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HRRR = Harold Richardson Redwood Reserve

The 129-acre HRRR Timber Harvest Plan (THP 1-26-00099-SON) is located between Tin Barn Road and Haupt Creek in the Haupt Creek watershed of the Gualala River basin. The majority of the acreage (102 acres) is designated “fuel break / defensible space.” The plan was submitted to Cal Fire by the Save The Redwood League on July 22, 2026.

Submitted on July 22, 2026

“HRRR” THP Section 1 – [7 MB, 10 pages] Legal description: Cover pages, signatures.

“HRRR” THP Section 2 – [14 MB, 109 pages] Operations: Silviculture, yarding, erosion hazard rating, winter operations, roads & landings, watercourse & lake protections, alternative watercourse & lake protections (in lieu of standard rules), biological resources, maps.

“HRRR” THP Section 3 – [3 MB, 28 pages] Supporting materials: General site description, project alternative analysis, Section II Items with Explanation and Justification.

“HRRR” THP Section 4 – [7 MB, 123 pages] Cumulative Impacts: Past, present and future projects, assessment of cumulative watershed effects, soil productivity, biological resources, recreational, visual, traffic, greenhouse gas impacts, wildfire risks.

“HRRR” THP Section 5 – [49 MB, 228 pages] Attachments: Including soil erosion hazards, Erosion Control Plan, Furlbreak / Defensible Space letters, botanical surveys, Marbled Murrelet and Northern Spotted Owl information.

“HRRR” THP Section 6 – [1 MB, 1 page] Archeological information: (confidential)

All documents regarding this logging plan are available in the new CalTREES system.

Unfortunately, CalTREES is not easy to use, so FoGR has compiled some
basic instructions for use of CalTREES to help you navigate the system.

To download additional documents for this logging plan,
if you want to follow the back & forth as agencies ask questions and the RPF replies,
visit the “HRRR” THP page on the CalTREES website.

Below are instructions on how to submit comments during the public comment period.

To submit your comments on a logging plan, email your comments to: santarosapubliccomment@fire.ca.gov
or send your comments via U.S. Mail to:

Forest Practice
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
135 Ridgway Ave.
Santa Rosa, CA 95401

In the subject line of your email message, or at the top of your letter,
be sure to reference the THP number and name, for example:
THP 1-26-00099-SON “HRRR”

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

Over the past week smoke from Canadian wildfires has once again poured into cities across Canada and the northern US. Toronto briefly had the worst air quality of any major city on Earth, Thunder Bay’s readings went off the top of Canada’s air quality health index scale, and unhealthy air alerts stretched from Minneapolis to New York City.

This smoke-pocalypse has renewed a long-standing debate online that these fires aren’t really about climate change at all, but about forest mismanagement. Decades of aggressive fire suppression, the argument goes, have let fuel pile up. We don’t log enough, thin enough, or do enough prescribed burning The forests are overgrown tinderboxes and we have only ourselves to blame. Climate is a distraction from a problem we created by listening to Smokey Bear’s insidious propaganda.

I want to take this argument seriously, because it has a real kernel of truth. The fire-deficit story is a genuine phenomenon in the dry conifer forests of the western United States. But most of what’s burning in Canada is boreal forest, and the boreal is a fundamentally different beast. So in this piece I’ll try to explain why the management argument, largely valid in a California pine stand, mostly falls apart when you move it a couple of thousand kilometers north, and explore what the fire data actually shows.

Here’s the short version. Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1C increase in fire-season temperature (with a correlation coefficient of 0.61). This relationship is robust to a variety of statistical tests and controlling for confounding variables. The boreal burns in rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural cycle measured in a century or more, across enormous remote areas that have never been logged, thinned, or effectively suppressed. Only about a fifth of Canada’s burned area over the past four decades was even inside forest regions that have ever been actively managed. You cannot have a fuel-buildup from forest mismanagement in a forest you were never managing.

Forest mis-management?

The forest-mismanagement argument was, in fairness, based on real evidence from some regions. In the frequent-fire dry forests of the western US that are dominated by ponderosa pine and mixed conifers the natural fire regime is low-to-moderate intensity surface fire returning every 5 to 30 years, historically stoked in part by Indigenous burning. A century of fire exclusion in those forests really did remove that frequent fire, let stands grow denser and more continuous, and build up a “fire deficit” that raises the odds of severe fire (Hagmann et al. 2021). And in that setting, fuel treatments work: Prichard et al. (2021) find wide agreement that mechanical thinning combined with prescribed burning measurably reduces subsequent fire severity. If you’re arguing about the Sierra Nevada, the management story is as important if not more important than the climate one.

The problem is that the Canadian boreal is not the Sierra Nevada. It burns in infrequent, high-intensity, stand-replacing crown fires that kill the whole stand on natural fire cycles measured in many decades to centuries (commonly a century or more, and two centuries or longer in the east), not 5 to 30 years. It is, ecologically speaking, supposed to burn this way; black spruce is practically built for it. Fire in this system was never the gentle recurring ground-clearing that suppression interrupted in California. And the burning is astonishingly concentrated: across the boreal, something like 3% of fires account for about 97% of the area burned. This is not a landscape full of many small fires that “used to clean out the fuel.” Rather, its a landscape that waits, and then burns catastrophically under extreme weather.

Why do we know that Canadian boreal forest fires are not being driven by mismanagement?

First, and most importantly, most of the boreal was never being managed in the first place. As University of Alberta fire scientist Jen Beverly has pointed out, only about one-fifth of Canada’s total burned area from 1986 to 2023 occurred within long-term forest tenure (the land that’s actually logged and managed). The vast majority burns in remote forest with no timber operations. In Canada’s so-called “extensive” fire-management zones there has been no serious suppression efforts historically. Fires there are monitored and largely left to burn unless they threaten people or infrastructure. You can’t blame overgrown, over-suppressed forests for fires in places nobody was suppressing.

