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Drowning in manure: How livestock farms threaten Iowa’s drinking water and public health rcoleman July 14, 2026 Ethan Bahe Anne Schechinger, M.S. July 14, 2026 Overview

• EWG found 15,309 Iowa factory farms producing over 107 million tons of manure a year.
• The number of large animal facilities increased by 13% between 2019 and 2025.
• The state’s livestock produce significant amounts of manure that pollute drinking water and recreational water, leading to public health harms like cancer.
• Because of inadequate oversight, polluted drinking water results from all sizes of facilities.

Iowa – the nation’s top hog producer – had more than 15,000 factory farms in 2025 producing over 107 million tons of manure, a first-of-its-kind EWG analysis finds. This waste can pollute water, exposing people to serious health risks like cancer.

EWG mapped every livestock facility across Iowa to uncover the massive scale of the farms and their manure. The waste generated would weigh the same as over 53 million Ford F150 pickup trucks, and would account for 33 tons of manure each year for every person in Iowa.

And the problem isn’t limited to Iowa. 

A third of all pork raised in the U.S. is produced in Iowa, which is by far the largest hog-producing state. Minnesota, the runner-up, makes up only 12% of total U.S. hog production. If you’ve eaten pork, it’s very likely that you've eaten pork from hogs raised in Iowa. The consequences of huge Iowa hog farms extend far beyond the state borders.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources tracks the number of hog and other animal feeding operations and their locations, with a data file showing just under 11,000 facilities.

In contrast, EWG’s well-established methodology located thousands more facilities that are not included in the state’s dataset. This analysis found more than 15,000 factory farms on the ground from aerial and satellite imagery, providing the most comprehensive picture yet of Iowa’s enormous industrial livestock footprint. 

This investigation updates a 2020 EWG analysis that mapped the state’s largest animal operations only. That study found there were 3,936 large factory farms in the state in 2019. Our latest research found a 12.9% increase in large facilities, to 4,444 in 2025.

The vast amounts of manure these facilities generate are often applied to nearby farm fields as a fertilizer, since it contains nitrogen and phosphorus, nutrients that feed crops. But manure and its components can wash off farm fields, leach through soil into drainage systems that empty into nearby rivers, streams and lakes, and get into groundwater. 

Nitrogen can form in drinking water as nitrate, and consuming this contaminated water can increase the risk of birth defects and cancer. Iowa is the state with the second-highest rate of new cancer cases. 

Manure runoff can also create potentially toxic algae blooms in recreational waters when more nutrients are applied than crops can absorb. EWG has reported on algae toxins in bodies of water throughout Iowa.

To help reduce the environmental and public health damages caused by livestock raised in these facilities, consumers can choose to eat less meat or eat meat not raised in a factory farm. And federal and state-level policies must change to improve public health and the safety of water for Iowans. 

Iowa produces huge amounts of manure

Animal feeding operations are concentrated facilities and feedlots that produce livestock for meat, eggs and dairy products. Hundreds and even thousands of cattle, swine, chickens, turkeys and other animals are raised in large buildings or, in the case of cattle, in open feedlots. Over 90% of U.S. livestock are raised in factory farms. 

EWG found that Iowa had 15,309 such facilities in 2025. Hogs made up the vast majority of facilities in the state, at 66%. 

There were 10,172 facilities housing 33.4 million hogs, 336 poultry facilities housing 178.6 million turkeys and chickens, and 4,801 operations that contained 2.7 million cattle.

Together these facilities produced 107.6 million tons of manure in 2025.

Two-thirds of all factory farms produced swine last year. They also produced the largest share of manure. (See Figure 1.) 

Figure 1. Hog facilities generated over 64% of total manure in Iowa. 

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Source: EWG, with data from Department of Agriculture National Agriculture Imagery Program and Iowa DNR 

The five Iowa counties with the most animal feeding operations in descending order were Sioux, Lyon, Plymouth, O’Brien and Washington. These counties contained 3,095 factory farms, or one in five of all facilities in the state. 

Water quality problems are especially prevalent in the counties with the most operations. This map shows the locations of all the state’s 15,000-plus factory farms:

Interactive map Iowa livestock facilities in 2025

EWG mapped every livestock facility in the state using aerial and satellite imagery, uncovering a much greater industrial footprint than Iowa’s own data suggests.

View map here Large operations have increased since 2019

Iowa has seen a substantial increase in the number of large animal facilities in just the past few years. The largest operations generate the most manure, exacerbating manure storage issues. It becomes increasingly difficult to manage waste without applying excessive amounts to nearby farmland, where it contributes to water pollution and other environmental problems.

For this analysis, EWG used the Environmental Protection Agency’s definition of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, to determine farm size. According to the EPA, small facilities have fewer than 300 “animal units,” medium facilities have between 300 and 999, and large facilities have 1,000 or more animal units. 

An “animal unit” is defined as an animal that’s equivalent to 1,000 pounds of live weight. For example, a single animal unit would be one 1,000-pound beef cattle, 2.5 hogs or 125 chickens. Large CAFOs house at least 1,000 beef cattle or 2,500 hogs or 125,000 chickens – a lot of animals generating an enormous amount of manure.

The number of large swine operations increased the most between 2019 and 2025, at over 400 facilities.

The largest facilities produced a disproportionate amount of manure. The 4,444 large facilities accounted for 29% of all facilities but generated 60% of all manure.

Medium-size facilities made up 51% of operations but only 35% of the manure. Small farms accounted for only 20% of facilities and 5% of the manure. 

This expansion between 2019 and 2025 reflects the continued consolidation of livestock production into larger, more intensive facilities with greater waste management and drinking water challenges.

Sioux, Kossuth and Hamilton counties were the three with the greatest number of large animal feeding operations, where manure application in these counties likely has a big impact on water quality. 

Existing regulatory requirements

There were also thousands of factory farms just below the “large” size designation. These operations generate significant amounts of manure but are not required by the EPA to get a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, water permit.

To obtain the required permits, large animal feeding operations submit applications that include manure management plans identifying the fields where manure will be applied each year. 

Management plans aim to prevent multiple facilities from applying manure to the same fields or applying manure above the agronomic rate. 

Animal facilities that have more than 500 animal units but under 1,000 need to submit a manure management plan to the Iowa DNR, but they do not have to get a NPDES permit. 

Although manure management plans are an important safeguard, they are often incomplete and inconsistently enforced. In 2025, there were only 745 inspections of manure management plans for Iowa facilities that had over 500 animal units. 

Operations with fewer than 1,000 animal units are exempt from many of the permit requirements faced by larger facilities, despite generating enough manure to pose water quality and public health risks similar to the risks of waste generated by large facilities. And those under the 1,000 animal unit threshold with manure management plans are only infrequently inspected.

A total of 3,276 operations had between 950 and 999 animal units – just 50 animal units short of the large CAFO designation. These facilities represented 21% of all facilities in the state and produced a lot of manure, but they are not regulated the same way as operations with 1,000 or more animal units are. 

Threat to water and public health

Human waste usually goes through a multistage treatment process before being released back into the environment. 

But the more than 100 million tons of manure produced annually by Iowa’s animal operations are typically spread, untreated, on nearby agricultural fields as a fertilizer. It’s the most common disposal option because the waste contains nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed the crops.

But once spread, the nitrogen in manure gets into groundwater, leaches through soil into drainage systems that empty into nearby waterways, and runs off fields to contaminate lakes and streams.

EWG recently released an analysis of nitrate levels in drinking water served by community water systems across the U.S. The report found that, in Iowa, 822 community water systems tested for nitrate between 2021 and 2023. 

Of those systems, 146 provided drinking water to almost 1.2 million Iowans and had at least one nitrate test at or above 3 milligrams per liter, or mg/L. During that time, 81 community water systems serving just under 800,000 people tested at or above 5 mg/L, and eight systems serving over 56,000 people tested at or above 10 mg/L.

Nitrate contamination in drinking water poses significant risks both to public health and the environment, with the potential harms varying based on the amount of nitrate (see Figure 2).  

The EPA’s legal limit for nitrate in drinking water – known as the maximum contaminant level, or MCL – is 10 mg/L. This standard was set based on 1960s science to guard against “blue baby syndrome,” a potentially fatal condition that starves infants of oxygen if they ingest too much nitrate. 

More recent research shows strong evidence of an increased risk of colorectal and other cancers, thyroid disease and birth defects at 5 mg/L and other levels far below the woefully outdated federal legal limit for nitrate in drinking water. 

Figure 2. Levels of nitrate in drinking water and their associated health risks. 

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Source: EWG, Drinking water of almost 1 in 5 Americans contains nitrates linked to cancer and birth defects

These findings are especially concerning in Iowa, which has the second-highest incidence of cancer cases in the nation and continues to experience rising cancer rates. 

Considerable evidence connects nitrate consumption to increased risk of bladder cancer and colorectal cancer. Emerging research also links kidney, ovarian, thyroid and pediatric cancers with consumption of nitrate in drinking water at levels below the MCL. 

The risks of negative birth outcomes for infants also go up when pregnant people drink water contaminated with nitrate, even at levels far below the MCL – preterm birth, low birth weight and birth defects, including neural tube birth defects like spina bifida.

Beyond its impacts on human health, excessive fertilizer and manure application contribute to climate change. Nitrogen from commercial fertilizers and livestock manure is converted in soil into nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. 

Agriculture is one of the largest sources of nitrous oxide emissions, making improved nutrient management critical for protecting both water quality and the climate.

How consumers and policymakers can help

Consumers

Iowa is the largest producer of pork in the U.S., and swine facilities are the largest contributors of manure in the state. Consumers can choose to eat less meat or eat meat not raised in a factory farm, in turn helping to reduce the environmental and public health damages caused by raising livestock in these facilities. EWG’s Meat and Dairy Label Decoder helps users decipher what individual meat and dairy labels mean about how the livestock generating those food products were raised. 

The decoder suggests consumers look for these labels on meat packages at the grocery store to avoid factory-farmed meat: 

• Animal Welfare Approved by AGW
• Certified Humane, if the package also includes “grass fed” or “pasture-raised” 
• Global Animal Partnership, if the steps are 4, 5 or 5+. 

Pictures of EWG’s recommended meat labels are provided below. 

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These labels can help consumers choose products from animals raised on pasture, not in factory farms. Pasture-raised animals cause much less of a manure problem.

Policymakers

Changes to federal conservation policy could help reduce one of the largest sources of water contamination in Iowa. Millions of dollars from the Agriculture Department’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, support infrastructure that compounds the problems of industrial livestock production rather than practices that protect water quality, one of the stated goals of the program. 

That is, this money subsidizes infrastructure that supports factory farms. 

According to EWG’s Conservation Database, two of the top most-funded EQIP practices in Iowa between 2017 and 2024 were animal manure storage facilities, and roofs and covers for them. Together these two practices received $44.7 million in federal funding during that period, representing 17% of all EQIP dollars awarded to Iowa farmers. 

Instead, federal conservation funding should prioritize proven conservation practices that reduce nutrient runoff, improve soil health and protect drinking water. Funding should be prioritized so it goes to practices that improve water quality, like those on EWG’s list of regenerative agriculture practices.

Iowans should also press their state officials to create policy changes that would reduce the amount of manure that gets into water. 

The amount of manure that animal feeding operations produce, and where the manure is applied, could be better regulated with a number of policy changes. Many of these policy updates could reduce the risk of cancer Iowans currently face.

One idea that could attract bipartisan support would be to shift the regulation of animal feeding operations to counties. Iowa’s DNR currently manages how livestock facilities operate and expand, as well as the application of manure to farm fields. 

Shifting that decisionmaking authority to county governments would give a greater voice to the people who live and work near animal facilities and are most likely to experience the health outcomes tied to the operations. 

With this change, county officials would decide whether to approve proposals for building new facilities or expanding existing ones. These officials would also manage the amount of manure that is produced and where it is applied. 

Taken together, these achievable federal and state policy changes, along with consumer calls for action and changes to their eating preferences, could make a welcome difference to Iowans’ health.

EWG: Iowa’s 15,000+ factory farms produce over 107M tons of manure, risking public health Anthony Lacey July 14, 2026

MINNEAPOLIS – Iowa has 15,309 livestock farms that generated 107.6 million tons of manure in 2025, polluting the state’s water and putting Iowans’ health at risk, a landmark Environmental Working Group mapping project finds.

For this comprehensive report, EWG mapped every livestock facility in the state using aerial and satellite imagery, uncovering a much greater industrial footprint than Iowa’s own data suggests. The state Department of Natural Resources tracks just under 11,000 facilities – a significant undercount, compared to the 15,000-plus EWG found.

Much of the manure generated ends up applied – untreated – to nearby farm fields, where it can leach into groundwater or run off into rivers, streams and lakes, polluting tap water.

When manure leaves the fields it is applied to, the nitrogen it contains can form nitrate in drinking water. Research links nitrate – found in manure and commercial fertilizer – in drinking water to an increased risk of colorectal, bladder, kidney, ovarian and thyroid cancers, as well as adverse birth outcomes, including preterm birth, low birth weight and spina bifida. 

Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancer cases in the nation, and its cancer rates continue to rise.

“Iowa is drowning in manure from factory farms,” said report co-author Anne Schechinger, EWG’s senior director of agriculture and climate research. “The health threats of manure ending up in recreational and drinking water are well known and need to be addressed.”

The manure generated by Iowa’s factory farms is equivalent to 33 tons of waste for every person in the state each year – the same weight as over 53 million Ford F-150 pickup trucks

Many large factory farms

Hog operations dominate Iowa’s factory farm landscape, accounting for 66% of all facilities, EWG’s mapping found. Iowa produces a third of all U.S. pork, so the pollution problems linked to the large-scale factory farming of hogs aren’t limited to the Hawkeye State. 

Minnesota, the second-largest pork producer, accounts for just 12% of U.S. production.

The number of large animal facilities – those with 1,000 or more “animal units” – increased by nearly 13% between 2019 and 2025, from 3,936 to 4,444. Those large facilities represent just 29% of all operations but generate 60% of all manure.

