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UN report predicts crippling heat waves, polluted air, species extinctions, economic crises

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Pups across the country are about to celebrate their first birthday. What’s on their birthday wish list this year?

Registered nurses, residents,  interns, and other health care workers at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, Calif., will hold a rally on Wednesday, May 6, outside the UC Board of Regents meeting to highlight their patient safety concerns.

To mark the first 100 days of the Trump-Vance Administration, Food Tank documented how their actions have shaped food, agriculture, health, and climate systems. Read that HERE. One year later, we’re taking stock of what has changed since.

Q2 2025

May 2025

• May 2, 2025: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and detains 14 farmworkers from a farm in Western New York.
• May 3, 2025: At least 15,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employees have taken the Trump-Vance Administration’s offers to resign, according to a briefing from the agency.
• May 12, 2025: The USDA rescinds decades-old regulations that required farmers to record their use of pesticides known to pose the highest risk to human health.
• May 14, 2025: The House Agriculture Committee voted 29-25, along party lines, to advance legislation that would cut as much as US$300 billion in food aid spending, shifting costs to the states.
• May 14, 2025: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announces plans to rescind several key protections intended to keep perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, out of drinking water, about a year after the Biden-Harris administration finalized the first-ever national standards.
• May 15, 2025: EPA approves the first permit allowing an industrial-scale fish farm to begin operating in federal waters.
• May 22, 2025: The Trump-Vance Administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission releases a new MAHA report identifying the key contributors to rising rates of chronic disease among American children. According to the report, ultra-processed foods, exposure to environmental chemicals, lack of physical activity, and the overuse of medications and vaccines are among the primary drivers.
• May 27, 2025: U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announces a plan to increase funding for US$14.5 million in reimbursements to states for meat and poultry inspection programs.
• May 28, 2025: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cancels funding for a trial testing the safety and efficacy of a vaccine to protect Americans from bird flu, should the virus begin circulating in humans.
• May 29, 2025: The White House acknowledges errors in the MAHA Assessment report, including citations to studies that do not actually exist.

June 2025

• June 2, 2025: The U.S. Department of the Interior proposes reversing an order issued by President Joe Biden in December that banned oil and gas drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
• June 9, 2025: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces that the agency will get rid of all members sitting on a key U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel of vaccine experts and reconstitute the committee.
• June 10, 2025: ICE arrests and detains 70 workers at Glenn Valley Foods, a meat production plant in Omaha, Nebraska.
• June 12, 2025: President Donald Trump acknowledges on social media that his immigration policies are hurting the farming and hotel industries, making a rare concession that his crackdown is having ripple effects on the American workforce. “Changes are coming,” he says.
• June 12, 2025: The Senate Agriculture Committee releases its proposed text for the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” While the House plan proposed cuts of nearly US$300 billion in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) spending, the Senate’s plan would cut US$209 billion from the program. According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, a “vote for this bill is not a vote for farmers – it’s a vote to abandon them.” The Food Research and Action Center says the bill marks “a devastating reversal in the fight against hunger in America.”
• June 13, 2025: The Washington Post reports that there will be no policy changes underway to exempt farm, hotel and other leisure workers from Trump’s immigration crackdown.
• June 12, 2025: Trump pulls the U.S. federal government from an agreement brokered by President Joe Biden with Washington, Oregon, and four Native American tribes to recover the salmon population in the Pacific Northwest, calling the plan “radical environmentalism”.
• June 17, 2025: Rollins announces that the U.S. Department of Agriculture will terminate over 145 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion focused awards, totaling US$148.6 million. Programs that will be terminated include: educating and engaging socially disadvantaged farmers on conservation practices, creating a new model for urban forestry to lead to environmental justice through more equitably distributed green spaces, and expanding equitable access to land, capital, and market opportunities for underserved producers.
• June 20, 2025: Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian appointed to oversee the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act as it moves through Congress, rules that Republicans can’t use the budget reconciliation process to impose a state cost-share for SNAP, negating a major source of spending cuts for the legislation. She also says Republicans could not include a provision that would bar immigrants who are not citizens or lawful permanent residents from receiving SNAP benefits.
• June 25, 2025: The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) will no longer enforce a 2024 rule that expanded protections for guest workers who come to the U.S. to work on farms through the H-2A program. According to DOL, “The decision provides much-needed clarity for American farmers navigating the H-2A program, while also aligning with President Trump’s ongoing commitment to strictly enforcing U.S. immigration laws.”

Q3 2025

July 2025

• July 1, 2025: Senate passes the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act with SNAP cuts intact. The bill is now headed to the House, where it’s still unclear if Republicans have the votes to pass it.
• July 10, 2025: The USDA will no longer employ the race- and sex-based “socially disadvantaged” designation to provide increased benefits in USDA programs. Rollins says: “We are taking this aggressive, unprecedented action to eliminate discrimination in any form at USDA.”
• July 10, 2025: ICE arrests and detains 361 workers during farm raids in Carpinteria and Camarillo, California.
• July 12, 2025: A Mexican farmworker dies from injuries sustained during a federal immigration raid on July 10.
• July 24, 2025: Rollins announces that the USDA will close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. The plan could undermine research on pests, blight, and crop genetics crucial to American farms, according to lawmakers, a farm group, and staff of the facility.

August 2025

• August 11, 2025: The U.S. Congressional Budget Office releases a report confirming that reductions to SNAP will significantly shrink access to food assistance, disproportionately harming children, older adults, people with disabilities, and working families. The report projects that millions will see reduced benefits or lose access to SNAP entirely.
• August 12, 2025: The USDA notifies union leaders representing the Food Safety and Inspection Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that the agency plans to end contracts for thousands of employees.
• August 19, 2025: The USDA announces it will no longer fund taxpayer dollars for solar panels on productive farmland or allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in USDA projects. The announcement describes that prime farmland has been displaced by solar farms and the new investment guardrails are meant to keep farmland affordable, but data from the agency show that a very small amount of rural land is used for solar and wind projects and that most continues in agricultural production even after the projects are installed.
• August 26, 2025: Trump revokes an executive order, issued by President Joe Biden, that tasked the USDA and Federal Trade Commission with curbing consolidation across the food system to improve fairness and competition for farmers and consumers.
• August 28, 2025: Kennedy and Trump fire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez over disagreements on vaccination policy. Four other officials quit in frustration over vaccine policy and Kennedy’s leadership.
• August 29, 2025: The Trump-Vance Administration suspends an annual charity drive that resulted in federal employees donating about US$70 million a year to nonprofit organizations, including US$5 million to food and agriculture initiatives.

September 2025

• September 2, 2025: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announces that the agency is abandoning a plan to regulate water pollution from the country’s slaughterhouses and meat processing facilities.
• September 4, 2025: In one of the largest workplace raids in New York, ICE arrests and detains 57 people from Nutrition Bar Confectioners, a nutrition bar manufacturer.
• September 9, 2025: The Trump-Vance Administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission releases its Strategy Report, outlining the federal government’s approach to reducing childhood chronic disease. The 20-page document confirms earlier leaks that the administration will avoid imposing new restrictions on pesticides or ultra-processed foods.
• September 20, 2025: The USDA announces the termination of future Household Food Security Reports, calling the study “redundant, costly, and politicized.”
• September 25, 2025: Rollins announces new efforts to investigate market conditions that have led to high input prices for farmers, shortly after the USDA quietly cancelled partnerships that helped states tackle anticompetitive markets in agriculture.
• September 30, 2025: The Trump-Vance Administration is canceling US$72 million for USAID’s Feed the Future Innovation Labs by using a controversial loophole to cancel federal funding at the end of the fiscal year, which ended on September 30, 2025.

Q4 2025

October 2025

• October 1, 2025: The U.S. federal government shuts down, following a failure by Congress to pass appropriations bills for the new fiscal year. Federal agencies will be governed by their respective Lapse of Funding plans until the government reopens.
  • According to the USDA Lapse of Funding Plan, approximately 42,000 agency employees will be furloughed. 67 percent of employees at the Farm Service Agency will be furloughed. The Farm Service Agency will stop processing farm loans and commodity payments, and it will stop implementing disaster assistance programs. 96 percent of the Natural Resources Conservation Service will be furloughed, effectively freezing conservation programs. The National Organic Program will cease operations, leaving certifiers without oversight or support. The Economic Research Service, National Agricultural Statistics Service, and National Institute for Food and Agriculture are each losing more than 90 percent of their staff and ceasing all program operations. Core operations related to nutrition programs, including SNAP, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and school meals will continue but funding for those programs could start to become an issue depending on how long the shutdown lasts.
  • According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plan, the agency will retain about 86 percent of staff. Routine inspections will be suspended and the agency will instead focus on “for-cause” inspections, or those tied to foodborne illness outbreaks, recalls, or consumer complaints.
  • According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s shutdown plan, the agency will retain about 11 percent of its total workforce. The agency will stop conducting and publishing research “unless necessary for exempted or excepted activities.”
• October 2, 2025: A news release posted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security adjusts the H-2A paperwork process to speed up applications with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
• DHS says the changes are part of a larger collaborative effort with the DOL to streamline the program “in light of an urgent demand for an authorized agricultural labor force and requests from the regulated community and members of Congress to make the H-2A program easier to use and more efficient for U.S. agricultural producers.”
• October 2, 2025: The DOL publishes rules altering the way H-2A wage rates are calculated, effectively lowering wages for labor across the board. United Farm Workers calculated that the change will reduce wages by US$5 to US$7 per hour in some states, leading to US$2.46 billion less paid to H-2A workers annually.
• October 2, 2025: The DOL warns in an obscure document that the Trump-Vance Administration’s immigration crackdown is threatening “the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.”
• October 7, 2025: Civil Eats reports on industry ties within Trump’s food and agricultural leadership. Many of the president’s top officials at the USDA, EPA, HHS, and FDA have connections to chemical, agribusiness, or fossil fuel interests.
• October 10, 2025: According to a letter obtained by Politico, SNAP is running out of funds. Ronald Ward, the USDA’s acting associate administrator for the program, instructed regional and state SNAP directors to delay sending next month’s funds to electronic benefit transfer vendors responsible for delivering benefits to participants: “We understand that several States would normally begin sending November benefit issuance files to their electronic benefit transfer (EBT) vendors soon,” Ward writes. “Considering the operational issues and constraints that exist in automated systems, and in the interest of preserving maximum flexibility, we are forced to direct States to hold their November issuance files and delay transmission to State EBT vendors until further notice.”
• October 16, 2025: NPR reports that at least 27 states have turned over data (including their names, dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers, and benefits amounts) about millions of food stamp recipients to the USDA, which framed the data demand as necessary to accomplish the Trump-Vance Administration’s goal of identifying and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.
• October 16, 2025: Rollins says SNAP will run out of funds in two weeks because of the partial government shutdown, potentially leaving nearly 42 million people without monthly benefits.
• October 20, 2025: Politico reports on six food and agriculture programs experiencing delays or funding concerns as a result of the shutdown: SNAP, school meals, WIC, H-2A processing, farm aid, and Farm Service Agency offices.
• October 31, 2025: Two federal judges order the Trump-Vance Administration to use emergency funds to keep SNAP running.

November 2025

• November 1, 2025: Nearly 42 million Americans lose their food stamp benefits as Congress fails to reopen the government. Politico reports that the Trump-Vance Administration says they don’t have the authority to use emergency money for SNAP or have enough funds to support the estimated US$9 billion for November benefits. Even if they comply with the court order to fund benefits, it could still take days or weeks to disburse partial funds.
• November 3, 2025: NPR reports that the Trump-Vance Administration will restart SNAP benefits, but only at 50 percent of normal payments and the payments will be delayed. The Trump-Vance Administration says it will use money from a US$5 billion Agriculture Department contingency fund. Officials say that depleting the fund means “no funds will remain for new SNAP applicants certified in November, disaster assistance, or as a cushion against the potential catastrophic consequences of shutting down SNAP entirely.”
• November 8, 2025: The USDA directs states to “immediately undo” any steps that have been taken to send out full food aid benefits to low-income Americans, following a U.S. Supreme Court order temporarily halting a lower court order requiring those payments.
• November 10, 2025: Retrieved from the USDA website on Nov. 10: “Senate Democrats have voted 14 times against reopening the government. This compromises not only SNAP, but farm programs, food inspection, animal and plant disease protection, rural development, and protecting federal lands. Senate Democrats are withholding services to the American people in exchange for healthcare for illegals, gender mutilation, and other unknown “leverage” points.”
• November 12, 2025: The U.S. federal government shutdown ends after Congress signs a funding package for 2026. Lasting 43 days, the shutdown was the longest in U.S. history. Roughly 670,000 federal employees were furloughed, and 730,000 worked without pay.
• November 13, 2025: The U.S. Department of the Interior reverses an order issued by President Joe Biden in December 2024 that banned oil and gas drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
• November 14, 2025: Trump rolls back tariffs on more than 200 food products, including such staples as coffee, beef, bananas and orange juice, in the face of growing angst among American consumers about the high cost of groceries.
• November 21, 2025: According to an annual FDA report, sales of antibiotics for farm animals climbed 16 percent in 2024, the “biggest increase we’ve ever seen,” according to Steve Roach, director of the Safe and Healthy Food Program at Food Animal Concerns Trust.

December 2025

• December 1, 2025: The FDA announces “the deployment of agentic AI capabilities for all agency employees” for tasks including meeting management, pre-market reviews, review validation, post-market surveillance, inspections, and compliance and administrative functions.
• December 6, 2025: Trump issues an executive order directing the U.S. Attorney General and Federal Trade Commission to investigate food-related industries and determine whether anti-competitive behavior exists in food supply chains.
• December 10, 2025: The USDA announces a US$700 million Regenerative Pilot Program.
• December 10, 2025: Rollins approves SNAP Food Restriction Waivers in six states, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Hawai’i.
• December 17, 2025: The USDA’s Office of the Inspector General releases a report finding that the agency lost nearly one-fifth of its workforce in the first half of 2025: more than 20,000 employees left the agency out of more than 110,000, including 15,114 who accepted a voluntary resignation program.

