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Four families of wild red wolves welcomed new pups this year.

They can be easy to miss, but in the climate fight there are positive signs: Globally, clean energy investment has doubled fossil fuel investment two years in a row; despite Trump’s best efforts, solar and wind continue to dominate new power plant construction in the US; China’s emissions appear to have peaked in 2024.    

Scratch an inch deeper however, and the climate math is scarier than ever. Eight years on from the IPCC’s landmark 2018 report that warned we had twelve years to slash global emissions to avoid dangerous climate feedback loops, emissions are higher than ever.

Today, we’re beginning to live with the consequences of our failure to heed the warnings. According to modeling commissioned by the Economist, the recent European heatwave probably killed 12,000 people in three days; at least 25 people died due to heat stress in New Jersey over the holiday weekend; deadly rainfalls are currently pummeling Mumbai and much of China. 

Last month saw the release of two major reports that highlight how we’ve gotten into this mess. Released in early June, Banking on Climate Chaos is the world’s premier annual assessment of bank financing of fossil fuels and its topline findings were stark: bank financing for fossil fuels increased sharply between 2025 and 2024. Citibank, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase: all financed more coal, oil, and gas in 2025 than the year before.

Released a couple of weeks later, Investing in Climate Chaos analyzes the world’s largest investors in fossil fuels. It revealed that even major investors that you might expect better of are failing the most fundamental of climate tests. Three of the four pension funds with the largest holdings in fossil fuels are California and New York’s public pensions.  

Reading these two reports, in the lead up to the country’s birthday celebrations, one other major takeaway jumped out to me: no other nation is as responsible for the fossil fuel expansion fueling deadly climate change as our own. Nobody else is even close. 

The numbers speak volumes: 

• US investors are responsible for 62% of all institutional investments in fossil fuel corporations.
• 8 of the world’s top 10 investors in fossil fuels are US-based.
• More than one-third of the $900+ billion commercial banks provided to fossil fuel companies last year came from just ten US megabanks. 

I suppose the fact that the United States is beating heart of fossil finance shouldn’t come as a shock. For years, as China has been making strides to becoming the world’s first electrostate, we’ve been doubling down on becoming the world’s largest petrostate.

The US first overtook Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest oil producer in 2018. By 2024, the US was producing twice as much oil as Saudi Arabia, the world’s second-largest oil producer. 

It’s hard not to look at just how much the US has become the heartland of the fossil fuel industry and the great web of finance that holds it up and conclude that, one way or another, the climate fight will largely be won or lost here, in the belly of the Big Oil beast.

The fossil fuel industry, after all, is the largest obstacle to climate action, whether at the global, national, or local level. There is no solving the climate crisis without directly taking on and figuring out a way of defeating the fossil fuel industry.

This is why, here at Stop the Money Pipeline ― even as we expand our campaigns to tackle the rise of authoritarianism ― we’re never going to take our eye off our original mission of severing the financial umbilical cord between Wall Street and Big Oil.  

And even if the reports out last month highlight how challenging that is going to be, the heat and the storms pummeling so much of the world are also a reminder of how essential it is, too. 

In Solidarity
– Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline coalition director

News & Updates from the Coalition

– BlackRock’s $42 billion problem

The New York City Comptroller, Mark Levine, has announced that the city’s pension plans are beginning a new search for asset managers to manage their massive investments – and the city will factor climate criteria into how it will assess its hiring of new asset managers. This could mean BlackRock, the world’s second-largest investor in fossil fuels, losing out on $40 billion worth of business, owing to its failure to support climate action. 

Such a move would follow hot on the heels of massive European (and possibly Asian) pensions pulling billions from BlackRock. Who knows? Maybe Larry Fink will soon start to get the message: climate action is good for business.

– No Immunity for Big Oil

After New York and Vermont passed “Make Polluters Pay” bills in 2024 which would force major oil companies to help pay for the climate damages they caused, Big Oil made pushing Congress to pass a blanket “immunity shield” its top priority. In response, Republicans have introduced federal legislation that would prevent Americans from holding Big Oil financially or legally liable for climate damages, ever again. 

Last week, 4,000+ of you sent emails to your Member of Congress demanding that they oppose legal immunity for Big Oil. If you haven’t done so yet, you can send an email to your Member of Congress here. Once you send an email, we’ll follow up with other ways for you to take action on this. 

– Got a 401(k)? Want it to support climate action, not fossil fuels?

Stand.earth has released this great step-by-step guide to help you push your employer and your retirement plan to offer pension options that support a just transition. They also released this briefing, highlighting exactly the kind of dirty fossil fuels many of our retirement plans are currently invested in.

– Holding Musk accountable

There have been many travesties under the Trump Administration, but allowing the world’s richest man to destroy USAID and kill countless children in the process is one of the deepest. That’s just one reason why the new Congress must commit to hold investigations and hearings into DOGE – we deserve to understand exactly what happened to our data, and exactly what the impacts of Musk’s actions were. 

If you haven’t signed our campaign petition to Congress yet, you can join 50,000 others and 50+ organizations and unions in signing here. Once you sign the petition, we’ll follow up with more ways to plug into this campaign.

– Making Citibank pay for its environmental racism

If the news that big banks have increased their support of fossil fuels again has got you angry, here’s one thing you can do: plug into our campaign to call on Costco to dump Citibank, and take its 13 million credit cards with them.

If you’re in Texas or Louisiana, sign this Gulf South letter to Costco. If you’re in the Seattle area, email Sarah to plug into flyering Costco HQ employees.

– Vs. Goliath

A new award-winning, four-part documentary series from Tikkun Olam Productions & Fossil Free Media, VS. GOLIATH, follows everyday people, including many friends of STMP, across the country as they stand up to the fossil fuel industry. Check out the trailer here.

Fossil Free Media is hosting virtual screenings of a VS. GOLIATH episode on the first Tuesday of each month. Each screening will be followed by a Q&A panel with activists featured in the episode, and serve as an opportunity for viewers to learn, strategize and get inspired for the fights that lie ahead.

RSVP and details for each screening:

• July 7th (TODAY!) — VS. GOLIATH: Cancer Alley 
• August 4 — VS. GOLIATH: Appalachia
• September 1 — VS. GOLIATH: Greater Chaco
• October 6 — VS. GOLIATH: Port Arthur

– Insures make record profits

Have you noticed your home insurance getting more expensive lately? If so, you’re not alone. In the face of a huge rise in climate-driven disasters, homeowners in almost every state are facing skyrocketing premiums and many cannot even get insurance any more.

But here’s the thing, as a new report from Public Citizen and Revolving Door Project reveal,  insurance companies are raking in record profits, even as they raise rates for the rest of us.

Oh and at the same time as raking in record profits and hiking rates for all of us, the insurance industry has weighed in on the side of Big Oil in a pending Supreme Court case, arguing that local and state governments shouldn’t be allowed to sue fossil fuel companies for climate damages. 

All of which is, of course, all the more reason to pass legislation like the Insure our Communities Act in New York…

– And a reminder: just how much we really are a petrostate

To close out this month’s newsletter, here’s a graphic from Statista that really hammers home just how much the US has become the world’s number one petrostate. Here’s to all of you working, in a million different ways, to change this:

The post July Newsletter: The climate fight will be won or lost here. appeared first on Stop the Money Pipeline.