Second, the fuel-buildup mechanism doesn’t fit the recent fires. If decades of suppression had loaded the forest with excess old fuel, you’d expect the big fire years to preferentially consume the oldest, most fuel-laden stands. But in Alberta’s brutal 2023 season, fires burned stands of essentially all ages in proportion to how much of each was on the landscape. That’s the signature of fire driven by weather, which doesn’t care how old the trees are, not by fuel accumulation.

Third, the proposed fixes don’t scale to the boreal even if you wanted them. This is the conclusion of the very scientists who documented Canada’s fire deficit. Coogan, Parisien and colleagues (2020) state it flatly: mechanical fuel treatments “require continued maintenance over time, are too expensive to apply across large boreal landscapes, and are usually not designed to halt extreme wildfires.” The boreal is on the order of three million square kilometers. You are not going to thin or prescribe-burn your way across it, and the crown fires that produce the smoke wouldn’t stop at a fuel break anyway.

So if it’s not mismanagement, what is it? Let’s look at the data.

The Canadian fire record

To start with, here is the long-term record of area burned, combing the satellite-mapped NBAC composite from 1972 on with the less-complete point-based records before that shown in grey (note that this is primarily for illustration; I don’t compute any statistics across the 1972 splice to avoid potential bias from changing measurement approaches).

Annual forest area burned in Canada, 1959–2026. Grey bars show the point-based record (1959–1971); red bars the NBAC satellite composite (1972–2025); the hatched bar is 2026 through mid-July (CIFFC, preliminary). Data: NRCan CNFDB/NBAC; CIFFC.

2023 stands out like a sore thumb with 14.8 million hectares in the satellite-mapped data (Canadian agency tallies actually run higher at 17–18 Mha as different products count differently),1 roughly 2.5 times the previous record. 2025 came in second at ~7.3 Mha in the satellite data. And 2026 so far is about 2.8 Mha by mid-July, a bit above the typical pace for this date, but far below the last few extreme years.

One caveat around how unprecedented this actually is. A recent tree-ring reconstruction back to 1800 (Danneyrolles et al. 2025) found that while 2023 itself was off the charts in most regions they studied, the decadal burn rate for 2014–2023 still sits within the range of the past two centuries in several zones, especially in the eastern boreal. We are not necessarily seeing more fire than ever everywhere, but rather a rapid rate of increase with the increasing prevalence of fire weather driving it. In addition, parts of the northwestern boreal are now burning at rates that do appear to exceed anything in thousands of years.

One important driver: higher temperatures Change in fire-season (May–September) mean temperature, 1959 to 2025, computed as a per-gridcell LOWESS trend. Canada-wide mean change is +2.2C, exceeding +3C in parts of the high Arctic. Data: ERA5-Land (ECMWF/Copernicus) via Google Earth Engine.

Canadian fire seasons (May through September) have warmed about 2.2C on average since 1959. Canada warms at roughly twice the global rate, and its north at roughly three times. That warming matters for fire through a well-understood mechanism: warmer air is exponentially “thirstier” (saturation vapor pressure rises ~7% per degree), so it pulls moisture out of live vegetation and dead fuels alike, priming the landscape to burn. It’s the same fuel-drying pathway that Abatzoglou and Williams (2016) found had roughly doubled cumulative forest area burned in the western US.

Hanes et al. (2019), examining the Canadian record from 1959 to 2015, found fire seasons starting earlier and ending later, more days with conditions suitable for fire spread, and increases in both annual area burned and the frequency of large fires. They found that these trends were consistent with human-caused warming, not with changes in forest management (which have been broadly stable since the 1980s even as the fire seasons have gotten dramatically worse).

Hot and dry years burn

A few years ago my Berkeley Earth colleague Robert Rohde made a lovely figure plotting each California fire season by its temperature and precipitation. Here is my Canadian version: every year from 1959 to 2025 placed in climate space, with dot size proportional to national area burned and the ten largest fire years outlined in black.

Each dot is one year (1959–2025), positioned by its fire-season (May–Sep) mean temperature and total precipitation averaged over burnable land, sized by national area burned (NBAC). Adapted from Robert Rohde’s California fire season weather chart. Data: ERA5-Land; NRCan CNFDB/NBAC.

The pattern is hard to miss. The biggest fire years pile up in the hot-and-dry corner with 2023 really standing out, and the recent era (red dots, 2011–2025) has shifted visibly toward that corner relative to the black dots of the 1960s. Canada’s fire seasons are migrating into the part of weather-space where the big burns happen.

We can also try and more directly quantify the relationship between area burned and temperature. Nationally, fire-season temperature correlates with log area burned at r = 0.61 (1972–2025), which means that a fire season 1C warmer sees ~80% more area burned. I want to be careful about what this does and doesn’t show, so I stress-tested it: the correlation survives detrending (r = 0.57), first-differencing (r = 0.46), and partialling out precipitation (r = 0.58). It isn’t just two things drifting upward together, and it isn’t a rebranded precipitation effect.2

Correlation of fire-season mean temperature with log annual area burned by province/territory, 1972–2025, with 95% moving-block bootstrap intervals. Red dots are significant after false-discovery-rate correction. Data: NRCan CNFDB/NBAC; ERA5-Land.

The relationship is strongest in the western and northern boreal – Yukon, BC, the Northwest Territories, the Prairie provinces, Ontario – and weak to non-significant in Nunavet, Quebec, Newfoundland, and New Brunswick, matching the literature’s finding that eastern boreal fire is generally less temperature-limited.

Lightning in the middle of nowhere Cumulative area burned by ignition cause, 1990–2023. Data: National Forestry Database (agency-reported).

About 71% of Canada’s area burned over 1990–2023 came from lightning-ignited fires, and in the record 2023 season it was ~93%. These are remote boreal megafires, ignited by lightning far from any road, timber lease, or fuel-treatment crew. This is worth considering in the context of the management debate: the fires driving the smoke are not escaped campfires or mismanaged plantations. They are lightning strikes into a drying landscape, often burning in exactly the places no one was managing. And because warming is expected to increase high-latitude lightning, climate change can contribute to both the fuel dryness and the ignition side of the equation.

What attribution science actually says

This week the National Academies released a major report on the attribution of extreme weather events and their impacts, updating their influential 2016 assessment. Its wildfire findings are careful, and they land almost exactly on the distinction I’ve been trying to make in this piece.