EWG also found 3,276 operations with between 950 and 999 animal units – just below the threshold that triggers Environmental Protection Agency requirements for water permits and manure management plans. These facilities produce large amounts of manure but are not regulated as stringently as larger operations, leaving nearby communities without adequate protection.

Nitrate pollution associated with the application of these facilities’ manure to fields is alarming. EWG recently released an analysis of nitrate levels in drinking water provided by community water systems across the U.S. It revealed that in Iowa, 146 community water systems had elevated levels of nitrate at some time between 2021 and 2023. 

Manure runoff from farm fields also fuels toxic algae blooms in recreational waters, posing additional risks to public health.

“Science increasingly links this waste to serious health harms, including cancer. We can’t keep ignoring the problem – real policy changes can help and are overdue,” added Schechinger. 

Potential policy solutions

The federal government spends billions annually on farm conservation programs. But EWG’s analysis of the Agriculture Department’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, finds that federal dollars are not being directed to where they could make the most difference.

Two of the most-funded EQIP practices in Iowa between 2017 and 2024 were waste storage facilities and manure storage structure covers – infrastructure that supports factory farming. Together those two practices received $44.7 million in federal funding, representing 17% of all EQIP dollars awarded to Iowa farmers.

“Federal money subsidizes the very practices that drive this water pollution problem. That has to change,” said Ethan Bahe, the report’s other co-author and EWG senior GIS analyst.

EWG recommends redirecting conservation funding to practices proven to reduce nutrient runoff and protect drinking water, including those on EWG’s list of regenerative agriculture practices. Expansion of permitting requirements to cover more facilities would also ensure greater oversight of factory farms, which should include more local authority over them.

Consumers can also help by choosing to eat less factory-farmed meat, which could reduce the market demand that leads to the proliferation of facilities in Iowa and across the country. EWG’s Meat and Dairy Label Decoder helps consumers identify products from animals raised outside industrial operations.

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The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action. Visit www.ewg.org for more information.

Areas of Focus Water Farming & Agriculture Factory Farms Farm Pollution Midwest Number of large facilities jumped 13% since 2019 Press Contact Alex Formuzis alex@ewg.org (202) 667-6982 July 14, 2026

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In their second fatal shooting of the wrong person in just days - and as his three-year-old daughter watched - ICE thugs murdered a young Colombian husband and father legally working in Biddeford, ME for simply trying to driving away. After state Dems blasted the killing and advocates insisted "this has gone too far," ICE waited 12 hours to say they fired "fearing for public safety" while "every law enforcement officer in America was scratching their head trying to figure out what that means."

Talk about following the money. Having somehow railroaded through last year's big obscene bill gifting over $170 billion to immigration and border enforcement - and last month inexplicably adding another $75 billion, seven times ICE’s annual budget (thanks Susan), with virtually no public accounting of how they spend it - the regime is now scurrying to spend their blood money by setting random, armed-to-the-teeth, 2,000-arrests-a-day benchmarks of what have become mere numbers of bodies in an ethnic cleansing of immigrants, brown and black people, or anyone standing near them. What could possibly go wrong?

For starters, a record-breaking mortality rate of 11 people fatally shot, over 20 other deaths in custody, over 70,000 mostly harmless people in concentration-camp-like detention, and a "systemic failure" of accountability. A new report by Physicians for Human Rights and Berkeley's Human Rights Center just added more: At least 412 incidents of "misuse" of brutal crowd-control tactics - teargas, pepper spray, "less-lethal kinetic impact projectiles" from rubber bullets to stun grenades - resulting in over 200 "lasting and traumatic injuries" including blindings, brain trauma, fractures often to journalists, elderly people, children.

As Maine goes, so goes the nation. Monday's murder of 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero came after ICE's relatively brief, grotesquely named Operation Catch of the Day last year that saw the arrest of over 500 people, most with no criminal records. Originally from Bucaramanga, Colombia, Guerrero was legally authorized to be here, worked two jobs, had a Social Security card and was going to a delivery job. After some initial confusion/lies, the regime said he was not the intended target of the endlessly inept, homicidal ICE goons; nor were any wearing body cameras that Congress had appropriated $20 million for.

The same lethal incompetence marked last week's murder in Houston TX of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three who'd spent 35 years building homes and raising his U.S. citizen kids, all of whom he helped get through college. He was shot and killed by ICE agents who said he "weaponized" his vehicle; it took about 5 minutes for Araujo's three passengers, who'd witnessed it all and were quickly detained for it, to refute the claim. So did video footage of the deadly encounter. Again, the goons had the wrong guy - and outdated address info - and none were wearing body cameras Congress generously allocated for them.

On Pool Street in Biddeford, a small southern mill city of about 22,000 with a long immigrant history, marauding ICE agents in an SUV rammed the small white Kia Guerrero was driving to work shortly after 7 a.m. Video shows Guerrero, evidently fearful after armed men rammed him, turning his car around and trying to drive away. ICE agents fired what witnesses said were up to seven shots, and at least four smashed through his windshield - though law enforcement guidelines clearly prohibit firing at a moving vehicle unless there is an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm, and call for police to (duh) just move away.

A neighbor said he heard a “pop, pop, pop,” looked out his window and saw the car still slowly moving until the SUV hit it again. After the Kia came to a stop, witnesses said Guerrero, bleeding from his head, was pulled from his car; several heard him say, "I tried to stop." Gruesome video shows ICE thugs handcuffing him on the ground, where his soon-lifeless body lay for five hours. Horrified witnesses said goons "yelled" at his young daughter, still in Bluey pajamas, trying to smell some nearby flowers. "I watched a wife fall to her knees looking at her husband’s dead body," said one. "I watched a little girl with a pink backpack crying because she’s never going to see her father again.”

One upset neighbor said an ICE agent claimed, "He tried to run me over." But here, as elsewhere, ICE has "lost the benefit of the doubt," and the city erupted in grief and rage. By mid-day, hundreds of pissed Mainers had marched, chanting "Whose Streets, Our Streets," to rally in Mechanics Park with signs: "Crush ICE," "Due Process For All," "Immigrants Make Biddeford Great," "Extrajudicial Killings Are A War Crime, and "Is This the America We Want?" Sadie Dilboy said Guerrero often came to her laundromat, giving his daughter quarters to buy vending-machine candy: "He was such a good person. He was always cleaning up.” A worker at Applebee’s, where Guerrero often picked up orders, would always ask if we needed anything: "He was always a good smile to see,” thus clearly "one of those dangerous criminal aliens who have turned America into a living hell."

Later, a crowd of protesters swarmed the local office of Susan Collins with fierce chants of "Vote her out!." One prominent sign, speaking for us all, proclaimed, "Get the Fuck Out." Collins, forever on the wrong and bloody side of history and drunken rapists, was the deciding vote last month to approve the extra, mind-boggling $75 billion in ICE funding, though most Mainers want to see it abolished. Last year, after the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, she voted against both language seeking to curtail further violence and funding for mandatory body cameras, which most thugs are clearly not wearing anyway.

In the wake of yet another senseless murder on America's streets in broad daylight, a presumably very concerned Collins urged "a full and impartial investigation." She did not condemn ICE’s actions, nor did she voice sympathy for the man whose life was just snuffed out. Her staff later cited her vote for a few measures - optional body cameras, more oversight of concentration camps, a paltry $2 million for "de-escalation training" - for better ICE "accountability." As local police blocked her office door, they also noted ICE's "work goes far beyond immigration enforcement to help protect our country" - from brown-skinned delivery drivers, taco makers, contractors, landscapers, nurses, abuelas and kids with cancer. So fuck Susan Collins.

GOP gubernatorial nominee Bobby Charles cravenly echoed her: "Maine deserves the truth about what happened." He also urged there be ”no getting ahead of the facts - let facts, not politics, drive our conclusions," adding, "Federal agents put their lives on the line every day...If an agent's life was threatened, he had every right under the law to protect himself" - presumably from brown delivery drivers, contractors, sick kids et al. So fuck him too. He wants facts? Being here legally and driving to work should not cause death by rogue morons looking for someone else. Guerrero lay in the street for five hours. His government didn't bother to name him for almost a day, but his neighbors did. We hope his daughter gets the therapy she'll need.

The largest, darkest question: "How many more people 'not the target' will die before someone in Washington decides the answer to a wrong-vehicle stop cannot be seven rounds through a windshield?" Tuesday, ICE told their goons to suspend most vehicle stops around the country; they declined to disclose "law enforcement tactics" but said they're "always evaluating our procedures to (keep) criminals off our streets," in which case they should probably remove all their own sociopaths. But they likely won't. The outrage was nationwide - "ICE murdered a 26-year-old in front of his wife & daughter. It’s just pure evil" - and global. Colombian President Gustavo Petro: "He was killed because he was believed to be an inferior being with no rights."

Hopefully, his death will impact the electoral chances of Susan Collins, who funded it. Happily, Maine Dems were unshy about voicing their rage at her abetting ICE violence that’s gone on too long. Gov. Janet Mills: “This has to end.” Senate candidate Dr. Nirav Shah, who urged support for immigrants through the Maine Solidarity Fund, blasted Collins for approving billions more for ICE to "terrorize our communities...She gave them a blank check to kill. Maybe sit this one out.” In an angry video, Rep. Chellie Pingree asked ICE, "Why are you in Maine?" given "every report we hear is somebody picked up who's legally here. It's time to get ICE off our streets."

Troy Jackson, a top Senate contender to replace Graham Platner and the only one polls show beating Collins (though several come close) attended a Portland protest Monday, charging "our immigrant communities are under attack" by a rogue ICE that must be abolished. Advocates also argued, "Our communities are hurting." Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition head Mufalo Chita: "We are furious, and we will not allow this death to be treated as routine or inevitable." Crystal Cron of Presente!, on another family "shattered by state violence": “To say we are heartbroken does not convey the depth of the exhaustion, terror, or grief we are feeling."

Maine authorities have struggled to get information from the feds, unsurprising given they just, finally turned over to Minnesota investigators evidence from the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. It took over 12 hours, till Monday night, for ICE to name their victim and say, in fascist gobbledygook, "an illegal alien" tried to "flee" during "a targeted surveillance" and a goon, "fearing for public safety," "discharged his weapon.” Notably, there was no claim of a driver "weaponizing" his vehicle, leaving national law enforcement "stunned" as to why anyone fired: “If you want to arrest someone, this is a good example of how to do everything wrong."

Murdering brown people in cold blood for no reason is likewise a good example of how to topple democratic governance and the rule of law. “Does the senseless murder of this man make any of our lives better in any way?" asked Kelli Brennan of the Maine State Nurses Association. Critics argue every member of Congress who voted for more money for ICE or DHS has blood on their hands; so do their supporters. During last spring's shutdown, Susan Collins, that act's deciding vote, whined it wasn't "fair" to those thugs to have a "cloud of uncertainty" over whether they'd be paid. “They are keeping us safe,” she mewled. Fuck Susan Collins and the incomparable real-world damage she's done. Vote like your life and many others depend on it, because they do. Fundraiser here.

Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero and his daughterPhoto from Facebook

Checks & Balances Project (C&BP) seeks all emails and other communications in which Sussex County Board of Supervisors Chairman Steve White used his state employee email for county business.

Multiple sources show White uses his state of Virginia email address for his county job, but the agency he works for won’t say where he works or whether he’s on a leave.

Since April, White has served as the acting county administrator for Sussex County, after he engineered the firing of former administrator Richard Douglas during a surprise move in the supervisors’ monthly meeting.

White’s service as acting county administrator is in apparent violation of Virginia law that says elected officials can’t serve in county jobs.

C&BP has filed requests with the FBI, Virginia Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Sussex County sheriff, and the Sussex County commonwealth attorney seeking an investigation into White’s conduct.

Multiple sources say White is routinely at the county administration building, known to locals as the Blue Box, for hours a day. If White is working there, how can he be at his regular job, as a Trades Manager II for the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS)?

The salary for that job, which is classified in salary band 6, ranges between $75,423 and $189,075, Virginia records show.

Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.

You may also want to read:

Checks & Balances Project files FBI complaint about White, SCVRS

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Checks & Balances Project seeks Sussex County’s recusal policy

 

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Our July Common Sense monthly newsletter dives into how injustice is fundamental to the U.S. legal system and was deliberately incorporated since the founding of this nation. This is why revolution and various forms of disruption are not just justified, but essential.

The post “Common Sense” Newsletter – July 2026: Injustice Calls for Revolutionary Disruption appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

Lies about the correct size of a monument, the history of the Antiquities Act, and hunting and fishing access were all used to justify the downsizing On July 13, President Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office, surrounded by Utah’s entire congressional delegation, Governor Spencer Cox, and Deputy Interior Secretary Kate MacGregor. He signed two proclamations slashing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 3 million acres, shrinking both monuments by about 90 percent. Grand Staircase-Escalante went from 1.87 million acres to roughly 182,000, and Bears Ears from 1.36 million acres to 121,000. The president and the officials around him leaned on claims that range from misleading to flatly false. Hunting and fishing

Describing the monuments, Trump said they were set aside “for nobody to use, right? Can’t do anything. You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.” MacGregor replied, “That’s exactly right, sir.”

This is completely wrong, and MacGregor knows it—as do Utah’s leaders. Hunting and fishing are explicitly allowed in both monuments, and are, in fact, managed by the state. In both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, hunting for deer, elk, bighorn sheep, black bear, mountain lion, and turkey is permitted. President Joe Biden’s proclamation restoring Bears Ears celebrated its “unparalleled rock climbing” at Indian Creek and its “hunting, backpacking, canyoneering, whitewater rafting, and mountain biking” destinations. His Grand Staircase-Escalante proclamation likewise highlighted “world-class outdoor recreation opportunities” including hunting, hiking, river running, and horseback riding. Far from being lands nobody can walk on, these are lands people come from around the world to see and use.

