Green News

The motley crew of scientists, conservationists, and agricultural producers set out to begin in earnest. Spring was well underway in Hood Canal, Washington, when the team assembled on the shores of Baywater Shellfish Farm, armed with buckets. Before them, floating mats of seaweed were strewn about, bright green clumps suffocating clams, geoducks, and other intertidal creatures while swallowing the gear laid out to harvest them. 

Excess seaweed is a seasonal nuisance along the bays and inlets that twine throughout Puget Sound. But the issue has magnified as excess nutrient runoff has fueled sprawling blooms. It has become a bona fide threat to the business of Washington shellfish farmers like Joth Davis.

In the past, Davis has attempted to harvest the seaweed by hand to reduce the surging number of macroalgae menacing his catch. Alas, there is the “age-old problem of scale,” he said. “It is difficult work, and time available during low tides to tackle the problem is limited, with everything else we need to accomplish when the tide is out.” 

A couple years before the team got to work last May, researchers at the University of Washington, or UW, approached Davis to see if he’d be interested in partnering with them to develop a new supply chain. The plan was simple: Harvest the seaweed from Davis’s farm, give it to small and mid-sized crop farmers in the area as a soil-building replacement for chemical fertilizer, and along the way study the effects — reduced emissions from a shortened supply chain, steady yields from shellfish and terrestrial farms, changes in soil chemistry, and possibly a way to sequester the carbon stored in the seaweed itself. They were also aiming to investigate the impacts of seaweed removal on shellfish survival and growth. 

A Department of Agriculture program established by the Biden administration, and funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, offered exactly the federal support they needed to make the vision happen. In February 2022, the USDA launched the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, or PCSC, which former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said at the time would “provide targeted funding to meet national and global demand and expand market opportunities for climate-smart commodities to increase the competitive advantage of American producers.”

Davis, who has a background in marine science, seized the chance. 

The aptly named “Blue Carbon, Green Fields” project was selected by the USDA in 2023 to receive roughly $5 million of the climate-smart commodities money in a five-year agreement. In addition to Davis’s team at Baywater and the scientists from UW, the partnership consisted of researchers from Washington State University and Washington Sea Grant, conservationists from the nonprofit Puget Sound Restoration Fund, and the local farm incubator Viva Farms. In their first year in the field, the team harvested a little over 15,000 pounds of wet seaweed, which was stockpiled and distributed to four crop farms throughout the region. By laying the groundwork for the agricultural supply chain, the team was on track for the unthinkable — a quadruple win of sorts, where everyone involved benefited, including the planet. 

Instead, not even halfway through a federal contract, their drying racks and other seaweed harvesting equipment are at risk of just gathering cobwebs on Davis’s farm; each unused tool a daily reminder of the progress they lost at the behest of President Donald Trump’s cultural politics. The supply chain, fragile in its novelty, is splintering apart.

Excess seaweed overtaking shellfish gear on Baywater Shellfish Farm in Hood Canal, Washington. Sarah Collier

Almost a year after the team began their field work harvesting seaweed in Puget Sound, the USDA announced that it would cancel the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. In a press release issued on April 14, the agency called the $3.1 billion funding pot a “climate slush fund” and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins decried it as “largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers.” The USDA said that it axed the initiative due to the “sky-high administration fees which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers.” 

Robert Bonnie, the former under secretary for farm production and conservation at the USDA under the Biden administration, rejects this claim. He contends that the reason some projects reported higher administrative fees than others is because roughly half the awards were intended to boost markets for smaller projects. “You would expect those projects to have higher administrative costs because those farmers are harder to reach,” he argued. “Take the Iowa Soybean Association, or Archer Daniels Midland, where they’ve got established relationships with farmers, where they’ve got high demand amongst many of their farmers, you’re going to expect those projects to have lower administrative costs as a percentage because they’ve already got an extensive network. So we wanted to provide flexibility across projects to make sure that the door was open to everyone,” added Bonnie. 

In any case, USDA’s use of the term “cancel” was something of a misnomer. In the same announcement, the agency shared its plan to review existing projects under a new set of scoring criteria, to ensure that they align with the new administration’s priorities. The release noted that the program would be “reformed and overhauled” into a Trump-era effort to redistribute the pool of IRA money. So as the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program sunsetted, the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative was born. 

The Trump program’s criteria required grant awardees to ensure that a minimum of 65 percent of their funds go directly to farmers, that they enrolled at least one farmer in their program by December 31, 2024, and that they have made a payment to at least one farmer by that same date. According to a former senior USDA official, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity, the USDA grouped the 135 PCSC grantees into three buckets: Fifteen projects were told they could keep going, as they met the new thresholds; five recipients were told they could continue on the condition that they modified their projects to meet the new priorities; and 115 were informed that their projects were terminated as they did not meet the new policy priorities and were invited to resubmit. A few weeks later, the official said that projects that initially received cancellation letters were told something different – that the termination would be rescinded and they could just modify their proposals to meet administration priorities.

The group behind Blue Carbon, Green Fields was among the 115. 

In the USDA’s official termination notice to the University of Washington, shared with Grist, the team was told that their project “failed to meet the first of three Farmer First policy priorities identified by USDA” — that at least 65 percent of the funds must go to producers. A second notice stated that because of that, “the award is inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, department priorities.”

Sarah Collier, the UW assistant professor leading the initiative, remembers how the news of the termination hit her. When she got the letter, “everything had to come to a screeching halt.” She jumped into crisis mode, notifying the 25 or so people working on the project, including students whom Collier said saw their “dissertation research derailed.” She then reached out to notify the farmers who had been receiving the seaweed fertilizer. The timing couldn’t have been worse: The team had just completed a round of farmer recruitment, and were in the middle of signing contracts with five more small and mid-sized farmers.  

“I have days where I am like, I can’t,” said Collier. “I can’t handle one more conversation where all I can say is, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do about this, because this isn’t the way that things are supposed to go. This isn’t the way that federal grants are supposed to work.’” 

In May, the USDA sent a letter to grantees who had received cancellation notices informing them of how to submit revised applications. According to the letter, which was also shared with Grist, grantees would need to arrange one-on-one meetings with Natural Resources Conservation Service representatives and submit a new budget narrative and statement of work incorporating Trump’s policy priorities. They had until June 20. 

When they first learned that their funding had been culled, Collier’s UW team, as the main grantee, wasn’t sure they were going to resubmit — or whether they even could. At the time, nothing further had been disclosed about what it would entail, so Collier decided to wait to talk with the NRCS to find out more. After that meeting, they moved forward with resubmission, in a bid to salvage what funding they were able to. That required Collier to create “a very revised” narrative and restructure the budget, in addition to regular meetings with the NRCS. 

The former USDA official noted that specific details of the resubmission process have since largely been kept quiet, since the vast majority of former PCSC grantees are fearful of speaking out about their experiences in case of retaliation by the administration. The closed-door nature of it all, with a lack of clear communication from the Trump administration and changes in guidance leading up to the submission deadline, the official said, has sown confusion and distress among former grantees. 

Although no official verdict timeline has been communicated — Collier has heard everything from 60 days to sometime in September — she expects to be waiting on the final funding decision for at least two more months. Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director at the nonprofit Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, or Pasa, has been told something similar about her pending resubmission. Another PCSC grantee, Pasa also reapplied to the new USDA program after being informed they didn’t meet one of the Trump administration’s priorities. Doing so required a total revamp of what their old project had been structured to do. 

“In the end, we decided to completely rewrite our proposal rather than just alter our original proposal. We had already said goodbye to the old program and knew it wouldn’t be able to fit the new reality,” said Smith-Brubaker. She says she “lies awake at night” concerned over the outcome, including whether the USDA may choose to deny their resubmission because of Pasa’s involvement in a federal lawsuit filed earlier this year challenging the Trump administration’s funding freeze. 

“It’s hard to say right now which decisions and actions might unintentionally result in things going awry,” said Smith-Brubaker. “Even though we still feel it was not in farmer’s best interest to have this degree of disruption, and fear for what a new reality could mean where every change in administration could involve a complete dismantling of stability and promises, we are extremely grateful for the opportunity to still leverage these funds for what our farmers need most.”

In a series of separate recent actions, the USDA provided a peek into how leaders at the nation’s highest food and farming agency have taken strides to comply with the president’s executive orders targeting climate action, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In mid-June, the agency announced the termination of more than 145 awards totaling $148.6 million of “woke DEI funding.” Then, on July 10, the USDA posted a final rule in the Federal Register revoking a longstanding provision that ensured “disadvantaged” producers have equitable access to federal support, by allowing for carve-outs designed specifically for groups, such as Black and Indigenous farmers, that have historically faced discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the agency also revoked guidelines implemented during the Biden administration that mandated schools administering federal meal programs to ban discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Some observers say that in the USDA’s rushed campaign to gut federal funding while erasing footprints of the Biden administration, the termination of the climate-smart project happened much too fast, and much too soon. For one, Bonnie, who helped design and implement the PCSC initiative, believes that the USDA’s invitation for grantees to resubmit their applications signals the administration’s initial lack of understanding about the bipartisan backlash to the decision. 

“The Trump administration was surprised at the amount of support for not only this program, but for climate-smart agriculture more broadly,” said Bonnie. Leadership at USDA were, he added, “under pressure to satisfy the far right, to be anti-climate and anti-woke.”

“They try to paint with a broad brush about this being the Green New Deal,” Bonnie continued. “Most people that knew this program knew that they were blowing smoke.” 

Read Next USDA abruptly cancels rural energy grant application window Kari Lydersen

While the Blue Carbon, Green Fields team is hopeful that, in time, an iteration of the project may continue, work on the ground has stalled. If they do receive a new round of funding from the USDA, Collier said, one change to their budget proposal will have considerable impacts on how the project will be carried out. To satisfy the requirements for resubmission, nearly two-thirds of the funds for the award will have to go directly to participating producers — rather than to the partners like the UW team, which is how it was originally structured.

“That does mean that, pending what we learn as we engage with USDA on this, that if we’re able to go forward, participants will have to seek out their own services to support the practices that they’re implementing, rather than having those services provided by the project partners, as part of the grant,” said Collier. “Instead, they will receive funds to seek out the services that they need, like technical assistance, or like harvesting and transporting seaweed.”

That modification, though seemingly minor, is rather significant, particularly for small farmers who already struggle with limited time and resources to allocate to anything beyond their day-to-day operations, some of whom say it presents an unjust burden. According to fellow PCSC grantee Smith-Brubaker, such a structural change will make things harder for them. “It’s really too bad to have to make it even more complicated for farmers to get the services they want and need,” she said.

Ellen Scheffer, who co-operates a 20-acre organic vegetable and grain farm in Fall City, Washington, is a small farmer involved with the Blue Carbon, Green Fields project. The funds “being yanked away” makes Scheffer “feel really defeated about the future.” A downside of USDA’s resubmission process, she noted, is that “any positive benefit that might help the future of our environment is going to have to be a side benefit, rather than the direct goal of the research. It feels very, very frustrating, especially as someone who is living every day trying to grow food in a way that is good for our planet.” 

Others, like project partner Viva Farms, the nonprofit farm incubator that connected producers in their network with the seaweed researchers, feels as if the group’s chapter together has already come to a close. “It did feel like the momentum was really a sheer drop-off,” said Viva Farms’ Elma Burnham. “We were about to prepare to onboard all sorts of new farms, to have seaweed drying here, to sort of get them more action of the program, instead of more of this, like, planning. And, yeah, it was challenging to see it sort of come to a halt,” she said. 

The likelihood of revival, according to Burnham, feels low. “Of course, we would love to see more organic, small-scale farmers pursue this research, we would love to see more innovation and collaboration happening in the Puget Sound region. But it feels over,” said Burnham. “This particular project feels over.” 

Davis, the shellfish grower, says he struggled to come to terms with the time and workload that would be demanded of him in the revised program — and what the restructuring of the proposal to align with the Trump administration’s policy priorities altogether represents. “I just thought it was kind of backwards, to be honest. It just didn’t seem like the right way to do it,” he said. For instance, directing most of the grant money to the farmers rather than project leads, he added, “didn’t make sense.”   

Instead, he’s going his own way. Davis has begun planning out an even shorter seaweed supply chain in tandem with his daughter, Hannah, and Emily Buckner, one of her colleagues at the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, just two of the six original partners. They’ve been busy identifying producers in the Chimacum Valley to collaborate with, all within a 20-mile radius of his farm. By narrowing the geographic range and foregoing much of the soil chemistry research, the scope of Davis’s new venture is limited compared to Blue Carbon, Green Fields, but, he said, “At the end of the day, I was, and I am, too invested in the parts that [the USDA] didn’t want.”

Still, not all the equipment that the USDA funds bought is laying idle around the farm, at risk of catching cobwebs: Davis is currently testing out a raft-based suction system to vacuum up the excess seaweed clustered around sensitive geoducks.

“We’ve got the equipment, and we’re going to harvest it and dry some and see where this can go,” he said. “We want to move forward with that, just to see if it works.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Seaweed brought fishers, farmers, and scientists together. Trump tore them apart. on Jul 25, 2025.

It’s less than an hour before the Dave Matthews Band takes the stage on a sunny Thursday evening on the coast of Long Island — but the biggest crowds at the Northwell at Jones Beach Theater aren’t at the tequila bar. They’re in the “eco-village” operated by Reverb, a nonprofit focused on greening live music by inspiring fans to take action around climate change. 

As I wander through tents emblazoned with the logos of organizations like the Nature Conservancy and Generation180, volunteers explain how fans can reduce their carbon footprints and join the clean energy transition. The longest line emanates from Reverb’s flagship tent, where batches of limited-edition blue-and-yellow Nalgene bottles hang from tent poles like so many coconuts from a grove of palm trees. 

Fans acquire the bottles by making a $20 donation, which enters them into a raffle to win a guitar signed by Matthews; they can fill their bottles at a nearby filtered water station. It’s all part of “RockNRefill,” a partnership between Reverb and Nalgene. The program has raised $5 million for climate and conservation nonprofits and eliminated an estimated 4 million single-use plastic bottles. 

“It’s cutting down on single-use plastics, so we hope everybody takes a bottle home or brings it back to another show,” says Dan Hutnik, Reverb’s onsite coordinator. “We’re trying to help save the planet — I like to say, one water bottle at a time.” (I bought one of the Nalgenes, but didn’t win a signed guitar.)

Concertgoers wander around the Reverb eco-village at Dave Matthews’ show at the Northwell at Jones Beach Theater. Zack O’Malley Greenburg

With this year’s summer touring season in full swing, the Dave Matthews Band’s efforts are just one example of the increased focus on sustainability in live music over the past several years. Decades after trailblazers like Bonnie Raitt began to prioritize climate, more and more artists are embracing sustainability and pushing for change — both inside and outside the industry — with the help of organizations like Reverb. 

Founded in 2004 by environmentalist Lauren Sullivan and her husband Adam Gardner, a guitarist and vocalist of the alt-rock group Guster, Reverb has become a leading force in greening live music. The nonprofit sends staffers like Hutnik out on the road with acts from Matthews to Billie Eilish, setting up eco-villages and organizing volunteers. Reverb staffers serve as the bands’ de facto sustainability coordinators, allowing initiatives like RockNRefill to be scaled up, rather than every artist having to build something similar from scratch.

Reverb also coordinates with concert promoters and venues, which have their own sustainability teams and programs. As part of the recent renovation of Jones Beach, for example, Live Nation added a sorting facility out back where employees handpick recyclables and compostables out of the garbage. The company’s Road To Zero campaign, a partnership with Matthews, diverted 90 percent of landfill-bound waste at the majority of the band’s shows last summer.

Live music has grown immensely since the pandemic — the top 100 tours grossed roughly $10 billion last year, nearly double what they reached in 2019. (For various reasons unrelated to climate, the 2025 number will likely be lower.) 

If abandoning climate projects is the new normal in our current political moment, the music business hasn’t gotten the memo. According to a recent Reverb study, 9 out of 10 concertgoers are concerned about climate change and are prepared to take action — and artists are ready to lead the way.

“As more and more artists are asking for the same things, it makes sense for these venues to make it a permanent change and not something where they just say, ‘OK, put away all the Styrofoam and all that crap, we’ll save it for the next band,’” said Gardner. “And that’s where the power really starts coming into play.”

Five days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Coldplay played the biggest — and almost certainly the most overtly eco-friendly — stadium show of the 21st Century. A crowd of 111,000 streamed into Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, India, to see the latest stop on the band’s Music of the Spheres Tour. Coldplay has grossed nearly $1.3 billion in the first three years of the tour, making it the second-most lucrative of all time behind Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. 

Coldplay has notched quite a few firsts on the climate front. After the group’s 2016-2017 tour, front man Chris Martin and his bandmates were so concerned about their carbon footprint that they took a break from the road until they could forge a more sustainable path. They eventually began planning the Music of the Spheres Tour with a pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 percent compared to their last tour, and to hold themselves accountable with transparent reporting.

Coldplay committed to offsetting unavoidable emissions as responsibly as possible, drawing on the Oxford Principles for Net-Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting, a guide that aims to ensure the integrity of carbon credits. The group has also used a portion of its tour proceeds to support new green technologies and environmental causes. Above all, the band wanted to push the envelope industry-wide with a sustainability rider — a set of requests that artists make as a condition for performing — covering everything from venues’ power connections to free water for fans.

Coldplay performs at a Music of the Spheres tour stop in Las Vegas in June. The tour and album name references planets and outer space.
Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Concert promoters are accustomed to accommodating all manner of demands on big acts’ riders (ranging from peppermint soap to actual kittens) and have proven open to doing the same for climate initiatives.

“Any artist could add sustainability considerations to their rider and try to influence promoters and venues to do things in a lower-impact way,” said Luke Howell, the band’s head of sustainability. “While not all artists can change how a venue operates at the macro scale, they can all ask for no single-use plastics, more veggie options on menus, or make sure the kit they are using is efficient and specced correctly to minimize energy use. And they can all engage their fans.”

