency in word processing and spreadsheet packages, such as MS Word/Excel or Google Docs/Sheets.
• Excellent spoken and written English.
• Experience with social media, such as Twitter/X and Instagram, would be a benefit.

Location: The internship will follow a hybrid format, involving time in person at our offices near London Bridge station in central London as well as remote working.

Reporting to: Our Associate Editor Daisy Dunne.

Hours/Duration: This is a three-week-long placement which will take place in the summer months from 13-31 July. Our office hours are 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday, with an hour for lunch.

Salary: London Living Wage (£14.80/hour), plus £100 towards travel expenses.

How to apply

To apply, please send:

1. Your CV.
2. A short covering letter of no more than 300 words, explaining why you would be a good fit for the internship and how you would benefit from it. Please include a paragraph explaining how Carbon Brief first caught your attention and pitch one idea for a Carbon Brief article. Any letter generated using AI will invalidate the application.
3. A link or attachment for an article you have published. This can either be in traditional or student media, or on a personal blog.

To: jobs@carbonbrief.org (please use “Internship application” in the email’s subject line).

Applications must be submitted by 9am UK time on 1 June. Interviews will likely be held on the week beginning 8 June.

Applicants must already have the right to work permanently in the UK and be more than 18 years of age.

Carbon Brief is committed to encouraging equality, diversity and inclusion among our workforce. Our aim is to be truly representative of all sections of society and for each employee to feel respected and able to give their best. We strongly encourage applications from those who feel underrepresented in climate journalism, including ethnic and social minorities.

The post Vacancy: Three-week summer journalism internship at Carbon Brief appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Why don’t more people talk about chameleons?

These amazing reptiles come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and colors, and are known for their color-shifting abilities and unique eyes, which can look in two different directions at once.

But not enough human eyes are paying attention to chameleons, and they now represent one of the world’s most at-risk species groups. According to experts as many as 50% of the 200-plus recognized chameleon species are endangered, critically endangered, or vulnerable to extinction.

On the eve of the third annual International Chameleon Day on May 9 — an occasion to call attention to these animals’ amazing abilities and underrecognized plight — I sat down with Dr. Christopher Anderson, chair of the IUCN/SSC Chameleon Specialist Group, to talk about what’s threatening these diverse reptiles, what we need to do to help them, and why they’ve eluded media and scientific attention over the past few years.

Let’s start with an observation: The word “chameleon” is part of our culture — I mean, everyone understands the word, everyone thinks they know what it means — but I have found almost zero news coverage about chameleons over the past two years. There’s been a little bit of coverage of research about their eyes or their tongues, but almost nothing about their conservation.

That is exactly true. And I think it’s one of the biggest shortcomings that we have as far as awareness about chameleons.

Like you mentioned, chameleons have fascinated naturalists, the public, and researchers for centuries. Aristotle wrote about chameleons and a lot of their unique behaviors. If you ask somebody on the street about a chameleon, they have a picture of what a chameleon is in their head because of a lot of those unique features.

Oftentimes people are a little bit squeamish or have some concerns or fear of reptiles — snakes in particular. But generally, when people hear about chameleons, they’re like, “Oh yeah, chameleons are great.”

The question there is, why have chameleons not fostered some of that attention that we see with turtles and tortoises, various snakes, and other groups? If you look at zoological institutions, most zoos will have a chameleon or a couple of chameleons on display, because they are fascinating and they really are important to most collections to be able to display. But most zoological institutions have not really focused on any type of major or large-scale projects with chameleons, in large part because they are difficult to capture, and delicate and difficult to display.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by IUCN SSC Chameleon Specialist Group (@iucnchameleons)

So while a lot of zoos have many different turtle and tortoise species, or boas, or iguanas, or crocodilians, and so forth, and are very engaged with conservation efforts in those groups, chameleons have never really benefited from a lot of that attention. If you look at species survival plans or programs that zoological institutions have within reptiles, you see a number of iguana species, numerous turtle and tortoise species, crocodilian species, and so forth. There’s not a single chameleon species that has gotten that focus or attention.

The other thing is, if you look at the number of researchers that are working with crocodilians or turtles and tortoises, and iguanas — not to keep pointing the finger at a few different groups — there are lots of people that study those, even though there’s a lot fewer crocodilians or iguanas than there are chameleons.

But there are actually very few people that specialize in chameleons. I think that that has really been a disservice to even our understanding of where chameleons are as far as their conservation is concerned.

It’s not that they’re not threatened, or that there aren’t numerous species that should be covered, or even that there’s no interest. It’s just that there’s just not enough work that’s being done to really highlight it.

Right. So is that the goal of International Chameleon Day? What do you hope this species awareness day will accomplish?

Yeah, that’s a huge part of one of the goals that we’re hoping to get across with International Chameleon Day. There’s a huge potential, I think, to engage the public, educate them about the conservation status of chameleons, encourage awareness, as well as broader benefits that that could have for different animal groups that live in similar types of environments.

And who knows, maybe in the long run we can actually encourage other people to start focusing on chameleon conservation and increase the number of people that are working with them.

So what’s threatening them? You mentioned that they’re very sensitive animals, and it seems that a lot of them have evolved in particular microclimates or microhabitats. Can you tell us how they’re threatened by climate change or other factors?

We all kind of have an inherent image in our mind of what a chameleon is. But one of the things that fascinates me about chameleons is how diverse they are. There are 236 species that are described in science. And those 236 species are extremely diverse in their biology, ecology, natural history, anatomy, and so forth. They range in size from very small animals that are less than an inch in total length to species that, in total length, are well over two feet. We have species that give live birth, species that lay eggs. We have species that live upwards of 20 years and species that live outside of the eggs for a matter of three or four months.

 

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They’re hugely variable, and a lot of that variation and that species diversity is highly specialized to local microhabitats and very small areas. We have a lot of local endemism with chameleons where there’s a species that lives in a certain elevational band on a single mountain, or a single type of vegetation, or habitat in a very small area. That’s where lot of that diversity occurs, in very small, limited-range habitats.

When you have species that have that limited range, they can be very prone to local disturbances potentially wiping out a population or a significant portion of their distribution.

Most of the major threats that we have for chameleons relate to habitat alteration. That can be from clearing of the habitat for subsistence farming, timber harvesting, charcoal production — particularly in Madagascar, that’s a major issue. We see a lot of local effects from surrounding communities altering the habitat that these species live in.

But there’s other threats that we see with chameleons as well. One of those is harvesting for the pet trade, both illegal and legal. Chameleons for the last 30-40 years have been heavily traded in the international exotic pet trade. Some of that is legal and some of that is sustainable, but much of it is not sustainable or even illegal for some species and some regions.