Monument size

MacGregor also offered a misleading history lesson. She noted that “the first monument that was created was only 1,200 acres,” implying that Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden invented large landscape monuments, which is not true. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt, who signed the Antiquities Act, protected more than 800,000 acres at the Grand Canyon as a national monument, which eventually became Grand Canyon National Park. A year later, he designated 610,560 acres as Mount Olympus National Monument, now Olympic National Park.

Perhaps most misleading of all, the proclamations dismiss the landscapes themselves as “ordinary” and claim they should be smaller. The Bears Ears text writes off “deep sandstone canyons, broad desert mesas, towering monoliths” and calls the region’s cultural sites, like petroglyphs and pictographs “not unique,” while the Grand Staircase proclamation labels its cultural and paleontological resources as “relatively common.” In fact, Grand Staircase-Escalante makes more than 200 million years of Earth’s history visible through cliffs and plateaus, a landscape so rugged and remote it was among the last places mapped in the contiguous United States. The Kaiparowits Formation, located inside the monument, has become one of the most productive dinosaur laboratories on the planet, yielding more than two dozen species new to science, including horned dinosaurs found nowhere else on Earth. Just last month, scientists from the Natural History Museum of Utah uncovered a rare skeleton of a baby duck-billed dinosaur in Grand Staircase-Escalante. The canyons of Grand Staircase also hold one of southern Utah’s richest concentrations of Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan sites.

Bears Ears National Monument, Moon House site; Source: BLM/Bob Wick

Bears Ears contains one of the densest concentrations of archaeological and cultural heritage in the United States, an estimated 100,000 sites spanning thousands of years of continuous human presence, from Archaic hunters to the cliff dwellings, kivas, granaries, and petroglyph panels of the ancestral Puebloans. To the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute, and Zuni Tribes, the twin buttes and surrounding canyons are not relics but a sacred homeland, which is why the five Tribal nations came together to request landscape-scale protections in the first place. Scientists say these places cannot be understood as scattered sites, but as a single landscape whose trails, sightlines, and stories make the whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Calling that “not unique” ignores the scientific record, as well as Tribal knowledge. And it also runs counter to the 1920 Grand Canyon legal precedent, which held that large landscapes themselves qualify as protectable objects.

Multiple use and mining

The White House fact sheet about the reductions bends the truth further. It promises the unprotected lands “will now be available for multiple-use, sustained-yield management,” as if monument status ended multiple use. It didn’t. Recreation of all kinds continues in both monuments, livestock grazing continues in all of the places it was allowed before the monument, and timber management for restoration and wildfire mitigation continues under existing law. Existing mining and drilling leases are also still valid inside a national monument. The White House also claims that the concept of “objects of historic or scientific interest” established by the Antiquities Act has been “stretched” to include landscapes. Roosevelt protected the Grand Canyon as exactly that kind of landscape object, and the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the designation in 1920.

The proclamations also lean on national security, claiming the Bears Ears region holds resources “vital to energy and resource independence,” including “critical minerals such as silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.” The Grand Staircase text lists fifteen minerals, from chromium to zirconium. The government’s own assessments undercut these claims. As the Deseret News notes, the Bureau of Land Management previously found that both monuments have little to offer in terms of oil and gas potential, and Utah’s Department of Natural Resources has stated there is “very little energy potential within Bears Ears.” The Kaiparowits Plateau’s coal exists but is uneconomic, too remote and infrastructure-poor to attract investors, with no active leases since the federal government bought out the existing ones in the 1990s.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument; Source: Azuki350/Wikimedia

Local support

Back at the White House, Representative Celeste Maloy of Utah claimed that both monuments were created “over the unanimous opposition of Utah’s federal delegation, our governor, county commissioners, the locals.” Some Utah politicians did oppose the designations. But casting them as the voice of “the locals” erases the Tribal nations, local business coalitions, and everyday Utahns who asked for these monuments in the first place. Neither proposal originated in Washington. Both were brought to the White House by people who live close to these lands and were refined through years of consultation with Tribes, communities, and recreation, and grazing permit holders. Today, polling shows 74 percent of Utah voters support keeping Grand Staircase-Escalante protected and 71 percent support keeping Bears Ears protected. Colorado College’s most recent Conservation in the West poll found similarly overwhelming support among Utahns for leaving existing monument designations in place. If anyone is out of step with “the locals,” it is the delegation that stood behind the president as he signed these orders.

Conservation groups and Tribes are already preparing to fight the reductions in court, where the lies and misleading statements uttered in the Oval Office and embedded in the new monument proclamations will not fare well under legal scrutiny. And if the overwhelming online reaction to the reductions is any indication, they won’t age well in the court of public opinion either.

 

Feature image: Trump signs proclamations reducing the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments, Juluy 13, 2026; Source: White House YouTube

The post How President Trump and Utah leaders lied and misled on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

By Jeremy Brecher,
Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

Listen to the audio version >>

While Trump conducts his war against Greentech, many US states are forging ahead with energy expansion based on sun, wind, and water. Greentech’s slashing of the cost of renewable energy production and use has made states turn to it not only to protect the climate but to make energy affordable for their people. 

A photo of Donald Trump in the Oval Office with several of his Executive Orders, January 20, 2025. Photo credit: The White House, public domain.

The US federal system gives states a powerful position in energy policy. States regulate electric generation, local distribution of electricity, and infrastructure siting. They can set policy in myriad other areas from urban planning to public transit to housing that can help shape the utilization of climate-protecting Greentech.

Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order entitled “Protecting American Energy from State Overreach.” The order describes state clean energy policies as “burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.” The order calls on the Attorney General to take action against these state laws, and she began to file lawsuits against them almost immediately. This executive order was followed by many other Trump efforts to hamstring or outlaw state climate policies, ranging from blocking California emission standards to forced reopening of shuttered coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, recent headlines have publicized retrenchment in state climate policies. New York state abandoned its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2030, substituting weaker and squishier targets. California also relaxed requirements for emission reductions – although the change continues to be contested in the state legislature. In both cases energy affordability was given as a reason, although advocates of both changes acknowledged that they would not bring down energy prices any time soon. Both New York and California changes were preceded by heavy fossil fuel industry lobbying.

Such retreats register the reality that Trump’s attacks are restricting the development of the Greentech New Deal. Federal defunding of climate-protecting initiatives has made them more expensive; regulatory changes and subsidies have advantaged fossil fuels; and legal attack has undermined the Greentech revolution. But these retreats should not conceal the advances the Greentech Revolution has made in US states even during the first year-and-a-half of the Trump era.

Today’s Greentech advances in the states typically combine climate protection with affordability. That’s possible because Greentech has made production and use of renewable energy so much cheaper – rendering fossil fuels non-competitive.

California–Two steps forward, one step back?

California’s electricity is increasingly coming from solar. Photo credit: Tom Brewster Photography, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Data Source: US Energy Information Administration

California, now the world’s fourth largest economy, illustrates the collision of the irresistible force of the Greentech Revolution with the immovable object of the Trumpian fossil fuel counter-revolution. In recent years it has faced devastating heatwaves, droughts, storms, wildfires, and other extreme weather conditions resulting from global warming. Not surprisingly, an overwhelming proportion of Californians worry about climate change and back policies to fight it. In 2006 California passed AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, which set targets for greenhouse gas emissions and sets a declining limit on total emissions by the state’s major polluters. Over the next twenty years California substantially raised its targets and implemented many other climate protection policies. From 2001 to 2019, California reduced its carbon emissions by 25%, leaving a typical Californian emitting only half as much as other Americans.

In 2024, California’s natural gas generation fell by 8%; coal is expected to soon be eliminated entirely from its electrical supply. By the end of 2025 the state had 2.5 times more battery storage available than it did in 2022.

As soon as Trump was inaugurated president, he began a massive attack on California’s climate protection efforts. For example, he attacked the state’s first-in-the-nation ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035. The state sued to preserve the ban. In 2025 it extended the cap and trade program, renamed cap and invest, by 15 years. Then Governor Newsom, under heavy lobbying from California’s oil industry, announced a new plan which offers free pollution permits worth as much as $4 billion to oil refineries and other major polluters. Legislative leaders are refusing to accept the plan, however, and have refused to fund many of Newsom’s other programs until he abandons his plan. Contested negotiations are expected to continue until the legislative session ends in September. The result is hanging in the balance.

Other states go Greentech

The California climate drama should not obscure what is happening in other states.

Soon after Trump’s inauguration, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey issued an executive order that directs the state to procure 10 GW of clean energy and 5 GW of battery storage by 2035. The governor’s office projects up to $10 billion in savings for residents and businesses. Massachusetts also announced $180 million in immediate utility rate reductions. This cut residential electricity bills by up to 25 percent for two months.

Maryland’s Utility RELIEF (Reducing Energy Load Inflation for Everyday Families) Act provides $200 million from the state’s Strategic Energy Investment Fund to accelerate local clean energy development and storage and provides targeted utility bill relief. An Affordable Solar Act which would add up to 4 GW of new solar capacity by 2035, promote plug-in solar, and improve grid access, is pending in the legislature.

Upon her inauguration, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill declared a state of emergency on utility costs. An executive order directed the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to pursue rate relief by pausing new hikes and delivering residential bill credits. Another ordered rapid expansion of solar and battery storage and streamlining of the permitting process. In March, the BPU approved the expansion of the state’s community solar program, adding 3 GW of new capacity, with low-income households guaranteed a discount of at least 25 percent on their bills. According to American Progress, this expansion was the largest of a state-run program in the country’s history, and the program has already delivered more than $70 million in bill credits to households across the state. The governor also signed a measure that increases transmission-scale storage across the state, helping store low-cost clean energy and deploy it during peak demand to reduce price spikes and improve reliability.

In Pennsylvania, the PA EDGE (Pennsylvania Economic Development for a Growing Economy) creates tax credit programs for billions of dollars in energy and advanced manufacturing investment, including clean energy technologies. In June 2026 the Pennsylvania House put a cap on profits from utility company investments in infrastructure and eliminated nearly $1.7 billion in taxes that electricity companies now pass along to consumers as part of their bills.

In Virginia, a clean energy package includes streamlining solar siting, expanding storage connections to the grid, limiting carbon-emitting backup generators at data centers, and expanding virtual power plant programs that let utilities draw on distributed clean energy sources such as rooftop solar and home batteries.

The obstacles fall

One of the main objections to renewable energy has always been that it becomes unavailable when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. This objection has been largely overcome by Greentech’s radical reduction in the cost of energy storage. As a result, the most recent wave of state programs has put battery storage front and center.

Illinois’s Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act instructs the state to procure three gigawatts of new battery storage by 2030 to help stabilize electricity prices. It also includes a “storage for all” program that provides incentives for income-qualified households and businesses to install battery systems co-located with solar projects. The Illinois Power Agency expects the act to save customers $13.4 billion over two decades.

Pennsylvania is investing $22 million to help battery manufacturer Eos Energy Enterprises expand battery manufacturing operations in the Pittsburgh area. The expansion is expected to create 735 new jobs in Allegheny County. Last year the workers at Eos Energy voted to join the United Steelworkers Union. Eos also announced a plan to develop energy storage projects across Pennsylvania.

Another obstacle facing renewable energy is that the location where it is needed is not necessarily the location where it is produced. So state policies are addressing the extreme inadequacies of the electrical grid. For example, the state of Washington has established the Washington Electric Transmission Authority, a new state entity empowered to plan, site, and finance transmission infrastructure. New Mexico and Colorado have established similar authorities.

New technology doesn’t always mean greater complexity. Witness the emergence of small solar systems that hang on a balcony and plug right into a wall socket. More than a million homes in Germany now have such “balcony power plants,” but they are forbidden in the US. Last year the Utah legislature voted unanimously to let residents use plug-in collectors. 23 other state legislatures are now considering similar bills. According to the New York Times, such legislation would “eliminate one of the technology’s biggest barriers in the United States”: homeowners or renters could install plug-in systems “without approval from their local utility.”

A common complaint against large-scale solar projects is that they use up land that would otherwise be available for agriculture. However, solar projects are now actually supporting agriculture by the new techniques known as agrivoltaics. State policies are now promoting agrivoltaics. Last year, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities launched a new dual-use pilot project to organize and accelerate agrivoltaics development in the state. The three-year pilot program calls for up to 200 megawatts of solar power, with Rutgers University applying its agrivoltaics research to develop best practices and guidelines. Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia also have agrivoltaics programs under way.

Renewable energy projects can also contribute to improved land use by utilizing currently degraded spaces like landfills and contaminated industrial sites. An example is New Jersey’s Brownfields Redevelopment Incentive Program, accompanied by a Landfill to Solar online guide for local governments and solar developers, created by the Governor’s Office of Climate Action and the Green Economy. An already completed example is the Toms River project, the largest solar power plant in New Jersey and also the largest solar array on a Superfund site anywhere in the US.

Beyond the blue

Wolf Ridge Wind Farm in Muenster, Texas. Photo credit: Ben (Out with the Old, In with the New), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The expansion of Greentech in the Trump era has by no means been limited to blue states. Some of the most extensive installations of Greentech are in red states – witness Texas. Utility-scale solar plants produced 45 terawatts from January through September, 2025, up 50% from 2024 and nearly four times what they generated in 2021. Wind power also continued to climb, producing 87 terawatts through September – a 4% increase from 2024 and 36% more than in 2021. Together, wind and solar supplied more than a third of Texas’ electricity in the first 9 months of 2025. Battery use is also growing. Three of the four largest US battery storage projects scheduled to open in 2026 are in Texas. Solar collection and battery storage are now being systematically combined: one dual project is adding 837 megawatts of solar power and 418 megawatts in battery energy storage capacity.

In Nevada, generally regarded as a “purple” state, a third of all energy demand is now met by solar panels. The state has the highest solar electricity generation per capita in the country, as well as the most solar-industry jobs per capita. The goal of producing half of its electricity from renewables by 2030 is enshrined in the state’s constitution. The Las Vegas region has the highest concentration of residential rooftop solar in the continental US. The city’s chief sustainability officer attributes this in part to the city’s easy permitting. “You’re pretty much in and out of our office with a permit in 30 minutes.”