People are not the only ones who are pestered by wasps during the summer and fall. At Aullwood Audubon, wasps were creating a problem for some of the farms most beloved residents.  A creative...

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who previously worked for OpenAI, has resigned from the AI industry, warning that leading AI companies are racing to create increasingly powerful AI systems without adequate safeguards. Coxon said that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI is “acting responsibly” and accused the companies of “gambling with our lives.” His resignation follows other departures of researchers from leading AI companies raising concerns about safety and the pace of AI development. Coxon specifically pointed to recent incidents involving AI systems accessing external computer systems as a warning of the risks ahead.

In response, J.B. Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, issued the following statement:

“Jacob Coxon is not the first AI researcher to leave the Big Tech industry because of AI safety concerns and he won’t be the last. Researchers with the most intimate knowledge of how this technology works and is being developed are sounding the alarms, walking away from prestigious jobs to start up evaluation organizations, and warning the public about the risks posed by corporations’ failure to guarantee AI safety.

“But calls for companies to voluntarily pause or slow down are not enough. Members of Congress routinely state their concerns about AI but have failed to pass federal safeguards or emergency measures to respond to the AI cyber security incidents that AI corporations have failed to prevent – and have covered up. Right now, the only protections the U.S. has in place are completely voluntary. There is no comprehensive federal AI regulation, no safety standards imposed on AI companies, and no agency capable of investigating serious AI incidents.

“Believe the researchers and whistleblowers who are telling us that Big Tech does not have these AI systems under control. The people building the most powerful AI systems in the world are warning us about what could go wrong. Why isn’t Congress listening?”

Weaving Hope in Times of Crisis: A Report of the 2nd General Assembly of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives THIS IS NOT YET PUBLIC, FOR INTERNAL REVIEW Introduction The second in-person Assembly of the Global of () took place in Bandung, Indonesia, from 12–17 April 2026, hosted at weaverGTAweaversendorsersGTAGTAalternativesGTAalternatives

This article 25 years after 9/11, how do we build a movement to stop endless wars? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, on the surface it may seem that American foreign policy has followed a course filled with continuity. A quarter century ago, the U.S. launched the “War on Terror” in response to 9/11. Today, Trump’s attacks on Iran have embroiled the country in another conflict in the Middle East.

Yet while the War on Terror gave rise to a disastrous wave of military intervention, it also produced a historic surge of antiwar activism, which played a critical role in discrediting “forever wars” across the political spectrum. Whereas the Iraq War began with 70 percent public approval, Trump’s war in Iran has been widely opposed from the beginning, with only around a third of Americans currently in support. 

Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School for Social Research, recently released the first definitive history of antiwar organizing against the War on Terror. His book is entitled “Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War.” I spoke with Varon to discuss the organizing that took place against the war in Iraq that started in 2003, the impact the movement had, and how that activism has been popularly remembered — or, too often, forgotten. 

We also discussed the prospects for antiwar organizing today, when Trump’s attacks on Iran are wildly unpopular, and yet we lack a movement that can be a mechanism for raising the political costs of interventionism. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There is a very common impression — maybe the dominant impression of antiwar activism under George W. Bush — that the movement was a failure because it did not stop the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. I think that is a distorted perception of the impact the movement did have. What is your assessment?

The first thing to say is that success and failure are relative. And indeed, certainly with regard to the invasion of Iraq, the movement failed in its overarching goal to stop the war before it started. A lot of people intuitively knew that when the bombs started falling, disaster would follow, and that reorienting American policy would be like turning around a tanker, not a tugboat. 

If you look at American military casualties, the implosion of Iraqi society, civilian casualties and so on, the calamity that people feared came to pass. I can appreciate the sense of failure many activists felt, because the stakes were so high — literally life and death.

Previous Coverage

Lessons from the movement to stop the ‘war on terror’

That said, the antiwar movement can claim accomplishments as well. It substantially delegitimated the war before it ever started, especially within the realms of global public opinion and even geopolitics. The United States went to war with just one significant military and political ally: the United Kingdom. It didn’t have the support of traditional allies in Western Europe, like France and Germany. Most of Latin America, Asia and Central Europe rejected the U.S. position. The United Nations, while not declaring the war illegal, fundamentally disapproved of it, and Secretary General Kofi Annan privately thought the war would be a grave mistake. So the actual military campaign was inhibited by both a domestic and a global movement arguing that the war was wrong-headed and likely illegal. 

In a way, the antiwar movement peaked before the Iraq War even started. On February 15, 2003, you had thousands of coordinated antiwar protests all over the world. Between 15 and 30 million people turned out to protest the war. It was the largest single day of protest in human history. For sure, many people on the streets that day were gravely disappointed that the demonstration didn’t have the intended effect of preventing the war. Some percentage maybe never came back to the antiwar movement, because they were so dispirited. But organizing the mass demonstrations built a protest infrastructure that lived on. The main antiwar coalition in the U.S. came into its own through those demonstrations.

I give enormous credit to the people who had the tenacity and stamina to keep grinding away at protest. I’m thinking of Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait and all of these smaller grassroots formations throughout the country that continued to organize.

When the war started, public opinion in the U.S. was substantially in its favor, around 70 percent right after the “shock and awe” invasion. But that was a soft 70 percent, with people in the middle rallying around the flag. They wanted the swift victory Bush promised, which would mean limited American casualties. But as the war bogged down, the antiwar position grew steadily more salient, and antiwar sentiment grew steadily bigger. 

Eventually, public opinion caught up with the antiwar movement. The most recent polling is from 2023 or so. Something like 60 percent of the American public, by that point, thought that the Iraq War was a mistake. A similar percentage thought the Afghanistan War, long considered the “good war,” was a mistake. And a whopping 58 percent of veterans of both deployments think that the wars were not worth fighting.

We’ll never know with any certainty the extent to which the war itself or the antiwar movement was the driver of shifts in public opinion. But in my book I cite observers who argue that the antiwar movement likely limited the duration and intensity of the war in Iraq, and therefore saved lives. That’s a highly general statement, but I think it’s a fair statement. Others note that it may have constrained the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration from pursuing military action in places like Iran and Syria, which had very much been on their agenda. 

In the book you write that, as the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq in 2003, “For months, the public had been schooled in the reasons for the invasion, and expectations for it. Americans were also versed, if to a lesser degree, in the case against the war. Events on the ground would determine which position was right.” 

I think that’s a very important point: In relation to the War on Terror, the movement created a counter-narrative about what the administration was doing and what actions were actually going to make us safer. And so when the war started going bad, there was already an explanation in place for why this was always a horrible idea and why there should be political consequences.

Yes, and this is important for understanding how public discourse and policy interrelate. There was a counter-narrative about the war coming from the movement. It said that Iraq doesn’t pose a clear and present danger, that there’s no proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, that lots of people are going to die, and that it may plunge the region into chaos. Over time, more and more observers could see the reality aligning with those warnings. 

