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On January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA took effect, the Indigenous Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose up in Chiapas demanding land, autonomy, dignity and democracy for Indigenous peoples.

A new proposal from the federal government would narrow the scope of the Clean Water Act so much that it would be legal to drain nearly any wetland or pollute the vast majority of streams, experts...

On Monday, contractors knocked down an iconic “grandmother” cottonwood tree on federal land in the San Rafael Valley near Lochiel, Arizona to clear the way for border wall construction. Armed Border Patrol agents cleared an encampment of about 50 people who had gathered to try to protect the cottonwood after three others had already been felled. All four trees were estimated to be as many as 250 years old. The protesters’ efforts included taking turns camping in the tree itself to ensure it was occupied at all times for more than 70 days. Ten protesters were cited and at least another 12 were arrested, including the person who was camped in the tree itself at the time and was forcibly removed from the tree using a cherry picker.

“We are resolute,” said Kate Scott, one of the protesters. “This movement is not going anywhere. They have cut down our grandmother, but her roots are within us.” A similar continual-occupation protest is also happening in a tree on the Mexican side of the border, and a demonstration at the local Bureau of Land Management office is planned for later this week to protest the agency’s recent land closure orders related to border wall construction in the area.

The Border Patrol’s actions fit with a pattern of using the southern border to militarize national public lands, as Center for Western Priorities Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein wrote in a Westwise blog post earlier this year. “If the administration continues on its current course, these iconic landscapes will continue to be collateral damage,” Bock-Brownstein wrote. “Border security should not require the permanent sacrifice of America’s public lands, and it should not come at the cost of the heritage and economies of the communities that surround them.”

Quick hits Analysis: 99% of commenters oppose motorized use changes in forests

Wyoming Public Radio

Native nations sue over Endangered Species Act changes

High Country News

Supreme Court grapples with case on holding Big Oil liable for climate change

Washington Post

NPS denies request to maintain water stations along Arizona-Mexico border for migrants

KJZZ

Winter is coming, and Crater Lake National Park is in trouble

SFGATE

Residents express worries about copper mine’s return

Las Cruces New Mexican

Judge jails man in moose abuse case and warns: Wyoming values wildlife

WyoFile

Heinrich: Repealing the roadless rule ignores public approval

The Hill

Quote of the day

The Roadless Rule is overwhelmingly popular, including with sportsmen, anglers, campers and recreators. It is so popular that the administration knows it will lose if it consults the public on dismantling it. Thus, the administration is simply refusing to hold public meetings at all. That is not only insulting—it is undemocratic. And it is a failure to listen to the people these lands belong to.”

—U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, The Hill

Picture This @rockynps

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
— L. M. Montgomery

October is a special time of the year in Rocky Mountain National Park. Enjoy shades of green, gold, orange, red, and purple throughout the park.

Image Credits: NPS

 

Featured image: San Rafael Valley border wall construction in southern Arizona. Russ McSpadden, Center for Biological Diversity

The post Arrests made as Border Patrol cuts down iconic tree to clear way for border wall appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

At least 130 organisations urge UN carbon market Supervisory Body to suspend credits and independently investigate controversial Myanmar cookstove project

UTRECHT, 6 October, 2026 — At least 130 civil society organisations, networks and other stakeholders are calling on the Supervisory Body of the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM) to immediately suspend the first carbon credits issued under the UN’s new “high-integrity” Article 6.4 carbon market and commission an independent, comprehensive assessment of the project behind them.

The call comes as the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body meets in Bonn from 5–9 October for its 23rd meeting (SBM 023). At the centre of the controversy is PoA 10471, a Myanmar biomass cookstove programme backed by one of South Korea’s largest companies, which, in February 2026, became the first activity to receive credit issuance under Article 6.4. 

In an open letter signed by 130 civil society organisations, the groups call on the Supervisory Body to immediately suspend the project’s credits and undertake an independent assessment, citing serious concerns about environmental integrity, verification, human rights and other safeguards and stakeholder participation, particularly given the radically changed conditions in Myanmar following the February 2021 attempted military coup.

“The first project to receive credits under the UN’s new ‘high-integrity’ carbon market was implemented in communities experiencing war, displacement and grave human rights abuses, while independent analysis indicates that, even if the project had been implemented under ideal conditions, its claimed emissions reductions may still have been substantially overstated,” said Zaw Tuseng, foundation director of the Myanmar Policy Institute. “This is not simply a question of how many credits should be issued. It raises fundamental questions about whether carbon credits can represent genuine climate action when they are separated from the political and social realities in which projects operate.”

The concerns are wide-ranging. The June 2026 report Carbon Credits Under Fire: Myanmar, Crimes Against Humanity, and the Crisis of Credibility Facing the UN’s “High-Integrity” Carbon Markets documents serious concerns about the project’s operation amid conflict and human rights abuses, as well as safeguards, stakeholder participation and the wider conditions in which its claimed emissions reductions were generated. 

PoA 10471 was designed and registered before the February 2021 attempted military coup, but continued operating during all but one month of the monitoring period underlying the first Article 6.4 issuance, from January 2021 to May 2022. Its first six component activities covered 27 townships in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, where communities experienced documented war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attacks on civilians, forced displacement, the burning of homes and public buildings, and conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence.

Project documentation identifies the Dry Zone Greening Department and other Myanmar government authorities in connection with implementation and data collection. The Dry Zone Greening Department operates under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation, which came under military control following the takeover, and is a major income earner for the junta through gemstone mining and other resource exploitation. 

The project’s monitoring documentation does not acknowledge these fundamental changes in the political, administrative and security environment or consider how they may have affected implementation and the claimed mitigation outcomes. However, verification reports indicate that security conditions prevented the verification team from conducting the required on-site inspections of monitored households in any of the project’s implementation areas. Instead, the verification team was granted an exceptional exemption and permitted remote inspection. Instead of site visits, the verification team conducted video interviews through Zoom with just 22 end-users from an office in Yangon. Only two of the interviewees were women.

Meanwhile, two independent analyses of the project’s emissions reductions calculations have raised substantial concerns about the quantity of credits issued: an earlier analysis estimated that the project was over-credited by a factor of 14 under the CDM, while more recent analysis estimates that it is still likely to be over-credited by approximately a factor of seven under Article 6.4’s supposedly tougher rules. These findings further undermine the claim that the first credits issued under the new mechanism represent genuine and verifiable emissions reductions.

“Environmental integrity cannot be reduced to accounting methodology alone. Simply refining the methodology used to calculate emissions reductions and slapping on a “high integrity” label does not guarantee that the resulting credits represent genuine mitigation, especially when they are so completely separated from the political, social and environmental circumstances in which they are supposedly generated,” said Oli Munnion, Global Forest Coalition (GFC)’s Climate Justice and Forests Campaign Coordinator. “The Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism has fallen at the first hurdle. The Supervisory Body must immediately suspend this credit issuance and investigate how on earth it was approved in the first place.”

The organisations also raise concerns about safeguards and participation. Women and girls are presented as important beneficiaries of the cookstove programme, yet women in the project areas have experienced displacement, severe restrictions on movement and conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence. Of the 231 households surveyed for monitoring purposes, 80% of recorded heads of household were men, raising questions about whether women—whose unpaid labour the project depends on—were adequately represented as decision-makers rather than primarily as beneficiaries.

The organisations are calling on the Supervisory Body to immediately suspend any further issuance, transfer or use of credits associated with PoA 10471 and to commission an independent, comprehensive assessment of the project and the process through which the credits were approved. The assessment should examine the project’s environmental integrity, monitoring and verification, safeguards and stakeholder participation, as well as the impact of Myanmar’s radically changed political, administrative and security circumstances. 

The organisations are also calling for the assessment to consider the best available evidence and real-world conditions, rather than treating formal methodological compliance or previous validation and verification as conclusive, and for its findings to be made public. Where the evidence shows that applicable requirements were not met or that the credits do not represent genuine and verifiable emissions reductions, the Supervisory Body should take appropriate corrective action, including revoking credits already issued and preventing the project from participating further in the mechanism.

In support of these calls, a Formal Stakeholder Communication was also submitted to the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in response to its call for stakeholder input on matters before SBM 023. The submission sets out the concerns in detail and calls for PoA 10471 to be considered under the relevant agenda items, including Agenda item 4.3 on issuance.

PoA 10471 is the first activity to receive issuance under the Article 6.4 mechanism and therefore represents an early test of what the mechanism’s stated commitment to “high integrity” means in practice.

“Climate mitigation cannot be based on human rights abuses and questionable carbon accounting. If the Article 6.4 mechanism is to have credibility, its first project must be assessed against the realities in which the claimed emissions reductions were generated, not simply against calculations on paper,” said Sooyoun Han, Plan 1.5’s Policy Activist.

The food and agriculture sector employs 1.4 billion people—more than any other in the world. It’s also the most exploitative,  according to a new report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). But stronger labor protections and worker-led movements can help build food systems that work for those who sustain them.

Roughly two out of every five people in the global workforce depend on food and farming systems for their livelihoods. But whether they are in a field, on a boat, in a processing facility, or a supermarket, many lack the protections they need to keep them safe.

