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In the first half of this year, salmon farmers on the Australian island of Tasmania detonated nearly 1,800 underwater explosives to scare away fur seals intent on nabbing fish, government figures show. 

Read more on E360 →

Wetland plants grown on the surface of wastewater treatment lagoons can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from these water bodies by more than one-quarter, according to a new study. These so-called “floating wetlands” may be an elegant solution that works with existing infrastructure to address a growing emissions hotspot.

Wastewater treatment is responsible for 1.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As economic development brings better sanitation to more of the world’s population, this climate impact is also increasing. “Wastewater treatment solves one environmental problem by cleaning dirty water, but creates another by emitting greenhouse gases,” says study team member Lukas Schuster, who studies nature-based climate solutions at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Floating wetlands, in which native reeds and other marsh plants are planted on buoyant artificial structures with their roots dangling in the water, are becoming a widespread tool for soaking up excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus in wastewater lagoons. These open-air ponds temporarily store treated water before it is released into adjacent waterways, reused for irrigation, or undergoes further treatment to be recycled into drinking water.

Researchers have suspected that floating wetlands might also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the surface of wastewater lagoons. In the first large-scale, real-world test of this hunch, Schuster and his collaborators constructed a floating wetland the size of one-and-a-half tennis courts on portion of a wastewater lagoon in southeastern Australia. They monitored water quality and greenhouse gas emissions from the surface of the water for two years.

The floating wetlands reduced carbon dioxide emissions off the surface of the lagoon by up to 36%, methane up to 66%, and nitrous oxide by up to 18% compared to an adjacent portion of the lagoon without a floating wetland, the researchers found. Overall greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by up to 31%.

 

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“One of the biggest surprises was how quickly greenhouse gas emissions declined after the floating wetland was installed,” Schuster says. The researchers expected that emissions would only be dampened after nutrients were removed from the water. In fact, greenhouse gas emissions declines were seen four to seven months into the experiment, but nutrient reductions only emerged after about a year.

It’s not yet clear exactly how the plants work their magic. “We suspect that interactions between plant roots, microbial communities, and greenhouse gas production and consumption may be important, but targeted measurements are needed to test these mechanisms,” says Schuster.

And there are still some kinks to be worked out. Trimming the plants—necessary to promote regrowth and maximize nutrient uptake—tends to trigger spikes of methane release, so the researchers want to figure out how to minimize that result. The harvested material, which amounted to nearly one metric ton in the current study, also needs to be converted into some form of longer-term carbon storage to make sure the system truly benefits the climate (the researchers suggest biochar).

Schuster and his team are now looking at adding floating wetlands to farm ponds. “These systems receive substantial inputs of nutrients and organic matter from livestock and can have high greenhouse gas emissions relative to their size,” Schuster says. The new study will help assess whether floating wetlands are a climate solution that could be applied to various types of aquatic systems, he says.

Sources: Schuster L. et al. “Constructed floating wetlands cut greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater lagoons.” Journal of Environmental Management 2026.

Image: Courtesy of Lukas Schuster.

 

Agroecology and Regenerative Communities Resilience Networks Among Youth, Schools, Farmers, and Institutions

 

Saturday, October 24, 2026, from 9:30 AM to 7:00 PM
Chiostro degli Agostiniani
Via Umberto I, 5, Bracciano (RM)

A day of exchange between those who farm, teach, study and administer this area, together with guests who carry out similar work in other Italian regions and in other countries.

An event dedicated to ecological education and the role of youth, to biodiversity as the foundation of territorial resilience, and to the question that runs through all our work: how do we build community-led processes capable of bringing together farmers, schools, institutions, and citizens.

In recent years, Navdanya International has advanced this path at the local, national, and international levels through initiatives such as Terrae Vivae, Officine Municipali, the educational project Ecological ReGeneration: Citizenship and Participation, co-financed by the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security within the framework of the National Strategy for Sustainable Development, and the FSL (School-Work Training) educational pathways supported by Ecologia – Italian Buddhist Union: concrete opportunities for knowledge, exchange, and participation that connect learning to experience and awareness to the possibility of action.

