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Editor's note: Conservation along the Platte River is a collaborative effort, and Rowe Sanctuary works closely with many partners to work towards our habitat and landscape goals.  This month, we...

Nebraska is the home of Arbor Day, established in 1874 to promote tree-planting; an effort that has since spread across the country with great success.  It is ironic, then, land managers along...

On Monday and Tuesday, Paris hosted the G7 Finance Ministers’ meeting, bringing together finance ministers and central bank governors from some of the world’s most powerful economies, alongside counterparts from Brazil, India, Kenya, South Korea, Ukraine, Syria, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But behind the diplomatic pageantry,and despite the G7’s call for innovative financial instruments to urgently address overlapping crises,French host Roland Lescure squandered a major opportunity.

While fossil fuel companies raked in billions in profits in the first quarter of 2026 amid the South-West Asia conflict, campaigners at 350.org condemn the French G7 presidency’s glaring inaction on windfall and excess profits taxes targeting the oil and gas industry.

Fanny Petitbon, 350 France Country Manager, said:

“France has built its G7 presidency on the bold promise to use this forum as a lever to reinforce economic security in times of crisis and to respond to the legitimate concerns of citizens. But fine words ring hollow. When it comes to taxing the obscene profits recently made by oil and gas corporations, Paris chose complete silence. Not a single word appeared in the final communiqué.

Once again, the interests of a powerful minority are being protected. Companies like TotalEnergies, which boast of their so-called foresight while doing little more than speculating on war and human suffering, have cashed in billions,while families around the world pay the price at the pump and on their energy bills.

The G7’s initiative to expand insurance coverage for people and countries experiencing extreme weather events is welcome. But without turning off the fossil fuel tap and forcing the biggest polluters to foot the bill, climate finance risks becoming little more than taxpayers cleaning up a mess that oil giants are still being paid to create.

President Macron has positioned himself as a global leader on climate and economic justice. Yet this silence tells a very different story. Is this really the legacy he wants to leave in his final G7 presidency? The Leaders' Summit, to be held in Évian from June 15 to 17, is the last chance to course-correct and finally choose people over profit.”

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Does electromagnetic radiation from wind turbines pose a threat to human health?

Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from wind turbines are well below international exposure safety limits.

Wind turbines produce EMFs mainly from their electrical equipment. Multiple studies have found their strength to be lower than everyday exposure to many common household appliances, such as microwaves and vacuum cleaners.  

In a field study at a Canadian wind farm, average magnetic fields at the base of operating turbines were around 0.1 microtesla (µT) and dropped to background levels within 2 meters. Turbines under high wind and low wind conditions emitted equivalent levels of radiation. Another 2020 study found wind turbines produced under 0.1 µT at 4 meters distance.

For comparison, an electric can opener measures about 60 µT at 6 inches but 0.2 µT at 4 feet. International guidelines set a safety reference level of 100 µT at 50 Hz, far above the turbine measurements reported in field studies.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.

Sources

Environmental Health Measuring electromagnetic fields (EMF) around wind turbines in Canada: is there a human health concern?

Radiation Protection Dosimetry EXTREMELY LOW FREQUENCY ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD EXPOSURE MEASUREMENT IN THE VICINITY OF WIND TURBINES

World Health Organization Radiation: Electromagnetic fields

Frontiers in Human Health Wind Turbines and Human Health

Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles

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About fact briefs published on Gigafact

Fact briefs are short, credibly sourced summaries that offer "yes/no" answers in response to claims found online. They rely on publicly available, often primary source data and documents. Fact briefs are created by contributors to Gigafact — a nonprofit project looking to expand participation in fact-checking and protect the democratic process. See all of our published fact briefs here.

This article Automatic draft registration undoes a victory decades in the making was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Young people in the U.S. have won a major unsung victory: Starting in December, they will no longer be required to register or report their addresses for a possible military draft. But Congress has given the agency tasked with “readiness” for a draft a second chance to find a way to sign young men up for a future draft involuntarily and “automatically.”

To understand how this victory was won and how young people and their allies can fight the plan for “automatic” registration, we need to look at 45 years of forgotten history of draft registration and resistance during a time when there was no active draft.

In December 2025, Congress finally voted to end the requirement in effect since 1980 for male U.S. citizens and residents to register with the agency that would administer any military draft — the Selective Service System, or SSS — within 30 days of their 18th birthday and report to the SSS within 10 days of any change of address until their 26th birthday.

This is an extraordinary and largely unrecognized victory for pervasive noncompliance with the registration law. This spontaneous, silent resistance has been sustained by generations of young people for 45 years, during which there has been essentially no visible or organized anti-draft movement. 

But Congress remains so unwilling to admit to failure in the face of popular resistance, and so intent on preserving the fiction of readiness to activate a draft, that it included a provision in this year’s annual “defense” bill, at the urging of the SSS, that gives the SSS a second chance. The agency is instructed to try to register potential draftees “automatically” by using information from other federal agencies. 

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The SSS has already drafted regulations for “automatic” registration that are currently under review by the White House. The change in the law will take effect in December 2026 unless Congress takes action before then to repeal the Military Selective Service Act. 

“Automatic” registration will be a fiasco. Mining data collected by other federal agencies for other purposes won’t produce a list of young men and their mailing addresses that’s any more accurate or complete than self-registration. But it will enable continued planning for endless, unlimited wars without the need to consider whether enough Americans will be willing to fight them, and will create a database that can be weaponized against vulnerable young people. 

Because only men are subject to the draft, the SSS must track gender, and because the agency interprets “male” to mean “as assigned at birth” for the purposes of the draft, it may seek to obtain information on the sex assigned at birth of all young people. And since U.S. residents are subject to being drafted regardless of citizenship, the SSS will have a mandate to try to compile a list of the names and addresses of all male immigrants ages 18-25, including undocumented immigrants. Those lists will likely be available to ICE, DOGE and other agencies.

Why, though, is the SSS getting a do-over from Congress despite such abject failure? And if there’s been such widespread resistance to draft registration, why haven’t we heard about it? 