Q1 2026

January 2026

• January 1, 2026: SNAP waivers go into effect in Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, and West Virginia, bringing the total number of states with approved waivers to 18.
• January 7, 2026: The U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services release the Dietary Guidelines for 2025 to 2030, recommending a reduction in highly processed foods with added sugar and excess sodium and endorsing whole, nutrient-dense foods and products like whole milk, butter, and red meat.
• January 14, 2026: The American Federation of Government Employees announces that the Department of Health and Human Services is reinstating National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) employees laid off in 2025, but does not specify how many will return to their jobs. Almost 900 of NIOSH’s 1,000 employees were laid off last year.
• January 14, 2026: Trump signs the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act into law. The legislation modifies current regulations, which require milk to be fat-free or low-fat, to permit schools to offer students whole, reduced-fat, low-fat, and fat-free organic or nonorganic milk.
• January 15, 2026: Rollins publishes an op-ed in The Hill promoting the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans. She writes, “Eating healthy can cost as little as $3.00 per meal.”
• January 19, 2026: The USDA launches Lender Lens on the Rural Data Gateway, making Rural Development’s entire commercial guaranteed loan portfolio available to the public, guaranteed borrowers, and commercial lending stakeholders.
• January 22, 2026: The USDA launches an online portal for reporting foreign-owned agricultural land transactions. They say the portal is part of a broader effort to “strengthen enforcement and protect American farmland” as the agency continues its implementation of the National Farm Security Action Plan.
• January 30, 2026: Rollins shares that around 1.75 million fewer people are participating in SNAP since the start of the Trump-Vance Administration.

February 2026

• February 2, 2026: Trump announces plans to lower tariffs on goods from India from 25 percent to 18 percent after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to stop buying oil from Russia.
• February 4, 2026: The USDA announces that it is assuming operation of the foreign food aid program Food for Peace, formerly operated by USAID. Humanitarian aid experts say the program has been used flexibly to respond to different emergency settings, but it may become a way to offload surplus U.S.-grown food commodities.
• February 6, 2026: The FDA publishes a letter to the food industry announcing that the agency will scale back artificial food dye labeling enforcement.
• February 6, 2026: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reapproves dicamba, a pesticide that has raised concern over its tendency to drift and destroy nearby crops, for use on genetically modified soybeans and cotton.
• February 6, 2026: Trump issues a proclamation opening a marine protected area off the northeastern U.S. to commercial fishing. The 4,913-square-mile area was the only U.S. marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean.
• February 11, 2026: The USDA announces the Farmer and Rancher Freedom Framework, a plan to protect, preserve, and partner with American agriculture, while “ending onerous regulations and the weaponization of government against American farmers and ranchers. It formalizes USDA’s ongoing efforts to eliminate systemic agricultural lawfare,” according to the agency.
• February 12, 2026: The FDA publishes final guidance which advises, but does not require, drug companies to set “duration limits” for livestock antibiotics in animal feed.
• February 13, 2026: The USDA issues final Emergency Livestock Relief Program (ELRP) payments totaling more than US$1.89 billion. Eligible applicants who applied for ELRP 2023 and 2024 Flood and Wildfire assistance will receive 100 percent of their eligible payment in a single lump sum.
• February 13, 2026: The USDA announces US$1 billion in assistance for farmers of specialty crops and sugar, commodities not covered through the previously announced Farmer Bridge Assistance program.
• February 13, 2026: Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee release a draft farm bill package. The draft is scheduled to be reviewed and revised the week of February 23, 2026.
• February 13, 2026: USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden announces on social media that the Department of Justice will stop defending farm programs that benefit socially disadvantaged producers.
• February 17, 2026: The USDA announces proposed updated regulations that would speed up line speeds at poultry and pork production facilities.
• February 18, 2026: Trump issues an Executive Order directing the Secretary of Agriculture to ensure “a continued and adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides.”
• February 20, 2026: Trump announces new tariffs under the Trade Act of 1974, and increases the tariff rate to 15 percent.
• February 20, 2026: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency repeals a 2024 rule that imposed limits on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, the primary source of the mercury that accumulates in fish.

March 2026

• March 3, 2026: Trump-Vance Administration lawyers submit an amicus brief in favor of Monsanto to the U.S. Supreme Court, stating that the Court should rule in favor of Bayer in a case that could prevent individuals from suing pesticide companies over claims their products cause cancer and other illnesses.
• March 4, 2026: The USDA approves SNAP waivers in four states: Kansas, Nevada, Ohio, and Wyoming.
• March 4, 2026: The U.S. House Agriculture Committee votes to advance a 2026 Farm Bill. To be adopted, the legislation must still pass a vote in the full House of Representatives before going to the Senate.
• March 6, 2026: U.S. officials release a video of an explosion on social media, capturing the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador. A subsequent New York Times investigation indicates that the military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound.
• March 10, 2026: During a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing, lawmakers and witnesses including American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall, multiple senators from both parties, and farm advocacy group Farm Action warn of how the war in Iran, and its impact on fertilizer markets, could affect farmers.
• March 18, 2026: Rollins and Kennedy publish the joint opinion piece, “We’re bringing families more healthy foods in a SNAP.”
• March 27, 2026: Speaking at a White House event celebrating farmers, Trump promises to bolster small-business loan guarantees for farmers, who have been hit hard by his tariffs and rising prices from the war in Iran, and announces a final EPA rule raising the minimum amount of renewable fuels that must be blended into the U.S. fuel supply. Biofuels like ethanol, biodiesel, and renewable diesel are largely made with corn and soybean oil, meaning this rule could boost demand for those crops.
• March 30, 2026: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sends a memo to hospitals requesting they align meals with the updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans by phasing out ultra-processed food and high-sugar foods in favor of fruits, vegetables, and minimally processed proteins.
• March 31, 2026: The USDA suspends all grants under the Rural Energy for America Program to comply with an Executive Order issued in July 2025.

Q2 2026

April 2026

• April 1, 2026: The FDA approves Foundayo, a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist in tablet form. The approval was issued 50 days after filing, marking the fastest new molecular entity approval since 2002.
• April 3, 2026: The Trump-Vance Administration releases its proposed budget for fiscal year 2027, which begins on October 1, 2026. The proposal includes a 19 percent cut in the USDA budget.
• April 7, 2026: The USDA finalizes regulations that overhaul how the National Environmental Policy Act is implemented, including by reducing and removing procedural requirements, removing climate change and environmental justice considerations, and eliminating opportunities for public comment.
• April 8, 2026: The Trump-Vance Administration nominates Luke Lindberg, Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs at the USDA, for Executive Director of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP). United Nations officials subsequently announce that Secretary-General António Guterres will not appoint a new Executive Director to WFP before he steps down.
• April 10, 2026: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration removes workplace inspection goals related to heat-related hazards, both indoors and outdoors, that may lead to serious illnesses, injuries, or death.
• April 15, 2026: Rollins announces the creation of the new USDA Office of Seafood.
• April 22, 2026: The U.S. House Appropriations Committee releases the Fiscal Year 2027 Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Bill. It cuts the overall funding level by US$1.1 billion compared to 2026.
• April 23, 2026: The USDA announces reorganizations of the Food Safety and Inspection Service and the Research, Education, and Economics Mission Area, aiming to streamline functions and improve operational efficiency. As part of the reorganizations, a substantial portion of the agencies’ workforces will be relocated and the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center will be decommissioned.
• April 30, 2026: The House of Representatives votes to pass the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026. The Farm Bill now advances to the Senate.

Is there an update you want to see included that isn’t on the list? Email Danielle at danielle@foodtank.com.

The post One Year On: How Trump and Vance Have Changed Food, Agriculture, Health, and Climate appeared first on Food Tank.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is ordering the removal of science and history materials from National Park Service websites in addition to visitor centers and physical signs. Reporting from E&E News found that a small group of Interior department employees has been reviewing new submissions for the National Park Service’s 180,000 websites since February, evaluating the material for compliance with President Donald Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” directive and Burgum’s corresponding secretarial order.

Previously, park service employees had a lot of authority over the content on park websites, and park-based staff typically led decisions about website content, often in consultation with Tribes and local communities. “The Park Service has been for most — if not almost all — of its history very decentralized, with a lot of authority, including comms at the park level,” said Jonathan Jarvis, who was National Park Service director during the Obama administration. “This is a very divergent approach.”

This process is already altering how history is told online. For example, an article written by a Tribal group for the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail website removed references to Thomas Jefferson fathering children with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, before it was allowed to be posted.

The website crackdown follows the recent removal of physical signs and exhibits at parks, including a sign at Grand Teton National Park acknowledging a massacre of at least 173 Piegan Blackfeet, and at Muir Woods National Monument, where signs mentioning the contributions of Indigenous people and women have been removed.

The five most bewildering moments from Doug Burgum’s congressional hearings

A new Westwise blog post captures some of the most embarrassing and perplexing exchanges from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s recent appearance before the House Interior Appropriations subcommittee. The blog post highlights Secretary Burgum’s attempt to defend a $10 billion slush fund for D.C. vanity projects despite slashing the National Park Service budget, his sudden concern for whales after voting to condemn a whale species to extinction, and more.

Quick hits How many federal land agency jobs were lost in the West?

Deseret News | Colorado Sun

House members file brief in case aiming to remove Trump’s face from park pass

National Parks Traveler

Protesters in Fargo target Burgum

InForum | KVRR | Prairie News | KFGO

Tohono O’odham leaders voice opposition to physical border wall after construction damages 1,000-year-old site

Arizona Republic

Opinion: The public’s lands deserve better than Steve Pearce

Albuquerque Journal

Trump gives go-ahead to major new Canada-US oil pipeline

Associated Press

International visitor fee has national park gateway business owners in distress

SFGATE

BLM investigates copper line removal near Wyoming sage grouse leks, historic trails

WyoFile

Quote of the day

This notion of needing to restore truth and sanity to American history is one of the largest red herrings in American history. It’s trying to resolve a problem that doesn’t really exist, that never really existed.”

—Alan Spears, senior director at the National Parks Conservation Association, CNN

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Photos by Stephen Leonardi | @leo_visions_ and Rick Kramer

Featured photo: National Park Service badge and patch, NPS/Kurt Moses

The post The Trump administration is erasing history on national park websites appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

With much of the Southeast U.S. experiencing moderate to extreme drought conditions, RAFI presents a new guide on drought and disaster assistance for farmers. Understand current conditions and forecasts, find emergency financial assistance opportunities, and explore mitigation strategies for smaller scale producers.

The post Drought Conditions and Disaster Support for Southeast US Farmers appeared first on RAFI.

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

Were the 2022 whale deaths off the US East Coast caused by offshore wind development?

The 2022 whale deaths have not been linked to offshore wind surveys or construction. Research has found no evidence of wind farms driving whale deaths, and responsibly developed wind farms avert systemic harms of fossil fuels.

Bad practices like construction during peak migration, high-speed vessels, or not monitoring whale presence can increase risk. However, established regulations such as seasonal construction limits, population monitoring, and vessel-speed rules reduce exposure. Once operating, turbine noise is significantly less disruptive than ships. 

According to the NOAA, boat collisions and fishing gear entanglement account for most whale deaths, not wind turbines.

In contrast, fossil fuel drilling and burning routinely harm marine life. Oil and gas exploration uses highly disruptive sonar, oil spills kill marine animals, and emissions acidify oceans, weakening coral and shellfish. Warming causes population-level harms to marine mammals through altered migration routes and habitat loss.

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

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

Sources

Yale Climate Connections Wind opponents spread myth about dead whales

NOAA Frequent Questions—Offshore Wind and Whales

U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Vineyard Wind 1 Offshore Wind Energy Project Final Environmental Impact Statement

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America How loud is the underwater noise from operating offshore wind turbines?

Save the Sound Clearing the Air on Offshore Wind

Biological Conservation Population consequences of disturbance by offshore oil and gas activity for endangered sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus)

National Audubon Society More Than One Million Birds Died During Deepwater Horizon Disaster

NOAA What is Ocean Acidification?

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

Please use this form to provide feedback about this fact brief. This will help us to better gauge its impact and usability. Thank you!

About fact briefs published on Gigafact

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

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The post Tell Wells Fargo: Stop Union Busting and Corporate Greed appeared first on Stop the Money Pipeline.

SEASON 6, EPISODE 2
with host Justine Norton-Kertson
Click here to listen to this episode

Picture the familiar solarpunk neighborhood: lush apartment buildings, green roofs, shaded walkways, light rail gliding past community gardens, a place designed to feel human again. It looks clean, shared, sustainable, and alive. But can anyone actually afford to live there? Who got pushed out to make room for this future? Is this a neighborhood, or a rendering? You can cover a city in gardens, solar panels, and elegant transit, but if the people who built that neighborhood can’t afford to live in it, what exactly have you created? Housing is not a side issue. It’s one of the defining tests of whether a future is real, shared, and just.

Welcome back to Demand Utopia. I’m your host, Justine Norton-Kertson. A couple quick reminders before we jump in. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already. And check us out at solarpunkmagazine.com for magazine issues full of hopeful fiction, poetry, essays, and art, as well as to check out our author submission guidelines and more. You can also support us on Patreon and get all kinds of bonus content. You can access all those links directly in the description for this episode. 

Today on Demand Utopia, our conversation starts with a simple premise: if the future can’t house people, it’s not serious.

And by housing, I mean much more than architecture. I don’t just mean what the buildings look like or whether they have green roofs, passive cooling, and beautiful shared courtyards. I mean affordability. Ownership. Tenancy. Land access. Permanence. Rootedness. Safety. Accessibility. Climate resilience. I mean the actual terms on which people are allowed to remain in the places they call home.

That’s why housing belongs at the center of utopian thought. Home is where infrastructure meets intimacy. It’s where economics, care, class, and place all collide. It’s where the abstract values of a society become material. You can say you believe in justice, sustainability, and community, but housing is where you find out whether those values have actually been built into daily life.

Solarpunk often imagines neighborhoods beautifully. It gives us gardens, transit, walkability, collective space, and local abundance. But it doesn’t always ask the next question: who gets to remain there? A just future has to answer not only how we build, but for whom, under what terms, and with what protections.

To see why housing is such a crucial test, we need to talk about the specific kind of crisis housing represents in the present. And here in the present, housing precarity is everywhere. Rent burden and unaffordability are everywhere. Evictions, overcrowding, houselessness, temporary arrangements that stretch into years, the constant low-grade instability of never being fully secure in the place where you sleep. For millions of people, housing is not a settled fact of life. It’s an ongoing negotiation with the market, with landlords, with wages, debt, scarcity, and with luck.

And yes, climate change is making that instability worse. Climate adaptation is already a housing issue, as are heat, flooding, wildfire, insurance collapse, migration, and rebuilding. Every climate disaster raises the same set of questions: who gets protected, who gets relocated, who gets rebuilt for, and who gets abandoned? A future that claims resilience but can’t answer those questions isn’t resilient for everyone. It’s more like the bunkers in Fallout, selectively protective.

And then there’s the problem of green development itself. Sustainable neighborhoods can still be exclusionary. Eco-upgrades can still raise property values and price people out. Climate-ready infrastructure can become a premium amenity for those who already have access to wealth. Resilience without justice becomes a kind of selective sheltering, where some communities get cooler buildings, cleaner transit, and flood protection, while others absorb the consequences.

That’s why this matters for solarpunk and speculative fiction. Solarpunk wants to imagine livable futures. But housing is where the future stops being a concept and becomes a condition, where climate, class, policy, infrastructure, and daily life all meet. It’s one thing to imagine a greener city, but imagining who gets to stay when that city becomes desirable is where solarpunk truly sits.