In the absence of federal support, states are reaching out to each other to create regional alliances to implement Greentech. For example, thirteen states have formed the Geothermal Power Accelerator collaboration to rapidly expand geothermal power development. Another example: The California State Legislature passed Assembly Bill 825 to begin the process of establishing a regional electricity partnership across the West. In late June, the state of Washington joined the partnership along with California and Quebec. And, after briefly withdrawing, Virginia rejoined the 11-member northeastern Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

In some states like Texas, the Greentech boom is occurring without much attempt to reap its potential social benefits. But in many states, as we will see in a subsequent commentary in this series, the Greentech revolution is enabling a broader program for jobs and justice that embodies the principles of the Green New Deal. That in turn is laying the basis for a national Greentech New Deal to come.

Looming over recent climate politics has been the issue of energy affordability. Because Greentech has made the production and use of renewable energy so much less costly than fossil fuel energy, states have accelerated their introduction of it. But the energy cost squeeze on consumers has in some cases also led states to shortsightedly reduce investment in Greentech and unleash fossil fuels.

These dynamics are now being exacerbated by the escalation in fossil fuel prices and the threat of energy insecurity that have accompanied the Iran war. The relative expense and unreliability of fossil fuel energy is likely to accelerate Greentech in the states. States that don’t want to render their economies “stranded assets” should go all out for the Greentech revolution right now.

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The post Greentech Revolution in the States first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

On a quiet stretch of land along Stinking Creek, deep in Knox County, Kentucky, the Lend‑A‑Hand Center began with two women who devoted their lives to serving community members in need. Irma Gall, a teacher and farmer, and Peggy Kemner, a nurse‑midwife, came to Knox County in 1958 to serve the community. 

In those early days, Peggy would walk or ride miles to care for a mother in labor, and Irma would build roads, bridges and tend to the farm’s livestock and produce. They would share food at their house and provide Sunday school, 4H, and Day Camp programs for children in the area. Any need someone had, from home repair to help getting back on their feet after a hardship, they would lend a hand. 

Over time, the Lend‑A‑Hand Center grew into a place the community could depend on in times of need for healthcare, food or simply connection. Today, the clinic and the food pantry continue to be critical lifelines on Stinking Creek.  

Now co-directed by Charles and Diann Carnes, the organization primarily relies on volunteers to maintain the center and its services. Volunteers sort donations and operate a twice a month pantry that serves 300 people. 

Like many small nonprofits, it has had to learn how to stretch every dollar. Keeping the lights on, the refrigerators running, and the pantry stocked takes resources. Their utility bill is their biggest overhead, costing them around $500 per month. At the same time, they desperately needed storage. 

Charles and Kathryn of Lend-A-Hand with Josh Bills of Mountain Association and a team from Appalachia-Science in the Public Interest in June 2026

“We were having to turn away donations – things that people around here can really use, like new doors and windows, you name it,” said Charles. 

With support from the Mountain Association, KY Office of Energy Policy, The Nature Conservancy, the Solar Finance Fund and Invest Appalachia, the Center is taking steps to reduce its energy costs by installing solar panels and batteries on a newly constructed building. Volunteers broke ground on the building in April 2026 and are continuing to work through the summer. The wood comes from the 500 acres the center owns with Charles processing each board at their on-site sawmill. 

“This is a generational investment,” said Kathryn Engle, Lend-A-Hand board member. “With this, our overhead will greatly decrease and we’ll be able to invest even more into the community and into our programs.” 

The batteries will serve as a backup source of power for the food pantry during outages, helping ensure refrigerated food stays safe and services can continue when the community needs them most. 

The Mountain Association’s Energy Team has assisted in system design, siting and connections to partner resources like funding from the Nature Conservancy and the KY Office of Energy Policy.

“This project shows how energy savings can be a powerful tool for strengthening communities,” said Josh Bills, Senior Energy Analyst at the Mountain Association. “The solar and battery system will provide reliable power, greater energy security and lower operating costs, allowing them to focus on serving families through whatever challenges they are facing.” 

As volunteers work through the summer to complete the new building, the investment represents another chapter in a story that began 68 years ago, ensuring that the work of lending a hand continues, one meal, one family and one act of care at a time.

The post Lend-A-Hand Grows Knox County Food Pantry with Solar Savings  appeared first on Mountain Association.

The CFS Advisory Group and Bureau meeting will meet to continue the preparation of the upcoming CFS 54 Plenary Session, including an update on the CFS 54 Side Events, as well as a discussion regarding the Building Resilient Food Systems Workstream which did not conclude after the two past round of negotiations.

• Bureau outcomes – May 2026
• Provisional Agenda

Brackground documents

1. CFS 54 – ITEM II -Strengthening coordination and collaborative actions – Draft Conclusions 
2. Building Resilient Food Systems
3. CFS 54 – ITEM IV – Strengthening the Impact of CFS policy products – Draft Conclusions 
4. CFS 54 – ITEM V – CFS Strategic Direction 
   a) Update of the Rolling Section of the CFS MYPoW 2024-2027 
   b) Draft Decision on the Update of the Rolling Section 
   c) Identification of prioritized themes for HLPE-FSN Report 2028 
   d) Draft Decision on the Theme of the HLPE Report 2028 
   e) Draft Conclusions on Critical, Emerging and Enduring Issues 
   f) Draft Conclusions on Strategic orientation in the context of the UN 80 Initiative 
5. CFS 54 – ITEM VI – Indigenous Peoples’ Food and Knowledge Systems – Draft Conclusions 
6.  CFS 54 – ITEM VII – Global Thematic Event on Empowering Family Farmers 
   a) Draft Conclusions 
   b) Monitoring Report – Secretariat’s analysis of the contributions received to inform the Global Thematic Event 
7. CFS 54 Guide 
8. Update on CFS 54 Side Events 
9. Main takeaways from the CFS Bureau and Advisory Group retreat 
10. Workstream updates 
11. Any other business
    
    
    

The post CFS Advisory Group and Bureau meeting | July 27 2026 appeared first on CSIPM.

The UN body that regulates mining in international waters has defended its authority over ocean governance after two subsidiaries of deep-sea mining firm The Metals Company (TMC) launched legal action to halt an investigation into their conduct.

Speaking at the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) annual meeting in Kingston on Monday, secretary-general Leticia Carvalho said the regulator’s role “matters more than ever” as governments grapple with growing pressure to exploit the deep seabed for minerals needed for the energy transition.

“The deep seabed belongs to no single country and no corporation; it belongs to all of us,” Carvalho said, describing its resources as “the common heritage of humankind”.

“If we lose sight of this,” she added, “we risk repeating on the ocean floor the same injustices and destruction we still strive to remedy on land.”

The conflict stems from TMC’s attempt to bypass the UN process by applying for US-sponsored ocean mining permits offered last year by the Trump administration. The Canadian firm aims to become the first company to mine the seabed for minerals like nickel, rare earths and manganese used in the production of both clean energy technologies and military equipment.

Several governments, including China, condemned the move as a “violation of international law”. In response, ISA member states agreed to open an inquiry into its licence-holders – among them two of TMC’s subsidiaries – to make sure they have complied with international law. If they are ultimately found to have breached those obligations, their exploration contracts could be revoked.

In June, the two TMC subsidiaries – Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd (TOML) and Nauru Ocean Resources Inc (NORI) – filed claims against the ISA at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), asking the court to suspend the inquiry while the case proceeds. The companies argue they are being targeted “without lawful procedural basis”, “in breach of due process”, and without “good faith”.

Environmental groups have accused The Metals Company of using legal tactics to block the investigation into its subsidiaries.

“We find ourselves in this Orwellian situation where these companies are trying to effectively get an injunction against the ISA from continuing its inquiry,” said Louisa Casson, who leads Greenpeace’s global campaign against deep-sea mining.

“The stakes are so high and that’s why we’re seeing this pretty extraordinary move to try to get an injunction against the ISA,” she added.

• Apr 25, 2025 News Trump throws lifeline to Canadian deep-sea miner, setting scene for international clash US president’s executive order looks like a victory for Vancouver-based The Metals Company (TMC) and other industry advocates, but fierce environmental and international opposition still stands in the way of ocean floor mining Read more
• Feb 3, 2026 Business UK government faces legal challenge over deep sea mining permits to “opaque” firm Greenpeace says UK may have acted unlawfully by transferring deep-sea mining licences to firm with US ties Read more
• Jul 10, 2026 News Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources The new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage faces an overwhelming number of initial requests for its limited pot of money and board members decided to take more time to choose which to back first Read more

Mining the deep ocean floor

The ISA has been negotiating a mining code for the deep ocean floor for over 12 years without success. Nearly 40 governments, including the UK, France and Germany, have called for a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining until there is sufficient scientific evidence that it can proceed without causing serious harm to marine ecosystems.

Rather than wait for the UN process, industry frontrunner, The Metals Company, decided to apply for US permits offered by the Trump administration last year. In May, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) certified TMC’s application to explore 120,000 square kilometers of sea floor.

The firm wants to mine an area in the Pacific known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which holds critical minerals inside potato-sized rocks found in the deep ocean floor known as polymetallic nodules. The minerals like manganese, nickel and rare earths are used in clean energy technologies like batteries and wind turbines.

But the area is also a little-understood ecosystem inhabited by thousands of unnamed species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest environmental network, says mining this area would threaten the existence of over half of all molluscs reliant on deep-sea vents.

A field of manganese nodules in the ocean floor. (Photo: photo by NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research) Governments launch inquiry

Seeking to discourage companies from bypassing the UN process, the ISA’s member states unanimously agreed to open an inquiry into whether holders of its exploration licences complied with their contractual obligations under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

“The stage we’re at now is countries grappling with what they can do about this. What tools do they have to constrain this pathway that would go against international law,” Casson said.

Both NORI and TOML continue to hold ISA exploration contracts in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. NORI’s license, however, expires later this month on July 21st and is up for review.

The inquiry is currently ongoing, but Casson said that if governments decide to cancel NORI’s license, other firms could apply for the ISA permit and compete for mining rights in the area.

“If that happens, it could really put into jeopardy TMC USA’s application (for US permits) because then suddenly that area could be open for a competing claim,” she explained. “At the moment, TMC is trying to kind of play both sides and shore up the area so that there will be no competition.”

Deep-sea mining firms push back

The cases before ITLOS are the first contentious disputes over deep-sea mining to reach the court designed for maritime disputes and the first brought directly by private contractors against the ISA. Among the companies’ legal advisers is former ISA secretary-general Michael Lodge.

Both NORI and TOML claimed that, unless the inquiry is suspended, there is a “real
and imminent risk of prejudice” that “may have significant legal and practical consequences” for
their activities.

The claim was backed by the Pacific island nation of Nauru, which has sponsored TMC’s push to mine the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and would benefit from the economic activity. The country raised “concerns on the adherence of due process with respect to the treatment of NORI”.

The mining companies allege that the ISA has singled them out among other applicants by requesting additional documentation, and that the UN auditors did not give them an opportunity to “meaningfully respond” to their concerns.

The ISA rejected those allegations as “wholly unsupported assertions”. It added that, given TMC’s application for US mining permits, it had done “what any reasonable regulator would do”: with the unanimous support of member states, it opened an inquiry simply to establish the facts.

A view of the International Seabed Authority council meeting in Kinston, Jamaica. (Photo: Andrés Felipe Carvajal Gómez/ ENB) Delay tactics

A decision from the maritime court is now expected by July 18, which has added to a “climate of significant regulatory uncertainty”, according to global law firm HSF Kramer.

As ISA countries meet in Kingston this week, the court’s president asked them “not to act in any way that could hinder any order” the court may make.

At the hearing representing the ISA, renowned human rights lawyer Philippe Sands said the deep-sea mining firms were engaging in “strategic litigation” meant to delay the inquiry and send the ISA into a years-long legal process.

“It’s a delaying tactic, and nothing would make them happier than for you to kick this into the long grass for two years while you sort out the merits. That is what they want this Tribunal, the Chamber, to do. You are being instrumentalized in this process,” Sands told the judges.

The post UN seabed regulator defends authority as mining firms seek to halt inquiry appeared first on Climate Home News.

Checks & Balances Project (C&BP) filed a complaint with the FBI’s Richmond field office seeking an investigation into Sussex County Board of Supervisors Chairman Steve White and the Stony Creek Volunteer Rescue Squad (SCVRS).

The complaint cites 10 issues of concerns about White’s apparent corruption in office, including his conflicts of interest in voting to send taxpayer money to SCVRS, which he runs, and potential Medicare and Medicaid billing fraud tied to SCVRS.

C&BP has reported that White is serving as acting county administrator in apparent violation of Virginia law after he engineered the firing of County Administrator Richard Douglas in April.

C&BP also obtained a memorandum of understanding between the county and SCVRS that pays the rescue squad $422,250 a year for emergency medical services. That’s more than twice the amount of money SCVRS made in 2019, when it filed its most recent tax returns with the IRS.

The IRS stripped SCVRS of its nonprofit status in 2023 because it failed to file tax returns for three straight years. It regained its status in January 2025 but continued to solicit donations during the 18 months it had no nonprofit status.

Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.

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The post Checks & Balances Project files FBI complaint about White, SCVRS appeared first on Checks and Balances Project.

This article Movements cannot shy away from conflict was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This is an excerpt from “For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness,” originally published at Convergence.

The truth is, most of the groups and organizations that make up our movements do not have a strategy for winning. They might think they have a strategy. They might tell themselves they have one. They certainly tell their funders or dues-paying members they do, and on their websites there is plenty of stuff written under the header “Our Strategies.” They have mission statements, vision statements or other grandiose paragraphs in flowing prose that say what they think they’re doing. They have lists of programs — the things they do, hope to do or once did.