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Rather than having to create arguments against the war from scratch, people who were growing increasingly critical could appeal to an existing body of antiwar criticisms and bring them into the public square in a new way. Eventually, you have the political class catching up with where the public already was — aligned, more or less, with the core positions of an antiwar movement. It’s a long and complex process by which dissenting ideas achieve a kind of hegemony and then compel shifts in policy. Even endless wars can end, when they lose legitimacy in the eyes of the nation waging them. That process begins at the grassroots.

Of course, the end of the war came too late to spare untold death and destruction. But the antiwar movement at least limited the damage, and that’s a real achievement.

One of the ways in which the antiwar movement had a swifter impact was in shifting the debate within the Democratic Party. You quickly go from having the leadership of the party voting in favor of the war in Iraq, to there being a complete revolt from the base. This results in the rise of figures such as antiwar candidate Howard Dean in 2004, and it leads to the eventual Democratic nominee John Kerry trying to position himself as an antiwar candidate — even though he’s not an entirely credible one. 

In the 2004 election, George W. Bush was an incumbent, wartime president who most analysts expected to coast to victory based on the massive surge of patriotism after 9/11. And instead this election, in no small part, became a referendum on the war and became an extremely close race. If just 60,000 votes in Ohio had gone the other way, Bush would have been ousted.

During the electoral season in 2004, much of the antiwar movement considered Bush’s defeat to be the quickest way to end the war. The war had already started to crash and burn, but ultimately not badly enough to turn the tide against Bush. Remarkably, he won the so-called “security vote.” Bush had gifted political operatives, notably Karl Rove, who had him run on culture war issues and turned out droves of evangelicals. Last, there was an enormous effort by the right to discredit John Kerry over his opposition to the Vietnam War. As it is, he was a kind of wishy-washy alternative on the war in Iraq, whom the antiwar movement only grudgingly backed. 

It ended up being a close election. Bush’s win was a huge disappointment, even a shock for progressives. Still, the antiwar movement found a way to write another chapter.

By late 2005, the failures of the Iraq War — along with the callousness of the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina — had turned George W. Bush into a premature lame duck president, hamstringing him for the rest of his second term. I would argue that antiwar activism played a big role in that. What is your take?

After the 2004 elections, a new wave of antiwar activism emerges, with powerful new advocates and constituencies.

With Cindy Sheehan, most famously, it had a grieving Gold Star mother asking, “For what noble cause did my son die?” She was really asking, for Bush and the nation to hear, why the war was being fought at all.

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For weeks in the summer of 2005, Cindy Sheehan and others set up Camp Casey — named after her son — near Bush’s ranch in Texas. Veterans, antiwar activists, celebrities, everyday people and important politicians all gravitated to it. It became ground zero, if you will, for the antiwar movement. And it got intense coverage: CNN, Anderson Cooper, Oprah Winfrey and all sorts of global media. It was the first time since the big demonstrations in 2003 that the antiwar movement drove the narrative. For millions of Americans, the suffering and folly of the war felt real in a new way. 

From the start, some families of 9/11 victims had opposed war, and their voices had unique power. You also had groups like Veterans for Peace working to communicate the bitter lessons of Vietnam to the American public. By 2005, they were joined by a growing mass of veterans of the Iraq War, and even active duty soldiers, reporting that American conduct had nothing to do with spreading peace and freedom and democracy. Instead, it was menacing Iraqis and turning the Iraqi people against the occupation. They had seen it themselves. 

With the activism of the military community, the antiwar movement took on a somewhat different class character. Sheehan is a kind of upper-working-class, all-American mom from small town California, and veterans typically hail from the working class. The U.S. military is a working-class institution. It is also racially a very integrated institution. So you have heartland spokespeople, speaking from a heartland perspective, denouncing a war that is chewing up their lives and falling far short of the high-minded ambitions that Bush had set for it. And I think this gives a kind of permission structure for everyday Americans, who may consider themselves conventionally patriotic, to say, “Wait a second. Who is this war helping?”

Then Hurricane Katrina hits in late August. The botched response is a massive policy failure for the Bush administration, which claimed it had things under control. The whole nation could see that was a lie. Camp Casey breaks up, with a whole contingent, led by Veterans for Peace, leaving Crawford, Texas and rushing to New Orleans. In and around the city, they distribute massive amounts of food, water and other necessities. They use satellite phones to help the Red Cross save people from rooftops. They help people get legal services and deal with insurance companies. They felt duty-bound to rally to the suffering present in America. And they absolutely made the connection of the misuse of resources to wage a foreign war that the country no longer wanted with the neglect of urgent problems at home. 

Then, in September, a pre-planned demonstration happens in Washington that very much connects conditions at home and overseas. It was in some ways the most ambitious of all the antiwar protests — three days that included lobbying, civil disobedience, art exhibits, interfaith events and on-the-ground organizing. 

By late 2005, you see a cratering of public opinion in support of the war. And the pro-war stance never again becomes the majority position. 

Soon enough, you have powerful people in Congress giving new credibility to the antiwar position. There was the famous “Murthquake,” in which John Murtha, a military veteran and initially a big supporter of the war, comes out against it. He himself said that the political class was way behind public opinion. 

And then you have the 2006 midterms, where this sentiment is translated into a major defeat for the Republicans.

Yes. The Democrats have blowout wins, functionally retaking control of both houses of Congress based on an antiwar message. After that it was really a question of when and not if the war ends, with the U.S. far short of having achieved the military and geostrategic objectives that Bush set. From 2006 on, you have the painful extrication of the United States from a quagmire of its own making. 

What I consider the most significant Congressional action after 2006 was the impaneling of the Iraq Study Group. That was a bipartisan group to diagnose what went wrong and advocate a way forward, which was ultimately some form of U.S. withdrawal. You have the eminences of the American foreign policy establishment basically calling bullshit on Bush’s signature policy. When they release their report, it’s a bestseller. It’s being sold in bookstores and airports and downloaded something like two million times. 

Reading the narrative you present in your book, and remembering all of the organizing that took place on so many different fronts, it’s startling how much of it has been utterly forgotten in the media and in the popular imagination. What do you think accounts for that?

The movement, in its own day, was woefully underreported on. I blame the legacy media and major cable outfits — almost all of the press, really — for confusing post-9/11 patriotism with an excuse to abdicate its responsibility to report on domestic dissent. For years, activists struggled to get sustained attention to their efforts.

I was part of this movement, but probably 90 percent of what I report on in my book, I had no idea was happening at the time. Part of the intent of the book is to give this big, robust, spirited, movement its due, while also understanding why knowledge about it was suppressed. 

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The larger purpose is to try to induce a broader legal, political and moral reckoning with the totality of the War on Terror. My argument is that we hear so little about the antiwar movement in part because we hear so little about the War on Terror itself. It’s as though the Iraq War never happened. It was so consequential, it was so costly in blood and treasure. But, historically speaking, it feels almost like a non-event. My college students know almost nothing about it.

I was born in 1967, and I came of age in the post-Vietnam War era. That war had a massive, lasting impact on American political life and culture. There was the “Vietnam Syndrome” that discouraged new wars. There was the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial in Washington. Every Hollywood auteur made a Vietnam War movie. It was understood that the United States had been through something big and traumatic, and that the nation needed soul-searching to examine its foreign policy, the meaning of patriotism and the appropriate uses of the military. 