We also see there’s some looming effects of climate change that are impacting chameleons, making the conditions at local habitats potentially unsuitable. Climate change is also doing things like accelerating dangers from fire and increasing the duration of the dry season, which increases the amount of vegetation that fires can consume if they get started.

And similarly, as habitats become smaller and smaller, you have these boundary effects around the edge of habitats where those boundary areas can be more prone to fire and so on.

Changing of a lot of the durations of the wet seasons and dry seasons, increases in temperature and aridity — all of that is going to play into some of these fire issues and so forth. That could affect a lot of these populations, even in protected areas.

Have you seen some of this in the wild? I found a paper you wrote about the Chapman’s pygmy chameleon in Malawi that seems to be suffering specifically from some of these problems.

Exactly. So, you know, I first traveled to Madagascar many years ago. I have not been back professionally recently, but I traveled there for ecotourism. And one of the things that I was shocked with was the amount of erosion and clear-cut forests and habitat alteration that I was seeing. And that’s not slowed down. If anything that’s accelerated in recent years.

That’s a huge issue. I’ve seen it in Cameroon. I’ve seen it in Kenya. I’ve seen it in Tanzania. I’ve seen it in South Africa. Anywhere you go where there are chameleons, we see a lot of those types of issues.

 

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I also have noticed over the years that there seem to be shifts in the wet season. When I was in Madagascar almost 25 years ago now, the beginning of the wet season was starting at the end of December, beginning of January. Now that period has shifted. People are now going in February or March to be there when the rain has started and when you can see a lot of that biodiversity.

We’re seeing a lot of shifts. Madagascar over the last few years in particular has gotten a lot of attention for some of the massive fires that they’ve had, particularly in the southern portion of the country, in the central highlands, and the southwestern regions. And those are going to have massive effects on local populations.

There’s a lot of concern that as these fires extend into protected areas, areas that we thought were safeguarding these animals may not actually be safe havens for them.

I don’t want to generalize with a couple hundred species, but what do chameleons need to ensure their continued survival? What can people in the conservation community do to help?

Yeah, like you said, there’s a lot of diversity within chameleons. And some chameleons are doing quite well. They’re habitat generalists, they’re widespread. And those species aren’t really ones that are under a high probability of extinction.

But of chameleon species that we know of, a large proportion are threatened — about 78 species based on our IUCN Red List assessments are considered either critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. That’s about a third of the species that we have described.

But we also have a lot of species that are not evaluated yet. They’re relatively newly described species or we don’t have enough data yet. If we figure in these species that are not evaluated, or that we haven’t actually got enough information to evaluate them, we could actually have as much as 50% of the diversity of chameleons threatened with extinction. That’s huge. We’re talking about 120 species that just from what we know right now may be threatened.

Education, I think, is one of the huge things as far as what we can do right now to advance the awareness of the conservation status with chameleons. We need people to be aware of the threat status of these species. If they’re engaged with the pet trade, [we need to teach them] to make educated and sound conservation decisions and make sure that if they’re involved with keeping chameleons as pets or anything, they’re doing so sustainably and ethically and legally.

 

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But in addition to that, we really need to reach out to local communities about the status of the environment around them, the species that live there, the importance of those species, and try and encourage sustainable practices in safeguarding of those animals.

That’s super challenging because a lot of the areas where these animals live are surrounded by communities that are struggling. Life in Madagascar and life in a lot of these places is not easy. They’re not generally doing mass agriculture that’s wiping out huge tracts of land. Most of it is subsistence agriculture that they depend on for their day-to-day survival.

So helping to provide resources and development that’s sustainable and helps these populations in a lot of these areas is potentially hugely beneficial to the conservation of lot of these animals as well.

This is kind of related to that, but do chameleons have any cultural value to the people who live near them?

This is actually an additional challenge that we face with chameleons and their conservation. What I mean by that is across most of the range of chameleons, there are a lot of local superstitions or taboos or what they call fady in Madagascar about chameleons. They have a longstanding, oftentimes negative connotation to local communities.

Across their range, people tend to think that they’re venomous, that if you touch them, you’ll die. They tend to think things like, if you have a chameleon in a tree in your village, it’s a bad omen. There are stories in northeast Africa saying if a camel steps on a chameleon, the vibrations will kill the camel. There are all kinds of variants on this common theme of not trusting chameleons or thinking that they’re dangerous that they’re bringing bad omens or so forth. So a lot of the time, the local communities don’t view chameleons in a particularly positive manner. When we’re talking about engaging these communities, just convincing them that they need to protect the chameleons is sometimes a little bit of a hard sell.

What we really also need to communicate to them is that they’re not dangerous, that they are harmless animals, that they’re interesting, and that they have value in their local community and in the environment around them. And that can be challenging because we’re trying to challenge and change generations of stories and stuff that have been passed on.

Wow. Are there any memorable encounters you’ve had in the wild with these animals, and can conveying those stories help influence other people?

You know, any time I’m in the field working with chameleons, it’s memorable for me. I am absolutely fascinated with them.

There’s a lot of different species that are very pretty, a lot of beautiful colors that they will express, and there’s some morphologies that are just incredibly intricate and impressive. Finding those species for the first time is always fascinating for me. There are so many species. I’ve never seen all of them in the wild, of course. Every time that I get out into the field and I can find a new species, it’s really exciting. Learning about the environment that each of those species lives in and seeing them in the field and kind of getting a little bit of a better understanding of them is always incredibly rewarding.

My wife and I teach a field course every other year. We bring students from South Dakota, where we’re based, to Kenya. We take them around to different habitats and we teach them about the local environments and so on. One of the things that we do is teach them how to find chameleons, and I teach them about the different species.

The students absolutely love this process of going out and looking for the chameleons. We’re in habitats where we’re looking at lions and elephants and rhinos — these megafauna that they’ve grown up idolizing, wanting to see in the wild. But then we go out and look for chameleons and they love it. The number of students that list that as among the most fun things that they did on these trips is really surprising.

That’s one of the things I really love about teaching that course, taking these students out and showing them these animals and giving them a chance to learn about chameleons firsthand — and appreciate that it doesn’t need to be one of these charismatic megafauna for them to get excited.

So what’s your favorite chameleon species — if you can even answer that?

There are so many species that I think are just fascinating, but I could give a couple that I think are just incredible — and I think some of those actually might surprise people, because they’re maybe not the most colorful species, for instance.