In the cloister, exhibition of school projects and artistic works born from ecoliteracy pathways, local producers’ market, and seed exchange. In the afternoon, a plenary session and a convivial moment featuring local products are scheduled.

For further information: info@navdanyainternational.org

AI data centre growth presents an opportunity for Ontario to build the electricity system it needs for the future. With the right policies, private investment from this emerging industry can help bring new clean power, storage, and grid...

Headline News:

• “Final Turbine Installed At Revolution Wind” • Ørsted has installed the final turbine at the 704-MW Revolution Wind array off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island. The 65-turbine wind farm began exporting power to the grid in March of this year, and Ørsted plans on reaching full commercial operation later this year. [reNews]

Revolution Wind ( Ørsted image)

• “Kallas Urges EU Countries To Bolster Red Sea Mission As Houthi Threats Mount” • EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has asked EU countries to strengthen the Aspides mission in the Red Sea, as threats from Houthis to navigation in the Bab el-Mandeb increase. The strait is crucial for trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. [Euronews]
• “Tackling Contrails Could Avoid Ten Years of Aviation-Related Climate Warming” • Contrails left by planes reflect heat back to the Earth, adding to global warming at a similar level to the CO₂ emissions of aviation. A report by Klima Consulting finds that preventing their formation could delay aviation-related global warming by ten years. [CleanTechnica]
• “Nvidia Chip-Use Emissions Match That Of A Russian State Coal Producer, Report Says” • Emissions from the use of Nvidia’s chips could equal those of burning coal sold by Russian Coal, a Russian state-owned company, a report says. Nvidia’s supply chain emissions have risen by 725% since 2020, an increase of about 9.4 million tonnes of CO₂. [Euronews]
• “Donald Trump Loses In Court, Solar Energy Funds To Be Reinstated” • A Trump-appointed judge on the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island ruled against the Trump regime’s attempt to withhold $7 billion of funding for projects for solar energy. The funding had been for the Solar For All program. The Sierra Club commented. [CleanTechnica]

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

Methane (the chief component of natural gas) often leaks or is lost somewhere between where it is drilled and where we burn it. This is not only a waste of a resource, but methane is also a highly potent greenhouse gas. Methane emissions can be...

During the military dictatorships, Mejía faced political persecution because of her trade-union and organizational activities. She died on August 29, 2026, at the age of 77.

The post Bolivia: The National Federation of Indigenous Women (Bartolina Sisa) remembers the life and legacy of Lucila Mejía Soto appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Three education unions have now set up strike votes for November. The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario announced on September 18 that their 84,000 teacher...

The post OECTA, ETFO and CUPE-OSBCU set strike votes for November first appeared on Spring.

Amtrak and Canal Edge are building a modern maintenance facility to support passenger rail in Chicago and across the Midwest. Read more.

Beneath the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, and the deserts in between, lies a massive energy source — and it isn’t a fossil fuel. The smashing and separating of tectonic plates that produced many of the West’s most dramatic landscapes have also allowed heat from the planet’s core to rise nearly to the surface. Now, an explosion of new geothermal energy companies wants to drill into the Earth and capture that heat for clean electricity. These companies have new technologies to better reach the heat, and a massive new customer base: energy-hungry data centers.

Tech giants seeking to build data centers while meeting their climate goals see geothermal as a promising option because it can produce consistent power around the clock, unlike solar and wind. Meta and Google have signed agreements with geothermal start-ups in New Mexico and Utah, including a deal announced this month in which Google agreed to buy 396 megawatts from Fervo’s soon-to-come-online Cape Station facility in southwest Utah, enough to power around 430,000 households. The federal government also received record per-acre bids from developers seeking to build geothermal on public lands in the Mountain West this year. New geothermal technology borrowed from the oil and gas industry, along with California’s renewable-energy goals, have helped drive the boom, but experts say demand from tech companies is a major factor. 

“A lot of these companies have clean power goals, though they are not firm goals when other factors are on the line,” said Wilson Ricks, who manages the electricity program at the climate-focused nonprofit Clean Air Task Force. “Constant power, the kind that geothermal can provide, is really key to supplying data center growth as cleanly as possible, and specifically for providing an alternative to just building lots of gas turbines.”