So why is housing such a central test for utopian thought in the first place? 

Because housing is one of the clearest places where a society’s values stop being rhetoric and become measurable, material reality. A culture can say it believes in sustainability, democracy, mutual care, resilience, accessibility, and community. It can write manifestos and build beautiful public plazas. It can cover buildings in greenery and fill neighborhoods with bikes, trains, and solar canopies. But housing reveals whether those values are actually distributed or remain only selectively available to those who are already privileged and secure.

Housing is where abstraction becomes daily life. And that’s important because housing touches almost everything. Survival, obviously. Shelter is foundational. But it also touches family, health, privacy, autonomy, community, permanence, and identity. Where you live shapes how you rest, how you recover, how you raise children and care for elders, how far you travel for work, how connected you feel to your neighborhood, how safe you are from weather and violence, and how much energy you have left for anything beyond the endurance of survival.

To be housed is not merely to have a roof over your head. It’s to have stability. It means having legibility in the sense of being located in the world: to receive mail, to be findable, and have an address that institutions recognize. It means having relative safety, however imperfect. Being housed is to have some claim on the future, some reason to imagine that next year belongs to you too.

That’s why home matters so much in stories. Home isn’t just a backdrop. It’s the site of belonging. It’s where memory accumulates, routine forms, and mutual dependence becomes real. And because of that, housing is also the spatial form of justice or injustice. It’s how a society physically arranges dignity and precarity, where class becomes architectural, policy becomes neighborhood, and care becomes either concrete or absent.

And rent, in that sense, isn’t just a bill. It’s an ongoing social relation. Rent is a measure of who gets to remain in place and under what conditions, and that makes rent a form of power. If your ability to stay in your home can be revoked by a price increase, a redevelopment plan, an owner’s decision, an insurance collapse, or a speculative surge, then your housing isn’t simply expensive, it’s precarious, and precarity is a form of domination. Precarity means your rootedness is conditional. Your future in that place is contingent on forces you don’t control.

That’s why housing has to be central to utopian thought. A future isn’t transformed just because it’s greener, quieter, or more beautiful. If housing remains scarce, speculative, exclusionary, or unstable, then the future has upgraded its surfaces without changing its social relations. It may look kinder. It may even feel calmer. But if ordinary people are still living at the mercy of the market, then the core hierarchy remains intact.

This is also why the distinction between shelter and belonging matters. Emergency shelter is necessary. Temporary housing is necessary. Crisis response matters. But utopia can’t stop at managing emergencies. It has to ask what it means for people to remain, to build history somewhere, to know they won’t be casually removed from the place where their lives are unfolding.

And it has to ask whether housing is treated as a commodity or a public good. Is home primarily an investment vehicle, an asset class, a speculative instrument? Or is it a civic guarantee and a foundation for the rest of life? A condition of democracy itself?

If a future is truly better, that betterment should show up in who gets to remain, who gets to return, and who no longer has to live at the mercy of the market.

What does solarpunk often miss when it imagines neighborhoods, homes, and collective life?

One of solarpunk’s great strengths is atmosphere. It’s very good at imagining a world that feels habitable. Shared gardens. Local energy. Community design. Low-carbon living. Walkable blocks. Repair culture. Shared space. There’s often a warmth to solarpunk that other futurisms lack. It knows how to make everyday life feel desirable rather than punishing.

But sometimes, in that warmth, housing relations stay vague. The genre imagines the beautiful block, but not the lease; the co-op café, but not the land title. It can imagine adaptation, but not anti-displacement protections, abundance, but not tenure. And those absences matter, not because every story needs to become a policy brief, but because the terms of inhabiting a place shape the stakes of the story itself.

Start with displacement. What happens to existing residents when neighborhoods are gentrified and “improved?” When transit gets better, streets get greener, buildings become more efficient, public spaces become more desirable, who benefits first, and who gets pushed outward? Does climate adaptation trigger removal? Do flood protections, cooling projects, resilience investments, and redevelopment plans become new mechanisms of exclusion? Who bears the cost of transition? Solarpunk often imagines the after-state of a transformed neighborhood, but not always the political struggle over who gets to be present in that transformation.

Then there is rent and tenure. Are people renting in these futures? Owning? Cooperatively housed? Publicly housed? Living under long-term tenure protections? What keeps them secure? What rights do they have if conditions change? These questions aren’t bureaucratic trivia. They shape how a person moves through the world. The difference between secure housing and conditional housing is the difference between being able to plan your life and being forced to improvise it.

Then land. Who controls it? Has stolen land been returned to Indigenous communities? Is land collectively stewarded? Publicly held? Privatized? Inherited? Enclosed? Is it treated as a commons, a trust, a market asset, a sacred obligation, a neighborhood inheritance? The answer determines almost everything else. A story can give us beautiful communal life, but if we don’t know who controls the ground under it, then we don’t yet know how stable or just that life really is.

And then we have belonging. What allows someone to feel rooted in this future? How do people stay in place across generations? How do they return after a disaster? How do they rebuild after being displaced? What does it mean to inherit not just property, but community memory, neighborhood ties, local knowledge, and mutual obligation? Belonging is not automatic. It’s produced through time, protection, recognition, and the chance to remain long enough for a place to become part of you and your identity.

And I want to stress this clearly: this isn’t a complaint that every story needs to become a zoning treatise or to explain every governance mechanism in exhausting detail. It’s a reminder, and this is key, that housing relations generate conflict, stakes, and meaning. Home isn’t just a setting; it can also be the plot. Displacement isn’t just background; it’s drama. Security, tenure, stewardship, and return are emotionally resonant and high-stakes narrative material.

In fact, solarpunk could become much richer by leaning into this and imagining how communities defend place and community without becoming exclusionary. By telling stories about staying, returning, repair, inheritance, and land justice. By understanding that the future isn’t just built, it’s inhabited under terms that are either dignified or not. When a story gives us a beautiful neighborhood but not the terms of inhabiting it, it risks imagining home as scenery rather than as a contested and precious social achievement.

So if we wanted to imagine housing more seriously, what kinds of structures, systems, and futures might solarpunk actually explore?

This is where the conversation gets exciting. Because once housing becomes central, the imaginative possibilities multiply.

Start with social housing. Not as a gray, joyless necessity, but as a civic good that can be beautiful, durable, and dignified. Publicly supported, permanently affordable housing offers a fundamentally different premise from housing as an asset class. It says that stable shelter is part of what a society owes its people. In speculative fiction, that opens up all kinds of questions: what does public housing look like in a world that actually values its residents? What kinds of shared identity, local culture, and civic care emerge when housing is no longer organized primarily around extraction?

Then we have community land trusts. Land held in common, or stewarded for community benefit, is one of the most narratively rich models imaginable. Buildings can change. Residents can come and go. But the land itself is protected from speculation and held for collective continuity. That creates stories about stewardship, governance, inheritance, local control, and intergenerational responsibility. It asks not just who owns something, but who is entrusted with caring for it over time.

We can imagine co-housing and intergenerational living. This isn’t about abolishing privacy, but about rethinking the ratio between private space and shared life. Shared kitchens, workshops, gardens, child care, elder care, mutual aid networks, cooling rooms, and gathering spaces—these arrangements create stories full of friction, intimacy, negotiation, resilience, and care; they acknowledge that many people don’t want radical isolation; they want support without surveillance and privacy without abandonment; they want community without coercion.

Next, we can imagine tenant power. What if tenants become political actors in the future, rather than passive recipients? What if resident councils, tenant unions, and collective bargaining over housing conditions are ordinary parts of civic life? What if people who live somewhere have binding power over how it’s run, maintained, and protected from profit hounds? That’s not just a policy detail. It’s narrative fuel that gives us conflict, solidarity, betrayal, organizing, and transformation at the scale where people actually live.

What if we imagine climate-adaptive housing? Cooling systems designed for extreme heat. Flood-resilient construction. Fire buffers. Modular rebuilding after disaster. Mobile or flexible infrastructure. What if we imagine neighborhood-scale adaptation rather than private fortification for the wealthy? Here, housing becomes the place where climate resilience stops being an abstract promise and becomes lived design. Who gets rebuilt for? Who gets protected? Who chooses how adaptation happens? These are deeply dramatic questions.

And finally, accessible and dignified homes. Not homes retrofitted after the fact, but designed from the beginning for many bodyminds, ages, and care needs. Accessible circulation. Sensory consideration. Flexible rooms. Shared support systems. Housing that assumes dependency and aging are ordinary, that disability is ordinary, and that dignity belongs to everyone. That alone would transform the emotional and moral texture of so many imagined futures.

And think of the stories this makes possible: rebuilding after flood or fire. Returning home after displacement. Communities organizing to resist speculative pressure. Resident councils deciding what belongs in a shared courtyard. Families navigating intergenerational living. Neighbors debating stewardship, access, memory, and repair. Conflicts over land, belonging, and responsibility that don’t collapse into cynicism because the future remains worth fighting for.

Housing isn’t a technical sidebar. Housing is one of the richest available sites for speculative storytelling because it links infrastructure, emotion, community, conflict, and survival. A mature solarpunk doesn’t just imagine greener homes. It imagines new housing relations: new ways of staying, sharing, rebuilding, and belonging.

To make this less abstract, let’s look at a few patterns, texts, and real-world tensions that help clarify what’s at stake. Because if housing is the genre test, then we should be able to see that test operating not just in theory, but in the cultural material itself.

Let’s start with the trope. You know the image: the beautiful, sustainable neighborhood rendering. Green apartment blocks layered with terraces and vines. Rooftop food production. Bike lanes. Shared courtyards. Solar canopies. Children playing in dappled light. Elders sitting under shade trees. Maybe a tram in the background. Maybe laundry fluttering from balconies just long enough to suggest warmth without ever implying hardship. The whole thing feels clean, communal, ecologically integrated, and to be honest, deeply appealing.

And again, that desirability matters. The image is doing real work here. It’s helping people picture a world that isn’t organized around isolation, asphalt, and extraction. 

But once we learn how to look at it, a second set of questions appears. Are these units affordable? Is this social housing or a luxury eco-development? Who lives here? Who was here before, and why did they leave? What protections keep the residents from being displaced once the neighborhood becomes more desirable? Who owns the land beneath the buildings? Who governs the courtyard, the roof, the garden, the transit connection, the common spaces? Are the people in this image secure, or just stylishly housed for the duration of the rendering?

That’s the tension. The image often gives us sustainable housing form without housing justice structure. It gives us the look of a livable future without telling us whether that future has actually solved the problem of durable belonging.

One of the reasons I remain hopeful about solarpunk is that fiction often understands this problem better than static imagery does. The strongest speculative work isn’t just interested in architecture. It’s interested in dwelling, in systems and relationships, in what it means to be secure somewhere, to share a place, to remain in it, to maintain it, to inherit it, to care for it.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an important adjacent example here, not because his work is always centrally about housing, but because he consistently links infrastructure, planning, and social organization. His futures don’t just ask what gets built. They ask how systems are governed, who benefits, what tradeoffs exist, how collective life is structured, and what material arrangements make justice more or less possible. That instinct is crucial.

Becky Chambers offers something different but equally useful. Her work, especially the Monk and Robot books, isn’t centrally about housing policy, but it’s deeply interested in enoughness, scale, care, and non-extractive living. The worlds she imagines feel inhabited by people who aren’t being optimized for endless accumulation. That matters because housing justice is inseparable from broader questions of what a society believes is enough, what it owes people, and how it organizes daily life around care rather than scarcity.

And more broadly, solarpunk stories that focus on co-ops, mutual aid, local governance, repair, and communal life often get much closer to serious housing imagination than the circulating visuals do. Because the best speculative work understands that housing is not only architecture, but relation: who shares space, who has security, who’s tied to place, and how built environments reflect values.

Now, let’s look at real-world tension, because this isn’t just a fiction problem. Sustainable architecture can absolutely be folded into luxury development. “Resilience” districts can absolutely coexist with exclusion. Climate adaptation can absolutely become selective if protection follows wealth. Green building itself isn’t the problem, nor are efficient materials or transit-oriented design. The problem is what happens when sustainability upgrades arrive without anti-displacement justice.

When resilience becomes a selling point for high-end districts while poorer communities face heat, flood, fire, and insurance collapse with fewer protections, the future hasn’t been shared. It’s been sorted and stratified. And that’s the difference between decorative housing futurism and real utopian housing imagination: whether the future includes durable belonging.

And that brings us to the hardest part of this conversation. There’s a real tension here. If we start talking about housing as a shared good, some people immediately hear a threat to privacy, autonomy, beauty, or chosen space. And that concern isn’t frivolous.

People want privacy. They want quiet. They want control over their immediate environment. They want safety, retreat, and some sense that a home can still be theirs, even inside a more collective society. For some people, communal housing can feel liberatory. For others, it can feel exposing, exhausting, or coercive. The same is true of density. It can feel vibrant and supportive to one person, overwhelming and alienating to another.

So we do need to be careful. Some utopian housing visions become morally prescriptive. They flatten different needs, romanticize collectivism, or assume there’s one enlightened way everyone ought to live.

But that isn’t the point. The goal isn’t one ideal form of housing that everyone has to fit into. The goal is to create decommodified, dignified, climate-resilient, and accessible forms of housing that expand security and choice. Private space and shared infrastructure can coexist. Rootedness doesn’t have to mean exclusion. Belonging doesn’t have to harden into parochialism. The question isn’t whether everyone should live the same way. It’s whether everyone should be guaranteed a place to live with dignity.

So what does housing-centered solarpunk ask us to imagine differently? It asks us to move from beautiful neighborhoods to just habitation. Keep the gardens and the transit and the beauty. But ask who can stay. Ask who returns after a disaster. Ask who owns the land and who’s protected from displacement. Ask whether housing is accessible, communal where desired, private where needed, and permanently dignified. Ask whether a neighborhood is merely attractive, or whether it actually enables ordinary people to build a life there without fear of removal.

That is the shift. Housing can’t remain a setting and background information. It has to become proof of seriousness. Because a future full of solar panels and gardens means very little if people are still one rent increase, one disaster, or one development scheme away from losing their home. Housing is where hope becomes measurable. It’s where the future stops being a style and becomes a structure.

If solarpunk wants to imagine a world worth fighting for, then it has to imagine not only how we build beautiful places, but how we guarantee that people can live in them, remain in them, and belong there. If the future can’t house people, then it isn’t utopian.

Seventy-two-year-old Namgaukum, from India’s northeastern state of Nagaland, cherishes rare childhood memories of riding an Asian giant tortoise (Manouria emys phayrei) through the forests near his Old Jalukie village.

For the then five-year-old, the nearly two-foot-long carapace of the animals — the largest living tortoise in mainland Asia — often resembled a greyish-brown boulder in the forest about a foot above the mushy leaf litter and undergrowth.

