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Puneet Maharaj, executive director of NNU, was appointed as a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Council. The Executive Council comprises labor union leaders who serve as the governing body of the AFL-CIO, the federation of 64 labor unions representing nearly 15 million working people.

Photos by Dana Schot

We are immensely grateful to the speakers and attendees of our February Action Night: The Dangers of Tear Gas.

Portland City Councilor Sameer Kanal The night began with a screening of “Gas Me, Teddy” a short film that examines the deployment of tear gas during the 2020 Portland protests for black lives, and draws connections to the current situation at the Portland ICE facility. After the screening, City Councilor Sameer Kanal shared about legislation he’s working on to ban tear gas in the City of Portland. Following the councilor’s talk, 5 panelists brought distinctly unique and important perspectives to the discussion of tear gas: from impacts of tear gas on the human body to working within the legal system to stop the use of tear gas. Sandy Chung, Oregon ACLU We are at a critical moment to take action: the mayor is rolling out implementation of a Detention Facility Impact Fee Ordinance *AND* Portland City Councilor Sameer Kanal is developing an ordinance to ban the use of tear gas in Portland. To send an email to the mayor and city council click here and to watch “Gas Me, Teddy”, which is now online, click here. Much thanks to City Councilor Sameer Kanal, filmmaker Irene Tejaratchi Hess, and panelists: Taishona Carpenter, board president Don’t  Shoot PDX Chris Wise, protest medic Erika Maria Mosesón, MD, MA, Air Health Our Health Sandy Chung, Oregon ACLU Brenna Bell, environmental attorney _________________________

The post Action Night: The Dangers of Tear Gas appeared first on 350PDX: Climate Justice.

Last month, we invited you to show up to hear oral arguments in a legal challenge to a ballot measure seeking to give 25% of PCEF funds to the Portland Police. PCEF supporters won the lawsuit! Ballot measure supporters can go back and collect signatures again, so this threat to PCEF’s intentions of climate action with equitable community benefit is not over yet. Read more about the case in this OPB article.

Discussions are also roiling at City Hall regarding who gets to decide how PCEF funds are allocated. On February 25, community groups successfully advocated for Councilors to adopt the PCEF Committee’s community-driven recommendations, so that’s good news!

There’s another threat on the horizon, however, as PCEF has been suggested as a way to pay for Moda Center renovations. While we all love the Blazers, the Moda Center is already platinum level (the highest) in LEED Certification. Stay tuned for suggested actions as we advocate together to keep PCEF focused on climate justice.

The post Some PCEF Threats Thwarted…for Now appeared first on 350PDX: Climate Justice.

On February 17, the 350PDX Arts Team brought their beautiful puppets to Mississippi Avenue’s Mardi Gras. Capitalists fought over fake money, trees danced, and our incredible heron sauntered down the avenue along with mushrooms, beavers, owls and more – all supported by 350PDX Arts Team volunteers! On the way, we shared flyers inviting people to join the climate justice movement.

All photos & video: Irene Tejaratchi Hess

350PDX’s Cherice Bock, Jessica Vaughan, and Arts Team lead extraordinaire Donna Murhpy!

The post 350PDX Puppets at Mardi Gras on Mississippi Avenue! appeared first on 350PDX: Climate Justice.

On Tuesday, five organizations filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s approval of an expansion of the Bull Mountains coal mine in central Montana. The mine, operated by Signal Peak Energy, has been the target of lawsuits in the past for its environmental impacts, including dewatering grazing lands above and near the mine.

The lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s reliance on “a supposed energy emergency that has no basis in reality” to allow the expansion, alleging that the administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act in doing so. According to the lawsuit, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (part of the Interior department) failed to issue a draft environmental impact statement or consider public comments as it rushed to approve the mine expansion.

The groups also point out that most of the coal mined at Bull Mountains is exported, energy production is high, and demand for coal is low—all of which undercut the Trump administration’s domestic ‘energy emergency’ rationale for the mine expansion.

“The mine has a long history involving criminal and corrupt actions, and it has devastated the ecology and ranching community of the Bull Mountains,” the lawsuit states.

Quick hits New lawsuit aims to halt expansion of a Montana coal mine and ‘energy emergency’ used to justify it

Inside Climate News | Daily Montanan | E&E News

Leaked files point to Trump admin’s review of American history

National Parks Traveler | Wes Siler’s Newsletter

Utah monument could be the latest target of a law to undo public lands decisions

KUNC

In New Mexico, natural gas transporter goes to the mat over $47.8 million fine

Capital & Main

Legislature fails to conform Wyoming law to court’s OK of corner-crossing

WyoFile

The West’s 32-year drought may now be aridification

Arizona Republic

Opinion: We need a public lands champion to lead the BLM, not Steve Pearce

Cody Enterprise

Opinion: Boundary Waters a cautionary tale for Idaho

Idaho Press

Quote of the day

Pearce has gone so far as to publicly criticize American conservation hero President Theodore Roosevelt for making popular ‘big ideas of big forests and big national parks.’ Pardon me, but most of us believe these big forests and national parks are what make America great.”

—Scott Christensen, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Cody Enterprise

Picture This @grandtetonnps

Have you ever been told you were burning daylight?
It’s a saying that means you’re wasting precious time.

At this time of year, the change in daylight hours is perceptible.

In Grand Teton, the length of day changes from just under 9 hours at the winter solstice to almost 15½ hours by the summer solstice.

Tomorrow alone brings about 3 more minutes of light. Over the month of March, we’ll gain 1 hour and 29 minutes of daylight.

How will you use your extra minutes?

Savor it. Don’t waste it.

Photo: NPS/Tobiason Sunrise on the Teton Range

 

Featured image: Bull Mountains Mine, WildEarth Guardians/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The post Lawsuit challenges coal mine expansion, ‘energy emergency’ used to justify it appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

So-called ‘Stewardship Caucus’ faces its first real test—and fails

DENVER—Today, the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted 11-9 to advance Steve Pearce, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management, to the full Senate.

The Pearce nomination vote was the first real test of the Senate Stewardship Caucus, formed last fall with an ostensible focus on national public land access and management policy. Members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee who are also members of the Stewardship Caucus are Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada), Steve Daines (Montana), Martin Heinrich (New Mexico), and John Hickenlooper (Colorado). Of these four, only Daines voted to advance the Pearce nomination.

The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Policy Director Rachael Hamby:

“There’s no point in joining the Senate Stewardship Caucus if you’re not going to uphold its stated values. A vote for Steve Pearce is a vote to sell off and privatize our national public lands—the complete opposite of stewardship.

“For years, Western voters have expressed their overwhelming and unwavering support for protected public lands, wildlife habitats, and recreation access, only to have their clear preferences ignored time and again by lawmakers who prioritize loyalty to the Trump administration over service to their constituents. We can only hope that other members of the Stewardship Caucus, and the rest of the Senate, listen to the West and vote for conservation of our irreplaceable public lands.”

Pearce’s nomination will be considered by the full Senate in the coming weeks, giving more senators and Senate Stewardship Caucus members an opportunity to prevent Pearce’s confirmation, including Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, co-founder of the Stewardship Caucus along with Heinrich.

 

Learn more:

• ‘Political bedrock’: 16th annual Conservation in the West poll confirms bipartisan support for conservation among Western voters [Westwise]
• Why a New Mexico gun rights leader opposes Trump’s pick to lead the BLM [The Landscape]
• Seven times ‘Sell-off Steve’ tried to dispose of America’s public lands [Westwise]
• Trump’s new pick to run the BLM has a history of working to sell off public land [Westwise]

 

Featured image: Upper Missouri River Breaks in Montana, BLM Montana and Dakotas

The post STATEMENT on Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee vote to advance Steve Pearce’s nomination to lead the Bureau of Land Management appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

EDMONTON — Tim Weis, senior director of the Pembina Institute’s Industrial Decarbonization program, made the following statement in response to the National Energy Corridor agreement announcement.“This initiative to work together on a national energy...

This story is published in partnership with The Guardian.

As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel agenda.
 
“In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the “World Prosperity Forum,” a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a right-wing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The event’s sponsor was The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation for decades, and was also a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for President Trump’s second administration.

“Billionaires are silent. Democrats in Congress have been silent. Climate activists. There has been no push-back on this,” Morano said — and he may have a point, according to some experts who research the climate denial movement.

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“The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” said Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.

“And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whimper. I never thought I’d ever say this: Marc Morano is correct.”

Last month, the Trump administration repealed the 2009 “endangerment finding” establishing that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health. It was a determination that undergirded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating pollution from automobiles and power plants.

Elimination of the endangerment finding had long been a core goal of the climate denial movement.

Its repeal is just the latest in a long line of President Trump’s climate-related destruction. Since taking office in January 2025, his administration has significantly curtailed the country’s weather forecasting organizations and climate science research facilities, published reports denying established climate science, and made deep cuts to funding for climate-related energy and community projects.

Under the leadership of Trump appointee Chris Wright, the Department of Energy last year all but banned its key renewable energy department from using terminology like “climate change,” “green,” and “sustainability.”
 
 ”Trump overturned Biden’s climate agenda at breakneck speed,” Morano said at the Heartland Institute’s Zurich forum. 

Instead of pushing back on this blitz, many Democratic Party representatives have retreated from talking directly about climate change across social media, podcasts, speeches, and in Congress. The party is now embroiled in a debate about whether affordability is a better message than climate action, despite polling suggesting that 63 percent of the American public believes the president and Congress should prioritize clean energy.