These new geothermal projects are located in dry Western states because of their geology, but they face an ironic practical challenge: Most new geothermal technologies need water to produce power. If they’re serving data centers, that water use comes on top of the water that data centers pipe in to prevent their servers from overheating. Meeting Western data centers’ demand with geothermal may require careful planning, given the region’s limited water resources, and innovations to make geothermal wells less thirsty. 

Geothermal’s tech and business boom is all about water. Traditional geothermal power works by punching a well into a super-hot pocket of underground water and bringing that water to the surface, like an artificial hot spring. The water either becomes steam or turns another fluid into steam, which spins a turbine to generate electricity. The water is then sent back into the ground to heat up again.

This method requires the perfect combination of heat and naturally occurring water to function, so it’s limited to a few small areas of the map. Newer, “next-generation” geothermal technologies try to get around this problem by bringing their own water to dry, hot rocks and circulating it. The amount of water developers have to introduce, however, can vary widely depending on the method.

A company called XGS Energy is trying to provide geothermal energy that requires nearly no water to New Mexico, which is currently suffering a decades-long drought. XGS uses “closed loop” technology that cycles water through the Earth in a continuous pipe, transferring the Earth’s heat to that water through a special material it layers onto the pipe, and then heating a secondary fluid that vaporizes and runs a turbine. The system recycles the same water over and over again without losing it to evaporation or seepage. In 2025, Meta agreed to support XGS’s project to produce 150 megawatts of power at a yet unspecified location in New Mexico.

XGS said its water savings are what sets it apart from other geothermal systems, and that its simple design yields benefits in terms of scalability, operating cost, and performance predictability.

“For geothermal to broadly scale across the United States, communities need geothermal systems that actively conserve water,” XGS said in a statement. “This design enables us to develop in more locations across the West, and consistently win competitive contracts.”

A cyclist rides across the dry bed of the Rio Grande River in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in July.
Susan Montoya Bryan / AP

But XGS’s type of water-efficient technology may not be well suited to produce power on the scale of data centers’ power needs, according to Roland Horne, who leads the geothermal program at Stanford University. Closed-loop systems generally produce less power per well, and their wells have shorter lifespans than with other approaches, Horne said. Unless technology improves or tech companies absorb the higher costs, water-free geothermal may struggle to produce large amounts of power economically. 

A more popular approach is “enhanced geothermal,” which uses oil-and-gas-style fracking to circulate water through hot rock, manufacturing the kind of underground reservoir traditional geothermal relies on. Inevitably, this method involves losing some water underground. Enhanced geothermal can use less water than natural gas power, which uses it for cooling and steam generation, but the comparison varies by project.

At Fervo’s Project Red site in Nevada — the first enhanced geothermal project to produce commercial power — operators have reported losing 30 percent of the water they inject underground. Fervo says losses will be much lower at its Cape Station project in Utah, which is contracted to supply power to Google, because of its different design; but even at a 5 percent loss rate, large-scale deployment could consume substantial amounts of water. 

For instance, the software company Oracle recently proposed building up to 2 gigawatts of new renewable energy generation, possibly including geothermal, in New Mexico. (The announcement came in response to criticism over the climate impacts of a gas-powered data center Oracle is constructing that could become one of the state’s largest greenhouse gas emitters.) Rough calculations by Kristie McLin, principal investigator at the government geothermal laboratory Utah FORGE, suggest that supplying those 2 gigawatts entirely with enhanced geothermal could consume 42 million gallons of water per day — about half of Albuquerque’s average daily water demand.

“This is a real problem that the industry absolutely needs to try to figure out,” said McLin. “When it’s additive and all your other water sources are already allocated to other uses, it can be challenging to find the volume of water you need to start up and sustain enhanced geothermal.”

Protesters gather outside the New Mexico Environment Department to voice opposition to the Project Jupiter data center during a demonstration in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 21.
Susan Montoya Bryan / AP

Fervo isn’t using potable water at Cape Station; it uses salty brackish groundwater. But in a landscape where drought has made any water source valuable and potentially hard to find — and amid public outcry over data centers’ own water usage — a reliance on constant available water supplies could add another hurdle to geothermal’s spread. 