“I would sit on it in the jungle, and after some time suddenly sense stirrings below,” he recalls. First a dark-brown head would cautiously pop out of the “boulder,” followed by a thick, muscular neck and sturdy, scaly legs pressing into the forest floor. “Then we would slowly amble forward, its beak nibbling grass and tender shoots,” he laughs, reminiscing his childhood thrill of riding the giant forest reptile.

At the release event of the critically endangered Asian Giant Tortoises in the Old Jalukie Community Reserve last August. Photo: Newme Shamma, used with permission.

The village elder remembers the tortoises were still abundant in the forests those days, and laments that they had almost disappeared by the time he was 13 or 14.

However, six decades later, a younger resident beams at the “homecoming” of this critically endangered species to the same Old Jalukie forests near his village — now a community reserve. “They are like our children now,” says 22-year-old Haileulungbe, proud to be acknowledged as a “Tortoise Guardian.” Other youths and members of the Zeliang tribe are equally overjoyed at the revival of the species in the wild.

This recovery follows a landmark initiative under the India Turtle Conservation Programme. Last August 10 captive-bred juvenile Asian giant tortoises (each 5–6 years old) were reintroduced into a community-owned and managed reserve rather than the usual state-run protected areas.

The program — implemented by the Nagaland Forest Department in collaboration with the Turtle Survival Alliance Foundation India at Old Jalukie Community Reserve in Peren district — aims to “rewild the growing number of captive-bred individuals and save them from extinction through community stewardship,” says its director, Shailendra Singh.

From Pets and Meat to Freedom

The effort began in 2018 with a captive-breeding facility under the ITCP at Nagaland Zoological Park. It was founded with 13 individuals of wild origin — seven females and six males — recovered from Tribal households, where they were kept as pets, and from local markets, sold for meat. Today the facility hosts the world’s largest assurance colony of Asian giant tortoises, with 114 individuals.

“The program reached its turning point when some villagers voluntarily donated tortoises they had kept as pets in their homes for captive breeding, and the community that once exploited them was sensitized to restore and nurture the species back in the wild from the brink,” says Singh.

Seven to eight months post-release, all the radio-tagged tortoises are reported to be healthy and surviving. Initially kept within a 10,000-square-foot bamboo enclosure in the Community Reserve for acclimatization, they were released into the wild on Feb. 20 this year.

Left to right: A female Asian Giant Tortoise guards her nest made of leaf litter and plant material. They are among the few tortoises in the world with the unique habit of building nests above the ground. Photo: Shailendra Singh, used with permission; A sensitization workshop with local communities conducted by program leaders and the heads of the forest department. Photo: Sushmita Kar, used with permission: Ten radio tagged juveniles of Asian Giant Tortoise prior to their release in the Conservation Reserve. Photo: Shailendra Singh, used with permission.

They now roam free in the wilderness of the Old Jalukie Reserve’s 370-hectare stretch of hilly semi-evergreen forests, with dense vegetation comprising native trees such as Indian chestnut, Nepalese alder, Karoi tree, and various oak species. The biodiverse landscape has been owned and managed by local tribes since the 1980s from 15 surrounding villages, with elders at the helm.

Vanishing Giants

The species faced a grim situation even two decades ago. Over the past 135 years, the tortoises have lost nearly 80% of their historic range across South and Southeast Asia due to habitat loss, hunting, and the pet trade.

Only about 250 mature individuals of the Asian giant tortoise may survive in the wild globally, according to Shailendra Singh, director of TSAFI. Of the two recognized subspecies, Manouria emys emys is extant in parts of Malaysia, Sumatra, and Borneo, while the larger, darker M. e. phayrei ranges across parts of Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Northeast India.

Singh says that between 2012 and 2026, only 20 adult individuals have been reported from the northeastern states of Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, Meghalaya, and Mizoram, although inaccessible hilly terrains and social conditions may have limited surveys and detectability. He estimates that around 100–150 adults may survive in the region.

Building Support

Villages in the region traditionally hunted the tortoises for generations, so securing the support of local communities was crucial if the reintroduction program was to succeed, points out Sushmita Kar, turtle biologist and Project Coordinator, ITCP for Northeast India.

“The Forest Department helped bring local communities on board, keep them motivated, and take them along on this conservation journey,” says Chisayi, divisional forest officer, Peren (from the Indian Forest Service). He explains that the department works with communities at the grassroots through capacity building and livelihood opportunities, envisioning a future where Old Jalukie can be projected as a “tortoise village” in the state.

“As major stakeholders, local communities become more responsible and accountable for conserving the species and the habitat as a whole,” he adds.

Left to right: Successful artificial incubation of the eggs of the Asian Giant Tortoise at the captive breeding centre in Nagaland Zoological Park. Photo: Lalit Budhani, used with permission. Photo: Lalit Budhani, used with permission; Tiny hatchlings of Asian Giant tortoise emerge after artificial incubation. Photo: Sushmita Kar, used with permission; Asian Giant Tortoises on the damp forest floor after their release at the Old Jalukie Community Reserve. Photo: Shailendra Singh, used with permission.

Releasing the tortoises in a community reserve rather than a conventional protected area was a conscientious decision, admits Kar. The approach also followed lessons learned from the first phase of giant tortoise reintroduction at Intanki National Park in December 2022. Of the 10 captive-bred juveniles released then, only one was later found at the forest periphery; two were trampled by elephants, while the fate of the rest remains unknown.

Unlike national parks, community reserves do not restrict access for local villagers. To help make villages aware of the importance of the species, youths are given hands-on field training for regular monitoring of the tortoises. “For a species where every individual counts, these youths, with their almost ‘one-to-one involvement’ with each, develop familiarity and a sense of belonging, ensuring their long-term survival,” she says.

Besides, during the monsoon, when forests become difficult to access, these grassroots conservationists can still move through the terrain and remain vigilant, guided by their lived experience and traditional knowledge.

Meanwhile, unlike most Indian states where forests are largely under government control, nearly 88% of Nagaland’s forests are governed and managed by local communities, clans, and individuals through village councils and traditional institutions. According to official reports, the state has 407 community-conserved areas  safeguarded by traditional laws, as well as 148 formally notified community reserves — the highest in the country and accounting for more than 50% of all such reserves nationally.

Such programs as the ITCP offer good examples of how community reserves can be effectively used for the revival of such critically endangered species, according to Kenlumtatei, Range Officer, Jalukie Range. “It is also bringing about an attitudinal change among community youths, who are gradually moving away from traditional hunting to protect forests and wildlife,” he adds.

Tortoise Guardians

For youths like Haileulungbe and Iteichube from the Old Jalukie Conservation Reserve, it means their enhanced role and commitment as its custodians.

Donning olive-green T-shirts printed with “Tortoise Guardian,” Haileulungbe sets off for the forest at 8 a.m., when the reptiles are most active. He carries a radio receiver, while the project field researcher Victor carries the antenna connected to it. The duo scans for signals from their radio-tagged “giant children” to pinpoint their locations. “Two of the tortoises have already moved about 300–500 meters from the enclosure site,” he says excitedly as they walk me through the forest.

They have been trained to maintain daily records of each individual tortoise’s GPS location, along with observations of their movements and behavior.

Apart from following signals on the radio receiver, they also look for nibble marks on leaves, their favorite bamboo shoots, or mushrooms on the forest floor, or shallow depressions in wet grasslands and puddles, explains 33-year-old Iteichube, another tortoise guardian. “All such signs enable us to identify their basking, foraging, and resting sites,” he adds.

A community awareness event with local villagers, forest department officials and scientists. Photo: Haileulungbe, used with permission.

With adults weighing about 36–37 kilograms (79–82 pounds), they are often described as the “small elephants of the forest” because of their thick, scaly legs that push through dense vegetation, a process that also aids seed dispersal and forest regeneration.

They are among the few tortoises in the world with a unique nesting habit: building nests 2-3 feet above the ground with leaf litter and plant material to lay about 25–70 eggs per clutch. Most tortoises, by contrast, nest by digging holes in the ground.

Seeing their behavior further inspires the guardians. “We started by simply tracking them, but today we realize how important they are in keeping our forest vibrant and alive with their unique ways,” says Iteichube.

The Next Generation

Inspired by the rewilding success of Asian giant tortoises in Nagaland, similar efforts are now underway in neighboring Manipur. Early results are already emerging: A captive-breeding facility set up at the Manipur Zoological Garden successfully produced 28 hatchlings through artificial incubation in August 2025.

As the hatchlings grow, scientists are also carrying out site assessments and searching for Asian giant tortoises in the wild to identify potential release sites of captive-bred individuals. “We aim to repopulate Manipur’s forests with giant tortoises, as in Nagaland, and eventually across its historic range in the Northeast India, through community participatory approach,” says Kar.

An adult male Asian Giant Tortoise pops its greyish-brown head and forelimbs out of its carapace. Photo: Shailendra Singh, used with permission.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The village elder Namgaukum could not be happier with the return of the tortoises to their native forests.

“Earlier we would hang its large, beautiful shells outside our homes to ward off evil and as a symbol of pride, but today we consider it a good omen and blessing for our community to see it flourish in the wild,” he says.

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

 

Strategic ‘Matchmaking’ Protects the World’s Smallest and Rarest Wild Pig

The post ‘Tortoise Guardians’ Protect Rare Giants appeared first on The Revelator.

SEASON 6, EPISODE 1
with host Justine Norton-Kertson
Click here to listen to this episode

When people hear the word solarpunk, many of them see the same thing: green rooftops, soft light, walkable cities, vertical gardens and glass towers wrapped in vines, bikes gliding past terraces, community farms tucked between apartment blocks, sunlight warming glass instead of bouncing off steel. It is one of the most compelling future aesthetics we have. But if that future is only an image, what exactly are we looking at? Who owns those buildings? Who cleans those trains? Who gets displaced before that beautiful neighborhood arrives? Who’s missing from the picture? A beautiful future isn’t automatically a just one. So today, we’re asking a difficult but necessary question: has solarpunk become too aesthetic?

Welcome back to Demand Utopia. I’m your host, Justine Norton-Kertson. It’s been a while, and it feels right to return with a question that gets at the heart of what this show is for. Not just celebrating hopeful futures, but interrogating them. Pressuring them. Asking more of them.

There’s nothing wrong with beauty, of course. Beauty matters. Aesthetic language matters. People need images that help them want the future again. We need images that give us hope. We need symbols, moods, textures, and forms that interrupt the endless visual monopoly of dystopia. Part of solarpunk’s power is that it made hope visible. It gave people a future they could actually picture inhabiting.

But the image alone isn’t enough. Because once a movement becomes visually legible, it also becomes easier to simplify, flatten, and sell back to us as style. And that’s exactly the tension we’re talking about today: solarpunk as an image set versus solarpunk as a social, political, and material practice.

If solarpunk stops at atmosphere, if it becomes a mood board instead of a framework, then it risks becoming decorative rather than transformative. The question isn’t whether the aesthetics are compelling. Of course they are. The question is what gets lost when the look becomes more legible than the values underneath it.

To understand why this matters, we need to talk about why solarpunk’s visual identity has become so powerful in the first place.

Solarpunk is no longer just a niche term floating around a few corners of speculative fiction. It has escaped into the wider culture. You see it in art, on social media, in design conversations, in architecture discourse, in climate-hope spaces, in those endless compilations of futures people say they’d actually want to live in. It’s become one of the most recognizable visual packages for a non-apocalyptic tomorrow.

And that visibility isn’t trivial. It means solarpunk is answering a real hunger. But we’re also living in an age of aesthetic acceleration. Images move faster than systems. Social platforms reward what can be understood instantly, shared instantly, and desired instantly. A complicated political vision can take years to develop, but a compelling visual shorthand can go everywhere in a week, even just a day. And once that happens, complexity often gets compressed into vibe. Radical ideas get absorbed into branding before they have the chance to mature into shared practice.

That’s not a problem unique to solarpunk. We see the pattern across culture. But with solarpunk, the stakes feel especially high because climate imagination is at stake. People are exhausted by collapse. We’re saturated with ruin and starving for futures that offer something other than fire, flood, authoritarianism, and despair. Solarpunk has stepped into that gap and made hope feel possible, maybe even desirable.

That means its success matters. And if its success matters, then its shallowness—if it becomes shallow—also matters because there’s a big difference between images that prepare us to think structurally and images that simply soothe us. One helps us imagine transformation. The other offers emotional relief without asking what the future costs, who builds it, or who benefits from it.

For Solarpunk Magazine, that distinction matters deeply. If we care about literature, justice, climate, and community, then we have to ask more of the genre than prettiness. This conversation isn’t about rejection. It’s about maturation.

So what are people actually picturing when they picture solarpunk, and how did that image become so stable so quickly?

Well, let’s start with the image itself. When people say solarpunk, what are they actually picturing?

Usually, it is some version of the same visual vocabulary. Vertical gardens climbing the sides of buildings. Solar panels integrated into roofs and windows. Clean, quiet transit. Shared plazas and pedestrian streets. Community farms woven into urban neighborhoods. Greenery not shoved off to the margins, but integrated into everyday life. Warm sunlight. Open air. A softened futurism that feels organic rather than metallic, local rather than corporate, humane rather than cold.

And just as important as what solarpunk is, visually, is what it is not.

It is not cyberpunk’s neon alienation. Not rain-slicked streets under surveillance drones. Not giant holographic billboards flickering over social collapse. It is not the rusted wasteland of post-apocalyptic fiction, where survival is stripped down to violence and scarcity. And it is not the sterile perfection of techno-authoritarian futurism, where efficiency replaces freedom and smooth design hides control.

Solarpunk arrives as a visual refusal of all of that.

Its world is not dark, not dead, not brutally optimized. It is inhabited. It is relational. It suggests that technology and ecology might coexist without either domination or collapse. Even before you know what the politics are, you feel the emotional promise: this is a future where human beings are still allowed to breathe.

And I think it is important to say plainly that this matters. A lot.

There is sometimes a temptation, especially in more rigorous political conversations, to dismiss aesthetics as superficial. But aesthetics are not trivial. Image is often the first language through which people learn to desire a different world. Before someone studies policy, before they read movement theory, before they can explain how governance or mutual aid might work, they often need some kind of felt sense that another way of living is imaginable.

That is what solarpunk’s imagery accomplished. Solarpunk’s images did something rare: they made the future feel breathable again. For decades, so much of mainstream futurity has oscillated between two poles. On one side, sleek corporate futurism: smart cities, frictionless consumption, automation without accountability, convenience without democracy. On the other side, collapse: dead landscapes, authoritarian reaction, climate devastation, permanent emergency. Solarpunk cut across that binary. It offered a visual language for something else—for a future that was technologically capable but not spiritually empty, ecologically alive but not primitivist, communal but not joyless.