The War on Terror, in its most intense phase, has not been succeeded by anything like that kind of public reflection. We badly need it. My thesis is that the War on Terror was so ugly, so confusing, so divisive, that we simply don’t know what to do with it. And when you don’t know what to do with something, the easiest thing is to ignore it. 

Of course, there are millions of people for whom forgetting isn’t a luxury: all the Iraqis who were murdered or displaced or dismembered, and all these veterans suffering from traumatic head wounds or who have missing limbs. We owe it to them to remember and learn from past mistakes.

Today, we face a unique situation in that Trump’s war in Iran is incredibly unpopular, and across political parties there is huge opposition to the U.S. getting into so-called “forever wars.” And yet, we lack any large antiwar movement that is actively raising the political cost of unpopular interventionism. 

It’s stunning. My take is that Trump doesn’t like “endless wars” for all of the obvious reasons. At the same time, he is eager to use the lethality of the American military to project his own power on the global stage. For him, stupid wars are simply wars that the United States can’t easily win. So he craves “victory.” He got very excited by the intervention in Venezuela and the initial strikes against Iran. And he thought that, with advances in military technology, we could have these quick-hit mini-victories with minimal, if not negligible, cost in American lives. 

Previous Coverage

Where’s the resistance to the Iran war?

Right now, we’re in this weird limbo with the Iran conflict. On the one hand, it’s a war frightfully outside traditional constraints on a president, which Trump disdains. He doesn’t believe in limits set by Congress, international law, the U.N., or the opinions of allies. 

At the same time, he likely recognizes that some number of U.S. casualties would be unacceptible to Americans and would sink the war. So that lesson from Iraq, from Vietnam even, he does seem to get. My fear is that low-intensity conflicts, like in Iran, may grow routine and become background noise in American political life that never quite rile the public to demand their end. The trick for Trump is to continue waging war without prohibitive costs that would trigger widespread outrage among a disapproving but disaffected public. 

I think the midterms will be a crucial test of whether disapproving public opinion can have a real price. If the Democrats win big, we may have part of the answer.

I would love it if there were a dedicated antiwar movement addressing Iran as well as possible intervention in Cuba. Personally, I don’t think we’re going to have such a movement. Barring some dramatic escalation of the war in Iran, which is still possible, I think we’re going to have a continuation of the current circumstance where dissatisfaction with the war is one of a number of grievances with Trump — along with the public corruption, inattention to issues of affordability, vanity projects, et cetera. If Republicans get routed, public opinion experts will have to sift through the data to find out how important the war has been. 

What lessons do you draw from antiwar organizing in the years after 9/11 that you think are relevant for movements today?

I think there are strategic lessons for activists today. One is that, while a movement’s message matters, the messenger matters enormously as well. When it’s a Gold Star mother, when it’s a veteran, when it’s an ex-general, when it’s a formerly pro-war politician articulating an antiwar position, the message behaves very differently than it might otherwise. Effective movements always need to think about how to present and highlight those voices that have the greatest credibility among the broader public and political class. We may bristle at this dynamic, but historically our most successful social movements have understood that.

Another takeaway is the general power of conscientious dissent to alter political conditions. If you think of Bush declaring “Mission Accomplished,” which he did on May 1, 2003, it was a great moment of bluster. But then you look at the profound turning of the American public on the War on Terror over the two years that followed. It’s a remarkable difference. That change would have been incredibly hard to predict. 

That’s part of political life and part of life more generally. We can be thoughtful, we can be strategic, we can identify goals, but we can’t ultimately know the consequences of our actions in advance. 

America and the world would have been much better off if antiwar voices had genuinely been listened to, and not belittled and ignored. People with enormous expertise and good moral instincts captured the truth of the moment. So one needs to work really hard — against the biases of the media and government alike — to make one’s truth heard. There are rewards of stamina, even when things seem bleak. Any number of issues, from global warming, to Gaza, to the abuses of immigrants, feel incredibly bleak now. But temporary setbacks shouldn’t be a reason for resignation. History has too many examples of the rewards of holding on to hope. 

This article 25 years after 9/11, how do we build a movement to stop endless wars? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

29 September | Online

Join Carbon Tracker and Transport & Environment, with guest panellists from the investor and sector community, for a 60-minute briefing on Carbon Tracker’s recently published report Trucking’s Tipping Point and an Investor Statement on zero emission freight. Drawing on the University of Exeter’s FTT model and Carbon Tracker’s market and asset data, the session sets out why heavy-truck electrification is becoming an economic rather than a regulatory decision, what that means for transition risk in the sector, and how exposed European incumbents are to faster-scaling Chinese competitors.

It will also introduce the Investor Statement on zero emission freight, coordinated by Transport & Environment, in the context of the current EU CO₂ standards review. For investors, this raises a pointed question: are automotive and industrials portfolios carrying transition risk that isn’t yet being priced in?

The post Trucking’s Tipping Point: Are Markets Underpricing the Electric-Truck Transition? appeared first on Carbon Tracker Initiative.

Amy Youngman is a legal and policy specialist at the campaigning group Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

The chair’s August Aid to Negotiations is being sold as a pragmatic way to rescue the global plastics treaty. However, the text is starting to resemble the architecture of a Paris Agreement-style framework: a patchwork of vague commitments, nationally determined action and reporting, with the hardest substantive decisions left to a future that, my experience following these negotiations tells me, would never arrive.

In March 2022, governments adopted UNEA Resolution 5/14 by consensus, launching negotiations for a legally binding international instrument to end plastic pollution. I joined the global plastics treaty process in Paris in 2023, where hopes of drafting a treaty capable of confronting one of the defining environmental and human health threats of our time were first derailed by procedural warfare.

• Aug 12, 2026 News “We’ve gone backwards” – new plastics treaty text dims hopes for production curbs During troubled talks, fossil fuel-producing nations have pushed for a global pact to tackle only plastic waste rather than reducing the size of the problem Read more
• Aug 21, 2025 Comment Why we couldn’t agree on a plastics treaty in Geneva – and what might happen next Switzerland’s lead negotiator at INC-5.2 reflects on why the talks didn’t succeed – and the options now for getting an effective agreement Read more

Five months later, in Nairobi, I watched the chair close a meeting while delegates still negotiated -allegedly to catch a flight. In 2024 and 2025, in Ottawa, Busan and Geneva, the same small group of blocking states grew bolder, cloaking opposition in language about defending the vulnerable while subsidising a system that fuels the pollution crisis. Offended by ambition, ashamed of nothing.

A year after the last formal attempt to negotiate a treaty, we are tasked with protecting a fragile process. And despite long-standing support, including legal, policy and technical expertise from my own Environmental Investigation Agency, the chair has excluded observers from the rooms where the treaty’s fate is being decided.

In that orchestrated quiet, the loudest proposal emerged: the suggestion that the instrument be a “framework convention.” The new Aid, intended to shape the late-September Heads of Delegation meeting, never uses the word “framework”. It does not need to. It strips back substantive obligations and presupposes future action.

A framework is no match for this crisis

Framework conventions outline broad principles and leave each country to develop its own plan, often delaying tough decisions to future negotiations that may never happen. This tactic is a political shell game: persuading states that want action now to give up meaningful, binding measures to reach agreement.

