The Revelator

Environmentalists, myself included, pay close attention to gloomy topics like species extinctions and Earth’s dwindling life-support systems. It’s not for the love of dark matters that we keep tabs on depressing metrics. Rather, it’s with the hope that they teach us something and guide us toward mitigating future losses.

On the biological front, about a million species could be taken by an extinction vortex by the end of the century. That’s also when linguists estimate about one-third of the world’s 7,000-plus Indigenous languages will go silent — and with them, most of their related cultures.

This is not uplifting news, to be sure. Nonetheless, people concerned with environmental protection can learn a lot from language extinctions. As it turns out, the survival of languages and species may well be linked. And when we wrap our minds around this, the panorama for conservation actually gets a little brighter.

A Confluence of Curious Similarities

Linguistic variation around the world caught the imagination and attention of naturalists going back at least to the Victorian era of exploration, when folks like Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin traveled across the wilds of South America and the Malay Archipelago.

Wallace marveled at the linguistic diversity shown by communities spread along the edges of the watery world in the Amazon basin and dotting the highlands of New Guinea. He even wrote out partial lexicons to aid in communicating with his guides. Darwin, in his ruminations on the descent of man, went so far as to remark that languages and species are “curiously the same.” He was thinking about human evolution and wondering if languages might evolve by natural selection. With his thoughts on the flowering of languages, he did not give time to their senescence.

It would take more than 100 years, after the concurrent publication of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection, for scientists to uncover the full extent of global linguistic variation, and also the languages’ risk of extinction. Today the patterns emerging from these discoveries hold lessons for environmentalists.

One of the pioneering explorations was conducted by Larry Gorenflo (Penn State University) and his team of conservation biologists and linguists. Their labors produced some profound findings.

First off, the places on Earth with outrageously high numbers of species also have outrageously high numbers of Indigenous languages. Furthermore, many of the species and languages of these hyper-rich spots are endemic. They don’t occur, much less co-occur, anywhere else.

Gorenflo and team went on to examine language diversity in regions that conservationists designate as “priority areas.” A second striking fact emerged: High-priority conservation regions are home to nearly 70% of the world’s languages.

These results demonstrate we can either win big or lose big, depending on the success of our efforts in these doubly diverse hotspots. It’s like playing a Daily Double, with “How to save life on Earth?” as the question to the answer.

Lullaby for Language

Extinction is forever. Except when it’s not. This isn’t a reference to de-extinction and the facsimiles brought into existence by technology. It’s about languages.

When the last speaker of a language falls into eternal slumber, so does their language. Linguists say that such languages are “dormant.” Dormancy is different from the extinction of biological species, at least in principle.

Sleeping languages can, hypothetically, experience reawakening. That is, they can be spoken again after a period of dormancy, but only under special circumstances. At a minimum there must be a written record of the lexicon and syntax.  For instance, Hebrew came back in the 19th century after a long slumber.

Sadly, however, the vast majority of Indigenous languages only exist in the oral form, making linguistic resurrections nearly impossible. This is why dormancy and extinction are, for all intents and purposes, synonymous. It’s also why we must work to document and teach Indigenous languages before they nod off.

High Tolls for Both Languages and Species

Just as the vastness of language varieties was unearthed, the global decline became apparent as well. Nowadays researchers race to figure out what drives language endangerment. Lindell Bromham and Xia Hua (Australian National University) are two such investigators, who lead a large interdisciplinary team analyzing the subject.

In a recent cutting-edge study of massive scope and scale, the team uncovered the principal determinants that drive the downturn. One of the top three is strangely simple: roads.

“Greater road density, which may encourage population movement, is associated with increased (language) endangerment,” Bromham and team conclude.

You might say that roads compromise the linguistic intactness of a landscape. Conservation biologists, well versed in the dangers that roads pose to natural ecosystems, should relate to that.

A South American tapir crosses a fresh road cut across fragmented habitat in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Photo by Leandro Maracahipes, with permission to use.