Informal employment agreements, legal loopholes, and systemic discrimination make food systems workers some of the most vulnerable on the planet. The climate crisis, expanding gig economy, and corporate consolidation are adding new layers of uncertainty and risk.

“This report confirms what we’ve seen for many years: That there’s widespread exploitation throughout these systems,” says Susan Longley, a labor rights expert and External Advisor for IPES-Food.

The authors highlight a stark gender imbalance. One in three food systems workers makes below a living wage with women earning, on average, 50 percent of what men do. Women are also more likely to engage in unpaid care work, from cooking to cleaning, which makes up an estimated 12.5 billion combined hours of labor per day. This often prevents them from holding full-time jobs, resulting in lower wages and weaker protections.

“One of the things that is fairly central is our insistence that care be centered in the way that we think about food and food work,” says Raj Patel, a member of IPES-Food’s Expert Panel. “That means that we need to recognize care [and] we need to reduce the amount of it that is disproportionately on women’s shoulders.”

Migrant workers also face a uniquely precarious position. Despite the essential role they play in food and agriculture systems, they face “some of the highest rates of workplace abuse,” the report states.

The authors reveal that migrant workers are three times more likely to experience forced labor and they are 70 percent more likely to die on the job compared to the general population. They are also “routinely victims of wage theft,” says Olivier De Schutter, Co-Chair of IPES-Food’s Expert Panel. The International Labor Organization estimates that, collectively, migrant workers lose US$31 billion in underpaid wages every year.

The report makes clear that the exploitation experienced by food workers is no accident. It is built into the systems and structures that shape how food is produced, processed, prepared, distributed, and sold.

Patel sees efforts to upend these harmful power dynamics, but notes that “we are at the very early stages of the transformations that we need.”

Outlining 12 levers for change, the authors call for legislation that guarantees protections for workers, regardless of status, and demand accountability for employers guilty of labor abuses. And at the heart of solutions are the workers, who are empowered through stronger trade unions, collective bargaining, and broad cross-movement coalitions.

“The key to resolving a lot of these problems is through building worker power,” Longley says.

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

Photo courtesy of Bernd Dittrich, Unsplash

The post Ending Exploitation Across the Food System appeared first on Food Tank.

Solar farms in desert areas could reduce dust pollution in cities downwind, according to a new Chinese study. The findings reveal unexpected synergies between renewable energy development and cleaner air, suggesting that solar’s air quality benefits go beyond reduced pollution from fossil fuel burning.

During springtime in the Gobi Desert, strong winds pick up desert dust and transport it hundreds of kilometers to the east and southeast to some of China’s largest urban centers. As China cleans up its air quality by reducing fossil fuel use, dust is becoming a larger proportion of remaining air pollution, and one that is harder to address.

Solar development in the Gobi Desert—where 42 solar farms cover a total of more than 13,000 square kilometers—is already improving downwind air quality, with the potential for even greater future benefits, the new analysis suggests.

Scientists already suspected that solar farms could help dampen dust pollution, but no one had yet conducted a quantitative analysis using true-to-life assumptions incorporating all of the possible mechanisms that regulate desert dust emissions.

In the new study, a combination of satellite observations and computer modeling reveals that existing solar farms reduce springtime dust emissions from the Gobi Desert by 352,400 metric tons per month.

 

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Several mechanisms contribute to this effect. Arrays of solar panels increase the roughness of the terrain, slowing wind speed near the ground so that the wind picks up less dust. The solar panels also stabilize the soil itself, in part by increasing vegetation cover.

Solar farms also act as windbreaks, shifting local wind patterns and resulting in less dust blown downwind—an estimated 131,400 metric tons less dust each month.

China aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by the 2060, a target that would require increasing the area covered by solar farms in the Gobi Desert by eleven-fold. With 140,000 square kilometers of the desert covered by solar panels, dust emissions from the Gobi Desert would fall by 12% and transport downwind by 21% compared to a scenario without solar farms, the researchers calculated. That’s an order of magnitude greater benefit than today’s solar farms yield.

What’s more, climate change is likely to make dust pollution worse by increasing wind speeds.Without the additional solar farms, springtime dust emissions form the Gobi Desert are likely to increase by 13%, and downwind transport by 27%. So the dampening effect of solar farms is likely to be even more sorely needed in the future.

Less dust in the air would be especially noticeable in big cities downwind. With future solar development, average springtime concentrations of larger dust particles could fall across northern China by about 14%.

In turn, those improvements would bump most of China’s northern cities up a tier in the World Health Organization’s air quality rating system. What’s more, both today and under future solar development, solar panels would have their greatest effect on days when dust pollution is at its worst, underlining the unexpected contribution of solar energy to respiratory health, the researchers say.

Source: Hao Y. et al. “Dust Pollution Mitigation by Solar Farm Deployment in Northern China.” Geophysical Research Letters 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine (AI-generated)

Indonesia is obstructing access to government data on the state of its forests. The new restrictions come as the country witnesses a surge in deforestation. 

Read more on E360 →

Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it. 

Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.

Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit. 

• Oct 2, 2026 Comment As COP31 co-host, Australia should make its polluters pay for climate damage With UN climate funds running short on cash, now is the time to start taxing the companies whose emissions are driving harm in the Pacific and other vulnerable parts of the world Read more
• Oct 5, 2026 Politics At pre-COP, UN climate chief warns of heat threat to mothers and babies The spotlight on maternal health came on the first day of the pre-COP31 meeting in Fiji, where Pacific concerns are set to top the agenda as ministers gather for talks Read more

Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.

Rising ocean waters

I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.

I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away. 

A climate activist protesting the drilling of new coal seam gas wells holds a sign during a demonstration outside Origin Energy Ltd’s Annual General Meeting in Sydney, Australia, October 15, 2025. REUTERS/Hollie Adams A climate activist protesting the drilling of new coal seam gas wells holds a sign during a demonstration outside Origin Energy Ltd’s Annual General Meeting in Sydney, Australia, October 15, 2025. REUTERS/Hollie Adams

We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.

Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.

Wearing the mantle of climate leadership

This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the pre-COP meetings.

Ironically, just days before the pre-COP began, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved the largest-ever coal project the state has seen, set to emit an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions. I joined the Pacific Climate Warriors and other communities in submitting about 4,000 appeals to oppose the project – yet these all fell on deaf ears. 

• Sep 18, 2026 News Fossil fuel expansion threatens COP31 hosts’ credibility, experts warn Türkiye and Australia are pushing coal, oil and gas at home with no national timeline for their own fossil fuel phase-out Read more
• Mar 19, 2025 Justice This Australian coal community is co-designing its own green future The mining town of Collie offers a promising example of how to survive – and even thrive – amid the global transition to net-zero emissions Read more

But the fight is not yet over. The project still requires federal approval to proceed, so every promise that Australia makes while at the helm of the climate talks counts. These promises will be measured against actual decisions it makes at home: to either lock us into more decades of climate pollution, or begin shutting down coal and gas once and for all.

Pacific leaders have made it clear that countries must align their policies with the 1.5-degree warming goal, a limit that we already know will be breached within the decade. Any chance of keeping this still within reach requires an immediate end to fossil fuel expansion and concrete plans to phase out existing projects. But success will be an uphill battle if COP31’s own head of negotiations refuses to lead by example.

Kaibakia Pinata holds the fish he caught in his nets off Bikeman islet, located off South Tarawa in the central Pacific island nation of Kiribati May 25, 2013. Credit: Reuters Kaibakia Pinata holds the fish he caught in his nets off Bikeman islet, located off South Tarawa in the central Pacific island nation of Kiribati May 25, 2013. Credit: Reuters

Australia remains the second-largest coal exporter in the world. It is one of the very few industrialised countries under the Paris Agreement’s Annex I that still has no coal phase-out plan. Since 2022, the Albanese government has approved 37 new, expanded or extended coal, oil and gas projects. It is thus unsurprising that its own mitigation policies have been rated by Climate Action Tracker as “insufficient”, even without factoring in fossil fuel exports and related expansion.

Keeping 1.5C alive

Australia must course-correct to earn the mantle it has been given, especially by Pacific nations that backed the country’s bid for the COP31 co-presidency. As a first step, the government must end all coal expansion and explicitly declare a coal phase-out date. It’s the only way to show that it’s capable of leadership that moves beyond endlessly deliberating the “if”, and starts implementing the “how” of keeping the 1.5C target alive. 

The dread I felt staring down at the abyss on the edge of that coal mine months ago still exists. I carry it with me as I show up at the pre-COP to demand that leaders heed the calls of Pacific people. But it is tempered with resolve to keep our lands and communities alive. We remain steadfast in our efforts to secure an outcome that protects people everywhere and brings us back below 1.5 degrees as soon as possible.

The post Coal mines and hypocrisy must not be Australia’s COP31 legacy appeared first on Climate Home News.