This trend hasn’t gone without resistance in the party, however. “Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ — people who think Dems should stop talking about climate,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) posted on social media in January.
 
Genevieve Guenther, a climate communications expert and founding director of the advocacy group End Climate Silence, largely agrees. “The Democrats’ climate hushing is politically foolish,” she said in an email. “It only benefits the Trump regime’s agenda.”

At the Heartland Institute event, Morano expressed delighted “shock” over the “flips on climate” of tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the founders of Amazon and Microsoft respectively, whose companies have abandoned once-ambitious climate promises as they confront the skyrocketing energy demands of their AI businesses.

Gates, whose foundation has donated millions of dollars to a think tank run by climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg, published a controversial memo in October arguing that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and advocating for ending climate funding in favor of direct humanitarian aid.

Microsoft and Amazon, which have donated large sums to Trump, have both recently embraced fossil-fuel powered AI data centers alongside Trump energy officials and fossil fuel industry players. 
 
 In early February, Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, slashed at least 14 reporters from the venerated paper’s climate desk. Just weeks later, the Post published an editorial board opinion, “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach,” praising Trump’s repeal of the endangerment finding.

Morano noted that overall, journalists have been reporting less aggressively about Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. “When you have Lee Zeldin, the EPA chief, calling climate a cult, a scam, religion, he doesn’t even get push-back from reporters,” Morano said.

During Trump’s first term, by contrast, environmental officials like Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency from February 2017 to July 2018, “would have to be very careful on climate,” Morano said. Otherwise “they would be beaten and browed by the media.” 

The growing “climate hush” is not limited to the U.S. — a hushed silence about climate change has expanded across the globe.
 
At Davos in January, world leaders across business and government talked noticeably less about addressing climate change than in previous years.
 
Why? “In today’s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” Anjali Chaudhry, a business sustainability researcher at Dominican University, wrote about the silence in Forbes.
 
Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who once served as a United Nations Secretary-General Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, limited his mentions of climate change at Davos to a quiet reference to the COP climate summit and a simple “Canadians remain committed to sustainability.”

Despite all this quiet, the vast majority of people worldwide, 89 percent, support climate action, even if they underestimate how much others care — a misperception that has added fuel to a “spiral of science.”
 
What can be done to counteract the trend towards silence? “In this time of ‘climate hushing,’ having conversations about climate change is more important than ever,” Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and climate communications expert, advised in her influential blog.
 
For environmental sociologist Brulle, addressing the growing hush around climate must go beyond talking.

“I think the climate movement in the United States has failed. It has flat failed, and that means we need to rebuild this movement in a completely different manner,” he said.
 
Environmentalist Bill McKibben is more optimistic. “I think [the Trump administration] is whistling past the graveyard of their fossil-fueled dreams,” he said in an email. “The real story of the last year is how politicians, movements, entire nations are moving fast towards clean energy. They’re not all doing it in the name of ‘climate,’ but we’re making faster climate progress than we have at any point in the last 40 years.”
 
McKibben added a caveat: “Fast enough? Of course not. The deniers have delayed change and that continues. But it’s going far faster than they want it to — hence their resort to political gamesmanship.”

The post Climate Deniers Expected More Resistance to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Blitz appeared first on DeSmog.

This report examines the histories and designs of five major Canadian carbon pricing systems: Alberta’s Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) regulation,British Columbia’s Output-Based Pricing System (OBPS),Ontario’s Emission Pricing...

Mondelēz International — the food giant behind Oreos, Cadbury, and Toblerone — has spent years cultivating an image as a sustainability leader, earning high environmental scores and pledging to eliminate…

This article Trump and his enablers must be held accountable for the war on Iran was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article was originally published by Truthout.

As news broke that the United States and Israel had launched war on Iran, two posts kept showing up over and over on my social media feeds. One was from the Israeli military’s official account, which stated an oft-repeated phrase: “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

The other was a video from the Iranian city of Minab, where the first reports of casualties were emerging. The joint U.S.-Israeli attack had hit a girls’ elementary school; the death toll kept ticking higher and higher. At the time of publication, Iranian authorities said 108 people, mostly schoolchildren, had been killed in the strike, with many more injured.

Plenty has been written, in Truthout and elsewhere, about the totally incoherent justifications for this war, the illegality of it, the potential for regional disaster, the joke it has made of the very idea of diplomacy. All of this was and continues to be true, and all of it is important to raise. But more than anything, we in the U.S. need to reckon with the fact that so much of our state wealth, capacity, and technology goes toward burying children in rubble.

Last year, when Israel and the U.S. launched the strikes that would be prelude to this attack, I wrote that the two countries were “shedding even the pretense and facade of the principles of a rules-based international order that has already worked in their favor.” In the wake of those strikes, once the immediate violence ceased, we largely heard crickets from U.S. lawmakers. This, despite the fact that those strikes, like these, were illegal under U.S. and international law. We cannot let this continued lack of accountability stand. If we do, what will happen next?

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Over the years, U.S. and Israeli leaders have become increasingly vocal about their hopes for “greater Israel” — the boundless expansion of an apartheid state. Before the start of the current assault on Iran, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a favorite in the country’s upcoming elections, accused Turkey of being the hub of a threatening axis “similar to the Iranian one.” This war is not about Iran’s nuclear program. It is not a war to free Iranians from a repressive regime. This is a war to preserve U.S. power and hegemony across the entire region.

It is also not accurate to say that Israel is dragging the U.S. into a war against its choosing. Reporting has shown that these two nuclear powers were in lockstep in their planning of this attack. In order to stop this violence, we need to really contend with how it started. The U.S. is hardly a victim here.

This state of affairs is intolerable. I am disgusted to know that my tax dollars are being spent to bomb my ancestral homeland. I was sickened to wake up to messages from family members telling me that the city where they live was under attack from the country where I live. I’m terrified now that Iran’s government has cut internet access yet again, leaving us disconnected from our loved ones. No fear, of course, can compare to the terror of being on the receiving end of missiles or guns, whether they are wielded by a foreign power or your own government; Iranians have been killed by both in horrifying numbers over the last year. But for those of us in the diaspora, the fact that it has now become routine to check in on family and friends living through untold violence does not make it any less traumatic.

Despite the abject horror of this moment, we cannot afford to slip into despair. There is still space for things to get much worse, but, more importantly, there is still so much left that we must protect. No one can predict what will happen over the coming days and weeks, but we know they are likely to be filled with more violence and uncertainty. We need to use every single tool at our disposal to chip away at the war-making systems inflicting this horror, which are so thoroughly embedded in the heart of the United States.

We can start, of course, by demanding that Congress immediately pass a war powers resolution to put an end to this destructive assault. Beyond that we can lift up the call being made by groups like Defending Rights & Dissent for Congress to impeach not only Donald Trump but every single member of his cabinet who had a hand in making this unjust and illegal war possible.

But we shouldn’t stop there. Our elected officials need to publicly explain why they hemmed and hawed over a war powers resolution before these attacks occurred, despite an obvious military buildup.

We must demand that every member of Congress who has voted to increase our military budget to nearly a trillion dollars account for their choices. We must push those members who have personal investments in the military machine — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — even further. They need to explain their conflicts of interest, and why they continue to profit off this death and destruction. Lawmakers who take money from groups like AIPAC that are relishing in this war especially need to answer for their votes.

It’s also imperative to not view this war in a silo, but instead see it as part of the same violent, hegemonic project that has been conducting genocide and spreading violence across Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and beyond. We must hold elected officials accountable for failing to uphold U.S. and international law by continuing to support the transfer of weapons to Israel as it commits genocide against Palestinians. We must make it politically toxic for those lawmakers not to support legislation like the Block the Bombs Act, which aims to stop such transfers.

We also can’t expect elected officials to do more just because we ask them to. We need to build power. We must support grassroots movements like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that seek to make war, apartheid, and genocide too costly to wage. We must back campaigns like Taxpayers Against Genocide that are searching for legal avenues to keep federal funds from being used to violate human rights.

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We can wage campaigns against death-dealing corporations and make sure that war-profiteering is exposed and subjected to public outrage. The No Tech for Apartheid movement has long been organizing to push Silicon Valley to stop supplying the Israeli military with computing power, and has already found some success. The Israeli military’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in Gaza has received a great deal of reporting; now that OpenAI has announced a deal to allow the Pentagon to use its models in their classified networks, the fight against AI has taken on renewed urgency. Campaigns across the country against data centers are now also a crucial nexus of resistance against militarism.

So too are campaigns for immigrant rights and against deportations. In the wake of the U.S. strikes against Iran last June, the Trump administration rounded up Iranian immigrants for deportation. Those deportations continued into this year, even as the Iranian government staged a brutal crackdown on protesters. As we prepare for war to rage across the region, we can demand the U.S. and Europe open their borders to people fleeing violence and despair. We can continue to show the links between the occupation of cities by federal immigration agents here at home and imperial wars waged abroad. The enemies of democracy here are also the enemies of democracy abroad.

Some of these demands may seem futile under this murderous president, backed by an obedient Congress, and with a Supreme Court that has offered comparatively little restraint. But this unaccountable bureaucracy makes it all the more essential that we build grassroots power to issue these demands and force those in power to heed them.