One of those species is the armored leaf chameleon. It’s a species from a drier area in Madagascar, the Tsingy de Bemaraha. It’s an endangered species, and it’s the largest species of the genus Brookesia, which are these miniaturized chameleons — you’ll often see pictures of them on a matchstick. But this is a species that has incredible ornamentation. They’re the only chameleon species that’s known to have osteoderms, these bones in the skin. They have these ornate projections off of their vertebral column that project out of their skins to create spines along their back. Overall coloration-wise, they’re just basically brown with a little bit of different hues of these drab colors, but they’re just incredibly intricate and interesting to me.

There’s a species in Tanzania, Trioceros laterispinis — one of its common names is the spiny-flanked chameleon. It looks kind of like those tree lichens that grow on branches. And it’s incredibly cryptic. You can just look at it and you can tell this is living in an environment that has a lot of those lichens and mosses. It’s beautifully evolved to live in that habitat.

Spiny-flanked chameleon. © Otto Bylén Claesson via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC)

In both cases these aren’t species that are exhibiting bright pinks and blues and reds and greens or flashy colors, but there’s just something about them that I just find fascinating, because you could just see the way that they’re trying to conceal themselves and the way that they’re living in this environment and how they’re adapted to that place, that specific location. I just find that fascinating.

So what can we do to maintain the energy and interest of International Chameleon Day throughout the year?

Chameleons are exciting to the public. They’re interesting. People are intrigued by them. And I think that we really should try to harness that. I think, like you said, if we could see an increase in the coverage of chameleons — just generally, not only on International Chameleon Day, but across different times of the year — that that would go a long way to promoting our understanding and encouraging others to work with these animals in the future. Education about these animals and their local habitats doesn’t need to just be isolated to a single day. We can take advantage of opportunities as they come to educate local communities about the wildlife that they have around them and the value of some of these animals. That would be huge.

Trying to break down some of these longstanding prejudices toward these animals — that doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen if we’re just isolating that to one day a year. I think that International Chameleon Day is a huge benefit for trying to start those conversations and start those education programs and start those efforts.

But we really do need to continue those across the year at different times and try and promote those messages and get that information and that word out there more generally.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

This Month in Conservation Science: Trojan Seahorses and ‘Vampire’ Birds

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This article is part of Food Tank’s primer series, “Food Tank Explains.” Each installment unpacks the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping today’s food and agriculture systems, offering clear insights into complex topics. To explore more articles in the series, click here.

Food and agriculture systems generate a variety of environmental, health, social, and economic impacts that are not generally reflected in the prices consumers pay for food, referred to as externalities in economics. True Cost Accounting (TCA) is an evolving, holistic framework for measuring and valuing the positive and negative externalities of the food system.

TCA seeks to make the impacts of food production, processing, distribution, and consumption more visible to support improved decision making by policymakers, farmers, and consumers and reduce the true costs of food. Drawing from the four-capitals framework of the TEEBAgriFood Evaluation Framework, TCA assesses four key capitals: natural, human, social, and produced.

The agrifood system generates myriad positive and negative externalities, says Salman Hussain, Coordinator The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food initiative (TEEBAgriFood).

Common examples of positive externalities include a beekeeper incidentally providing a benefit to neighboring farmers when their bees pollinate the farmers’ crops and community cohesion. Examples of negative externalities include emissions from use of fuel in farm machinery, water pollution from fertilizer runoff, and healthcare costs for workers in unsafe conditions.

Though invisible in market prices, the costs of externalities across agrifood systems are nonetheless borne—just rarely by those who create them. Instead, they are passed on to the environment, workers, consumers, and society more broadly.

Environmental costs show up in the 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions that agriculture produces, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss. Workers in food and farming systems face risks like pesticide exposure and heat-related illness and death.

Consumers bear rising rates of diet-related diseases and issues that are linked to modern food environments. 2.5 billion adults suffer diet-related illnesses, 733 million people live in hunger, and 2.8 billion people are unable to afford a healthy diet. And these burdens are often disproportionately carried by vulnerable populations who face higher exposure to environmental risks, poor health outcomes, and economic instability.

The hidden environmental, health, and social costs of global agrifood systems amount to roughly US$12 trillion each year, according to a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report that Lauren Baker, the Deputy Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, calls a “startling call to action.” A Rockefeller Foundation study attributes US$1.1 trillion unaccounted-for costs to human health, US$900 billion to environmental and biodiversity damage, and US$100 billion in unaccounted livelihoods.

TCA evaluates four forms of capital—natural, human, social, and produced—reflecting the environmental, health, social, and economic dimensions of agrifood systems. The eco-agri-food system is like a puzzle, Alexander Müller, Study Leader for TEEBAgriFood, tells Food Tank. One only understands the full picture when all the pieces are considered together unclear.

TEEBAgriFood established the four-capital framework in 2018 with contributions from more than 150 researchers and experts across 30 countries. It now underpins most True Cost Accounting assessments used today.

Natural capital refers to the stock of physical and biological resources and ecosystem functions that sustain life and enable food production. In agriculture, this includes land, water, soil, biodiversity, and atmospheric systems.

Social capital captures the networks, institutions, and shared norms that enable cooperation and collective action within societies. This can include labor conditions, fair wages, worker protections, community well-being, and the broader social impacts of food production, such as rural livelihoods, job creation or loss, and community stability.

Human capital refers to individuals’ knowledge, skills, health, and capabilities. This includes farmers’ expertise, agricultural training and education, food system innovation, and the health outcomes associated with both food production and consumption.

Produced capital includes the manufactured and financial assets that support economic activity. This encompasses physical infrastructure such as buildings, machinery, and irrigation systems, as well as financial and intellectual capital that enable food production, processing, distribution, and retail.

The goal of TCA is not to increase retail prices, according to Adrian de Groot Ruiz, Co-Founder of True Price, a Dutch social enterprise that helps identify and measure products’ social and environmental costs. Rather, TCA seeks to reveal information that can ultimately help improve the way food is made and reduce the true costs of food, De Groot Ruiz tells Food Tank.

When externalities go unmeasured, they remain unaccounted for in policy decisions, private purchases and markets fail to prevent or address them. Failing to put a value or price negative impacts “creates a dishonest pricing scheme and perpetuates farming systems which destroy our planet and cause a catastrophic impact on public health,” says Patrick Holden, Founder and CEO of SFT.

By identifying and valuing externalities, TCA can help governments, businesses, and investors design policies, legislation, incentives, and investments that reduce harmful impacts, reward practices that generate public benefits, and support food systems in which nutritious food is accessible, workers are compensated fairly, and consumers can make informed choices.

As detailed in FAO’s reports, The State of Food and Agriculture 2023 and 2024, identifying and assessing all hidden costs across agrifood systems is resource- and data-intensive, requiring collaboration between political, economic and social actors and prioritization of the most decision-relevant impacts.

To be effective, TCA must be incorporated into national and international policy frameworks, accounting standards, and performance evaluation systems, supported by standardized metrics that allow impacts to be measured consistently across food value chains, according to government bodies and industry experts.