September was busy month for our movement! From debt and financial dispossession to land, food sovereignty and agrarian struggles, peasants and rural communities continue to resist policies that threaten their rights and livelihoods. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, La Via Campesina members are mobilising, building alliances and advancing agroecology and food sovereignty while defending land, territories and the rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The post 2026 | September News Wrap: Updates from LVC Members Worldwide appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Headline News:

• “Climate Change Takes Center Stage In SCOTUS Battle Over Oil Companies” • The City of Boulder and Boulder County, Colorado, in 2018 sued major fossil-fuel producers. They allege the companies “knowingly caused and contributed” to climate change by promoting fossil fuels. The case is before the US Supreme Court. [ABC News]

Impacted forest (Dan West, Colorado State Forest Service)

• “Aula Energy Plans 1.8-GWh battery To ‘Optimise’ 330 MW Solar Farm” • Aula Energy, owner of one of Australia’s biggest solar farms, has revealed plans to add a 1.8 GWh battery energy storage system at a site in central west New South Wales. It is seeking to overcome limitations associated with the intermittent nature of solar energy. [pv magazine Australia]
• “Climate Damage Already ‘Locked In’ – But These 10 Insights Show Our Future Is Still Being Decided” • The 10 New Insights In Climate Science report points to a “narrowing window for action” but one that is still open, showing us what is already locked in, what can still be avoided, and where policy can have the greatest effect. [Euronews]
• “BYD Commercial Vehicle Sales Up 113% In September” • Sales of BYD’s commercial vehicles, all EVs, look great now. BYD has separated reporting them into bus sales and non-bus sales, but we can combine them. BYD’s total was 6,848, 194.8% more than the 2,323 sold in August 2026 and 113.3% more than the 3,210 sold in September 2025. [CleanTechnica]
• “The EPA Cooks The Books And The Planet” • The Trump EPA went past repealing the 2024 power plant standards. It issued a new proposal purporting to find that the EPA lacks any authority to regulate power plants’ climate pollution under the Clean Air Act. The proposal is yet another step on this administration’s campaign against climate action. [CleanTechnica]

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

Content Warning: This Brief describes violence and abuse that took place during and after the Indian Residential School System. The content is difficult and it may be upsetting. Read with care.

–

“There’s not a single Indigenous person in Canada, who has not been touched by the legacy of Residential Schools.” – Justice Murray Sinclair, Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

I WAS IN the room in 2015 when the late Justice Murray Sinclair stood at a podium at the final event of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and said those words. The TRC commissioners were releasing their 94 Calls to Action, a roadmap to reconciliation for Canada and I was there reporting for CBC News. 

I believed what Justice Sinclair said; he and the other Commissioners had just spent the last six years, travelling across the country to hear the stories of Survivors. But if I am honest, at the time, I didn’t really know or understand how my own life had been shaped by my family’s experience in residential school.

It wasn’t until years later when I learned that my late father Howard Cameron was sexually abused by a priest when he was a boy at Residential School, that I began my own journey of understanding.

I wasn’t close to my dad. My parents split up when I was seven years old and I think at the time, I mostly felt relief. The father I remember from my childhood was angry and violent, and the memories I have of him, kept me at a distance from him my whole life. 

But learning about what had happened to him when he was a boy at residential school unlocked some empathy and curiosity. It made me want to get closer and to understand him better. It also made me realize how little I knew about my dad’s childhood. I knew that he had gone to a residential school but I didn’t know where he went, or for how long, and I never really thought about how what happened to him there might have affected the father that he was to me. 

 Fig. 1: Cover image for Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s podcast

So I decided to investigate the residential school my dad went to and see if I could find the priest who abused him.

It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long investigation documented in our podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, where our team uncovered a shocking level of abuse at the St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan.  The Independent Assessment Process 

In the very first interview I did for the podcast, I learned the name of a Catholic priest that my dad’s brother, Ivan Cameron, had accused of sexual abuse: Father Gilles Gauthier. I learned Gauthier was a principal at St. Michael’s and he was there at the same time as my dad was. I found a newspaper article from the Edmonton Journal, featuring Father Gauthier and a local boxer, who were both working with ‘natives in Hobbema’ in 1989. The long profile covers his childhood in Quebec and his career as a priest (including his time at St. Michael’s and later in Bangladesh working with Mother Theresa) but it was a quote near the beginning I found most interesting. Gauthier was explaining his views on non-violence and recalled a conversation he had when ministering to people in prison. 

“Like, the guys in the penitentiary, I said to them: “I would rather be a sissy and be free than to have lots of muscles and be behind bars. I have no muscles but I am free. The Father pauses. “I told them also, ‘Maybe I should be in here also. But I never got caught!”

Fig. 2: Clipping from the Edmonton Journal, February 5, 1989

Could Gauthier be the priest who abused my father? I learned that my dad never told anyone in my family the name of the priest who abused him; but he likely had to disclose it when he applied for compensation, as part of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA). 

More than 38,000 survivors applied for compensation for residential school abuse through the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) and the records produced in their claims make up the most comprehensive archive that exists of Survivor testimony — five times the number of Survivors applied to the IAP than gave testimony to the TRC.

To apply for the IAP, Survivors first had to fill out an application form and to describe in detail the abuse they experienced in residential school. They were also compelled to name their alleged abusers. Though, if they were not able to, they were warned that they may not get an IAP hearing.

Fig. 3: Excerpt of IAP application form

If their application was accepted, Survivors were given a date for a hearing with an adjudicator, where they had to testify in great detail about their abuse. 

In his book, Broken Circle, The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools: A Memoir, the late Theodore Fontaine described his IAP hearing. It lasted over 8 hours: 

“I turn the handle, open the door and slowly step into the room. I am almost overcome with panic. My eyes can’t stop darting around various parts of the room and I feel a deep stab of fear. I almost turn around and walk back out. This is eerily similar to what I experienced when I was a seven-or eight year old boy and heard Father P. directing me in a commanding, low whisper, “Come in, tci-ga (little boy).”

Fontaine writes that he asked for a hearing far from his community. He didn’t want the pain of those memories associated with his home. . Inside the room, he had a friend and Elder Barney Williams for support as the government adjudicator presided over the hearing. 

“The adjudicator’s questions become even more vivid and probing. The abuse I have endured in this particular incident has never been discussed except superficially, and never as graphically as in this moment. My anger and frustration must be obvious as I struggle to remain in my seat. I fight off a frantic urge to grab and slam the water jug, and whatever else is on the table, against the wall. In her wisdom, the adjudicator suggests that this would be a good time to have a break. I’m overwhelmed by emotion and fear I’m having some kind of attack and will collapse before we’re done. I push back from the table and stagger to my feet. The floodgates open and I try mightily to hold back tears and sobs.

Barney is standing beside me, helping me up and guiding me to the door. It opens to the waiting area; the bright daylight hits my eyes, and I reach for my wife as she flies from the waiting area to hold me in her arms. I can’t envision how I look, and only realize later that this ordeal is nothing I have experienced before. It has touched my wife, her soul and consciousness, as deeply as it has mine. She’s frightened. Confronting this particular incident of abuse aloud has painted shock and horror all over me. My face is burning and I’m blind with tears. I’m shaking and falling. Never did I imagine that this hearing would create such panic in me.”

The Scale and “Levels” of Abuse

Survivors were promised that testimony in IAP hearings would remain confidential. So very little information from the IAP has ever been made public. But through their testimonies, the IAP Secretariat knows about the scale of abuse at every single residential School that was covered by the Settlement Agreement. They know what kind of abuse happened, they know how many people were accused of abusing kids and they know the names of alleged abusers.

When my dad sent in his application, if he had named his abuser, the priest and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) would have been notified. In February 2016, investigative journalist Martha Troian reported that the IAP records include the identities of over 5,000 alleged abusers; each tracked down, sometimes by private investigators. One of my uncles believed that when he named Father Gauthier as his abuser in his IAP hearing, that it would trigger a criminal investigation. But the IAP only tracked down alleged abusers to invite them to participate in the process and be given a chance to respond to the allegations made against them. 

If Survivors were believed and their claims were deemed credible, they were compensated based on the severity of the abuse and the level of harm the adjudicator believed they had experienced. 

Fig. 4: Levels of abuse used by IAP Adjudicators to assess
the level of compensation

While researching for our podcast, there were IAP documents accessible at the courthouse in Toronto. They were draft reports created by the IAP Secretariat to report progress to the court. There was more information in those court documents than I’d ever seen about the IAP. There were statistics about IAP hearings and decisions broken down by age, gender, province and church denomination. There was also information about compensation amounts and the levels of abuse and harm proven in the claims. 

Fig. 5: Scans of tables found in IAP draft report

I learned that most of the compensated claims were designated as SL 4 (Fig.4) which was defined by: 

SL4 – Sexual abuse level 4 

• • One or more incidents of anal or vaginal intercourse. 
  • Repeated, persistent incidents of oral intercourse.
  • One or more incidents of anal or vaginal penetration with an object. 

And the vast majority of claims that were compensated were found to be Harm Level 3 (Fig. 5) – “Continued detrimental impact”. Evidenced by:

• • Difficulties with interpersonal relationships, occasional obsessive-compulsive and panic states, some post-traumatic stress disorder, occasional sexual dysfunction, addiction to drugs, alcohol or substances, a long term significantly disabling physical injury resulting from a defined sexual assault, or lasting and significant anxiety, guilt, self-blame, lack of trust in others, nightmares, bed-wetting, aggression, hyper-vigilance, anger, retaliatory rage and possibly self-inflicted injury.