Polling shows that this war is unpopular. Trump may be an authoritarian, but he is not entirely invulnerable, nor are the elected officials who have given him pass after pass. We cannot let him believe for a second longer that he can get away with something this wildly illegal or recklessly dangerous without accountability. And we cannot let the leaders who follow him believe that they, too, can unleash such violence without consequences. After all, would we be here if there were any real repercussions for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the continuing genocide in Palestine? We need true accountability for these crimes. And the only way to get it is to wage a struggle against militarism every day — not only in moments of crisis, but whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.

This article Trump and his enablers must be held accountable for the war on Iran was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article A successful general strike requires trauma-informed mutual aid was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The dream of a national general strike to paralyze multiple major industries or corporations is gaining traction. 

Across the nation, voices are rising with a righteous call for collective action at scale, especially in the wake of ongoing local economic strikes and protests against the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. The Day of Truth and Freedom on Jan. 23 gave a glimpse of the power of everyday people to make the system tremble. Over 50,000 people poured into downtown Minneapolis in the middle of the workday, braving temperatures of 20 below zero. Roughly a thousand businesses were shuttered, and organizers estimate that a million Minnesotans supported the action. The level of participation demonstrated the power of strikes to energize activists even as we have been grieving the murders, blatant cruelty and torture perpetrated by ICE agents. 

What has happened in Minnesota will only add momentum to other efforts to build toward general strikes: There is a national call to strike when 3.5 percent of the current U.S. population commits to it, an ongoing push for regional strikes by Blackout The System and a plan by the United Auto Workers for a general strike on May Day 2028. These calls for general strikes reflect a yearning to reclaim agency from systems that profit from exhaustion, division and despair. They also emphasize that to halt the slide into fascism and climate collapse, we must disrupt business as usual, awaken a shared sense of moral and civic sovereignty, and wield our collective economic power.

Recently, Aru Shiney-Ajay, a Minneapolis-based organizer with the Sunrise Movement, said in an interview that Jan. 23 “was a fantastic start.” But to get to a real general strike, she added that “it’s going to take a lot more work.” 

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Indeed, pulling off a successful long-term general strike in this large and diverse country will require unprecedented organizing. It will place great demands on each of us — on both a personal and collective level.  

This need for deeper organizing could be seen when the call for a “general strike” on Jan. 30 did not materialize nationwide despite the increasing momentum after Alex Pretti’s murder. 

As we lay the groundwork for future strikes, we should not overlook another essential ingredient to their success: Strong movements require deep mutual support. We must ensure that strikers and their families have their fundamental needs met when conventional economic systems are being challenged. We need to support one another despite the messages we receive from our culture that it is unsafe to rely on one another. In other words, we will not be able to strike at scale and over the long-term unless we learn how to collaborate through distrust, fear and trauma.

Practicing interdependence amidst trauma

We must learn to depend on one another for our very lives: for food, shelter and safety from violence. This sort of dependence is called, in movement speak, mutual aid. Mutual aid — the practice of voluntary, reciprocal exchange within a community — is not a peripheral support activity; it is the essential infrastructure that will make a prolonged strike possible. The promise of mutual aid is that we learn to depend on one another rather than rely on the broken institutions we’re striking against.

In the past, notable mutual aid networks have been organized in response to the COVID pandemic, natural disasters and to support teacher strikes, among many other causes. And under tremendous risk, inspiring and self-organized mutual aid efforts have sprung up — neighborhood by neighborhood — in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and other cities targeted by ICE over the last year. 

Previous Coverage

How LA is uniting to provide mutual aid for those impacted by ICE raids

However, the scale of mutual aid needed for a long-term general strike will be much larger than anything we have seen to date. It wouldn’t be just the marginalized or immigrant families that will need “aid.” People who are currently employed and supporting others will also need to survive without relying on mainstream structures. The mutual aid networks that emerged over the past two months in Minneapolis are a solid step in the right direction. Beyond the rent assistance and food delivery systems for immigrants sheltering at home, restaurants, places of worship and coffee shops have opened their doors to feed neighbors for free and supply ICE patrollers with gas masks, hand-warmers and whistles. We need to continue building on this momentum.

The hyperindividualistic capitalist script tells us to rely only on ourselves, that we must work hard and make enough money to secure our own food, health and shelter. But that system is designed to fail, and too many of us and our neighbors are vulnerable, exploited and denied access to our basic human needs. A poorly planned strike risks making those injustices even worse if people step away from their sources of income. This is the trap: We wouldn’t need to strike if we had a safety net, but without a safety net, striking is far more difficult.

Mutual aid is how we break this circular logic. But here’s the big problem: Collective traumas have robbed our society of the willingness to depend on one another — to give and receive support as if our lives depend on it. Mutual aid is a trust fall, but many of us still need to learn to trust one another. Past or ongoing money and class trauma make some of us believe that our economic privilege was justly earned — that we have the right to hoard our resources and to not share what we have with others. For others, financial stress keeps us stuck in the systems that are killing our biosphere and degrading our souls. Racism causes a similar spiritual degradation, teaching us that some people are more deserving of our support than others.

Our bodies are so traumatized that interdependence feels unsafe for most of us. We believe the narrative that living alone with a six-figure salary is safer than living in deep interdependence with our community. Or that working four part-time jobs to pay our rent is our destiny, and no one can help us change this fate. Our inability to trust one another is capitalism’s great victory. The unspoken truth is that we are lonely, traumatized, dysregulated and grieving. We are trying to build a movement with bodies and hearts locked in states of fight, flight or freeze. We can make brilliant intellectual arguments for mutual aid, but without an embodied sense of safety, healing and belonging, these networks remain abstract — impossible to lean on when the paychecks stop.

But I am not traumatized!

“But I’m not traumatized!” I have heard this so often in my work of bringing trauma healing practices and frameworks to activist communities. Especially from men and white people. Any conversation about emotions can seem like a waste of time in a culture obsessed with productivity and rationality. But in a world in which we are bombarded with news of genocides perpetrated with our tax dollars, unhoused people dying on our streets, a mental health crisis among children, an opioid epidemic, police brutality, mass extinctions and unfolding climate chaos, none of us are shielded from the violence of this world. Our collective stubborn insistence that we are “just fine” can actually be a symptom of disassociation and trauma, not a sign of true well-being.

Crucially, the most insidious and primal traumas are personal. Too many of us did not receive the unconditional love from our families and society that is so essential for human flourishing. We were treated as less than the sacred beings that we are. Even worse, many of us have experienced acute familial violence. I also never fail to be struck by the fact that 60 percent of kids in the U.S. have faced at least one of the following: sexual abuse, physical beatings, domestic violence or alcoholism in their family. And personal trauma can be rooted in many realities of life beyond childhood abuse: intergenerational racial pain, dysfunctional societal power dynamics, and income and wealth disparities.

How do we enable more people to participate in the mutual aid that will be essential to carrying out a general strike? We can share information about how neighborhoods can meet fundamental human needs. We can advocate for healthy, grassroots decision-making. We can educate one another about conflict resolution processes and transformative justice. But does information and political education alone inspire people to act? No.

It is important to recognize that an intellectual understanding of mutual aid is fundamentally different than actually practicing mutual aid. Many of us understand that our daily actions harm the water, soil or other species, yet we continue engaging in them. We understand that there is no truly ethical consumption under capitalism, and yet we continue to consume. Our habitual consumption despite knowledge of its harms can intensify pain and trauma.

Consider the legacy of scarcity: A person might intellectually champion a political movement, but when the moment comes to contribute, they are flooded with a paralyzing anxiety they don’t understand. Later, they remember a story: “My mother lived in her car before I was born.” This isn’t just a memory; it’s an inherited, somatic warning that shouts, “Your safety is your money alone! Sharing is risking destitution!” The body’s survival impulse overrides the mind’s political commitment.

Or consider the shame of dependency: Another organizer, eager to dedicate themselves fully to the movement, feels a knot in their stomach at the idea of quitting their corporate job. The obstacle isn’t a lack of conviction, but shame at the thought of becoming dependent on others. In a society that equates self-sufficiency with virtue, the vulnerability of needing support can feel like a profound moral failure. Trauma whispers in our bodies that we should stay in a compromising job rather than face the perceived humiliation of mutual reliance.

Moving from the theory to practice of mutual aid means confronting the emotional and traumatic barriers that block us from exercising true interdependence. To build a resilient movement, we must bridge this gap between knowing and feeling. We must embody the beauty and joy of radical interdependence with other humans, and with the Earth itself.

Unless we can access the subterranean emotions preventing us from living this radical practice, it will remain little more than an intellectual exercise for most of us. Political education, when not coupled with emotional sensitivity, doesn’t land in our hearts. In fact, political education without trauma awareness can bind us deeper into our siloed opinions where we don’t see each other’s genuine needs and grief under the surface of our opinions. Many of us debate meaningless political differences rather than actually practicing mutual aid.

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A trauma-informed practice of mutual aid in our daily life would look like us acknowledging our past traumas, fears or hesitations and yet offering our time, money and even bodies to our community members. This ability to “see” our traumas and act in spite of them is possible when we can tap into a strong sense of groundedness — and even joy — in our sense of belonging to our community, and hopefully our spiritual practice.