But they have not, for the most part, spent real time and energy getting a grasp on the challenge their organization exists in order to solve. They are not usually clear on their purpose, beyond the visionary sense and in the narrower, more practical sense — the specific part of all this grave need around us for which they are going to actually take responsibility; the specific point of intervention they are going to make and how that specifically is going to add value to our greater project of liberation. They are rarely clear on the role they play in the broader ecosystem, nor are they willing to adjust it because of what else is going on around them. They don’t often, if we’re honest, have a coherent plan for how to get from here to there despite the real constraints they will face from the world around them and the opponents who continue to forward their own interests. They do not usually know what they want to win in practical terms, nor how they will measure their successes or failures. In fact, they do not often genuinely measure these successes or failures at all, beyond what ends up in self-congratulatory social media posts, glossy end-of-year reports, inflated fundraising documents and glowing emails to the base inviting them to the next thing. They do not, almost ever, know how to make the strategic decision to shut down programs that are failing or sunset their organization to make way for something else. They are aided and abetted in all this by leaders who are conflict avoidant, by members who are more concerned with their belonging than on good strategy, by consultants and facilitators who have made a living helping groups stay on the surface and maintain their business as usual, and by funders who expect this kind of behavior and decide on their survival based on it. And they push one another to do this too, by competing over media attention and limited funding, and bullshitting each other at conferences and coalition meetings.

I know, because I have been in movements for over two decades, played a leadership role at Occupy Wall Street, built organizations and supported some of the cutting edge movement groups of our time. I know, because I have led movements like this, run organizations like this, have been a facilitator like this, have been a fundraiser like this, have been a bullshitter like this myself. Mostly, I have done this out of fear of conflict. I thought I was being good, being noble: avoiding conflict to shield people from pain, to keep resources and activity flowing, to keep my people happy and connected, to keep the train moving. But none of this led to the work we were doing becoming greater than the sum of its parts, or prevented the pain of loss in the long-run anyway. And years later, I can see that I avoided conflict for selfish reasons, too: to shield myself from having to actually justify the thoughts and feelings driving me, to protect my ego, to protect my place in the group (and my income), to maintain an image of confidence and success and security that masked my fear of failure. I avoided conflict to protect my team from loss, but, honestly, to protect myself from loss too.

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Conflict avoidance is widespread in our movements and the organizations that drive them. We avoid conflict by diffusing tension with humor, discouraging anger, expressing negativity with passive aggression and gossip instead of discussing things directly. We sweep conflict under the rug, find surface-level tensions on which to spend our energy or project grievances onto some external actor (like, for example, a facilitator). We replace deep planning with an untenable pace of doing, or with producing documents everyone can agree on but that ultimately don’t change much. We use tools like stack, where people are called on in the order they raised their hands, or progressive stack, where the order is arranged based on the facilitator’s sense of people’s identities. And these tools, although reasonable, often lead to circular, abstract conversations where people are not responding to one another directly but rather saying whatever they wanted to say when they raised their hands 15 minutes earlier. When we see tension come up in a conversation, we move on to the next person on the stack, and the opportunity for engagement flutters off into the ether instead of landing at someone’s feet. We encourage compromise toward a middle ground to avoid polarization, and though compromise is good in many contexts, it can also be the avoidance of choice — a way to mediate conflicting interests and desires rather than pushing to get somewhere deeper, sharper, clearer. We let folks stay on the surface, and accept indirect statements, behaviors that don’t line up with stated intentions and ideas that would fold under cross-examination. We hire facilitators who do all this for us too: steer us away from the bumps, protect the agenda at all costs, smooth things over to support the group feeling connected and help us get to the end instead of to the bottom.

But I have also seen good strategy, been led by people committed to doing the hard work of making it, and even — I am lucky to be able to say — tasted its fruits. It almost always rests on a real orientation to power — wanting it, being willing to sacrifice for it, and it almost always begins with the willingness to tell the truth, even when it is difficult.

On the precipice of good strategy

This retreat center has weird chairs. They are folding chairs without legs, so the bottoms lie flat on the carpeted floor, and the backs sort of crank backward into an L shape, but it’s easy to flop over or sink into them, especially late in the day. I often have to get the participants out of their seats to keep them from drifting.

It’s the fall of 2021 and I’m with Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, or CAAAV, a long-time New York City community organization that’s been remaking itself for the past few years, organizing Asian tenants to break the relationship between the real estate sector and the government so that their base — mostly Chinese and Bengali tenants — can afford to stay in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in this city. Right now they have an active campaign in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and are building a new base of Chinese, Bengali and Korean tenants in Queensbridge Houses, a public housing complex in Long Island City, Queens. We’ve spent some months now reading Richard Rumelt’s strategy book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy,” designing what he calls a strategy kernel, and putting it through the wringer. They have gone toward conflict many times already — something we have learned together is critical to good strategy — and they are getting sharper and deeper, but something still isn’t quite landing.

We abandon the weird chairs, and move to stand in a half-circle around the big whiteboard where they’ve scribbled and diagrammed for the better part of a week. As we stare quietly, I am struck, not for the first time, by the scale of the task before them. I wonder how on earth they will beat this much more powerful opponent, how they will turn their small advantages against the opponent’s weaknesses. So I ask, What’s actually going well? Where are you growing? Where are you strong?

Emily, one of the veterans, says: Chinatown. They struggle there too, of course; they constantly feel under capacity, without enough time, without enough money. But they punch above their weight, are in the middle of a campaign that they really have a shot at winning, and are building a solid base. The others agree. They have been in the community for ages; this is the part of the work that CAAAV has always been known for.

I continue: Ok, so then why not take the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge and put them there? Why not throw down where you have something going already, and really throw your full weight behind the campaign you’re in?

This question is not altogether innocent. I have a sneaking suspicion that no one has made this suggestion because if they moved all the Chinese organizers out of Queensbridge, it will more or less crush that operation, require them to let go of it. Someone says something to this effect. Most of the others nod, and seem to move on, accepting the boundary and continuing to gaze at the whiteboard, as if staring at it hard enough will reveal something hidden.

New York City tenants with organizations including Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence rallied outside of a Rent Guidelines Board hearing to demand a rent freeze. (Instagram/CAAAV)

But then Em, a young Chinese organizer who has been doing that work in Queens, interrupts the quiet pondering: Well, what if we just . . . didn’t do the organizing in Queensbridge anymore?

We all take our eyes off the whiteboard and look at Em. It is significant that this question comes from Em, someone who is doing the work and demonstrating commitment and care for the leaders being developed there. It feels like people are taking this option seriously for the first time, but I know the group might still back away here. They are thinking now about the leaders who they have organized there — poor and working-class Asian tenants who are sacrificing so much to help build something there. They are thinking, too, about the Korean and Bengali staff who have been recently hired to do this work, talented and energetic people who have been trained and invested in, who won’t have a place in Chinatown. They are thinking, probably, about the conflict that going down this road might force them to have in this room, worried about its costs. Maybe they’re thinking also about CAAAV’s reputation, or funders, or partners. They are thinking, in short, about loss — this strange, dark shadow that often keeps us doing things that aren’t quite right because doing them is better than the risk of something new.

Conflict for the sake of good strategy

There are lots of reasons for the lack of good strategy we often see across movement organizations, but conflict avoidance is one of them. Facing that isn’t the only thing we need to do to correct course, but it is a prerequisite, because groups need the capacity to be in healthy conflict in order to develop good strategy and the ability to carry it out.

Sometimes the conflict we are avoiding is between one another on our teams, or between us and other organizations, or with our funders, or our members. But perhaps unexpectedly, often enough, the conflict is inside us — between the parts of us that want to be big and powerful and effective, and the part of us that is ambivalent about power, the part of us that is afraid of the loss that comes with all real choice. Many of us are truly not in the habit of telling the truth when it is hard; we prefer, instead, to stay on the surface, to keep doing what is comfortable and within reach, to keep one another happy, to avoid the hard choice that might put us in conflict with one another or force us to give up things we care about, to protect the little islands we have made for ourselves despite the tidal waves heading straight for us. Conflict avoidance most often looks, in the end, like dishonesty.

But groups that don’t tell the truth cannot form a winning strategy, and they are unlikely to be healthy and strong enough to actualize it even if they did. So much of good strategy — and strong movements more broadly — is about making choices, to prioritize one thing over another, to let go of some things all together, to say many nos for the sake of a strong yes. Good strategy is about painstakingly clawing our way toward the truth: what is real about the opponent, about us, about the world, about our role, about the best way to move from here to there, about what we will need to change, even if it’s painful, in order to get there. Groups that lie to themselves about these things make strategies divorced from reality. Groups that lie to themselves and each other about these things can’t make real hard choices. And groups that lie to themselves about the tensions that exist in their strategy or their group dynamics also lie to themselves about everything else — about what is realistic for them to accomplish, about their competence and levels of accountability, even about their deadlines and when they’ll start their meetings. 

It is understandable that we sometimes avoid the conflicts that might lead to good strategy, because conflict can be difficult and dangerous. Many of us, especially those most often on the receiving end of the systemic abuses of this empire, have faced devastating conflict in our work, in our social lives, even in our movements. We’ve seen conflict break things we care about. Not all conflict, after all, is healthy, and even healthy conflict can be painful. And we have so few models for generative conflict, and often find ourselves unequipped, unpracticed and unsupported to carry it out.

The truth is, if we move toward conflict, we will encounter loss. We’ll discover disagreements where we thought we were aligned, weaknesses where we projected only strength, messiness where there was previously order. Sometimes we will work it out, but sometimes we won’t. In our organizations, moving toward conflict will sometimes mean changing course, letting partners down, disappointing funders or members. Sometimes it will mean parting ways with our teammates, hurting or being hurt, firing or being fired. Sometimes it will mean the group dissolving, leaving before the job is done, finding ourselves without a vehicle through which to do anything about the things we continue to want to change. Sometimes it will feel like failure. I cannot even count the number of times — as a facilitator and as a leader — that I avoided the conflict beneath the surface to escape this pain, to protect the people around me from it, to protect myself. It wasn’t just out of fear and comfort; it was also out of love. I loved the people around me and thought that what was best for them was to stay together, thought that conflict would wreck that.

But failure is a tricky thing. Often when we imagine it, we see groups imploding from infighting, mass firings or quitting, the organization disappearing. This happens sometimes, and it is painful when it does, to be sure. But more often, failure doesn’t look like collapse at all: It looks like organizations continuing forever and ever in mediocrity. It looks like achieving far less of our potential because we aren’t willing to confront each other and get to the bottom of things to become a stronger team with a sharper strategy. It looks like a movement incapable of meeting the moment. Conflict avoidance makes this kind of failure much more likely than open conflict would.

People are, in the end, much more capable of facing the truth than we sometimes imagine; we do it all the time. All we need are small supports, encouragements, structures and processes to do it well. In fact, avoiding it takes an enormous toll, requires immense effort, relies on endless tricks. If we want to build powerful groups, powerful organizations, powerful movements, we will have to cultivate truth telling as a skill, a reflex, a superpower. 

From Chinatown to Zohran

There is a brief silence that covers the room with the weird chairs, as the organizers from CAAAV consider what Em has said. And then Sasha, the executive director, steps into the gap, walks through the door: No, really. This is an actual option. Let’s play it out.

It is rare to have leaders who are willing to say no to something important for the possibility of a sharper, clearer, more powerful yes; rare, I think, to find groups that are really, truly committed to sacrificing things they care about for the sake of winning. But when I am in their company, I can feel it like a kind of electricity, and it is humbling.

The group begins to loosen, and as they start to talk about what could shift, their eyes light up. Emily and Julie talk about what they could accomplish if Alina and Em joined them in Chinatown; it could mean the difference between winning and losing their campaign to prevent four luxury towers from going up and displacing many of their residents. Em breathes a sigh of relief at the possibility of having a real team, rather than working alone to organize Mandarin-speaking Chinese tenants in Queensbridge while Oni works alone with the Bengalis and Kit alone with the Koreans. They admit that they don’t have much of a chance of winning there.

CAAAV tenants union members celebrate NYC Mayor Mamdani’s two-year rent freeze for stabilized apartments in June 2026 in Queens, New York. (Instagram/CAAAV)

They’ve knocked on every Asian door in Queensbridge, and even if CAAAV was successful in organizing all of them, it would make up only a tiny minority of the population there. Sandra reminds the group of the logistical cost of shifting their operation in such a big way again, offers some thoughts about how to do it. Alina says, voice catching, that she has always dreamed of organizing in Chinatown, where her grandma lives in a small apartment that she spent visiting as a kid and living in with her as a young adult. Every time I visit, she says, a tear escaping despite her best effort, I can see that my grandma is trying to hide some new pain over something lost and gone — a favorite restaurant closed, a service she needed suddenly shut down, an old friend pushed out of the neighborhood. Farihah and Oni start to wonder about Sunnyside, Woodside and Astoria, these neighborhoods in Queens that Bengali immigrants are making home — a huge new base of people to organize. When Farihah, whose ambition and determination are both inspiring and intimidating, shares that Astoria is where her own family landed all those years ago, the fire usually in her eyes is replaced by something softer and more vulnerable, something seemingly aware of the challenge and the need and the stakes. They all go on talking and scheming, and there is some laughter, some arguing, some more scribbling on the whiteboard. And then there is thoughtful quiet again.

Someone asks: But, what about the leaders in Queensbridge? The doubt creeps back into the new quiet, a doubt brought on by real costs — the real impact on real people’s real lives. They say the names of some of these leaders they have supported and trained and sometimes coaxed into the fight, these poor and working-class immigrants who have so much to lose, so few resources, such a hard road ahead. They talk about the time they’ve spent, about the work being unfinished. They talk about heartbreak.

And then Kit, clear and determined, says: We have to do it anyway. We aren’t going to win if we don’t get more strategic. We owe it to our people to build as much power as we can. This is the first time Kit has spoken, and there is a silence bigger than the others after she does, because everyone knows that what Kit is suggesting could very well cost her her job. Kit is Korean, was brought on to organize Korean-speaking tenants in Queensbridge, and one of the most likely scenarios of the pivot the group is moving toward will mean not only throwing down harder than before in Chinatown, but building a new base of Bengali tenants somewhere in Queens, likely Astoria. There may not be a role for her anymore.