When the IAP hearings were happening in our community, my dad was involved as a cultural support worker. My stepmother Norlaine said that after sitting with other Survivors during their hearings, he would come home drained. Sometimes he’d get a call in the middle of the night and he would go and sit with somebody who just needed to talk. In the weeks before his own hearing, he became more agitated and upset. She told me that about a week before his hearing was to take place, he broke down and told Norlaine that he couldn’t do it.

My father never received compensation through the IAP process. But his application form is part of the archive. And almost certainly, it will be lost after September 19, 2027. That’s when the records of nearly all of the 38,000 Survivors who applied for compensation from the IAP have been ordered to be destroyed by order of the Supreme Court of Canada. 

Whenever I tell people that the most comprehensive archive of Survivor testimony from Indian Residential Schools is set to be destroyed, they react with disbelief and then confusion. The Supreme Court ordered the destruction of records relating to atrocities committed in Indian Residential Schools? How? Why? The answer is complicated and I’m actually working on a podcast about the case and the decision — but essentially it’s an issue of privacy. Survivors were promised confidentiality and the IAP did not obtain their consent to preserve their records. 

The Supreme Court decision was made in 2017. It mandated a ten year window to allow for Survivors to “opt in” if they wanted their records preserved.

However, in ten years, only around 100 Survivors have applied to have their records kept with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. The decision to preserve their records can only be made by Survivors.  Accountability and the Archive

When we couldn’t get my dad’s IAP record but were still looking for the priest who abused him, one of my former colleagues, Chantelle Bellrichard, had an idea. To understand what was happening at St. Michael’s, we could go back to the lawsuits that Survivors filed before the IRSSA. Between 14,000 – 20,000 lawsuits were filed by Survivors, mostly in the 90s and early 2000s, attempting to hold the government and churches accountable for abuse they endured in Indian Residential schools. It was the largest class action lawsuit in Canadian history, at the time. If we could find those documents, what would they tell us about abuse at St. Michael’s?

 We filed Access to Information requests with Justice Canada and received 485 file numbers of lawsuits from Survivors of St. Michael’s. We then travelled to courthouses across Saskatchewan to access them. The court documents painted a shocking picture. 

     Fig. 6: Boxes of files at the Regina courthouse

We found more than 200 allegations of sexual abuse against 17 priests, 13 nuns and 15 staff members. 

Many of the allegations were not a single incident but abuse that was ongoing, sometimes for months, even years. In our podcast, we named all of them:

Anthony Duhaime Georges Chevrier Gilles Gauthier Denis Dubuc Georges Latour Eugene Labonte Georges Roussel Armand Allard Antonio Alberti Laurent Houde Ernest Lacombe Louis-Clement Latour Lionel Dumont Armand Rodrigue Irenee Gauthier Toussaint Bouchard Irene Lalonde Bernadette Lemay Brigitte Simard Lucienne LaFlamme Laura Fortier Therese Gosselin Lucille Hudon Marie Rose Gauthier Roseanne Roy Anna Gaudet Elodie Dery Marguerite Lajeunesse Edna Marois

Most of these allegations were never tested or proven in court because many of the claims were dropped so that survivors could participate in the IAP.

Fig. 7: Table from IAP draft report showing compensated claims by Indian Residential School 

We knew that although we had uncovered a staggering level of abuse at St. Michael’s, it was not the full picture. In the IAP documents, we saw that 660 Survivors were compensated for abuse at St. Michael’s.

Early on in our investigation, after hearing that my uncle Ivan Cameron accused Father Gauthier of sexual abuse, I reached out to Ken Thorson, who was at the time, the head of the Oblates in Canada. The Oblates ran most of the Catholic-run Indian Residential Schools including St. Michael’s. When I first asked Ken Thorson about Gauthier, he said he’d never heard of any allegations of sexual abuse against him. After hearing his name several more times in interviews and court documents, I asked again, and Thorson told me that since we last spoke, he’d asked around to other priests and OMI staff and no one had ever heard of allegations against him.

One of the court documents we found from St. Michael’s was my uncle Ivan’s statement of claim where he alleged that he was brutally abused by Father Gauthier daily for years as a boy at St. Michael’s. I sent it to Ken Thorson. After that, Thorson wrote back with new information. He said that a review of legal records from Oblate-run residential schools revealed that Father Gauthier was named in 23 IAP decisions, and that 16 of those claims were deemed by the IAP to be credible allegations of sexual abuse against Father Gauthier. As far as we know, he has never been charged or investigated for any crimes relating to abuse at Indian Residential Schools. Gauthier died in 2024.

There were 140 Catholic priests who worked in residential schools and the Catholic Church knows how many of them were credibly accused, as they were sent every single claim made by Survivors through the IAP. Last  December, I attended a gathering that included many Survivors. When the destruction of the IAP records came up, one of them addressed the room and said,

“Who is being protected by the destruction of these records? Not me.” The Indian Residential School Records Project 

Even after the podcast was released, I knew that I wasn’t done with the story. I had an incredible team and unprecedented support to tell the story of St. Michael’s, but it felt unfinished.  I heard from so many other intergenerational survivors who said it felt like I was also telling their story. They had grown up with parents or grandparents who attended residential schools, but who never talked about it and had the same questions I did about what happened to our relatives at those institutions and how it shaped our lives. I realized how lucky I was that I was able to investigate my own story, but how unfair it was that so many other stories wouldn’t be.

What late Justice Murray Sinclair said in 2015 still echoes in my mind. As intergenerational survivors, we have all been affected by what happened in those schools and we should all have the right to truth. 

So earlier this year, I started the Indian Residential School Records Project. Our goal is to try to replicate the work we did on the podcast but to go further — to create a new archive from the lawsuits Survivors filed before the Settlement Agreement. I’m collaborating with Kimberly Murray (now at Queen’s Law and former Executive Director of the TRC and Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves), and the Yellowhead Institute, the School of Journalism and the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University. We will be working with Survivors, family members and communities to decide on how to best preserve and share these sensitive records. 

We’ve spent the last several weeks in courthouses in Toronto, Ottawa, and Cochrane, scanning over 70 boxes of court records related to Indian Residential Schools and it’s clear just how much truth there is left to uncover.

We are still learning so much about the experiences of children at Indian Residential Schools but even our initial research has raised some serious questions about the process surrounding the impending document destruction. 

We are hoping that our work may help in the efforts others are making to reach Survivors to give them information about, and help to exercise the option, to preserve their records.

On September 30th, 2026, Yellowhead Institute hosted a special event on this topic, The Right To Truth: Protecting Indian Residential School Records featuring Kimberly Murray, Connie Walker, Marie Wilson and Stephen Kakfwi. Watch a recording of the event here.

Citation:

Walker, Connie. “Truth, Justice & Indian Residential School Records” Yellowhead Institute. Oct 06 2026. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2026/truth-justice-indian-residential-school-records

Photo by Crystal Gamble courtesy of Connie Walker

 

The post Truth, Justice & Indian Residential School Records appeared first on Yellowhead Institute.

As CUPE and the four Ontario teachers’ unions announce their plans for strike votes in November, CUPE-OSBCU, the union representing 57,000 Educational Assistants, caretakers, office...

The post Ontario education workers: CUPE says no work-to-rule, will strike on day one first appeared on Spring.

As the fever dream of this summer’s scorching heat slowly subsides, nightmares from Europe’s past are lingering in waking life in the form of warships, bombs, and catapult stones. Still, a shared understanding of history remains elusive despite physical evidence of all that befell the continent. And while some of the walls that separated us have crumbled, new divides are forming in front of our very eyes.

London’s unforgiving, sun-bleached summer of 2026 has a dystopian, hallucinatory quality. As I write this, the city has not seen proper rain in 45 days. We swelter, unused to high temperatures. Air-conditioning in private homes is rare. People are suffering from sleep deprivation. Underground trains and buses are like ovens. A hosepipe ban has turned English lawns into dusty deserts of parched yellow and trees are shedding leaves to survive. We watch in horror as wildfires devour vast areas of France and seemingly everywhere else further south. Reports suggest that almost half a million hectares of European land have been consumed by flames so far this year.

Email exchanges with friends across the European continent frequently start and end with the weather. A distinguished university professor in Timișoara, in Romania, reports living as if under house arrest, with temperatures rising into the 40s. “In the end we will probably have a repeat of the 1980s,” she writes, “when, albeit for different reasons, there were constant power and running water cuts”. Our conversations about climate are increasingly coloured by a fatalism which seems, in many ways, more difficult to argue against than climate denial.

Skeletons of the past

Meanwhile, the falling waters of the Danube, Europe’s great East-West thoroughfare, are peeling back layers of European history in a way which makes the physical vulnerability of our present difficult to separate from the traumas of our past. In Hungary, the riverbed has surrendered centuries-old catapult stones and a live wartime bomb, causing a temporary bridge closure in Budapest. Further downstream, the wreck of a cargo ship materialised in Croatia, and the ancient remains of a woolly mammoth surfaced in Bulgaria. Most striking of all, a fleet of World War II German warships emerged from the river’s former depths in Prahovo, Serbia. Skeletons of the European past have never seemed so close to the surface.