The power of multiracial coalitions

A general strike — and the mutual aid effort necessary to sustain it — requires a multiracial coalition. A multiracial coalition is crucial not just as a moral necessity, but also as a strategic necessity rooted in demography, economics, history and the current reality of who serves as essential workers. Historically, some of the most militant and class-conscious segments of the U.S. working class have been workers of color, precisely because they face the compounded exploitation of low wages, unsafe conditions and systemic racism.  

A multiracial coalition will make the movement less vulnerable to attempts by the ruling class to break strikes by exploiting racial differences through the age-old tactic of “divide and conquer.” Workers of color are disproportionately concentrated in the most exploited and strategically vital sectors (e.g. warehousing and logistics, hospitality, domestic care and agriculture) where a strike would have maximum impact. Therefore, a multiracial coalition would be able to mobilize workers at the economy’s critical chokepoints and build on the most effective traditions of labor struggle. A strike without this foundation is a ship with a hull breach; it may set sail in calm weather, but it will not survive the storm.

Building a multiracial coalition depends on confronting racial trauma. This trauma isn’t an abstract concept. It lives in the daily, embodied experiences of our potential comrades. It shows up in our meetings, in our resource sharing and in our silences. We witness it arise when a low-income femme of color calculates how to ask for rent help from her community while listening to others casually plan their summer vacations. She may wonder, “Can they truly understand what ‘mutual aid’ means when my survival is only an abstraction to them?” 

Or imagine a gentle, well-intentioned white man who can recite the statistics on racial wealth disparity but cannot feel in his body the pain of the mother in his group who works overtime to make ends meet. He overlooks her deep fatigue, the fear of a single missed shift, or the weight of an entire lineage of forced resilience. His intellectual declarations for justice become a wall, not a bridge. He has an inability to fully embody the empathy he feels. Such a man needs to move beyond intellectual understanding to feel the pain of his friends as if it were his own. He can only do this by opening up to his own layers of grief and trauma.

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These moments are not mere interpersonal friction; they are the manifestations of unhealed racial and class trauma. They are why, despite our best intentions, our coalitions fracture. Why, for example, the #MeToo movement fractured under accusations of racial bias.

Unaddressed trauma — the wild inner impulses of wrath and grief — does not vanish by suppression or avoidance. This pain can only begin to transform when it is wisely witnessed with love by our own selves and fellow human beings. By shining a light on emotions and experiences that feel neglected and shameful, we can begin to heal and move towards deeper solidarity with one another.

How can we face this trauma? 

Modern psychotherapy could be a good starting point for different kinds of activist groups. But we do not have enough well-trained and affordable therapists to confront the scale of trauma we are facing.

Many ancient healing lineages, including Indigenous and Eastern spiritualities, have also been offering us pathways for healing. In contrast to the individualist approaches common in Western healing, these approaches emphasize the creation of belonging with one’s community and the Earth itself. Modern spiritual leaders like Joanna Macy have curated pathways for healing collective ecological trauma, drawing on some of these ancient lineages. Some younger and people of color leaders are creating new integrated practices that address other kinds of trauma from both modern psychological and ancient spiritual community-based frameworks (search for facilitators here). 

Healing is, of course, not easy — it’s full of pitfalls, but it cannot be bypassed. Our mass movement must admit that a general strike can only succeed if we face our traumas head-on.

As we prepare to engage in nonviolent struggle, we must also learn to care for each other. This is the quiet, unglamorous work of our time. We must slow down to build the relational fabric for true mutual aid that will make any future strike not merely possible, but unshakable. 

This article A successful general strike requires trauma-informed mutual aid was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The government has told North Yorkshire Council it is keeping regulation on lower-volume fracking “under review”.

The energy minister, Michael Shanks, was replying to a letter in November 2025 from a senior member of the council.

The business executive member, Mark Crane, had asked for guidance on how a promised government ban on fracking could affect a planning application at Burniston, near Scarborough.

The application, by Europa Oil & Gas, includes a form of lower-volume fracking, known as a proppant squeeze.

Cllr Crane said in his letter:

“What we need to know from the minister is whether or not they’re going to do that [ban hydraulic fracturing] soon or whether North Yorkshire will have to make a planning decision on the law as it presently stands.”

There is a moratorium in England on high-volume fracking, defined as associated hydraulic fracturing. It was introduced in 2019 because of concerns about earthquakes induced by fracking in Lancashire.

But the moratorium does not cover lower-volume fracking, which is currently allowed by law.

Campaigners have described this as a legal loophole and called for lower-volume fracking to be added to the moratorium and a future ban.

Michael Shanks reply to North Yorkshire Council 2 March 2026Download

In a reply released today (though dated 2 March 2025), Mr Shanks said he could not comment on the Burniston application.

He said:

“Low volume hydraulic fracturing activities, including for example ‘proppant squeezes’, take place at lower volumes than the thresholds for ‘associated hydraulic fracturing’ and in a variety of geological contexts.

“These activities are not currently in scope of the effective moratorium in England, however we are keeping all regulation under review.”

Mr Shanks did not refer in is reply to the government’s promised ban on fracking.

The government’s position on whether lower-volume fracking was being considered in the ban also appeared to have changed.

In January 2026, in a revised response to a petition on lower-volume fracking, the government said:

“the government recognises concerns from local communities regarding low volume fracturing and the fact that it is currently treated differently, and is therefore currently reviewing the position with regard to low volume hydraulic fracturing.”

“Unhelpful response”

Steve Mason, a member of North Yorkshire Council and anti-fracking campaigner, said today:

“The response from the minister is unhelpful, and I question if this response has been given the thought it deserves. The government seem to be taking a step back from the commitment made to conduct a review, which in my opinion is the opportunity to close this loophole exploited by the frackers. It’s very disappointing that when the council asked for clarity and guidance, the government have simply passed the buck and U-turned on their commitment to communities for a review, as promised.

“The letter explicitly refers to the seismicity behind the moratorium, yet the minister has framed this answer in a way that excludes the very same scientific evidence allowing for the comparison between the volumes proposed at Burniston which are higher than the actual volumes used, leading to the seismicity in Lancashire.

 “I begin to question the motivation, and I deeply hope this is not a political decision to hang this around the necks of a local authority Conservative administration. The Labour Party has pledged to ban fracking for good, yet when presented with an opportunity to do so, it seems this is becoming an empty promise, hiding behind a semantic policy that is outdated.”

Decision postponed

North Yorkshire Council’s decision on the Burniston application was due to be decided in January but was postponed at the last minute.

Local people, including councillors and the MP, had asked the government to take over the decision from North Yorkshire Council because it had national, as well as local, significance.

Last week, the local government secretary sent the application back to North Yorkshire.

A new date for the decision has yet to be published. A meeting of the North Yorkshire strategic planning committee, scheduled for 10 March 2026, has been cancelled.

Council letter North Yorkshire Council letter to energy secretary Ed MilibandDownload

Investors in Europa Oil & Gas, the company behind plans for gas drilling and lower-volume fracking at Burniston, have approved resolutions to issue more shares and warrants. Announcement

After a general meeting, Europa said it would apply to admit more than 345 million new shares to the AIM stock market. This increases the company’s total number of voting ordinary shares to more than 1,316 million.

The company also announced it would issue more than 86 million warrants.

Europa previously said the share placing would raise £3.5m. The money would be used to drill a well in Equatorial Guinea and meet “ongoing working capital needs”, the company said.

An earlier company statement warned that if the share placing were not approved “there would be a material uncertainty over the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

The 4th Annual Youth Storytellers Field to Film Festival is inviting young people from smallholder, rural, and Indigenous farming families to document how their communities are transforming food systems through agroecology.

The festival runs until March 12 and is part of Groundswell International’s Youth Storyteller Program.

In honor of the United Nations’ International Year of the Woman Farmer, the 2026 festival places a special emphasis on the central role of women farmers in rural food systems. “Many of the female youth who participate in this program play many roles,” Groundswell International Program Director Rebecca Wolff tells Food Tank. “While they are youth, they are also parents, entrepreneurs, farmers, or students, responsible for the wellbeing of their families and land.”

The program and festival began in 2021, and originally included four partner organizations across Ecuador, Burkina Faso, Nepal, and Honduras. It has since expanded to engage nearly 500 youth participants and create over 50 nonfiction and fiction short films. The program now includes 11 partner groups across Mali, Ghana, Senegal, Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that women farmers, especially young women, face more precarious working conditions, heavier workloads, and less equitable access to resources than their male counterparts.

Justine Natama, a filmmaker from Burkina Faso, will present “Women’s Access to Resources: A Lever for Agroecology and Sustainability,” the film she developed through the Youth Storyteller Program.

Melissa López, a youth Honduran filmmaker, explores similar intersections of gender and agriculture in her work. “At the local level, I would like people to value the work done by rural women,” she tells Food Tank.

Youth also face significant challenges in the rural agrifood sector. According to the FAO, nearly 85 percent of global youth live in low- and lower-middle-income countries where agrifood systems are essential to their livelihoods. And although 44 percent of working young people rely on agrifood systems for employment, compared to 38 percent of working adults, youth perspectives are rarely centered in stories about agriculture.

“Centering youth voices is also a matter of justice. The next generation is inheriting food systems that deplete landscapes, harm health, and deepen inequality,” Maylis MouBarak, Groundswell International’s Storytelling and Communications Manager, tells Food Tank. “Including rural youth in these conversations is essential. They bring firsthand experience of what works on the ground and can help identify and scale solutions that are relevant not only to their own communities, but to broader efforts to build food systems that work for people and the planet.”