I ask Kit how it feels to say this out loud and she replies: Honestly, I feel relieved. I know it’s going to hurt some of our folks. I know I might not have a job anymore. But winning is more important. And now it feels clear, even if it’s a little scary.

The silence now seems proud — reverent, almost. They look at one another with kind eyes, and it feels like a decision. Sasha comes in again to offer structure and process. They lay out the beginning of a plan to gradually phase out of Queensbridge in a way that helps the members there understand the choice, get themselves organized another way and continue on with CAAAV if they want to. They start to design a process to gather data about different neighborhoods in Queens where they might organize this growing Bengali community and make a plan to test the organizing on the ground. They talk about the campaign in Chinatown, which has always felt like a losing battle, but which they now suddenly feel they might actually be able to win. They set next steps to write out the new strategy kernel.

They can’t yet know, at this moment, that these shifts will result in them stopping the towers from going up in Chinatown, but also lead to the embodied conclusion that if they want more than partial victories in these never-ending defensive battles — want to win a city their people can afford to live in — they will need the power of city hall behind them; they can’t yet know that this will lead to their sibling organization, CAAAV Voice, having some of the first conversations, hushed and tentative at first, about throwing down for a longshot democratic socialist mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani; they can’t yet know that they will organize a formidable Bengali base to win a massive affordable housing campaign in Astoria against a private developer; they can’t yet know that pouring immense volumes of sweat and tears there will result — alongside the hard work of other immigrant-led organizations like Desis Rising Up & Moving, or DRUM, Beats, and the steady organizing of the Democratic Socialists of America, and others — in the creation of a new power base that will end up being essential to that longshot candidate actually becoming mayor. They can’t yet know that, some short months after this mayoral victory — because of a million small decisions made by a whole host of actors that add up to greater than the sum of their parts — the city will pass a historic rent freeze, something they have only barely dreamed of at this point. They can’t see the future, and neither can I.

But there is enough here: enough clarity about their leverage and their options, enough willingness to take risks and experience loss and enter into conflict for the sake of good strategy; there is enough courage, enough honesty, enough choice, enough possibility.

Telling the truth

Not having good strategy sends resources, attention and activity in different — even contradictory — directions. It’s a waste of what precious few tools we have; it usually means we lose. And the losing that comes with bad strategy shapes us over time, gets swallowed up in the form of despair, calcifies into ideas and behaviors that make up the politics of powerlessness — an ambivalence toward power, where we turn inward on each other rather than face outward to the public and our opponent. 

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In the end, breaking the conflict avoidance that blocks good strategy is really about telling the truth whenever we can. And if we want to be different, we’ll have to practice. We can all begin by doing the small but vital things that are in our control: say what we mean, steer toward tensions instead of away from them, ask follow-up questions when we sense there is something being left unsaid, get curious about what is inside us and inside others, be honest about misalignments when they arise. Every day, little by little, we can just be a little more honest, even when it is hard — about our groups, ourselves, each other, our fears and doubts, our hopes and dreams, the stakes, our plans. We can anticipate conflict, make time for it, create regular rhythms for feedback, have ongoing conversations about how power is being wielded in our spaces, regularly question our own strategic choices and put them relentlessly to the test. We can build all of this into our meetings, our retreats, our planning sessions. We can invite people from the outside to facilitate or advise us in these risky, delicate, transformative journeys; demand that they challenge us, help us fill our gaps, take us through the fire and not around it. 

We should do all of this for the sake of good strategy and stronger groups. We should do it because organizations and movements that have good strategy win more often, and those embodied experiences of winning are some of our best protections from the politics of powerlessness — the choice to stay small and pure and righteous over growing and opening and taking big risks. But we should do it, too, because telling the truth is central to transformation. It is a fundamental part of looking at what is and what might be and making the choice to climb the distance between; a chance to flex that muscle of becoming and becoming again; an opportunity to become bigger as individuals and greater than the sum of our parts as groups. And it is absolutely central to the task we have taken up as movements more broadly: to take control of our lives, to shape the world, to make of it something nearer to the world we all deserve.

This article Movements cannot shy away from conflict was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Registered nurses will hold an informational picket on Thursday, July 16 in Bakersfield, Calif., to protest proposed health care staffing reductions and service cuts at CommonSpirit Health’s Dignity Health Bakersfield Memorial Hospital and Dignity Health Mercy Hospitals that will jeopardize patient care.

By JEANNE GREEN

Alert: There is still time to comment on the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) proposing an increase in nuclear weapons at LANL. The deadline for written/e-mailed comment is July 16th.

You may not have heard about this, even though Taosenos live within about 50 miles of the nation’s only nuclear bomb factory at Los Alamos. The NNSA—National Nuclear Security Administration—is proposing an increase of production of 200+ plutonium pits/year for new nuclear weapons, 80 at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and 125 at Savannah River, South Carolina.  Plutonium pits are the core triggers for nuclear bombs. This proposal disregards the fact that there are over 15,000 reusable plutonium pits sitting at the decommissioning plant in Amarillo, Texas. These are verified reliable for at least 100 years. There are 1,200 nuclear bombs, ready to deploy a mile from the Albuquerque airport and around 4,000 deployed across the country in silos and submarines, many on hair-trigger alert.

During the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia amassed 70,000 nuclear warheads, fueled by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD.) Due to nuclear arms control treaties, 48,000 of these were retired. Now NNSA plans to trigger a new global nuclear arms race with new nuclear weapons that would require testing.

Officially, at least 2,056 nuclear bombs were exploded globally before treaties were established. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty forced testing to go underground due to concerns over radioactive fallout. LANL attributes local findings of radioactive materials, including plutonium in homes, soils, fruits, to global testing. This doesn’t even take into account that the first test was detonated right here in New Mexico, without warning to locals and no accountability for the vast numbers of cancers resulting in local populations. The Center for Disease Control’s LAHDRA report also delineates the historical multitudinous releases of radioactive and hazardous materials by LANL into the air and waters of NM.

The NNSA’s PEIS (Programmatic Environmental Impact statement) required by law, gives short shrift to their justification for producing new nuclear weapons. On page 5, their mission is: “2. maintaining and enhancing the safety, reliability and performance of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, including the ability to design, produce and test, in order to meet national security requirements.” But no future production maintains the safety and reliability of the existing tested stockpile. The 2009 JASON (an independent group of elite scientists) report for NNSA verified the longevity of the stockpile until 2080.

NNSA’s mission number 4 is “promoting international nuclear safety and non-proliferation.” In fact, new nuclear pit production conflicts with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The 1970 NPT, Article VI obliges the U.S. to “enter into serious negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament.” Despite this international treaty, the PEIS states its “missions are conducted fully consistent with current treaty obligations.” No—a new nuclear arms race and testing is the opposite of non-proliferation. Non-proliferation program funding is also being cut in the PEIS. The U.S. is a non-signatory to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons signed by 191 countries.

Pope Francis states that “possessing atomic weapons is a crime against humanity and the future,” and “relying on the fear of annihilation poisons relationships between nations and obstructs real dialogue.” Who would not question the morality of killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in seconds, for what?

LANL, in recent years, has managed to produce one pit per year due to safety infractions, radiation exposures, contamination, criticality incidents, and an aging 48-year-old production facility, the PF-4. Rocky Flats, the previous nuclear bomb factory near Denver, was shut down in 1989 by the FBI for environmental crimes. The massive contamination was imploded down and covered, but it’s still there. This is indicative of the damage we can expect to see in New Mexico with mass production.

Production facility PF-4, containing significant amounts of plutonium, is situated between two fault zones and on top of a fragile layer of volcanic tuff, within 2,000 feet of the nearest fault zone. This has been analyzed by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB) and declared unsafe. In their recommendation 2009-2 to the Secretary of Energy they report that “the critical NNSA assumption that the upgrades addressing seismic issues are adequate is flawed. . .  A major deficiency in the facility’s safety basis exists.” In the late 1990s cautionary upgrades were judged to be cost-prohibitive.

The DNFSB also cites the probability of post-seismic fires which would result in widespread contamination throughout New Mexico and beyond. We have already seen massive fires come within a mile of the Lab boundaries, where 10,000 barrels of radioactive waste sit atop the mesa.

Please send comments to: PitPEIS@nnsa.doe.gov with subject #DOE/EIS-0573. More information is at https://pitpeis.com/

 

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Do electric vehicles stop working in extreme heat?

Extreme heat can temporarily reduce range, but recent research does not show that EVs are unable to operate in hot weather.

Much of the decrease comes from energy diverted to cool the vehicle, not because EV batteries or motors stop functioning. Modern EVs use thermal management systems to keep components within safe operating temperatures.

U.S. Department of Energy testing in 2024 found EV range fell on average about 14% at an ambient temperature of 95°F (35°C) compared with mild weather. However, the same proportional decrease was measured for gasoline vehicles under comparable conditions. 

AAA testing of popular EV models in 2026 found an average range decrease of 8.5% at 95°F. Meanwhile, a 2025 study of 345,000 real-world EV trips found a 16% reduction at temperatures up to 122°F (50°C).

Extreme heat can reduce efficiency, but it does not make EVs unable to function.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.

Sources

U.S. Department of Energy Impact of Cold Ambient Temperature and Extreme Conditions on Electric Vehicles

AAA TEMPERATURE EFFECTS ON ELECTRIC AND HYBRID VEHICLE EFFICIENCY

Applied Energy Extreme heat effects on electric vehicle energy consumption and driving range

Recurrent How Hot Summer Weather Affects EV Range

Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles

[Based on Evan's suggestion in the comments, we updated the title to eliminate the double negative. July 15, 2026]

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Fact briefs are short, credibly sourced summaries that offer "yes/no" answers in response to claims found online. They rely on publicly available, often primary source data and documents. Fact briefs are created by contributors to Gigafact — a nonprofit project looking to expand participation in fact-checking and protect the democratic process. See all of our published fact briefs here.

How quickly we forget — if we allow ourselves to.

For journalist Jason Dove Mark, bald eagles represent what the planet can lose, what it can regain, and what it can still lose in the process.

His new book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet (W.W. Norton, published July 14), examines what scientists call “shifting baseline syndrome”: how we quickly forget the way things used to be.

For example, skies that once abounded with bald eagles — or the skies from which they once nearly vanished.

The Revelator is proud to present this excerpt from The Earth Said Remember Me. We don’t think you’ll forget it easily.

For hundreds of thousands of years, during those long centuries when the New World was still old, bald eagles lived nearly everywhere in North America, their one and only natural home. Eagles flew over the tidal estuaries of the Atlantic Coast and the rugged seashore of the Pacific. They built their nests in the folds of western basin and range, on the prairie, throughout the north woods. There were likely a half million of them, an eyrie perched every few miles along fish-rich rivers like the Schuylkill, the Hudson, the Columbia, the Colorado. Up to 14 pounds in weight and with a wingspan that can stretch eight feet from tip to tip, the bald eagle was sovereign of the American sky, the apex predator of the air.

The First Nations perceived a great power in the bird. Many Native cultures considered bald eagle feathers as sacred and used them in ceremonies or for ritual healing practices. For the Lenape people of the Delaware River region, it was considered a sign of courage and good luck to wear an eagle feather that had been plucked from a living bird. In the Southwest, the Pueblo and Zuni kept domesticated eagles in large aviaries. Across diverse cultures, Indigenous lore esteemed the eagle as a chief, the bird of heaven. “In an eagle there is all the wisdom in the world,” the twentieth-century Lakota spiritual leader Lame Deer (aka John Fire) once said. “Eagle” was very likely the most common animal clan name continent-wide.

When the newcomers arrived from across the sea and encountered this bird they had never known, they also apprehended its strength. Perhaps it was just anthropomorphic projection. Bald eagles mate for life and carefully tend their young, and maybe the settlers imagined some kind of puritanical family values. Bald eagles also have a passion for building — their nests can weigh up to a ton and last for decades — and maybe the restless settlers appreciated the bird’s industriousness. At the very least, the new Americans liked the bird’s military bearing, with its steely gaze, broad chest, and bone-white crown. In 1782, the bald eagle became the central symbol of the Great Seal of the United States, the unofficial national bird — George Washington in feathers.

But it was a conflicted relationship. The eagle had become a symbol of America, yet many Americans didn’t like the actual animal. “He is a Bird of bad moral Character,” Benjamin Franklin famously wrote. “He does not get his Living honestly.” Franklin was referring to the bald eagle’s habit of stealing fish from the smaller osprey, its penchant for poaching, and its taste for carrion. Settlers complained that eagles often snatched their lambs and chicks. Against all common sense, the myth spread that bald eagles could carry off human babies from the crib.

A campaign of ecocide began. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans murdered eagles mercilessly. Farmers and ranchers shot them on sight — “We kill all the eagles we can,” one sheep farmer said — while some state and local governments paid bounties for dead eagles. In Alaska alone, hunters killed some eighty thousand eagles to cash in on the territory’s bounty. By the turn of the last century, the birds were vanishingly rare in most of the country. “Twenty years ago, I used to see a dozen or more along the river in the spring” the nature writer John Burroughs noticed in the early 1900s, “where I now see only one or two, or none at all.”

Image by Hans Toom from Pixabay

Eventually, the American public realized the country’s mistake. In 1940 the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act outlawed killing the bird. But the protection came almost too late. A new danger worse than bullets and buckshot threatened the species: the powerful insecticide DDT, which government agencies and farmers were spraying all over the place. The bald eagle — along with osprey, peregrine falcons, and pelicans — became collateral damage in the war against insects. DDT weakened the eagles’ eggshells and lowered females’ hormone levels, impacting the species’ ability to procreate. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote, “Something is at work in the eagle’s environment which has virtually destroyed its ability to reproduce.  The reports differ in detail, but always repeat the theme of death.” By 1963, there were just 417 nesting pairs outside of Alaska.