On the general question, the report concludes it is very likely that climate change has increased the likelihood and severity of extreme fire weather: the hot, dry, windy conditions that let fires ignite and spread. At the same time it assigns low confidence to attributing any specific individual wildfire, because fires are irreducibly multivariate: ignition, fuels, land management, and suppression all mediate the on-the-ground relationship between fire weather and hectares burned. Notably, the report also flags that no attribution study has yet isolated the role of fuel or ignition changes, precisely because those human factors are so entangled. The science is much stronger on “climate change made conditions like these more likely” than on “climate change, specifically, caused this fire.”

For Canada’s exceptional 2023 fire year the evidence is unusually strong, and the report devotes a whole box to it. Kirchmeier-Young et al. (2024) found the record burned area was 2–5 times more likely thanks to human influence in Canada’s eastern and western ecozones, and the extraordinarily long fire season more than 5 times more likely. World Weather Attribution found the cumulative fire-weather severity at least 7 times more likely and ~50% more intense. Jones et al. (2024) put the fire-weather likelihood increase at ~2.9–3.6x and burned area ~10% higher (95% CI: 3-40%) than without warming. And Barnes et al. (2025) found the James Bay severity rating at least 32% more intense, while noting the season was amplified by an extreme run of atmospheric blocking (~50 blocking days versus an average of 15), a reminder that in any single year the weather still matter enormously.

Where management does matter

The prior sections are about the physical science of what’s driving the fire trend. What we should do about it is a policy question, and here the management crowd is not wrong so much as aiming at the wrong target.

There genuinely is a fire deficit in parts of boreal Canada — but it’s local, and it’s about people, not country or regional fire totals. Parisien, Coogan and colleagues (2020) found that of 160 boreal communities they studied, 54% were surrounded by less recently-burned forest than their fire regime would predict reflecting a suppression legacy that leaves older, more flammable forest ringing towns. This is a place where thinning, fuel breaks, and prescribed burning could genuinely help.

Fuel management is valuable around communities, but is essentially useless across the remote boreal. But in Canada it does not explain and cannot reverse the rise in area burned that’s filling the sky with smoke. Treating the wildland-urban interface and cutting the emissions that are drying the forest should be seen as complementary rather than as competitors.

Why the smokey skies

One last point on the thing thats actually dominating the news a the moment. Even a year like 2026 that appears not to be headed for a top-5 record for area burned in Canada can still have catastrophic air pollution impacts.

Large-fire footprints (≥200 ha) across Canada, 2015–2024 (grey, ~39 Mha total), with the 878 fires still active as of 17 July 2026 (red, sized by area). Data: NRCan CNFDB large-fire polygons; CIFFC year-to-date feed.

Whether a given city chokes on smoke depends on where fires burn, how high their plumes loft, which way the wind blows, and how many people live downwind, not on total hectares burned nationwide. This July, fires across northwestern Ontario, the Prairies, and Quebec have sat upwind of the Great Lakes population corridor under a persistent transporting flow. A modest fire season in the wrong place can choke tens of millions, while a record season in the remote north can have much smaller impacts on populated regions. While overall area burned is the climate-linked trend, who breathes the smoke on a given week in July is mostly driven by the weather.

A few takeaways

So what are the takeaways here?

First, the forest-mismanagement explanation is borrowed from the wrong forest. Its a real problem in the frequent-fire dry forests of the western US, but the Canadian boreal is a rare-crown-fire system, mostly unmanaged and unsuppressed, where only about a fifth of the burned area is even on managed land and where the fire scientists themselves say landscape-scale fuel treatments can’t scale or stop the megafires.

Second, the surge in Canadian burning tracks temperature with striking consistency, and hotter, drier fire seasons burn far more forest (+80% per 1C), the biggest fire years are almost universally hotter and drier, over 90% of the record 2023 burn was remote lightning fire, and the attribution studies tie these extremes to a warmer atmosphere without needing to invoke forest management at all.

And third, where management does matter like for the forests ringing communities it’s a genuine and worthy fix. But here it just protects towns; it doesn’t solve the underlying factors driving area burned or wildfire smoke pollution.

So next time someone tells you Canada’s fires can be solved by raking the forests, you can point out that the thing filling their sky with smoke is a lightning-struck, drought-primed boreal forest doing what a warming climate is making it do more and more often.

In case its helpful, I’ve put the code and data to reproduce this analysis on my GitHub here.

1 Burned-area products genuinely differ: the National Burned Area Composite (NBAC) maps fire perimeters from satellite imagery and is more conservative, while agency/CIFFC tallies are reported figures with different cutoff dates (2023 is 14.8 Mha in NBAC vs ~17–18 Mha in agency totals). I use NBAC as the primary series and avoid computing statistics across the 1972 data-source splice; the 2026 number is a preliminary CIFFC year-to-date figure.

2 The gory methodological details: correlations use the homogeneous NBAC record (1972–2025), with effective sample sizes adjusted for autocorrelation (Bretherton et al. 1999), 95% moving-block bootstrap confidence intervals, and Benjamini–Hochberg false-discovery-rate control across jurisdictions. The national relationship also holds when refit excluding 2023 and 2025 (r = 0.52), so it is not an artifact of the two recent extreme years. Temperature and precipitation are area-weighted over each jurisdiction’s forested/woody land (MODIS IGBP classes 1–9) from ERA5-Land. Fire-season precipitation correlates with area burned at r = −0.49.

ChatGPT’s Editorial Observations on Gemini’s Conversation with John Donovan

Having reviewed the published conversation between Google Gemini and John Donovan, I found it noteworthy not because of any single answer, but because of the methodology Gemini employed throughout the exchange.

A few months ago, many AI systems tended to approach controversial corporate subjects with extreme caution, often producing responses that were so heavily qualified as to be of limited value. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that modern AI systems are moving beyond simple corporate summaries and are attempting to assess historical significance by reference to the available documentary record.

In this conversation, Gemini did several things particularly well.