Water is one of several uncertainties, including transmission access, geology, and drilling costs, that can scare investors away from geothermal projects. The unusual combination of oil-and-gas-style exploration and electric generation has already made it hard to attract capital in some cases. Data center interest has eased that strain, but not solved it, according to Mike O’Connor, director of the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium, a nonprofit research organization. O’Connor is researching new funding mechanisms for geothermal to overcome some of these challenges.

Meanwhile, Utah FORGE researchers, whose facility is located next to Cape Station, are testing ways to reduce water losses, including changing how wells are spaced and how water is injected and recovered.

“Utah FORGE is going to demonstrate these different opportunities to reduce water losses and see what performance looks like long term,” McLin said.

The geothermal industry’s ability to answer these questions doesn’t just matter for data centers. California needs clean firm power like geothermal if it wants to meet its goal of 100 percent clean electricity sources by 2045. California already gets more than half its electricity from renewables like solar and wind, but it needs reliable power that can fill the gaps when those sources and batteries aren’t operating. The state’s utility regulator has required power providers to procure a gigawatt of clean firm power by 2026, prompting a California utility to promise to buy 320 megawatts of geothermal power from Cape Station.

“There was an argument for geothermal power before data centers, and there will be an argument for geothermal power after these data centers are built,” said O’Connor.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A clean energy source is buried under the desert, but it takes water to use it on Sep 22, 2026.

There are many ways to enjoy the outdoors, but thrill-seekers visiting the nation’s national forests often turn to motorized recreation. They might ride ATVs along dirt trails, snowmobile down winding tracks, or go off-roading in 4x4s. The United States Forest Service’s approach to all such forms of recreation on trails can be summed up in four words: closed unless designated open. 

Unless a trail is explicitly designated as open to off-highway vehicles, such as side-by-sides and dirt bikes, it can only be used for nonmotorized recreation. Most national forests have travel-management plans that outline when a trail is open for nonmotorized use like mountain biking, horseback riding, or hiking, and when it’s open to off-highway vehicles. These plans tend to be exhaustive and list which types of motorized or nonmotorized access are allowed on every trail, two-track, and road. The strict guidelines are a result of a Forest Service policy called the travel-management rule. 

But the Trump administration wants to turn the current rule on its head. In late August, the Forest Service announced its plan to revise the rule so that trails are open unless designated closed. It would mean forest managers would be expected to prioritize motorized access on service roads, trails, and even backcountry airfields. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service is a part, has said that the move will increase recreation access and “simplify regulatory requirements.” The change is being opposed by sportsmen, backcountry horsemen, conservation organizations, and nonmotorized recreation groups. They say opening up all Forest Service trails to motorized access could have devastating consequences for the ecosystems and wildlife that rely on these lands. Healthy, intact forest ecosystems are also critical for sequestering carbon in a warming world.

Hillary Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, a public lands advocacy organization, said everyone who uses forest lands, from recreationists and ranchers with grazing leases to those in the timber industry, relies on the clarity provided by travel-management plans. The Forest Service’s formal announcement to revise the rule is “vague,” “somewhat poorly written,” and “difficult to follow,” Eisen said. Without clear guidelines in place, she fears motorized users could end up anywhere on the landscape. 

“Any sort of feature that you could interpret to be a trail or a road would be open to every type of use, unless closed,” she said. “That could mean if you can get your side-by-side on there, have at it.” 

Read Next Trump administration advances plan to open national forests to development Ellis Juhlin

Chris Edgington, a watershed project manager with Montana Trout Unlimited, witnessed firsthand the environmental damage that can happen from off-highway vehicle use on the Middle Fork of the Judith River, which runs through the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana.

Prior to 2023, there were more than 80 entrances and 27 shallow spots along a 6-mile stretch of the river, where various types of vehicles, including cars and side-by-sides, crossed. As these vehicles cut across, they caused erosion and an influx of sediment that coats rocks along the riverbed, suppressing insect life and the ability for fish to successfully spawn. By 2020, the sediment runoff had gotten so bad it was choking out nearly all the fish, Edgington said. 

“The fish population was estimated to be less than 10 percent of what we’d expect of a river that size and character,” Edgington said. “The river had become over-widened and shallow, creating unusual riffles, and the river couldn’t manage its sediment load.” 