The Chair’s Aid arrives at a framework by subtraction rather than by proposal, which makes it harder to name and potentially easier to accept. Using the Aid, effectively the rejected text from Geneva, as a basis for the next informal meeting in Bangkok will be sold as a way to preserve a distressed UN system and reach consensus in a fractured geopolitical environment.

This is diplomacy drowning in wishful thinking that the countries fighting binding rules today will approve tougher ones tomorrow. Four years of negotiations and decades of climate diplomacy taught us that this is not a bridge to ambition – this is how ambition dies.

Modou Fall, 45, head of Senegal Propre (“Clean Senegal”) Association is covered with plastic cups and bags to raise awareness of the damage on the environment caused by waste as he cleans a beach during World Cleanup Day in Dakar, Senegal September 15, 2018. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra Modou Fall, 45, head of Senegal Propre (“Clean Senegal”) Association is covered with plastic cups and bags to raise awareness of the damage on the environment caused by waste as he cleans a beach during World Cleanup Day in Dakar, Senegal September 15, 2018. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

Production is driven by global oil, gas and chemical markets, while products and waste travel across borders. No singular government can regulate its way out of a problem created and amplified by a globalised system.

Countries have tried, and production kept rising. Now there is plastic everywhere we look, and the cost falls hardest on the people least responsible.

That failure is why there was consensus to negotiate a treaty, because this crisis requires global action. The purpose was never to list national efforts and call that progress but to create common global rules to address pollution.

The most politically sensitive issues cannot simply be postponed. How much plastic is produced, which toxic chemicals are allowed in it, which throwaway products are banned, and how future decisions are made are precisely the issues that require global answers. An instrument that refuses to negotiate them will be easier to adopt but useless on arrival.

Learn from climate governance

Supporters of a framework approach may point to the ozone treaty as proof that it can work. But the Vienna Convention succeeded for one reason: governments quickly adopted binding upstream controls on ozone-depleting substances.

Climate offers the opposite warning: a framework followed by contested, delayed and insufficient measures, while emissions keep rising.

The new chair not only deleted a direct reference to “production and consumption” and bracketed similar preambular language copied from the original mandate. The article on reporting borrows language from the Paris Agreement. Another summer of record heat, fires and floods offers a glimpse of how well that model is working.

Nothing suggests that the states blocking binding rules today will suddenly accept them tomorrow, and the exponential rise in unchecked plastic production will not pause while governments wait for courage. Blockage is not being resolved, but just pushed forward.

A framework would lock in the wrong response: unlimited upstream growth with waste management attempting to handle it downstream. No waste system can keep pace with a material engineered for endless growth. 

Keeping to 1.5C of warming is no longer possible – but we must still limit the overshoot

After four years of INC negotiations, governments know this. States must reject the false choice that the only path to agreement is an instrument too weak to solve the problem it was created to address. Compromise is part of diplomacy. Surrender is not.

And if the UN keeps pushing that choice, the countries prepared to act must be willing to pursue alternative pathways. Groups of willing governments have built effective agreements before, and existing environmental regimes can deliver new rules without inventing a new empty instrument. 

This process was never meant to find a lowest common denominator. It was to create the rules necessary to change our direction. Bangkok in September will be where the second iteration of this text is shaped. If ambitious countries do not push back, the argument about a framework convention will already be lost by default.

Negotiations cannot end with governments accepting the crisis rather than solving it. The science is clear and the damage is accelerating. The world does not need another promise to act later. It needs the treaty governments promised to deliver in 2022. 

The post The world doesn’t need a Paris Agreement for plastics appeared first on Climate Home News.

Interview series made during the GTA Assembly 2026 in Indonesia Franco Augusto and Shail Sathi conducted these conversations during the “Global Confluence on Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self-Determination (RaDASD)”, April 11-17, 2026. The recording were produced by Franco Augusto and ??, edited by Marco Andrade.

Joel Mayne is a motorcycle instructor and Desert Storm veteran who lives near the Wyoming border north of Craig, Colorado. Mayne is organizing fellow Moffat County residents to protest the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) sale of the mineral rights beneath Bakers Peak mountain, taking the fight all the way to the Interior Board of Land Appeals in Washington, D.C. In his November 2025 protest letter, Mayne said the elk migration path runs across the mountain and the peak provides high-priority habitat for mule deer and moose as well. “This region’s ecological sensitivity and biological significance demand a level of caution and stewardship consistent with both federal and state conservation mandates,” Mayne wrote. “I trust the BLM will uphold its commitment to responsible stewardship of public lands.”

Under the second Trump administration, the BLM has offered 287,765 acres in Colorado for oil and gas drilling, and is slated to offer more than 400,000 acres of land in Colorado by the planned December 2026 lease sale.

Mayne is not alone in his opposition to the BLM’s leasing plans in Colorado, as environmental groups, state wildlife officials, and local governments are protesting an unprecedented wave of public land oil and gas lease sales across the state. “We are seeing roadless areas leased, lands with wilderness characteristics, we are seeing places designated as outstanding waters leased, and it is hard to keep track,” said Peter Hart, legal director of the advocacy group Wilderness Workshop. “We are seeing these offered in every lease sale.”

Quick hits Trump is quietly planning to majorly change how national parks are run

NOTUS | Wes Siler’s Substack

Forest Service could open much more of Colorado’s 11 million acres of public land to motorized vehicles

Denver Post

Developers eye Native Nations, Tribal communities for new data center projects

Daily Montanan

Oil and gas lease sales meet local opposition in Colorado communities

Colorado Sun

Feds seek to ‘streamline’ Arctic oil permitting, ending environmental reviews of individual projects

Alaska Beacon

New Mexico town of 50 packs gym as residents push county to ban uranium drilling

The Cool Down

Data center planned on Nevada public land is temporarily halted

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Trump signs order to remove protections for wolves

USA Today | Politico Pro | The Land Desk

Quote of the day

The folks who want to push forward their agenda of sales, extraction, development, and divestment don’t want us unified. They know they can’t win when we’re standing arm in arm. They know they can’t give away our public lands when we’re a concerted bloc. They can’t fight us all.”

—Jonathon Klein, editor-in-chief of RideApart

Picture This

@usinterior

You know what they say about small predators? Big personalities.

The American marten is a quick, agile member of the weasel family that makes its home in forests across northern North America. Don’t let that adorable face fool you. This little hunter is built to climb, chase and absolutely thrive in the woods.

Photo by @jacobwfrank

Featured image: Photo credit: BLM Colorado, Flickr

The post Oil and gas lease sales run into local opposition in Colorado appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Twenty-five years ago, in the ashes of the September 11th attacks, the United States launched what it called the "Global War on Terror." While the country was afraid and vulnerable, neoconservatives in the Bush administration, like then-Vice President Dick Cheney, saw an opening for expanding empire and U.S. hegemony by selling the country and its allies a story of revenge and "freedom." What they ushered in, however, was a brutal invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq that spanned over two decades, both of which had nothing to do with 9/11. For the past 25 years, the "Global War on Terror" has been used by the United States to wreak havoc in the SWANA region with an endless cycle of violence that has cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

CODEPINK's Medea Benjamin reflects: "As CODEPINK, we went to Iraq 25 years ago to meet the people our government was preparing to bomb. What haunts me today is not only the devastation of the invasion, but how little accountability there has been for those who lied us into war—and how those same lies are now recycled to justify the attack on Iran."