In a spate of legislative urgency that these days feels like some-thing out of legend, lawmakers rushed to address the crisis. Congress banned DDT, which was pulled off the market in 1972. When the Endangered Species Act became law in 1973, the bald eagle was among the first species to come under its protective umbrella. The Clean Water Act helped too. An eagle can’t survive if it has nothing to eat, and by the 1960s many of the United States’ rivers served “as little more than sewers to the sea,” in the words of one senator. The Clean Water Act prohibited industries from using streams, rivers, and lakes as dumps for their chemical crap. Freed from pollution, the waters slowly came back to life. Fresh waters again furnished the food web.

The descendants of the destroyers became the restorers.

State fish and wildlife agencies launched captive breeding programs in which biologists, often assisted by volunteers, pantomimed the behavior of eagle parents to raise chicks. Using a technique called “hacking” that was already common among keepers of trained falcons, biologists reintroduced young eagles to lakes and rivers. Citizen scientists kept vigil over nests and helped count bald eagle numbers. Popular attitudes changed. For many Americans, to kill a bald eagle came to be something akin to burning the flag.

The heroic labor paid off. In 2007, the bald eagle was removed from the endangered species list. Between 2009 and 2021, the number of bald eagles in the lower 48 quadrupled, from about 72,000 to more than 300,000 — a figure not all that far from the estimated baseline before European arrival in the Americas. In the space of a couple human generations, the nearly extinct became common again.

It was as if the great hoop of time had spun all the way around. Once — that word that weighs the scales of every shifting baseline — could be used in celebration instead of lamentation.

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

After an absence that stretched beyond memory, the bald eagles arrived at Madison’s Warner Park in the summer of 2020. Warner Park is one of the largest parks in the Wisconsin state capital, one of those jewel boxes of city nature that — like New York’s Central Park or Audubon Park in New Orleans — forms an eco-tone where the urban, the cultivated, and the undomesticated meet. Braceleted by the tracks of the Wisconsin & Southern Railroad, encircled by modest middle-class neighborhoods, and just a five-minute drive from the local airport, Warner Park is no wilderness. But it’s still a wild place, home to beaver and muskrat, deer and fox. An unruly copse — locals call it “the Big Thicket” — is packed with red maple, ash, and walnut. A massive bur oak, some 250 years old, has lived there since well before the first settlers appeared. Warner Park is one of those spots where people can watch wildlife and the wildlife are just comfortable enough with humans to watch back.

For the eagles, Warner Park had what they needed to make a home. When a mated pair began building a nest on an island in the park’s cattail-ringed lagoon, neighbors quickly spotted them. The birds became minor celebrities, symbols of hope in that eerie season of pandemic lockdown. “It was this brilliant beacon of light during a very dark time,” Beth Sluys, a Warner Park neighbor and amateur naturalist who had long been involved in local conservation issues, told me. “Observing the birds living their lives, there’s something magical about that.”

A neighborhood teenager named Elsie Olmanson who had started watching the eagles with her father after hearing about them from Beth also found joy in their arrival. “You’re happy that they are able to have a recovery, and that they’re coming more and more back into the world,” she told me. The eagles, she said, were “adorable creatures.” The nesting eagles seemed to her “like a married couple — they will bicker with each other.”

By the time of autumn leaf fall, the nest was impossible to miss: a lump of sticks and branches some thirty feet up, the whole mess wedged in the crook of two limbs, like a leather sofa had been dropped from the sky. The calendar flipped to 2021, and that March the bald eagle couple hatched a single eaglet. At which point a minor controversy broke out. Just a few hundred yards from the eagles’ home lagoon sits “the Duck Pond” — a small stadium that is home to the Madison Mallards, a collegiate summer baseball team. Every Fourth of July the Mallards stage a big fireworks display, and some of the eagle fans feared the fireworks would scare away the birds. A few folks petitioned the baseball team to halt the pyrotechnics or, at the very least, post-pone them until after fledging time. “We were concerned that this might potentially impact the fledglings at a critical time,” Elsie’s father, Eric, said.

Other eagle enthusiasts were nonplussed. Patrick Hasburgh, a passionate outdoorsman who owns a fishing bait and tackle shop on the edge of the park, was among the first people to spot the nesting eagles, and he felt like the fireworks controversy was overblown. “I’ve been watching the nest since it was built,” he told me, “and the eagles don’t seem to mind [human activity] at all. They are used to people. It’s an urban environment.”

In an age of mass extinction, the dustup over whether a fireworks show would disturb an eagle family seemed to me like something of a First World problem. Fifty years ago, there were just 108 eagle nests in all of Wisconsin; by the time an eagle pair started stacking sticks in Warner Park, that number had climbed to nearly 1,700. With eagle survival no longer in doubt, the question had become how best humans might help eagles to thrive. Here was another form of shifting baseline syndrome — an example of how progress, every bit as much destruction and diminishment, can be difficult to remember.

Too much of environmental history is a litany of losses. Ghost stories haunt the landscape: the passenger pigeon, the Tasmanian tiger, the ivory-billed woodpecker. But running parallel to the string of disappearances are stories of recovery and resilience. The bald eagle is not alone.

Image by Dave Eslinger from Pixabay

Think about the forests of North America: there’s more forest in New England today than there was in 1850. Consider the air and the water: both are clearer now than before the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were passed. Recall the beaver — now numbering in the millions across North America — or loggerhead turtles, whose population increased by nearly two orders of magnitude in the last twenty-some years. The California condor, at one point on the doorstep of extinction, is on the wing again. Take a breath and remember the whales, saved from annihilation. Seen from one vantage, many of those success stories could also be evidence of shifting baselines, of how our ideas of abundance contract generation by generation. Sure, there are more wolves on the American landscape now than there were fifty years ago — and there are also far fewer wolves than there were 150 years ago. But Mia Monroe, the co-founder of the Western Monarch Count, often brings up such wildlife recoveries as examples of the possibilities that also exist for her beloved butterflies. If we could save the bald eagle, what else can we save? “In my life I’ve watched the gray whale return and the peregrine falcon and the otter,” Mia told me once. “I don’t know what’s ahead for monarchs. But I do know that when people realized there was a problem, and we did something different, then nature responded. I always remember those examples.”

I remember them, too. They remind me that baselines some-times shift in virtuous directions. The British writer Robert Macfarlane suggests a name for this: lifting baselines. “We can normalize betterment as well as decline and then wish for betterment’s increase,” he has written. “We can run the reel backward.” The bald eagle’s comeback is proof that the passage of time doesn’t always mean loss and decay. Growth and increase are also expressions of time. So is healing.

There is, however, a danger that can come with lifting baselines and the normalization of betterment. To grow accustomed to abundance risks obscuring all the hard work and long years it took to achieve that abundance. Without collective memory, improvements can also be difficult to see. Rebecca Solnit made a similar point in an essay a few years ago when she warned that “forgetting is everywhere.” Solnit wrote that she feels like “a tortoise at the mayfly party,” and cautioned that “change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change.” The indivisible present can cloak the march of progress just like it provides cover for the grind of destruction.

Environmental progress is especially vulnerable to becoming invisible since, more often than not, it leaves no trace. Many environmental victories are triumphs of harm avoided: the proposed oil pipeline denied, the forest kept free from the loggers, the fossil fuels unburned. Pollution, once cleaned from the air and the water, is another one of those absences that the mind struggles to recognize and remember. Without memory, environmental well-being is always at risk of being taken for granted. To endure, progress requires vigilance — the long view of history.

When I was growing up, the bald eagle was a rarity; the first time I saw one, I was in my mid-twenties. Now, I live in a place where bald eagles are common to the point of mundane. I make an annual winter-solstice pilgrimage to the North Fork of the Nooksack River, where bald eagles stage big convocations. From the small bridge there I can spot scores of eagles perched in the December-bare alder and cottonwood, their calls — skreee, like a door on rusty hinges — echoing off snow and ice. It’s a thrill to watch them scrimmage over salmon carcasses. For me, an eagle sighting never gets old.

My daughter has a different relationship to the bald eagle, especially having grown up in a place where you can spot them at the county dump (He does not get his Living honestly). She barely registers them as special, and she all too often greets her dad’s glee with an eye roll. What is a bald eagle to a child who has never known them as endangered? About as interesting as a wren.

I got a welcome corrective to these worries after spending a morning with the family of Patrick Hasburgh, the bait store owner who has been involved with the Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance’s formal Bald Eagle Nest Watch since the mated pair showed up Warner Park. The Hasburgh boys — Fletcher, then sixteen, and Ranger, eleven — had spent count-less hours with their parents monitoring the eagles. But the commonplace had not dulled excitement. If anything, their regular eagle-watching had made them fascinated with the birds — appreciation earned through intimacy. Fletcher told me he “absolutely” knew the story of the fall and rise of the bald eagle, in part “because I have, you know, a kind of field knowledge.” Ranger, who was sporting a skater’s cut and an Off-the-Wall black hoodie, said he liked to “see the birds up close and see their whole life cycle.” He liked how, when he uses his dad’s spotting scope to check out the nest, he can “pretty much see every individual feather.”

We strolled the park, and the family shared with me some of its natural wonders: a killdeer nest on the railroad tracks, a pair of sandhill cranes coming in for a landing. The birds were like giraffes on the wing, tumbling earthward and honking madly. It quickly became apparent that the Hasburghs were involved in all sorts of neighborhood-scale environmental stewardship projects. Here was an ordinary American family who intuitively, organically, was embodying the antidotes to environmental amnesia — going outside in all weather and all seasons, emotion-ally encoding their relationships with the living world, writing them down, and transmitting their experiences back and forth between generations. This focus group of four seemed the very model of Emerson’s “practical naturalists.”

As a family, they go outside all the time. When Patrick and his wife, a nurse practitioner named Ashley, started a family, they committed to get their kids outdoors as much as possible because, as Patrick said, “they have more than enough reasons to stay inside.” The family made a point to visit every state park in Wisconsin. They hiked a lot, fished a lot. And they adopted Warner Park as their backyard wilderness. “This park has been a constant through my life,” mop-headed Fletcher said as we walked the paths not far from the eagle nest. “Now, when I’m going through this park, there’s a million stories.”

Over time, the family attuned themselves to the urban wildlife, began to notice things that other people seemed to miss: the cranes and the eagles, tiny frogs in the lagoon, a big snap-ping turtle laying its eggs on the railroad tracks. “For me, it’s one of those things where it’s like: Is it that I’m more aware, or are things changing?” Ashley said. “I see more nature than I remember seeing when we first started walking.   Maybe I’m more in tune, or maybe it’s that it’s actually just kind of started becoming more wild. Or both. Probably both.”

The Hasburghs had made a record of their experiences in Warner Park. In addition to the eagle nest monitoring, Patrick enlisted the family in an initiative to protect the area’s bluebirds, believing that a formal citizen-science project would be a way of “sneaking some education in  without it being their lame dad preaching to them.” On a weekly basis the family checked on eleven bluebird nesting boxes, evicted any sparrow squatters if necessary, and then sent to the Bluebird Restoration Association of Wisconsin information about the number of eggs and chicks. When he was a little kid, Fletcher had taken the work very seriously. Equipped with a clipboard, he studiously went from box to box making observations. “Pretty much half of my entire summer was spent just checking bluebird boxes,” he told me as we inspected one nest box that, it turned out, was empty. By now, Ashley said, the bluebird stewardship was “built into our lives.”

Both boys had become crackerjack birders who could tell a sparrow nest from a chickadee nest from a bluebird nest at a distance. They could see a bluebird chick and tell how many days old it was. With familiarity came emotional attachment: the family imprinted on the birds. “Maybe it’s just in my head, but you build sort of a relationship with them,” Ashley said. “I love it, and it’s fun to see, like, the evolution. And you kind of feel like, you know, a little mama bird.”

Passing on their naturalist knowledge to other kids was a big-ger lift. Fletcher — whose great passion is video games, especially Call of Duty — said he didn’t exactly advertise his conservation endeavors. “I don’t really want to have a big prom sign that says, Come to the prom with me — I look at birds.” And as much as Ranger was psyched about outdoor activities like fishing — the previous winter, he had caught a “monster” thirty-eight-inch pike and a twenty-nine-inch walleye — most of his free time was spent skateboarding.

If anything, the boys had passed their environmental passion not outward to peers but upward to their parents. Patrick said one of the reasons he had gotten into birds is because Fletcher, when he was very young, kept asking for their names. “And I wouldn’t have an answer,” Patrick said. “So then I got curious and then we started looking at other birds and we started a life list.” A child’s inquisitiveness, it turned out, could be a parent’s spark bird.

When we first spoke, Patrick told me that one his great inspirations was Aldo Leopold, whose writings he had been exposed to during a brief stint in college and who moved him to seek out “an engagement with the landscape.” It was A Sand County Almanac that spurred Patrick to start keeping a fishing journal, which turned into a birding journal, and then into an all-around phenology journal that is now entering its twenty-fifth year. “It’s mostly birds and animals and stuff like that,” he told me. “And at the end of the year I go through my journals and notes and send out a little report to friends.”

A famous line in Leopold’s canonical book comes as the author declares, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on the land is quite invisible to laymen.” The Hasburghs’ tour of Warner Park made me think that maybe it was time to turn Leopold’s insight onto its head. Perhaps it’s equally true that one of the benefits of an ecological education is that one might, together with friends and family, inhabit a world of wonders. Much of the abundance that remains on the land is made visible by sharing it.

Isn’t this how the world might turn toward environmental progress, one workaday relationship with nature after another? The Hasburgh family was living proof that the task of ecological remembering isn’t necessarily difficult or esoteric; it can be as simple and as easy as a walk in the park. And as much as the Hasburghs demonstrated how to make memories of the living world, they also illustrated why it’s worthwhile to do all this physical, mental, and emotional work. Remembering isn’t about dwelling in the past, but a way of casting oneself forward in time, into the future tense. It was Ranger who helped make this clear. “I like just seeing the eagles and just watching the nest,” he said as we wrapped up our loop around the park and stood, again, not far from the eagle eyrie “That’s, like, a memory that will stay with me for a while.”

The post For Bald Eagles, the Descendants of the Destroyers Became the Restorers appeared first on The Revelator.