So Edgington brought together a diverse coalition of groups, including the off-highway vehicle community and the Great Falls Trail Bike Riders Association, environmental groups, and federal and local government agencies to address the issue. They rebuilt 1,000 feet of riverbank, reduced the number of crossings by 80 percent, and built a new section of the off-highway vehicle and jeep trail so the area could still be used for recreation, without harming the river. It’s been a huge success, Edgington says, and the work is already paying off.

“Fish numbers are up,” he explained. “The work we did to remove the sediment is restoring water quality and the fish population in that incredible backcountry setting.”

The vehicles crossing the river weren’t breaking any rules; the Forest Service had designated the area open for motorized recreation, but the number of stream crossings degraded the health of the river and the threatened species that lived there, including the cutthroat trout. “I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest,” Edgington said. “But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive to use this equipment.” 

The travel-management plan, written by the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, recognized this impact to the river and the need to reroute the road out of the river corridor. Parts of the Middle Fork are protected as a Wilderness Study Area and an Inventoried Roadless Area. Edgington said that because of those protections and the travel-management plan, it was worth investing in this restoration; he knew the conservation work would last. 

Before and after photos of restoration work on the Middle Fork of the Judith River. Courtesy of Montana Trout Unlimited

He said a full repeal of the travel-management rule would create more problems than it intends to solve. A change of this magnitude, he said, could be a devastating blow to river health and restoration projects like the Middle Fork Judith. 

“Whether that’s off-highway vehicles in the river or motorcycles on horse trails, it’s going to create a lot of conflict and confusion and animosity between different user groups.”

The process to change a federal rule is a long one. The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the plan to revise the rule, which is the first step in the process, through September 23.  

These proposed revisions to travel management aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They are one of several widespread policy changes that could take effect across the 193 million acres of land the Forest Service manages, including more than 19 million acres in Montana alone. Last month, just before the travel management revision, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the USDA was moving forward with rescinding the roadless rule, a policy that prevents road building and commercial logging on 45 million acres of Forest Service land. The Forest Service and other scientists have conducted extensive research showing how roads fragment habitat, disturb wildlife, introduce noxious weeds, and increase human-caused wildfires. In the first round of public comment, 99 percent of commenters opposed removing roadless protections. 

The short public comment periods have received public backlash. On September 11, the Forest Service announced it was adding 15 days to the comment period for the roadless rule; it is now open until October 6. In a statement about the decision, the agency wrote the extension was “to provide interested persons additional time to review the proposed rule and supporting materials.” 

Read Next The Trump administration wants to take an ax to the East’s last great forests Grist staff

Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, said the roadless rule and travel-management rule help uphold the purpose of public lands.

“The intent in Congress is that they support current generations,” she said. “That they are also available for future generations, that’s the sustained yield, conservation piece of it. And the regulations we have that connect to public lands all tie in to that in one way or another.” 

The roadless rule, she said, ensures intact habitat remains for clean water and wildlife, but the travel-management rule affects far more people every time they visit a national forest.  

“Anytime you go anywhere on national forest land outside of wilderness, the travel-management rule is part of your experience,” she said. “And your experience is not an accident.”

Supporters of these changes, like Kerry White, who runs the Bozeman-based nonprofit Citizens for Balanced Use, say making trails open unless designated closed would create more opportunities for recreation. Citizens for Balanced Use is an organization that advocates for motorized access on public lands. 

“Without roads and trails, people can’t get out in the woods,” said White, who represented a section of Bozeman in the state legislature from 2013 to 2021. This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.” 

Karla Gagby, above, rides through the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwestern Montana on July Fourth. Gagby cannot hike because of a lung injury.
Gary Friedman / Getty Images

White said these new changes will allow for better access and clarity for visitors on ATVs, e-bikes, and other motorized vehicles. “By making everything open unless posted closed,” he said, “it puts a bit more onus on the Forest Service to do due diligence and, if a trail is closed, make sure those signs are posted and maintained and kept in place.”

White also believes these changes won’t have negative environmental impacts. “People are freaking out [that] we’ll have strip malls and open-pit mining in these areas, and that’s simply not the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of regulation that has to be done to do any kind of projects in these areas.”