The Youth Storyteller Program equips participants to effectively share these stories. Youth filmmakers receive equipment, ongoing support, and long-term training from local consultants and professional storytellers, covering interviewing, filming, editing, and narrative development. Creative control remains entirely in their hands. The filmmakers are also able to deepen their knowledge and understanding of their agency in food and agriculture systems.

“Initially I used to think agriculture meant farming in large areas, huge production and not suitable for marginal farmers,” Saroj Upadhyaya, a storyteller and filmmaker from Nepal, tells Food Tank. “But when I visited farmers during the YST [Youth Storyteller] video shooting, I saw people practicing agriculture on their own, raising three to four goats in small spaces nearby their house, maintaining kitchen gardens, and getting healthy nutritious foods year-round.”

Youth Storyteller Program participant and Nepali filmmaker Bimala Shrestha shares similar insights. Through the filmmaking process, she discovered the human health benefits of botanical pesticides and natural farming practices.

For others showing their work in this year’s Field to Film Festival, the process is an affirmation of their existence in farming and storytelling. “As a young girl, I used to think that photojournalism and fieldwork were jobs for men,” says Justine Natama. “Today, I am proud to prove the opposite.”

The Field to Film Festival’s short films are available to livestream and watch here.

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 Groundswell International

The post Field to Film Festival Amplifies Indigenous and Rural Youth Voices appeared first on Food Tank.

Contrails are a climate puzzle written across the sky

As airlines test new routes and researchers refine models, contrails are shifting from an afterthought of flight to a potential tool for cutting the carbon footprint of aviation.

 

By Virginia Gewin

At cruising altitude, jet engines often leave behind contrails: puffy white streaks that briefly lace the sky before thinning into nothing. Formed when hot, moist exhaust meets frigid, humid air, these manmade clouds have long been more aesthetic curiosity than environmental concern. They have inspired wonder, and occasionally provoked debunked conspiracy theories about toxic chemicals; but for decades they were treated as little more than a fleeting byproduct of flight.

In recent years, however, researchers have documented contrails’ hidden climate connection. Aviation is responsible for roughly 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, but that’s only part of the story. Aircraft also release nitrogen oxides, aerosols, and contrails—emissions that, taken together, may warm the planet as much as aviation’s CO₂ output alone, according to a 2025 National Academies of Science report. Most contrails dissipate quickly. But under the right atmospheric conditions, some linger and spread into thin cirrus clouds that trap heat, subtly but persistently altering the climate below.

This growing recognition has turned contrails from an atmospheric footnote into a target of serious scientific and policy interest. One of the people leading this work is Marc Shapiro, an engineer with a background in earth systems modeling and the director of Contrails.org, a project backed by Breakthrough Energy, Bill Gates’s climate initiative. Shapiro hopes to provide airlines with tools to prevent long-lasting contrails. His organization is developing AI models to predict when and where these persistent contrails will form, so that airlines can re-route flights effectively to reduce aviation’s climate footprint.

Shapiro’s interest was sparked five years ago by a striking finding in the scientific literature. A study of Japanese airspace found that just 2.2 percent of flights contribute roughly 80% of the contrail warming impacts in that region. Rerouting an even smaller share, just 1.7 percent of flights, by 2,000 feet could cut that warming impact by up to 60 percent. The implication was hard to ignore: A modest change in how planes move through the atmosphere could yield an outsized climate benefit.

At first, Shapiro and colleagues thought there must be a company they could build to help airlines deliver this climate benefit. After they looked into it and conducted some initial modeling, they found that the research wasn’t yet robust enough to support a commercial endeavor. Instead, they decided to build an NGO to do that research to underpin contrails management.

Shapiro and his team of aviation experts, atmospheric researchers, and software engineers have spent the last four years working with airlines and air traffic controllers to test whether contrail avoidance can work in practice. The problem involves both logistics and atmospheric nuance. If airlines know where contrails will form, could they route planes above or below the thin pockets of cold, humid air? Re-routing flights could mean burning additional fuel, generating more carbon dioxide in the process. But the potential payoff could be large. If airlines can learn to identify and sidestep the small fraction of flights responsible for most contrail warming, they could cut a significant slice of aviation’s climate impact at a cost measured in thousands of feet and tens of dollars per flight.

Pilots already have iPads that display a turbulence screen so they can communicate with air traffic control to avoid bumpy air. Shapiro’s colleagues developed an identical contrails screen so it looked familiar.

The Messy Middle

Contrails are tricky beasts. Their warming or cooling potential depends on a number of factors, chiefly how long they last in the upper atmosphere—which is largely determined by the amount of humidity present. If the air is dry or only slightly humid, contrails sublimate quickly. For long-lasting contrails to form, the atmosphere must hold more water vapor than normal, a state called ice supersaturation, in which there’s ample moisture for ice crystals to persist and expand into long-lasting cirrus clouds.

Timing matters, too. Contrails that form during the daylight hours can reflect incoming solar radiation back into space, sometimes producing a modest cooling effect. At night, though, contrails lose that reflective benefit. Instead, they trap outgoing heat, resulting in a net warming impact.

So how can researchers accurately predict which contrails will have a net warming effect? The answer, according to the 2025 National Academies report, hinges on better measurements of the atmospheric conditions at various flight altitudes. “The biggest challenge is confidently predicting the humidity in the upper atmosphere,” said Shapiro. But there are no sensors 20,000 feet up. Instead, researchers have to cobble together what data they can from different sources to feed into contrail formation models. Radiosondes are weather balloons that provide a vertical profile, collecting and transmitting atmospheric measures of humidity, temperature, and wind as they ascend. Geostationary satellite imagery is able to detect the location of ice supersaturation states. And instruments installed on commercial aircraft (dubbed IAGOS for In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System) can collect flight-bound data on water vapor, nitrogen oxides, aerosols, and cloud particles.

Data limitations mean that the existing contrail models can struggle to accurately predict the persistence of individual contrails. Shapiro is collaborating with Google Research on a model that powers his online dashboard, Contrails Map, which he says does a good job of depicting the contrail outbreak regions. But the evolution of individual contrails—including their length, duration, and climate warming potential—is less accurate. The dashboard currently allows users to compare model output to satellite imagery, but Shapiro plans to also include other data sources on the map in the first half of 2026. Scientifically, he said, we need to be able to attribute contrails back to individual flights to understand the efficacy of interventions.

Some researchers worry that calculating the climate impact of every individual contrail is unnecessary—and even impossible from a cloud physics perspective. “We know that bunches of contrails will occur in specific areas when conditions are right, and that will create an additional impact,” says Andreas Petzold, lead atmospheric scientist at the Jülich Research Center in Germany.

Shapiro agrees that it is unrealistic to observe or measure every contrail formed. Still, he thinks we need some way of attributing contrail warming back to individual flights, and to have measurements across all scales—”from individual contrails to outbreak regions and global contrail coverage.”

Petzold’s recent research, for example, revealed a previously overlooked dynamic at the regional scale. In a study published in November 2025, Petzold analyzed seven years of IAGOS data and concluded that over 80 percent of persistent contrails form in existing cirrus clouds rather than in clear, humid skies. When contrails thicken those clouds, they actually make them more reflective—decreasing their warming potential and possibly having a greater net cooling effect than previously understood.

Other research published last year also suggested that contrails may not result in quite as much warming as originally expected, due to rapid atmospheric changes, for example, in low to mid-level clouds.

Petzold doesn’t want his work to dissuade contrail avoidance efforts. Rather, he said, “we need to get the scientific understanding right before we start any operational procedures.” He added, “Our intention was simply to put a puzzle piece together to avoid wrong detours.” Getting it wrong could not only impact airline regulations, business plans, and flight paths— it could even increase carbon dioxide emissions, if airlines end up spending more fuel to avoid contrails.

But avoiding contrails may ultimately prove to be worthwhile, especially if the details can be worked out. “Compared to other climate measures, contrail avoidance is relatively cheap,” explained Alexander Kunkel, a senior data analyst for clean fuels at Transport Environment, a clean energy advocacy organization in Brussels, Belgium. Kunkel rattles off the most pressing questions: “What will regulation look like? Who is responsible—airlines or air traffic controllers? How will this scale up?”

“We’re in the messy middle right now,” said Shapiro. But, he adds, “even if contrail climate impacts are at the low end of the scientific estimates, contrail avoidance could still have a really big impact.”

©Google

Shapiro is collaborating with Google Research on a model that powers his online dashboard, Contrails Map.

Tracking contrails via meteors

Luc Busquin has been a commercial pilot for over 30 years. But even he just learned a few years ago that contrails can impact climate. “I have yet to fly with another pilot who is aware of that,” he said.

Busquin knows that the upper atmosphere is a notoriously data-poor environment. The IAGOS and radiosonde data can identify whether conditions exist for a contrail to form, while geosatellites are able to indicate whether a contrail persisted. But none of these measures could identify which plane formed a contrail.

Two years ago, Busquin noticed a box on his neighbor’s roof. It was a nighttime camera—one of 1,600 in 44 countries that are currently part of the Global Meteor Network, formed in 2018 to detect meteors and analyze their tracks from the ground. Busquin realized immediately that ground-based cameras could reliably match observed contrails with their originating flights.