To that end, while operating at a scale that few other acts can approach, Coldplay has introduced a bevy of novel green touring concepts. The band partnered with BMW to develop the first mobile show battery, which can power 100 percent of a concert with renewable energy. These clean sources include solar panels that come along for the ride, as well as power-generating bicycles and kinetic floors that quite literally draw energy from dancing fans.

Coldplay, of course, isn’t the first group to care about its impact on the planet, or try to reduce it. Environmental activism in the modern pop music world dates back more than half a century to conservation-focused songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” 

Similarly, early benefit concerts — many organized by late folk singer Tom Campbell — focused on causes like protecting forests in the Pacific Northwest. After Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne played one such show in Oregon, their crews needed a police escort out of town to stave off a convoy of chainsaw-wielding loggers.

As the science around global warming went mainstream at the turn of the millennium, artists turned their focus toward climate change. Raitt’s 2002 summer tour launched Green Highway, a traveling eco-village where fans could learn about environmental issues and check out the newest hybrid vehicles from Honda. She and her manager, Kathy Kane, convinced tour bus companies to let them power their vehicles with biodiesel, booking the tour well in advance so as to route buses efficiently instead of wasting fuel hopscotching the country. 

At every venue, Raitt’s rider called for replacing disposable silverware with real cutlery, and she began bringing her own water bottle refill stations to reduce backstage plastic use. If there wasn’t a proper recycling system on-site, the crew would bring paper scraps on the bus and dispose of them properly in the next town. And Raitt inspired a new generation of artists who were concerned about live music’s environmental footprint.

“All I had to do was look at the ground when the lights came up at the end of the show to see all the plastic,” said Guster’s Gardner. “I just didn’t feel good about it.”

His wife, Lauren Sullivan, was working for the Rainforest Action Network when a venue refused to let them set up a table at a Dave Matthews show. Apparently, the nonprofit had been rallying against old growth woodcutting practices of one of the venue’s major sponsors. When Matthews threatened to skip the gig, the venue relented. 

The episode inspired Sullivan to team up with her husband to channel the power of live music into climate action. Sullivan reached out to Raitt, who was on the Rainforest Action Network’s board, and learned that the touring gear from Green Highway was in storage. Raitt offered it up — and pledged to incubate Sullivan’s project via her own nonprofit, until Reverb was officially launched in 2004.

Sullivan and Gardner wanted their new nonprofit to be an organization that all acts could use to make their tours greener. In their vision, fans walking into any venue would be greeted by a Reverb volunteer wearing a band-branded T-shirt, ready to engage on environmental issues. Concertgoers would be incentivized to take action — like reducing their own carbon footprint or pushing elected officials to enact eco-friendly legislation — with chances to win goodies like ticket upgrades and signed instruments. 

On the artists’ side, Reverb helped institutionalize practices that not only reduced waste, but saved dollars — like replacing single-use batteries with rechargeable battery packs for performers’ in-ear monitors. Over time, due to artist demand, these rechargeable packs became the norm.

It turned out that, when big acts demanded a certain standard of sustainability, the live music industry was willing to make meaningful changes. Adam Met, from the alt-pop band AJR, remembers realizing this while planning a tour five years ago and asking venues to eliminate single-use plastics.

“Every place we went, the venue [employees] said, ‘Oh, like Jack Johnson,’” recalled Met, who now serves on Reverb’s advisory board. “That was the artist bringing the requests to the table, and an organization like Reverb.”

As the nonprofit grew, one challenge was broadening its reach beyond alt-rock, whose artists and audiences skew heavily white, male, and middle-aged. To that end, Reverb worked increasingly with emerging artists to help them weave sustainability into their touring process from day one.  

Perhaps the best example is Billie Eilish, who started teaming up with Reverb six years ago when she rose to stardom with her 2019 album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” On her 2022 Happier Than Ever Tour, Reverb helped her eliminate 117,000 single-use plastic bottles, save 8.8 million gallons of water, and push venues to offer plant-based meals — for the same prices as meat-based meals. She also introduced the pricier Changemaker Ticket, with proceeds supporting climate projects. Eilish even fueled her 2023 Lollapalooza set with solar-backed batteries.

Billie Eilish performs onstage at Lollapalooza in 2023 in Chicago.
Michael Hickey / Getty Images for ABA

Other young artists have also joined the movement. Last year, for the first time, solar panels fueled the batteries behind festivals in the world of country music (Tyler Childers’ Healing Appalachia) and hip-hop (Tyler, the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw). And concert promoters continue to step up to meet artist and fan demand. In 2022, Live Nation invested in Turn Systems, purveyor of a leading reusable cup setup; earlier this month, AEG hosted its first solar-backed battery-powered festival.

“As touring infrastructure becomes normalized where we don’t have to go out of our way to bring along our reusables and compostables, it’s just part of what’s happening at those venues,” said Gardner. “If that becomes the new normal, then there’s massive savings there, both with carbon and with dollars.”

On a bright Monday morning, I was walking through Central Park with AJR’s Met — discussing the future of green touring — when, appropriately, we happened upon the seasonal amphitheater at Rumsey Playfield. Perched on a hill overlooking Bethesda Fountain, it has hosted acts ranging from Pitbull to the Barenaked Ladies. The venue is largely constructed with repurposed shipping containers.

“So the infrastructure itself is already reused, which is great,” said Met, who then wondered aloud how this sort of space could be used during the venue’s downtime — perhaps as a seasonal solar farm. “There are all of these different ways to think about how to use the venue itself as a producer for sustainability initiatives.”

For Met, though, what’s even more powerful is the collective ability of fans to mobilize around the causes championed by their favorite artists. That’s the focus of his new book, Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connectivity to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World. 

He believes that, with a little encouragement, audiences can be particularly potent around local causes. For example, during last summer’s AJR tour stop in Phoenix — where temperatures reached 109 degrees — thousands of fans signed petitions to FEMA asking the agency to designate extreme heat as a type of emergency, thereby unlocking additional funds for response. In Salt Lake City, concertgoers phone-banked around increasing the Great Salt Lake’s water levels because of the economic benefits it provides to seven different states; Met noted that each state later voted for progressive climate policies, even the ones that went for Trump.

This sort of activity might strike some as preachy, but it turns out most fans don’t mind. According to a survey of 350,000 concertgoers organized by Met’s nonprofit, Planet Reimagined, most fans encourage it. A full 70 percent of respondents said they had no problem with musicians publicly addressing climate change; 53 percent believed artists had an obligation to do so.

Perhaps the most important thing an artist can do on the climate front is spotlight the collective carbon footprint of concertgoers — a facet that has more to do with advocating for a greener society than a greener music industry. As part of its Music Decarbonization Project, Reverb recently released its Concert Travel Study, which found the average amount of CO2 emissions generated by the thousands of fans getting to a given show is 38 times larger than that of the typical act — including artist and crew travel, hotel stays, and gear transportation. 

That makes sense: 80 percent of fans at the average show arrive in a personal vehicle, usually gasoline-powered. Yet the study also found that fans are hungry for greener ways to attend concerts — 33 percent would prefer to use public transit, but only 9 percent say they can and do.

Rock stars can’t make cities build more subways. But they can work with municipalities to run more routes on show nights, and keep trains and buses open later than usual. They can also team up with businesses like Rally and Uber that can offer deals on group shuttles. That’s something Raitt and her peers never had back in the day.

“I mean, what were you going to do, send postcards to people in the ’90s: ‘Let’s meet up at 8 o’clock and catch a ride to the show?’” said Raitt’s manager, Kane. “The development of technology has been able to allow fans to connect into a community, and artists to connect to their fans, in more real time.”

Music — and the special energy and sense of community that forms around a concert — has a unique power, whether that’s starting fashion trends or catalyzing social change. It shouldn’t be a stretch for acts to inspire fans to choose more sustainable options, especially if artists and venues do the work to make those options more accessible. 

At its best, live music can be a launching pad for all sorts of climate-friendly ideas — from the plant-based concessions championed by Eilish to the kinetic dance floors pushed by Coldplay — making them not only available, but desirable to the broader public.

In the meantime, back at Jones Beach, as Dave Matthews winds down his set, thousands of cars sit in the parking lot beyond the grandstand, dimly illuminated by a strawberry moon rising over the ocean. While many fans will be leaving with new reusable water bottles, they’ll still have to burn dinosaur bones to get home. But the singer offers a message of hope.

“The world is a little bit crazy at the moment,” Matthews tells the crowd. “We should take care of each other a little bit more.”

One Nalgene at a time.

Correction: This story originally misstated the partners involved in the RockNRefill program.

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How musicians and concert venues are upping the tempo on climate action on Jul 25, 2025.

The massive budget bill that President Trump signed into law earlier this month took aim at a robust system of tax credits that have aided the explosion of U.S. wind and solar energy in recent years. While the move was primarily intended to help enable the law’s extension of tax breaks for high-earning Americans, some Republicans felt the law did not go far enough in discouraging the growth of wind and solar power. Those holdouts, however, voted for the bill after saying they’d received assurances from President Trump that he’d use his executive authority to further stymie the energy sources. 

“We believe we’re going to get 90-plus percent of all future projects terminated,” U.S. Representative Chip Roy of Texas told Politico after the bill passed. “And we talked to lawyers in the administration.”

Last week, Trump’s Department of the Interior announced what appeared to be a fulfillment of the president’s promise to his party’s right wing. The department’s new guidelines for wind and solar developers now require all federal approvals for clean energy projects to undergo “elevated review” by Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, who was appointed by President Trump in January.

The new guidelines include a granular outline of steps that will now require personal approval from Bergum’s office, rather than being delegated to department bureaucrats as had previously been customary. Experts who spoke to Grist say that this could create an unmanageable slowdown for developers and allow the administration to quietly kill wind and solar projects on public land. Some are even worried that the effect of the updated regulations will spill over into private projects, which sometimes have to consult with the Interior Department when their work bleeds into federal lands or a habitat for endangered species.

Since only 4 percent of existing renewable energy projects are on public land, clean industry insiders who have interpreted the new policy narrowly are not yet panicking. But those with a broader interpretation of the text — or those who suspect that the administration will take a broad interpretation — wonder if the new rules will amount to a de facto gag order on the industry. For now, only time will tell just how many of their fears come to pass.  

Much of the memo’s power to wreak havoc for renewables depends on how strictly it’s enforced. The Interior Department maintains a website called Information for Planning and Consultation, or IPaC, which developers often use to plan large-scale projects. You type in the name of a locale, draw a border around the general area of your proposed project, and IPaC will tell you what kind of federal permitting you might need to move forward. (For example, it would flag if there are any protected wetlands or endangered species that would be affected by your development.) As of last week, the website now displays a pop-up warning users that “solar and wind projects are currently not eligible to utilize the Information for Planning and Consultation website.” This kind of opacity could make it especially hard for developers to plan for an endless bureaucratic battle with Interior. 

“It’s one thing to take away our [tax] credits, but it’s another to basically just put impediments so projects can’t get built,” a source who works for a renewables developer told E&E News. (He was granted anonymity due to his ongoing professional engagement with the federal government.) “The level of review here is so ridiculous.”

Others say that, while the outlook for wind and solar has become much dimmer, the new Interior rules aren’t necessarily a kill shot. “I was personally very worried when I saw it come out,” said Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics, a solar risk management firm. “But after doing more reading, it does seem like it affects, hopefully, a minority of assets.” 

An internal report from the investment bank and research firm Roth Capital Partners, which was obtained by Grist, estimated that only 5 percent of projects on private land — specifically, those that require an easement or need to cross public land to connect a transmission line to the main electrical grid — would be affected by the new regulations. 

“If [projects are on] a private piece of land, that’s a totally different story that would not be impacted by this,” said Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “There’s plenty of projects that are going to go ahead.” 

Others warn that it will be hard to know anything for certain until the dust clears and the permitting process begins to play out. “Just how broad and wide-scoped the activities listed in the memo were, points towards an attempt to quash [private] projects, not just the ones on federal land,” said Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at the clean energy think tank Energy Innovations, noting that developers often end up consulting the Interior Department on issues like wildlife protection.

Regardless of the scope of the memo, any move with the potential to slow the deployment of renewables is almost certainly bad news for American energy, since most other sources of new electricity simply aren’t being built: 93 percent of new energy that came online in 2024 was renewable. But upon taking office, President Trump warned that the United States was reliant on a “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” and immediately set about revoking previously approved federal funding from green energy projects, trying to cancel offshore wind leases, and rescinding clean energy tax credits that had been expanded by his predecessor. How this will lead the nation toward the current administration’s promise of “energy dominance” is unclear. 

“You don’t have enough [electricity] supply to meet new demand,” said O’Brien. “Instead of new capacity coming online — cheap renewables — you have existing gas plants running longer, and so gas demand goes up and prices go up, both for power plants and for household consumers. … All signs point toward this being a bad, bad scenario.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will new Interior Department rules shackle wind and solar? Insiders are divided. on Jul 25, 2025.

The apocalypse will be televised Channel Comment brendan 25th July 2025 Teaser Media

Every summer brings the familiar joys of sunny weather, family barbecues, and beach vacations. But for Americans on the Gulf or Atlantic coasts, the daily weather forecast always comes with a constant thrum of worry — any small disturbance in the Atlantic has the potential to evolve into a major storm.

And as hurricane season gets underway, the palace intrigue, staffing cuts, and general upheaval of the Trump administration could have dire effects for people on these coasts.

We know hurricanes all too well. I was still in elementary school when we had to evacuate for Ivan and fret over Dennis in my small northwest Florida hometown. And I was in middle school in 2006, when refugees from Katrina were still pouring into my school district to enroll in my class — since their schools no longer existed.

I was in college at Louisiana State University when torrential rains flooded Baton Rouge in 2016. And just one year later, Hurricane Harvey stalled over southwest Louisiana, causing catastrophic flooding in that corner of the state.

I’m no stranger to natural disasters, and that’s exactly why I felt called to spend my career at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — one of many federal agencies that work together to both predict hurricanes and repair the damage when one strikes.

Each hurricane can feel like an act of God. Why this storm? Why now? Why my town, and why me? The longer I worked at NOAA, the more I came to appreciate how many experts work together to predict these storms and respond to them.

I wasn’t a storm chaser or a hurricane expert. I managed the budget for a major coastal wetland restoration program called the Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act.

CWPPRA is a piece of legislation spearheaded back in 1990 by Senator John Breaux of Louisiana. Five federal agencies work together to implement CWPPRA projects that build back land along Louisiana’s coastline, and NOAA alone has already restored 14,000 acres of coastal land since the law was passed 35 years ago.

Some of NOAA’s restoration projects protect the shrimp fisheries that are vital to Louisiana’s economy. Others restore habitats for migratory birds as they pass through Louisiana on their long journeys north or south. Some reinforce levees to protect crucial hurricane evacuation routes. And others still restore land that was lost in Hurricane Katrina.

It’s hard to overstate what a great investment coastal restoration is. Dozens of other government employees and I worked hard every day to design effective projects and get money out the door so that local Louisiana businesses could build land on what used to be open water.

At first glance, it might seem like my program has nothing to do with hurricane preparedness. But as any Southerner knows about hurricanes, the further inland you are, the safer you are.

That land protects every Louisianan, especially the poorest residents who are least likely to evacuate when a storm makes landfall, and most likely to suffer the consequences. And when Louisiana is protected from storm damage, that’s money FEMA doesn’t have to spend to rebuild destroyed schools, homes, and highways.

But unfortunately, NOAA — and the CWPPRA program specifically — is among the victims of this administration’s slash-and-burn tactics. And I’m one of thousands of NOAA employees who’ve lost their jobs since the president took office in January.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Gulf of America Alliance (@gulfofamericaalliance)

Without my financial expertise, money isn’t getting out the door to rebuild South Louisiana. Cuts to FEMA loom on the horizon. And soon, hurricane season will ramp up ferociously. I worry about my hometown in Florida, the people of South Louisiana, and everyone in states affected by hurricanes.

It’s not too late to protect the federal workers who remain in their roles working on hurricane preparedness. Much of the damage from hurricanes this summer can be restored, but you can’t bring back the dead.

This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Previously in The Revelator:

In Ohio, Facing a Future Without Clean Water

The post Trump’s NOAA Cuts Put Coastal Communities at Risk appeared first on The Revelator.

In the first six months of the second Trump administration, some 60,000 federal workers have been targeted for layoffs, even more have taken buyouts, and up to trillions of dollars in funding has been frozen or halted. Many more people could still be facing cuts under additional planned reductions.

President Donald Trump has explicitly targeted climate- and justice-related programs and funding, but the resulting cuts have gone deep into services communities rely on to survive, like food aid in rural areas or improvements to failing wastewater infrastructure. Farmers have lost grants and support that help keep them going through increasingly volatile weather. Even your favorite YouTube creators may be affected.

We asked those who have lost their federal jobs or funding to tell us about what’s being lost: What was their work providing to communities, and what happens now?

Their stories, reflecting just a small sample of the many people who’ve been affected, illuminate  how deep these cuts go, not only into programs explicitly working to reduce emissions, but also into those keeping us safe, healthy, fed, and informed.

Have you been impacted, or know someone who has? We want to hear about it. Message us on Signal at 206-876-3147 or share your story using this form. (Learn more about how to reach us and how we will use your information.)

Sort by topic All Disaster recovery Health and safety Food access Historical preservation Public information Education Data and research Waste and recycling Energy costs

• Disaster recovery

  “It offered housing, your food was paid for. I didn’t really have to worry about how I would survive.”

  Rachel Suber, former FEMA Corps member | Pennsylvania

  Read more

  Since January, Rachel Suber had been a member of FEMA Corps, a specialized program of AmeriCorps, the federal national service program, which deploys volunteers to disaster zones to aid in recovery. She’d been assigned to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to help those affected by Hurricane Debby, a tropical cyclone that flooded parts of the Northeast last summer.

  As a corps volunteer with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Suber would go into the field to survey damage and help people access federal assistance funding. Back at the office, she would log data about what had been done at site inspections, where the worst damage was, and who had yet to receive assistance.

  In April, Suber got the news that her program — and all of AmeriCorps — was being terminated. “We will be demobilized immediately,” she remembers her boss saying. “I’m going to miss you all.” One hundred and thirty FEMA Corps members and some 32,000 AmeriCorps volunteers were out of work.