Some organizations and researchers advocate for policies under which governments tax activities that impose environmental or social harm so market prices reflect their full costs, alongside subsidies or incentives for practices that generate positive externalities such as improved soil health or ecosystem protection. Ultimately, according to Nature Food, TCA calls for a fundamental change to the valuation of food.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Ed Wingate, Unsplash

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In summer of 2025, I embarked on the internship assignment of my dreams. Armed with a Nikon D3200, a 2008 birding map, and a healthy supply of coffee, I set out with my coworker to photograph all 35...

In February, the Department of Homeland Security purchased an idle 250,000 square foot warehouse.

Romulus, Michigan is a city of 25,000 people 23 miles outside of Detroit and home to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. In February,  the Department of Homeland Security purchased an idle 250,000 square foot warehouse in Romulus for $34.7 million. City leaders and the community were kept in the dark as rumors circulated about the sale, including that it was sold at 56 percent more than the previous purchase price. After initial reporting on this sale, 300 Romulus High School students walked out and a thousand people gathered outside Romulus City Hall in late February when the reports were confirmed. On No Kings Day, March 28, another 350 to 400 people gathered for the Romulus No Kings at the warehouse. On Saturday, April 25, hundreds more gathered there for the Communities Not Cages National Day of Action.

A Coalition to Shut the Camps has developed out of weekly pickets at the planned detention center location. This coalition has produced a regulatory punch list and a package of letters sent to various state and local agencies demanding full transparency on all proposals and the opportunity for public meetings. The coalition has been leafleting homes and schools in the area, encouraging people to join weekly meetings and protests. Thirty-three organizations have signed onto the letters, and some are becoming partners in “Solidarity Saturdays,” collaborative events co-hosted by coalition members and other community organizations.

The National Day of Action on April 25 was called by the national coalition Detention Watch Network and involved the participation of other national organizations like Indivisible, Workers Circle, Public Citizen, MoveOn and many others. More than 200 events around the nation transpired as a result. The core campaign demands are to cancel the warehouse detention plan and stop conversions immediately; reject all public funding, approvals, and local resources for detention expansion; and require transparency and community consent before any federal detention action. In Romulus, the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America, No Detention Centers in Michigan (NDCM), the People’s Assembly of Detroit, Southfield Neighborhood Action Committee (SNAC), and Community Aid for Empowerment (CAFE) from Pontiac came together with the Coalition to Shut the Camps to center the experiences of those at risk of being detained and those detained or recently released from detention.

The day of action in Romulus coincided with a hunger strike and work stoppage that began April 20 at the GEO Group owned-and-operated North Lake Processing Facility in the Village of Baldwin, Michigan (population < 1,000). The hunger strike and work stoppage were responses to the intensification of abuse in ICE detention, reflected by deaths in ICE detention entering a record high, and a continuation of unrest at the isolated Northern Michigan facility. From 2019-2022, there were multiple deaths and six separate hunger strikes at this immigrant-only federal prison.

Built in 1999 as the Michigan Youth Correctional Facility, North Lake has closed and reopened four times. Since reopening in June 2025 as the largest ICE detention center in the Midwest, North Lake has consistently imprisoned over a thousand people, many found by federal judges to be unlawfully detained. In recent months, a combination of reports of an increasingly unsafe environment, medical issues going unaddressed, and a steep decline in judicial approval of bonds has brought the North Lake detention center into the international spotlight. Following the death last December of Nenko Gantchev, an immigrant from Bulgaria who lived in the US for over 30 years, and the sharp increase in incidents requiring an EMS response, immigrants detained in Baldwin are demanding better medical care, adequate food, and their constitutional right to timely due process. They are also demanding conditions that allow for adequate sleep and an end to arbitrary rules.

No Detention Centers in Michigan (NDCM) has recently organized multiple protests and is calling for additional actions outside the Baldwin facility in solidarity with those incarcerated, such as blasting song requests from detainees with a loudspeaker to the inside. The strike has spurred calls from the ACLU of Michigan and Michigan Immigrant Rights Center for Congress to conduct formal independent investigations into neglectful and abusive conditions at North Lake.

The strike had been renewed as of April 27, despite claims by ICE denying any such assertion of the rights and dignity of those confined. A statement from a recently released immigrant affirming the courageous act of collective resistance by hundreds of immigrant men across multiple units in North Lake was read at the action in Romulus on April 25. A statement was also read there from Women’s Collective Civil Action, a group of women from another unit at North Lake who filed a joint habeas corpus petition earlier in the month. Many attendees of the Romulus demonstration made the 3.5 hour trek across the state to Baldwin the following day to express solidarity with those kidnapped from the broader region and subjected to the brutality of the state.

As Ale Rojas of NDCM put it, “This courageous collective action is a response to the dehumanization and abuse that are endemic to ICE detention, where immigrants are used as scapegoats so corporations like the GEO Group may continue to build their profits unchecked. Centering our humanity and the humanity of every person who has been kidnapped by ICE is the only way forward.”

Worsening conditions of confinement around the country and the expansion of ICE presence in Michigan with the purchase of the warehouse in Romulus has given rise to a deepened sense of alarm and more community opposition. The Ban Warehouse Detention Act would prohibit DHS from establishing, operating, expanding, converting, or renovating any warehouse or similar building for the purpose of detaining people. Congressmember Rashida Tlaib’s announcement of the bill on April 23 was a direct response to ICE’s expansion in Romulus and Southfield. She herself attended the Romulus No Kings demonstration organized by the Coalition to Shut the Camps on March 28 as well as demonstrations in Southfield opposing the leasing of office space to ICE. Her bill also addresses ICE’s plans to convert 23 such warehouses nationwide into new immigration detention and processing facilities, a plan that would expand the federal agency’s detention capacity significantly.

This legislation was drafted in partnership with Detention Watch Network and cites the likelihood that confining large amounts of people to spaces not meant for human habitation will increase the spread of illness and put people’s health at risk, increasing the chance for abuse and death in ICE custody. The group also suggests that such expansion normalizes mass confinement and will result in an increase in unlawful arrests, violations of due process rights and widespread family separation.

On April 25 in Romulus, the tenth demonstration since the end of February occurred in the city against the purchase of the warehouse by the federal government. The City of Romulus unanimously passed a resolution opposing the sale, citing proximity to nearby elementary and middle schools; negative impacts on the health, safety and welfare of Romulus residents; and negative impacts on economic development. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has also joined with the City of Romulus in a lawsuit against DHS and ICE, alleging the federal agency failed to complete necessary environmental reviews and to consider alternatives.