Busquin borrowed his neighbor’s camera unit. He modified the Global Meteor Network software to also record contrails—during the day as well as at night. “Then I approached Denis,” said Busquin. Denis Vida is the founder of the Global Meteor Network and a meteor physics researcher at Western University in London, Ontario. Contrails were never part of Vida’s research agenda, but he realized swiftly after Busquin contacted him that his network of meteor-surveying cameras were in a position to help researchers ground-truth which flights form contrails.

Vida likens the regions where contrails form to invisible, thin, floating pancakes in the upper atmosphere. These so-called ice super-saturated regions (ISSR) are typically found between 25,000 and 40,000 feet, at air temperatures between roughly -40°C and -60°C. “Contrail model prediction accuracy is very low for the persistent contrails that have an overwhelming climate impact,” said Vida. “For short-lived contrails, the accuracy is closer to 50 percent.” He believes atmospheric models will need to improve the accuracy to at least 80 percent to be perceived as reliable. “Whether or not we’ll be able to achieve this remains to be seen,” he said. “Large uncertainties remain and no one has demonstrated an accurate, fully validated, operational model for contrail mitigation—yet.” But, he added, it could happen in the next couple of years, given how fast the field is moving. Shapiro said he hopes to include Global Meteor Network imagery in his organization’s Contrails Map in the future.

Junzi Sun, who studies the science of air traffic management at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, cautions that the highest caliber research is necessary given the stakes for airlines. “If the science is not strong, airlines can push back against any penalties,” said Sun. He also believes it could take 15 years “to sort all this out,” and that the challenges of practically rerouting flights to avoid contrail formation will be particularly difficult in Europe, where it may be challenging to close such congested air space.

As airlines and European regulators seek answers, tensions are rising. In 2025, the European Union’s Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system began requiring aircraft operators to monitor and report on aviation’s non-carbon dioxide climate effects, including the impact of contrails. The pilot phase of data collection will go through this year, and the European Commission will use the data to debate future policies in 2027.

Re-routing flight trials

American Airlines in the United States and TUI airlines in Europe are at the forefront of testing rerouting flights to avoid contrails. “This has the potential to be a low-cost, actionable strategy for aviation,” said Jill Blickstein, vice president of sustainability at American Airlines. “But it will be really complicated.”

In 2023, American conducted its first trials with pilots. Pilots already have iPads that display a turbulence screen so they can communicate with air traffic control to avoid bumpy air. Shapiro’s colleagues developed an identical contrails screen so it looked familiar. During 35 out-and back-flights conducted over many weeks to test altitude adjustments to avoid contrail formation, Blickstein said, “we didn’t have any additional fuel burn. Universally, we saw excitement and enthusiasm.”

Last year, American conducted additional trials with flight dispatchers. While the results haven’t yet been released, Blickstein said they learned a lot. For example, some of the proposed contrail-avoidance flight plans were unrealistic for a variety of reasons: either the new route would cross turbulence; or, on occasion, it would burn too much fuel; or it would simply get rejected by Air Traffic Control. Some proposed flight plans were impossible because they crossed NAT tracks—weather-optimized invisible highways in the sky for flights crossing the North Atlantic Ocean. “NAT tracks are set by Air Traffic Control, and once you get on one, you don’t go to another one,” said Blickstein.

Blickstein, Shapiro, and others are collaborating to find a systemwide approach that works for all the players. The flurry of recent studies and flight trials have only added to a growing sense of urgency among climate researchers, policymakers, and airlines to determine to what degree contrail avoidance can be a climate win.

“From all the evidence we’ve seen, this is the place to invest in right now—even if it takes 15 years to get to full scale,” said Shapiro. “Our goal in five years is to have at least a few airlines and a few airspaces doing this as routine practice.” The effort might only target clear skies in a few hot spot regions or below a certain added fuel cost. “But if we’re not doing that,” he said, “we will have failed our mission.”

 

Virginia Gewin is a freelance science journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her stories have appeared in Nature, Science, Discover, Washington Post, Modern Farmer and others. See more of her work at www.virginiagewin.com.

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Clean Air Council has been engaged in an EPA funded air monitoring program in Delaware County and South and Southwest Philadelphia for about two and a half years now. In that time, Council staff have installed 60 purple air monitors and 8 high quality VOC sensors at private residences, churches, and municipal buildings across Marcus Hook, Trainer, Chester and surrounding areas in southern Delco, as well as throughout Grays Ferry, Eastwick, Kingsessing and surrounding areas in S/SW Philly. You can see all the Council’s Purple Air Monitors 24 hours a day at www.purpleair.com.  

The data we have seen from these monitors over time paints a striking picture of air quality in the greater Philadelphia area:

1. Higher air quality readings occur in both Summer and Winter 

2. Most days are in the moderate/yellow zone across our region, which exceeds air quality standards 

3. The most significant poor air quality readings have been caused by the addition of wildfire smoke to our existing regional air quality challenges

We’ve also seen a strong correlation between when residents are noticing odors or respiratory symptoms, and when the Purple Air particulate monitors or VOC sensors are spiking. For example, air quality reached hazardous levels from June 12th-14th 2025 when smoke from the Mines Spung Wildfire in New Jersey blanketed the region. Residents noted noticeable smog, trouble breathing, and itching and swelling eyes during this poor air quality event. 

In January 2026, a resident reported a noxious odor in the Kingsessing/Cedar Park neighborhoods. The red line in this graph demonstrates how the nearest Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) sensor in Kingsessing spiked within the same time period, affirming resident reports on the ground.

Residents can report air quality concerns as a simple but effective way to be an advocate for cleaner air. The more specific the information we have from impacted residents the better we can identify local pollution patterns, trends, and sources, as well as support ongoing advocacy. Residents who notice unusual and strong odors or visual signs of pollution, including, smoke, dust, heavy smog, or spills and leaks can report air quality issues to different governmental agencies.

In the case of an emergency, including strong odors, fires, spills or leaks, please call 911.

For these emergencies and other serious air pollution concerns, also call: ​​

1. The Department of Environmental Protections (DEP) at 1-800-541-2050 

2. The EPA’s National Response Center at 1-800-424-2050. 

However, if you reside in Philadelphia, call the Philadelphia Air Management Services at 215-685-7580, instead of the EPA’s National Response Center. You can find more information at https://cleanair.org/complaints/.

Going forward, Council staff will continue to support our Community Air Monitoring network, including our network of incredible air monitor hosts. We hope to be able to use the data generated by our host monitors to inform advocacy efforts for cleaner, healthier air in the Philadelphia and Delaware County region. 

If you would like to host a Purple Air monitor or VOC sensor, we have a few more to distribute in Delaware County. Contact Outreach Coordinator Alyssa Felix at afa@cleanair.org. You can also reach out to Advocate Russ Zerbo at rzerbo@cleanair.org any time you have air quality concerns. If you are a current air monitor host and have questions or concerns about your monitor, contact Community Organizer Jendaiya Hill at jhill@cleanair.org

Il cibo e gli agricoltori sono diventati gli emblemi di una guerra culturale condotta dalla destra populista nell’Unione Europea e negli Stati Uniti contro le politiche climatiche. Le proteine alternative, come gli insetti e la carne coltivata in laboratorio, in particolare, sono considerate una minaccia esistenziale per gli stili di vita tradizionali, la mascolinità e la civiltà. Per respingere efficacemente questi timori come ridicoli, dobbiamo prendere sul serio le insicurezze economiche ed ecologiche che li sottendono.

L’ampiezza delle proteste degli agricoltori che hanno attraversato l’Europa nella prima metà del 2024 ha portato molti commentatori a parlare di un diffuso risentimento nei confronti delle politiche dell’Unione europea (Ue) ideate per mitigare gli effetti del cambiamento climatico. La destra populista è stata tra le principali forze che hanno alimentato questo risentimento. Sfruttando il malcontento per le politiche sostenibili, spingendosi ben oltre le rivendicazioni specifiche avanzate dagli agricoltori in protesta, la destra ha portato avanti una serie di critiche pesanti nei confronti dell’agenda climatica dell’Ue. Uno studio pubblicato dallo European Council on Foreign Relations a maggio del 2024 – un mese prima delle elezioni del Parlamento europeo – ha evidenziato come la destra abbia saputo sfruttare l’aumento del costo della vita in tutta l’Ue in modo molto e,cace per rappresentare l’agenda climatica della Commissione come l’ultimo sopruso di un complotto internazionalista sui governi degli Stati membri. La destra ha indicato i cittadini e i loro stili di vita come bersagli di questo complotto; gli agricoltori, e in particolare il cibo, ne sono diventati gli emblemi.

Infatti, mentre la Commissione faceva marcia indietro sui piani per dimezzare l’uso dei pesticidi e per ridurre le emissioni legate all’agricoltura in risposta alle proteste, il fulcro della contesa politica si spostava dai sussidi all’agricoltura a campi di battaglia più simbolici: in gioco non c’era solo la minaccia della scomparsa delle attività agricole ma anche quella del “cibo normale”. Tra gli effetti dei piani malevoli del Green Deal, la destra populista paventava la scomparsa del cibo tradizionale assieme a quella degli allevatori e agricoltori.

Le elezioni europee del giugno 2024 sono così diventate una piattaforma della destra populista per lanciare l’allarme su un’imminente fne del “cibo normale”: un vero e proprio “incubo in cui la frittura di insetti aveva sostituito quella di pesce” e “la carne Frankenstein” (cioè, la carne coltivata in laboratorio) sarebbe stata imposta dalle multinazionali avide di proftti alle spalle degli ignari cittadini.