Elsewhere, history is yielding its secrets through deliberate excavations. Joint archaeological teams from Poland and Ukraine are searching for the mass graves of up to 100,000 Poles murdered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Volyn Oblast during the last two years of the Second World War. This vast project is, in some ways, a belated example of the type examined by Katherine Verdery in her seminal book The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (1999).

In some ways, the passage of time and the exigencies of economic survival have achieved more progress towards reconciliation than the activities of expensive and sometimes self-serving international bodies set up to forge it.

The people of Eastern Europe, Verdery argued, suffered “cosmic disorientation” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In order to re-anchor their sense of history, they turned to exhuming, moving, and reburying historical figures and national heroes, as well as counting victims of mass executions in an effort to reframe versions of the past they had lived with since the end of the Second World War. The materiality of dead bodies seemed to promise an “objective truth” in contrast to narratives coloured by communist ideology.

Ukraine may be spurred to cooperate with Poland by its desire to join the European Union, but “objective truth” requires more than a body count. Having witnessed perhaps the largest and certainly the most technologically advanced effort in human history, conducted on the territories of at least four of its successor states, and still ongoing, former Yugoslavia illustrates the limitations of such endeavours. Causes and effects of past events continue to be disputed to the extent that makes the idea of a shared, agreed version of history seem like a naïve dream. In some ways, the passage of time and the exigencies of economic survival, involving trade, shared infrastructure projects, or cross-border employment, have achieved more progress – however painfully slow – towards reconciliation than the activities of expensive and sometimes self-serving international bodies set up to forge it.

I am drawn to contested versions of history by the invitation to consider the current state of the East-West divide in Europe, and its transformations in the last 15 years. The evidence of this summer’s parched landscapes leads me to wonder if the North-South division is not already more critical. The seemingly unstoppable mass migration patterns are certainly speaking in its favour. Britain’s departure from the European Union in 2020 was largely driven by fears of uncontrolled immigration, yet when it comes to global movement, post-Brexit Britain and the rest of Europe continue to share the same problems. Desperate people walking and sailing into Europe from Sub-Saharan Africa or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan do not worry if their biometric passports are EES or ETA compliant.

Europe “as it used to be”

In an episode from the 2010 UK election campaign, broadcast live on British television, 65-year-old lifelong Labour supporter Gillian Duffy challenged the then prime minister Gordon Brown by highlighting immigration issues. “But all these Eastern Europeans that are coming in, where are they flocking from?” she asked. Brown offered a predictably anodyne public response. Some moments later, being driven away and forgetting that his microphone was still on, he commented to his aide that the conversation was a disaster and that Duffy was “just a sort of bigoted woman”.

The comment derailed Brown’s campaign by its suggestion of political arrogance, yet the so-called “Bigotgate”, highly damaging at the time, seems almost quaint today. Even the language used to depict the threat of immigration belongs to a simpler world. Instead of “flocking”, with its suggestion of birds that can potentially fly away as easily as they arrived, we now hear threats of biblical deluge, conquest and population replacement. The most prejudiced Brexiteers sometimes hint at nostalgia for the Polish plumbers of yesteryear and even a degree of envy for those plumbers’ as yet unspoiled homeland.

It might seem paradoxical that Poland, historically one of Europe’s most significant exporters of labour, is also one of the most vocal opponents of southern migration. It is not without its support in western social media, where countries such as Poland, Hungary, or the Baltic republics are often mentioned not as “New Eastern Europe” but as Europe “as it used to be”, evoking postcard images tinged with the sepia tones of false memory. Such nostalgia is often a conservative fantasy, a coping mechanism for the West’s own identity crisis and its diminishing social cohesion.

In 2022, I published Iron Curtain, a novel set in the mid-1980s, the dog days of communism. Its story linked an unnamed Soviet satellite state with Britain in the grips of its yuppie revolution under its Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher. I had lived through the era but the experience of recreating it on the page seemed at times as challenging as researching the French Revolution. In 1986, I arrived in London from socialist Yugoslavia, a country enjoying freedoms unimaginable further east and officially not behind the Iron Curtain. As a student I had criss-crossed Europe by train. Britain was less easily accessible. Airplane tickets were expensive and a single telephone call from London to my parents in Belgrade cost more than my current monthly mobile phone bill. We were so paralysed by the need to be succinct that our conversation often consisted of the same basic phrases, reassuring each other that everything was all right. Our steadiest link consisted of weekly letters: one means of communicating which has since become both more expensive and more unreliable.

What resurfaced with those memories, more than almost anything else, is a sense of the sheer physical distance between East and West, a void that is no longer there. My British students hop on an airplane to spend a weekend in Riga or Budapest with less forethought than, at their age, I gave to spending 48 hours in my grandparents’ village a hundred kilometres south of Belgrade. Could the distinction between East and West still be relevant, on either side of wherever that divide might lie now, when a whole generation of what would have been East Europeans has grown up benefiting from freedom of movement, buttressed by budget flights and a shared digital space?

Nostalgia is often a conservative fantasy, a coping mechanism for the West’s own identity crisis and its diminishing social cohesion.

Recycled concepts

Indeed, it sometimes seems that the East now has an advantage even beyond the conservative longing for an impossible return to safe, homogenous, and traditional societies. In The Historical Novel (1937), György Lukács described how an awareness of Europe was formed by the mass marches of the Napoleonic Wars, taking millions of people for the first time across their country’s border. Something similar happened at the beginning of this century, now in a benign context, when the borders of Western Europe opened to labourers from the East.

As reverse brain drain started to occur more recently, the West to East knowledge transfer brought with it an economic and digital boom in cities as far apart as Tallinn, Warsaw, and Cluj. It would appear that any notion of a simple binary opposition pitching a rich, democratic West against an impoverished East – unfree until 1989, then for many years lagging behind – has been replaced by a more complex, fluid set of ideas and values.

The concepts of East and West are still recycled, even if the West is no longer so sure of its progressive ideas; and the East is more ready to resist what it sees as western cultural impositions; and even if we are no longer so certain where exactly we are talking about when we talk about East and West. Again, it is in former Yugoslavia, once perceived as “the West in the East”, that the West continues to assert its superiority most confidently, even running Bosnia like an EU colony through its own appointed viceroy. The notion of “the Western Balkans”, now a common reference for those regional states still not in the EU, is part consolation prize, part insult. It is an oxymoronic designation devised by outsiders, and it makes no geographic sense other than to define a hole in Europe’s Balkan bagel.

Viewed from the West, this area is still routinely described in tones that are more redolent of Bismarck than of contemporary European debate. This is illustrated by a quote from a recent report published by the Robert Schuman Foundation: “In the Balkans, borders, regimes, dynasties, alliances and even the names of states are constantly changing … It is clear that today, Balkans or not, the region wants to be European. Yet will all these countries, having barely regained their sovereignty, easily accept Community rules which by definition imply limits to national sovereignty? Will the Community model suit them? After centuries of dependence, will they be able to tolerate a new form of federalism? And finally, can the European Union overcome the Balkan curse?”

There is profound irony in the fact that the report’s authors, the French centre-right politicians Jean Bizet and Fabrice Hugot, worry about the Balkan ability to accept limits to national sovereignty just at the moment when Western European nations are putting forward greater demands for sovereign border controls. To borrow their gothic turn of phrase, the curse may be European and not Balkan.

However, and whenever, the war in Ukraine ends, that new demarcation – between what Putin calls the ‘collective West’ and the shrunken, Russia-dominated East – seems likely to remain.

A new West?

Of course, it is impossible to discuss shifts in mutual perceptions between East and West while ignoring the fact that there is war in the East. I have argued elsewhere that the Iron Curtain was removed in 1989 only to divide Europe again in February 2022, this time several hundred miles further east from the Szczecin-Trieste line made famous by Churchill’s speech. However, and whenever, the war in Ukraine ends, that new demarcation – between what Putin calls the “collective West” and the shrunken, Russia-dominated East – seems likely to remain.

As we look at the parched earth of the South and the newly dug trenches of the East, yet another difference of perspective emerges from the geopolitical vice. It is the contrast between those countries in the European Union with direct memories of the Soviet Union and all too concrete fears of Russia, and those countries further West, with populations much more concerned with Israel and Palestine than they are with Ukraine. Their peoples are more influenced by the post-colonial priorities of the Global South than by fears of Moscow. To them, Gaza seems closer than Kyiv. It is easier, in light of such a divergent sense of existential threat, to pinpoint the “New East” than it is to locate the “New West”.

This article first appeared in New Eastern Europe. It is republished here with permission.

The Supreme Court opened its 2026-2027 term Monday with a climate case: a lawsuit brought by Boulder, Colorado, against Exxon Mobil and Suncor, a Canadian oil company, over the costs of a warming planet. The case is one of dozens across the country in which local governments have sued fossil fuel companies for their role in driving climate change and are seeking compensation as they now deal with its effects. The Supreme Court’s decision could decide the fate of all those other cases and the idea that oil companies must pay for the damages their products caused.