The Communities Not Cages demonstration featured a teach-in with speakers from No Detention Centers in Michigan, the Coalition to Shut the Camps, Detroit DSA, People’s Assembly, CAFE, and SNAC. Organizers discussed the work they have been doing to address ICE activity in Michigan, the needs for future work, how to keep building out the organizing, and how different organizations can work together effectively.

Another demonstration and march occurred earlier in the day organized by local Indivisible groups. Between the two events, roughly 500 people demonstrated throughout the day against the plans for a detention warehouse in metro Detroit.

As in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, the potential for social upheaval has led to action, in this case Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s suit against the DHS. The lesson taken from experiences around the country has been that local officials respond to organized mass pressure from below. With May Day following the day of action against warehouse detention, there was an opportunity to deepen the involvement of organized workers. The Metro Detroit AFL-CIO recognized International Workers’ Day for the first time in decade. Members organized a post-rally march to the Detroit ICE office, with a contingent for immigrants’ rights and against wars abroad.

Union support against immigrant detentions is crucial. For example, in the nearby city of Wayne, the No Kings Day event was held at UAW Local 900, a major Ford production complex not far from the Romulus detention center project. That No Kings Day was largely focused on the movement against ICE. At a March 16 demonstration outside the Romulus warehouse, a member of UAW Local 900 expressed opposition to the warehouse detention plans. Ron Lare, a retired Ford worker and member of UAW Local 600 at the Ford Rouge plant, held a sign that read, “UAW members and leaders –– join the resistance in the streets!” Lare urged UAW members and leaders to come out to the protests at the detention center project in Romulus. “The union is supposed to stand for the principle that ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’ It is inevitable that if this detention center opens, some UAW members will be detained inside.”

Ron Lare, a retired Ford worker and member of UAW Local 600 at the Ford Rouge plant, held this sign at the March 16 demonstration.

Against the violence and brutality of the state, there is space for exposing connections to attacks by the ruling class on people throughout the world. It is possible to deepen bonds of international solidarity that pose an alternative to the reactionary ethno-nationalism of the ruling class. The emergence of a detention state with a renewed focus on borders and exclusion is the latest phase of a long history of racialized criminalization essential to stratifying and regulating the labor-market that produces the wealth of capitalist society. Immigration enforcement is a tool of capitalist exploitation that creates a tiered labor market, providing employers with a pool of cheap, exploitable labor and exerting a downward pressure on wages and working conditions, limiting the bargaining power of the working class.

The creation of ICE in 2003, following the post-9/11 reorganization of immigration services, consolidated and militarized longstanding practices rooted in history. The struggle for immigrants’ rights must be rooted in multiracial solidarity that shatters the myth of American exceptionalism and exposes the violent foundations of capitalism and US imperial dominance. Only a united working class has the power to reorganize society on the basis of real democratic control and defend against the inevitable disappointment entailed by elite cooptation.

We must reject any hollow attempt to paint over the historical existence of racial capitalism and recognize it as the key task for socialists to actively strengthen and learn from the struggle for abolition. We must understand, as CLR James did, that those most oppressed in the class struggle “carry the hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it” to a greater degree than other sections of the population. It is an essential question of strategy and power to center and uplift such voices in a bottom-up struggle that targets the foundations of capitalism.

The struggle against oppression is the prerequisite for organizing a democratic mass movement capable of confronting the ruling class. A socialist vision for immigration recognizes freedom of movement as a fundamental human right. Only such a vision can address global inequities that drive migration and fuel the fight to extend full labor rights to all workers, removing the incentive for employers to exploit undocumented labor. A genuinely internationalist solidarity can unite workers across borders and advance the global struggle against exploitation.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Ben Solis/Michigan Advance; modified by Tempest.

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Rising seas could render New Orleans uninhabitable before the end of this century, according to a new paper calling for a managed retreat from the city.

Read more on E360 →

by Rebecca Rutt, Margrethe Birkler, and Emily Jean Cornwell

Interdisciplinary research is tricky enough but working across faith / atheist positionalities can bring unexpected insights to scholar-activism. In this essay, the authors recount their journey and report their findings on the Indecent Eco-Theology Praxis of Christian Environmentalists in Trump’s America.

I (Rebecca) am a social scientist working in the field of political ecology, and an atheist – or perhaps the humbler ‘agnostic’- although I was raised in an evangelical U.S. Christian home. I (Emily) am also from the U.S., also raised Christian, though I am a pantheistic Quaker today, and have recently completed an interdisciplinary MSc program on Climate Change. And I (Margrethe) am a Christian and a Danish theologian.

What we share, besides academic roles and calling Denmark home, is a commitment to action toward social, environmental, ecological and multispecies justice. This inspired a collaboration and propelled us to direct our collective academic gaze toward a field that we deem to be of great shared importance: the potentials and challenges of environmentalism in the United States – as undertaken by Christian organizations.

Recently, we conducted a case study of how one eco-Christian organization in the United States is resisting the political and inter-religious marginalization of ecological concern. Our work was based on interviews with the main staff of Creation Justice Ministries (CJM), a small but well-connected U.S. faith umbrella organization aspiring to unite Christian denominations to protect and restore the environment in God’s name. Importantly, CJM is among the few explicitly Christian eco-organizations, alongside the more numerous interfaith environmental groups.

This felt pertinent because of Christianity’s prominence and influence in the U.S. (where 62% of American adults identify as Christian according to the Pew Research Center, 2025). As explained by CJM’s Executive Director, while interfaith groups are also doing critical work, the fact that CJM is “rooted in Christian tradition, Christian theology” provides “a depth and a specificity” to their work that strengthens the potential for impact throughout the ecumenical community.

“Restore / Share / Protect God’s Creation” – 2025 public event by CJM calling for the administration to take bold action for creation care. Source: CJM, Executive Director Avery Davis Lamb.

This in turn was pertinent in light of the findings from a recent poll of religious American citizens who were asked about their views on climate change. While 70% of respondents said that they believe the Earth is getting warmer, only 48% believe this is because of human activity.

Among Christians, 85% believe God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth, yet only 54% find stricter environmental protections worth the cost. And despite the longstanding presence of environmental stewardship in Christian values, the dominant Christian discourse in the United States appears largely apathetic – or actively hostile – towards the climate crisis.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences also documented that while up to 90% of Christian leaders believe in anthropogenic climate change, only around half have ever discussed this with their congregations, and only a quarter have mentioned it more than once or twice. Within congregations where climate change was discussed, a reported 35% of listeners were apathetic or uninterested, 27% were suspicious or resistant, and 10% were hostile towards hearing about climate change in sermons.

Some religious leaders who delivered such sermons have also described being threatened with angry letters and firing. It is clear from such figures that caring for the Earth is a marginal position to hold, both politically in the country but also within the Christian faith.