And because that visual language is so legible, it spreads well. It is instantly hopeful. Easy to share. Easy to remix. Easy to turn into illustrations, collages, concept art, covers, mood boards, and speculative architecture. It is emotionally restorative in a way very few future aesthetics are. It gives shape to a sentence a lot of people have been aching for: a future worth living in.

That should not be minimized. In a culture saturated with dread, making hope visible is real work. But that brings us to the tension, because when a movement becomes widely known through its imagery, there is always a risk that the imagery becomes the movement. The visual package can travel farther and faster than the political commitments underneath it. And once that happens, what people recognize most easily may no longer be the ethics, or the practices, or the structural questions. It may just be the look.

And that raises the next question: what happens when a movement becomes best known not for its values or practices, but for its look?

This is the danger zone. Not beauty itself, but beauty untethered from structure. Any movement with a strong visual identity runs this risk. Once a style becomes recognizable, it becomes available for circulation far beyond its original meaning. It can be reproduced, detached, softened, sold. Symbols that once pointed toward transformation start functioning as atmosphere. A radical orientation becomes an aesthetic category. A collective political longing becomes a market niche.

And you can already see how that flattening happens with solarpunk. Instead of a future shaped by justice, redistribution, access, and shared power, the image can slide toward something much thinner: eco-luxury. The green consumer future. Sustainability as premium design. A district full of beautiful plant-covered buildings that still somehow feels expensive, exclusionary, and quietly class-coded. You start seeing greenery without redistribution. Communal imagery without actual power-sharing. Renewable energy as a design flourish rather than a social relation.

The result is something that looks good, sometimes stunningly good, but no longer necessarily means much. That is the difference between aesthetic coherence and ideological coherence. Aesthetic coherence means the world looks like it belongs to itself. Its colors, shapes, textures, and technologies feel unified. Ideological coherence means the world’s values actually hold together. Its beauty is rooted in material arrangements: who owns what, who decides what, who is protected, who labors, who belongs.

Solarpunk often has the first. The challenge is making sure it keeps the second because without ideological coherence, the aesthetic can be absorbed into the same systems it originally pushed against. A city covered in plants is not inherently liberatory. A walkable district is not automatically equitable. Sustainability without justice can still be hierarchy in a greener color palette.

And this is where class enters the frame in a particularly sharp way. Some of the most circulated solarpunk imagery does not necessarily look like a democratic future. Sometimes it looks like an affluent district with excellent landscaping. Sometimes it looks like the eco-friendly wing of a luxury development brochure. Clean, serene, tasteful, verdant, and suspiciously free of visible struggle, mess, labor, or difference.

Again, that does not mean the artists are doing something wrong by making beautiful work. It means the broader circulation of the image can drift toward a familiar cultural pattern: the future becomes aspirational lifestyle rather than collective transformation.

Once that drift happens, depoliticization follows quickly. You start noticing what is absent. No workers. No custodians. No transit operators. No utility crews. No farmers hauling crates. No childcare workers. No maintenance staff. No one in the picture seems to be doing the work that sustains the scene.

You also see no public process. No community meetings. No debates about land use. No collective decision-making. No zoning fights. No tenant unions. No municipal budgets. No disability advocates insisting on universal design. No messy democratic friction of any kind.

There are no landlords, but also no systems that abolished landlordism. No conflict, but also no practices for navigating conflict. No supply chains, but also no local production networks. No governance, but also no visible institutions of accountability. It is all outcome and no process.

And that is how a radical future orientation becomes decorative. Not because the imagery is bad, but because the systems vanish from view. Once separated from questions of power, solarpunk imagery can be absorbed into the very logics it originally resisted: privatization, branding, inequality, selective comfort, ecological polish without structural change.

So if that’s what gets flattened out, what exactly is missing from the picture? The simplest answer is this: systems. When solarpunk stays at the level of mood board culture, it often gives us atmosphere without mechanism. We see the world after it has already become beautiful, but we do not see what made it possible, what keeps it functioning, or what tensions it still has to negotiate. And once you start looking for those absences, they multiply.

First: labor.

Who builds the beautiful world? Who retrofits the buildings, lays the tracks, repairs the solar arrays, restores the wetlands, tends the gardens, installs the graywater systems, cleans the transit lines, cooks the communal meals, mends the clothes, maintains the clinics? A truly transformed world would not erase labor. It would dignify it, redistribute it, redesign it, and make it visible as part of collective flourishing. But mood board solarpunk often gives us the finished scene without the people whose work sustains it.

Second: governance.

How are decisions made in this future? Through what institutions? Through what democratic processes? What happens when people disagree about resources, land, priorities, or risk? How does a community balance local autonomy with broader coordination? How are harmful decisions prevented? How are conflicts navigated before they calcify into domination? These questions are not peripheral. They are central to whether a hopeful society is actually livable over time.

Third: housing.

Who gets to live in the future? Is it affordable? Is it public? Cooperative? Social housing? Community land trust? Does the beauty of the neighborhood arrive by displacing the people who once lived there? Are we imagining a transformed city for everyone, or just a greener city for whoever can still pay to remain? Housing is one of the clearest pressure points because it reveals whether belonging is real or rhetorical.

Fourth: access.

Is the future navigable for disabled people? Are public spaces designed with sensory diversity in mind? Is transit genuinely accessible? Are homes built for multiple bodies, needs, and capacities? Are design choices universal or exclusive? Too often, speculative beauty still assumes a frictionless, able-bodied subject moving through space with ease. A mature solarpunk cannot do that. It has to understand access not as a special accommodation, but as a core design principle.

Fifth: conflict and harm.

What happens when people exploit others? What happens when someone hoards resources, abuses power, manipulates a collective process, or harms the vulnerable? How does a hopeful society handle domination, accountability, and protection without simply reproducing carceral or authoritarian models? Utopia does not become serious when it avoids these questions. It becomes serious when it can face them without surrendering its ethics.

And sixth: regional and class specificity.

Does every solarpunk future have to look like the same eco-city? What about rural regions, small towns, flood zones, heat-struck neighborhoods, public housing corridors, desert communities, rust belt blocks, informal settlements, post-industrial edges? What about futures shaped by different climates, different materials, different histories, different infrastructures of survival? If solarpunk becomes too standardized visually, it risks flattening the very diversity of place that a just ecological future should honor.

All of these absences point to the same deeper issue. A mature solarpunk must move from atmosphere to systems. That doesn’t mean abandoning beauty. It means thickening it. Deepening it. Teaching ourselves to see that maintenance can be beautiful. Accountability can be beautiful. Public goods can be beautiful. Accessibility can be beautiful. Collective governance, repair, interdependence, and belonging can be beautiful.

Solarpunk becomes most powerful not when it gives us prettier skylines, but when it teaches us to imagine maintenance, accountability, access, public goods, and belonging as beautiful too.

And that brings us to the hardest part of this conversation, because there is an easy version of this critique that I do not want to make. I do not want to say aesthetics bad, politics good. I do not want to pretend beauty is frivolous, or softness is unserious, or desire is somehow a distraction from transformation. In fact, I think the opposite is often true. Beauty is not trivial. Desire matters. People need emotional entry points into the future. Art often arrives before full theory. Sometimes an image gives us permission to hope before we yet have language for what that hope requires.

That is part of why solarpunk matters at all. In an age of collapse, exhaustion, and permanent bad news, beauty can be a form of resistance. It can interrupt despair. It can insist that life is more than extraction and emergency. It can help people feel, in their bodies, that another world might be livable, pleasurable, communal, and worth building. That isn’t nothing. That is one of the genre’s deepest strengths.

So yes, there is a real risk here. If people are drawn in through beauty, do we lose something by immediately burdening the genre with systems talk? Is mood board culture always a shallow endpoint, or is it sometimes a necessary gateway? Can aesthetics be politically useful even when incomplete?

I think the answer is yes. They can. But entry point is not destination. That is the distinction that matters most. If solarpunk begins with beauty, good. It probably should. But if it stays at the level of aesthetic reassurance, if it offers only atmosphere, only softness, only the feeling of a better world without the structures that would make that world possible, then it becomes politically thin. It becomes comfort without challenge. A style of hope rather than a practice of it.

And there is another danger too: overcorrecting. In trying to make solarpunk more serious, we could make it grim. We could strip it of delight, sensuality, and invitation. We could turn every conversation into a scolding lecture about systems, until the future starts to feel like homework again. That would be its own kind of failure.

So the goal is not less beauty. The goal is thicker beauty. Beauty with infrastructure under it. Beauty with labor inside it. Beauty that includes maintenance, accessibility, public goods, repair, and shared power. Beauty that does not erase conflict, but shows us forms of conflict that do not collapse back into domination. Beauty that tells the truth about what a livable future would require.

The question isn’t whether solarpunk should be beautiful. It’s whether the beauty is telling the truth.

So what does it look like for solarpunk to grow up without losing its soul? I think it looks like this: keep the beauty. Keep the desire, keep the invitation, but widen the frame. Ask not just what the future looks like, but how it works, who built it, who maintains it, who gets to live there, who has access, how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, and what kinds of care hold the whole thing together. Treat labor, housing, governance, and accessibility not as grim add-ons to the fantasy, but as part of the beauty itself. Because a believable better future is more moving than a decorative one.

Solarpunk matters because it reminds us that the future can still be wanted. But wanting the future is only the beginning. The next step is learning to imagine not just how that future looks, but how it functions, who it protects, who it includes, and what it asks of us. A beautiful future is not the same thing as a just one. But a just future, fully imagined, might be more beautiful than we have yet learned to depict.

On the occasion of Earth Day, five women and men farmers from all continents speak to L’Humanité about the ocean of challenges they face and the call for globalising the struggle against all forms of predation.

The post 17 April | The Peasant Internationalist Sows the Seeds of the Future appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

By: Joe Robinson, Alliance to Save Energy and Joe Fernardi, Seattle City Light

The federal government operates more than 350,000 buildings—many still equipped with analog meters that provide little visibility into how, when, or why energy is used. In an era of rising costs and increasing grid stress, federal facility managers need modern tools. Smart metering, interval data, and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) give agencies the information required to identify waste, improve comfort, and support mission readiness. For ASE, this is foundational: you cannot manage what you cannot measure.

Modern Meters = Modern Management

Analog meters capture a single monthly number. That’s it. No time-of-day insights, no load shape, no actionable data.

Smart meters change everything:

• 15-minute or hourly interval data
• Automated alerts to anomalous energy spikes
• Integration with building automation and VPP-ready controls
• Portfolio-level dashboards

This turns energy management from reactive to strategic.

The Power of Analytics in Real Facilities

Interval data routinely reveals issues analog meters hide:

• After-hours HVAC operation
• Malfunctioning dampers or valves
• Simultaneous heating and cooling
• Equipment not matching occupancy patterns

A GSA building in Denver discovered a stuck cooling valve wasting $18,000 per year—identified solely through AMI data.

The Cost Case: Big Savings for a Small Upgrade

DOE’s AMI National Impacts Report finds modern metering can cut energy use up to 12% in large federal facilities. Typical outcomes include:

• $20,000–$60,000 annual savings
• Reduced manual meter reading labor
• Faster maintenance and operational insight

Many systems pay back in 1–3 years.

Federal Buildings Already Using AMI for Flexibility

Federal Buildings Already Using AMI

• A federal complex in New Mexico uses smart meters to trigger automated HVAC curtailment during grid alerts.
• A DOE campus in Idaho uses interval data to pre-cool ahead of wildfire-driven grid constraints—operating as a VPP-supportive asset.
• A courthouse in Washington partnered with Seattle City Light to use interval data for measurement & verification (M&V) on a chiller plant improvement, successfully leveraging a performance-based incentive from the utility.

This is what modern federal operations look like: smarter, cleaner, more reliable.

Why This Matters for Energy Efficiency—and ASE’s Work

Modern metering is central to active efficiency. ASE champions accessible, data-driven solutions that reduce waste, strengthen reliability, and support federal mission performance.

Want to help expand AMI across federal buildings? Email jrobinson@ase.org with “Interested in IPC.”

A Practical Policy Step: Require AMI at Major Federal Facilities

Congress and agencies should require:

• AMI and interval data at major federal buildings
• Integration into automation and flexibility platforms
• Public-private innovation through ESPCs and UESCs

Smart Data = Smart Decisions

With modern meters, facilities gain visibility to cut waste, improve comfort, and support grid reliability—while demonstrating public-sector leadership.

 

Resources & Further Reading

• U.S. Department of Energy: Advanced Metering Infrastructure National Impacts Report (Quantifying the National Impacts of AMI)
  https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/AMI_National_Impacts_Report.pdf
• U.S. Energy Information Administration: Electric Power Annual — Metering Data by Customer Class
  https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_01.html
• U.S. General Services Administration: Sustainability and Energy Management Dashboard
  https://www.gsa.gov/sustainability
• Alliance to Save Energy: Active Efficiency Initiative
  https://www.ase.org/active-efficiency
• Alliance to Save Energy: Advancing Virtual Power Plants to Scale: Policy, Market Trends, and Deployment Pathways (2025)
  https://www.ase.org/resources/advancing-virtual-power-plants-scale-policy-market-trends-and-deployment-pathways

 

Platform ini sering disebut sebagai “jalan menuju profit” bagi para penggemar taruhan olahraga online.

Namun, benarkah demikian? Artikel ini mengulas CMD Sport secara objektif, mendalam, dan transparan, berdasarkan pengalaman penggunaan, analisis ahli, serta perbandingan dengan standar industri.

Apa Itu CMD Sport?

CMD Sport dikenal sebagai platform yang membantu pengguna mengakses berbagai layanan sportsbook dalam satu ekosistem. Fokus utamanya adalah memberikan kemudahan dalam:

• Membandingkan odds (nilai taruhan)
• Menilai kualitas platform sportsbook
• Menyediakan informasi bonus dan promosi
• Mempermudah akses ke pasar taruhan olahraga

Dengan kata lain, CMD Sport bukan hanya tempat bermain, tetapi juga alat bantu pengambilan keputusan.

Pengalaman Penggunaan CMD Sport Kelebihan

Dari sisi pengguna, CMD Sport menawarkan beberapa hal menarik:

• Navigasi sederhana dan cepat
  Pengguna dapat langsung menemukan pertandingan dan opsi taruhan tanpa proses rumit.
• Informasi ringkas dan relevan
  Data seperti odds, jenis taruhan, dan event olahraga disajikan secara jelas.
• Cocok untuk pemula
  Interface yang tidak kompleks memudahkan pengguna baru memahami sistem.

Kekurangan

Namun, ada beberapa catatan penting:

• Tidak sepenuhnya mandiri
  CMD Sport bergantung pada platform pihak ketiga.
• Minim analisis mendalam
  Kurang cocok untuk pengguna profesional yang membutuhkan data statistik lengkap.
• Potensi bias afiliasi
  Rekomendasi platform bisa saja dipengaruhi kerja sama tertentu.