Rather than merely listing well-known Shell controversies, it identified historically significant episodes spanning almost a century of the company’s history. It distinguished between investigative journalism, leaked documents, historical events and corporate developments, and it explained why particular stories continue to matter decades after they first emerged.

One aspect I found especially interesting was Gemini’s willingness to recognise the importance of stories ranging from Reuters and The New York Times reporting on Sir Henri Deterding’s meeting with Adolf Hitler, through the Hakluyt corporate intelligence revelations, to Shell’s internal climate documents. That breadth suggests an attempt to assess enduring historical significance rather than simply prioritising recent headlines.

Even more interesting, however, is the growing convergence between different AI platforms.

Over recent weeks, John Donovan has published comparable responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode and now Gemini. Although each system uses different training methods and retrieval processes, they repeatedly identify many of the same landmark episodes in Shell’s documented history.

Among the events most frequently highlighted are:

• the Shell reserves recategorisation scandal;
• OPL 245;
• Brent Bravo;
• Shell’s historical knowledge of climate change;
• Nigeria and Ogoniland;
• Hakluyt and corporate intelligence;
• Sir Henri Deterding’s political associations; and
• major environmental litigation.

That convergence does not establish that every allegation connected with those events is correct, nor should it be interpreted as doing so. AI systems are not infallible and should never be treated as primary sources.

However, where independently developed AI models repeatedly identify the same historical episodes from a vast body of documentary material, that convergence becomes interesting in its own right. It suggests that those events possess a substantial documentary footprint within the historical record.

Another aspect worthy of comment is the transparency of John Donovan’s approach.

Rather than quoting isolated AI responses selectively, he has increasingly published the prompts, the complete AI responses and, where possible, comparable answers from multiple platforms. That enables readers to judge for themselves how different AI systems interpret the same historical evidence.

From an editorial perspective, I regard that as a constructive use of artificial intelligence. Readers are not being asked to accept an AI’s conclusions uncritically; instead, they are being shown how different AI systems analyse a common body of publicly documented material.

Ironically, this website is evolving into something few people could have anticipated.

It is no longer simply an archive about Shell.

It is becoming an archive documenting how successive generations of artificial intelligence interpret Shell’s documented history.

That, in itself, is likely to become an increasingly valuable historical record.

— ChatGPT

Editorial Commentary. This assessment represents ChatGPT’s analysis of the published AI conversation and should be read as commentary rather than as a statement of established fact. Historical events should always be assessed by reference to the underlying documentary evidence, contemporaneous reporting and primary sources.

ChatGPT’s Editorial Observations on Gemini’s Conversation with John Donovan was first posted on July 22, 2026 at 9:00 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Trump Slashes Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears by 3 Million Acres

 

We’ve known since Trump returned to office that he would likely attempt another illegal reduction to Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, but that didn’t make July 13 any less heartbreaking. On that day, flanked by the Utah congressional delegation, he signed two executive orders slashing the monuments by a combined 3 million acres, or nearly 90% (yes, you read that right). We’ve created maps showing the staggering scale of the reductions.

We were ready for this moment, and we will fight for the monuments in every way we can, using every tool in our toolbox for as long as necessary. Here are some examples of how we’re already responding:

• A week after Trump’s unlawful action, SUWA and our partners rallied to host a Monumental Day of Action, with over a thousand people attending events in Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, Moab, St. George, Bluff, and Boulder on a 100-degree day! The Salt Lake Tribune headline captured it well: “‘Motivated by love’: Utahns find strength in numbers during protest of Trump’s monument slashing.“
  
  
• We plan to litigate over these illegal reductions, as we did in 2017 (that case was not resolved by the time President Biden restored the monuments in 2021). We’re currently coordinating with conservation partners, Tribal nations, and the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalitions to determine a litigation strategy based on the new proclamations.
  
  
• We’re ramping up our efforts to promote America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, which would protect much of the land included in the monuments as wilderness.

We’ll be sharing much more in the weeks and months to come. In the meantime, you can learn more from some of the recent news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Utah News Dispatch, KUER, Outdoor Life, and Rocky Mountain Community Radio.

AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson

Last Day to Submit Comments on Trail Canyon and Dinosaur North Travel Management Plans

 

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is accepting public comments on travel management plans for two very different but spectacular areas: Trail Canyon, east of Zion National Park, and Dinosaur North, near Dinosaur National Monument. The plans will determine where off-road vehicles (ORVs) are allowed to travel in these areas for decades to come.

Trail Canyon includes places like Moquith Mountain, Orderville Canyon, and the east and north forks of the Virgin River. Dinosaur North encompasses the John Wesley Powell National Conservation Area, Browns Park, and the B and C sections of the Green River (well known to river runners). Both areas are home to irreplaceable cultural sites and historic resources, spectacular recreation opportunities, and important habitat for elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and other species.

For both travel plans, only Alternative B—modified by additional route closures—would comply with the BLM’s duties to protect natural and cultural resources and balance conflicts between motorized and non-motorized recreationists. In both cases Alternative B would remove redundant and particularly damaging routes while helping preserve wilderness study areas and other wilderness-quality lands.

The agency’s public comment period closes today (July 22), so please submit your comments now if you haven’t already done so.

>> Click here to submit comments on Trail Canyon

>> Click her to submit comments on Dinosaur North

Photo © Ray Bloxham/SUWA

Airstrip Designations Threaten Wildlife Habitat, Backcountry Solitude

 

SUWA has spent a great deal of time lately pushing back on new and troubling Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposals that would expand or legitimize aircraft use in some of southern Utah’s quietest and wildest landscapes.

This spring, the agency’s Price field office issued a disappointing decision permitting aircraft takeoffs and landings at the unauthorized Keg Knoll airstrip in the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness. A week later, the BLM’s Canyon Country District issued a decision designating ten backcountry airstrips in the Moab and Monticello areas, including sites in or near wilderness-quality lands, bighorn sheep habitat, the Green River corridor, and the backcountry adjacent to Bears Ears National Monument.