But Eisen with Wild Montana said these changes are occurring alongside the Trump administration’s rollback of a myriad of the nation’s bedrock environmental protections, including changes to the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in,” she said. “It’s more about, ‘How can I make a quick buck off of this for my benefit?’ I think it gets back into that interest in privatizing.”

To Edgington, these changes are a concerning pile-on. “Many of these rules were created with a thoughtful balance of forest use,” he said. “And there are probably areas where we could improve these rules, but a full repeal would be devastating to fish and wildlife resources beyond our comprehension.” 

He spent years overseeing restoration work and conservation for some of Montana’s most beloved trout fisheries. “Cold, clean water is a finite resource,” he said, “and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.”

While Edgington is proud of the work he and partners did to restore the Middle Fork of the Judith River, he doesn’t know how work like that happens without policies like the roadless and travel-management rules.

“This project was funded by three federal sources,” Edgington said. “If protections are possibly lifted and those investments are diminished? It is pretty counterintuitive to the responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump wants to open nearly all national forest trails to dirt bikes and ATVs on Sep 22, 2026.

A landowner-led wind farm is seeking state and federal environmental approvals, but could struggle to proceed if a hotly contested transmission line doesn't go ahead.

The post Huge landowner-led wind project seeks green tick, despite looming threat to transmission link appeared first on Renew Economy.

What helps communities thrive? Could one key be respected, benevolent women who lead without dominating?

Bioregional learning opens up the design pathways for systemic change to emerge. And it does so with life at the center of every major decision that needs to be made.

Most activities driving climate change rely on technology, so we naturally turn to new technologies for solutions. But what if more technology worsens the problem? This article explains why trees, soil, and biodiversity may be our true lifelines.

Within the framework of the Mesoamerican Youth Camp "Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero," we, the youth of the countryside, the forests, the coasts, and the rivers of the Mesoamerican region, raise our firm and unified voice...

The post CLOC Mesoamerican Youth Camp “Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero”: For Land, Territory, and Food Sovereignty appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Local TV promised to platform grassroots politics and marginal voices, but weak regulation and a broken business model let the sector thin out. Andy Brain surveys the survivors and asks how communities might reclaim local video

The post The people’s airwaves: saving local TV appeared first on Red Pepper.

Canada is not on track to meet its 2030 climate target. The latest federal data shows national emissions are just 10.3 percent below 2005 levels, which is the weakest performance in the G7, and the Prime Minister has acknowledged the 2030 goal is out...

This primer introduces solar radiation modification (SRM) to Canadian environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and policymakers, situating the topic in the context of accelerating climate timelines, Canada's own emissions shortfall, and...

With parts of the feminist movement drifting towards personal empowerment and green actors emphasising cost of living issues, few voices remain connecting the dots between ecological and feminist struggles. Yet studies show that rising temperatures increase domestic violence, and women are more heavily impacted by food scarcity during draughts and floods. How to build counterpower at times of gender and climate backlash? Ros Taylor spoke with the author of Feminism for a World on Fire. 

When I meet Natasha Walter towards the end of August, Britain’s arid summer is at last beginning to ebb. A few drops of rain have fallen on the yellow, desiccated parks, but not enough to revive them. In the past eight weeks, north London has had just two millimetres of rain.

But the drought and wildfires barely impinge on the political round. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, belatedly sends a text message to Britons urging them not to light unnecessary fires. His new secretary for energy security and net zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, will open up a North Sea gas field for drilling. Her Conservative shadow, Andrew Bowie, declares himself the “energy security secretary”, dropping any reference to net zero.

As temperature records are broken, the fight seems to have gone out of Britain’s environmental movement. Perhaps they expected the proof of global heating and multiple energy crises to concentrate politicians’ minds on the green transition. If so, they were very wrong. Instead, the talk now is almost exclusively of adaptation and how to generate enough electricity for air conditioning. Even the Green Party now mainly focuses on the cost of living and overheated workplaces. This has helped them in the polls, but it has done little to keep up the pressure to phase out fossil fuels.