  Suber and her cohort were aware of the changes Trump was making to FEMA and other federal agencies, but the funding for her program was allocated for the year. No one had thought the new administration could take it away.

  So far, FEMA’s work in the region continues. But without help from the corps members, Suber said, more work will be put on program managers, slowing the process of getting aid to those who need it.

  For Suber, it’s also the end of her path to a career and a way out of rural Pennsylvania, where jobs are scarce. “It offered housing, your food was paid for. I didn’t really have to worry about how I would survive.” With the cancellation of the program, less than four months into what should have been a 10-month assignment, Suber’s dreams of working for FEMA have faded.

  — Zoya Teirstein

• Health and safety

  “People felt like their concerns were real and that they deserved better.”

  Caroline Frischmon, graduate research assistant | Mississippi

  Read more

  Caroline Frischmon had been selected to receive a $1.25 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to study air pollution in two Louisiana towns and Cherokee Forest, a subdivision in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The neighborhood, which is near a Chevron refinery, a Superfund site, and a liquefied natural gas terminal, has more than three times the amount of cancer risk the EPA deems acceptable.

  The funding was part of EPA’s Science to Achieve Results, or STAR, an initiative that has awarded more than 4,100 grants nationwide since 1995 to support high-quality environmental and public health research. In April, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin ordered the termination of STAR and other research grants, including some $124 million in funds that had already been promised. Frischmon’s funding evaporated overnight.

  As a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Frischmon had set up low-cost air monitors in Cherokee Forest and identified a recurring pattern of short-lived, intense pollution episodes that correlated with resident complaints of burning eyes, sore throats, vomiting, and nausea. The state air quality monitors were capturing average pollution levels but missed short-term spikes that were just as consequential to human health.

  “The validation has really led to an activation in the community,” said Frischmon. “People felt like their concerns were real and that they deserved better.”

  The $1.25 million EPA grant would have funded a multiyear air quality study and Frischmon’s postdoctoral position at the university. She is now job hunting and searching for smaller grants, but she isn’t optimistic she will find funding on the scale of the EPA grant. For the community, she said, it feels like an abrupt end to tangible progress toward solving their health crisis. “So there’s a lot of sadness over losing that momentum.”

  — Naveena Sadasivam

• Food access

  “Agricultural producers are already living on the fringes of income.”

  Matthew O’Malley, agricultural engineer with the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service | Colorado

  Read more

  As an agricultural engineer with the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, Matthew O’Malley’s job was helping farmers and ranchers in northeastern Colorado implement more efficient infrastructure to deal with growing water scarcity. On any given day, that could involve anything from building an irrigation system that cuts down on the amount of water released to feed thirsty crops to designing a retention basin to store excess water produced during rainy periods for use during drier ones.

  In February, O’Malley was abruptly fired from his position in a wave of mass layoffs by the Trump administration. By the end of the following month, he’d be invited back to work, temporarily, after a federal court ruled the thousands of laid-off government workers must be reinstated. O’Malley instead elected to take the deferred resignation he was subsequently offered, wary of the volatility. Until September 30, he will remain a federal employee on paper.

  Before the mass government firings hit the NRCS offices in northeast Colorado, there were a total of four staffers, O’Malley included, serving as agricultural engineers in the region. Half took the deferred resignation.

  “The planning stopped for the projects I was designing overnight,” said O’Malley. “I’m more concerned for the smaller agricultural producers, rather than myself, for the agency. They’re the ones that rely on USDA programs to help them make it through years when there’s crop failure.”

  Because of the economic landscape, escalating extreme weather risk, and intensifying water scarcity, farmers’ need for support in the region is at a level O’Malley has never before seen. “Agricultural producers are already living on the fringes of income,” he said. “Helping these producers protect the resources that they have, and allowing them to better utilize them, ultimately helps everyone. We all need to eat.”

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

  Photo credit: Courtesy Matthew O’Malley

• Health and safety

  “The funding just stopped. I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

  Edgar Villaseñor, advocacy campaign manager for the Rio Grande International Study Center | Texas

  Read more

  Residents of Laredo, Texas, like people in cities all over the world, endure a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, whereby roads, sidewalks, and buildings trap heat. For Laredo, this phenomenon only exacerbates already ferocious heat, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods that tend to have fewer trees and green spaces.

  Last summer, to better understand how heat affects Laredo’s 260,000 residents, the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and enlisted more than 100 volunteers to drive around the city taking temperature readings. Edgar Villaseñor, the center’s advocacy campaign manager, then worked with a company called CAPA Strategies to create a map of heat throughout the city.

  Villaseñor wanted more detailed data and an enhanced, interactive map that would not only be easier for residents to navigate, but also help the city council plan interventions, like installing more shade for people waiting at bus stops. He applied for a $10,000 grant through NOAA’s Center for Heat Resilient Communities, which was funded through the Inflation Reduction Act.

  The center had planned to work with a range of communities for a year to craft targeted heat action plans, and then to create guides that would help cities around the U.S. build their own heat strategies.

  The research center was ready to announce in May that Villaseñor’s nonprofit, along with 14 city governments, had been selected. But the day before the announcement, NOAA instead sent notices that it was defunding the center. “The funding just stopped,” Villaseñor said. “I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

  Villaseñor said his work won’t stop, even though that $10,000 grant would have gone a long way. “I’m still trying to see what I can do without funding.”

  Read more: Funding to protect American cities from extreme heat just evaporated

  — Matt Simon

• Historical preservation

  “You have to make sure you’re not destroying any wetlands, not affecting air pollution … not harming any historical or cultural material.”

  Name withheld, National Park Service archaeologist | East Coast

  Read more

  Archaeology might not be the first profession that comes to mind when you think of the National Park Service. But the federal agency, housed under the Interior Department, needs a whole lot of them — to examine historical artifacts, to oversee excavations, to ensure that on-site construction projects comply with preservation laws.

  One federal archaeologist, who asked that their name be withheld for security, worked at a historic East Coast park, combing through a “very long backlog” of 19th-century farm equipment and deciding which samples should be preserved. Storage space is a “very serious problem in archaeology,” they said, and the park service generally lacks the funding to make more room.

  The other part of their job was about compliance, ensuring that proposed developments — whether a new water line or a building renovation — adhered to federal laws on environmental and historical impacts. “You have to make sure you’re not destroying any wetlands, not affecting air pollution … not harming any historical or cultural material,” they said.

  This worker had been at their post, which was supported by funding via the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, for national parks, just over a year when Trump froze IRA spending. They found out in February that their funding was no longer available, but held on a few more weeks, thanks to extra funds cobbled together by their supervisor. By the time a federal judge ordered the IRA money unfrozen, they had already accepted another archaeology job. With all the funding uncertainty — compounded by layoffs and buyouts that have reduced park service staff by 24 percent since the beginning of the year — they said the vacancy they left is unlikely to be filled.

  Without archaeologists, the worker said, simple maintenance projects could be stalled or improperly managed. “They will either not be able to do that or they will do the projects without compliance and destroy very important sites to our shared history.”

  — Joseph Winters

• Public information

  “The team was part of a nationwide push to build trust with communities so that we could better understand what they needed so that the government could serve communities better.”

  Amelia Hertzberg, environmental protection specialist at the EPA | Virginia

  Read more

  When EPA employees engage with communities affected by an environmental disaster, they often face angry and distrustful crowds. These communities are often the ones that have been historically neglected by the federal government, and residents may be dealing with serious health problems. Amelia Hertzberg was training staff to stay calm and engage productively in those situations.

  Hertzberg began working at the EPA in 2022, first as a research fellow and then as a full-time employee in the community engagement department within the environmental justice office. She initially helped communicate the risk that ethylene oxide, a toxic chemical used in sterilization, poses to communities. Then, as the EPA ramped up its efforts to work with historically disadvantaged communities during the Biden administration, she began conducting trainings to help staff understand how to work directly with communities facing trauma.

  “Again and again, I heard, ‘I don’t know how to deal with people’s emotions,’” recalled Hertzberg. “‘There’s things that I can’t help them with that make me upset, and I don’t know what to do with my feelings of stress or theirs.’ And so I was trying to meet that need.”

  In April, the Trump administration announced that it would lay off 280 employees from the EPA’s environmental justice office and reassign an additional 175 people, effectively ending the office altogether. The announcement came after a February notice that placed 170 staff members, including Hertzberg, on administrative leave. Just two of the 11 people on Hertzberg’s community engagement team stayed on, and most of their programs have been canceled. Hertzberg is still on administrative leave.

  “The environmental justice office is the EPA’s triage unit,” Hertzberg said. “The team was part of a nationwide push to build trust with communities so that we could better understand what they needed so that the government could serve communities better.”

  — Naveena Sadasivam

• Disaster recovery

  “We were in constant contact with survivors who were very upset.”

  Julian Nava-Cortez, former California Emergency Response Corps member | California

  Read more

  After devastating fires tore through Los Angeles in January, Julian Nava-Cortez traveled from northern California to assist survivors at a disaster recovery center near Altadena, where the Eaton Fire had nearly destroyed the entire neighborhood. People arrived in tears, overwhelmed and angry, he said.

  “We were the first faces that they’d see,” said Nava-Cortez, at the time a member of the California Emergency Response Corps, one of two AmeriCorps programs that sent workers to assist in fire recovery. He guided people to the resources they needed to secure emergency housing, navigate insurance claims, and go through the process of debris removal. He sometimes worked 11-hour, emotionally draining shifts, listening to stories of what survivors had lost. “We were in constant contact with survivors who were very upset,” he said. What kept him going, he said, was how grateful people were for his help.

  Volunteers like Nava-Cortez have helped 47,000 households affected by the fires, according to California Volunteers, the state service commission under the governor’s office. But in late April, Nava-Cortez and his team at the California Emergency Response Corps were suddenly placed on leave. Another program helping with the recovery in L.A., the California AmeriCorps Disaster Team, also abruptly shut down as a result of cuts to AmeriCorps.

  At the end of April, two dozen states, including California, sued the Trump administration over the cuts to AmeriCorps, alleging that DOGE illegally gutted an agency that Congress created and funded. In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts in those jurisdictions.

  The nonprofit that sponsored Nava-Cortez and his fellow AmeriCorps members offered them temporary jobs 30 days after they were put on leave, though many had already found other work. Nava-Cortez took the offer and worked for another month before the money ran out, but was unable to finish his term, which was supposed to go through the end of July. Since then, he’s been on unemployment, unable to find work ahead of moving to San Jose for school this fall.

  Read more: After disasters, AmeriCorps was everywhere. What happens when it’s gone?

  – Kate Yoder

• Public information

  “There might just be one day you log onto YouTube and none of your favorite creators are there anymore.”

  Emily Graslie, creator of The Brain Scoop YouTube channel | Illinois

  Read more

  Emily Graslie creates YouTube videos explaining all kinds of scientific research in fun, easy-to-understand ways. On her channel, The Brain Scoop, she’s covered topics ranging from fossils to rats, often partnering with libraries or museums to tell the story of their work.

  Her next project was going to be with the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, creating videos for The Brain Scoop explaining some of the organization’s groundbreaking medical research. She’d spent a year developing the series with her NIH partners and was supposed to be on campus at the NIH in January of this year to begin shooting. Instead, she received an email telling her that the project was on hold until further notice.

  The acting Health and Human Services secretary had issued a memo within the first days of the Trump administration halting nearly all external communications. “Because I’m considered a member of the media, I was unable to communicate with these people I had been partnering with for over a year,” she said.

  Through an informal meeting with one of her collaborators, she learned that the project was effectively canceled — and with it, money Graslie had been counting on for her livelihood, a slate of planned videos, and what she saw as important work educating viewers about lifesaving science.

  Many people may not realize, Graslie said, that the federal funding that supports scientific research and programming at museums also often covered contracts with independent creators like herself, to help communicate the work to the public.

  “One of the most significant things that The Brain Scoop did is just share the different kinds of work that happens at nature centers and museums across the country,” she said. The loss is “just a limiting of people’s understandings of what they’re capable of, who they want to be when they grow up, how they see the world around them.”

  Read more: Even your favorite YouTube creators are feeling the effects of federal cuts

  — Claire Elise Thompson

  Photo credit: Julie Florio

• Education

  “It’s a huge loss for the 1,000 students that we work with.”

  Sky Hawk Bressette, former restoration educator for the city of Bellingham’s Parks and Recreation Department | Washington

  Read more

  For three years, Sky Hawk Bressette served as a restoration educator in the parks department in Bellingham, Washington. With a fellow member of the Washington Service Corps, he worked with the school district to teach nearly every fifth grader in the city about native plants.

  Their free lessons — aligned with state science standards — showed kids how to identify plants, spot invasive species, and understand the role of native flora in the local ecosystem. They also hosted “mini-work parties,” where students got their hands dirty pulling weeds and planting native trees and shrubs, learning how to care for the land around them. “All of our teachers that we work with absolutely love what we do,” Bressette said.

  But that work is now on hold — possibly for good — after federal cuts to AmeriCorps funding. In late April, Bressette received notice that he was being put on unpaid leave, effective immediately. “It’s weird, it’s sad, it’s scary,” he said. “I really do love what I do.” After a judge struck down the cuts in June, he briefly returned to work until his term ended in July. By then, he had already missed the end of the school year, the busiest time for working with students.

  Outside the classroom, Bressette helped organize volunteer work parties that planted thousands of trees and hauled dump trucks’ worth of invasive species out of local parks in Bellingham. But with no guarantee for future funding, the city is eliminating Bressette and his colleague’s positions. That means that the environmental education lessons are likely shut down for at least the next year, Bressette said, while the city weighs whether to bring them back.

  “It’s a huge loss for the 1,000 students that we work with in our city alone,” he said.

  — Kate Yoder

  Photo credit: Allison Greener Grant

• Disaster recovery

  “I lost my job from the fire and here again from this political climate.”

  Ryanda Sarraude, former office administrator at Roots Reborn | Hawai‘i

  Read more

  In the summer of 2023, Ryanda Sarraude was working as an account manager at a human resources company serving local businesses in West Maui. When massive wildfires shut down tourism and contaminated the water in her neighborhood, Sarraude was forced to move out of her house and her company laid her off because so many local businesses had shut down.

  Months later, a job opened up at Roots Reborn, a nonprofit organization serving recent immigrants on Maui, and Sarraude was hired as an office administrator. The role was funded by a federal program aimed at helping disaster survivors get back on their feet.

  Lāhainā is home to many immigrant communities from the Philippines, Latin America, and the Pacific islands. Many families who didn’t have bank accounts had hidden cash in their homes that burned down, so the nonprofit launched a financial education workshop. Health issues like depression and asthma shot up in the wake of the fires, so Roots Reborn partnered with Kaiser to help people enroll in health insurance by providing guidance and Spanish interpreters.

  “I wanted to help people,” Sarraude said. “It was very rewarding.” Then in February, Sarraude found out the federal funding for her position had evaporated amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on government spending. Sarraude was among 131 Maui workers who lost their jobs almost overnight across 27 different organizations, even though the nonprofit overseeing their program had expected the federal funding to be renewed for several more months. Around 5 p.m. on a Sunday, Sarraude was told not to show up to work the next day.

  “I lost my job from the fire and here again from this political climate,” Sarraude said. She scrambled to apply to other gigs and a few weeks later landed a lower-paying role as a web administrator for a local business. She likes her new job, but is relying on Medicaid and food stamps and is nervous about what Republicans’ decision to cut funding for those programs will mean for her access to food and health care.

  — Anita Hofschneider

• Food access

  “We want kids to understand where their food comes from. We want them to be able to have that experience of growing their own food.”

  Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted | Wisconsin

  Read more

  First established some 25 years ago in a historically underserved neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin, that has long struggled with access to healthy food, Mendota Elementary’s garden is now a part of the school’s curriculum — students plant produce, which is shared with local food pantries. Come summer, the garden opens to the surrounding community to harvest crops like garlic, tomatoes, zucchini, collards, and squash.

  “They’re mending the soil one week, and then the next week they’re going to start to see these little seedlings pop through the soil,” said Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted, a nonprofit that helps oversee the garden.

  In January, the Rooted team applied for a $100,000 two-year grant through the USDA’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School program, intended to provide public schools with locally produced fresh vegetables as well as food and agricultural education, a grant they’d received in past cycles. The program was created in 2010, and Congress allocated $10 million for it this fiscal year.

  In March, Rooted received an email announcing the cancellation of this year’s grant program “in alignment with President Donald Trump’s executive order Ending Radical and Wasteful Government and DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

  The loss of the funds is “so upsetting,” said Krug, and the reasoning provided, she continued, is “ridiculous.” In prior years, Krug said, “we were being asked ‘What are you doing to address equity? To address diversity? How are you making sure your project is for everyone?’ And now we’re going to be penalized for talking about that.”

  The team at Rooted is now working overtime to find other funding sources to continue the work. “We’re not ready to say, without this funding, that we’re going to abandon this program, because we believe so strongly in it,” she said.

  Read more: Trump’s latest USDA cuts undermine his plan to ‘Make America Healthy Again’

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

• Public information

  “It’s our duty to help protect people and have them understand the risks and understand the tools they can use.”

  Tom Di Liberto, former public affairs specialist at NOAA | Washington, D.C.

  Read more

  For Tom Di Liberto, a climate scientist-turned communications specialist, working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fulfilled a dream he had held since elementary school. It was also, he believed, fulfilling an essential function for the American people.

  “I was incredibly proud of being able to work with different communities to help them understand the resources that NOAA has, so they can properly use them in the decisions that they make,” he said. That included working with doctors to help them make better use of the agency’s climate and weather data to understand the shifting probabilities of various medical diagnoses, and reaching out to faith communities to discuss how they could use their gathering spaces to help residents weather extreme heat and other impacts.

  “Those sorts of activities are all done now,” Di Liberto said.

  He lost his job at NOAA on February 27, along with hundreds of his colleagues targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency. By court order, he was rehired in March, but then fired once again in April, he said, when the judge let that order expire. Di Liberto is now working as a media director for the nonprofit Climate Central.