La battaglia contro la carne coltivata in laboratorio e la commercializzazione di insetti commestibili si è così inserita in una più ampia protesta contro le proposte della Commissione in materia di clima. Janusz Wojciechowski, commissario europeo all’Agricoltura dal 2019 al 2024, è intervenuto per rimuovere dagli obiettivi climatici dell’Unione europea il riferimento alla promozione di un “consumo diversificato di proteine”, cioè un consumo fatto anche di proteine alternative alla carne. L’Italia ha fatto da apripista nei dibattiti sulle proteine alternative, diventando il primo Paese a vietare nel 2023 la produzione e la vendita di carne coltivata. Francesco Lollobrigida, Ministro dell’Agricoltura e della Sovranità Alimentare del governo Meloni, ne ha parlato come una questione ben più grave di una semplice preoccupazione legata alla salute dei consumatori: le fonti proteiche alternative rappresentano, secondo il Ministro, una minaccia per la cultura e la civiltà italiane. Ettore Prandini, presidente della Coldiretti, il principale sindacato degli agricoltori italiani, ha sostenuto con forza una posizione analoga in diversi contesti istituzionali dell’Ue affermando che “le bugie della carne in provetta provano che dietro i ripetuti e infondati allarmismi sulla carne rossa c’è una precisa strategia delle multinazionali che con abili operazioni di marketing puntano a modificare stili alimentari naturali fondati sulla qualità e la tradizione”.

La carne “Frankenstein” – come l’ha chiamata la Coldiretti (ibidem) – e altre presunte mostruosità come gli insetti hanno occupato il centro della scena nei dibattiti politici in tutta l’Ue, spostando di fatto la discussione dalle proposte di politiche vere e proprie verso scenari immaginari e simbolici dal grande impatto emotivo. Emblematica in questo senso è stata l’iniziativa italiana di vietare la carne coltivata ben prima che iniziasse il processo di approvazione da parte dell’Autorità Europea per la Sicurezza Alimentare.

Icone di una guerra culturale

La carne “Frankenstein” e gli insetti sono stati trasformati in icone di una guerra culturale – non solo nell’Ue, ma anche oltreoceano – con le forze della destra populista europea e statunitense che, in questa battaglia, si sono ispirate a vicenda. Si tratta di un conflitto in cui l’antagonista è per lo più frutto dell’immaginazione, ma le cui conseguenze sono molto reali. Se si vuole portare avanti una politica climatica europea efficace, queste guerre culturali vanno prese molto sul serio.

“Non mangiamo più bacon”, ha dichiarato Donald Trump lanciando la sua campagna presidenziale la scorsa estate. Al contempo, diversi stati del Sud degli USA, guidati dal governatore della Florida Ron DeSantis, non solo vietavano, ma addirittura criminalizzavano la produzione e la vendita della carne coltivata in laboratorio. Firmando la legge, DeSantis ha annunciato: “la Florida sta rispondendo al piano delle élite globali per costringere il mondo a mangiare carne coltivata in provetta e insetti […] per raggiungere i loro obiettivi autoritari”. La carne coltivata è così diventata l’ultimo fronte della più ampia guerra culturale oggi in atto negli Stati Uniti.

Sarebbe troppo facile sminuire le narrazioni sulle élite globali che impongono “cibo mostruoso” agli ignari consumatori come se fossero dei semplici slogan “acchiappaclic” messi in circolo dai politici populisti di destra che hanno costruito le proprie carriere su dichiarazioni estreme. La paura del cibo “anormale” si inserisce in un più ampio quadro accusatorio usato spesso dai leader populisti; vale a dire, l’accusa per cui le élite vogliono imporre una serie di misure ingiuste e pratiche “innaturali” alla cosiddetta gente comune, tutto nel nome della “pazzia” rappresentata dal Green Deal.

Il richiamo ad opporsi ai complotti delle élite globali e ai loro referenti simbolici – come la carne coltivata appunto – si fondano su un più ampio insieme di ansie sentite dall’opinione pubblica statunitense ed europea, in modo molto simile a come il velo islamico è diventato un’icona di altrettante ansie. Come ha sostenuto l’antropologo francese Emmanuel Terray nel suo saggio del 2004 sulla “psicosi del velo”:

Quando una comunità non riesce a trovare in sé stessa i mezzi o l’energia per affrontare un problema che mette in discussione, se non la sua esistenza, quantomeno il suo modo di essere e la propria immagine di sé, questa comunità può essere tentata di adottare una singolare strategia difensiva. Sostituirà a un problema reale, che considera insormontabile, uno fittizio, che può essere affrontato unicamente attraverso parole e simboli. Affrontando quest’ultimo problema, la comunità può convincersi di aver affrontato con successo anche il primo.

Il saggio di Terray metteva in luce come il velo avesse incorporato una ben più ampia “politica della paura” in Francia. Lo spettro degli insetti che sostituiscono la carne “normale” sembra aver assunto una funzione di “feticcio” simile a quella del velo islamic, non più nel dibattito pubblico sulle migrazioni ma in quello sulle politiche climatiche. Questa volta, infatti, il problema non riguarda la presenza “aliena” dei migranti nelle società occidentali, ma la presunta sostituzione degli alimenti “normali” e “tradizionali” con cibo “alieno” come gli insetti.

Cibi da temere

Come possiamo, allora, dare un senso politico al “feticcio” degli insetti? In che modo possiamo dare un senso ai processi attraverso i quali, per citare Rachel Pain e Susan Smith “le insicurezze globali si infiltrano strisciando nella vita quotidiana”?

Le metafore dello strisciare e dell’intrinsecarsi – particolarmente appropriate qui visto che parliamo di insetti che, tutto d’un tratto, potrebbero comparire all’improvviso nei nostri piatti – ci permettono di iniziare a comprendere come le più ampie paure legate a un mondo in rapida trasformazione vengano interpretate dalle persone e vadano ad influenzarne la vita quotidiana. E soprattutto, ci aiutano a capire come queste paure vengano tradotte in corpi e oggetti da temere.

Come sottolineano recenti studi di geografa culturale e politica sulla geopolitica affettiva, oggetti specifici – proprio come corpi specifici – sono fondamentali per comprendere le dinamiche delle politiche del risentimento populista. Proprio come i corpi dei migranti, diventati simboli dell’alterità e percepiti come “fuori luogo” nei discorsi della destra populista, anche gli oggetti possono assumere una funzione simile, “agendo come esche per le emozioni”. Emozioni come la paura e la rabbia “aderiscono” agli oggetti così come “aderiscono” ai corpi; o, più precisamente, vengono “fatte aderire” come sostiene la studiosa femminista Sara Ahmed da oltre due decenni. Descrivendo le “economie affettive” che determinano a cosa e a chi – a quali oggetti, a quali corpi – certi sentimenti vengono associati, Ahmed spiega in modo convincente come “le emozioni si accumulino nel tempo, assumendo la forma di un valore affettivo”.

La carne coltivata in laboratorio e gli insetti sono contenitori ideali, al contempo simbolici e materiali, per le paure e le ansie alimentate dalla destra populista in Europa e negli Stati Uniti. Le paure legate a futuri incerti – riguardo l’economia e l’ambiente – vengono fatte aderire al cibo, la sostanza fondamentale di cui tutti abbiamo bisogno per sopravvivere. Il cibo è forse ciò di più intimo e quotidiano con cui interagiamo: entra a far parte dei nostri corpi non solo per darci energia e contribuire alla nostra salute, ma anche per nutrire la nostra identità, ancorandoci a comunità di appartenenza, a culture, a tradizioni locali e nazionali. La carne, in particolare, ha a lungo incorporato politiche tradizionali e maschili. Lo spettro della sostituzione della carne “normale” con gli insetti o con la carne “Frankenstein” – che, nella retorica della destra populista, rappresenta le ideologie ambientali woke8 delle élite urbane (i soy boys9 derisi dai sostenitori di Trump) – scatena pertanto una reazione letteralmente viscerale: la sostituzione della carne diventa il simbolo della sostituzione delle persone “normali”, cioè quelle che, ci ricorda Donald Trump, negli Stati Uniti “mangiano bacon”.

Il cibo è, infatti, profondamente viscerale: provoca reazioni affettive come il piacere e il disgusto che vanno ben oltre la razionalità. Gli insetti suscitano reazioni altrettanto viscerali: mentre una farfalla è splendida, un verme è ripugnante. Soprattutto in Occidente, gli insetti sono stati a lungo rappresentati come esseri pericolosi, contagiosi, disgustosi e “altri fuori luogo” che, “naturalmente”, non possono essere parte della “nostra” alimentazione – implicano i discorsi della destra populista.

Come ricorda Heidi Kosonen, “il disgusto potrebbe essere la più viscerale tra le emozioni umane di base, perché è stato associato ai meccanismi di difesa dell’essere umano. [Il disgusto] può proteggere gli organismi da minacce alla loro esistenza, come il cibo avariato, gli animali velenosi […] o le malattie infettive”. Kosonen aggiunge inoltre che “il disgusto è stato [anche] associato a diversi tipi di differenziazioni simboliche tra ‘sé’ e il ‘mondo’, tra ‘noi’ e ‘gli altri’” (ibidem).