The justices gave no clear signs of how the court will rule, but over the course of two hours of questioning, they did demonstrate unison on one point: It is a hard and consequential task to identify who is legally liable for the impacts of climate change. 

Although Boulder’s case was first filed in Colorado courts, oil and gas companies asked the Supreme Court to step in, arguing that important climate change matters shouldn’t play out at the state level. Instead, they say, the issue belongs to Congress and the White House. Boulder wants the court to send the case back to Colorado, where it can proceed. 

Eight justices — Justice Samuel Alito removed himself from the case — attempted repeatedly to cast the case into something legible and simple. Multiple times, justices from both sides of the ideological spectrum asked attorneys, “Why make this argument so complex?” Yet they seldom openly agreed on what the simpler argument would be. The consequences for oil companies weighed heavily on some parts of the discussion, while the consequences for communities dealing with a warming planet went largely unexplored.

Some judges attempted to describe it as a case about reducing emissions — a framing that aligns closely with what Exxon Mobil and Suncor argue. If Boulder’s case is an attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through state court, it opens the possibility that a state court could police activity all over the country, and even the world. No state law could be appropriate to apply to the cumulative impact of global pollution, the companies argue.

“This case involves an unprecedented effort to use state law to regulate global conduct,” said Kannon Shanmugam, the attorney representing oil companies.

Several justices seemed to agree with that general picture. Kavanaugh said he could see no difference between allowing a state court to order oil and gas companies to pay damages for climate-related harms and allowing a state to effectively regulate greenhouse gas emissions all over the world. He told Boulder’s attorney, Kevin Russell, that he was downplaying the effect this case could have on oil companies, arguing it could “bankrupt” some of them. In his closing arguments, Shanmugam reinforced the idea that the chaotic consequences of the case could reach the scale of climate change itself. 

“Boulder could tag me … when I am in Colorado in two weeks and sue me on a nuisance claim for refilling my car and thereby contributing to global climate change,” he said. 

A recently rebuilt neighborhood in Superior, Colorado, that had been destroyed in the Marshall Fire. Boulder County, where Superior lies, is suing oil companies in an attempt to receive compensation for the effects of climate change.
Chet Strange / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Ironically, these questions were far from what Boulder claimed it wanted to do with its case. The city hasn’t asked to stop companies from producing oil and gas, or to stop those who burn them from sending greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Rather, it wants oil companies to pay for deceiving the public into thinking those products weren’t producing large-scale harms through climate change. 

Justice Elena Kagan argued Boulder’s case was similar to suits that states brought against cigarette companies in the 1990s, seeking compensation for health care costs linked to tobacco consumption. The companies weren’t required to stop selling cigarettes, but to roll back their pro-cigarette marketing and fund awareness campaigns around the effects of smoking.

“This is not an effort to reduce emissions,” said Russell. “Under our deception theory, they can continue to produce as much fossil fuels as they like and contribute to as much air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as the market will bear when consumers are properly informed about the consequences of that decision.” 

“It doesn’t prohibit them from engaging in the conduct. It requires them to internalize a portion of the cost of their activities by paying for some of the damage,” Russell said later.

Kavanaugh called Russell’s phrasing “cavalier,” saying that those costs could be significant to oil and gas companies. Some firms, including Suncor, have told their shareholders the accumulating climate cases against them could affect their bottom lines. 

An Exxon gas station lies only blocks from the Supreme Court building on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. Exxon Mobil is one of the defendants in Boulder’s climate case. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, looms behind the station. Austin Corona / Grist

If the case is allowed to proceed in Colorado courts and Boulder wins, it could open the floodgates for other cases, Shanmugam argued: “More [suits] are being filed by the week … so given the extraordinary magnitude of these cases, where, in each of these cases, plaintiffs are seeking billions of dollars of damages, we need an answer to this question sooner rather than later.”

Justices typically hear opening arguments and ask questions at the beginning of the court’s term and then take months before publishing a decision. This thread was only one of several they teased apart during the arguments, including arguments over states’ regulatory authorities under the Constitution and the intent of the Clean Air Act. Judges could use a range of rationales for their ultimate ruling, each of which would affect other climate suits against oil companies differently because those suits depend on different legal bases.

“States and local governments are trying to recoup costs related to harms from climate change in a lot of different types of lawsuits,” said Erika Kranz, an attorney with Harvard Law School’s environmental and energy law program. Whether these other cases “run into trouble will depend on how justices write their decision.”

It’s also possible justices send the case back to Colorado, either by deciding the Supreme Court isn’t the right place for it or by voting 4-4, which would leave Boulder able to carry on with its state-level lawsuit. (Alito has not explained why he removed himself from the case, though he has faced accusations that his investments in oil and gas companies not related to the case made his participation inappropriate.)

Kranz and Chris Winter, executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School, said it’s hard to know whether that emphasis showed the court was leaning toward the oil companies, but it suggested that at least some justices were deeply concerned about the case’s potential financial consequences for the industry.

Boulder’s lawyers must now convince them that this risk to oil and gas companies was beside the point, Winter said. To do that, Boulder will have to overcome justices’ claims that it’s trying to reduce emissions through the court.

“There’s a lot of concern from the oil industry, from corporate actors, and from the conservative justices about the significant consequences of these cases,” Winter said. “One way to get at that is to equate this case with previous cases, which were much more directly about regulation of pollution.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Supreme Court wrestles with who should pay for climate change on Oct 6, 2026.

Marvin Martin was in the Four Corners area of Dorchester one day when a train sped by on the Fairmount Line into downtown Boston. It was filled with white people, sitting comfortably and reading newspapers. It made him wonder why the commuter line seemed to pass through communities of color without stopping, leaving people in his neighborhood to crowd into buses.

Martin decided to do something about that. In 1995, he and others began pressuring the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to expand service. It took more than 15 years, but the agency added three stops in Dorchester in 2012 and 2013. It opened a fourth in Mattapan in 2019.

But Martin wasn’t finished. He also had been pushing for electrifying the line. 

“We want a train that would not be spewing a bunch of toxic particulates into the air,” Martin, who recently retired as the head of the transit advocacy organization Action For Equity, said.

Nearly three decades after Martin saw the train roll through Four Corners, the T, as the transit agency is known, plans to electrify the Fairmount line. It will lease seven battery-powered trains, each with four cars, for 15 years in a deal expected to cost $765 million. The arrangement allows the agency to gain experience with the technology before deciding whether to use it more widely.

The trains, built by the Swiss company Stadler, are slated for 2030. They will boost frequency of stops along the 10-mile route from every 30 minutes to every 20 and save 17,700 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually compared to the diesels they will replace, according to the T.

Battery-powered trains allow transit agencies to electrify without the expense or complexity of installing overhead power lines, called catenary. But some worry the technology remains unproven on lines with ridership similar to what the Fairmount carries daily. 

Read Next How electrifying a Bay Area rail system made trains faster, cleaner, and more frequent Benton Graham

They’ll find out soon enough. Caltrain, which provides regional service in the San Francisco Bay Area, plans to introduce battery-powered trains by 2028. Chicago’s Metra has a similar timeline. The projects could offer a glimpse into the future of rail electrification, but the technology must first show that it is capable of transporting thousands of people each day.

Boston is no stranger to electric rail. Its first electric streetcar rolled out in 1889, and the Tremont Street Subway — now part of the Green Line — was the first electric subway in North America. (It was third worldwide behind Budapest and London.) 

Chris Friend, interim executive director of the advocacy organization TransitMatters, considers the Fairmount line a logical place to begin the T’s regional re-electrification because it is the system’s shortest commuter route. But he added that battery-powered trains have not yet been widely used on busy routes anywhere in the world. “So, is this the thing,” he asked, “or are we going to end up in another quagmire of an unproven technology?”

Battery-powered trains built by the French manufacturer Alstom are zipping back and forth on a 50-mile route in Germany that carries 2 million people annually. Dani Simons, the company’s vice president of communications in the Americas, said rising fuel prices make electrification more appealing. (The average price of diesel was $6.32 a gallon on Monday, up from $3.70 a year ago.)

Simons conceded the technology is best suited to “medium ridership.” But she said transit agencies should be pursuing electrification in all its forms, including diesel-electric hybrids and trains powered by overhead lines. These technologies can mitigate the impact of rising fuel costs and improve air quality. Even the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is diversifying, with plans to deploy both battery and catenary trains on the Providence Line.

In some ways, electrifying transit means going back to the future. Urban systems began the transition from horse-drawn vehicles to electric streetcars in the 1880s and 1890s, said Albert Churella, a history professor at Kennesaw State University. Steam railroads, meanwhile, carried passengers between cities and their outskirts, helping spur the growth of suburbs.

Some commuter lines, including routes from New York to New Haven and Philadelphia to Paoli, along with the Long Island Rail Road, electrified at the start of the 20th century. Subways in Boston and elsewhere used electricity because steam trains emitted smoke and risked asphyxiating passengers underground. 