The power of silent resistance

The dynamics of draft resistance and anti-draft activism since 1980 follow a pattern that was articulated perhaps most clearly by the late James C. Scott. Scott was a political scientist and ethnographer who backed into anarchism through his fieldwork on the forms of subaltern resistance to authority and oppression. Scott situated his work within the “subaltern studies” movement, which seeks to center and uplift the voices, actions and interests of those who make up the underclasses in structures of domination and subordination.

Throughout his work on the forms of resistance, Scott took it for granted — as have many others — that resistance is a phenomenon defined by actions, not by ideology or organizational affiliation. As Joan Baez described it while introducing her band at Woodstock, “We … are members of the Resistance, which simply means that you have to turn your [draft] card in, or put ketchup on it and eat it, or burn it or flush it or whatever you want. … So, that’s what it takes to be in the Resistance.”

Acts of resistance are sometimes open, organized and accompanied by protest — but not always. One of Scott’s key points is that too narrow a focus on elite organizations and open defiance can blind us to the underlying phenomenon of quiet resistance, its subaltern character, and its power. 

“Quiet, unassuming, quotidian insubordination, because it flies below the archival radar, waves no banners, has no officeholders, writes no manifestos, and has no permanent organizations, escapes notice,” Scott notes in “Two Cheers for Anarchism”. “[But] more regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by … the silent, dogged resistance … of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”

Scott describes as typical a symbiosis between a small, visible, vocal, organized, largely elite “movement” and a vast, mostly silent, largely subaltern phenomenon of mass resistance. And he defends the meaning and significance of “self-serving” acts of resistance, such as desertion from the military or draft “evasion,” that may have no explicitly political intent.

How this played out with draft registration is a case study in the effectiveness of quiet, passive direct action, and of the need for organized solidarity and allyship to realize the full potential of that otherwise invisible undercurrent of insubordination.

The response to  draft registration

When President Carter proposed resuming draft registration in 1980, the response was an immediate wave of public protest. There were rallies on campuses across the country within days, and tens of thousands of people took part in marches against the draft in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco just two months later — a remarkably rapid mobilization in the pre-Internet era.

For understandable reasons, only a few thousand young people publicly announced that they wouldn’t register. (I was among them.)

Protesters mobilize against the draft and draft registration in San Francisco on March 22, 1980. (Chris Booth for Resistance News)

The erroneous impressions this gave were that 1) opposition to the draft could be equated with protest or complaint, and 2) most of those who opposed the draft would, despite their objections, comply with the law.

The reality, though, is that most of those who didn’t want to be drafted stayed home. They didn’t protest or publicly confess to a crime, but neither did they sign up for the draft. Most remained uncommitted, taking a wait-and-see attitude toward whether they would register. 

There were many exceptions, but the broad pattern was what Scott has described as typical: Those with the least financial or social capital to lose were generally those least likely to register. Those with more privilege were more likely to decide that they could afford to take the risk of publicly refusing. The press looked for visible anti-draft protest — and found it, initially, in the early 1980s — among the most privileged potential draftees at elite colleges. But few observers looked for, noticed, or recognized the significance of the passive resistance of much larger numbers of marginalized youth.

Registration began in July 1980. At the start of the school year that September, The Boston Globe — in the first independent attempt to collect compliance statistics — reported that perhaps a million men, a quarter of the initial cohort, hadn’t registered. By June 1982, even the SSS admitted that at least half a million potential draftees had failed to register.

Faced with an unexpected crisis of noncompliance, the Department of Justice had little choice but to make examples of a few of those whose public statements could be used to prove in court that our refusal to register was “knowing and willful,” as the law required. One DOJ strategist expressed the hope that “an initial round of well-publicized prosecutions” might “yield sufficient registrations to maintain the credibility of the system”. 

That didn’t happen. I was one of just 20 non-registrants who were prosecuted in the early 1980s (perhaps 1 percent of those who had publicly announced our refusal to register). Those of the 20 who didn’t register after being indicted were all convicted, and nine of us were eventually imprisoned. But these show trials called attention to the extent of the resistance and the inability of the government to enforce the law against those who stayed home, stayed quiet, and didn’t publicly confess to criminal intent.

These trials were highly publicized, as the government wanted to achieve maximum intimidation. But the legal issue that dominated press coverage for the next several years was whether the government could constitutionally prosecute only those who had publicized their refusal to register.

In 1985 the Supreme Court, in a poorly-reasoned decision over a dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall, upheld this selective prosecution scheme. For the government, this was a legal victory but a practical loss. The silent majority of non-registrants got the message loud and clear that there was safety in silence as well as safety in numbers. The risk was in speaking out, not in skipping registration.

Decades of noncompliance

After this brief and counterproductive experiment, the DOJ abandoned any attempt to enforce the registration law against even the most flagrant violators. Nobody has been prosecuted since 1986, and nobody could be prosecuted without proof that their noncompliance is “knowing and willful.” The SSS sends a hundred thousand or more threatening letters every year to names and addresses obtained from data brokers and others sources. As decades passed, however, these empty threats were less and less effective.

In the aftermath of the test cases, fewer and fewer people either registered with the SSS or spoke publicly about their refusal. This was a rational response to the government’s pattern of selective prosecution. Organized opposition to the registration requirement also faded away. Why would activists prioritize organizing against a law that isn’t being enforced?

The public and most of those who could have been allies to the resistance wrongly interpreted the disappearance of public proclamations of resistance and visible anti-draft protests as indicating that the vast majority of potential draftees had been cowed into compliance.

This misimpression was heightened by measures to require registration with the SSS as a condition of eligibility for federal student loans (a requirement that was quietly repealed in 2020) and, in some states, driver’s licenses.

These laws were less effective than most people thought, especially because not all states have enacted laws like this. “California does not share driver’s license [information with the Selective Service System] — so, hey, move to California and you’re basically exempted from being drafted,” as a former director of the SSS testified in 2019. 