“Restore / Share / Protect God’s Creation” – 2025 public event by CJM calling for the administration to take bold action for creation care. Source: CJM, Executive Director Avery Davis Lamb.

For those of us engaged as scholar-activists in the field of environmental justice, we may benefit from a reminder of the crucial historical role played by Christian churches and their congregations in the struggle against environmental racism, and later for environmental justice in the U.S., where the term first emerged. This history receives perhaps less attention in contemporary environmental justice scholarship (although perhaps less so in grassroots activism).

In particular, we acknowledge the decades of work by civil rights and faith leader Rev. Benjamin Chavis Jr., who in the late 1980s coined the term ‘environmental racism’ that paved the way for the broader notion of environmental justice (even as environmental racism remains as important today).[i] Rev. Chavis was responding to a groundbreaking 1987 report by the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ. The analysis documented for the first time the systemic connection at the national level between race and the sitings of toxic facilities – above and beyond class.

A plaque dedicated to the protests against PCB dumping in Warren County, North Carolina. Source: Wikimedia Commons/ Creative Commons.

The report noted, for example, that three out of every five Black and Hispanic Americans lived in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites. At the press conference presenting Chavis’ charge, he described this situation as, “an insidious form of institutionalized racism. …  in effect, environmental racism”. Even earlier, we recall the important role of African American Protestant churches as critical sites of organizing and mobilizing in the now famous 1982 protests against a PCB landfill in Warren County, North Carolina.

Relatedly, eco-theology, which for decades has helped draw attention to the intersections of religious faith and environmental concern, is nothing new in the U.S. The field coalesced in the 1960s, most famously through the works of U.S.-based Islamic scholar and philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr and U.S. historian Lynn White, and developed throughout the 1970s-80s.

A narrowing landscape for eco-theology, and an ‘indecent eco-theology’ as a critical response

However, the contemporary political landscape is sharply narrowing the space for articulations of eco-theology attentive to the climate and related crises. Under the Trump administration, Christian right-leaning nationalism is growing, and those who challenge the destruction of the Earth in their theology are likely to become further marginalized.

Upon returning to office, Trump continues to solidify the entanglement between right-wing nationalism and Christianity. Recent policies under the Trump administration, such as defunding faith-based environmental programs and empowering religious leaders who frame ecological protections as anti-Christian, have reinforced a theological culture in which domination and extraction define human relations with the rest of nature.

Our entry into this context was also influenced by Margrethe’s recent theorizing of what she dubbed ‘indecent eco-theology’ (IET): a critical theological approach centering the experiences of especially marginalized groups in (re)defining Christianity alongside action toward eco-justice. This made CJM as a case organization also relevant, given IET’s attention to the Christian faith.

In brief, IET emphasizes an action- and practice-informed Christianity, inspired by Argentinian theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid’s ‘indecent theology’ foregrounding a queer, liberatory, and street-based God-walk (as opposed to merely God-talk). Althaus-Reid maintained that theology does and should begin outside academic walls and halls of institutionalized power, which may engender ‘indecency’ in the eyes of powerholders – although Althaus-Reid rather recognized and celebrated less formalized knowledge/praxis.

A portrait of Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, writer of the book ‘Indecent Theology’. Source: Wikipedia/Creative Commons.

Birkler’s IET similarly suggests that environmentally-engaged congregations can be the primary source of theology and encourages new insights of Christianity that emerge from activism. The IET framework also acknowledges the queerness and liberatory aspirations in Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology. Her queer theology, characterizable as “ruptures rather than reconciliations with structures that cannot be reformed”, articulated a sharp critique of the dominant social, religious, and political systems of the Global South- even speaking out against the limitations of liberation theologies.

Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw’s explicit attention to intersectionality provided IET with additional analytical purchase. Their ‘intersectional theology’ calls for attention to the complex social categories that inform and legitimate the production of particular knowledges, shape the daily experiences of various groups, and assert an ecclesiology (i.e. the study of the Church) that embraces difference and centers social justice.

With the notion of eco-justice in mind, IET is also informed by Laurel Kearns’  conceptualization of the term as equitable relations in God’s kindom (as opposed to the more hierarchical term ‘kingdom’) amongst humans but also between humans and the vast realm of creation.

Crucially, this perspective brings other species and ecological systems into the realm of justice, thereby moving beyond the historical anthropocentrism of environmental justice and toward what some secularly conceive as ecological or multispecies justice. We thus used the IET as a lens to examine the theological praxis of Creation Justice Ministries (CJM) in the context of the U.S.

Insights from the theological praxis of Creation Justice Ministries

Our work resulted in the publication of an academic paper entitled “We can’t be quiet. We can’t sit back.”: Examining the Indecent Eco-Theology Praxis of Christian Environmentalists in Trump’s America. While the main focus of the article, published in the theological journal Dialog, became to advance ongoing theological debates[ii], it also generated important reminders for those of us operating within the more secular environmental and environmental justice scholar/activist terrains. It further showcased the perspectives of those from the faith community, and the contemporary potential for secular and faith communities to collaborate toward shared goals.

For instance, while eco-concerned faith groups are marginalized in the broader religious and political order, collaboration with secular environmental groups is viewed by CJM at least as important to nourish shared values and the achievement of political goals, as they have experienced firsthand. The Theological Director described:

“A lot of folks in the environmental community aren’t expecting a faith voice. I think people are pleasantly surprised when we show up, when we show up with numbers, when we show up with energy, when we show up educated on the topics”.

The divisive political climate today likely deters faith-secular collaboration around environmental issues by generating negative expectations of eco-concern, especially on the part of faith communities. Based on CJM’s experiences, informed, organized faith groups should actively explore the potential of partnerships for meeting urgent shared environmental, climate, and social goals. And environmental groups, irrespective of their faith position, should understand that partnerships with groups like CJM are essential.

“You are not alone.” CJM mapping of allied churches and faith communities taking action around the country. Source: CJM, 2026: https://www.creationjustice.org/resilience.html

Referring to one of their programs in conjunction with the American Geophysicist Union, called Private Earth Exchange, CJM’s Theological Director described how churches serve as community science hubs:

“themselves identify[ing] environmental issues that are happening in their community, and are then paired with community scientists.”

He described the multiple benefits of such collaborations:

“One, it’s really empowering to these churches to believe that there are solutions that they can be a part of.”

Nourishing a sense of efficacy is integral for mobilization. Another benefit is amending their understanding of the “false and artificial divide between faith and science.”