  These workforce reductions have hampered the agency’s research capacity, as well as its ability to share that critical research with the public, Di Liberto said.

  “I think people don’t know that NOAA is beyond just your weather forecast — that NOAA works directly with communities to help build resilience plans for extremes,” he said, adding that, under the new Trump administration, the bulk of that community work “is either threatened or come to a screeching halt.”

  One of the communication projects he was proudest of was launching NOAA’s first animated series — a creative tool to teach climate and weather science to kids. “I have all the episodes downloaded personally on my computer — so if they ever take it down, they’ll go right back up,” he said.

  — Claire Elise Thompson

• Food access

  “This was for important work, representing small- and medium-sized farms, and also trying to leverage the food economy to go faster and further.”

  Anthony Myint, cofounder of Zero Foodprint | Oregon

  Read more

  Anthony Myint’s nonprofit, Zero Foodprint, works across the public and private sectors, sourcing and awarding grants that incentivize the adoption of better farming practices. His goal is to support farmers who are working to build healthier soil, which increases the food system’s resilience to supply chain shocks, improves water quality, and stores carbon.

  A chef-turned-entrepeneur, Myint founded the nonprofit after seeing firsthand how important farming practices are to ensuring a more sustainable planet.

  In April, Myint learned that a $35 million USDA grant his team was a subawardee on had been suddenly canceled. The nonprofit had been awarded roughly $7 million in 2023 as part of a five-year program to help hundreds of farmers and agricultural projects across the country implement production techniques to improve soil quality and crop resilience.

  Myint’s team had been helping award and distribute the funding to roughly 400 projects, like a group of almond producers in California’s Central Valley working to establish composting and nutrient management practices. By the time the project was terminated, only about $800,000 had been awarded to around 50 projects. “We were ramping up to the bulk of work this spring,” said Myint.

  The loss of the funding left “a really big gap.” “We’re using reserves and philanthropy and other things to maintain and sort of shift our growth onto that new available capacity instead of hiring,” said Myint. “We’re essentially frozen.”

  Myint saw the USDA funds as a vital — and successful — incentive to move farms and companies to more sustainable practices. “This was for important work, representing small- and medium-sized farms, and also trying to leverage the food economy to go faster and further … and every single project was negatively impacted.”

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

• Data and research

  “It’s just about having the info that policymakers need to make decisions. Without it, we’re flying blind.”

  Shane Coffield, former science and technology policy fellow at AAAS | Washington, D.C.

  Read more

  Every year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, places roughly 150 fellows at various federal agencies. Established in 1973, the Science and Technology Policy Fellowships program provides a pipeline for scientists to enter public service.

  Shane Coffield was one of six fellows placed at the EPA last September. As a researcher with a doctorate in Earth system science, Coffield specializes in various remote sensing techniques and was tasked with working on the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, an annual accounting of the country’s emissions, which provides a baseline for climate policy and has been published since the early 1990s. The U.S. is also obligated to provide the emissions data every year to a United Nations body that oversees international climate negotiations.

  In April, the agency missed a deadline to release the data, even though Coffield and others at the EPA had finished the report. That month, the agency also terminated its agreement with AAAS that allowed Coffield and five other fellows to work there, four months before their positions were due to end. This year’s report was never officially released, although the information was made public through a FOIA request. It’s unclear if the agency will produce the inventory in 2026.

  The greenhouse gas inventory is “policy agnostic,” said Coffield. “It’s just about having the info that policymakers need to make decisions. Without it, we’re flying blind.”

  During his time at the agency, Coffield also helped other countries such as El Salvador and South Africa build their own greenhouse gas inventories. When the Trump administration instructed staff to drop all foreign aid work in late January, Coffield could not engage with his international counterparts anymore.

  — Naveena Sadasivam

  Photo credit: Courtesy Shane Coffield

• Education

  “There’s a huge need to increase climate literacy, even here in NYC, and now there will be fewer opportunities for it.”

  Rafi Santo, principal researcher at Telos Learning | New York

  Read more

  Last year, Rafi Santo helped launch an education project that aimed to connect young people from climate-impacted communities with scientists and artists to co-create interactive public exhibits. The program — a collaboration between Pratt Institute, Beam Center, and Santo’s organization, Telos Learning — was funded by a National Science Foundation grant focused on bringing STEM learning to new settings and audiences.

  “We have an incredible need to both have the general public understand the mechanisms behind climate change, but also understand what they can do about it,” Santo said. The pop-up exhibits would aim to build climate literacy and awareness of local adaptation efforts in New York.

  Santo, who studies educational frameworks, also wanted to research the significance of giving young people a seat at the table — “helping to better understand how those most affected by the crisis can be meaningfully contributing to its response.”

  The group received around 400 applications. But on April 25, the day they planned to send acceptance letters, they instead found out that their grant had been terminated. The National Science Foundation had announced that it was terminating awards “that are not aligned with program goals or agency priorities.” Hundreds of research grants were canceled.

  Santo’s program was specifically focused on young people in communities of color, which “probably made an easy keyword search for them,” he said.

  It was devastating to see so much passion and so many stories that now won’t get to be shared, Santo said, as well as the loss to the public of the opportunity to engage with climate topics in new ways. For him personally, this would also have been his first climate research initiative — something he had wanted to pursue professionally ever since he experienced a devastating heat wave in 2021. “It feels especially heartbreaking,” he said. “I now don’t know how I might contribute or what kind of projects I might do that can contribute to this work.”

  — Claire Elise Thompson

• Waste and recycling

  “Composting, for me, is a lot about community.”

  Ella Kilpatrick Kotner, compost program director at Groundwork RI | Rhode Island

  Read more

  “Composting, for me, is a lot about community,” said Ella Kilpatrick Kotner, who leads a composting program at Groundwork RI, a nonprofit in Providence, Rhode Island, “and treating this thing that many people think of as a waste as a resource to be cherished and handled with care and turned into something beautiful that we can then reuse to grow more food.”

  Every day, her team of three bikes through the city, collecting food scraps from hundreds of households. Back at a community garden, they mix it all with dry leaves and wood shavings, while sifting out pieces of plastic and even the occasional fork, transforming the waste into a nitrogen-rich conditioner for the soil. That compost is available to those enrolled in Groundwork RI’s subscription service to use in home gardens, yards, or urban farms.

  In December, Groundwork RI was one of nine organizations included in an $18.7 million grant awarded to the Rhode Island Food Policy Council through the Community Change Grants Program, a congressionally authorized program to support community-based organizations addressing environmental justice challenges.

  A portion of the three-year funding was intended to help Groundwork RI expand its collection service to neighboring cities, build a bigger compost hub, renovate its greenhouse and pay-what-you-can farm stand, and add composting bin systems to more local community gardens. It also would have made it possible for Kilpatrick Kotner’s team to launch a free food-scrap collection pilot with the city.

  During Trump’s first term, his administration committed to ambitious food waste reduction goals. This time, after months of uncertainty, the partners involved in the Rhode Island food-waste project learned in May that their grant was terminated. The EPA’s official notice, shared with Grist, informed the grantees that their project was “no longer consistent” with the federal agency’s funding priorities and therefore nullified “effective immediately.”

  Read more: An $18M grant would have drastically reduced food waste. Then the EPA cut it.

  – Ayurella Horn-Muller

  Photo credit: Charlotte Canner / Groundwork RI

• Health and safety

  “We have wastewater infrastructure that is old. It’s critical that we do the work to replace this.”

  Sheryl Sealy, assistant city manager for Thomasville | Georgia

  Read more

  Thomasville, Georgia, has a water problem. Its treatment system is far out of date, posing serious health and environmental risks — not just the risk of sewage overflowing into homes and waterways, but resulting respiratory issues as well.

  “We have wastewater infrastructure that is old,” said Sheryl Sealy, the assistant city manager for this city of 18,881 near the Florida border. “It’s critical that we do the work to replace this.”

  Earlier this year, Thomasville and its partners were awarded a nearly $20 million Community Change grant from the EPA to make the long-overdue wastewater improvements, build a resilience hub and health clinic, and upgrade homes in several historic neighborhoods.

  “The grant itself was really a godsend for us,” Sealy said.

  Thomasville has a history of heavy industry that has led to high risks from toxic air pollution, and the city qualified for the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, which prioritized funding for disadvantaged communities.

  In early April, as the EPA canceled grants for similar projects across the country, federal officials assured Thomasville that its funding was on track. Then, on May 1, the city received a termination notice. “We felt, you know, a little taken off guard when the bottom did let out for us,” said Sealy.

  Under the Trump administration, the EPA has canceled or interrupted hundreds of grants aimed at improving health and severe weather preparedness because the agency “determined that the grant applications no longer support administration priorities,” according to an emailed statement to Grist.

  Thomasville, along with other cities that have had grants terminated, is appealing the decision.

  Read more: Trump cuts hundreds of EPA grants, leaving cities on the hook for climate resiliency

  — Emily Jones

• Disaster recovery

  “I come home and I’m exhausted and I’ve got cat poop all over me, but it was just such a rewarding feeling.”

  Susan “Lala” Caballero, former humanitarian at the Maui Humane Society | Hawai‘i

  Read more

  Susan Caballero wasn’t living in Lāhainā the day that the West Maui town burned down on August 8, 2023. But the devastating wildfire brought the island’s tourism industry to a screeching halt. A day later, Caballero was laid off from her job as a salesperson at a boutique handicrafts store 45 minutes away.

  Within months, federal funding to help wildfire survivors poured in and the Biden administration released a federal grant specifically to help displaced workers. It was through that funding that Caballero got hired at the Maui Humane Society. Her job was caring for cats: feeding them, giving them medicine, persuading families to adopt them.

  There are 40,000 stray cats on Maui that need homes, about one cat for every four people living on the island. Residents often abandon their cats because there’s so little pet-friendly housing. It’s a massive challenge with terrible environmental consequences: Parasites in feral cat poop contaminate the ocean, killing endangered monk seals. Caballero felt proud using her sales skills to persuade families to take the creatures home, once successfully adopting out a 20-year-old feline.

  “It’s just an amazing feeling, I come home and I’m exhausted and I’ve got cat poop all over me, but it was just such a rewarding feeling,” Caballero said.

  In February, Caballero was hospitalized after a moped accident. She was lying in her hospital bed when she learned that she was out of a job. The state of Hawaiʻi had expected the federal grant supporting her position and 130 others to be renewed at least through September, but in February the state learned that, at best, the new administration would only offer half of what had been requested. Confronted with uncertain funding, the state shut down the program.

  “I was only making $23 an hour. I’m 58 years old,” she said. “I have to laugh because that’s all I can do and that hurts.”

  Five months later, she’s still physically recovering and isn’t sure what’s next. Her rent just went up to $1,582 per month, and her disability check will no longer cover it.

  — Anita Hofschneider

• Food access

  “This is a blow to our entire food system.”

  Robbi Mixon, executive director of the Alaska Food Policy Council | Alaska

  Read more

  Three years ago, the Alaska Food Policy Council, or AFPC, partnered with a handful of other food and farming groups to apply for the Regional Food Business Center program — a new initiative launched by the Biden administration to expand and build localized food supply chains. In May 2023, it was selected by the USDA as a sub-awardee to help create one of 12 national centers established through the initiative, leading the Alaska arm of the Islands and Remote Areas Regional Food Business Center.

  Ever since, Robbi Mixon, the AFPC’s executive director, and her team have devoted countless hours to developing the center, an online hub to help farm and food ventures connect with local and regional markets. Her team had planned to give out $1.6 million in grant awards — representing a direct investment in over 50 businesses over the next three years — and use another $1.4 million for training over 1,000 individuals statewide.

  In January, their funding was frozen by the new administration, and for the last six months, their funding pot has continued to remain inaccessible. On July 15, the USDA finally announced it was shuttering the program.

  “This is a blow to our entire food system,” said Mixon. The center “was a catalytic opportunity” to build capacity for small businesses across the state, she said. “Its loss disrupts food security planning, economic development, and supply chain resilience.”

  Mixon’s team had been planning to use their funding to support the creation of fresh produce markets in rural Alaska, training to help remote communities learn how to start home-based food businesses, and grant-sourcing for those in fishing and aquaculture industries, among other initiatives.

  “Food security is national security,” she said. “Just because this funding goes away, the need certainly does not.”
  
  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

• Energy costs

  “I’ll find the money, if I have to. I’ll win the lottery and spend the money on cheaper power.”

  John Christensen, Port Heiden tribal president | Alaska

  Read more

  In Port Heiden, Alaska, home to a small fishing community of Alutiiq peoples, the diesel fuel they need to power their lifestyle costs almost four times the national average.

  “Electricity goes up, diesel goes up, every year. And wages don’t,” said John Christensen, Port Heiden’s tribal president. “We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.” Christensen and his son are among those who will spend the summer hauling in thousands of pounds of fish each day to sell to seafood processing companies.

  In 2015, the community built its own fish processing plant, a way to keep more fishing income in the village. But the building has never been operational — they simply can’t afford to power it.

  The tribe planned to use a $300,000 grant to pay for studies to design two hydropower plants, which Christensen sees as a path to cheaper and cleaner energy. In theory, the plants could power the entirety of Port Heiden.

  The money was coming from Climate United, a national investment fund selected to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a project of the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, the fund has become a particular target in the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate climate programs. The EPA froze all grants, calling the fund “criminal” and leaving $20 billion in limbo.

  As it awaits the outcome of its lawsuit filed against the EPA and Trump, Climate United is exploring other options, including issuing the money as a loan rather than a grant. For his part, Christensen said he has lost what little faith he had in federal funding and has begun brainstorming other ways to get his community off diesel.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll find the money, if I have to. I’ll win the lottery, and spend the money on cheaper power.”

  Read more: This Alaska Native fishing village was trying to power their town. Then came Trump’s funding cuts.

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller

  Photo credit: Courtesy John Christensen

• Food access

  “Our people are hurting, and our people are hungry.”

  Sylvia Crum, director of development at Appalachian Sustainable Development | Virginia

  Read more

  In March, Appalachian Sustainable Development, a nonprofit food hub, was forced to shutter its food-box program. The program provided fresh produce to Appalachia residents in need, and income to 40 farmers who supplied that produce.

  A $1.5 million USDA grant that was supporting the program was being delayed, and the team learned they may end up being reimbursed only a portion of the money. Then, another of the local food system programs they were counting on for future funding was suddenly terminated by the USDA.

  For director of development Sylvia Crum, the situation was “heartbreaking.” But there was no other choice. “We don’t have the money,” said Crum. It costs roughly $30,000 to fill the 2,000 or so boxes that, up until March 7, the organization distributed every week.

  For decades, the USDA has funded several programs that are meant to address the country’s rising food-insecurity crisis. A network of nonprofit food banks, pantries, and hubs around the country, like Appalachian Sustainable Development, rely extensively on government funding, particularly through the USDA. Most of these programs continue to face funding freezes or have been cut altogether.

  Food insecurity has long been a widespread problem across Appalachia. Residents in parts of Kentucky, for example, grapple with rates of food insecurity that are more than double the national average. In the last year alone, a barrage of devastating disasters has magnified the issue, said Crum, causing local demand for the nonprofit’s donation program to reach new highs. Just in February, the region was hit hard by torrential rain and flash floods.

  “[This region] has really dealt with so much, with the recent hurricanes and mudslides and tornadoes. And our farmers are hurting, and our people are hurting, and our people are hungry,” Crum said. “It’s an emotional roller coaster for everybody.”

  Read more: ‘Our people are hungry’: What federal food aid cuts mean in a warming world

  — Ayurella Horn-Muller and Naveena Sadasivam

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline They lost their jobs and funding under Trump. What did communities lose? on Jul 24, 2025.

Zoe Jonick didn’t think she was asking for much when she went before the Oakland City Council with what she considered a simple request: Urge the California state legislature to vote yes on a bill requiring the state to study the feasibility of ditching Pacific Gas & Electric and embracing public power.

It didn’t seem unreasonable, given that the nearby cities of San Francisco, Berkeley, and Richmond had done exactly that in recent months. What Jonick, an organizer with the climate organization 350 Bay Area, and others backing the move wanted the city to do was push state lawmakers to support SB 332. The legislation would explore alternatives to investor-owned utilities and introduce safety and equity measures to improve service. “We’re not being prescriptive and saying what exactly a not-for-profit system would look like,” she said. 

Yet this proved to be too much for the City Council, even if dozens of residents spoke out against the utility — which employs more than 8,000 people in Oakland — during a tense council meeting last week. The legislation, which also would have urged regulators to link utility executive compensation to power reliability and grid safety, was pulled from the agenda by a procedural maneuver. “It seems like a number of the council members have not had an opportunity to meet with both sides,” said Kevin Jenkins, the council president.

It was the latest setback in a nationwide campaign to replace investor-owned utilities with publicly owned operations. Advocates argue such a move would lead to cheaper, more reliable power and greater say for residents in how electricity is generated. Despite some victories here and there — Winter Park, Florida, and Jefferson County, Washington, have flipped the switch, and some nonprofit utilities, like California’s Sacramento Municipal Utility District, are many decades old — they’re fighting an uphill battle. Voters in Maine rejected switching to public power in 2023, an effort to do so in San Diego stalled amid skepticism from city leaders, and the city council in Ann Arbor, Michigan voted down a feasibility study proposal five months ago.

Those hoping to see Oakland join the fight come from the climate and environmental justice world. People of color comprise about 70 percent of the population, and almost 14 percent of the city’s 438,000 people live at or below the federal poverty line, leaving them burdened by utility debt. Critics of the utility, known locally at PG&E, also say the for-profit model disincentivizes maintenance and upgrades. That lack of upkeep contributed to faulty equipment sparking at least 31 fires, which killed 113 people, between 2017 and 2022.

Oakland council member Carroll Fife sponsored the measure in support of Senate Bill 332, the Investor-Owned Utilities Accountability Act. Beyond calling for a feasibility study, the bill ties executive bonuses to affordability metrics and requires all utilities to publish disconnection data on their websites. California’s utility bills are the second-priciest in the nation, and Fife said people in her district have experienced six rate hikes and frequent cutoffs in the past year — even as PG&E’s CEO earned $17 million.