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Nevertheless, these laws helped prop up the myth of compliance as the norm, even while compliance continued to fall. By 2023, fewer than 40 percent of men turning 18 had registered by the end of the year, much less within 30 days of their 18th birthday. “Absolutely nobody” tells the SSS when they move, as the chair of the House Armed Services Committee noted at a hearing in 2021.

The failure of draft registration was obvious to anyone who scrutinized the program. Yet in the absence of a movement shouting, “The emperor has no clothes!”, it took another 40 years for Congress to seriously consider admitting failure. It was only a misguided push to expand draft registration to include women as well as men (prioritizing a false notion of “equality” in war over real equality in peace and freedom) that drew enough attention to the issue to prompt Congress to seriously consider action. The bipartisan Selective Service Repeal Act to abolish the SSS was introduced in 2019 and reintroduced in each session of Congress since.

In response to this existential threat to their own jobs, the staff of the SSS — not the Pentagon or anyone in Congress — came up with the idea of trying to “automatically” register potential draftees.

Congress approved the SSS proposal without any hearings or debate. Most Republicans and most Democrats in Congress want the draft available as a “fallback” when their party is in power, just as most of them want to keep nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal of threats. The availability of a draft enables planning for larger, longer wars, without having to consider whether enough people will be willing to fight them. This, of course, is why it would be so significant a constraint on “forever” wars to take the draft off the table as an option for any president.

Stopping “automatic” registration

Well-meaning but ageist older people often conceptualize anti-draft activism as protecting weak and vulnerable young people against being drafted. In reality, it’s the young people on whom the government depends to fight its wars who hold the power. They are wielding their power of noncooperation to protect us all against military adventurism. We should thank them for their service.

Previous Coverage

Uncovering Americans’ long history of hostility to conscription

More concretely, if we want to be allies to young people in their struggle against conscription and war and for youth liberation, we should work to expose the dangers of “automatic” draft registration and its inevitable failure.

In the event of a draft, the government will have the same difficulty enforcing induction orders that it has had enforcing registration. But if young people are registered involuntarily, their unwillingness to fight old people’s wars won’t become visible until after the country is militarily overcommitted and a draft is activated. That’s a dangerous scenario, even if you support U.S. plans for wars and a draft.  

“Automatic” draft registration is a bad idea, and it won’t work. But it’s not yet a done deal. We still have a chance to get Congress to repeal the draft law before the attempt at “automatic” registration begins in December. On May 14, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Sens. Ron Paul of Kentucky and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming reintroduced the Selective Service Repeal Act.

A diverse coalition of anti-war, religious, feminist and civil liberties organizations has already announced its opposition to “automatic” registration and its support for the Selective Service Repeal Act. Much more educational outreach and organizing is needed to get this issue on the agenda and into the demands of antiwar organizations and activists.

Young people have done the heavy lifting. They have brought us to the brink of victory over the draft and the threat it poses to everyone around the world against whom draftees would be weaponized. Our task as older allies is to amplify their continued resistance, whether it takes public or quiet forms, and to pressure Congress to include the Selective Service Repeal Act in this year’s defense bill.

This article Automatic draft registration undoes a victory decades in the making was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

“Who remembers the four rules?” I ask, holding up my ready-to-count fist to the group of toddlers, preschoolers, and parents gathered for this week's Nature Playgroup. “Scoop them!” one...

By: Green Knowledge Foundation

Every morning in Nigeria’s Benin City, before traffic builds up and markets awaken, faint plumes of smoke rise from heaps of waste scattered across open spaces. In Jos, plastic bags cling to drainage channels after heavy rains. On the outskirts of Abuja, government-approved dumpsites quietly ferment under the sun. In Lagos, Africa’s most populous city, towering landfills on the city’s fringes swell daily as trucks unload tons of mixed waste, while clogged canals and lagoons trap floating debris beneath the humid coastal air.

What appears to be ordinary waste is, in reality, an invisible climate threat: Methane.

Across Nigeria’s rapidly growing cities, unmanaged organic waste is releasing one of the most potent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Multi-Solving Action to Methane Reduction in Nigeria (MAMRN) Project was conceived in response to this urgent environmental challenge.

When organic waste, food scraps, green waste, and agricultural residues decompose in oxygen-deprived conditions, such as open dumpsites, they produce methane (CH₄). Methane is not just another greenhouse gas. It is over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term, responsible for nearly half of the global warming already experienced, and the second-most-important anthropogenic greenhouse gas after Carbon dioxide (CO₂).

Municipal solid waste landfills globally account for approximately 11% of anthropogenic methane emissions. For every tonne of waste sent to landfill, an estimated 50–100 kg of methane may be released; equivalent to roughly 1,610 kg of Carbon dioxide (CO₂) per tonne due to methane’s high global warming potential.

Nigeria generates over 32 million tons of municipal solid waste annually, yet only about 20–30% is formally collected. More than 90% of waste in many developing regions ends up in open dumpsites, waterways, unused land, or is openly burned. 

Nigeria’s waste composition is particularly significant: approximately 50–60% of municipal solid waste is organic. This means that a large proportion of waste entering dumpsites is actively generating methane. In 2021, methane accounted for 44.6% of Nigeria’s total greenhouse gas emissions, making it one of the country’s most critical climate pollutants.

With Nigeria’s population estimated at over 223 million and projected to rise significantly by 2050, urban centres such as Benin City, Jos, Lagos, and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) are expanding rapidly. Urbanisation, rising consumption patterns, and limited infrastructure have widened the gap between waste generation and effective management.

Globally, about 2.01 billion metric tonnes of municipal solid waste are produced annually, and this is expected to increase by 70% by 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is projected to reach 269 million tonnes of waste per year by 2030. Nigeria mirrors this trajectory.

Nigeria is already experiencing the effects of climate change, including increased flooding and stormwater runoff, coastal erosion and sea-level rise, rising temperatures and heat waves, agricultural productivity losses, food insecurity and water scarcity, and increased disease outbreaks. Open dumpsites worsen these impacts. During heavy rainfall, flooding dislodges waste, spreading pollutants into homes, schools, and water bodies. Methane buildup within dumpsites also presents explosion hazards.