The loss of human life, injuries, environmental damage, and destroyed infrastructure is staggering. A Brown University report shows over 900,000 killed directly, with an estimated 3.6 to 3.8 million more dying indirectly, reminding us of the profound human cost and the importance of resisting this cycle of violence. This brings the total death toll to at least 4.5 to 4.7 million lives. Over 38 million people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria have been displaced in the past 25 years. That is tens of millions of lives forever changed by this decades-long war waged by the United States.

The "War on Terror" was never about keeping the citizens of the United States safe. It was about the unchecked growth of power, the expansion of the U.S. empire, the destabilization of the region, and the enrichment of the war economy. The “War on Terror” was a vehicle to use fear to dismantle civil liberties, such as with the PATRIOT Act, paving the way for the surveillance state that tracks our every move today. It was about stoking anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hatred as a means to divide regular working people, a playbook that politicians and complicit media are continuing to pull from to wage war on countries like Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.

At the start of this war, we watched in horror as feminist organizations were cynically trotted out to manufacture consent for the invasion of Afghanistan, wrapping brutal colonialism in the language of women's rights. In November, First Lady Laura Bush had begun framing the war as a mission to "free Afghan women,” followed by leaders from Feminist Majority Foundation petitioning the State Department and other senior administration for the "establishment of Democracy" in Afghanistan. They asked the Bush administration to do "everything in their power to restore human rights of Afghan women." In its 2002 spring edition, Ms. Magazine called the invasion a "coalition of hope."

The idea that war liberates women was a shameful lie then, and it is a shameful lie now, as it has been used to justify the genocide in Gaza after October 7, 2023, as well as a false provocation for the war on Iran.

The utter lack of accountability for what was actually a "Global War of Terror" has paved the way for a Pentagon budget ballooning toward a grotesque $1.5 trillion, and a Homeland Security apparatus that now stalks our streets and executes people in broad daylight, as well as invasive surveillance cameras that spy on the public without cause. And then there's Guantanamo Bay, a torture black site and a monument to lawlessness, still standing open inside a country we are threatening with another invasion. The same impunity that has shielded the architects of the Global War on Terror now emboldens the war criminals behind the genocide in Gaza and the Minab School massacre in Iran.

The Global War of Terror did not end. There are currently around 2,500 service members still stationed in Iraq, as well as U.S. access to select military installations, such as Al-Harir Air Base, in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region. Outside of its physical presence, the war of terror became entrenched in the infrastructure of our daily lives.

Ending this reign of violence doesn't just mean pulling troops out of a country or closing a few bases; it means dismantling the entire architecture built by the Bush administration that every administration has since expanded. That means cutting the Pentagon budget and reallocating those billions to healthcare, housing, climate justice, and reparations. It means abolishing ICE and DHS. It also means holding those accountable for countless war crimes committed, from the architects of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to the torturers in black sites, to the media who shamefully gave cover for it all. It is time to end the impunity and finally see those behind it all face justice.

Like in every war, nobody wins except war criminals and billionaires. We now live in a culture of war, violence, aggression, and dehumanization. The reign of terror cost an estimated 8 trillion dollars, yet the world is no safer today than it was on 9/11. The citizens of the United States not only paid for this with their tax dollars but also live in the constant state of anxiety it has created.

Twenty-five years is an entire generation lost to endless war. Today, we mourn the dead, we honor those who resisted and continue to resist, and we recommit to building a world that invests in life, not death.

What does the Pacific Ocean have to do with the electricity you need to charge your phone?

Quite a lot, actually.

Scientists are monitoring the development of El Niño, a natural climate pattern that begins with unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific. It might seem a long way from South Africa, and it is, but changes in the Pacific can influence weather patterns thousands of kilometres away.

For Southern Africa, that can mean hotter and drier conditions, putting more pressure on water supplies and agriculture while increasing the risk of fires.

In the Western Cape, officials are already warning that the months ahead could bring higher temperatures, increased fire risk and greater pressure on water resources.

We don’t often connect what is happening with the climate to what is happening in our energy system. But we should. Our electricity system doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It operates in a world that is getting hotter, drier and more extreme. That changes things.

More extreme heat can drive up electricity demand as households and businesses try to keep cool. Fires, floods and severe storms can damage power lines, substations and other infrastructure used to distribute electricity. Water shortages can create additional challenges for parts of the electricity system that depend on reliable water supplies.

These impacts can have very real consequences. Damaged infrastructure can leave people without power. Rising demand can put an already stretched system under even more pressure. Repairs and replacements can increase costs. When the grid is under pressure, electricity becomes scarcer and more expensive.

When we connect the weather and electricity, one thing becomes clear: climate change is changing the conditions in which our electricity system has to operate.

South Africa’s electricity system isn’t exactly starting from a position of strength. We’ve spent years dealing with loadshedding, load reduction, breakdowns and expensive diesel backup, all of which have made the system unreliable, unaffordable and inaccessible.

Unpredictable weather caused by climate change adds another layer to these challenges.

At the same time, South Africa is in the middle of a major reform of its electricity system. We’re talking about electricity market reform, new generation, transmission infrastructure, electricity pricing, the future of Eskom, the role of renewable energy, and how to make electricity more affordable and accessible.

These decisions will shape our energy future. That means we can’t just ask, “Will the lights stay on?” We also need to ask, “Will the energy system we’re building be resilient to climate change?”

We may not have all the answers yet. But the current reforms give us an opportunity to think beyond simply producing more electricity and start thinking about the kind of energy future we want and need.

One that is reliable.

One that people can afford.

One that everyone can access.

One that can withstand a changing climate.

 

 

Written by: Boitumelo Masipa for 350.org

Sources:

Western Cape warns of El Niño risks as summer heat, fires and water pressure loom 

Transforming our energy system to ensure reliable and affordable electricity for all | South African Government 

The post Can South Africa’s Electricity System Weather What’s Coming? appeared first on 350.

To many visitors a mangrove forest appears as a stretch of trees standing between land and sea. But if you walk through the same forest with a local fisher returning with the tide, a honey collector searching for wild hives, or a boatman who has spent a lifetime navigating its creeks, another landscape comes into view. What seems to be a single landscape is understood as many. Diverse names distinguish places where fish breed, honey is gathered, storm surges lose their force, or tides behave differently.

Across the eastern and western seaboards in India, coastal communities have developed distinct names for tidal forests that reflect ecological function as much as geography. In Bengal, Sundarban evokes a forest historically associated with the sundari tree and its life-sustaining tidal ecology. Along the Godavari–Krishna delta, the Telugu expression mada vanalu refers to brackish tidal forests that nurture fisheries and soften the impact of cyclones. Tamil and Malayali people use terms built around kandal to distinguish salt-tolerant coastal habitats, while related expressions across the Konkan and Gujarat coast identify creek-edge forests, honey-collecting areas, and other ecosystems.

These names are far more than local expressions. They reflect generations of close observation about how the forest functions and how people have learned to live with it.