It also helped that the technology was new.

“People get infatuated with technological advancements, and they tend to believe that these are cure-alls, that these are things that have extraordinary, almost unlimited potential,” Churella said. “Electrification of railways was no different.”

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Most commuter lines, however, were never electrified. Many ran on tracks owned by larger railroads that also carried long-distance passengers and freight, operations that favored steam and, later, diesel power, said Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a historian and author of The Great American Transit Disaster. As passenger rail declined after World War II, he added, those companies increasingly wanted out of the passenger rail business. Diesel trains also offered a cheaper alternative to electrification because they do not need miles of wire.

Caltrain provides a look at what electrification can deliver. In 2024, it replaced diesel trains with electric ones on the 51-mile route between San Francisco and San Jose, powering them with overhead lines. Commute times dropped by as much as 23 percent because electric trains accelerate so much faster, and people loved the smoother, quieter cars. Ridership climbed 60 percent, and quality improved. Beyond the immense reduction in CO2 emissions, Joshua Apte, an environmental engineer at the University of California Berkeley, found that riders’ exposure to black carbon dropped 89 percent — a result he called comparable to what California cities achieved during 30 years of regulation.

Given the number of commuter rail systems that still rely on older diesel locomotives, “you might see similar air quality gains if you electrify them,” he said.

Although battery-powered trains might be slightly less efficient than those that use overhead lines or a third rail, Apte said they still do wonders for easing pollution. 

That’s enough for Martin. He acknowledges that the cleaner, quieter trains that will begin rolling through the Four Corners will be a “novel thing” and that riders will continue breathing air polluted by diesel exhaust until they go in service. But he considers his three decades of advocacy a success.

“I’m pretty satisfied with where we ended up,” he said. “As long as we still get that train.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of French train manufacturer Alstom.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The future of commuter rail could be taking shape in Boston on Oct 6, 2026.

Apologies for invoking again the awful noise that never stops. But a month before mid-terms, a fascist feckless clown show run by the dumbest people ever churns on with lies, bribes, cruelty, crude racism; their flailing leader grows daily more perilous; and fiery patriots remind us we cannot grow weary. Oddly, we find solace in Lindsey Graham's 2016 prophesy to the GOP: "If we (choose) Trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it." God: "And in the fullness of time...."

Because we are well and truly beyond the looking glass, an actual, NYTPitchbot-likeTimes headline just posited that "some conservatives are having second thoughts" about Trump - this, even as he continues obliterating every institution of democratic governance, bars press outlets, ignores court rulings, betrays allies, courts autocrats, spews profanities online and at rallies, turns the election into a reality show and the Oval Office into a bordello, and shovels over $1.8 billion into junk vanity projects as his approval plunges to 26% on the economy and his brain dissolves into mashed potatoes. "Second thoughts?"

Decades ago, Robert Reich warned an American economy moving increasingly overseas through the 1970s was creating a two-tired society of a few rich winners and too many left-behind Americans whose anger, resentment and historic racism could be easily manipulated by a savvy carnival barker hungry for power - especially with a right-wing SCOTUS willing to give him almost total immunity for his boundless crimes. The grim result: What Timothy Snyder calls unprecedented "superpower suicide," wherein a major country quickly crashes and burns due to incompetence at all the "basic instruments of state power."

Now, facing "the mid-term music," the GOP flounders through "a five-alarm fire," pulling out lies, bribes, denial. They "must WIN" by using "every tool" - vote early, absentee, in person, by mail (or ICE thugs). Rick Wilson: "Oh, NOW mail-in ballots AREN'T a scam? Sweaty Don is nervous." They hype a duplicitous White House App: "365 Days of Wins." Trump offers a stream of paltry bribes: $90 to 20 million seniors to offset higher Medicare costs he caused, $500 to a million "excess" Obamacare fees, $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans win, conjuring a shameless Oprah-like spectacle: "You get a car, and you get a car..."

The alleged master of the Art of the Deal grows cringey and desperate, as do his boasts. At a recent rally: "I know more about inflation, I know more about everything than anyone in this room, anybody anywhere in the world." Of his two-day "emotional support" debacle of a Texas convention, he claimed 107 million views compared to the NFL's 25 million; the reality was his 3.3 million vs. their 25 million views, with even Ken Paxton secretly complaining, "It dropped our numbers." One viral meme tells the tale: A sign with sky-high gas prices, an angry MAGA voter, and the text, "Turns out my truck doesn't run on liberal tears."

In 2015, Trump packed a rally in Mobile ALA with over 30,000 fans; last week, at a high school gym with mostly empty upper tiers, people began streaming out as he bragged the economy is "booming," with new plants "everywhere." Later, he stubbornly insisted, "There are no empty seats" and his rallies are "HOTTER than ever," so nothing to see here except mashed potatoes. "Just pretend I’m on the ballot," he pleaded, a loser's losing message amidst the debacles he's forged. In need of safe harbor, his itinerary in "a red-state October blitz" is almost entirely in deep-red states he once won by double digits: Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas.

In Ohio this weekend, he raved Democrats' "transgender for everybody" policies would “mutilize your children," he has "record-winning numbers," "Talafreako" (in Texas, not Ohio) is a "vaygan" who "eats a piece of lettuce all day long" but he's now "gone full on eating meat" to get elected so he goes to barbecues where he's "throwing up all the time." He rambled, ranted, cursed, flaunted "the utter disdain for the office he holds and the people hes supoosed to serve." NYTPitchbot: "Whether it’s Obama saying 'Yes We Can” or Donald Trump saying 'We're gonna shove it up their ass,' both presidents adopted divisive slogans."

Beyond the rallies, the carnage persists. Millions have lost SNAP benefits. Many thousands, caught in our immigration atrocities, endure "quiet reckonings with what the country has become.” The Atlantic profiled the Ohio truck driver who hit and killed Haitian student Pierre Damas Bel in an apparent suicide; he is haunted by a young man who “would have been a model citizen,” who had to charge his own ankle monitor, who "was hurting - we did not do right by him.” War agit-prop still spews. So does cultural appropriation: Park rangers blast regime theft of Smokey the Bear, a forest fire refugee: "Only you can prevent fascist liars." "Zoologically-deficient hacks" have also dropped AI slop of USA-themed penguins in Greenland, where they don't live; some suggest they "shouldn’t have dismantled the Department of Education so quickly."

Surreal dissonance flourishes. Because they are "committed to leading the world in Gold Standard Science," other regime goons are bravely charging ahead to "MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY, SAFE, AND BEAUTIFUL" with an executive order to "ELIMINATE FOREIGN, INVASIVE TICKS AND MOSQUITOES" to "restore enjoyment of the great outdoors" through "safe and effective technology-enabled methods," thus rebuilding "public trust in science." Too little, too late? Still, their effort aligns nicely with Press Barbie's move to Fox News, per The Borowitz Report, "as a stepping-stone" to acquiring the requisite “warrior ethos" to become Secretary of Defense. And that profound disconnect is alive and festering in the incoherent child king somehow still babbling about "the golden age of America.”

Declaiming, “Watch for the ‘Midterm Surprise!’,” he just boasted his sparse rally crowds are "unbelievable!" He even added for the 8,726th time his now parody-level, "Nobody has ever seen anything like it"and raved the GOP is “flipping races all over the place.” As a public service, Aaron Rupar, who's borne witness to years of this insanity, urges we read the transcript of his recent Time interview to grasp "the grave cognitive impairment" of "random brain firings" like, "I just got a tariff from Lindsey Graham" and "100 million people watched the midterm convention." Observers: "He’s like a criminally inclined rutabaga with some language skills" and "He looks like an attendant just asked him if he wants pudding or Jello and he’s mad he has no idea what those are."

Sunday night, Indivisible hosted a "Hands Off Our Vote" event in New York to prep for Oct. 17's No Kings and the election. Despite our fatigue - from lying, thieving, genocidal rants, fucking ballrooms - a fiery Mark Ruffalo vowed to "Hulk-out" to convey his rage. "We are so tired, but we can't give up now," he said. "They want to keep us afraid. Their only weapon is our fear. But we're inevitable." He recalled meeting with activist Harry Belafonte a few years ago and asking, "How are we going to know what to do? When are we going to know when it's our calling? And he said, 'Brother, you’ll know. And then you go. You show up.’“

Robert De Niro, out of furious fucks to give, raged at policies crazy, cruel and increasingly unpopular. "Power...to...the...people," he intoned. "It isn't just a slogan. It's the founding principle of our nation." So what do those now unduly empowered do? he asked. "They try to take our votes away. Are you kidding me?" (Ghost of Travis Bickle) "Hands Off Our Vote. Lemme put it another way - keep your fucking hands off our vote," he seethed. Then he led the crowd in an explosive call-and-response to "spineless officials, the Supreme Court, masked ICE thugs," finally "that coward, that fucking piece of shit Donald Trump. When he tries to take our voice and power away, what do we tell him?" To each, he bade,"Keep your fucking hands off our vote!" and take back the House, the Senate, our country. In brief, show up.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Trump's middle-school level AI images feature headless penguins in Greenland, where they don't live. Truth Social post

To really understand what’s going on in the Nebraska Sandhills, Shelly Kelly told me, it’s helpful to see it from the air. From the window of her father’s Bonanza A36, we looked out over the heart of one of the most rural landscapes in the United States. The Sandhills are a 19,500 square-mile swath of grassy dunes embellished with grazing cattle, serpentine rivers, and sunflowers. 