L’insetto diventato cibo viene così facilmente evocato, sia in Europa che negli Stati Uniti, come il perfetto “altro indigesto”. In questo modo, la politica viscerale del disgusto si intreccia facilmente a teorie del complotto più ampie, proprio com’è accaduto con il presunto complotto per costringerci tutti a mangiare insetti.

Scrivendo sul potere dell’immaginazione complottista, l’antropologo francese Didier Fassin ha affermato: “le teorie del complotto non appartengono soltanto al regno delle visioni distorte della realtà. Sono anche indicatori delle relazioni sociali, delle tensioni politiche, delle inquietudini culturali e dei disagi morali”. In quanto tali, sono delle forme di discorso politico e vanno analizzate di conseguenza.

La strumentalizzazione delle difficoltà degli agricoltori

Esaminare in modo critico la paura degli insetti edibili significa, allora, prendere sul serio le più ampie paure legate all’impoverimento delle persone e alle crescenti incertezze in un mondo colpito da crisi molteplici, inclusa la crisi ambientale. Significa inoltre prendere sul serio anche il disagio che molti cittadini provano di fronte ai dettami ideati dalle “élite ambientaliste” per risolvere queste crisi. Significa anche considerare con attenzione non solo le ecologie politiche della transizione verde, ma anche le sue economie politiche e affettive. Alla destra populista che afferma che la sostituzione della carne con surrogati “mostruosi” è un complotto orchestrato dalle istituzioni delle élite della governance globale (come il World Economic Forum, la COP28 o la Commissione europea) per cancellare gli stili di vita e le tradizioni della “gente normale”, dobbiamo offrire risposte migliori, anziché limitarci a sminuire queste affermazioni deridendole come teorie del complotto.

Dovremmo, innanzitutto, riconoscere che le politiche economiche della transizione verde produrranno delle ingiustizie, andando ad incidere in modo molto diverso sulle attività delle aziende agricole e sugli stili di vita dei consumatori. Tuttavia, questo non basta. Come scrivono i ricercatori Edoardo Campanella e Robert Lawrence nella loro analisi del greenlash13 in Europa e negli Stati Uniti, anche gli incentivi economici da soli non basteranno per mitigare queste ingiustizie: “[P]iuttosto che presentare la transizione verde come un problema tecnico da risolvere con soluzioni tecnocratiche, coloro che promuovono le politiche climatiche devono costruire narrazioni più coinvolgenti, sottolineando come il riscaldamento globale metta a rischio gli stili di vita tradizionali, la salute delle persone e i luoghi in cui vivono”. Come possiamo allora creare narrazioni più e,caci e coinvolgenti e proporre alternative che parlino anch’esse al cuore e alla pancia delle persone?

Le disposizioni del Green Deal europeo sono tutt’altro che prive di problemi. Dopo decenni in cui la Politica Agricola Comune (PAC) ha sostenuto fnanziariamente sistemi agricoli intensivi, industriali e su larga scala, ora l’Unione europea sta cercando di attenuarne gli impatti ambientali. Eppure, ancora una volta, ci si dimentica dei piccoli agricoltori e del loro ruolo fondamentale nel sostenere un’agricoltura e un allevamento estensivi e rigenerativi. È infatti probabile che la strategia “Farm to Fork” avrà impatti economici negativi su molti agricoltori.

L’enfasi retorica della destra populista sulla “fine della carne” ha ben poco a che vedere con i veri problemi e gli interessi degli agricoltori europei (o statunitensi, del resto). Infatti, nella guerra culturale contro la carne coltivata e gli insetti, le vite e le proteste degli agricoltori (si veda Dansero, 2024) sono fondamentalmente strumentalizzate al servizio delle agende politiche della destra populista.

La risata come forma di intervento político

Il numero autunnale del 2024 della rivista statunitense Range, specializzata in allevamento, ha dedicato la sua storia di copertina a quello che viene presentato come un attacco globale contro agricoltori e l’alimentazione tradizionale, individuando un fronte comune di resistenza nelle esperienze condivise di agricoltori statunitensi, brasiliani e olandesi. Come si legge nella conclusione dell’articolo: “non si tratta solo di bistecche. In gioco ci sono letteralmente il futuro dell’umanità e della libertà”. Un’affermazione non priva di fondamento – ma non nel senso inteso dalla retorica populista.

Di nuovo, come possiamo creare un repertorio diverso di simboli e narrazioni in grado di motivare i cittadini in un momento di profonda sfiducia, non solo nella scienza, ma in tutte le istituzioni percepite come “élite”, in un contesto in cui molti si sentono impotenti di fronte al cambiamento climatico – o addirittura lo negano apertamente? Tra coloro che già fanno fatica a “portare a casa la pagnotta”, l’imposizione di ulteriori sacrifici – tramite misure legislative o richiami moralistici alla “responsabilità” – in nome di future e ipotetiche “ricompense ecologiche sostenibili”, è destinata a suscitare rabbia e resistenza.

Piuttosto che alimentare le paure profonde delle persone, forse dovremmo cercare di alimentare altre reazioni altrettanto viscerali ma positive come la risata, il piacere e la gioia. La risata, proprio come il disgusto, è una delle emozioni più viscerali che proviamo. Questa può essere anche una forma estremamente potente di “intervento politico non razionale”, come hanno sostenuto i geografici Ian Cook e Tara Woodyer. La risata

è un modo per prendere coscienza delle ambiguità etiche e dei paradossi con cui conviviamo, senza esserne paralizzati. [È anche un modo] per riconoscere e negoziare la nostra stessa complicità nei più ampi processi economici e politici e nelle relazioni di sfruttamento […] per esprimere allo stesso tempo fascinazione e inquietudine, piacere e disorientamento, e per essere critici, ma anche pieni di speranza (ibidem).

La strategia più efficace potrebbe allora essere, letteralmente, quella del riderci su – liquidare il feticcio degli insetti come qualcosa di ridicolo ma, al contempo, proporre altre narrative fondate sul riconoscimento della bellezza e del piacere che il cibo “vero” sa offrire, senza dimenticare il ruolo fondamentale di coloro che lo producono

National Nurses United is proud to endorse the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.). This legislation begins to right the wrongs of our corrupt tax code, which has allowed the rich and corporations to hoard exorbitant amounts of wealth while the working class, whose labor creates that wealth, is forced to decide between paying for housing and food or prescription medications and health insurance.

A leaked Interior department database reveals the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to “revise” historical facts, remove references to climate change, and more. First reported by the Washington Post and subsequently posted to two other websites, the database provides detailed information about the lengths to which the Trump administration is going to remove information that might “disparage” Americans at hundreds of national park sites.

“This data belongs to the American people, who need to know what is being done in their name,” the anonymous individuals who posted the database wrote. “Profiting from coal and oil is a lot easier if the impacts of fossil fuels are censored at sites like Muir Woods, Glacier, Acadia, and Everglades.”

The database also demonstrates the amount of time park employees have been ordered to spend on this exercise rather than on caring for the resources protected by national park sites. Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, noted that park staff “probably should’ve been doing other things most of us believe would be more important.”

The anonymous individuals who posted the database offered a warning about the Trump administration’s efforts: “Most of all, they want to turn the American people against their national parks. They want to discredit the national parks and set the stage to privatize them.”

2025 was awful for public lands. Is there hope?

In the latest episode of the Center for Western Priorities podcast, The Landscape, Aaron and Kate speak with Jim Pattiz of the More Than Just Parks newsletter about public lands news after the first year of the second Trump administration, including Jim and his brother Will’s list of 70 major public-lands setbacks in 2025 and CWP’s assessment of Project 2025.

Quick hits BLM’s strategy for greater sage-grouse prompts federal lawsuit by conservation groups

KLAS | Nevada Current

America’s national parks face an uncertain future as climate risks mount

Mongabay

‘Unprecedented’ snow drought sets up extreme wildfires for Western U.S. in 2026

Wildfire Today

Bennet, Hickenlooper call for ‘halt’ to consolidation of federal firefighting forces into U.S. Wildland Fire Service

Sky-Hi News

Dust from copper mine waste worries nearby residents

Arizona Republic

Instead of ‘Keep Out,’ Wyoming rancher invites people to ‘come hike’ on his property

Cowboy State Daily

Opinion: Public lands are Wyoming’s legacy. Let’s keep them that way

WyoFile

Opinion: Senate should reject unqualified national park nominees

Bangor Daily News

Quote of the day

While the threats we face vary from outdated policies that fail to protect critical habitat to pressures from expanding development, the solution remains the same — we need to keep and steward our public lands.”

—Jared Baecker, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, WyoFile

Picture This @mountrainiernps

Happy Birthday, Mount Rainier National Park!

“To foresee the beauty of Mount Rainier one must know many things —rivers, tumbling from boulder to boulder…a tiny fawn nestling under a shrub… flower fields that stretch unending distances… glaciers grinding and tearing at the high mound of rock… All of these things are separate, but all are a part of the story of Mount Rainier.” -John Barnett, former park naturalist, 1978

On March 2, 1899, Mount Rainier National Park was established as a national park. Since time immemorial, this majestic mountain has inspired people to explore, to recreate, to connect with their heritage, and to preserve this iconic landscape. How does Mount Rainier inspire you?

NPS Photo of Mount Rainier from Pinnacle Peak Trail.

 

Featured image: Arches National Park

The post Leaked database reveals Interior’s plans to ‘revise’ history appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.