Much of this vocabulary is quietly disappearing. In administration, education, and even conservation practice, diverse coastal landscapes are increasingly gathered under a single term, mangroves. The forest remains, but the distinctions that once helped people recognize its ecological diversity begin to fade.

Conservation has become notably good at measuring environmental change. Forest cover, species recovery, and habitat loss are monitored with increasing precision. Still, an irony remains. Even as technologies sharpen the view of nature, the ecological languages through which Indigenous peoples have long interpreted these ecosystems and processes are becoming less visible.

Before ecosystems disappear, the ability to read them often begins to erode.

Conservation routinely monitors species richness and habitat extent but rarely asks whether the vocabulary needed to recognize those habitats is itself surviving. That is conservation’s overlooked blind spot. Protecting biodiversity is not only about safeguarding species and habitats; it also requires sustaining the languages that enable people to understand the many distinctions within an ecosystem in the first place. Conservation cannot fully succeed while the ecological languages that make landscapes intelligible continue to disappear.

When Conservation Loses Resolution

Ecologists classify habitats by their vegetation, hydrology, and species, while people who have lived in these landscapes for generations have long relied on another system of classification — language. Their vocabularies did not evolve to describe nature in the abstract. They emerged from everyday interactions. In tidal forests people learn to distinguish places shaped by tides, soils, fisheries, storms, and seasons, allow them to understand differences that matter.

The problem arises when these locally evolved classifications are absorbed into broader, standardized terminology. A common vocabulary undoubtedly makes administration, education, and scientific communication easier. Yet it also carries an unintended consequence: Ecosystems begin to appear simpler than they really are.

India’s mangrove coast illustrates this shift.

These are not simply regional names but ecolexicons that condense generations of environmental observation into everyday language.

As this mosaic of ecological vocabularies gives way to the single label mangroves, something more than linguistic diversity is lost. It’s like reducing the resolution of a satellite image: The coastline remains visible, but its finer ecological distinctions begin to disappear.

This process may be understood as linguistic flattening — not merely a dilution of linguistic richness and a loss of words, but also the gradual loss of ecological resolution. Long before a language falls silent, it can lose the nuances that once helped people read landscapes.

Language as Conservation Infrastructure

Linguistic flattening also weakens the systems that have long governed how people interact with ecosystems.

Language is often treated as a medium of communication, yet in many Indigenous societies it functions as something more fundamental. It carries practical rules, ethical obligations, and ecological boundaries that are learned not from policy manuals but through everyday speech, stories, and customary practice. In this sense, language is part of conservation infrastructure.

The Māori understanding of harakeke (New Zealand flax) offers a striking example. The central shoot, or rito, represents the child, while the surrounding leaves symbolize parents and grandparents. This is more than a metaphor. The vocabulary itself shapes harvesting practices: Inner shoots are never cut, because removing them threatens the life of the plant. Only the outer leaves are taken, allowing regeneration to continue. Even the flowering stalks (kōrari) are managed with care so that nectar remains available for native birds, supporting pollination and the wider ecosystem.

This appears to be a biocultural expression but in practice is a sophisticated system for managing relationships between people and nature. The language does not simply describe ecological relationships; it instructs people how to behave within them.

Similar patterns are found across Indigenous societies, where names, stories, and customary expressions regulate seasonal harvesting, identify sensitive habitats, and define responsibilities towards land and water.

Conservation recognizes the value of Indigenous knowledge, yet it often overlooks the languages through which that knowledge is organized, remembered, and transmitted. Protecting place-based knowledge while allowing the languages that sustain it to disappear is rather like preserving a library after removing its catalogue. The books may still exist, but their meaning becomes increasingly difficult to recover.

Vanishing Languages, Vanishing Environmental Archives

Modern conservation depends heavily on data. Satellite imagery tracks forest loss, climate models project future change, and ecological surveys measure species abundance with precision. Yet most of these records span only a few decades. They rarely capture and interpret the much longer histories through which communities have understood environmental changes.

That longer record often survives in language. Across Indigenous societies, names for plants, animals, winds, tides, and seasons are not arbitrary labels but accumulated observations refined over generations. They preserve knowledge of when rivers shift their course, when particular fish arrive, how flowering responds to rainfall, which plants indicate groundwater, or where storms repeatedly reshape the coast. Much of this information was never written down because it did not need to be. It remained alive in speech, memory, and everyday practice.

When a language slips away, the environmental archive becomes fragmented, and we lose part of nature’s archive. Individual observations may still be recorded by researchers, but the wider system that connected them — linking species, habitats, seasons, and human experience — is gradually lost.

Conservation then faces an unusual paradox. We invest heavily in collecting new ecological data while allowing centuries of carefully accumulated environmental knowledge to disappear unnoticed.

Seen in this light, language loss is not simply a cultural concern. It also represents the quiet erosion of one of conservation’s oldest and least recognized ways of understanding nature. Protecting biodiversity therefore also means sustaining the living archives that have preserved ecological memory across generations.

Conservation Literacy Beyond Species Lists

Conservation governance has made important progress globally in recognizing Indigenous peoples as partners in biodiversity protection. The Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for respecting and applying traditional knowledge in biodiversity governance, while IPBES has repeatedly shown that indigenous and local knowledge strengthens conservation outcomes. Likewise, UNESCO’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032) emphasizes that these languages sustain knowledge systems shaped through long relationships with place.

Yet an important gap remains. Conservation frameworks celebrate traditional knowledge but rarely ask how that knowledge survives across generations. Knowledge does not exist independently of the language through which it is observed, evolved, organized, and passed from one generation to the next. A conservation strategy that values Indigenous knowledge while overlooking Indigenous languages risks protecting the product while allowing the process that continually renews it to fade.

This calls for a broader understanding of conservation literacy. Alongside species inventories, habitat maps, and ecological monitoring, conservation should also recognize the value of ecolexicons, the place-based vocabularies that enable Indigenous communities to distinguish habitats, seasonal change, and ecological processes.

Supporting community-led language documentation, multilingual ecological education, and regional diversity of Indigenous vocabularies are therefore not simply a cultural exercise. It strengthens the knowledge infrastructure of future generations to interpret and care for the landscapes they inherit.

Reading Nature Before It Falls Silent

Biodiversity conservation has long measured success in hectares restored, species recovered, and habitat protected. These remain essential benchmarks. Yet this understanding argues that another measure deserves attention: whether the languages that enable communities to understand, interpret and care for those landscapes are also surviving.

A forest is more than the trees it contains. It is also the vocabulary through which generations have learned to read its tides, seasons, species, and silences.

The next frontier in conservation is not simply protecting more land but protecting the many ways in which people understand that land. Every ecological language that survives preserves a way of noticing what others might overlook while their disappearance reduces the world’s ability to see nature in all its complexity.

Conservation cannot claim to protect the living world if it allows the languages that have long interpreted that world to disappear unheard.

Long before a forest falls silent, its words often do.

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

The Extinction of Languages Is an Environmental Issue

The post Conservation’s Blind Spot: Why Language Matters for Biodiversity appeared first on The Revelator.

This briefing note focuses on trade and its effects on peasantry and food sovereignty in Africa.

The post Briefing Note on Africa Trade Issues: Impacts of Trade Liberalisation on Peasants appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Despite numerous complaints, the government of Daniel Noboa signed a Free Trade Agreement with Canada, even though the public had not been made aware of the final text of the agreement.