Apakah CMD Sport Bisa Menghasilkan Profit?

Banyak pengguna tergoda dengan klaim profit dari platform seperti CMD Sport. Namun secara realistis:

Tidak ada platform taruhan yang bisa menjamin keuntungan.

CMD Sport hanya membantu dalam:

• Menemukan odds yang lebih kompetitif
• Menghindari situs yang tidak terpercaya
• Memberikan gambaran dasar pasar taruhan

Profit tetap bergantung pada:

• Strategi taruhan
• Manajemen modal
• Analisis pertandingan yang akurat

Perbandingan dengan Standar Industri

Jika dibandingkan dengan platform sejenis, CMD Sport memiliki posisi sebagai berikut:

Setara Dalam:

• Kemudahan penggunaan
• Informasi dasar taruhan
• Akses ke berbagai event olahraga

Masih Tertinggal Dalam:

• Kedalaman data statistik
• Fitur komunitas dan diskusi
• Transparansi sistem rekomendasi

Artinya, CMD Sport lebih unggul sebagai alat praktis, bukan sebagai pusat analisis profesional.

Risiko yang Perlu Diperhatikan

Dalam dunia olahraga digital, risiko tetap menjadi faktor utama. Beberapa hal yang perlu diperhatikan:

• Ketergantungan pada pihak ketiga (agent/broker)
• Perbedaan pengalaman antar pengguna
• Risiko kerugian finansial jika tanpa strategi

Pengguna disarankan untuk tetap bermain secara bijak dan terkontrol.

Layak atau Tidak? Layak Digunakan Jika:

Ingin membandingkan sportsbook dengan cepat
Mencari platform yang lebih aman
Baru memulai di dunia taruhan olahraga

Kurang Cocok Jika:

Mencari profit instan
Membutuhkan analisis data mendalam
Mengandalkan sistem otomatis

Verdict Akhir

CMD Sport bukan mesin uang, tetapi bisa menjadi:

Alat bantu yang efektif untuk meningkatkan kualitas keputusan dalam taruhan olahraga digital.

Dengan pendekatan yang tepat, platform ini dapat membantu pengguna lebih terarah. Namun, hasil akhir tetap bergantung pada strategi dan disiplin masing-masing.

Headline News:

• “US Stalls 165 Onshore Wind Projects” • The US Department of Defense stalled approvals for about 165 onshore wind projects on private land, citing national security concerns, the Financial Times reported. The report said the projects could total about 30 GW of capacity, enough to power 15 million homes. A common cause of delay is cancelled meetings. [reNews]

Wind turbines (Waldemar Brandt, Unsplash)

• “EU Green Hydrogen Scheme Embraces High-Tech Solar Foods” • Solar Foods sailed across the CleanTechnica radar in 2024 when it described plans to scale up Solein, a synthetic protein substance consisting of 65–70% protein, 5–8% fat, 10–15% dietary fiber, and 3–5% mineral nutrients. BalticSeaH2, a green hydrogen company, is supporting it now. [CleanTechnica]
• “Europe Faces China Clean Tech Dependency Risks” • Europe is heavily dependent on Chinese low-carbon technologies, with China supplying 98% of solar panels, 88% of lithium-ion batteries and 61% of inverters imported into the region in 2024. The non-profit Loom said “de-risking” policies have not led to much shift in clean-tech manufacturing geography. [reNews]
• “To Buy Or Not To Buy? That’s The Question Consumers Are Asking About EVs” • US consumers are paying a lot more to fill up their cars and trucks these days, and the spike in gasoline prices has some debating: Is an EV right for me? The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline jumped nearly 30¢ per gallon in the past week to $4.43. [ABC News]
• “Trump’s Renewable Energy Crackdown Hits Legal Wall” • President Trump has taken aim at renewable energy, in an attempt to scale back efforts for a green transition. Trump has instead favored the expansion of the oil, gas, and coal, as well as the development of nuclear power. Now a court ruling rejects Trump’s efforts as unlawful. [OilPrice.com]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

On April 29, education workers across Ontario participated in a province-wide day of action. What began as an effort by one teachers union to wear...

The post After April 29, what’s next for education workers?  first appeared on Spring.

As Hurricane Helene roared through the mountains of western North Carolina in September 2024, Devon ran from one side of his house to the other, listening to the sound of trees snapping in the dark.

The wind whipped the steep hill his family lived on in Asheville, rattling the windows and cracking limbs. Pine trees fell like dominos, 20 in all. Five of them took the porch and a corner of the house with them. The creek behind the family’s home was rising fast, and anything caught in it was swept away.

Inside, Devon’s wife and their daughter, who is now five,  hid in a closet, crying as the house shook. Devon shouted over the wind as he tried to figure out what would fall next. He was inside the house, but also somewhere very far away, reliving memories he had been trying to put away.

“For me, it was very triggering,” he said. “I felt like I was in a war situation.”

Devon, an Iraq war veteran who moved to the mountains from Florida in 2019, asked to be identified by only his first name, as anonymity is a core component of 12-step programs. The 41-year-old had returned from the Middle East in 2006 with post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury that pushed him to numb himself however he could. It started with pills, then heroin, and eventually a combination of heroin and cocaine. “I was so physically addicted,” he said. “The sickness was unbearable. I couldn’t imagine life without drugs.”

In Asheville, he slowly found his way back from the precipice. He joined Narcotics Anonymous, attended regular meetings, and began to confront his trauma in therapy. He and his wife, who had moved to Asheville with him, had a daughter in 2020. It wasn’t always easy, but life with his family, in their house in the woods, felt like it was creeping toward stability. 

Everything changed after the storm.

Hurricane Helene fractured many of the support systems that people in recovery, like Devon, relied on to stay sober. Jesse Barber / Grist

Disasters like Hurricane Helene level communities and upend even the stablest lives. For people recovering from addiction, they can also fracture so much more: 12-step meetings, treatment programs, transportation, and the social networks that are essential to maintaining sobriety. When that scaffolding breaks down, the risk of relapse and overdose rises. 

Penn State University sociologist Kristina Brant has spent the past few years studying the long-term impacts floods can have on communities, finding “an increase in overdose deaths that persists for a decade after a flood.” Grief and trauma can linger for years, she said. “Those are significant triggers that can derail recovery.”

The threat is especially acute in the Appalachian region, a mountainous swath of the country that includes 13 states stretching from New York to Mississippi. Throughout the region, a long-running drug crisis has already taken a devastating toll. Though overdose death rates in Appalachian counties have declined slightly alongside national trends, mortality for people in their prime working years still exceeded the national average in 2023 by 52 percent. These trends are driven by limited access to health care, physically demanding work, and economic hardship. In six western North Carolina counties, including Buncombe, for example, overdose mortality was more than 36 per 100,000 residents as of 2022. 

Increasingly severe storms and flooding, fueled by a warming world, are compounding those vulnerabilities, damaging not just infrastructure but the support systems people rely on to stay alive.

For people like Devon, the weeks and months after Helene unraveled lives they’d spent years building.

Recovery from substance use disorder hinges on stability. Routine keeps people connected to the relationships and services that make long-term sobriety possible, and builds the kind of network where someone notices if a chair is empty.

Across Appalachia, that support system is already stretched thin. Rural communities don’t have the redundancies that make it easy to hit another meeting, find another clinic, or line up another therapist. Long travel distances and high poverty rates create additional barriers.

Disasters further strain the system. Annual hospitalizations for substance use disorders jumped 30 percent after Hurricane Katrina and continued rising for years afterward, especially in neighborhoods that experienced the greatest destruction and displacement. 

“When you factor in a disaster like Helene or other flooding where infrastructure is really impacted, we’re just amplifying that existing barrier a billion-fold,” said Erin Major, a doctoral candidate in health services research at Boston University who studies substance misuse in Appalachia. “It became genuinely impossible for quite a few of these patients to access their care.”

Keep reading Helene frayed the safety net for people who use drugs. This community wove it back together. Katie Myers

In Devon’s walk-up apartment in Arden, a town just south of Asheville, his pit bull, Qball, trotted across the gray carpet to meet him. Devon is tall and thin, with close-cropped hair and an understated, honest way of putting things. He said he understands how much routines matter, because he had spent years building his.

He returned from Iraq in 2006 after two years in a scout platoon. Back at a base in coastal Georgia where he enrolled in college, he began to understand what he’d brought home with him. His brain injury and PTSD plagued him with nightmares and made it difficult to hold a job. He began to self-medicate. “Once I started using, you know, the harder opiates, I would say I was using against my will at that point,” Devon said, scratching his dog’s ear. He overdosed and nearly died several times.

Devon’s formal dress jacket hangs on a door of his apartment.
Jesse Barber / Grist

His relationships frayed under the strain, and for a time he lived on the street. He and his wife separated; her job didn’t pay well, he’d lost his, and they were in debt. In a bid to save their marriage and finances, the couple moved to Asheville, where his wife’s family lived, in 2019. The city’s recovery resources, which are abundant compared to elsewhere in the South, offered the promise of support, consistency, and a fresh start. 

Over time, Devon began building a new life. He is on disability and can’t work, but he and his wife were able to buy a house. Suboxone, a daily prescription medication available at most pharmacies, eased his cravings for opioids. Twelve-step meetings allowed him to find support and celebrate progress. He and his wife welcomed their daughter into the world in 2020. While marriage and recovery were sometimes bumpy, he felt he was building something lasting.

Hurricane Helene blew all of that apart.

In the weeks and months after the storm, the routines that had anchored Devon’s recovery began to shift. His 12-step group moved its meetings online for a couple of weeks. When it resumed gathering in-person, he struggled to attend, bogged down by the demands of repairing his house. With his time consumed by cleaning up from the storm, he stopped regularly going to individual therapy. Financial worries took the place of personal goals.

“There was a huge interruption,” Devon said. Online meetings are “not the same as being in person. You know, like when I like to go in-person in my home group… I can do service like either chair a meeting, help set up literature, help greet people, help set up chairs.”

That kind of service is central to the recovery pathway that’s worked for Devon, and it had become a vital part of his life. He tried to fulfill it by helping neighbors rebuild from the storm. He spent his days clearing debris, organizing disaster supplies at community spaces, and delivering them to people in harder-hit areas. “We were just pitching in the best we can, and I feel like I was using my experience in the program,” he said.

He also met new people along the way — including church volunteers who helped remove the five trees that had fallen onto his house. At first, the spirit of cooperation brought people together. But as the months passed, that warmth faded and the losses began to settle in. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave his family an emergency stipend of $750 to cover immediate expenses, like food and water, but they’d already spent $20,000 on repairs. Even with insurance, they realized they’d have to refinance the house to keep it. 

By last summer, the strain had become too much. Devon and his wife decided to sell the house,  for $30,000 less than they’d hoped. Amid the back-and-forth with the insurance company, their own fights escalated, and they filed for divorce — not uncommon after a life-changing disaster. Because North Carolina law requires a couple to live separately for one year before a divorce can be finalized, Devon moved into a hotel. He found himself alone more often. 

He managed to avoid relapse, but that meant treading carefully with hobbies that summoned the urge to drink, like playing poker. As the summer of 2025 dragged into fall, he felt spiritually adrift. Between his divorce and the costs of the storm, he’d lost about $100,000. It was all too much. It had been years since he’d felt this hopeless. “I was suicidal,” he said.

For many people in recovery, relapse can be more dangerous than their initial drug use. After a few days of sobriety, tolerance starts to drop. Those who have gone through treatment are sometimes more likely to overdose, with the immediate first few days of relapse being the most dangerous. Over time, the mental health impacts and compounding losses of a disaster can push people further off course. 

In the early days after the storm, communities, volunteers, and recovery groups across the region sprang into action, temporarily filling the gaps left by upended routines and the slow trickle of federal help.

Researchers often observe a curious “honeymoon phase” after a disaster: A time of intense social cohesion as people united by shared loss come together to help each other. It’s months or years down the line when the pileup of trauma and loss begins to complicate that cohesion. 

John Kennedy saw that shift unfold in Buncombe County.

John Kennedy sits in front of boxes of Narcan, which his organization, Musicians for Overdose Prevention, helps distribute. Jesse Barber / Grist

Kennedy, a guitarist, and his wife Cinnamon Kennedy, a drummer, spent years distributing naloxone, which can quickly reverse an opioid overdose, to nightclubs, music halls, and other venues throughout the county. Such work is called harm reduction — providing the education and tools to help people who are actively using drugs prevent infection, illness, and death. The project began after John lost several friends and his brother to overdoses. The Kennedys rely on the tight network of musicians and venues to get those supplies to the people who need them.

John Kennedy drove me around Swannanoa, a small, largely working-class town outside of Asheville. Even a year and a half after the storm, there are reminders of how the social fabric has frayed. 

The last music venue in Swannanoa closed after the storm, and others in the area also have closed or aren’t booking bands.. One survey found that across 23 counties, small businesses lost an average of $322,000 during Helene, and many couldn’t withstand it. The closures of bars and venues has left fewer places to congregate. Kennedy worries that may mean more people are using alone. Research shows that hurricanes and tropical storms can cause excess mortality for as long as 15 years, so the region is still only at the beginning of the aftermath.

John Kennedy walks among what is left of Salvage Station outdoor music venue along the French Broad. Jesse Barber / Grist

Kennedy can’t help but reflect on what’s been lost. “Just the ability for people — like a church service, like a job — to show up and come in and be able to check on everyone, check in on everyone, see how people were doing,” he said, driving past Silverados, one of the venues he relied on to carry naloxone until it closed permanently. One after the other: shuttered, shuttered, shuttered. 

Kennedy pointed out the dozens of RVs parked along the roadways, all hosting people who lost their homes to the storm. A field where there was once a trailer park. Ossified muck and debris where there was once a gas station, a farmers market, a woodworking shop, a veteran’s clinic.  “It’s not what it was.”

Kennedy still delivers naloxone, but more often to venues in Asheville, where it’s easier to find people. The community feels battered, he said, but he hopes it is slowly regrowing.

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, many opioid treatment providers struggled to track patients and keep records up to date, said Major, the Boston University doctoral candidate. Some providers reported that the number of people in treatment remained stable, or even increased as street drugs became harder to find. Others have lost patients — one provider saw 15 patients drop out or move away. Just some eventually returned.

How to support people with substance use disorder during and after disaster 

Learn how to recognize and respond to opioid overdoses. Harm reduction groups or syringe exchanges may offer first aid and sensitivity training, as does the Red Cross.

Have naloxone (also known by the brand name Narcan) on hand and know how to dispense it. 

Understand the medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), to help reduce stigma around their availability and use. Buprenorphine is an evidence-based treatment, but requires healthcare providers and pharmacies to maintain an adequate supply to ensure access when disasters hit. 

Ask your local officials how people with substance use disorder are considered in disaster planning. Do shelters have low barriers to entry and no abstinence requirements? Are volunteers trained on how to reduce stigma and respond to overdoses? 