“When I’m hearing that one ZIP code in my district in West Oakland has double-digit shutoffs for energy costs, I get concerned,” Fife said. “There are several neighborhoods in Oakland where at least 10 percent of the population has had their power cut off and remains without access to power.”

Critics say public power doesn’t necessarily mean cleaner power: Nebraska, the only state served entirely by a public utility, gets most of its electricity from coal. They also argue that the process of transforming a large utility system into a nonprofit would be time-intensive and expensive, and that they could cost electrical workers their jobs. But those weren’t the primary concerns constituents brought to Fife in voicing their reservations: She said Oaklanders were afraid that PG&E grant funding to local nonprofits would be cut off. 

Read Next Utilities are shutting off power to a growing number of households Akielly Hu

The company, which provides power to about 16 million people throughout California, is Oakland’s second-largest employer, and it recently spent $900 million relocating to Oakland. The utility also is a big philanthropic player — it provided nearly 1,000 grants throughout the state totaling $36 million last year, and spent $3.5 million on Oakland nonprofits in particular.  Fife said nonprofit leaders she’s known for “two, three decades” said they supported her resolution but feared losing funding over it. (None of them spoke at the July 15 council meeting.) 

“The lobbyists for PG&E were telling people that I specifically was trying to push PG&E out of Oakland, that I would be responsible for a lack of charitable giving to nonprofits in my district and in the city,” she said. 

A PG&E representative, in an emailed statement, said the company “did not, and would not, suggest that we would pull our charitable support.” 

“We stand ready to continue to listen to the concerns of City Council members and citizens, and we look forward to continuing to work with city officials on tangible efforts to advance energy equity, climate resilience, and public safety.” 

The company representative did not comment on SB 332, but the company made the its thoughts clear during a Senate hearing in May: “SB 332 proposes sweeping changes without fully accounting for existing regulatory safeguards or the operational complexities of transforming the state’s energy infrastructure,” a PG&E lobbyist told lawmakers. 

PG&E’s response speaks to the vehemence with which investor-owned utilities fight to maintain their hold over energy. When advocates of public power in Maine managed to get a referendum on the ballot, the state’s two dominant utilities spent more than $40 million to oppose it, outspending its advocates 34 to 1 and handily defeating the measure.

Even if Oakland’s resolution is out of play for now, the city’s public-power advocates aren’t done. As SB 332 continues moving through the legislature, “We’re also building this movement from the ground up,” Jonick said. That might look like more community workshops, or more city council resolutions. Above all, it’ll look like neighbors talking to each other. “No matter what, we’re going to be pushing to build community understanding that another way is possible, and we can fight the utility monopolies’ hold on us.”

Correction: This story originally misspelled Carroll Fife’s first name, and has been updated to reflect the latest version of SB 332.

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The national fight for public power comes to Oakland on Jul 24, 2025.

Like so much of an iceberg is hidden underwater, much of a tree is hidden underground. While the trunk and branches and leaves sequester planet-warming carbon dioxide, trees and other plants have long formed subterranean alliances with mycorrhizal fungi, which intertwine with their roots to establish a mutually beneficial trade network. In exchange for helping everything from oaks to redwoods find water and essential nutrients like nitrogen, the fungi get energy, in the form of carbon that their partners have pulled from the atmosphere. 

A whole lot of carbon, in fact: Worldwide, some 13 billion tons of CO2 flows from plants to mycorrhizal fungi every year — about a third of humanity’s emissions from fossil fuels — not to mention the CO2 they help trees capture by growing big and strong. Yet when you hear about campaigns to conserve and plant more trees to slow climate change, you don’t hear about the mycorrhizal fungi. Humanity may be missing the forest for the trees, in other words, in part because without going somewhere and digging, it’s hard to tell what mycorrhizal species are associating with what plants in a given ecosystem.

Mycorrhizal fungi in Italy’s Apennine Mountains Seth Carnill

A new research project is trying to change that. The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, has launched the Underground Atlas, an interactive tool that maps mycorrhizal fungi diversity around the world. It’s a resource for scientists and conservationists to better understand where to focus on protecting these species so they can keep sequestering carbon and provide other critical services in ecosystems. “We’ve known for a long time that these mycorrhizal fungi are very important in ecosystems, and that they exist all over the planet and partner with lots of different plants,” said fungal ecologist Michael Van Nuland, lead data scientist at SPUN and lead author of a new paper describing the work in the journal Nature. “But it’s been hard to match that sense of scale with large datasets or large-scale, high-resolution maps.”

To build this atlas, Van Nuland and his colleagues didn’t visit every square foot of vegetation on Earth and take soil samples, because they didn’t have to. Instead, they analyzed the DNA of mycorrhizal fungi samples from 130 countries. Because they knew the conditions where the samples were taken — local temperatures, precipitation, vegetation type, even the pH of the soil — they could teach a computer model to associate those characteristics with different species of fungi. 

SPUN

Now the system could predict what mycorrhizal species should live in a given place, even if scientists haven’t been at that exact spot to collect a sample. In the map above, brighter colors indicate a greater diversity of a group known as ectomycorrhizal fungi, which grow as sheaths around roots. Notice the glowing areas in the far north, which include boreal forests. “It is nice to see that their model recapitulates the patterns that we mostly know to expect of high diversity in those temperate boreal regions,” said fungal ecologist Laura M. Bogar, who studies ectomycorrhizal fungi at the University of California, Davis, but wasn’t involved in the research.

SPUN

The map above inverts that dynamic. It shows the predicted richness of the second group, the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. (You can play with the map here. To toggle between the two groups, hit the button at lower right.) Instead of encasing the roots, these penetrate them. Notice their species richness beyond the boreal forests, especially in the tropics. Interestingly, an arbuscular fungi hot spot isn’t the Amazon rainforest, but the adjacent savanna in Brazil. “When you think where the hottest hot spots on the planet for biodiversity are, most people are going to think about the Amazon rainforest,” Van Nuland said. “But for this type of mycorrhizal fungal group, that’s in the surrounding ecosystem.”

Scientists are still working out what influences the global distribution of ectomycorrhizal and arbuscular fungi. Complicating matters, though, is the fact that the two groups can overlap in the same environments. Bogar, for instance, works in Northern California with Douglas fir trees, which have ectomycorrhizal fungi, and redwoods, which have arbuscular fungi. “Even though to me standing on the ground, they both look like just really tall, beautiful trees that probably have similar ecology,” Bogar said. “From the perspective of a fungus interacting with their roots, they’re profoundly different.”

Scientists taking samples in Tierra del Fuego, Chile Mateo Barrenengoa

Globally, the researchers found that just 9.5 percent of fungal biodiversity hot spots lie within existing protected areas. If an area is deforested to make way for cattle grazing — a particularly acute problem in the Amazon — mycorrhizal fungi lose the partners they need for energy, and the planet loses a powerful symbiosis that naturally draws down carbon into soils. Without a robust population of fungi, nutrients leech out of the system, and soil erosion increases. “There are all these other cascading benefits, beyond just how much carbon physically goes into the bodies of the fungi,” Van Nuland said.

Not only do mycorrhizal fungi have to deal with humans degrading their habitats, but the climate around them is rapidly changing. Van Nuland and his colleagues included historical data in their model, which found that climates that were stable over long periods allowed unique and rare symbioses to evolve between plants and fungi. With the atmosphere now in flux — both with rising temperatures and worsening droughts — those unique symbioses may be at risk, imperiling both plant and mycorrhizal fungus. 

Equipped with the atlas, scientists might be able to better prioritize where they venture in the field to study the fungi, Bogar said. Van Nuland, meanwhile, is trying to determine the best way to conserve these essential fungi, especially the biodiversity hot spots popping up on the map. “We don’t know if the same protection strategies work for mycorrhizal fungi like they do for plant and animal biodiversity,” Van Nuland said. “We are actively researching that right now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s a surprising climate solution right under your feet on Jul 24, 2025.

Across Europe and beyond, trans rights are the subject of political backlash and negative media coverage. At the same time, the efforts of transgender people to claim a narrative of empowerment have largely been unsuccessful. How can we appreciate the life experience of transgender individuals in all its positive aspects without stumbling into the pitfalls of pathologisation, victimisation, or mystification?

Aria doesn’t hesitate when asked if she is happy with her choice to come out as transgender. Gender transition, says the 27-year-old woman from Brussels, is “the best thing that’s ever happened” to her, “contrary to what some people might think”.

Coming out as transgender to those close to her four years ago has enabled Aria to live her identity more freely. “I’ve regained a taste for life, so to speak,” is how she sums up her experience.

The umbrella term “transgender” refers to people whose gender identity is different from the one assigned at birth. Although they now appear regularly both on television and in legislatures, transgender people remain largely misunderstood by cisgender people – those who identify with the same gender identity as the one assigned to them when they were born.

Marion (the name has been changed) is a 31-year-old education assistant based in France who considers themself non-binary. For them, “being trans means not understanding the concept of gender in the first place, and above all not wanting to conform to it.” They also see it as a way to be themself and to feel more like themself. “I’ve gained a greater sense of balance. When I realised I was non-binary, I felt like everything became clearer, and it was very calming. It allowed me to understand and explain a lot of situations from my past and childhood, and to stop telling myself that I’m weird or abnormal.”

Mainstream media and politicians often only present a stereotyped account of trans identity. It is commonly reduced to either medical transition (which itself does not concern all transgender people) or to questions of discrimination and access to the law. Much less attention is paid to the concrete reality of the existence of trans people and the intimate experience it represents. Indeed, public figures all too often use hateful and dehumanising rhetoric to call into question the right of transgender people to exist.

Unbound: The Battle Over Freedom – Our latest print edition is out now!

Read it online or get your copy delivered straight to your door.

READ & ORDER Discrimination on the rise

In recent years, Europe has seen a campaign against trans rights. On 16 April, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. Although it was argued that transgender rights were still protected under the Equality Act 2010, some organisations pointed out the far-reaching implications of the decision, warning that trans women’s access to single-sex services and spaces could be jeopardised.

The Supreme Court’s ruling, hailed by prime minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government for bringing “clarity” (although it is still considered by some to be extremely vague in its application), was the culmination of an intense lobbying campaign by the trans-exclusionary feminist organisation For Women Scotland.

Such a decision is especially significant as it comes amid an ongoing culture war that has seen highly public controversies like the publication of the Cass review, which criticised the National Health Service’s medical assistance to trans youth, or the scandal surrounding the boxer Imane Khelif. High-profile individuals like Elon Musk and J. K. Rowling, who use their wealth and influence to attack gender minorities across the globe, have weighed in on the “debate on gender”. At the same time, the media sometimes repeats far-right talking points uncritically, thus playing a fundamental role in a political backlash with very real consequences for trans people.

In Hungary, a law introduced in 2021 barred organisations from sharing LGBT-related information with minors in schools and the media. In 2024, the French Senate adopted a bill banning hormone treatments for under-18s and strictly controlling puberty blockers. The government disapproved of the text, and it is still unclear whether Parliament will examine it.

And things are no better across the Atlantic: executive orders signed by Donald Trump banned trans people from the military and women’s sports.

Across Europe, transgender people are also facing increasing insecurity. In 2023, 14 per cent of LGBTQIA+ people surveyed by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) said they had been physically or sexually assaulted because of their gender identity or sexual orientation in the five years preceding the survey – three percentage points more than in 2019. If we only consider the statistics related to transgender people, this rate rises to 20 per cent (compared to 17 per cent in 2019).

Across Europe, transgender people are also facing increasing insecurity.

As the FRA summed up its findings, “overall, the survey results show that LGBTIQ people, and in particular trans and intersex groups, continue to experience hate-motivated violence and direct and indirect discrimination and victimisation, despite the protection afforded by EU law.” Moreover, for several years now, there have been habitual (and growing) attacks on the rights of LGBTQIA+ people by actors on the right and far right, jeopardising the gains made in the fight for trans rights.

In its annual report for 2024, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) reports a sharp increase in hate speech against LGBTQIA+ people, particularly by public figures and institutions. The report reveals a paradox: on the one hand, public acceptance of sexual and gender minorities is slowly but surely increasing in Europe, and some governments are facilitating changes in civil status. On the other hand, access to healthcare, family recognition, freedom of association, and housing are becoming more complex issues for LGBTQIA+ people. ILGA also notes an increase in “scare tactics around sex education […] with the far right and other actors instrumentalising children in anti-LGBTI arguments and sowing division amongst young people and parents”.

For Aria, this growing insecurity is cause for worry. Even though she has not personally been attacked for being trans, Aria acknowledges that she could face harassment or abuse in the future. At the same time, she thinks that the increasing publicity of the debate on trans rights (and what some falsely depict as a “trans epidemic”) is what is fuelling the backlash: “It seems that for people, because it’s more publicised, trans identity is new and that a lot of people are trans, but that’s not true,” she says. “It’s a small minority, which we have to defend. A minority that has the right to exist.”

Marion also confesses to being scared. “Not for myself […] but for my loved ones; and I think we always worry more about others than we do about ourselves. In the same way, the decline in abortion rights in some countries has worried me a lot, but it seems far away because in my immediate circle I only have people who are safe, and the danger doesn’t seem to be in my daily life.” Still, they perceive a growing threat: “I feel like things are getting worse,” they say, pointing to “a really bad backlash; and I feel sorry for trans people in countries where it’s getting really horrible. Selfishly, I’m crossing my fingers that it stays as far away from [France] as possible.”

Fighting back

Despite the challenges discrimination has brought to the LGBTQIA+ community, it has also served as a powerful motor for defiance and civic engagement. For instance, in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s governing Fidesz party has long made the suppression of gender minority rights a centrepiece of its ongoing power grab, people responded to the banning of Pride by organising the largest pro-LGBTQIA+ march in the country’s history. Over 100,000 people took part in the event in open defiance of the ban.

Aria says she would like to protest, but a physical disability prevents her from doing so. And for her part, Marion remains confident. “Even if politicians try to isolate us and ruin our lives, I think we can fight back, and that’s also important: not staying alone, not leaving people alone.” Marion tries to communicate this resolve in their work as a teaching assistant in a French high school, making sure that the young queer people under their responsibility “feel heard and know that they have the right to exist, and that it is beautiful and wonderful to be yourself and to be surrounded by people who care about you. And that it’s okay to be different from what society wants us to be.”

For Marion, the fight for the rights of gender minorities has already led to positive change: “I feel that even if what is visible publicly, like the media or political decisions, is transphobic, there is an improvement in the perception of non-queer people.”

Beyond their collective benefits, grassroots movements by LGBTQIA+ people can also be individually empowering. A 2023 study looking at the psychological consequences of such collective efforts found that “activism […] may facilitate the development of resilience in LGBTQ+ people.” Coming together and standing up for one’s rights may promote “identity affirmation […] or the positive regard toward one’s identity”, thus promoting “LGBTQ+ identity development […] and wellbeing”.

Still, there is a long way to go before sexual and gender minorities are fully accepted in Europe, and the victories that some activists have won often come at a great cost. The challenges that come with activism can also be mentally harmful. Frustration, anxiety, and direct attacks are commonplace.

Pathologisation and self-determination

The first European country to allow transgender people to change their civil status was Sweden in 1972. At the time, this change could only be made on the condition of having undergone gender-affirmation surgery.

When states authorise the modification of a person’s legal gender, it is often linked to a psycho-medical vision of the lives of transgender people. To be recognised as a transgender person under the law means ticking a number of boxes: having received a psychological diagnosis, hormonal treatment, surgery, or even sterilisation.

Despite scientific consensus – which is for many people the only factor that lends legitimacy to trans identity – on the fact that being trans is a natural and healthy expression of human diversity, transgender people are often portrayed as mentally ill, their feelings ignored and their right to self-determination called into question. This has pushed more and more activists to call for trans experiences to be depathologised. Only eight European countries allow gender self-determination: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal and Spain. By contrast, two European countries prohibit altogether any change of civil status: Bulgaria and Hungary.

But what is often absent from discussions on protecting the rights of transgender individuals is the potential to create positive change for society as a whole. “I think society has a lot to gain from including and understanding trans people”, Marion argues. “There is so much dysfunction and misery associated with the gender binary. To stop viewing gender as two boxes could help prevent people from suffering because of their gender. I’m talking mainly about women here, who experience sexism on a daily basis, but more generally about all people who experience patriarchy.”

For Marion, understanding trans identity means understanding that gender is not binary – and that no one has to fit into “one of the two boxes that society forces us into”.

“On top of that, society always wins when it stops discriminating and becomes more open and welcoming”, they continue. “In any case, I’m not interested in a world that isn’t.”

While trans people’s stories have gained in subtlety since the early 2010s, they remain steeped in the weight of suffering.

“A story told by others”

In public discourse and in the media, much of the debate on trans rights is rife with familiar, well-rehearsed clichés, and transgender people have found it hard to claim a grand narrative focusing on the experiences and individualities of the people concerned. “In 2015, over 96 per cent of transgender people surveyed were somewhat dissatisfied or not at all satisfied with the way the subject was covered in the media,” says Arnaud Alessandrin, a gender sociologist at the University of Bordeaux. Although they are more visible in the media today, trans people still feel that the discourse concerning them remains stigmatising and discriminatory even when it is not openly hateful, he notes.

And when trans identity does get people talking, it is rarely done in a way that trans people would approve of. “We’ve noticed that what interests us most is the political dimension of trans identity,” says Alessandrin, pointing to issues such as access to the law, change of marital status, etc. This is also visible in stories that have an “embodied dimension”, meaning that they delve into the “biographical account of a celebrity, his or her life story”. Personal stories are often structured as life journeys, featuring a before-and-after narrative of transition. Such a “sensational” approach, Alessandrin adds, leaves little room for more intimate issues, such as schooling for trans people or their relationship with ageing. Still, he notes that these subjects have started to get more attention than in the past.

“Trans identity is a story told by others,” the researcher says. And when this tale is told to the general public by cisgender people, it cannot escape the subjectivity of the person recounting it. “This storytelling is often accompanied by familiar language, such as ‘the wrong body’, ‘suffering’, and the idea of ‘mourning’.” These words were not necessarily used by the transgender people interviewed in Alessandrin’s study.