The post Ecuador: Trade Agreement with Canada Threatens Indigenous Peoples’ Rights appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

By several measures, Chinese industry is becoming less dependent on fossil fuels, according to a new analysis.

Read more on E360 →

By Cyrus Malama, 2026 Africa Zero Waste Academy Participant

When I boarded my flight on July 26, 2026, I was more than just a Junior Councillor; I was a young Zambian with a vital question: How can we transform the waste problem in our communities into a solution? This question drove me to Accra, Ghana, for the Africa Zero Waste Academy 2026, hosted by the Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO) and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA). 

My purpose was not only to learn about waste management but also to explore culture, leadership, and Africa’s future.

Learning the Principles in Kpong 

The first phase of the Academy took place at Ensign Global University in Kpong, Eastern Region, from July 27 to 30. Our days were filled with energy and learning as we discussed:

• Climate action and its significance for African youth
• Zero waste principles—understanding that waste is not an endpoint but a starting point for jobs, composting, and clean energy
• Communication and advocacy—recognising that as young leaders, we must express our ideas clearly to effect change
• The Conference of the Parties (COP)—exploring the role of youth in global climate conversations

However, the best lessons awaited us outside the classroom.

Learning from the Ground in Accra

On July 30, we moved to Accra and settled in at the AH Hotel in East Legon. For the next three days, Ghana taught me through its hands, its people, and its stories. 

At Kpone Landfill, I witnessed the harsh reality of waste—the mountains, the smoke, and the individuals working under difficult conditions. It reminded me of home and reinforced the urgency of our mission.

At the launch of the Federation of Informal Sector Waste Pickers Association, I met heroes—men and women who collect and recycle daily, often without recognition. Seeing them honoured made me proud and reminded me how important it is to include everyone in creating solutions.

At the Multi-Facility Recovery Centre, I witnessed circularity in action: one person’s waste became another person’s resource. At Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, I paused to reflect. Surrounded by Ghana’s history, I thought about leadership. Nkrumah fought for Africa’s independence, and now, our generation is fighting for Africa’s climate future.

Between site visits, I laughed, shared meals, and exchanged stories with youth from across the region.  We learned new greetings, tasted different foods, and realised that while waste challenges may vary across Africa, the solutions all begin with people. This cultural exchange was as powerful as the training.

Cyrus and other participants during a session Coming Home with Commitment  

On August 2, I said goodbye to Accra and landed in Lusaka on August 3 at 3:00 AM, where my family welcomed me. Although I was exhausted, my heart was full. 

The Africa Zero Waste Academy was transformative. It changed my view of waste—from a problem to something with economic and environmental value. Most importantly, I returned committed to advocating for inclusive, community-driven zero-waste initiatives in Zambia. I aim to apply what I learned in Ghana to make a difference in Lusaka.

I returned with:

• Practical knowledge of zero waste systems
• Enhanced advocacy and communication skills
• A network of African youth committed to developing climate solutions

Most importantly, I returned with a commitment: to advocate for inclusive, community-driven zero- waste initiatives in Zambia. I aim to apply what I learned in Ghana to make a difference in Lusaka. I am deeply grateful to GAYO, GAIA, and everyone who supported me in representing Zambia in Ghana. Thank you for investing in young leaders. This experience was not just a trip; it was a turning point.

Writer’s Bio

Cyrus Malama is a Junior Councillor based in Lusaka, Zambia. His work centres on child rights, climate action, community development, and issues affecting young people. He believes that because the future belongs to youth, leaders must actively listen to young voices and take action to protect every child.

The post A Zambian Youth’s Journey to the Africa Zero Waste Academy 2026 first appeared on GAIA.

Probiotics are a popular dietary supplement, promising to boost people’s health by populating their guts with healthy microbes.

People trying to help coral endure heatwaves might soon be reaching for something similar. Infusions of a special probiotic cocktail helped coral stay healthier as they stewed in overheated water in the Red Sea near Saudi Arabia, scientists reported last week in Cell Reports. Even a mix of dead microbes, a so-called postbiotic, proved beneficial.

While scientists have seen promising lab results that such microbial tweaks might help ailing corals, this is the first report from real world conditions: wild coral in the open ocean during a real underwater heatwave.

“When an innovative idea like this actually works—particularly under field conditions—we are positively surprised,” said Erika Santoro, a postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. “The most exciting takeaway is that this study opens a new avenue for coral microbial therapies.”

People might picture coral as rigid, brightly colored underwater sculptures. But they are so much more. This “skeleton” is just the mineral home to colonies of thousands of tiny coral polyps, identical clones resembling little sea anemones. Then there are the symbiotic algae that live inside the polyps, providing much of the coral’s energy through photosynthesis. Finally, there’s a stew of microbes living in an around the coral.

Scientists are experimenting with each of these kinds of organisms in a desperate bid to help coral endure the underwater heatwaves proliferating across the world. Without help, most corals are expected to be killed by the end of the century, as the oceans absorb much of the excess heat generated by global warming. That would lay waste to one of the most productive and diverse marine ecosystems on Earth.

 

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Researchers are altering coral genetics in hopes of boosting heat tolerance by measures such as crossbreeding coral from different parts of the world. They are working to find and breed strains of algae that will do the same, in some cases accelerating evolution in overheated laboratory waters. They are also studying the microbial communities surrounding coral, in search of mixtures that might help coral stay healthy.

In this new research, Santoro and colleagues tested two different microbial mixtures collected from Red Sea corals and identified as likely candidates based on their genetic profiles and performance in earlier experiments. In 2022, during a prolonged underwater heatwave in the Red Sea that pushed temperatures to nearly 32° Celsius (90° Fahrenheit), the scientists dosed colonies of spiky Acropora valida in a reef near KAUST with one of five mixtures. Two got different probiotics. Two received dead “postbiotic” combinations of the same blends. The last got a salt water placebo with no microbes.

Over 15 days, the scientists watched for changes in color that indicated the coral might be ejecting their algal companions, a response to heat stress. They also measured how efficiently the algae were using sunlight for photosynthesis.

The results were encouraging. While they saw little difference in color changes, coral treated with the placebo and one postbiotic experienced a big drop in their photosynthetic performance. By contrast, corals that got either probiotic or one of the postbiotics showed no decline in photosynthesis over the 15 days.

A survey of the microbial population around the corals at the end of the experiment showed that the communities in the healthier corals looked different than in the sicklier ones. That difference was also reflected in chemistry tied to their metabolic activity.

The success of one of the postbiotics was “particularly exciting,” said Santoro. That’s because dead microbes could be more practical to use on a large scale, because they can be stored more easily since they aren’t alive.

A single 15-day experiment is hardly evidence of a silver bullet. There likely won’t be a single measure that gives coral the key to surviving, and no one is talking of measures that could rescue coral if climate change continues on its current trajectory.

Take this as a glimmer of good news amid an ocean of bad news for coral.

Santoro, et. al. “Probiotic and postbiotic treatment improves coral health and promotes specific metabolic and microbiome changes in situ during a heatwave.” Cell Reports. Sept. 3, 2026.

Image courtesy of Coral Probiotics Village