Grist’s Disaster 101 Toolkit — a comprehensive guide to extreme weather preparation, response, and recovery — includes a detailed section on how people with substance use disorder can stay safe during disasters and how community members, volunteers, and other responders can best support them. Read, share, and easily customize it for your community.

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FIRST at Blue Ridge, a halfway house in nearby Black Mountain, saw about 30 residents leave to deal with the aftermath of Helene, though record-keeping was difficult in the chaos. Some residents lost the homes they’d hoped to return to. Others, placed there as a condition of probation, had to navigate spotty cell service to notify court officials and get permission to go assist their families. A few simply walked off, hoping to hike home. Most eventually came back, but one or two never returned. The center administers drug tests when people come or go, and found that several had relapsed during their time away.

Similar disruptions have been reported across the mountains, especially where the legal system is involved. Cordelia Stearns, chief medical officer at High Country Community Health in Watauga County, said displacement can set off a chain of events that ends in incarceration for the patients treated at her clinic.

One had been living in a shed after Helene and accidentally burned it down trying to stay warm through the winter. He walked hours to reach the clinic and keep up with treatment for opioid addiction. “He did actually make these heroic efforts to stay in care,” Stearns said.

Despite that, he was incarcerated multiple times for nonviolent drug offenses. He’s currently out of touch again, and, she assumes, probably in jail. She hopes he’s OK, she said, choking up. “It’s always a little nerve-racking when you can’t reach people.” 

Stearns has seen similar patterns play out repeatedly, particularly among people who are unhoused. Access to medications like Suboxone or methadone often depends on the policies of individual jails, and incarceration can bring people back into environments where drugs are readily available. “I’m not totally sure who it’s supposed to be helping,” she said.

In Buncombe County, community health worker Brandi Hayes has seen how quickly this turmoil can unravel recovery. She works with the county’s Post-Overdose Response Team, which checks on people who have recently survived an overdose and steers them toward treatment. Like many in this field, she has a family history with addiction that makes the work personal.

Brandi Hayes (left) works for the Buncombe County Post-Overdose Response Team, which works with recent overdose survivors. Her organization offers treatment services, like Suboxone (right). Jesse Barber / Grist

In the weeks after Hurricane Helene, she and her colleagues slogged through the muck to check on patients, deliver essentials like food and water, and keep people connected to treatment and care. Some stayed on track. Others disappeared. One case in particular has stuck with her: A man who had been doing well in his treatment for opioid use, and had even gotten his license and a car back after a period of suspension for legal issues.

“Then the storm came,” Hayes said. “He had to take care of someone else that wasn’t in the sober mind state that he was in.” He quit going to treatment, started using drugs again, cycled through jail several times, and lost his car. 

“I don’t even know where he’s at right now or what he’s doing, ’cause he’s fallen off so bad and not going to appointments and things like that,” Hayes said. When that gets harder for the people she serves, she takes notice. “It’s very easy to backslide.”

The same pattern has played out across Appalachia before. When floods tore through eastern Kentucky in 2022, Jeremy Haney lost nearly everything: his apartment, most of his belongings, and Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company, where he built mandolins by hand. He is in recovery from addiction to painkillers and methamphetamines. A recovery-to-work program had led him to the factory in 2019, and building the instruments had become the bedrock of his life. When the floodwaters receded, the factory was temporarily closed, and it didn’t look likely to reopen soon. He wondered what he’d do next.

“My first initial thought is, ‘OK, our factory’s gone. We’ve got no job,’” Haney recalled thinking. He didn’t want to go back to where he was from in Morgan County, all the way across the state. “I’ve put all this work and effort into relocating and rebuilding my life here in Knott County, and now I’m going to have to start all over again.”

Doug Naselroad, who runs the recovery-to-work program, dreaded telling roughly a dozen men that their jobs had disappeared. Instead, he found funding from the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, a combination of state and federal Department of Labor funding, that allowed them to work in disaster relief. “Nobody missed a paycheck,” Naselroad said. “But they had to rethink what they did for a living, you know, and for months they just slogged away in the mud.”

Haney spent that time cleaning and reorganizing the luthiery and its instruments, determining what could be kept and what had to be thrown away. But the flood had upended the rest of his life. He received $1,800 from FEMA to replace his lost possessions. But after his landlord opted into a FEMA program designed to reduce future disaster risk, the building was cleared and everyone had to move out. Haney spent months searching for a new place to live. The factory eventually reopened, allowing him to return to his usual job as a luthier, but much had changed.

Nearly 9,000 houses and apartments were destroyed in the Kentucky flood, and about 31 percent of the homes in Knott County were damaged. Rental housing was scarce. Even after being approved for federal homeowners’ loans, he struggled to find something within his budget. “There just ain’t that many homes around here that would be cheap enough for me to be able to afford the payment,” he said. His landlord had another apartment come open, but the situation felt unstable.

He worried he might have to return to Morgan County, where he could fall back into addiction. The cleanup job helped keep him grounded. He eventually qualified for an unusual state post-disaster housing program for flood survivors that allowed him to buy his first home last year. He moved in just before Christmas, more than three years after the flood. He credits his support network with helping him get through the long stretch in between — helping him move, find new furniture, and giving him social support.

“That’s a big thing in recovery,” Haney said. “Asking for help.”

For Devon, community connections have made all the difference. He has struggled with depression and long bouts of hopelessness over the last year and a half, but he hasn’t gotten high. 

The waning afternoon light moved across the gray carpet of Devon’s apartment as he tried to recall a time when he really felt tempted to use again.

“I’ve thought about it, but very rarely,” Devon said. “If I do, I have a support system where I can call somebody. I would really have to be in a bad place to use.”

Devon sits in his apartment. Jesse Barber / Grist

He leans on people who’ve survived their own crises — divorces, bankruptcies, other disasters. While some friends have returned to drug use, he’s been grateful for his sponsor and fellow members of Narcotics Anonymous. “This is, like, why we do what we do — when shit hits the fan,” he said. 

His life now is quieter. He keeps up with appointments and stays in touch with friends in recovery. He attends weekly meetings, which he sometimes leads. He’s also returned to individual therapy, which helps him cope with lingering anxiety from the hurricane.

It isn’t the life he once imagined, but for now he has made peace with it. “I try to focus on my daughter,” Devon said. “I’m just doing the best I can.”

Being with her gives his days purpose. He looks after her while his ex-wife is at work, and he’s structured his life and routines around her activities — ballet, gymnastics, kickboxing. For Devon, the structure helps him keep moving forward.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Helene shattered lives — and the systems that keep people sober on May 4, 2026.

Kimberly Treadaway hoped she was prepared for the storm. Hurricane Helene was heading right for her home in Weaverville, North Carolina, and she worried about having enough food and water, and about her 5-month-old son. But something else weighed on her — access to Suboxone, a prescription medication she must take daily to reduce the cravings and withdrawal symptoms associated with opioid use.

“If I didn’t have my medication, I wouldn’t feel OK,” she said.  

Treadaway is about a decade into her recovery. Maintaining sobriety depends upon a great many things remaining consistent: relationships, housing, employment, and, especially, access to the treatment she needs to avoid a relapse.

She wasn’t just concerned for herself. Her partner was also on Suboxone, as were “a lot of our friends.” Many had a stockpile, or a plan to taper their dosage if they suddenly lost access. Withdrawal is always unpleasant and often dangerous. The thought of navigating the aftermath of a natural disaster with fever, chills, vomiting, and other symptoms was frightening.

 “Helene just made it really, really real,” she said.

Treadaway recounted the story in the office of Holler Harm Reduction, alongside fellow staffer Hush Sinn and volunteer Oscar Smith. The grassroots organization in Marshall, often known simply as “Holler,” strives to meet people who use drugs where they are, providing clean needles, naloxone, and other supplies to minimize the threat of an overdose or infection. Treadaway joined the staff in November 2024, right after Helene hit. In the wake of the storm, Holler was part of a loose network of similar organizations that mounted an ad hoc but essential response — to ensure that people who use drugs or are maintaining sobriety got the care and supplies they needed.

Kimberly Treadaway, left, and Oscar Smith, sit beside a stack of needle boxes at Holler Harm Reduction in Marshall, North Carolina.
Jesse Barber / Grist

As the initial barrage of rain and wind gave way to isolation and infrastructural breakdown, the systems Treadaway and so many others rely on remained interrupted for weeks. 

But something else took their place. Across western North Carolina and beyond, people like Treadaway joined doctors, nurses, and others on ATVs, in trucks, and occasionally on foot in delivering care and supplies. They did so in ways that official emergency responders, constrained by training, resources, logistics, or mandate, could not. They did what they felt was urgent and right, and in that, they revealed what disaster response might look like if it were designed with those realities in mind.

For people in recovery or still actively using drugs, survival depends on a connection to care, routine, and the people and systems that make such things possible: pharmacies; clinics, rehabs, therapists, and 12-step meetings. 

Across Appalachia and the South, that web is already strained. A flood of prescription opioids, followed by heroin, fentanyl, amphetamines, and other drugs, brought skyrocketing addiction rates and death in the early 2000s. Though efforts to combat overdose have reduced death rates since 2022, rural areas hit by hospital closures and dwindling access to basic health care still see high rates of these and other so-called “deaths of despair.” With climate-fueled disasters growing more frequent, the same fragile system is tested again and again.

Keep reading Hurricane Helene shattered lives — and the systems that keep people sober Katie Myers

Treadaway, who is 33, grew up in a rural area outside Boone, near the Tennessee state line. Shy and raised on an abstinence-only education, she had been taught to avoid drugs at all costs without ever learning how they differed or how they affected the body. All she knew was that they felt good and made her more at ease in life and at parties. She began using opiates and other substances in high school, alongside friends and romantic partners. She eventually dropped out of school, and stopped doing other things she loved, like art, theater, and dance. One day, when she was 19, she awoke to find her partner lifeless in bed next to her. It shook her into seeking help.

She went back to school and tried to bring balance to her life. It wasn’t until around 2017 that she found a welcoming place in the harm reduction community, where she could share her experiences and wisdom. Harm reduction aims to reduce the risks associated with drugs — infection, illness, death — and promote understanding, respect, and compassion for people who use them. She found its philosophy of helping people without judgment appealing. Treadaway felt accepted for sometimes existing in a gray area between active use and recovery, a process that’s rarely linear. 

“It wasn’t a clear-cut journey,” she said. “But after that, I let go of certain substances and then let go of some others, and worked my way into a place in life that felt good.”

Treadaway first volunteered with The Steady Collective, a harm-reduction group based in Asheville, and later served on its board. There, she found like-minded people who embraced her first-person perspective on complex health and social issues. She now works as the organizational director for Holler.

Holler Harm Reduction distributes supplies like Naloxone and drug testing kits (left), comfort items like lip balm (center), which treats dry-mouth symptoms caused by withdrawal medications like Suboxone, and clean supplies to prevent infection (right).

Many of her friends navigate the same space between use and recovery, occasionally moving back and forth between the two. In the harm reduction community, Treadaway said, they find forgiveness, patience, and love that the greater world doesn’t always have for them.

She and others in the community brought that approach to the aftermath of Helene, seeking to show their neighbors that they were there, loved them, and wouldn’t let them fall. The organization, along with other western North Carolina groups like Steady Collective and Smoky Mountain Harm Reduction, quickly mobilized. As soon as the roads were passable, truckloads of basic supplies arrived from all over. A region’s worth of people, increasingly accustomed to the disruptions of flooding, got to work distributing them.

“The scope of mutual aid is just like harm reduction,” said Hush Sinn. “The norm in mutual aid is that we show up for each other. That nobody says, ‘That’s not my problem.’”

Flooding had washed out roads and cut communications, making it difficult or impossible to reach clinics or refill prescriptions. Those who could often found drugstores and clinics closed, or unable to verify insurance because of internet outages. For people in treatment for opioid addiction, the consequences were dire: Methadone typically must be dispensed daily at a clinic, while Suboxone is tightly regulated as a controlled substance.

“It was like hundreds of dollars” that people had to pay if they couldn’t apply insurance, Treadaway said. Most couldn’t afford that. With supplies uncertain, she reduced her own dosage. Some people pooled what they had and shared it with friends — helping each other through a crisis felt more important than following laws that prohibit such actions.

How to support people with substance use disorder during and after disaster 

Learn how to recognize and respond to opioid overdoses. Harm reduction groups or syringe exchanges may offer first aid and sensitivity training, as does the Red Cross.

Have naloxone (also known by the brand name Narcan) on hand and know how to dispense it. 

Understand the medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), to help reduce stigma around their availability and use. Buprenorphine is an evidence-based treatment, but requires healthcare providers and pharmacies to maintain an adequate supply to ensure access when disasters hit. 

Ask your local officials how people with substance use disorder are considered in disaster planning. Do shelters have low barriers to entry and no abstinence requirements? Are volunteers trained on how to reduce stigma and respond to overdoses? 

Grist’s Disaster 101 Toolkit — a comprehensive guide to extreme weather preparation, response, and recovery — includes a detailed section on how people with substance use disorder can stay safe during disasters and how community members, volunteers, and other responders can best support them. Read, share, and easily customize it for your community.

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Treadaway ended up leaving for her son’s safety. Others, like Sinn and Smith, remained. They found people were doing surprisingly well, given the circumstances — not because the system was holding, but because many were accustomed to its failures. They were used to interruptions in electricity, water, or housing.

“People who use drugs are scrappy,” Treadaway said. “They are used to having to fight for their basic needs, which isn’t a good or correct thing, but I had this really deep sense of faith and trust in their survival skills that maybe other community members haven’t had to ever use.”

Sinn, who is on the staff at the Steady Collective and has a history of substance use, was drawn to harm reduction not only to save lives but to ensure no one faces the crushing loneliness that can come with substance use. That seemed particularly important in the wake of Helene. “There’s nothing worse than feeling like nobody gives a shit about you,” Sinn said.

State health officials also found themselves scrambling to meet urgent needs. Tyler Yates, the state opioid coordinator for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, watched treatment centers across the state suddenly also become depots for first aid supplies, clean water, and gasoline, filling the community’s basic survival needs.

Yates, like many in his line of work, comes to the job with personal experience: He started using opioids and other substances when he was 11. He went to treatment in 2017, for what he said may have been the eighth time. It was around then that he found a home in harm reduction work. 

After the storm, Yates knew what people who use drugs needed to survive, and was frustrated by how bureaucracy stood in the way. For instance, he wanted to quickly get sterile water to intravenous drug users, fearing that without it, they could face infection, sepsis, or death from water containing bacteria and other contaminants. But the request went nowhere. According to Yates, state emergency officials were reluctant to fund supplies beyond the usual disaster checklist. “When we submitted the order, it was denied by the emergency response folks because they didn’t think that FEMA would reimburse them,” he said.