While trans people’s stories have gained in subtlety since the early 2010s, they remain steeped in the weight of suffering: the psychological pain, the medical burden, or the impact of discrimination. These are all legitimate considerations, but they may hinder more positive interpretations of transition. “We’re more interested in the question of discrimination and suffering than in the actual experience of discrimination, which is what can lead to feelings of indignation and then to militancy; something that has been little explored,” says Alessandrin.

This dispossession of the narrative goes hand in hand, the researcher argues, with a “polarisation” of trans identity. “Transgender people are [either victims] or heroic, courageous, beautiful, subversive,” he says. “We end up attaching a subversiveness to people who didn’t ask for it.”

In her essay Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2020), author and activist Julia Serano criticises what she calls the “mystification of trans people”. She defines this as a process consisting of “so strongly endorsing the idea of a taboo nature attributed to ‘sex change’ that we lose sight of the fact that transsexuality [this term employed by Serano is itself controversial today] is quite real, tangible and often commonplace for those of us who experience it directly”. For this American thinker, “there’s nothing fascinating about transsexuality. For many of us, it’s simply a reality.” In her view, making transgender people a subject of mystery only serves to emphasise their “artificiality”: the gender assigned at birth is imagined to be “natural” in contrast to the illusory one in which trans people live their day-to-day lives.

But how can we create an understanding of trans identity as a positive affirmation of self when, as Arnaud Alessandrin mentions, media narratives about transgender people sideline the day-to-day issues and realities they experience?

“We rarely talk about the intertwined dimension of subjectivity”, Alessandrin laments. Not all experiences fit into a standard media canon. “The best way to combat this is to give a voice to trans people in the plural”, he concludes. “To understand this subjectivity, this multiplicity”.

For centuries, the Native people of North America used controlled burns to manage the continent's forests. In an e360 interview, ecologist Lori Daniels talks about the long history of Indigenous burning and why the practice must be restored to protect against catastrophic fires.

Read more on E360 →

Iceland 'left with egg on its face' Channel News brendan 24th July 2025 Teaser Media

Right to repair 'would reduce inequality' Channel News Catherine Early 24th July 2025 Teaser Media

Today’s most effective environmental activists — including Bill McKibben, Jane Fonda, and others — draw large crowds and inspire us. To accomplish this, they draw upon history’s most transformative leaders as a model for how to make our voices heard even in difficult situations.

Whether those activists chain themselves to trees or bulldozers, stand strong en masse at government buildings, block transport of fossil fuels or deadly chemicals, or peacefully interrupt privatization of protected lands, these leaders all employ strategies established by historical figures who challenged authority.

Protesting has a long, rich history that you should familiarize yourself with. After all, the United States itself was born out of protest. And protest may determine how we move forward.

Gandhi’s Passive Protests

Mahatma Gandhi’s passive protesting, also known as satyagraha, was a philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance to injustice, love for one’s opponent, and a commitment to truth as the means to achieve social and political change.

Key aspects of satyagraha include:

• • Nonviolent Resistance: Gandhi believed violence is weakness and that true strength exists in nonviolent action, such as boycotts, strikes, and civil disobedience.
  • Self-Suffering: This is the willingness to suffer for one’s beliefs, to awaken the conscience of the oppressors and inspire them to change through hunger strikes and peaceful noncompliance/nonparticipation.
  • Conversion, Not Coercion: Do not just defeat opponents but convert them to a cause through persuasion and by demonstrating the moral superiority; winning hearts and minds.
  • Boycott Power: Organize widespread boycotts – vote with your wallet and reject unethical products, political actions, discriminatory laws and unscrupulous business models.

Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance has been highly influential worldwide, inspiring civil rights movements and other social justice campaigns by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela.

Do you fear protesting because it may disrupt your social, professional or political standing? Nelson Mandela tells us: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

King’s Lessons on Nonviolence

Martin Luther King Jr. was a central figure in the American Civil Rights movement, renowned for his leadership in peaceful protests. He advocated for nonviolent resistance to inspire social and political change. His approach emphasized challenging injustice without using violence. King’s nonviolent resistance, a strategic and morally sound approach, included sit-ins and boycotts, marches and demonstrations, civil disobedience, and an emphasis on love and reconciliation.

The King Center’s Six Principles of Nonviolence:

• • Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
  • Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
  • Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice or evil, not people.
  • Nonviolence means that unearned suffering for a just cause can educate and transform.
  • Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
  • Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.

In his 1964 Nobel lecture, King said: “Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love…violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”

John Lewis reinforced this message for all who resist injustice, saying: “Before we went on any protest, whether it was sit-ins or the freedom rides or any march, we prepared ourselves, and we were disciplined. We were committed to the way of peace — the way of non-violence — the way of love — the way of life as the way of living.” Sociological and political scientific research confirms that non-violent protests are more effective than violent ones. Peaceful protests are much more effective.

When authorities repress protests, it can strengthen peaceful movements. When protesters are violent, it often creates news coverage that is more sympathetic to the opposition, whose chosen media outlets will edit the most inflammatory clips of non-peaceful participants in your protest and create video loops and memes that will play repeatedly in the social media landscape and worse, go viral. This drowns out your protest message and its importance, meaning, and intent.

Protesting in Private

If you feel shy about joining a protest, or maybe you have physical limitations that may hinder your participation, you can often make everyday resistance by “voting with your wallet,” i.e. researching your grocery and goods purchases, your credit card corporations, the companies and stores you frequent as a consumer.

You can also spend time contacting your city, state, local and federal representatives if you find them lacking in leadership for the environment and human rights.

Next Time: This series will continue with a look at how, after you’ve gotten some effective protesting experience under your belt, YOU can organize a protest.

Are you active in protests this summer? Tell us about it! Share your ideas, inspirations, aspirations, and advice to newcomers in active movements and protests. Send your comments, suggestions, questions, or even brief essays to comments@therevelator.org.

Sources and Resources:

“The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists”  by Lisa Mueller

“Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting”  by Omar Wasow

“Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha)”  by M. K. Gandhi

Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action

The Activist Handbook and other sources below provide practical guides and resources so you can plan your demonstration successfully.

Indivisible and No Kings offer training and education on protesting safely and effectively, as well as new and upcoming protest events.

The Human Rights Campaign: Tips for Preparedness, Peaceful Protesting, and Safety

ACLU Guide: How to Protest Safely and Responsibly

Amnesty International Protest Guide

Wired: How to Protest Safely: What to Bring, What to Do, and What to Avoid

Infosec 101 for Activists

 

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Scan the QR code, or sign up here.

 

The post Freedom of Voice: Learn From History’s Most Effective Protesters appeared first on The Revelator.

A new study finds that lightning kills some 320 million trees around the world each year, more than was previously thought. And that figure could rise in the decades ahead as increasingly hot and humid weather fuels more lightning, particularly in forested parts of the Far North. 

Read more on E360 →

Brexit trade meetings remain a state secret Channel News brendan 23rd July 2025 Teaser Media

Joint blog by MiningWatch Canada and Earthworks

Versión en español a continuación

People living near the world’s sixth-largest gold mine are taking legal action to protect their communities, ecosystems, and their rights.

Local communities and civil society organizations have filed two constitutional protection actions (amparos) calling for an immediate halt to Barrick Mining Corporation’s recent efforts to begin construction of their massive new dam that would hold mine waste, including tailings and waste rock. 

The “Naranjo Tailings Storage Facility (TSF),” as it is known, is adjacent to Barrick’s Pueblo Viejo gold and silver mine in Sánchez Ramírez province. Hundreds of families living in six nearby rural communities are concerned that the project poses serious risks to the land, water, and their health. 

Concerns about Environmental and Social Risks

An Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) conducted by Barrick for the Naranjo project, submitted in 2022 and released to the public in 2023, proposes the disposing of 344.7 million tons of tailings and 452.7 million tons of potentially acid-generating waste rock in the facility. The ESIA has faced strong criticism from U.S.-based geophysicist Dr. Steven Emerman and community advocates who contend that it lacks crucial data. 

Barrick has stated that the existing El Llagal tailings dam will reach capacity by 2027, necessitating the construction of a second, new mine waste facility. Barrick has classified the consequences of the proposed Naranjo facility—planned to operate until 2049—as “Extreme” meaning that a dam failure is predicted to result in over 100 fatalities. Dr. Emerman estimates that a dam failure could impact a 227-kilometer area that includes key waterways including the Maguaca and Yuna Rivers, Hatillo Lake, and ends at the Bay of Samaná. 

Growing Protests and Opposition

Tensions escalated on January 8, 2025 when, according to multiple media reports, police and military forces converged on the community of Zambrana in what community members believe was an attempted violent eviction. Security forces used tear gas and rubble bullets, and eight people were injured, including a local priest.

In response, community members have engaged in peaceful protests, including chaining themselves to trees to prevent deforestation and ecological destruction. On May 30, 2025, tensions rose again. Military forces “dispersed with gunshots and tear gas” protestors who denounced the arrest of community members. Community members believe that a neighbor, Jesús Tejada, “died from a heart attack” because of the tear gas bombs the police launched. Barrick contends that “the process has been negatively impacted by a small group of individuals who are, among other things, instigating the illegal blockage of public roads to serve their own economic self-interest.”

Legal Action Submitted to Protect Rights and the Environment

In response to the escalating crisis, local communities—supported by organizations such as the Institute of Lawyers for the Protection of the Environment (INSAPROMA)—have recently filed two constitutional protection actions before the Superior Administrative Court. The filings argue that the Naranjo project violates rights enshrined in the Dominican Constitution, including their rights to life, health, dignity, water, food security, and a healthy environment.

These petitions call for an immediate halt to all construction activities and the cancellation of related environmental permits. They also demand an independent safety review of both the existing and the proposed dams, public release of all findings, and a thorough evaluation of safer waste disposal options.

The petitions further request a moratorium on tree felling and road construction near the Naranjo River; a reviewed environmental and social impact assessment that meets international standards; a funded plan for ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and water treatment post-mine closure; and a detailed hydrogeological risk and mitigation plan. 

Through these legal actions, communities are seeking to defend their rights, protect vital ecosystems, and demand accountability from both the government and Barrick in the face of intensifying industrial threats. A hearing is scheduled for August 5, 2025.

Please see Barrick’s response to an earlier draft of this blog.

Comunidades en riesgo: nueva presa de relaves de Barrick desata preocupaciones sobre el medioambiente y los derechos humanos en la República Dominicana

Los residentes que viven cerca de la sexta mina de oro más grande del mundo han emprendido acciones legales para proteger sus comunidades, ecosistemas y derechos.

Comunidades locales y organizaciones de la sociedad civil han presentado dos recursos de amparo constitucional, solicitando la suspensión inmediata de los recientes esfuerzos de Barrick Mining Corporation para iniciar la construcción de una nueva inmensa  presa que albergaría los desechos mineros que incluye relaves y la roca estéril.

La Instalación de Almacenamiento de Relaves El Naranjo, como se la conoce, se encuentra junto a la mina de oro y plata de Barrick en Pueblo Viejo, en la provincia de Sánchez Ramírez.  Cientos de familias que habitan en seis comunidades rurales cercanas advierten que el proyecto representa graves riesgos para la tierra, el agua y su salud.

Preocupaciones ambientales y sociales

La evaluación de impacto ambiental y social (ESIA) realizada por Barrick para el proyecto El Naranjo, presentada en 2022 y publicada en 2023, propone el depósito de 344,7 millones de toneladas de residuos y 452,7 millones de toneladas de roca estéril potencialmente generadora de ácido en la instalación. La ESIA ha sido objeto de  críticas por parte del experto geofísico estadounidense Dr. Steven Emerman y las comunidades, quienes sostienen que carece de datos esenciales para evaluar adecuadamente los riesgos.

Según Barrick, la actual presa de relaves El Llagal alcanzará su capacidad máxima en 2027, lo que hace necesaria la construcción de una segunda instalación para residuos mineros. Barrick ha clasificado las consecuencias de un posible colapso del depósito El Naranjo, como “extrema”, lo que significa que una falla de la presa podría ocasionar más de 100 muertes. El Dr. Emerman estima que  una falla de la presa podría afectar una zona de 227 kilómetros, que incluye cursos de agua como los ríos Maguaca y Yuna, el lago Hatillo y la bahía de Samaná.

Crecientes protestas y oposición

Las tensiones se intensificaron el 8 de enero de 2025, cuando según varios informes de los medios, la policía y las fuerzas militares se concentraron en la comunidad de Zambrana en los que los miembros de la comunidad consideran un intento de desalojo violento. Las fuerzas de seguridad usaron gases lacrimógenos, balas de goma, y ocho personas resultaron heridas, entre ellas un sacerdote local.

En respuesta, los miembros de la comunidad han participado en protestas pacíficas, como encadenarse a los árboles para impedir la deforestación y la destrucción ecológica. El 30 de mayo de 2025, las tensiones escalaron cuando fuerzas militares “dispersaron con disparos y gases lacrimógenos” a manifestantes que denunciaban la detención de varios miembros de la comunidad. La comunidad sostiene que un vecino, Jesús Tejada, “murió de un ataque al corazón” a causa de las bombas de gas lacrimógeno lanzadas por la policía. Por su parte, Barrick declaró que “el proceso se ha visto afectado negativamente por un pequeño grupo de personas que, entre otras cosas, están instigando el bloqueo ilegal de las vías públicas para servir a sus propios intereses económicos”.

Acciones legales para proteger los derechos y el medio ambiente

En respuesta a la creciente crisis, las comunidades locales, con el apoyo de organizaciones como el Instituto de Abogados para la Protección del Medio Ambiente (INSAPROMA), presentaron recientemente dos recursos de amparo ante el Tribunal Superior Administrativo. Las demandas sostienen que el proyecto El Naranjo viola derechos fundamentales consagrados en la Constitución dominicana, incluyendo el derecho a la vida, la salud, la dignidad, el agua, la seguridad alimentaria y un medio ambiente saludable.

Estas peticiones exigen la suspensión inmediata de todas las actividades de construcción y la cancelación de los permisos ambientales correspondientes. También exigen una revisión independiente de la seguridad de las presas existente y propuesta, la divulgación pública de todos los resultados, y una evaluación exhaustiva de opciones más seguras para la eliminación de residuos.

Así mismo solicitan una moratoria de la tala de árboles y la construcción de carreteras cerca del río Naranjo; una revisión de la evaluación de impacto ambiental y social que cumpla con los estándares internacionales; un plan financiado para el monitoreo continuo, el mantenimiento y el tratamiento del agua después del cierre de la mina; y un plan detallado de riesgos hidrogeológicos y de mitigación.

A través de estas acciones legales, las comunidades buscan defender sus derechos, proteger ecosistemas vitales y exigir responsabilidades tanto al gobierno como a Barrick ante la intensificación de las amenazas industriales. La audiencia está programada para el 5 de agosto de 2025.

Ver la respuesta de Barrick a un borrador de este blog.

The post Communities at Risk: New Barrick Tailings Dam Sparks Environmental and Human Rights Concerns in the Dominican Republic  appeared first on Earthworks.

From Texas clear to Georgia, from the Gulf Coast on up to the Canadian border, a mass of dangerous heat has started spreading like an atmospheric plague. In the days and perhaps even weeks ahead, a high-pressure system, known as a heat dome, will drive temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, impacting some 160 million Americans. Extra-high humidity will make that weather even more perilous — while the thermometer may read 100, it might actually feel more like 110. 

So what exactly is a heat dome, and why does it last so long? And what gives with all the extra moisture? 

A heat dome is a self-reinforcing machine of misery. It’s a system of high-pressure air, which sinks from a few thousand feet up and compresses as it gets closer to the ground. When molecules in the air have less space, they bump into each other and heat up. “I think about it like a mosh pit,” said Shel Winkley, the weather and climate engagement specialist at the research group Climate Central. “Everybody’s moving around and bumping into each other, and it gets hotter.”

But these soaring temperatures aren’t happening on their own with this heat dome. The high pressure also discourages the formation of clouds, which typically need rising air. “There’s going to be very little in the way of cloudiness, so it’ll be a lot of sunshine which, in turn, will warm the atmosphere even more,” said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tom Kines. “You’re just kind of trapping that hot air over one part of the country.”

In the beginning, a heat dome evaporates moisture in the soil, which provides a bit of cooling. But then, the evaporation will significantly raise humidity. (A major contributor during this month’s heat dome will be the swaths of corn crops across the central U.S., which could help raise humidity in states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana above that of Florida.) This sort of high pressure system also grabs moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, which evaporate more water the hotter they get. And generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere becomes, the more moisture it can hold. Once that moisture in the landscape is all gone, more heat accumulates — and more and more. A heat dome, then, essentially feeds off itself, potentially for weeks, a sort of giant blow drier pointed at the landscape. 

On their own, temperatures soaring over 100 are bad enough for human health. Such high humidity makes it even harder for the human body to cool itself, because it’s harder for sweat to evaporate. Hence 100 degrees on the thermometer feeling more like 110. The elderly and very young can’t cool their bodies as efficiently, putting them at higher risk. Those with heart conditions are also vulnerable, because the human body tries to cool itself by pumping more blood. And those with outdoor jobs — construction workers, garbage collectors, delivery drivers on bikes or scooters — have little choice but to toil in the heat, with vanishingly few laws to protect them.

Read Next After deadly flash floods, a Texas town takes halting, painful steps toward recovery Naveena Sadasivam

The humidity effect is especially pronounced in areas whose soils are soaked with recent rainfall, like central Texas, which earlier this month suffered catastrophic flooding. There’s the potential for “compound disasters” here: relief efforts in inundated areas like Kerr County now have to reckon with soaring temperatures as well. The Gulf of Mexico provided the moisture that made the flooding so bad, and now it’s providing additional humidity during the heat dome.

A heat dome gets all the more dangerous the longer it stagnates on the landscape. And unfortunately, climate change is making these sorts of heat waves longer and more intense. According to Climate Central, climate change made this heat dome at least five times more likely. “These temperatures aren’t necessarily impossible, but they’d be very hard to happen without a fingerprint of climate change,” Winkley said.