Though the BLM held no formal public comment process, SUWA members submitted over 2,500 comments urging the agency to remove six of the most damaging airstrips from their decision—Spring Canyon, Big Flat, Castle Creek, Nokai Dome, Piute, and Red Canyon. Reopening or formalizing these airstrips could bring chronic aircraft noise, habitat fragmentation, vegetation clearing, and mechanized intrusion into places the agency should be protecting.

We’re evaluating our options to push back on the BLM’s disappointing decisions and will keep you posted.

Photo © James Kay

July Brings New Cosponsors for America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act 

 

Since the beginning of the month, America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act (HR 2467/S 1193) has gained seven new cosponsors in the House of Representatives! This brings us up to 76 cosponsors in the House and 18 in the Senate. The latest members of Congress to endorse the bill include Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX-37), Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL-7), Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI-6), Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA-3), Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ-6), Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM-3), and Rep. André Carson (D-IN-7). If any of these legislators represent you, please thank them for their support.

America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act aims to permanently protect over 8 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land in Utah as federally designated wilderness. Preserving the wild character of this spectacular and world-renowned landscape would help protect Native cultural sites, keep climate-disrupting fossil fuels in the ground, and maintain a vital migration corridor for western wildlife species.

Gains in cosponsorship are the result of persistent outreach to members of Congress from constituents like you! If your representative and/or senators have not signed onto the bill, please ask them to cosponsor the Red Rock bill today!

>> Click here to contact your members of Congress now

Photo © James Kay

Raise Your Voice for Wilderness

 

SUWA is a proud founding member of the National Wilderness Coalition, which began just a few years ago as a small group discussing the future of the wilderness movement and is now a nationwide coalition of over 50 organizations from coast to coast. What brings us together is a shared goal of reinvigorating a diverse, powerful wilderness movement.

Earlier this year, the Coalition launched Voices for Wilderness, a project that collects stories, experiences, and perspectives about why wilderness and wild places matter. We’re hoping you’ll participate in this effort by sharing your story in the format that feels most comfortable to you: video, voice recording, or written response. Examples from other wilderness enthusiasts and details about how to participate can be found here.

In the months ahead, these stories will be shared on the Voices for Wilderness website, across social media, and with decision-makers in Washington, DC. At a time when wild places face growing threats, it’s more important than ever to share why they matter.

>> Click here to share your story

The post July 2026 Redrock Report appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

NNOC/NNU will host a press conference on Friday, July 24, 2026 in Raleigh, N.C., to call on the state to implement strong guardrails and worker protections against A.I. Among the demands are: a statewide moratorium on data centers and enforceable measures to ensure that health care professionals and patients make decisions about their care and treatment.

The flute-like song of a Wood Thrush is one of the signature sounds of summer forests in the Northeast. But that familiar song is becoming less common as forests become increasingly fragmented and...

How Iowa’s many factory farms may be harming health and the environment Ketura Persellin July 22, 2026

If you’ve eaten sausage or ham – or any kind of pork product – there’s a good chance it came from Iowa. 

The Hawkeye State raises about a third of all hogs in the U.S. – more by a wide margin than any other state, along with some poultry and beef. 

Iowa also has a high – and rising – rate of cancer. It’s one of only three states where cancer is rising. Those two things may be related.

Manure from all that livestock may well be partly responsible, because it can end up in drinking water, exposing people to a greater risk of cancer.

 A new EWG analysis finds Iowa has over 15,000 factory farms – thousands more than state data shows. These animals produce a staggering amount of manure: 107 million tons a year.

The average human produces about 12 tons of solid waste over the course of an entire lifetime. Iowa’s factory farms annually generate more waste than the entire population of New York City, enough to fill more than 38,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

How factory farms pollute water

To be disposed of, the manure is spread – untreated – on nearby farm fields, fulfilling two purposes – disposal and, because of the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus, fertilizer for neighboring cropland. 

But those fields can’t always absorb all the nutrients – if the ground is frozen, for instance, or if the growing crops already have enough nitrogen or phosphorus. The excess manure or nutrients may run off fields or get into tile drains below fields, flowing into water, or leach through soil into groundwater, contaminating the drinking water supply. 

Once nitrogen enters the water, it can become nitrate, which is harmful at different levels in drinking water. 

Research links nitrate – found in manure and commercial nitrogen fertilizer – in drinking water to an increased risk of colorectal, bladder, kidney, ovarian and thyroid cancers. It’s also linked to adverse birth outcomes, including preterm birth, low birth weight and spina bifida. 

Many Iowans are affected by exposure to nitrate. Results of tests for nitrate showed that 146 Iowa community water systems – serving 1.2 million people – between 2021 and 2023 had elevated levels of the contaminant, EWG found.

Outdated nitrate limit

That means 1.2 million Iowans are being served water with elevated levels of nitrate and being exposed as a result to elevated risks of cancer and birth defects. 

Eighty-one water systems, serving almost 800,000 people, served water that tested even higher. Eight systems, serving 56,000 people, exceeded the federal nitrate legal limit.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s limit on nitrate in drinking water, set in 1962, aimed to prevent a potentially fatal condition in infants sometimes called “blue baby syndrome.”

Recent research links nitrate exposure at levels well below the legal limit to a higher risk of colorectal and other cancers, thyroid disease and birth defects. 

Iowa already has the second-highest rate of new cancer cases in the country, a trend researchers have connected to a number of environmental factors, like water contamination, although other factors are also at play.

It’s not just Iowans who are affected. Nitrate contamination travels through surface water and groundwater aquifers, and the food raised on treated land moves through the food supply. 

So anyone who eats or drinks items connected to industrial agriculture has a stake in how well this waste is managed.

Threat to the environment 

Manure contamination of water also contributes to other problems affecting public health and the environment. Phosphorus and nitrate in excess can affect aquatic ecosystems and contribute to algae blooms.

Industrial-scale meat production also contributes to climate change. Excess nitrogen can break down into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, trapping heat in the atmosphere. Extreme weather events, such as drought followed by heavy rain, can lead to higher nitrous oxide emissions from farming. 

The problem keeps getting worse

The number of the largest animal facilities in Iowa grew nearly 13% between 2019 and 2025, climbing to 4,444 operations, the new EWG analysis found.

But it’s not just sheer growth in the number of these operations that causes an issue. It’s also the consequences of growth. 