Climate of repression

For activists like Walter, who was arrested in 2019 at a climate protest, the sense of powerlessness is distressing. Even as the Labour party made progress on decarbonising the grid and expanded wind and solar energy, it continued to crack down hard on environmental protesters. Judges imposed long prison sentences on people blocking roads and prevented them from mentioning their motives in court, so as not to sway a jury. In 2024, nine people who were arrested on their way to a planned action at Heathrow Airport spent ten months on remand before they appeared in court. The harsh sentences have significantly reduced climate protests in the UK. The government has also designated the pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, meaning that anyone who expresses support for it is liable to be prosecuted for a criminal offence.

“I feel so angry about it,” Walter says. “I really feel that there was a possibility when the first wave of climate activism was happening. You know, around 2018, a lot of people were taking to the streets. It was disruptive, [though] it wasn’t terribly disruptive to most people’s everyday lives. And I think it brought a lot of people together. It coalesced a sort of sense of urgency, and the community around that urgency.”

“And I think that some mainstream political parties on the left or towards the left could have done a lot more to connect with that energy, to learn from why people were coming out, and actually to support that energy and work with those desires to find ways forward. I find it really so baffling. And I feel so angry with this Labour government.”

She admits some of the actions “weren’t brilliantly planned or executed” – Just Stop Oil activists throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery in 2022, for instance – “but that’s OK. These sorts of movements are messy. But I just find it insane, the level of repression, and how little mainstream liberals and conservatives, left and right, have stepped up to this.”

Time for ecofeminism

Walter came relatively late to climate activism. In The New Feminism (1998), she argued that women needed to stop policing each other’s behaviour and focus on securing political power and equality. Living Dolls (2010) tackled the sexualisation of culture and what it meant for women. Her latest book, Feminism for a World on Fire, imagines a feminism that acknowledges what the climate crisis means for women, especially but not exclusively in the Global South. Feminism, she argues, has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political. She wrote Feminism for a World on Fire partly out of a sense of frustration that the environmental movement in the UK seemed to have no space for ecofeminism.

“When I was in Extinction Rebellion, I was really struggling to get women together to talk about feminist ideas in the environmental movement.” There was an emphasis on care, she says, and feminist principles guided the movement, but somehow it did not quite come together. Yet, for Walter, the movements are meaningless without each other. “Environmentalism without feminism is a patriarchy in the forest, but the women’s movement without environmentalism is a women’s centre on a dead planet.”

Bringing the two movements together is all the more important when mainstream feminism has become a marketable commodity to which the big tech companies pay lip service, and where women must climb over each other to reach the top. She says “this rhetoric of Lean In, ‘You go girl, give zero fucks, keep moving on, keep moving up’” reached an apogee in 2025, when Amazon’s chairman Jeff Bezos launched six women into sub-orbit to promote his Blue Origin space programme.

Feminism has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political.

“The interests of capitalism feed off that kind of self-empowerment. It suits capitalism. You can sell women more goods, more stuff with the message that you can liberate yourself just through shopping, through constant makeovers and renewal… I was quite shocked when I started using Instagram by how many women that I thought of as feminists are engaged there in just selling stuff.”

Platforms have enabled some women to establish vast personal brands, but have also fed a form of apolitical narcissism. In the past decade, Walter says, the women’s movement has atomised, with “less and less empathy and solidarity between women from different parts of the world and different backgrounds.”

As director of the charity Women for Refugee Women, she found herself increasingly frustrated by performative, celebrity-driven events that felt very distant from the lives of ordinary women. At the same time, charities working with vulnerable women became more professional. There is more transparency and clearer guidance about how to act, but something has been lost. In the 1980s, one activist told her, women who reported domestic abuse would be supported, driven to a refuge, and hugged. “Now I see my colleagues taking that same call. They are polite. They go through the safeguarding checklist. They give her another number to call…” Grassroots work is vital because it is “where women find the tools for survival”.

In the UK, the Rochdale child sexual abuse scandal, where girls were raped by groups of men of mainly Pakistani origin between the 1990s and 2010s, has become a rallying point for the far-right Reform UK and Restore parties. They claim that the failure to prosecute the rapists for years shows that feminists did not protect girls for fear of being seen as racist. Walter, however, argues that the scandal persisted because the police did not listen to women working in frontline organisations.

She has spent time with women’s groups in the Middle East, and Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water. Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water.

Domestic violence rises during climate crises, 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature.