Rather than treating waste as a burden, the MAMRN project reimagines it as a resource. Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) are being established to divert organic waste from dumpsites, process it into compost, sort recyclables such as plastics, glass, paper, and e-waste, integrate and strengthen the role of waste pickers, and reduce methane emissions at the source. Each facility is initially designed to manage approximately 260 tons of waste annually.

By converting organic waste into compost, the project improves soil health, reduces dependence on petroleum-based fertilisers, supports climate-smart agriculture, and minimises methane emissions from decomposition. Farmers are trained through the My Zero Waste Farm Project, with at least 20 farmers per state serving as trainers to expand adoption across communities. Organic waste is also processed through Black Soldier Fly (BSF) farming to produce high-protein animal feed, organic fertiliser, and new livelihood opportunities. This model strengthens local food systems while reducing methane emissions from landfills.

Methane reduction through improved waste management delivers multiple benefits, including lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduced flooding and pollution, improved public health outcomes, job creation for waste pickers and farmers, strengthened urban food systems, and contributions to SDGs 1, 2, 6, 7, and 13. The project aligns with Nigeria’s long-term low-emission development strategy, aiming to reduce emissions by 50% by 2050 and to transition to a circular economy.

Methane may be invisible, but its impacts are not. The rising temperatures, flooded streets, polluted waterways, and strained agricultural systems across Nigeria tell a visible story of climate vulnerability. The MAMRN Project represents a shift from open dumping to resource recovery, from unmanaged emissions to data-driven reductions, and from environmental degradation to circular-economy solutions.

By diverting organic waste, empowering communities, integrating informal waste workers, and influencing policy, Nigeria takes a practical step toward reducing methane emissions and building climate resilience. The future of Nigerian cities depends not only on how much waste is produced, but on how wisely it is managed. 

The path forward requires action from everyone.  Policymakers can strengthen regulatory frameworks that recognise waste pickers as formal climate workers and prioritise waste-sector investments in national climate plans. Development partners and funders can direct climate finance toward community-led Material Recovery Facilities and methane monitoring infrastructure. 

Businesses can adopt circular procurement practices, reducing organic waste across supply chains and supporting compost markets. Farmers can integrate compost and Black Soldier Fly products into their practices, improving soil health while cutting dependence on chemical fertilisers. And as a reader, you can start where you are: composting at home, supporting local waste initiatives, or simply sharing this blog post to grow awareness. 

In that transformation lies the power to slow global warming, protect communities, and build a cleaner, more sustainable future.

This article is the second in a series on the Methane Reduction in Nigeria (MAMRN) Project, implemented in collaboration with CfEW Jos, SraDev Lagos, Pave Lagos, CODAF Epe Lagos, and SEDI Benin City.

The post Nigeria’s 32 Million Tonnes of Annual Waste Is Doing Something Far Worse Than Polluting Streets first appeared on GAIA.

Most discussions of plastic pollution say the problem is that plastic never breaks down. A new study turns that assumption on its head, arguing the problem is that it always does – at least to some degree.

In the study, researchers introduce the concept of the “plastic particle footprint,” the mass of plastic micro- and nanoparticles that will eventually enter the environment when a given item disintegrates. Mounting evidence indicates that these plastic particles pose a risk to human and environmental health, but until now there has been no way to incorporate those concerns into standard study methodologies.

Applying their concept to four everyday manufactured objects, the researchers demonstrate how the plastic particle footprint can radically change our understanding of the sustainability of different consumer choices. “The carbon footprint only tells part of the story,” says study team member Valérie Guillard, a researcher at the University of Montpellier in France.

The plastic particle footprint is the mass of virgin plastic required to produce a given item, minus the amount of plastic that will be molecularly destroyed (such as by incineration or in the rare case of truly biodegradable plastics, by microbes) at the end of the item’s lifetime.

No one has ever proven that macro-plastics won’t crumble into micro-plastics in the medium to long term, so we must assume that they will, the researchers argue. In the long run, in other words, all plastic becomes microplastics. “The irreversibility of this pollution requires a precautionary approach,” Guillard argues.

The researchers analyzed data from published life cycle analyses of four common objects: kettles (one made of 30% plastic and another made of 50% plastic), beverage containers (glass, plastic, or aluminum with plastic liner), crates (wood or plastic), and T-shirts (cotton or polyester—a form of plastic).

 

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When carbon footprints are comparable as in the case of the two kettles, different plastic footprints can help guide consumer choices, the researchers suggest.

The item with the smallest carbon footprint does not always have the smallest plastic footprint. A cotton T-shirt has a slightly larger carbon footprint than a polyester one—but virtually no plastic footprint. Plastic bottles and aluminum cans have smaller carbon footprints than glass bottles because they take less energy to manufacture. But glass bottles and aluminum cans have smaller plastic particle footprints. And the plastic lining inside aluminum cans can leach into beverages and be ingested by consumers – making glass bottles look better and better in the final reckoning.

Sometimes the tradeoffs are not so clear. A reusable plastic crate saves 280 grams of greenhouse gas emissions compared to a wooden one, but results in 21 additional grams of plastic particle pollution. Which is worse in the big picture? How many grams of carbon dioxide is a gram of plastic pollution worth?

In order to weigh up the choices quantitatively, future research will need to link a given mass of plastic particles to a given cost to society from health impacts and so on. The time scale of impact also requires careful thought. While the carbon footprint of items is often concentrated during the manufacture and use phases, for plastic bottles and polyester clothing more than 90% of the plastic particle footprint comes after an item is discarded. “We are building a reservoir of plastic, with a toxicity debt that future generations will inherit,” Guillard says.

Source: Guillard V. et al. “A pioneering plastic particle footprint concept for addressing the challenges posed by plastic pollution.” Science Advances 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine. AI-gnerated.

By Gracia Ramirez and David Vergara-Moreno

This photo essay looks at Isla Grande, the largest coralline island of Nuestra Señora del Rosario Archipelago, which is part of the Parque Nacional Natural Corales del Rosario y de San Bernardo, in the Colombian Caribbean. The essay considers the environmental beauty and the violence that underpin Black lives on the island, and the ways in which they have resisted as a community to go forward into the future.