CJM’s work with other faith communities who may not yet connect the need for ecological care to their existing concerns and efforts, such as those related to racially-based injustices, offers insights into framing and communication of broad relevance for change-making. The Theological Director emphasized that many conversations other faith communities are having today, are just “one degree away from a climate conversation” – be it hunger, poverty, or racial equity.

Mapping the Climate-Church Crisis. Source: CJM, 2026 (https://www.creationjustice.org/resilience.html)

To make the connection, to “connect the dots”, requires

“recognizing that the conversation has to start at different places. The conversation starts about air quality, and that Black children are far more likely to have asthma because of air quality issues. The conversation starts at the fact that regardless of income, you are five times more likely as an African American to live near a waste treatment facility. …. And helping people understand that those are environmental issues. Those are Creation issues.”

A similar sentiment was expressed by CJM’s Church Engagement Manager, who stated her intention to bring her experiences from working at an ‘incarnational ministry’ in a Central American immigrant neighborhood outside D.C. into the work at CJM. ‘Incarnational’, here, was related to a doctrine of God where God is understood as being present with and in the world, as a way to “be tangibly present with all of the creation that is around you”.

Personal revelations toward our own scholar/activism

Some deeply personal revelations for us authors also occurred through this process.

I (Rebecca) came to terms with the partiality of my Christian upbringing in an evangelical Christian home and some beliefs so ingrained that I was blind to them. Through this work, I came to realize that while I may have been pleased in what is now my home country of Denmark by, say, the substantial presence of female clergy in the Danish Lutheran Church and its relative inclusion of homosexuality, I subconsciously assessed these as not truly Christian.

I also grasped the tremendous significance of eschatology (part of my new vocabulary!), namely beliefs (note the plural!) about biblical ‘end times’ and the return of Jesus Christ. The version I had been taught foretells a world in decline until the ‘rapturous’ moment of Christ’s return and the ascent of believers, as the rest remain to face devastating ‘tribulations’.

This ‘theology of despair’- in that it effectively precludes a rationale to work for change (apart from conversion to the faith)- was a major rereading of the Bible introduced in the 1800s that over time, became a cornerstone of contemporary U.S. evangelicalism.[iii] Not only does this view deter action for social and ecological justice, it is even interpreted in some faith circles as call to contribute to worsening conditions on Earth, in a hubristic attempt to force Christ’s hand, and his return.[iv]

Yet another view existed, and persists today, albeit in currently marginalized faith communities. CJM’s Executive Director explained to us that the theology of ‘rapture’ is not an orthodox belief but rather relatively new to Christian theology, and runs counter to the understanding of God as a loving creator. He explained:

“I don’t pretend to know what will happen in the eschaton, but I do believe strongly that God (…) made this world out of love (ex amore) and sent God’s son as Divinity incarnate to show what it looks like to intimately love creation — people and planet. It is completely contrary to how I understand God’s character that that same God would burn up the world.”

“Protect, Restore, and Rightly Share God’s Creation” – Recent outreach by CJM’s Director of Theological Education and Formation, Derrick Weston; Source: CJM, 2026 https://www.creationjustice.org/theologicaleducation.html

Encountering a U.S. Christian praxis so deeply committed to people and planet was revelatory.[v] While I have not made my way back to the faith, I did come to grasp both the partiality of my upbringing, and the way in which it undermines solidarities across secular and faith movements.

I (Emily) was delighted to learn of progressive, climate-aware Christians through this work. In conducting this research, I was surprised to find religious organizations that were entirely dedicated to acknowledging the climate crisis in their work, particularly as the Christian context I grew up in was hostile to these conversations.

Furthermore, finding theological work such as Althaus-Reid’s, which not only accepted marginalized perspectives but centered and uplifted these communities, was revelatory for my own relationship to faith and spirituality as a part of the queer community. This work ignited a passion and interest to continue working in this space, focusing on practical theology and ‘God-walk’ that might examine indecent theologies and their connection with the climate crisis.

Growing out of this research, I have taken up practicing restorative rituals, working alongside progressive theological organizations, aiming to acknowledge the climate crisis in small ways, communing with nature, community, and stillness. Through this, I realized the importance of silence, the more-than-human in faith, and found my way to a form of religion that feels aligned with who I am.

Lastly, I was encouraged by the ability for so many diverse areas of research and ‘fields’ to blend in this work. Though many of my peers were confused about the connection between religion and climate change, I found weaving this interdisciplinary web incredibly rewarding and meaningful, and this has opened my eyes to the ways that scholars can collaborate between fields previously thought to be distinct, such as science and religion.

Some resources provided by CJM for cultivating ‘faithful resilience’ through community mobilizations. Source: CJM, 2026 (https://www.creationjustice.org/resilience.html)

And I (Margrethe) explored the potential of empirical data collection, which is less common in the theological scholarship normally related to the subject of Dogmatics at the department I am connected to at Aarhus University. It was a truly enlightening experience to undertake an application study of a theory I had previously proposed. Suddenly, the theory was not only alive at my own desk at my office, but in the “real” world among faith communities.

This experience, furthermore, made me aware of a blind spot in the proposal of my theory of IET: if indecent theology is truly God-walk, and not merely God-talk, empirical data collection is vital to the study of it. While I had previously relied on the empirical studies of others in my work on IET, I was now challenged to produce this empirical data in collaboration with Rebecca and Emily. Here, I was reminded of the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration – not only in the data collection and analysis, but also across the different phases of discussing the impacts of our findings both as scholars and in relation to our private lives and the place of religion in them.

Through undertaking this study with Rebecca and Emily, I was not only reminded of the importance of collaboration but also faced with the need for scholarship to not be limited to the confines of my own office.

Speaking collectively once more, we acknowledge that this research collaboration came forth from a place of curiosity, and maybe a little uncertainty. Yet the interdisciplinarity and especially the cooperation across faith perspectives were unexpectedly giving, bringing an injection of new insights and momentum to our scholar/activism. We share these reflections in the hope that they may inspire others in the political ecology, justice, and faith communities to keep reaching across the aisles.

[i] One of the more recent examples of environmental racism in the U.S. context is the ongoing ‘water crisis’ of Flint, Michigan.

[ii] Specifically, we document the iterations between their practice and theological perceptions, advancing an interdependence with the more-than-human world while destabilizing dominant theological assumptions of the linear path from perception to practice. We also explore how they understand and mobilize ‘justice’, intersectionality, and engage with marginalized groups and the more-than-human world. Throughout, we draw insights to advance IET. Our findings thus reveal the organization’s resonance with IET alongside the particularities that emerge from a situated case study that are fruitful for further theoretical development.