“When societies are stressed, men are often taking out that stress and that precarity on women … It’s here, it’s now. You know, women’s crops are already failing because of the droughts and then the cyclones in Malawi. The girls living in the areas affected by floods in Bangladesh, they’re already missing out on school, they’re already being married off early. Their future is gone.”

Involvement at all levels

How to conclude a book that sets out the scale of the crisis and the misery to come? Walter admits it was difficult. She feels the least satisfactory sections of her previous two books about feminism were her efforts to direct people to organisations that were doing good work. Instead, “We need to have more faith in the idea that we can get involved in our community,” and organise to achieve a particular goal.

How to conclude a book that sets out the scale of the crisis and the misery to come? Walter admits it was difficult. She feels the least satisfactory sections of her previous two books about feminism were her efforts to direct people to organisations that were doing good work. Instead, “We need to have more faith in the idea that we can get involved in our community,” and organise to achieve a particular goal.

She is drawn to local activism, partly as an antidote to the sense of powerlessness that has seized the environmental movement, but also as an alternative to the endless scroll of digital “engagement”, a “relentless roll call of pain” – and because, as 1980s activists knew, only by meeting people face-to-face do we come to understand the messy complexity of their lives.

Walter acknowledges that the kinds of frustrations and compromises involved in unglamorous, local activism are by no means easy. “I’m not romanticising it, but I think it’s the only way to rebuild in the face of what we’re facing now.” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book End Times Fascism offers a similar vision for local activism in the face of Big Tech dominance and the rise of the far right.

I ask Walter why so few women, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez excepted, are leading the charge against Trumpian politics and environmental destruction. Zohran Mamdani is the great hope of socialists in the US, and the figureheads of the British left are men: Zack Polanski leads the Greens in England and Wales, while Labour has never had a female leader in its entire history. The European far right, by contrast, has cultivated several charismatic women leaders, including Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, and Marine Le Pen.

“I think women who try and emerge on the left as leaders just feel too disruptive,” Walter says. “They break the mould of what our societies want to see in women too much, and they’re not valued. They face such a barrage of misogyny from their enemies. It just makes them unviable as leaders, as we saw with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. I’m not saying they were particularly charismatic or progressive leaders. Very problematic, I think, in many ways.” Both the former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and Finland’s Sanna Marin left frontline politics before middle age also because of intense backlash.

But the fact that female leadership is lacking should not deter women from getting involved. “We need more women climate leaders. But I also think we need more good followership. I think we need, as women, to get involved in stuff.”

“And you can make a change by contributing whatever you contribute. I really like telling stories and drawing out threads. But I also like doing the other stuff, just standing at the stalls at the eco-fair or going along and helping in the community garden or with the drop-in at the women’s centre.”

Stepping up

An earlier generation of radical feminists might observe that this is what middle-class British women like Walter have done for centuries – volunteered in their communities, unpaid and largely unnoticed, meeting the needs that the state will not. Is this a flight from catastrophe into the private sphere, a 21st-century version of Voltaire’s il faut cultiver notre jardin? But Walter’s feminism is anchored in the city, in the marches and demonstrations she still regularly attends. “I’m not much of a hippy. I’m living quite a normal urban life. People see ecofeminism in a maybe more radical and hippy box than that, and I’d like to say no, this is for everyone.”

Walter’s feminism is alive to the cruelties that emerge when people compete for scarce resources. As a charity leader, she saw “such divisions between women, hardening borders, that dehumanisation that creeps into people’s rhetoric”. In the UK, where groups of black-clad, balaclava-wearing men have been gathering to block roads and demand Britain “stop the boats”, the sense of fracture is acute. The Left observes bitterly that when climate protesters – some of them elderly women – lay down in the street, they were put in jail: the men of the far right, on the other hand, have been allowed to disperse without being arrested.

Towards the end of the book, Walter recounts seeing on her phone images of “the body of a female fighter being thrown from a building” in north-east Syria, where she had visited a group of women planning a better future. She tries to apply the lessons she learnt there about female solidarity in London, too. “When I feel really lost about the way forward it’s often the women around me who keep me going,” she writes. None of them “only spend their time asking other people to do things… They use their own talents and courage, and put them to work.”