DOCKS

La Bodeguita dock in Cartagena de Indias is the tourists’ gateway to the promised paradise of white-sand beaches and turquoise waters of the Rosario Islands. The docks and other hard boundaries of the port witness an encounter with the polluted waters around Cartagena. This port is responsible for 70% of the country’s maritime trade and has been categorized as the third most efficient port in the world.

Although rarely mentioned by the early chroniclers, it is reasonable to infer that —prior to and during the early centuries of colonization— Cartagena’s Bay was a lush mosaic of abundant coral reefs, dense mangrove forests, and towering tropical dry forest trees.

Today, however, the bay reveals another face: murky waters, laden with sediments, polluted by centuries of maritime traffic, urban and industrial waste, and dredging works that have radically transformed its ecological cycles.

While the departure of tourism to the islands is mainly managed from La Bodeguita dock, the journey out of the bay and into the sea allows visual contact with other docks along the coast.

This is a layered cartography of memories, economies, and spatial regimes: tourist piers, logistical cargo yards, shipyards, naval bases, and private marinas. The bay is not merely a coastal landscape, it is a friction zone between multiple socio-economic and political logics: tourism, military operations, goods trade, and the communities whose ways of life are subordinated to those regimes. This is a liquid frontier: a place of circulation, exclusion, and resistance.

LOGISTICS

The archipelago of the Rosario Islands is connected not just to the Atlantic but also to another body of water, the Canal del Dique. The Spanish colonizers began its construction in the 16th century using enslaved Indigenous and African labor, with the goal of linking the Magdalena River —the nation’s main fluvial artery— with the Cartagena Bay.

Map of the Northern part of Bolívar Department, Republic of Colombia 1886-1903 (Edward Stanford, 1899, cropped). It is possible to see Cartagena de Indias, Barú island below, the Canal del Dique and the Calamar-Cartagena Railway (red line). Source: Mapoteca Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

Since then, the Canal has played a strategic role in both domestic and foreign transport and trade, evolving from wooden barges in the 17th century, to the advent of steam-powered boats in the 19th century.

For over three centuries, the Magdalena River and its canal were the only connection between Colombia’s Caribbean and its Andean provinces, linking a nation divided by three mountain ranges and a wide variety of thermal floors and ecosystems. Socially, the Canal became the route to freedom, as many runaway enslaved people (cimarrones) followed its waterways and founded Maroons communities (palenques) in the surrounding wetlands and hills during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Until the late 19th century, the Dique was merely a narrow, shallow ditch less than 15 meters wide, which was impossible to navigate during droughts. But throughout the 20th century, the canal was radically transformed. U.S. companies carried out major dredging and straightening projects that widened it to 100 meters, reducing its original 270 meanders to only 55, dramatically increasing its flow and sediment loads, altering the ecological balance of Cartagena and Barbacoas Bays and surroundings.

Despite these efforts, the canal became almost obsolete after the construction of two major highways that linked the Caribbean to the Andean region of the country in the 1950s. However, around the same time, Colombia’s largest oil refineries were established in Barrancabermeja and Cartagena.

As human geographer Austin Zeiderman argues, such infrastructures articulate geo-racial regimes and hierarchies of white and black, urban and peripheral, central and insular, that become sedimented into both Cartagenian landscapes and bodies.

MATERIALS

Excavations on the ground reveal the coralline stone, compacted after centuries of pressure and erosion. Isla Grande is a coral reef fossil itself. Coral reefs are vital ecosystems: they protect shorelines from storms, sustain local fisheries, support biodiversity, and form the ecological backbone of a tourism industry that underpins much of Cartagena city’s economy. Yet their very skeletons have been quarried and consumed. Entire islets were built for elite leisure by filling the sea with broken coral, the moneyed class literally manufacturing new islands from the bones of the reef.

Coral grounds. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

The Canal del Dique continues this slow and silent violence. Each rainy season, it expels plumes of sediment-laden freshwater that spread across several square kilometers, covering turquoise waters with brown stains. These pulses reduce salinity and block light, suffocating photosynthesis and interrupting coral reproduction cycles that coincide with the wet months. In fact, the deposits of sediment have turned the formerly island of Barú into a peninsula, following the interventions of USA engineering companies in the twentieth century.

The history of Isla Grande is intimately linked to that of Barú. Around the time of the Spanish colonization, these territories were called Bahaire after the indigenous chief that ruled them before the conquest. The Spaniards used enslaved labour to excavate quarries in Barú and Tierra Bomba, extracting coralline stone used in Cartagena’s colonial architecture. They also built kilns to burn coral stone, producing mortar for the city’s fortifications and lime for its characteristics whitewashed walls.

In the eighteenth century, the nearby island of Barú became a strategic point for cimarrones and Dutch and English smugglers who used enslaved workforce for the logistics related to trafficking. Some enslaved workers, in turn, were secretly saving money to buy their freedom to their masters –mostly Spaniards–.

Over the nineteenth century, with the crisis of slavery and the independence wars, Barú became an instance of a horizontal community formed mostly by cimarrones, freed slaves and mestizos. Their economy was based on subsistence agriculture, fishing, bartering and mutual support.

Wooden house. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

On June 7 of 1850, groups of neighbours from Barú bought an old hacienda to its then owner for 1.200 COP and finished their payment on May 19, 1851. Just two days later, the abolition of slavery was signed in the country. Thus, Barú become a Black community with collective property before the establishment of the modern-day Republican State. Coconut became the main crop and some families from Barú moved to the neighbouring Rosario Islands to extend the plantations.

Islander dwellings echo this layered material history. Traditional houses rely on wooden boards and palm-thatched roofs, fragile yet renewable. Modern constructions import thin red bricks and cement from the mainland, materials that, as they degrade, seep into the calcareous soil and alter its composition.

Seashell. Photo by David Vergara.