[iii] Also known as premillennialism; listen to the helpful NPR Throughline podcast, Apocalypse Now, from 2019. Also see the work of sociologists like Gorski and Perry (e.g. their 2022 book, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy) and Arlie Hothschild (e.g. her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land), who through quantitative, historical, and/or ethnographic research elaborate upon the history and current significance of end-times beliefs, with insight especially into the context of the USA.

[iv] Paradoxical to a position of disengagement, some evangelical leaders’ interest in gaining political power became apparent by the 1980s, coalescing around strategically determined issues that might rally Christian constituents – in particular the issue of abortion (despite that evangelicals were unopposed to abortion as recently as the 1970s). The election of Ronald Regan was a linchpin in this transformation.

[v] For me, this learning occurred both through getting to know the work of Christian environmentalists like the staff at CJM, but also through the many encounters with Margrethe, that came to push at my own firmly held beliefs about what counted or not as authentic faith. Margrethe’s sharing of her ambiguity regarding the Church, accompanied by such certainty of faith, was especially instructive.

 

The post Interdisciplinarity across the secular/faith divide: revelations from researching Christian environmentalists in Trump’s America appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.

Come join the early Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) event on June 27, 15:30 to 21:30 at La Cinètika in Barcelona. organized by Rupture Press & Undisciplined Environments.

Political Ecology Struggling: Between Industrial Extermination & Genocidal Wars

Being a researcher in the face of socioecological catastrophe, genocide and exterminating war feels increasingly untenable. While universities, and academia, are as much, if not more, than accomplices and apologists in political control and military development, they are also a space of critical discussion, political awakening and resistance.

This Political Ecology Network(POLLEN) pre-conference, Political Ecology Struggling: Between Industrial Extermination and Genocidal War, seeks to discuss these issues while inviting a new and enjoyable format for academic discussions—we embrace the joy of our possibilities, while recognizing we should do more against war, extractivism and political control.

While discussing heavy topics, we seek to bring an engaging—if not fun—format of passive and active participation. This pre-conference seeks to add to POLLEN, making the most of our travels and, most importantly, seeks to confront the by-and-large lack of tangible actions taking place at universities and within academia. With the exceptions of night attacks by anonymous actors and mobilization by select staff and students, academia has by-and-large failed to create and grow universities as liberatory spaces. Instead, liberatory spaces and academic culture are strangled by digital bureaucracy, competitive ranking metrics, impoverished, arm-chair and politically ignorant  conversations about political movements.

This academic normal continues alongside increasing political repression, flagrant enactments of genocide and political censorship perpetrated by universities, meanwhile academic relevance is affirmed by salaries. However limited, the Political Ecology Struggling pre-event seeks to make an enjoyable crack within the academic space to create participatory learning, dialogue and convivial congregation. Honoring and advancing the politically conscious and active legacy of political ecology, we seek to encourage a movement away from bureaucratic management toward socio-ecological transformation.

This pre-conference event includes a small book fair from local and foreign publishers and begins with a welcome and introduction (with more detail) about the event. This is followed by games, participatory workshops and a joint panel organized by Rupture Press and Undisciplined Environments titled: Can Academics Struggle? If so, how?

We seek to discuss the shortcoming, but more so imagine and express possible ways to advance liberatory practices and spaces within the University.  While creating a workshop space, to learn new skills, we provide an event for socialising, discussion and, hopefully, new (academic) conspiracies. The evening will conclude with an entertaining show to end the night with jubilee and laughter.

Located at a social centre, La Cinètika, the event is free to attend (and in English), but suggested 10€  donations are welcome. All donations go to covering the material costs and all leftovers are split between Rupture Press and La Cinètika.

Location: La Cinètika, Passeig de Fabra i Puig, 28, 08030 Barcelona, Spain

Date: 27th June 2026

We hope to see everyone there, and while much of this schedule will remain a surprise until the days before the event, here is what to expect:

15:30: Doors Open to socialize

16:15-16:30: Welcome Introduction – This Evening!

16:30-50: Ice-Breaker Game & Giggles

17:00 – 18:45: Workshops

18:45: Dinner

19:20 – 20:20: Rupture Press/Undisciplined Environments: Can Academics Struggle? If so, how?

20:30 – 21:30: Exciting Entertainment

We look forward to seeing you there!

The post Pre-POLLEN: Rupture Press & Undisciplined Environments Invitational appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.

Despite Scotland's lack of power over immigration policy, migrant justice remains central to the 2026 election, writes Cailean Gallagher

The post Elections 2026: Immigration, employment and the limits of Holyrood appeared first on Red Pepper.

With Alaska once again in the administration’s crosshairs, we’ve heard a big question from supporters across the country: How are we fighting back? 

The answer is: in every way we can. From the halls of Congress to communities across the country, we’re building a movement to defend the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This blog focuses on one of our most powerful tools to get there—the Arctic Refuge Protection Act—and why it matters right now. 

A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity 

The Arctic Refuge Protection Act introduced by Senator Markey (D-MA) and Representatives Huffman (D-CA) and Fitzpatrick (R-PA), offers something we’ve never needed more: a lasting solution.  

This bipartisan bill would repeal the destructive oil and gas leasing program mandated by the 2017 Tax Act and permanently protect the Refuge’s 1.5-million-acre coastal plain as Wilderness.  

At a time when short-term political decisions threaten long-term ecological futures, this bill charts a path rooted in respect, responsibility, and permanence.  

Why This Bill Matters on Capitol Hill 

Not only does the Refuge Protection Act provide the best opportunity to create lasting change, but it is a crucial tool to build support and empower our champions on the Hill. 

Every new co-sponsor is a public commitment to protecting one of the last truly wild places in America. It gives Members of Congress a clear way to stand with their constituents, with Indigenous communities, and with future generations.  

And in a deeply divided political moment, this bill provides a powerful opportunity to demonstrate that protecting the Arctic Refuge is a shared value and not a partisan issue. Growing this bipartisan support sends a clear message across administrations and party lines that the Arctic Refuge is not a bargaining chip for industrial extraction. It is a shared heritage that is worth protecting. 

 People Power Makes This Possible 

Our team is pushing our decision-makers on the Hill every single day, but we also know that the people fundamentally power this work. We’ve seen the impact when advocates step forward to share why the Arctic matters to them. Gwich’in leaders have traveled thousands of miles to speak about their deep, enduring connection to the land and the caribou. Their voices have opened hearts, shifted perspectives, and built lasting relationships with decision-makers

We’ve also partnered with organizations like Love Is King and Hip Hop Caucus to bring new voices into the conversation—veterans, young leaders, and community advocates who have experienced the Refuge firsthand and carry its story with them. 

And just as importantly, we’ve seen how powerful it is when constituents—people like you—speak up. Whether you live in Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine (or anywhere in between), your voice reminds Congress that the Arctic Refuge belongs to all of us.  

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.