Summer nights are warming almost twice as fast as summer days, Winkley adds, which makes heat waves all the more dangerous. As this heat dome takes hold, nighttime low temperatures may go up 15 degrees above average. For those without air conditioning — or who can’t afford to run it even if they have AC — their homes will swelter through the night, the time when temperatures are supposed to come down and give respite. Without that, the stress builds and builds, especially for those vulnerable groups. 

“When you look at this heat wave, yes, it is going to be uncomfortable during the day,” Winkley said. “But it’s especially those nighttime temperatures that are the big blinking red light that this is a climate change-boosted event.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

• Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

• Are you affected by the flooding in Texas? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

• Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The science behind the heat dome — ‘a mosh pit’ of molecules on Jul 22, 2025.

W pierwszych dekadach XXI wieku dochodziło do masowych demonstracji i buntów, na ulice miast całego świata wylegały wielkie tłumy. Ruchy te ani razu nie przyniosły jednak radykalnych przemian, które postulowały. Przeciwnie – niekiedy wytyczały nawet szlak dla przejęcia władzy przez prawicę i wojskową dyktaturę. Czy demonstracje już nie działają? Jakie lekcje płyną z tych zaprzepaszczonych rewolucji?

Alessio Giussani (Green European Journal): Twoja książka If We Burn bazuje na obserwacji, że choć w drugiej dekadzie XXI wieku doszło do największych w dziejach demonstracji – od Egiptu po Brazylię, Chile, Ukrainę i Hongkong – do żadnych prawdziwych rewolucji nie doszło. Jaki jest wynik tej dekady masowych protestów?

Vincent Bevins: Epizody, którym przyglądam się w książce, to masowe protesty, które nabrały takiej skali, że stały się czymś więcej – doprowadziły bądź to do obalenia dotychczasowych rządów, bądź do fundamentalnej destabilizacji społeczeństwa. Pytanie o to, czym się stały – często nieoczekiwanie i nieumyślnie – jest poważne, ale odpowiedź na nie zależy od konkretnego przypadku.

Długofalowe efekty tych buntów oceniam w ten sposób, że porównuję je z tym, co organizatorzy pierwotnego protestu deklarowali jako swój cel. W większości przypadków ludzie, z którymi prowadziłem wywiady, mówili, że zmiany poszły w złym kierunku, że dostali dokładne przeciwieństwo tego, czego chcieli. Inni czuli, że choć coś tam relatywnie wywalczyli, zdecydowanie nie udało im się osiągnąć celu, dla którego się z początku mobilizowali. Oczywiście, niekiedy trudno jest określić, co takiego chcieli pierwotnie osiągnąć demonstrujący, jako że z ulic dobiegało wiele sprzecznych ze sobą głosów.

Można jednak zastosować szersze ramy oceny. Amerykański politolog Mark Beissinger rozróżnia z grubsza między rewolucjami społecznymi, zmieniającymi konkretne konfiguracje władzy w ramach danego społeczeństwa, a rewolucjami obywatelskimi, zmieniającymi jedynie to, kto jest u władzy, same jej struktury pozostawiając nietknięte. Ukraiński Euromajdan w 2014 roku czy „kolorowe rewolucje” w Europie Środkowej i Wschodniej w pierwszej dekadzie XXI wieku nie zmieniły fundamentalnie struktury władzy. Często prowadziły do krótkotrwałego chaosu i zwiększenia nierówności oraz wewnętrznych napięć w środowiskach, w których do nich dochodziło.

Przypadki, które opisuję w książce, można określić mianem rewolucji obywatelskich. Prowadziły do powstania rządu pod nieco innym wezwaniem albo do czegoś o wiele gorszego – inwazji państw trzecich lub wojny domowej. Żaden z tych ruchów nie przyniósł jednak głębokiej społecznej przemiany, o której ludzie marzyli, gdy zaczynali organizować protesty.

Tunis, Tunezja, 20 stycznia 2011 r. Demonstranci zebrali się przed siedzibą Demokratycznego Ruchu Konstytucyjnego (RCD), partii byłego dyktatora Ben Alego. Tłum domagał się rozwiązania rządu tymczasowego utworzonego po odejściu Ben Alego i rozwiązania RCD. Protesty zainspirowały podobne działania w całym świecie arabskim, w reakcji łańcuchowej, która stała się znana jako Arabska Wiosna. ©AMINE LANDOULSI

Piszesz, że główną tego przyczyną jest to, że nie istnieje coś takiego, jak próżnia po usuniętej władzy. Jeśli ruch protestu nie jest gotowy przejąć rządów, jeśli nie ma takiej woli, zrobi to inna, bardziej zorganizowana grupa. Jak to rozegrało się w Egipcie na Placu Tahrir?

To, co nazwano później Arabską Wiosną, zaczęło się w Tunezji w 2010 roku. Jednak to wydarzenia z Placu Tahrir w Egipcie w 2011 roku w dużej mierze zdefiniowały to, co rozegrało się w kolejnych latach nie tylko w świecie arabskim, ale w wielu innych miejscach na świecie, gdzie skopiowano tamtejszy model – jak choćby w Stanach Zjednoczonych, Hiszpanii, Grecji i Hongkongu.

W styczniu 2011 roku grupa aktywistów zorganizowała w Kairze protest przeciwko brutalnym działaniom policji. Zbierała się od ponad dekady, tworząc wzajemne powiązania przy okazji wsparcia dla Palestyny i sprzeciwu wobec inwazji Stanów Zjednoczonych na Irak. Spodziewali się zwyczajowych represji ze strony policji, ale tym razem na ulice wyległo z nimi o wiele więcej ludzi, niż się spodziewali, a po kilku dniach dołączyło jeszcze więcej.

28 stycznia demonstracja skończyła się uliczną bitwą z policją. Policjanci ją przegrali, zerwali z siebie mundury, ukryli się w mroku nocy. Wojsko w tej konfrontacji nie uczestniczyło, więc przez krótką chwilę demonstranci stali w obliczu próżni władzy. Mogli pójść wieloma różnymi ścieżkami, spróbować ustanowić jakiegoś rodzaju dwuwładzę bądź przejąć część aparatu państwa, choćby środki masowego przekazu. Zamiast tego zajęli Plac Tahrir, bo taki był cel wielu innych demonstracji rozgrywających się tam na przestrzeni lat.

Pozostali tam przez 18 dni, aż do upadku rządu Hosniego Mubaraka. I podczas gdy oni mieli plac, wojsko przejęło władzę – choć wydawało się, że to plac kieruje rozwojem wydarzeń. Ściślej mówiąc, doszło do wojskowego zamachu stanu, na którego czele stanęła Najwyższa Rada Sił Zbrojnych (SCAF). Tyle dobrego, że Rada zgodziła się na demokratyczne wybory.

Jednak zwolennicy progresywnych i świeckich ruchów obecnych na placu, tak bardzo obecni w relacjach z powstania w 2011 roku i reprezentujący całkiem sporą liczbę mieszkańców Egiptu, nie byli w stanie dogadać się co do wyniku wyborów. W efekcie drugą rundę wygrała największa zorganizowana siła na placu – Bractwo Muzułmańskie. Rządzi krajem w sposób całkiem zadowalający dla wielu Egipcjan, a wiadomo przecież, że demokratyczna transformacja zazwyczaj odbywa się w sposób burzliwy i chaotyczny.

Jednak w czerwcu 2013 roku ruch przedstawiający się jako kontynuacja ducha wydarzeń z 2011 roku zorganizował wielkie demonstracje, które przetarly szlak dla kolejnego zamachu stanu. Wojsko działało przy wsparciu monarchii z Zatoki Perskiej, a ostatecznie także rządu Baracka Obamy – dokonało kontrrewolucyjnego zamachu stanu i ustanawiło dyktaturę, która trzyma władzę po dziś dzień.

Gdyby na czele buntu stanęła jakaś rewolucyjna organizacja, demonstranci mogliby zająć o wiele więcej, niż tylko Plac Tahrir. Takiej grupy jednak nie było, okazja przepadła.

Unbound: The Battle Over Freedom – Our latest print edition is out now!

Read it online or get your copy delivered straight to your door.

READ & ORDER

W Brazylii, kraju, który śledziłeś ze szczególną uwagą, fala udanych lewicowych demonstracji także doprowadziła do niezamierzonych skutków – do prezydentury skrajnie prawicowego Jaira Bolsonaro. Jak to się stało?

Przypadek Brazylii pokazuje, że wolność może dla różnych grup osób oznaczać coś zgoła innego. Początkowa grupa, Movimento Passe Livre, składała się z niezależnych, lewicowych anarchistów, którzy domagali się darmowych przejazdów dla wszystkich obywateli Brazylii. Od ośmiu lat regularnie organizowali protesty. Jednak w czerwcu 2013 roku brazylijskie media głównego nurtu, skłaniające się w prawo i należące do oligarchów, zaczęły nawoływać do stłumienia tych demonstracji. Owo tłumienie dokonało się rękami brazylijskiej policji wojskowej, będącej schedą po wspieranej przez Stany Zjednoczone dyktaturze.

Społeczeństwo obywatelskie Brazylii, w tym te same media, które nawoływały do rozprawienia się z anarchistami, było tym tłumieniem tak bardzo zbulwersowane, że masowo wsparło protestujących. Tyle że ani media głównego nurtu, ani ta zwielokrotniona grupa ludzi, która dołączyła wtedy do protestujących, nie miały zamiaru upominać się o pełne odtowarowienie publicznego transportu ani prowadzić anarchistycznej akcji bezpośredniej. Wraz z pierwotną grupą lewicowych demonstrantów włączyli się jedynie do konfliktu słownego, w którym później doszło już jednak do użycia sił, by następnie wielu z nich wypchnąć z ulic.

Tbilisi, Gruzja, 9 marca 2023 r. Protestujący przeciwko ustawie o „agentach zagranicznych”, wprowadzającej rejestr mediów i organizacji pozarządowych otrzymujących ponad 20 procent finansowania z zagranicy. Ustawa została początkowo wycofana, ale przywrócono ją w 2024 r., wywołując nowe fale protestów. ©MARIAM GIUNASHVILI

W tym momencie grupa młodych Brazylijczyków zatrudnionych przez wspierane przez USA neoliberalne think tanki stwierdziła, że sens ulicznych protestów jest do zagospodarowania. Przejęli go więc i fundamentalnie odmienili rozumienie tego, o co w tych protestach chodziło. Nadając im nowe znaczenie, ta dobrze zorganizowana i finansowana z zewnątrz grupa studentów zdecydowała się przejąć oryginalne hasło Movimento Passe Livre (MPL „ruch na rzecz darmowych przejazdów”) i zamienić je na Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL „ruch na rzecz wolnej Brazylii”). Wybrali skrótowiec o bardzo podobnym brzmieniu, choć ich rozumienie wolności było diametralnie odmienne. Wyznawali amerykańskie i libertariańskie pojęcie wolności jako relacji o sumie zerowej między społeczeństwem obywatelskim a państwem.

W ciągu kolejnych dwóch lat owa grupa zorganizowała nowe demonstracje przeciwko demokratycznie wybranej prezydentce Dilmie Rousseff, żądając usunięcia jej z urzędu, do czego doszło w 2016 roku. Następnie grupa zaczęła promować skrajnie prawicowego Jaira Bolsonaro, wraz z którym w 2019 roku przejęła władzę. Przywłaszczyli sobie zarówno styl, jak i reputację grupy z gruntu niezależnej, teraz zaś stali się częścią państwa i mogli je zniszczyć.

Ruchy, którym się przyglądasz, rządzą się dwoma mniej lub bardziej wyraźnie sformułowanymi zasadami – horyzontalności i prefiguracji. Czym one są i dlaczego to ważne dla zrozumienia wyników protestów, którym te zasady przyświecają?

Horyzontalność to podejście do organizacji, w którym nacisk kładzie się na zupełny brak hierarchii. Ruchy i eksperymenty antyhierarchiczne istnieją od dawna, były obecne zwłaszcza w latach 60. XX wieku, choć samo określenie horizontalidad wyłoniło się w Argentynie na początku XXI wieku. W reakcji na zapaść gospodarczą i zapaść państwa tworzono zgromadzenia, do których dołączyć mógł każdy, którym nikt nie przewodził i które w najmniejszym stopniu nie aspirowały do tworzenia reprezentatywnych struktur czy nowego państwa.

Brazylijski ruch MPL stał na przykład na stanowisku, że horyzontalność jest właściwym sposobem organizacji. Demonstranci z Puerta del Sol w Hiszpanii oraz Occupy Wall Street w Stanach Zjednoczonych także częściowo kierowali się zasadami horyzontalizmu, zaś w Egipcie horyzontalność wynikała głównie z niemożności właściwego skoordynowania reprezentatywnych struktur.

Grupom horyzontalnym zwykle bardzo zależy na prefiguracji. Prefiguracja opiera się na przekonaniu, że nie da się stworzyć wymarzonego społeczeństwa, jeśli już sam dążący do niego ruch nie będzie jego odzwierciedleniem. Na Placu Tahrir ludzie o różnych politycznych przekonaniach, z różnych klas i o różnym podejściu do religii stanęli wspólnie, wzajemnie się karmili i chronili. Wydawało się to oznaką tego, co Egipcjanie są w stanie osiągnąć, i po części także dlatego ludzie chcieli się na tym placu zbierać.

Z perspektywy radykalnie antyautorytarnej bunt ma stopniowo narastać do momentu, aż sam stanie się nowym stanem rzeczy, zarodkiem nowego społeczeństwa. W Brazylii horyzontalność protestów odnosiła się do ideologicznego horyzontalizmu pierwotnych demonstrujących, którzy nie wierzyli w przywództwo. Każdy czuł się zaproszony do wyjścia na ulice, jeśli tylko miał jakieś zażalenia do funkcjonowania brazylijskiego społeczeństwa. Horyzontalizm pozwolił demonstracjom urosnąć do ogromnych rozmiarów.

To samo wydarzyło się w tym samym roku w parku Gezi przy Placu Taksim w Stambule. Elementy prefiguratywne sprawiły, że bycie tam, na miejscu, stało się atrakcją i źródłem satysfakcji. Ludzie jedli razem i rozmawiali ze sobą. Opadły z nich role nadawane im przez kapitalistyczne społeczeństwo, doświadczali czegoś razem, czegoś co miało sens dla nich osobiście, nawet jeśli nie prowadziło do zmiany rządu.

Horyzontalizm staje się problemem w fazie drugiej, bo gdy nie ma środków, by się skoordynować, nie ma możliwości wypełnienia próżni w sprawowaniu władzy, ani nawet ustalenia najskuteczniejszej strategii wyborczej, jak stało się w Egipcie. W Brazylii prezydentka Dilma Rousseff chciała wprowadzić reformy zgodne z żądaniami ludzi na ulicach, nie była jednak w stanie stwierdzić, czego się domagają, bo żądań było niemal tyle, co samych protestujących, a może nawet więcej.

Prefiguracja nastręcza podobnych trudności, jako że nakłada ścisłe ideologiczne ograniczenia dotyczące tego, co jest akceptowalne. W drugiej dekadzie XXI wieku widzieliśmy, jak tworzą się rewolucyjne sytuacje. Gdy elity czują się zagrożone, ich odpowiedzią staje się kontrrewolucyjna przemoc. Jeśli ktoś napada na naszą wioskę i zaczyna mordować ludzi, pewnie nie będziemy skłonni zareagować w sposób, w jaki chcielibyśmy w przyszłości żyć, już po odparciu ataku – a tego wymaga od nas prefiguracja, wcielania ideałów od samego zarania.

Ruchy protestu, które analizujesz, zawierają silny element działań zbiorowych, często w kontrze do neoliberalizmu i jego indywidualistycznych ideałów. Jednak całkowite odrzucenie reprezentacji i hierarchii można także odczytywać jako indywidualizm w najczystszej formie – przekonanie, że nikt nie może mówić w moim imieniu. Jak to rozwikłać?

To przedziwny paradoks. Powiedziałbym jednak, że oba te stwierdzenia są jednocześnie prawdziwe. Jak przekonywał ukraiński socjolog Wołodymyr Iszczenko, wiele buntów, których byliśmy świadkami w drugiej dekadzie XXI wieku, można interpretować jako reakcje na kryzys przedstawicielstwa w ogólnoświatowym systemie pod wpływem neoliberalizmu. Ludzie coraz mniej ufają swoim rządom, ponieważ współczesne państwo spełnia potrzeby głównie gospodarczych elit, pomijając potrzeby zwykłych obywateli – chyba że znajdzie się jakaś część klasy rządzącej, która będzie za nich prowadziła tę walkę.

Pod innymi względami jednak owe bunty wewnętrznie odtworzyły pewne aspekty i podejścia istniejące już w systemie, w którym wybuchły. Argentyński historyk Ezequiel Adamovsky, jeden z bardziej elokwentnych intelektualistów ruchu organizującego okupacje na początku pierwszej dekady XXI wieku, które doprowadziły do popularyzacji horyzontalizmu, powiedział mi kiedyś, że to, co robili, było odpowiedzią na konkretne niedociągnięcia instytucji przedstawicielskich – przedsiębiorstwa, państwa, związku zawodowego, partii – ale że zapewne działali także pod wpływem neoliberalnych idei wolności i antypaństwowego dyskursu rozpowszechnionego w argentyńskich mediach, które sprzyjały prywatyzacji.

Można powiedzieć, że ruchy te były subiektywnie antysystemowe, obiektywnie jednak prosystemowe ponieważ przyjmując ostatecznie taką, a nie inną formę, tworzyły okoliczności wykorzystane przez dotychczasowe struktury władzy.

Masowe protesty są stosunkowo nową formą prowadzenia sporów politycznych. Ich wyłonienie się łączy się ściśle z nagłaśniającym efektem mediów masowego przekazu. Jednak bunty z drugiej dekady XXI wieku były też napędzane i kształtowane przez nowe platformy internetowe. Jak współdziałają ze sobą te dwa typy mediów, jak kształtowały główne ruchy protestu w przeciągu ubiegłej dekady?