Cement itself is ambivalent: it raises luxury resorts that displace the community, yet it also fortifies schools and homes through collective labor. In their very texture, these materials tell two stories at once—of extraction and restriction, but also of resilience and re-creation.

ORIKA

Right at the centre of Isla Grande is now the town of Orika. An old rubber tree guards the town’s square and provides shelter from the sun. The Cultural House is the gathering place where local council meetings (juntas) take place. The story of Orika is one of socioecological struggle and resistance.

Over the twentieth century, Barú started supplying agricultural goods to the growing Cartagena population, shifting toward intensive production of coconut, fish and mangrove charcoal. Up until the 1950s –when roads were constructed to connect Cartagena with other inland cities– the Rosario islands and Barú were the main providers of food sold at the city’s Getsemani market.

Rubber Tree in Benkos Biohó Square, Orika, Isla Grande, PNNCRSB. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

The first tourists were members of Cartagena’s urban elite. They arrived at the Rosario Islands between the 1930s and 1940s and started building recreational homes. While tourist infrastructure was consolidating around Cartagena and the islands, a beetle plague destroyed the coconut plantations in the 1950s.

In order to “protect” the islands, the government declared them National Natural Park in 1977, but the National Park mainly considered the sea, not the ground islands themselves. The decree sought to “conserve flora, fauna, landscapes, and historical and cultural manifestations with scientific, recreative or aesthetic goals”, but omitted any mention of the Blacks communities that already inhabited the territory (Rosario Islands, Barú, Santa Ana and Ararca).

New prohibitionist environmental policies, coupled with the rise of tourism, relegated local families to the hinterlands of Isla Grande and to the backs of hotels and resorts, where they worked as subordinate labor.

In the 1980s, the government declared the Rosario Islands to be State-owned vacant lands, unrecognising the community as a “organized population” for the use of land but allowing other economical uses such as tourism and recreation. This enabled a wave of land grabs by private investors that further marginalised the community. However, the 1991 Constitution and the ensuing law 70 of Black Communities of 1993 provided legal tools to transform the memory of dispossession into a fight for recognition.

The community used environmental education programs to strengthen social organizations and articulate their historical demands into a juridical argument. In 2001, after years of legal limbo, the Colombian state began the land restitution process.

Fearing expulsion from the territory, the families decided to establish a new village in the center of Isla Grande: Orika, in honor of the daughter of Benkos Biohó, a cimarron leader and hero of San Basilio de Palenque, the first Black free village in the Americas (1714). In just two months, the community cleared the land and built their houses, a gesture of dignity and memory, affirming their right to exist as a Black community in their ancestral territory. After collecting evidence and going through endless administrative hurdles, in 2014 the Constitutional Court recognized the collective deed title for the Black community of Isla Grande, becoming the only community having achieved that so far within the national park.

UNBOUNDEDNESS

Sunset horizons and native trees may meet the tourist’s gaze as landscapes ready for easy consumption— postcards of “untouched nature.” Yet the town of Orika unsettles this commodified view. Its soundscape resists containment: sound systems (picós) blasting loud music reverberates from the main square, echoing through every coralline ground cavity, vibrating as much in bodies as in stone.

In language, too, survival leaves its trace. The word Dios circulates as the name of the Christian god, but within it hides the untranslatable presence of African spirits, invoked yet unconfined by letters. This is not syncretism as tourist folklore, but the deep mimicry of African cosmologies that persisted beneath colonial surveillance.

In the Colombian Caribbean, enslaved Africans lived not in the vast monocultures of the sugar plantations of Brazil or Cuba, but in smaller, multiethnic communities tied to haciendas, cattle ranches, mines, and urban centres under the close watch of the Inquisition tribunal of Cartagena.

Cut off early from eighteen century renewed arrivals of African captives, these populations developed distinctive spiritual practices, an instance of what Sylvia Wynter called “black indigenization”— that in intertwining African, indigenous, and Christian forms, found ways of being human when colonial hegemony ruled otherwise.

Orika inhabits this layered spiritual geography. It is not simply a village bounded by its streets, but a porous space where music, light, and faith exceed enclosure—an unlimited terrain of survival, memory, and reinvention.

ROOTS

Mangrove forests form the living roots of Isla Grande. They are among the most resilient trees on Earth—thriving where others would perish. Their bodies adapt to saline soils and shifting tides, standing firm where land is not yet land.

Propagules germinate while still attached to the parent tree, dropping into the water as living seedlings that drift across lagoons and channels, anchoring themselves wherever conditions allow. Each root is a promise of survival, each forest a nursery that shelters fish, crabs, and birds in any of their stages of life. Mangroves breathe through aerial roots that rise above the mud, searching for oxygen in conditions too harsh for most species. Always green, they embody endurance.

The mangrove is never alone. Its leaves, roots, and fallen branches decompose into nutrients that sustain fish and crustaceans; its tangled roots interlace with seagrass meadows and coral reefs in a single inter-ecosystemic web. Together, these systems form the ecological triangle of the Caribbean coast: corals buffer waves, seagrasses filter and stabilize sediments, mangroves hold the shoreline while feeding both sea and land. In Isla Grande, these roots not only prevent erosion but also connect the island’s fragile ecology to Cartagena’s coastal mangroves, weaving life across waters.

For Orika, the mangrove is more than ecology—it is a metaphor for community. Like the red mangrove that elevates itself above its roots, the people rise from centuries of exclusion, rooted yet expansive. Their history drifts like propagules, carried by tides of resistance until finding ground to grow.

The mangrove teaches resilience, interconnection, and renewal: lessons for a community that continues to defend its territory while imagining futures where culture and ecology flourish together. Roots here are not only in soil, but in memory and struggle, anchoring Orika to both the Caribbean Sea and to its own unfolding horizon.

DRIFT

There are no roads in Isla Grande, only sandy footpaths weaving through the tropical dry forest and the mangroves. No motorized vehicles circulate within the island, people walk or ride bicycles, while boats and yachts, arriving from Cartagena, leave trails of oil shimmering over the turquoise surface.