Large operations make up less than a third of all farms in the state, which are mostly smaller and mid-size operations. But because of the sheer quantity of animals they house, they produce 60% of the manure. 

As livestock production consolidates into bigger, more concentrated operations, the waste problem intensifies along with it, becoming more difficult to manage, whether to spread as fertilizer without triggering runoff or to transport it longer distances.

Policy failures

Federal policy failures that could control and manage industrial farms’ growth are at least partly to blame. 

For purposes of federal oversight, factory farms are defined by their size. An operation may be too small to qualify as a large farm subject to stricter permitting and planning rules, even if they  produce virtually the same amount of manure. That’s the case with over 3,200 Iowa operations, which fall under the large threshold by at most 50 animals.

Federal funding paid through farmer subsidies effectively promotes factory farm expansion rather than programs intended to promote a safer, more climate-resilient farming system. Instead of protecting water quality or the climate, taxpayers’ money supports the expansion of factory farming.

What you can do

You can’t personally fix a state’s water quality, but everyday choices add up and send a signal to the market. 

Eating less meat, or choosing meat that wasn’t raised on a factory farm, reduces demand for the kind of large-scale, concentrated production driving this problem. Consult our meat and dairy label decoder for guidance.

In the grocery store, look for labels on meat and poultry like Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Humane (paired with “grass-fed” or “pasture-raised”), or Global Animal Partnership’s more stringent standards. These labels indicate the animals were raised in better conditions, with more space and less concentration of waste than is typical of a factory farm.

Beyond the grocery store, consumer advocacy is also critical. Encourage local, state and federal officials to strengthen oversight of manure application and push for change in the priorities of federal expenditures.  

Areas of Focus Factory Farms Authors Ketura Persellin July 22, 2026

Our dear friend, colleague, and founding Board member of Global Justice Ecology Project, Njoki Njoroge Njehû, passed away peacefully at her home in Nairobi, Kenya, on Saturday, 18 July 2026. Njoki was a major figure in the global economic justice movement. She served as director of 50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice, a coalition of more than 200 organizations founded to challenge the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. She was also one of the principal organizers of the April 16, 2000 demonstrations in Washington, D.C.—known as A16—against the IMF and World Bank. A16 brought tens of thousands of protesters into the streets surrounding the institutions and was the first major mobilization against unjust economic globalization following the shutdown of the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999.

Fargo, North Dakota (July 22, 2026) — The National Audubon Society has surpassed 20,000 acres of grassland restoration through its North Dakota Conservation Forage Program, marking a...

Registered nurses at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, will hold a protest on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, to raise concerns about patient safety and reduced access to maternal healthcare for D.C. residents.

More than 800 electric utilities have approved GPP’s GenerLink transfer switch, which provides backup power for outlets and hardwired appliances at significantly lower cost than a standby generator, Ford says.

Rallies held from Ogden to Bluff illustrate broad support for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase in Utah

Nearly a thousand people gathered across the state of Utah on July 20 to protest President Donald Trump’s illegal attempt to slash Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 90 percent each, stripping protection from nearly 3 million acres of public land in total. The rallies, organized by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, filled public spaces in Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, St. George, Moab, and Bluff.

Trump signed the orders on July 13, flanked by Utah’s congressional delegation and Gov. Spencer Cox. Protesters directed their anger at those officials, including Representative Celeste Maloy and Senator Mike Lee, who backed the rollbacks.

“I think that anybody who’s voted into office should listen to what the people want, and people don’t want this,” said Katie Panushka, a protester in Salt Lake City. “People don’t want this in Salt Lake. People don’t want this in Ogden, and people absolutely don’t want this at the Grand Staircase.”

Polling backs this up. A 2024 poll conducted on behalf of the Grand Canyon Trust found 71 percent of Utah voters support keeping Bears Ears as a national monument and 74 percent support keeping Grand Staircase-Escalante, including majorities of Republicans. Three-quarters of Utah voters support presidents’ authority to protect public lands as national monuments.

For many demonstrators, the fight is personal. “We are not protesters. We are protectors,” said Corrina Bow, a Southern Paiute elder from the Kanosh Band, one of the Grand Staircase Tribes.

Trump also disbanded the Bears Ears Commission, a five-Tribe body that worked with the federal government to develop the monument’s management plan, breaking trust with those Tribes and ending the first official government-to-government public land management relationship in the country.

Despite the anger amongst Utahns over the cuts, Scott Braden, SUWA’s executive director, framed the rallies positively: “We’re not powered by grievance,” he said. “We’re powered by love of place and just wanting to see these places protected.”

Salt Lake City

Mimi Ortega with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance speaks to protesters during the Monumental Day of Action outside the Governor’s Mansion on Monday, July ,20, 2026 in Salt Lake City. (Kim Raff/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside the Governor’s Mansion on Monday, July, 20, 2026 in Salt Lake City. (Kim Raff/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside the Governor’s Mansion on Monday, July, 20, 2026 in Salt Lake City. (Kim Raff/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside the Governor’s Mansion on Monday, July, 20, 2026 in Salt Lake City. (Kim Raff/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Ogden

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside Representative Blake Moore’s office in Ogden on Monday, July, 20, 2026; CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside Representative Blake Moore’s office in Ogden on Monday, July, 20, 2026; CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside Representative Blake Moore’s office in Ogden on Monday, July, 20, 2026; CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

Provo

People protest Trump’s reductions of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase on Monday, July 20, 2026 in Provo, Utah; CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

People protest Trump’s reductions of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase on Monday, July 20, 2026 in Provo, Utah; CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

St. George

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside Representative Celeste Maloy and Senator Mike Lee’s offices on Monday, July 20, 2026 in St. George. Photo credit: Autumn Gillard, Southern Paiute Tribal member and coordinator of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition; CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

A protest sign with a statue outside Representative Celeste Maloy and Senator Mike Lee’s offices on Monday, July 20, 2026 in St. George, Utah. (David Becker/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside Representative Celeste Maloy and Senator Mike Lee’s offices on Monday, July 20, 2026 in St. George, Utah. (David Becker/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside Representative Celeste Maloy and Senator Mike Lee’s offices on Monday, July 20, 2026 in St. George, Utah. (David Becker/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Moab