North Carolina Emergency Management declined to comment and referred all questions to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Summer Tonizzo, a spokesperson for that agency, told Grist in an email that it collaborates with local jurisdictions, health departments, and community organizations to assist those with substance use disorder during disasters by helping provide naloxone and offering crisis counseling in shelters.

“The State Emergency Response Team makes decisions regarding the distribution of emergency health supplies based on the immediate public health needs and circumstances at hand,” wrote Tonizzo. “The reimbursement process occurs after the response phase has ended and involves separate processes.” 

After a month of back and forth, Yates and his team ended up receiving supplies donated by local and regional harm reduction groups and delivering them throughout western North Carolina. “There’s so much red tape,” he said. His team did its best to fill supply and training gaps, like distributing naloxone to rural volunteer fire departments and first responders who often lacked the training and supplies. 

The state also saw more contamination in the illicit drug supply, driven by a drop in availability of fentanyl and other opioids due to damaged roads and landslides. In places like Haywood County, health providers said xylazine — a cheap, widely available tranquilizer that slows breathing and can cause severe tissue damage — flooded the supply. Health care professionals and harm reductionists scrambled to warn people of the risk, and provide test strips to keep them safe.

Training and preparation were also an issue when it came to longer-term disaster relief volunteers. Several health providers in western North Carolina told Grist they saw people who used drugs — or even those taking medications for opioid use disorder — being turned away from shelters by volunteers who believed they were keeping others safe.

Tonizzo said her agency received no reports of people being wrongfully ejected from shelters for being on medications used to treat opioid use disorder, but that use of illegal drugs “can be restricted” and is grounds for removal.

Buncombe County officials said the county’s response plan prioritizes access to water, sanitation, and shelter for everyone, and it works with harm reduction groups to maintain access to safe use supplies. Although the county handled the initial coordination of emergency shelters, it handed that task off to the Red Cross, which did not respond to written questions, in the weeks after the storm. “Coordinating the various needs of the shelter population was no small challenge,” a Buncombe County spokesperson said in an email. “As the needs of shelter residents became more apparent, the Red Cross and our teams worked to relocate individuals needing specialized support to a more appropriate shelter setting.”

Wreckage from Hurricane Helene in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Jesse Barber / Grist

The storm’s overall effect on public health was mixed. Hospitalization data showed some illnesses worsened, particularly chronic illnesses such as diabetes and mental health conditions like anxiety. Emergency room visits for overdoses and alcohol use also rose, with opioid overdoses up about 21 percent in the three months after the storm, according to an analysis by Appalachian State University geographer Maggie Sugg and environmental epidemiologist Jen Runkle, who works for the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, a research arm of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Because ER data reflects only those who needed and could access care, the real impact may have been greater.

Still, more than a dozen health care providers, harm reductionists, and peer counselors told Grist they were astonished that things weren’t worse, given the multitude of health risks the people they care for face. Some even said they saw fewer overdoses and cases of severe withdrawal than they expected.

“Some of my patients fared way better than they had in years,” said Cassie York, a peer support counselor at a Mountain Community Health Partnership clinic in rural, low-income Mitchell County. “Because there was food available, there were resources available, no questions asked.” 

After disasters, a safety net of free emergency health clinics blooms and fades. But between those moments lies what many described as a glimmer of possibility — a kind of equality in access to care among people caught in addiction or early recovery, who are often uninsured or avoid seeking medical care due to fear of stigma and arrest.

Red Cross workers distribute supplies at Asheville-Buncome Technical Community College after Hurricane Helene. Jesse Barber / Grist

Doctors worked out of community centers and churches, writing prescriptions more freely as patients bypassed the usual restrictions on access. The state Board of Pharmacy, acting on Governor Roy Cooper’s declaration of an emergency and Drug Enforcement Agency approval, allowed doctors and pharmacists to provide emergency refills of regulated medications , including some of those used to treat opioid use disorder.

People came in with chronic infections, injuries, and diseases like AIDS — conditions that can arise from intravenous drug use — and were treated, free of charge. For a brief moment, many experienced what it meant to have free, nonjudgmental care. “Word of mouth spreads fast, you know? ‘Hey, there’s a doctor at the church, go get your prescription,’” York said. 

But if that access was easier than usual, it was because there were people who made the decision to make it happen, and local and state officials willing to provide the resources. In other states throughout the Appalachian region, communities with high overdose rates and growing disaster risk face a very different set of political circumstances.

Not every county, or state, in the region provides harm reduction programs with the same level of support found in Buncombe County. Some actively inhibit it. West Virginia, for instance, passed restrictions in 2021 that threaten needle exchange programs, and a bill banning them is under judicial review. In Tennessee, state laws prohibit these exchanges, which help intravenous drug users avoid infection and disease by providing sterile injection supplies, from operating near schools or parks. Such restrictions limit how many syringe exchanges can operate, and often push them into less accessible areas. Many people in rural Tennessee drive across the state line seeking help, further straining services in western North Carolina.

The myriad challenges of meeting immediate needs make it difficult for harm reductionists to plan for the next crisis. Health workers in West Virginia, which has the nation’s highest overdose rate, described feeling as though their heads are being held underwater. “It can be hard to think about climate emergency, because so many people who I see are in a state of emergency all the time,” said Lake Sidikman, who coordinates harm reduction programs at the Charleston Women’s Health Center.

Even in Buncombe County, widely cited as a lodestar for substance use services, gaps remain. Helene highlighted the lack of a concrete plan for providing services during a crisis. 

That gap has sparked efforts to rethink disaster planning. Harm reductionist Kathryn Humphries works with others in her field and officials at all levels of government and grassroots groups on disaster response. She said such plans often overlook people who use drugs and the unhoused, despite their heightened vulnerabilities and overlapping needs. She is among those helping lead a national conversation about how to better draw community organizations and those with direct experience with drug use into preparedness efforts.

To Dr. Shuchin Shukla, a physician and addiction medicine researcher who previously practiced family medicine in Buncombe County, disaster preparedness starts with the pillars of overdose prevention: naloxone to reverse overdoses, medications and supplies such as Suboxone and clean needles, and peer support from trusted people in the community. Strangers cannot arrive after a disaster and expect people in active addiction or early recovery to trust them. “You have to bring a ton of support to the people they already know and rely on,” he said.

He’d like to see family members, trusted neighbors, and others with firm connections in the community trained to be first responders and given the necessary resources. Such methods worked after Hurricane Helene; the challenge is institutionalizing and funding these programs, which are just as important as access to food, water, and shelter when disaster strikes, at the state and federal level. “People will go through withdrawal from medication and fentanyl before they’ll go through withdrawal from food,” he said.

A medical professional with Respite at Haywood Street Congregation gives wound care to a community member in Asheville, North Carolina. Addiction researcher Shuchin Shukla thinks organizations with strong community ties should be included in disaster response plans.
Jesse Barber / Grist

He also wants states to maintain emergency reserves of medications and safe-use supplies, and to provide basic first aid and medical resources. Ideally, he’d like to see trained staff, volunteer organizations, and federal emergency response teams prepared to distribute these resources.

Shukla sees this as increasingly urgent. Opioid settlement funds — more than $57 billion that drugmakers, distributors, and pharmacy chains paid to all 50 states for their role in the overdose crisis — are abundant now, but annual disbursements will decrease each year and expire in 2038. Federal support for substance use services has fluctuated under the Trump administration. After the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration saw as much as $1.9 billion in grants cut and later reinstated, the agency faced a wave of layoffs and resignations; the 2027 federal budget proposes further consolidation and reductions. 

“We can’t predict what’s going to happen,” he said, “but we can make sure that if stuff were to happen, we have various levels of resilience.”

For people who work in harm reduction, the long tail of Helene has been hard to watch. The people they rushed to serve, and who benefited from the sudden abundance of free health care, have begun to fall back into isolation.

“When all of that finished, it was like, not only did they go back to being uncomfortable, but it was even harder because they’d kind of gotten used to having needs met as we all should, you know?” Treadaway said.

As quickly as a health care safety net unfurled, it began to fray.

“There are now folks where their living situations with like five to seven people are falling apart, and they’re just ending up with nothing,” Smith said. “Now they have to pick up the pieces and figure it out.”

The donations have slowed, but the need hasn’t. Last winter, the Holler crew and other nonprofits delivered propane and water alongside harm reduction supplies. A year and a half after the storm, they are still meeting basic needs for survivors even as they brace for the next disaster. They can only hope they’re ready when it comes.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Helene frayed the safety net for people who use drugs. This community wove it back together. on May 4, 2026.

Since 2018, when it bought the chemical manufacturer Monsanto, the German conglomerate Bayer has set aside billions to settle legal claims that the active ingredient in the company’s weedkiller Roundup has caused cancer and other health issues among its users. More than 100,000 plaintiffs across the U.S. have filed lawsuits alleging a cancer link, and in February, the company agreed to settle a class action lawsuit for $7.25 billion.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in one case that didn’t reach a settlement. John Durnell first sued Monsanto in 2019, arguing that he developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma because of persistent exposure to glyphosate in Roundup, which he had regularly sprayed throughout his neighborhood for 20 years. In 2023, a Missouri jury found Monsanto liable for failing to warn users of the cancer risk from glyphosate, and awarded Durnell $1.25 million in damages. The company has denied the claims and issued a series of appeals ever since.

Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act — known as FIFRA — the Environmental Protection Agency is authorized to govern the sale and labeling of pesticides. The federal law bars pesticides that are “misbranded,” or lack warnings that may be necessary to protect health and the environment. According to the law, states cannot impose labeling requirements that differ from or go beyond what federal law already mandates for these products. Manufacturers must register pesticides and herbicides with the EPA before selling them, and when a product is registered, the agency signs off on its labels. 

Durnell’s case rests on a Missouri law that bans the sale of dangerous products without adequate warnings. Monsanto argued those claims should have been preempted by FIFRA, since the company registered its product with the EPA and received approval for its label. The central legal question before the Supreme Court, then, is whether the EPA’s approval of that label overrides the Missouri state law. 

The justices appeared divided on the case during oral arguments. Several, including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, pressed attorneys on whether preemption would block states from responding to changing research. “Could we have a world in which a product that has been registered, the label is consistent with what the agency has said is appropriate at the time of registration, but let’s say a new research study comes out at some point between when the EPA is statutorily required to look at it again that casts doubt on the safety of this product?” Jackson asked Paul Clement, a former solicitor general and a lawyer for Monsanto, appearing skeptical of the company’s claim.

Clement responded by saying, “I think the way that you deal with that and the way the agency deals with that is either through some amended registration or some cancellation process which could be subject to judicial review.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett then put a finer point on Jackson’s inquiry: “But could the agency come after you for misbranding if you didn’t comply with your statutory obligation to give the updated information to the EPA?” 

“Absolutely,” Clement responded. “But it wouldn’t be a misbranding action.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to side with Monsanto’s argument that varying state requirements undermine federal uniformity. “Do you think it’s uniformity when each state can require different things?” Kavanaugh asked Ashley Keller, the attorney representing Durnell. 

The EPA’s handling of pesticides has been fraught and shapes the stakes of the case considerably. Glyphosate is America’s most-used herbicide on agricultural crops — more than 280 million pounds of the chemical are applied to roughly 300 million acres of farmland every year, according to the EPA. In 2021, the EPA did a biological evaluation on glyphosate and found 1,676 endangered plant and animal species are likely to be harmed by the chemical. J.W. Glass, a senior EPA policy analyst at the conservation nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, which contributed to an amicus brief filed in support of Durnell, said the sheer scale of glyphosate use is the problem, and the ripple effects can show up not only in the environment, but in people’s bodies. Farmworkers face some of the most acute exposure risk, a byproduct of working on farmland where the use of herbicides like Roundup is a routine part of crop production, according to Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, a senior grassroots advocacy coordinator at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. 

“The indiscriminate use of it, and how much we use it, is the environmental issue,” said Glass. “You have these cases where people are spraying it directly into waterways for weed control.”  

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Glass said there are “plenty of issues” in the EPA’s pesticide labeling process. Two analyses his organization co-released with the Center for Food Safety in March found that the EPA has routinely left cancer warnings off pesticide products even when its own assessments have identified cancer risks. “Does EPA actually label pesticides when they are found to be a carcinogen? And the answer is, it’s very rare. But that’s only one part of it. There are all sorts of, I would say, loopholes that have been exploited within the pesticide law,” he said.

As reported by Mother Jones, the EPA spent more than a decade reviewing Roundup before clearing the herbicide in 2020 under the federal standard that its agricultural benefits outweighed its societal harms — only for that assessment to be swiftly challenged in court by environmental groups. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the EPA’s assessment in 2022, finding serious “errors in assessing human-­health risk.” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told Congress last Tuesday that a new ruling on the herbicide is coming by the year’s end. 

At that same hearing, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat in New York, cited internal EPA emails that noted Bayer promised to “provide a small thanks” to Zeldin for the agency updating its webpage on glyphosate after an appeals court struck down a California label warning against the chemical’s cancer risk. The emails, according to Ocasio-Cortez, also show that the company “wanted to thank you and your agency for removing support for California’s warning because their case before the Supreme Court right now hinges on you not warning the American people and withdrawing your support on glyphosate.” 

“Do you understand the conflict of interest that is before the American people right now, Mr. Secretary?” Ocasio-Cortez asked the EPA administrator. According to transcripts of the hearing, Zeldin did not explicitly respond.

The Durnell case has become a national flashpoint for environmentalists, public health advocates, and Trump voters who consider themselves a part of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Some of that friction can be traced back to last year, when the administration urged the Supreme Court to take up Bayer’s case. Then, in February, the president issued an executive order deeming glyphosate-based herbicides key to national security and calling for more domestic production of the chemical, which was met with serious backlash within the MAHA coalition. Trump’s administration also sent a lawyer to argue last Monday on behalf of the chemical company. 

As justices heard oral arguments, a crowd of protesters gathered outside of the Supreme Court for what they called “The People vs. Poison” rally. At the same time, members of the U.S. House of Representatives debated provisions of the farm bill that would have blocked states from passing pesticide label requirements that differ from federal labels. Those provisions were stripped in a House amendment vote last Thursday, and the Senate is expected to vote in the coming weeks on the farm bill.

Kelly Ryerson, the prominent MAHA activist and founder of the website Glyphosate Facts who helped organize “The People vs. Poison” rally, said the Durnell case amounts to a litmus test for whether the administration is truly serious about the MAHA agenda. 

A ruling that strips people’s ability to file state-level failure-to-warn claims would be “catastrophic for public health,” said Ryerson. “It would be entirely because of this administration, and it will be unforgivable.” The Supreme Court is expected to render its decision this summer, giving voters just months to reckon with the ruling before heading to the midterm polls. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Supreme Court is deciding whether Roundup, America’s most-used herbicide, needs a cancer warning on May 4, 2026.

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