Caribbean Sea water around Isla Grande. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

Plastic bottles and rubbish drift ashore, carried by tides that remember more than the islanders would wish. Drift here is both material and historical: traces of empire, slavery, tourism, and extraction wash against the reef, staining waters once clear. The islands themselves are a coral body in constant erosion and recomposition, a living drift of stone, memory, and survival.

Plastic and vegetable waste. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

Yet drift is not only decline—it is also possibility. Orika, born out of dispossession, has become a node of reorganization and creativity. The community council anchors collective life, negotiating with agencies and hotels that now contribute resources for communal projects.

Every weekend, and on national and local holidays, happiness brightens the whole town in shared spaces like the main Plaza (Benkos Biohó Plaza), the picós, the cockpits, houses and the Casa Cultural. A new foundation works with children and youth, teaching them to stage traditional dances and music, reweaving ancestral ties to the palenques and to African rhythms long suppressed.

Ecotourism initiatives, led by younger generations, form alliances with older community projects, offering alternatives that value culture and ecology together.

Buildings around Benkos Biohó Square in Orika. Photo by Gracia Ramirez.

Drift, then, also gestures toward a different horizon. In Orika, the tides carry not only the weight of history but also the seeds of futures yet to come. The Rosario Islands are a historical drift still evolving—where coral, memory, and community recombine into new forms of life.

 

The post Notes on Isla Grande: Figurations of Environmental Violence and Beauty in the Colombian Caribbean appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.

A decade ago, illicit gold miners in the Brazilian Amazon began invading the lands of the Yanomami people. New research finds a clear link between the rush of illegal mining and a surge of malaria among the Yanomami.

Read more on E360 →

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Prime Minister Mark Carney has won deserved praise for standing firm against the Trump administration’s threats and imposition of tariffs. But political credit is only as good as the strategy that follows, and Canada now faces a genuine opportunity to do something more ambitious than weather the storm.

Carney’s approach has sparked a broader conversation among the world’s ‘middle powers’ – countries with significant economies like Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the U.K. that share a commitment to rules-based trade but sit outside the U.S.-China superpower axis. These are countries that are actively looking for a different economic path forward, one that doesn’t simply mirror the nationalism coming out of Washington and Beijing.

Keep reading this post, co-authored by Ryan Mulholland and Ollie Sheldrick, in Policy Options.

The post A Canada-led clean trade pact would show that middle powers mean business appeared first on Clean Energy Canada.

Conceptualizing Security in a Time of Deep Civilizational Crisis Date and time * Date: June 4th, 2026 * Time: 1pm GMT * Registration Link: Here * Speakers: Manuel Rozental (Colombia), Dipa Sinha (India) and (TBC) * Moderation: Introduction This is the first of a series of webinars that will open the series with a conceptual discussion on security in a time of deep civilizational crisis. It will examine how security has traditionally been framed through the international order, the n…

For decades, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, worked across many of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-besieged regions, funding thousands of humanitarian, healthcare, food, and disaster relief programs. That all changed last year when, days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration issued a stop-work order that suspended nearly all of USAID’s overseas programs. Then, last July, the administration informally dissolved the agency — leading to the largest withdrawal of American international development aid in more than 60 years. 

A new study published May 14 in the journal Science suggests the sudden USAID shutdown could have been linked to an uptick in violent conflict across much of Africa, with some of the most politically fragile regions seeing the largest spikes. Outside experts, however, caution that the findings are preliminary and may not capture the bigger picture. 

Farming and agricultural markets are easily disrupted by conflict, and when conflict occurs food security worsens because it can limit communities’ access to food. At the same time, deepening food insecurity in fragile political states contributes to social unrest. Climate impacts then layer onto this fragility. Extreme weather is second only to conflict in having the greatest effect on global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition, according to a U.N. report. That’s in part because it increasingly causes people to migrate as they flee places destroyed by rising seas and cataclysmic storms, which, in turn, can fuel conflict. 

“It is undeniable that USAID programming around food aid, including emergency food kitchens, therapeutic foods, and health and water programming on which basic food and nutritional security is built, provided a critical lifeline to millions of women, children, and families in severe nutritional deficits,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate change researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Who in their right mind would retract healthcare and food so abruptly, in so many places, when the direct result is people suffering and dying?”

In analyzing the impact of funding cuts on conflict across 870 subnational African regions that had been receiving different levels of USAID services, the Science paper’s authors found that in the roughly 10 months that followed the administration’s immediate withdrawal of aid, areas that had previously received more USAID support may have experienced more or different types of conflict. Using two global datasets that track funding disbursements and violent conflict, the study suggests that, in areas with high historical USAID funding, there was a 12.3 percent increase in conflict overall and a 7.3 percent surge in armed battles; protests and riots in these areas rose by 6.8 percent and battle-related fatalities by 9.3 percent after the shutdown. 

According to Austin Wright, a University of Chicago researcher who studies the political economy of conflict, and a co-author of the paper, the effects have been swift and destabilizing. “There is nothing that we’re aware of in recorded human history of the magnitude of that shutdown, in terms of ending a country’s commitment at a global scale,” said Wright. 

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Established in 1961, USAID was created to encourage economic and social development in emerging nations while countering the Cold War influence of the Soviet Union. Building resilience in foreign political systems has, in recent decades, been “one of the main goals of the work of USAID,” said Chelsea Marcho, a senior director for research and policy at the Food Security Leadership Council and former USAID official under former President Joe Biden, who was not involved in the Science paper. The study showing that violence may have been less severe in places where USAID had helped build stronger institutions, she said, only underscores the value of those aid investments. One example is the largely discontinued work to develop more resilient food systems across sub-Saharan African nations facing higher rates of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. 

But what many tend to forget, said Marcho, is that USAID also funded the bulk of pivotal data collection efforts across much of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-vulnerable regions. The dissolution of the agency has prompted widespread disruptions in everything from localized weather monitoring to one of the primary global famine early-warning systems. Although some of these systems have since been restored, the gaps in monitoring coupled with the decreased capacity across aid organizations means it is all the more difficult to understand what is happening on the ground. 