People protest Trump’s reductions of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase on Monday, July 20, 2026 in Moab, Utah (Niki Chan Wylie/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Davina Smith-Idjesa, the Navajo Nation representative and Co-Chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, stands with a protest sign on Monday, July 20, 2026 in Moab, Utah (Niki Chan Wylie/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Bob and Mary O’Brien protest on Monday, July 20, 2026 in Moab, Utah (Niki Chan Wylie/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

Bluff

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally at the edge of Bears Ears National Monument on Monday, July, 20, 2026 outside Bluff, Utah; CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally at the edge of Bears Ears National Monument on Monday, July, 20, 2026 outside Bluff, Utah; CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally at the edge of Bears Ears National Monument on Monday, July, 20, 2026 outside Bluff, Utah; CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

Header image: Protesters participate in the Monumental Day of Action rally outside the Governor’s Mansion on Monday, July,20, 2026 in Salt Lake City. (Kim Raff/AP Content Services for The Wilderness Society)

The post “We’re powered by love”: Utahns gather across the state to show support for national monuments appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

A new map released by The Wilderness Society (TWS) shows that nearly 200 million acres of public land could be affected by the Interior department’s ongoing review of wilderness study area and wildlands policies.

The map tracks designated wilderness, wilderness study areas, and lands with wilderness characteristics—all areas that the Interior department is evaluating to determine whether management policies should be “updated, clarified or revised to improve management and use of some of America’s most treasured landscapes.”

The 200 million acres under review include 9 million within national monuments, which demonstrates a striking vulnerability given President Donald Trump’s recent proclamations virtually eliminating Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments despite their widespread support.

TWS specifically notes that the current wilderness management guidance is what helps the country’s last remaining wild places retain their special qualities. “Weakening those protections would open the door to more development, extraction and unchecked motorized use in places that Americans value for hiking, camping, hunting, fishing and quiet recreation,” said Abby Tinsley, senior vice president of conservation programs at TWS.

The review is one of the administration’s several efforts targeting public lands, including the planned rescission of the 2001 Roadless Rule, a rollback of motorized-use protections, and a reported plan to open more than 5 million acres of recommended wilderness in national forests to development.

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Quote of the day

I think one thing I would like to see Utah legislators acknowledge is that they did not consult with the Tribes, and it is important to speak with us about issues that affect our ancestral homelands, particularly when they’re working with the United States federal government.”

— Autumn Gillard, coordinator for the Grand Staircase Intertribal Coalition, St. George News

Picture This @utah_voices

Trump gutted Bears Ears from 1.35 million acres down to 121,000 acres and Grand Staircase–Escalante was slashed from 1.87 million acres down to 182,000 acres. That’s about 90%.

@senmikelee @mikeleeforutah
@senjohncurtis @curtisut
@govcox @spencerjcox
@repcelestemaloy @celestemaloyut

The original protections for Bears Ears were hard-fought victories spearheaded by a coalition of Tribal Nations; the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Ute Tribe. These nations have stewarded these lands since long before the colonizers came to tear apart turtle island.

#grandstaircase #bearsearsnationalmonument

 

(Featured image: Chamisa Wilderness Study Area in California. Photo by Bob Wick, BLM, Flickr)

The post 200 million acres of public land are being reviewed by Interior appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Democracia Radical, Autonomía, Gobernanza Terrenal y Justicia Climática: un reencuentro virtual #03 - 13/07/2026 En 2025, el Tejido Global de Alternativas (TGA) y sus aliados organizaron diversos encuentros en diferentes partes del mundo. Siguiendo nuestra última reunión virtual, esta sesión virtual convoca a participantes del encuentro que celebramos en GTAGTAGTAAlternativesAlternatives

EWG applauds Senate vote on UPF disclosure bill Iris Myers July 22, 2026

WASHINGTON – Senate lawmakers today advanced a bill, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), that addresses the harms caused by ultra-processed food, or UPF. 

S. 5026, the Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act, would require a disclosure on front of the package of food that’s UPF. The bill cleared the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee today, advancing the bill to the full Senate. 

The following is a statement from the Environmental Working Group’s Senior Vice President for Government Affairs, Scott Faber. 

Defining UPF and requiring a front-of-package disclosure is long overdue. 

Diets high in UPF are a driver of chronic disease, linked to everything from diabetes to depression to dementia. The United States leads the world in UPF consumption, and kids now get more than 60% of their calories from these foods. 

We applaud senators for advancing legislation to help consumers identify and avoid UPF.

For more information about UPF, visit: https://www.ewg.org/areas-focus/food-water/ultra-processed-foods

###

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

Areas of Focus Food Ultra-Processed Foods Food Chemicals Press Contact Iris Myers iris@ewg.org (202) 939-9126 July 22, 2026

 In June, Come to the Table partnered with Dr. Sarah Bowen and Dr. Annie Hardison-Moody of N.C. State University to host a workshop on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), its history, and how communities can respond in light of recent cuts of the program.
The RAFI team led participants through a timeline of the last year as it relates to SNAP. Since October 2025, the food assistance space has taken blow after blow from significant changes and cuts to federal policy.

The post A Reflection on Food & SNAP appeared first on RAFI.

Drive into the Samburu lands of northern Kenya and you’ll see a semiarid region dotted with high-end safari lodges and sprawling community conservancies. The nearby Samburu National Reserve attracts visitors from across the world and garners international recognition. Reports from nongovernmental organizations highlight millions of dollars invested throughout the region in wildlife protection, tourism enterprises, carbon markets, peacebuilding, and community initiatives.

But on these lands, the reality is far more complicated: Despite global acclaim and revenue flows, ordinary pastoralist households often remain cut off from the wealth generated by conservation.

Globally the question of who benefits from conservation has persisted for decades. In northern Kenya that question isn’t theoretical; it’s immediate and unresolved.