Kelly has spent her life on the prairies of the High Plains. As a child, she made bouquets of flowering grasses and hunted for mudpuppies in the interdunal buffalo wallows on her parents’ ranch. Now a rancher herself, she’s trying to preserve the landscape she loves against the usual suspects — overgrazing and overharvesting — and one surprising new threat: trees. 

She pointed out my window to the prairie below. “You can see it there,” she said, pointing to a neat grove of Juniperus virginiana, eastern red cedar, deliberately planted by ranchers to protect calving heifers from the wind. These windbreaks are standard features on the Plains. But to the south of their orderly rows, a dozen cedars have popped up in the middle of the grass, scattering across the nearby range like race-runners breaking free of the pack. 

This spreading of trees is known as woody encroachment — or the “green glacier,” as some call it, evoking the slow creep of tree species over grasslands — and it’s got ecologists and ranchers of the Plains on high alert. 

“We’re losing our biodiversity,” Kelly said. “We’re losing our resiliency.”

Trees grow along the Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center in March 2024 near Lincoln, Nebraska. The Center works to conserve the tallgrass prairie ecosystem and associated wildlife.
David Madison / Getty Images

For ranchers, a woody takeover of their rangeland creates an obvious problem: less land to graze. The Texas A&M Agrilife extension estimates that woody encroachment over the 10 Great Plains states represents $4 billion in lost range production. Ecologists predict biodiversity losses would affect the insects, birds, and small mammals that populate the country’s remaining prairies. Everybody worries about what those thirsty trees will do to the already stressed water supply as the green glacier expands from the wetter climate in the eastern prairie states to the arid western regions. 

Prairies — on the High Plains and around the world — thrive in cycles of stability and disruption. Fire, grazing, dry seasons, and the area’s particular mix of vegetation all play a role in preserving the healthy root systems that allow a diverse mix of grasses to continue growing year after year. Some heartier grasses with root systems 20 feet deep can keep the prairie green in a drought, while healthy soil can hold dormant seeds until the conditions are right. 

Fire — both naturally-occurring and prescribed burns — has long been a feature of the prairie landscape. Suppressing it is part of what has allowed woody plants to seed, spread, and develop the thick bark that makes them more likely to then withstand future fires. Meanwhile, overgrazing reduces trees’ and shrubs’ grassy competition, allowing them to grow faster. Cattle and bison don’t eat the woody plants. Goats, sheep, elk, and other “browsing” species don’t eat enough of them to control the spread, though some are experimenting with browsers as a component of a larger management plan. 

The Flint Hills of Kansas and Osage Hills of Oklahoma are home to two-thirds of the nation’s remaining tallgrass prairie, said Brian Obermeyer, The Nature Conservancy’s Great Plains grasslands strategy director. The persistence of the prairie in this region is largely because of the longstanding culture of prescribed burns, dating back to when Chisholm Trail cattle drives would divert their skinnier livestock to fatten up on the highly nutritious, tender, juicy grasses that grow back after a burn. Obermeyer even found a lease contract dating back to 1915 requiring the land to be burned regularly so that cattle would have access to the new growth. But in regions where that practice is not common, Obermeyer said, “Getting people comfortable with the culture of prescribed fire takes time.” 

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The Sandhills in Nebraska don’t have the fire culture, though Kelly and others are trying to change that. What they do have, Kelly said, is a culture of tree-planting. 

“Most of the people that settled Nebraska came from areas that were full of trees,” she said. In fact, before it was known as the “Cornhusker State,” Nebraska’s official nickname was the “Tree Planter State.” It dates back to the Homestead Act of 1862, which required settlers to cultivate their land with crops or trees to establish ownership, and Nebraska’s Kinkaid Act of 1904, which offered free trees to help settlers cultivate 640-acre tracts in the state. The tradition has gone on for centuries now, and thanks to advances in horticulture, ranchers buy heartier and heartier red cedar saplings for their windbreaks, which then spread their juggernaut offspring across the plains. 

As executive director of the Sandhills Task Force, a nonprofit established 33 years ago to promote conservation and sustainable land management in the ranching industry, Kelly knows that half the battle is changing the culture. “We’re not talking about trees being bad everywhere,” she said. “But trees are not good on a prairie, especially invasive trees.” On her water bottle I spotted a sticker: Be A Leader, Cut a Cedar. 

Another cultural shift might be necessary as well, particularly for the broader conservation community. The prevailing climate wisdom has been pretty clear: Trees are good, and planting them is virtuous — the more the better. But actually, Obermeyer said, grasslands can be a more secure carbon sink than forests. A big reason for that goes back to the cycle of fire on the landscape, and the worsening threat of out-of-control wildfires that are often the result of too much fire suppression. Woody plants store most of their carbon above ground in their trunks and leaves. When they burn, all of that carbon is released, and the charred remains continue to release carbon after the initial burn. It can take years for the forest to return to its storage capacity. Grasslands store the vast majority of carbon safely underground in their deep root systems, and after a fire their stems and blades quickly rebound. 

The sun rises over the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County in June 2026 in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
Heather Diehl / Getty Images

There is evidence that the increased atmospheric carbon may be giving another advantage to woody plants, which utilize a different carbon pathway than grasses in photosynthesis, making them more efficient photosynthesizers in carbon-soaked, warm, dry air. While this means that trees may, in the short term, capture carbon more quickly, the loss of an entire ecosystem, especially one that stores carbon more securely, isn’t a good tradeoff in the long term, said Chris Helzer, Nebraska director of science and stewardship for The Nature Conservancy. 

Climate change is one of many reasons that a non-intervention strategy — letting nature take its course — won’t work on the High Plains. There are too many things in motion to simply go “hands-off.” But, really, Helzer said, grasslands as we know them have never been free of human intervention. From the time that Indigenous peoples hunted free-ranging bison, grasslands have evolved in tandem with humans, explained Helzer. The Nature Conservancy has also worked with the InterTribal Buffalo Council and Tanka Fund to support the return of bison to the Plains along with other tribal-led efforts to restore damaged ecosystems and build management capacity. 

Ranchers also have a critical role to play, Helzer said. And many are playing it with gusto. Kelly’s dad, John Taylor, has had a front-row seat to his daughter’s crusade and benefited from her growing expertise. On his ranch the cedar is under control, but near the fenceline, a few of the evergreen treetops peeked over a neighboring dune, like Birnam Wood advancing on MacBeth’s Dunsinane Hill. These trees are prolific, spreading their seeds across a 200-foot radius. Seedlings grow at about a rate of 1 to 2 feet per year, and once they reach 5 feet tall, they start spreading seed in their own 200-foot radius. That said, the Sandhills are mostly lucky, Kelly said. Eastern red cedar is easy to kill. Cut it down to the root and it mostly doesn’t grow back.

A red cedar grows near Wauneta, Nebraska. Getty Images Over 2,000 bison, also known as American buffalo, roam in the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County in June 2026 in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Heather Diehl / Getty Images

Kelly has even helped Nebraskans connect to funding opportunities to clear the cedars. Through grants and fundraising, the Sandhills Task Force can help ranchers pay for up to 75 percent of cedar removal. The funds are stimulating a growing cedar removal industry in the region. State and federal programs will also help fund the removal — but, ironically, the same departments still subsidize tree-planting for windbreaks, Kelly said, though they are increasingly discouraging red cedars. 

The Nature Conservancy is using its preserves to test grazing patterns, new mixes of plant species, and other mitigation techniques that can help private landowners across the High Plains find the right balance of grazing, burning, and rewilding to keep their grasslands healthy. “To some extent, you can have a prairie that has trees,” Helzer said. “But there’s a line — when you cross that line, you have a woodland with clearings, not a grassland with trees.” 

Grassland prairies — short, mixed, tall, and other types — used to stretch from Texas to the Dakotas, into Kentucky and up to the foothills of the Rockies. Only 4 percent of tallgrass prairies are left, making it, Obermeyer said, “the most altered landscape in North America in terms of acres lost.” At the same time, he said, places like the Flint Hills and Sandhills give him hope. More people are recognizing the subtle beauty and ecological power of the plains. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that we have a tremendous amount that we have the chance to preserve,” Obermeyer said. “We have a lot of opportunities to get this right.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Great Plains face a surprising threat: Too many trees on Oct 6, 2026.

The facility calls for 456 small nuclear reactors, nuclear fuel production and nuclear waste storage. On the same day it surfaced, Sen. Ron Wyden introduced legislation that would ban new data centers.

Communities that trust their institutions are more willing to participate, collaborate, adapt, and recover. Communities that do not trust them remain vulnerable, regardless of how much climate finance is mobilised.

What can one person actually do about the metacrisis? In this week’s Frankly, Nate explicitly outlines just a few of the countless actions we can take to actually change what’s coming.