Indeed, the end of USAID has buckled our ability to measure the very outcomes of the end of USAID. “The visibility that we have around food security is potentially in decline at the same time that the risks to the system are increasing,” said Marcho. “How do we actually get the data we need?”

Mehrabi finds the new paper creates “more questions than answers.” He argues the mechanisms of measurement are unclear, the analysis period is too short, and the authors don’t adequately disentangle USAID’s specific effects from Trump’s simultaneous cuts to other U.S. international funding sources, such as the State Department. “The results are clearly early and tentative,” he said. “I think it is a leap to say this is all attributable to USAID.” 

Wright, for his part, acknowledged the study has limitations, including a short post-shock observation window of just 10 months, a disbursement baseline drawn from the first Trump administration rather than the period immediately before the cuts, and a geographic scope confined to Africa — leaving much open to future research. He says the team ran extensive robustness checks addressing these concerns, detailed in the paper’s appendix. 

After running his own reanalysis of their data, Mehrabi, however, remains unconvinced. What’s more, he warns against the possible takeaway that the presence of American developmental intervention equates to stability. The U.S., he argues, could more effectively help deter widespread conflict and hunger in nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, through more equitable benefit-sharing of natural resource extraction from critical mineral supply chains. This would “far outweigh any benefits from foreign aid,” proposed Mehrabi. 

Nevertheless, with an annual budget of tens of billions and an institutional history spanning 64 years, USAID’s developmental footprint throughout the African continent was no small thing. “One cannot simply create USAID all over again, or give it a mandate and give it funding and assume that we have waved a wand and we can reverse the damage done,” said Wright.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump gutted USAID. Hunger and violence followed. on May 19, 2026.

In this installment of an ongoing series, Tom and Dave Murphy explore what “sustainable” truly means and whether any disruption to natural ecosystems or energy flows by humanity is inherently unsustainable.

History offers a grim account of how structural change occurs. But concealed within that bleakness is a window of possibility that opens just when things fall apart.

Extreme heat is already a defining climate and health threat in southern Africa, yet public debate still treats it as ordinary bad weather. A new study shows that, as climate change drives more extreme events, governments and institutions can adopt practical steps to make communities more climate‑resilient.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, record-breaking storms and flooding are impacting Māori land, health, and culture. And, according to a new national climate report, colonization has intensified those risks. 

The 2026 National Climate Change Risk Assessment is composed of four reports, including a companion document focused on Māori communities. That report argues that climate change is likely to deepen existing inequities shaped by colonization, exclusion from decision-making, and chronic underinvestment. 

To mitigate the impacts of climate change, the assessment points to Māori-led adaptation as uniquely effective. It calls for policy grounded in Māori customs and knowledge, Indigenous data sovereignty, and stronger Māori authority in climate decision-making.

“For more than 150 years Māori have been pushed to the margins, literally, by an aggressive colonization process,” said Paora Tapsell, who is Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Raukawa, and the director of the Kāika Institute of Climate Resilience at Lincoln University. 

The assessment, released earlier this month, adds to a growing body of national reports that highlight the harmful impacts of colonial policies on Indigenous peoples and the environment. In 2023, the United States’ Fifth National Climate Assessment found that land theft and colonization had exacerbated climate change’s impact. The year before, Australia’s State of the Environment report was prepared with an Indigenous lead author for the first time; it found that Indigenous peoples were more likely to be impacted by extreme weather events like fires. It too called for incorporating Indigenous knowledge into climate policies. Despite these findings, Indigenous leaders around the world say national governments are still not listening to them.

Aotearoa New Zealand recently experienced one of its most active severe weather seasons on record, with multiple declared states of emergency across the nation’s two islands. It also found that the country’s Indigenous peoples are essential in responding to such disasters. “The report accurately acknowledges that many kāinga [Māori settlements], despite their relative impoverishment, are still willing first responders on the front line of increasingly severe climate events,” Shaun Awatere, who is Ngāti Porou and lead author of the companion report, said.

The assessment’s seven interconnected risk areas span environmental, cultural, and economic domains. It says the loss of protected endemic species is not only a biodiversity issue but also affects food gathering places, the Māori lunar calendar, traditional customs, and intergenerational knowledge systems. According to the report, some species could face near-irreversible decline in parts of the country under high-emissions scenarios by 2090.

Read Next Indigenous peoples bear the brunt of climate change — and get almost none of the money to fight it Anita Hofschneider

Across Māori lands, climate-driven extreme weather events have had a destructive impact on infrastructure. But the report outlines how flooding, erosion, storms, and wildfires also present cultural risks by threatening tribal meeting places, burial sites, and communal homes. It warns that repeated damage and displacement could lead to long-term cultural fragmentation and disconnection from ancestral land.

Climate impacts may also be felt economically. Māori-owned forestry, farming, aquaculture, and horticulture enterprises face rising pressure from climate hazards, costs, and underinvestment in adaptation. Without structural reform and targeted support, the assessment says that economic vulnerability will increase. 

Awatere said the findings confirm what tribes have been saying for years. “Climate events do not arrive one at a time,” he said. “A storm floods a road, damages a marae [tribal meeting place], erodes whenua [land], disrupts access to mahinga kai [food gathering places], and overwhelms health and welfare systems that were already stretched, all at once. Each of those harms compounds the next.”

The assessment also said climate-driven displacement and ecological degradation could disrupt the transmission of language, customary practices, lineage relationships, and Indigenous knowledge systems between generations.

Awatere highlighted ongoing structural exclusion of Māori from climate planning and adaptation systems, despite the government’s obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi, which is the country’s founding document. The report describes legal exclusion and governance failure as a major risk multiplier, compounding climate impacts across all domains.

Awatere said the central question is whether adaptation plans will reflect that evidence, or whether Māori communities will continue to carry a disproportionate risk of harm.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Māori climate risk worsened by colonization, report finds on May 19, 2026.

May 14, 2026:

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The Yellow Vest, or gilets jaunes, are grassroots worker movement that have defied politics as usual in France and the rest of the world. In our latest, Scott talks with…