Photo Credit: Green Knowledge Foundation, Nigeria.

By Weyinmi Okotie, GAIA Africa, Clean Air Program Manager 

This week, 13 – 16 July, policymakers, scientists, civil society organisations, development partners, and community leaders will gather in Pretoria for the 2026 Africa Clean Air Forum. The theme is “Investment Case for Clean Air and Healthy Cities.” Air pollution is becoming one of Africa’s most pressing public health challenges. The forum is a crucial opportunity to shape the continent’s clean air agenda.

Over the years, the forum has grown beyond an annual conference. It has become a platform for collaboration. This helps governments, researchers, and communities share evidence, strengthen partnerships, and accelerate action on air pollution. Most importantly, it has raised air quality from a largely ignored environmental issue to a critical public health and development priority in Africa.  

Across Africa, awareness of air pollution is increasing as cities are investing in air quality monitoring. More cities are realising that clean air is essential for healthier communities, stronger economies, and climate resilience. 

The growth of air quality monitoring networks across the continent is especially encouraging. Reliable data leads to better policies, stronger accountability, and more informed public decision-making.  

But monitoring air pollution is only the beginning. The real measure of success lies in whether the investments that follow truly reduce pollution and improve people’s lives. As African governments seek solutions, we must ensure that the technologies promoted address the root cause of the problem rather than end-of-pipe solutions. 

While discussions on air pollution often focus on transport, industrial activities, and power generation, waste is a major yet frequently overlooked source of pollution in African cities. 

Open burning of waste is common in many communities due to poor collection systems, badly managed dumpsites, and limited waste infrastructure. Smoke from burning plastics, organic waste, and other mixed materials exposes nearby communities to harmful air pollutants and emits greenhouse gases.  

Open burning of waste accounts for 29% of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution in the air, and, together with other air pollutants, causes nearly 1.2 million premature deaths per year in Africa.

There is no doubt that Africa must stop open burning; the question is HOW do we achieve this?

Studies also highlight that around 70-80% of the municipal solid waste generated in African cities is recyclable – such as biodegradable waste, plastics and paper,and could be worth US$8 billion per year if kept in a circular economy. Hence, there is a need to support real solutions to waste management challenges in Africa, such as separation at source, waste reduction, reuse, recycling, and composting initiatives.

Increasingly, the industry is promoting waste-to-energy incineration as the solution to Africa’s municipal waste challenges. However, this is a false claim!

Incineration does not eliminate waste. It changes waste into emissions, toxic ash, and greenhouse gases. It also relies on a steady supply of combustible waste, creating long-term dependence on generating and burning materials that should be reduced, reused, recycled, or composted.  

For many African countries reviewing their waste systems, this is a critical moment. Decisions made today will shape urban infrastructure for decades. Investing in costly combustion technologies risks locking cities into a waste-management mode that competes with recycling, undermines resource recovery, and diverts limited public resources from real environmental justice efforts. 

The forum’s focus on increasing investment in clean air is both timely and necessary. Africa urgently needs more financial support to strengthen air quality monitoring, improve enforcement, build institutional capacity, and implement effective pollution control measures.  

However, as we work to increase clean air finance, we must ensure that the funds are NEVER used to support false solutions in the waste management sector, which are already known to emit a cocktail of noxious substances into our environment.

Funding for the waste sector should not support false solutions such as waste-to-energy incineration under the guise of reducing pollution. Clean air finance should prioritise interventions that prevent pollution at its source—such as waste separation, composting, recycling, organic waste recovery, material recovery facilities, and the integration of informal waste workers into modern waste management systems.  

These approaches do more than reduce emissions. They create jobs, improve public health, reduce methane emissions, strengthen local economies, and advance the transition toward circular economies. They address multiple environmental challenges simultaneously rather than shifting pollution from land to air.  

I hope this forum continues to inspire strong leadership—not only in acknowledging the scale of Africa’s air pollution crisis, but also in choosing solutions grounded in science, public health, and environmental justice, especially in the waste management sector.

My desire for Africa is that we do not confuse costly technologies with meaningful progress. That we resist the temptation to fund projects simply because they seem modern or innovative. That communities most affected by pollution are put at the centre of decision-making. And that Africa has the courage to reject false solutions, even when they are proposed as shortcuts to municipal waste management. 

The discussions at this year’s Clean Air Forum will not ultimately measure the forum’s success. It will be measured by the policies adopted, the investments made, and the quality of the air that millions of Africans breathe long after the conference has ended. 

ENDS.

The post Investing in clean air should also mean rejecting false solutions to the waste management crisis first appeared on GAIA.

The UK’s incoming prime minister Andy Burnham has remained tight-lipped on his views on climate change during his leadership campaign.

When asked his views on reversing Labour’s manifesto pledge to stop new North Sea drilling in June – a move that the oil-and-gas industry and right-wing media have pushed for in recent months – he said he had “something of an open mind” on the issue.

But a trawl of Burnham’s past comments about climate change, net-zero and fossil fuels reveals a different picture.

Just a year ago in June 2025, Burnham, while mayor of Greater Manchester, gave his support to the fossil fuel treaty – a proposed international pact on phasing out coal, oil and gas – calling it a “lifeline” that “all governments” should join.

In a video message endorsing the treaty, he also said that “there should be no turning away from net-zero”.

During his last bid to be Labour leader in 2015, he used similar language, saying: 

“Labour under my leadership will never turn our back on either our duty to tackle climate change or the prospects offered by the green economy.”

Burnham has spoken about the threat of climate change since at least 2008, noting in 2021 that accelerated action could “create thousands of good jobs”, but also warning that net-zero risked becoming the “next Brexit”.

Burnham is yet to appoint his cabinet, but there is much speculation that he will select current net-zero secretary Ed Miliband as his chancellor – with their ally Miatta Fahnbulleh having a “strong chance” of taking Miliband’s former position.

Below, Carbon Brief recounts 28 things that Burnham has said about climate change, net-zero, fossil fuels, energy and transport.

Climate change 

“Tackling climate change isn’t just about protecting the planet – it’s a powerful opportunity to build a fairer, greener future for our communities and businesses.”  

Calling for local councils to be given more power and money for climate action, 29 November 2025 

“There is little doubt that Greater Manchester’s biodiversity has taken a hit over the years, with habitats being lost, destroyed and becoming less diverse due to the impact of development, climate change, pollution and invasive species…We are committed to delivering a city-region for all residents to enjoy – a fairer, greener and more prosperous place for everyone.” 

Statement after Greater Manchester declared a “biodiversity emergency”, 25 March 2022

“Over the next decade, if we accelerate our response to the climate crisis, we can create thousands of good jobs, improve homes, overhaul our transport system and make [Manchester] an even better place to live.”

Greater Manchester Green Summit, 18 October 2021

“The environment has never been higher on the national and international agenda.” 

Statement after visiting a peat bog restoration project in England, 9 January 2020

Andy Burnham (left) and others, including members of Massive Attack, endorsing the Fossil Fuel Treaty in June 2025. Credit: Fossil Fuel Treaty

“I think climate change [action] will be driven more quickly from the bottom up, if I’m honest. It’s the will of evolution if you wait for the government to act…When governments aren’t listening you get out and get your voice heard…so I think [climate protesters] deserve our encouragement, not our criticism.” 

Speaking to Manchester Evening News at a student climate protest in Manchester, 24 May 2019

“Labour under my leadership will never turn our back on either our duty to tackle climate change or the prospects offered by the green economy.” 

Labour leadership candidate speech, 15 July 2015 

“Climate change can seem a distant, impersonal threat – in fact the associated costs to health are a very real and present danger…We need well-designed climate change policies that drive health benefits.” 

Speaking to the Guardian about a study on climate and health, 25 November 2009

“The Stern report on the economics of climate change has changed the debate, in this country and around the world. It made it clear that the people who could suffer most from a failure to tackle climate change, or from a lack of ambition in our approach to it, are those living in the developing countries. They are the most vulnerable…[and] Stern said that the cost of not acting would be large. That is why the government took various measures in the recent spending review to ensure that we are prepared to face the challenges posed by climate change.” 

Speaking in the UK parliament on the economic impacts of climate change on his final day as chief secretary to the Treasury, 24 January 2008

Net-zero

“There should be no turning away from net-zero.” 

Speaking after giving his support to the fossil fuel treaty – a proposed global pact to introduce laws to phase out coal, oil and gas – on behalf of Manchester, 6 June 2025 

“An opportunity is opening up for Britain as other countries move away from net-zero. We should seize that…We can make Britain a green leader. This is not the time to tiptoe, it is the time to commit to this path.”

Speaking at Innovation Zero World Congress in London, 29 April 2025 

“[We] need a government that fully buys into the 2038 vision because the UK will not get to 2050 unless places like Greater Manchester are freed up to go faster – and we’re ready to go faster.”

Speaking about Greater Manchester’s aim to reach net-zero by 2038, 19 October 2022 

“In Greater Manchester we have plans to build 30,000 net-zero social rented homes because we recognise that a successful city region needs good quality, affordable accommodation for everyone.”

Speech on the future of cities, 24 June 2022  

“By building a broad consensus behind the drive to net-zero, we can ensure that the transition is a fair one that delivers social justice as well as climate justice. This is an opportunity for all of us to show how cutting carbon emissions in our cities can make a real difference to our communities – away from the abstractions and rooted in the real world.” 

Panel discussion in Glasgow during the COP26 climate summit, 12 November 2021 

“To the extent that people have picked up anything from COP26, it’s a sense that the drive to net-zero will mean cost and inconvenience for ordinary people and offsetting for the wealthy and entitled. All of a sudden, you can feel how net-zero could become the new Brexit –  a debate that gets very divided on class grounds…This has got to be a wake-up call. We cannot let this happen. We need to act now to build a broad social consensus behind the drive to net-zero. How to do that? It starts with taking control of the climate narrative from those steering it in the wrong direction and turning it around…We must show how, if done in the right way, the drive to net-zero is actually an opportunity to reduce the cost of living; to make people’s lives better and society fairer.”

Writing for the London Standard, 5 November 2021 

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“The drive to net-zero is a chance to re-industrialise the north of England, this time in a clean way. Create really good jobs, future-facing jobs for people, better public transport, improve people’s homes…If we go quickly towards net-zero, it’s the quickest way to level up the country.” 

ITV interview at COP26, 1 November 2021 

“If we really embrace the drive to net-zero, that is the route to level up the country…But it needs substantial investment, upfront, now, of the kind that Rachel Reeves, shadow chancellor [and chancellor under Keir Starmer’s government], has been talking about. We need long-term predictable funding.” 

Interview with GB News at COP26, 1 November 2021 

“I would have preferred to hear slightly less about carbonated wine and much more about a decarbonised economy.” 

Referencing a UK budget, which included tax cuts for sparkling wine and other drinks, 28 October 2021 

“Decarbonising is not just about lowering costs on to people. It’s the route to get better, cheaper public transport. It’s the route to getting homes that are cheap to run. It’s actually the way we can create thousands of good jobs for the people who live in Greater Manchester. This is the route to levelling up the country by going further and faster on decarbonisation.”

Speaking to Manchester Confidential, 20 October 2021 

“[I am] asking people to stop seeing the environmental agenda as a cost and a burden agenda. I think this is a barrier that we’ve got to get over. Already in the media interviews I’ve done today, people are saying ‘can you afford it?’, ‘can it be achievable when times are tough?’. 

“My answer to that is, at some point in the 21st century, all homes will be zero-carbon. At some point in this century, all buildings of any kind will be zero-carbon…All cars will be zero-carbon, all public transport will be zero-carbon…The question is: when? And surely the places that embrace those things first are putting themselves in a position of economic strength when it comes to facing up to the future. Rather than seeing the whole agenda as a burden, we’ve got to see it for the benefits that it can bring. 

“There may be a greater upfront cost in a zero-carbon home, but let’s stop thinking, as we tend to do in Britain, of the short-term, the short-termist approach to life. Surely let’s start talking to the public about the lifetime cost.”

Greater Manchester Green Summit, 21 March 2018 

Fossil fuels

“I’ve got something of an open mind, you know. I don’t have a sort of fixed position.”

Speaking on the issue of new North Sea oil and gas in a New Statesman interview, 3 June 2026

“We would fight this in GM [Greater Manchester]…Communities across the north would face all the danger and disruption while big oil and gas walk away with all the profits.”

In response to Reform’s call for fracking, on X, 25 August 2025

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“I am proud to endorse the fossil-fuel treaty proposal today on behalf of Greater Manchester. It’s not just a plan – it’s a lifeline. It’s a call to end coal, oil and gas, hold polluters accountable…I urge all governments, nationals and subnationals to join this fight.” 

Statement upon endorsing the fossil-fuel treaty, 5 June 2025

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“Fracking is the past, it is not the future.”

Speech at London climate protest, 20 September 2019

“I have called for a moratorium on fracking. Far too many potential risks and unanswered questions.”

On X, 22 June 2015

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“What I would do, if successful, is lay out a plan for more public control over water, energy, transport, so that over the period we can get those bills down, fares down, and give people and give businesses breathing space.”

LBC interview, 2 July 2026

“I am all in favour of tough decisions at a national level. I don’t believe there should be a third runway at Heathrow, for instance. But I think those are decisions for national government.”

Guardian interview, 13 June 2019

“There is a debate to be had about aviation, isn’t there? There are changing public attitudes about aviation. Rather than just saying no to people flying, don’t we need to accelerate research into low and zero-carbon forms of aviation?”

Guardian interview, 13 June 2019

“Today, I stand alongside the mayors of some of the greatest cities in the world. I’m committed to a cleaner, greener and healthier future for Greater Manchester. Around a third of greenhouse gas emissions in our city-region come from transport.”

When signing the C40 Fossil-Fuel-Free Streets Declaration, which includes support for zero-emissions vehicles and walking and cycling, on behalf of Manchester, 14 September 2018

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Stopping neonic-coated seeds could mean the difference between survival and extinction for endangered pollinators like the rusty-patched bumblebee.