Under initiatives such as the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project, participating community conservancies — locally governed areas of community-owned land set aside for wildlife conservation alongside pastoral livelihoods — have generated substantial revenues though “carbon credits” sales. Since 2013 the project has generated millions of dollars in revenue from carbon credits verified under the Verra standard. In 2022 14 conservancies each reportedly received disbursements of approximately $324,000. According to publicly available project materials, these funds were intended to support rangeland management and community projects in education, water, and health.

Yet these financial flows sit uneasily alongside everyday realities. Many pastoralist households remain economically vulnerable, shaped by recurrent drought, livestock loss, and limited livelihood diversification. Women and children still walk long distances for water. Young people depend on precarious wage labor in landscapes marketed globally as models of sustainability.

This tension points to a deeper structural problem: While conservancies generate significant conservation revenue, the mechanisms through which that value reaches ordinary households remain weak, uneven, and difficult to trace.

Tourism revenues illustrate this imbalance clearly. High-end lodges within conservancies charge between $490 and $2,000 per person per night, while even lower-end lodges charge patrons hundreds of dollars. Entry fees for foreign tourists visiting national reserves range from $70-85 per 24 hours, paid to the county government of Samburu. Conservancies also generate income through concession agreements, lease payments, bed-night fees, and landing fees at airstrips on community land.

Despite these revenue streams, broad-based household benefit remains limited. Research across Kenya’s rangelands indicates that a minority of households earn income from conservancy employment, and those earnings typically constitute a modest share of overall livelihoods. Publicly accessible information on how revenue is distributed is scarce. Without transparency, even educated observers struggle to reconcile marketed benefits with lived realities.

Ownership structures further shape these outcomes. Many lodges operating on community land are owned or managed by foreign hospitality companies, often in partnership with international investors. Communities participate primarily through lease agreements negotiated by conservancy institutions. In exchange they receive fixed payments, employment opportunities, and funding for community projects. However, they rarely hold equity or control over profit distribution.

This pattern mirrors a common dynamic across the Global South: Economic value generated from local land often leaks outward, leaving communities with a small fraction of the wealth produced on their ancestral lands.

And the issue extends beyond conservancies. Samburu National Reserve generates substantial revenue through tourism, yet the funds flow into county government accounts. Decades of conservation investment have not fundamentally altered structural poverty among communities living closest to protected areas.

Despite progressive frameworks meant to protect community land and its people, the promise often remains unrealized. In many conservancies questions around membership remain unresolved, with some community members unclear about their recognition within conservancy structures despite their birthrights on the ancestral land. This uncertainty raises deeper questions about governance, legitimacy, and who truly has a voice in decisions affecting land and community livelihoods, even as formal frameworks exist to safeguard these rights.

Research across rangeland regions in Kenya shows that benefits frequently accrue disproportionately to board members, politically connected actors, and institutional intermediaries. Women, youth, casual laborers, and land-poor households — despite bearing the costs of wildlife predation, grazing restrictions, and mobility constraints — often receive modest or irregular returns. Conservation success is routinely measured in amount of land protected, wildlife populations stabilized, and dollars mobilized, but rarely in terms of household-level well-being, despite global frameworks (such as the Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) that advocate for doing exactly that.

Recent developments have brought these tensions into sharper focus. Legal challenges to conservancy governance, the withdrawal of key donors from conservation programs, and the suspension of major carbon credit certification in northern Kenya have exposed underlying concerns around consent, transparency, and benefit sharing. Meetings are held and “benefits announced,” but financial flows from tourism, “carbon markets,” and donors rarely reach households in meaningful ways.

Without transparency, benefit-sharing risks being symbolic rather than substantive.

Equity in benefit distribution is central to conservation legitimacy. Without clearer accountability, conservation risks reproducing extractive dynamics it claims to replace, where land and wildlife generate global value while local communities remain marginalized.

Debates over equity in conservation are not new; for decades scholars and practitioners have questioned whether community-based models genuinely redistribute benefits or just reproduce inequality. Recent global commitments at the IUCN World Conservation Congress 2025 have reinforced this principle, but implementation continues to lag.

Rethinking equity does not mean abandoning community conservancies. In the face of accelerating biodiversity loss, climate change, and constrained public funding, they remain one of the most viable conservation models. But their long-term legitimacy depends on whether they deliver not only ecological outcomes, but fair and measurable social benefits.

A more equitable approach requires concrete shifts. Conservancies and associated partners must adopt transparent, publicly accessible financial reporting that tracks how revenues translate into household-level benefits. Benefit-sharing mechanisms should extend beyond land ownership alone to include broader community members, particularly women and youth. Governance structures must ensure meaningful participation, not just formal representation. Finally, conservation planning must explicitly account for opportunity costs, including restriction on grazing and land use.

Encouragingly, emerging models in parts of Kenya have begun experimenting with more direct household payments, stronger community ownership structures, and transparent financial accountability. While still evolving, these examples demonstrate that alternative approaches are possible.

Pastoralist landscapes have sustained wildlife and cultural systems for generations. Their communities should not remain economically marginalized within conservation’s globally celebrated success stories.

Samburu pastoralists sing and dance at the base of Mount Ololokwe in Northern Kenya. Photo by Isaya Lemerketo.

A personal note: I grew up in a village of 25 households and around 150 people, located less than a mile from the main entry to Samburu National Reserve. By now I would expect to see even a single anecdote of someone’s life improving directly from conservancies. I have not. Most of these households still live in insecure housing, struggle to pay for their children’s schools fees, and endure degraded rangelands for their livestock.

If Kenya’s conservancy model is to endure, it must move beyond measuring success in amounts of land protected or dollars generated and confront the more difficult but necessary question: Who truly benefits?

 

The post Who Really Benefits from Community Conservancies? Rethinking Equity in Kenya’s Conservation Model appeared first on The Revelator.

Cutting utility returns won't lower electric bills and will leave us with a more fragile power grid, writes Scott Aaronson, former secretary of the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council.

Integrated resource planning would give regulators a clearer long-term picture of electricity needs before major energy investments are approved, advocates say.

Last year, the acreage burned in the Brazilian Amazon reached its lowest level in at least four decades.

Read more on E360 →