Początkowo proponowano wiele interpretacji, zwłaszcza w liberalnych mediach anglojęzycznych, według których mieliśmy do czynienia z „rewolucjami w mediach społecznościowych”. Z dzisiejszej perspektywy jest jasne, że te platformy były tylko jednym z wielu czynników, które uczyniły owe bunty możliwymi. Choć platformy społecznościowe odegrały pewną rolę, odbyło się to na ich styku z mediami tradycyjnymi.

Dziennikarze pracujący dla tradycyjnych redakcji, tacy jak ja, przyglądali się platformom społecznościowym, pisali na nich posty, zbierali tam informacje. Zaś użytkownicy tych platform czytali wytwory tradycyjnych redakcji i omawiali je w sieci. Trudno te dwa zjawiska rozdzielić i myślę, że nie ma takiej potrzeby.

Dzięki mediom o wiele więcej osób chciało wziąć udział w demonstracjach i definiowaniu ich znaczenia, jako że, jak już powiedzieliśmy, same bunty nie były w stanie albo nie chciały podjąć się przedstawienia światu tego, czego się domagały. Jednak sam sposób relacjonowania buntu w mediach może przekształcić to, co się w ramach tego buntu dzieje. W Brazylii grupy, które wyszły na ulice pod różnymi hasłami, wzięły te idee właśnie z mediów. W nieunikniony sposób to, jak dany protest był przedstawiany w mediach, wpływało na to, jak ludzie go rozumieli. Często bywało tak, że choć ludzie fizycznie zajmowali tę samą przestrzeń na ulicy, psychicznie brali udział w dwóch różnych protestach.

W Ukrainie to, co później nazwano Euromajdanem, było początkowo stosunkowo niewielką grupą osób, protestujących przeciwko decyzji prezydenta Wiktora Janukowycza, który odmówił podpisania umowy stowarzyszeniowej z Unią Europejską. Ci ludzie wierzyli w tę sprawę, mieli spójne postulaty, którymi uzasadniali potrzebę zawarcia tej umowy. Większość mieszkańców Ukrainy jednak tego nie popierała.

Stambuł, Turcja, 23 marca 2025 r. Policjanci używają gazu pieprzowego do oczyszczenia protestującego podczas demonstracji po tym, jak burmistrz Stambułu Ekrem İmamoğlu został aresztowany i wysłany do więzienia. Aresztowanie Ekrema İmamoğlu wywołało największą falę protestów w Turcji od czasu Gezi Park w 2013 r. ©HUSEYİN ALDEMIR

Dopiero po stłumieniu tych pierwszych protestów na placu w centrum Kijowa pojawiło się o wiele więcej ludzi. Dowiedzieli się, co zrobiono z protestami, uznali to za odrażające i chcieli coś z tym zrobić. Przynieśli ze sobą własne postulaty. Na ulicy toczyły się prawdziwe walki o znaczenie wydarzeń na placu.

Cokolwiek różni ludzie myśleli na temat Euromajdan – o ile nie byli fizycznie na miejscu i nie prowadzili własnych badań terenowych – brało się z różnych jego interpretacjach w mediach. Przed pełnoskalową inwazją Rosji na Ukrainę w 2022 roku spotykałem ludzi, którzy żyli w jednej rodzinie, a mimo to mieli zupełnie odmienne przekonania o tym, co się tam stało, ponieważ śledzili inne media. Ci, którzy oglądali media rosyjskojęzyczne, zazwyczaj o wiele częściej widywali na placu skrajną prawicę. Ludzie na Zachodzie zwykle słyszeli narrację o tym, że demonstranci domagali się wejścia do Unii Europejskiej.

Na początku drugiej dekady XXI wieku rozpowszechnione było przekonanie, że platformy społecznościowe oznaczają niezapośredniczoną samoreprezentację i dziennikarstwo obywatelskie, które głosi prawdę. Teraz już wszyscy wiedzą, że dobrze finansowane jednostki i grupy są w stanie wykoślawić komunikaty na tych platformach oraz że narracje wyłaniające się z miliardów ujęć rzeczywistości produkowanych dzień w dzień mogą wprowadzać w błąd. Przy tak ogromnym zwielokrotnieniu faktów nieunikniona jest pewna selekcja, a dokonuje jej algorytm stworzony po to, by maksymalnie zwiększać dochody z reklam. Nawet rzeczy, które są w ścisłym znaczeniu prawdą – jak prawdziwa fotografia – mogą przyczynić się do powstania mylnych interpretacji.

Czy poza Brazylią w ruchach, które badałeś, obecna była – jako konkretny postulat lub daleki ideał – wolność?

Na płytkiej warstwie wolność może oznaczać, cokolwiek chcesz. Można powiedzieć, że w każdym proteście w dziejach ludzkości chodziło o wolność. Jednak interpretacja tego pojęcia może być różna i zależy od tego, kogo zapytamy.

W drugiej dekadzie XXI wieku interesujące jest to, że repertuar skarg był mniej więcej podobny, podobna była taktyka i podejście organizacyjne, choć konteksty społeczne, gospodarcze i polityczne były skrajnie odmienne. Subiektywna treść każdego z protestów również była skrajnie odmienna, podobnie jak podejście do pojęcia wolności. W przypadku Tunezji, Egiptu czy Bahrajnu można było odczytać te bunty jako żądanie wolności od dotychczasowego reżimu. W Turcji – jako wołanie o wolność od naruszania przestrzeni publicznej. Współczesne im protesty przeciwko polityce zaciskania pasa na południu Europy można interpretować jako pragnienie wolności uczestniczenia w gospodarce poprzez zatrudnienie bądź dostęp do zasiłków w państwie opiekuńczym stworzonym przez poprzednie pokolenia.

W Ukrainie pierwotni protestujący chcieli wolności dołączenia do UE, jednak podpisanie umowy stowarzyszeniowej oznaczało także wprowadzenie wielu nowych zasad i zmian w gospodarce, co wytworzyłoby nowy podział na wygranych i przegranych. Ludzie także interpretują i pamiętają własne życie w odmienny sposób w różnych momentach historii. Dziś więcej Ukraińców zapewne interpretowałoby owe protesty jako żądanie wolności od Rosji.

W protestach o strukturze horyzontalnej, dopuszczających kakofonię wielu jednocześnie wysuwanych, niekiedy wzajemnie sprzecznych postulatów, pojęcia, którymi wygrywa się zazwyczaj bitwę o zdefiniowanie narracji, muszą być odpowiednio szerokie i całkowicie pozytywne, niezależnie od osobistych poglądów politycznych.

W drugiej dekadzie XXI wieku widzieliśmy, że pojęcia takie jak demokracja, wolność i sprzeciw wobec korupcji wybijały się na szczyt, jako że ze wszystkimi trzema zgadzają się wszyscy. Ludzie w Hongkongu walczyli o demokrację, choć Chińska Republika Ludowa jest, według własnego nazewnictwa, państwem demokratycznym. Dla wielu Egipcjan, którzy zgromadzili się na demonstracjach w 2011 roku, było oczywiste, że stworzenie demokratycznego Egiptu podważy imperializm Stanów Zjednoczonych i interesy ich sojuszników w tym regionie, Arabii Saudyjskiej i Izraela. Jednak w oczach korespondenta CNN Egipcjanie żądali wolności, aby być tacy jak my, aby powielić nasz system polityczny i dołączyć do Stanów Zjednoczonych jako pomniejszy sojusznik.

Gdy wymawia się te wielkie słowa, diabeł tkwi w szczegółach.

Kijów, Ukraina, 14 grudnia 2013 r. Protestujący gromadzą się na Majdanie Niepodległości podczas koncertu ukraińskiego zespołu Okean Elzy. Rewolucja Godności, będąca następstwem protestów Euromajdanu, zakończyła się obaleniem prezydenta Wiktora Janukowycza. Według oficjalnych danych w starciach z policją zginęło 106 protestujących. ©JULIA KOCHETOVA

Czy ruchy środowiskowe odegrały jakąś rolę w wielkich buntach drugiej dekady XXI wieku? W oparciu o wnioski wyciągnięte z badanych protestów, co mogłoby sprawić, że ruchowi na rzecz ochrony środowiska mogłoby się udać?

Bunty w miejscach takich jak Egipt czy Bahrajn miały charakter głównie polityczny, ponieważ zmagały się z oczywistymi i restrykcyjnymi represjami na gruncie polityki. Skupiały się głównie na transformacji porządku politycznego, nie zaś kwestiach ekologii. Ale w krajach takich jak Turcja, Brazylia i Chile, bunty wyraźnie dotyczyły kwestii ekologii. Protesty przy parku Gezi zainicjowała obrona publicznych terenów zielonych, a aktywiści stający w obronie przyrody zaangażowali się w nie jako pierwsi. W Brazylii zwolennicy działań progresywnych automatycznie są obrońcami przyrody, praw rdzennej ludności i ochrony dorzecza Amazonki. Bolsonaro, z drugiej strony, doszedł do władzy za sprawą jasno wyrażanej intencji dokończenia kolonizacji Brazylii, zniesienia autonomii rdzennych ludów i przekształcenia większych terenów wzdłuż Amazonki w ziemie o znaczeniu gospodarczym.

Jestem przekonany, że walka o przekształcenie istniejącej globalnej gospodarki w taką, która będzie mniej niszczycielska dla naszej planety, to jedno z najważniejszych wyzwań XXI wieku. Wiele dużych protestów w drugiej dekadzie XXI wieku przejawiało tendencje antypaństwowe, wyrażone bądź domyślne. Jednak czy nam się to podoba, czy nie, obecny układ państw tworzących ogólnoświatowych system będzie kluczowy dla ocalenia naszej planety przed katastrofą klimatyczną. Potrzebna będzie zmiana prawa i relacji międzypaństwowych. Potrzeba będzie współpracy pomiędzy dwoma największymi państwami tego systemu, Stanami Zjednoczonymi i Chinami, choć teraz sytuacja nie wygląda dobrze. Odrzucenie państwa jako terenu, na którym toczymy walkę, byłoby błędem.

Ruchy protestacyjne mogą wiele zdziałać. Mogą zmienić to, kto podejmuje decyzje, pokazać elitom, na czym ludziom zależy, narzucić im realne koszty, które sprawią, że racjonalnie dla nich będzie zachowywać się bardziej odpowiedzialnie. To wszystko będzie istotne.

Pomimo niepożądanych wyników wielu buntów, większość rewolucjonistów, z którymi rozmawiałeś, nie zaleca złożenia broni. Pierwsza połowa trzeciej dekady XXI wieku pokazuje także, że masowe protesty – od Black Lives Matter po Iran, Serbię i Gruzję – pozostają popularną formą toczenia politycznych sporów. Czy struktura i taktyka protestów obecnie się zmienia?

Szczególna forma protestu, którą opisuję, wyrasta zarówno z przyczyn ideologicznych, jak i materialnych. Stała się możliwa i łatwiejsza w stosowaniu w porównaniu z innymi formami oporu. W trzeciej dekadzie XXI wieku mamy do czynienia z pewną ideologiczną ewolucją. Obecnie panuje mniejsze przekonanie, jakoby spontaniczność i brak struktury były z gruntu korzystne. Dostrzegam mniejszy nacisk na wiarę, że każdy postulat jest jednakowo ważny i że każdy może dołączyć i przemawiać z równą dozą autorytetu. W propalestyńskich miasteczkach namiotowych w Stanach Zjednoczonych toczy się na przykład świadomy proces doboru osób, które w imieniu demonstrantów wypowiadają się dla mediów – tak, aby nikt przypadkowy nie zaczynał tłumaczyć mediom, czego dotyczy dana akcja, i podsuwać własne interpretacje.

Warunki materialne pozostają jednak z grubsza te same. Jawiące się jako spontaniczne, koordynowane w internecie masowe protesty o horyzontalnej strukturze wciąż są najłatwiejsze do zorganizowania – w porównaniu choćby z tworzeniem organizacji, które byłyby w stanie długofalowo podejmować działania zbiorowe oraz szybko i skutecznie je koordynować.

China has begun construction on a massive dam project in the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet, the longest and deepest canyon in the world. Experts fear the impact on wildlife in the river gorge, which is home to snow leopards and Bengal tigers, as well as some of the tallest and oldest trees in Asia.

Read more on E360 →

When former Grist fellow Joseph Lee tells people that his family is from Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, they invariably look confused about what it means to be from a popular vacation spot for U.S. presidents and celebrities like Oprah. Their confusion deepens when he explains that he’s Indigenous and a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag nation.

“Their surprise says as much about Martha’s Vineyard as it does about the way this country sees Indigenous people,” Lee writes in his new book, Nothing More of This Land, which was published last week. “Very few people ever say it, but I can always feel an unspoken ‘but I thought you were all dead’ in those moments.”

Throughout his book, Lee grapples with the question of what it means to be Indigenous. It’s a question intricately connected to climate change, Lee says, because it’s a question directly related to land. On Martha’s Vineyard, Lee’s community has long been saddled with the effects of colonization, which fuels both extreme gentrification and rising sea levels. Lee traces the history of his own tribal nation, reflects on being mixed race and living in diaspora, and envisions potential futures unencumbered by colonial constraints.   

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. How would you describe the connection between Indigenous identity and climate change? 

A. When you talk about Indigenous people, you have to talk about land. And right now, when you’re talking about land in any context, climate change is the looming backdrop. So many of the challenges Indigenous communities are facing may not be outwardly related to climate change, but they’re impacted by climate change. Fighting for water rights, which I would say is a sovereignty fight and a political fight, is made more difficult and the stakes are higher because of drought. Tensions around land ownership and what we do with our land are also made more complicated by climate impacts like rising sea levels and stronger storms that are eating away at our land. If you’re fighting over land and land you’re fighting over is shrinking because sea levels are rising, it makes that fight much more intense and much more urgent. You could look at salmon and the right to protect salmon and for subsistence lifestyles and all that’s becoming more complicated not just because of overfishing but because the way that salmon and other fish are impacted by warming waters and climate change. Any area of the story that you’re looking at, climate change is present. 

Q. I also grew up on an island that is a tourism hub, and in so many communities that’s often perceived as the only viable economic driver. Can you talk about what it feels like to be Indigenous in a land that’s become a tourist destination, and how that affects our communities? 

A. In this country, one part of the experience of being Indigenous is the experience of erasure and of being ignored. That’s throughout history, through culture, through politics, through all these spaces. But I think especially in a place like Martha’s Vineyard, it’s even more extreme because the reputation of the place is so big and so specific. Being Indigenous, people are really often not listening to you. The more your land becomes a tourist destination, the harder it is for Indigenous voices to be heard, the harder it is for Indigenous people to hold onto the land. 

In a very concrete way, tourism typically drives property values up. It drives taxes up. And that makes it harder for folks to hold on to land that’s been in the family for generations. And that’s what’s happened in Martha’s Vineyard. Beyond that, I think tourism is just a really, really difficult and unfortunate choice that people have been kind of forced into. When so much opportunity has been taken away or denied from Indigenous communities in these places, tourism is often the only thing that’s left. So it can become like a choice between having nothing and contributing to tourism, which is probably ultimately harming the community and the land, but there’s no other way to make a living. So I think that’s just a really unfortunate reality.

Q. There’s a part in the book where you’re talking about how every time you say you’re from Martha’s Vineyard, people either assume you’re really rich or they think, “Oh, I didn’t realize that people live there.” And that really resonated with me because when I say I’m from Saipan or Guam, people either don’t know what it is or they assume, “Oh, are you military?” And then when I say I’m not military, they are confused. This is a long way of asking: What do you want people to know about your community and your tribe in particular, separate from the broader journey of this book? Is there anything that you wish people knew that this book could convey so that other tribal members don’t have to be on the receiving end of that question?

A. First, I hope that this will help to change the narrative of erasure that has existed about Wampanoag people for most of this country’s history. At the very least, I hope this helps people know that we exist — we’re here. And also, I like to think that it helps to show some of the complexity and diversity of my community: that we have disagreements, we have different perspectives, we have different talents, we live in different places.

Something else that your question made me think of was the question of audience. And I thought about that a lot. Even growing up within the tribe, there was so much just about my own community that I didn’t know. And so I try not to be judgmental of what people know, whether they’re Indigenous or not. And that’s how I really wanted to approach the book. I would hope that Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers can get something out of it, both in terms of learning things, but also hopefully seeing themselves in the pages and this exploration of figuring out who we are and where we want our community to go. 

Q. Another part that really resonated with me and I think a lot of Indigenous readers will relate to is the struggle of what does it mean to be Indigenous if you aren’t living on your land. I was wondering what you hope Indigenous readers will take away from the book in terms of understanding what distance from their land can mean for their identity. 

A. I hope that Indigenous readers will discover what I’ve discovered, which is that there are so many ways to engage with your homelands and your home community, even if you don’t live there. I used to think that I was only engaging if I was there with the tribe doing some cultural tribal event or something, and I realized that there are so many other ways of engaging. I don’t think any of us are less Indigenous because we live somewhere else.

For a long time I felt like if it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t worth it. If it wasn’t the perfect ideal of me participating in the tribe, I thought I shouldn’t do it. Ultimately what that led to is I just wasn’t doing anything because I didn’t have as many opportunities to go to these tribal gatherings or participate in tribal politics. And so I just did nothing, and I felt the distance sort of growing over the years. What other people can do is realize that there are all these small ways to engage and to try to embrace those, and not let ideas of what it means to be Indigenous be defined by outsiders, or these big colonial structures like federal recognition, for example, or blood quantum.

Q. Why? What’s at stake? Why do you think it’s important for folks to embrace Indigenous identity and why is it important, particularly at this moment? 

A. Circling back to what we talked about at the beginning, we’re not going to be able to address these huge existential crises like climate change if we can’t be at least in some way united as a community, as a people. If we’re always fighting over who belongs and what does it mean to be Indigenous and saying that people are less Indigenous because of XYZ, that takes away our ability to tackle those bigger challenges. Right now we’re facing these serious challenges and that’s what we should be dealing with, so figuring this out is the first step. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rising seas, vanishing voices: An Indigenous story from Martha’s Vineyard on Jul 22, 2025.