This is not to suggest that road effects are perfectly analogous in their impacts on languages and species. There are major differences. They have to do with the paradoxical capacity of roads to both create and destroy connections.

For remote ethnolinguistic groups, a frontier highway increases connectivity. Distances that once required weeks or more to cross may be traversed in hours or days. Lines of communication suddenly open — for material goods, of course, but also for the transmission of diverse ideologies and ways of life.

When this happens with high speed or without guardrails, a collision with cultural traditions and language preservation ensues. Often, such roads are the handiwork of large industries, looking to make money in the frontier, usually at the expense of local peoples whose lands they usurp.

One of the first casualties of enhanced contact is the local vernacular. This is a big blow to culture, potentially harming people’s health, wellbeing, and identity. The loss is accompanied by a shift to another language, usually the parlance of government, business, and education. A new sociocultural reality arises as the highway expansion continues.

By contrast, roads harm ecosystems by severing connections. Effectively, highways fracture natural populations and break the fundamental rules of ecology.

Renowned ecologist and conservation biologist Dr. William Laurance (James Cook University) tells me that bulldozing through forest expanses is like opening Pandora’s box.

“It’s because of the transformative effect that (roads) have,” he says. “They’re the single most important proximate driver of environmental change and degradation. A road goes in and six months later the forest is split open like a splayed fish.”

In distant lands, far from government regulation and oversight, a motorway quickly spawns ghost roads — unauthorized byways branching from the central transit spine. In short order, plantation monocultures flatten forests and open-pit mines erupt like infectious pocks. The cleavage of habitats puts native plant and animal populations at greater risk of declines, even extinctions. Curbside, roadkill piles up.

So while highways and their byways exert harm in different ways, they are nonetheless critical factors that must be reckoned with, for both conservationists and linguists.

We Don’t Need No Education?

The work by Bromham and team produced a result that may run counter-intuitive to every reader of this piece. Next to roads, say the investigators, the biggest threat to languages is formal education.

Educators may shake their heads, but there’s good evidence that Bromham and colleagues are right. They argue that monolingual education can lead to language shifts, with local Indigenous languages yielding to rising tongues. Young people, looking ahead to professional careers, may be strongly incentivized to adopt the language that advances their aspirations.

Various lines of evidence suggest this is, indeed, what happens. An example comes from Papua New Guinea, a tiny nation in Melanesia whose name graces the very top of the list of language-rich countries. That diversity is endangered, in large part, due to high school education, say Alfred Kik (University of Goroka) and Vojtěch Novotný (Czech Academy of Sciences). They’re long-term investigators in Papua New Guinea who have been documenting students’ Indigenous language skills and knowledge of local flora and fauna.

Their work demonstrates a “precipitous” decline in both. The result derives, they argue, from the push for children to learn English, which is used in schools and perceived to be the language of opportunity. The shift is also related to the spread of Tok Pisin, a type of pidgin English used extensively as the lingua franca in multilingual settings, including cafeterias and playgrounds.

The message is not that formal education should be eliminated for the sake of global linguistic diversity. The lesson, rather, is that the language of instruction, which is usually determined by education policy and funding availability, is highly consequential. Multilingual education is a possible antidote, especially in the context of environmental education.

Nature and Knowledge

K. David Harrison (Swarthmore and Vin University), an environmental linguist, emphasizes the “nature-centric” qualities of Indigenous tongues. They are distinguished, he writes, by the great diversity of words that describe plants and animals and the way that grammar encodes information about the world around them.

Harrison attributes nature-centrism to longstanding, intimate relationships between Indigenous speakers and their natural surroundings. It reflects a mindset in which people are part and parcel of nature, not separate entities.

For oral languages, words are key to the transmission of traditional ecological knowledge. This refers to a body of information and concepts held collectively by community members. As such, it is a living, evolving, and growing library that is honed and built incrementally over time and comes to life in use. When language goes extinct, so does the knowledge it holds.

The continued existence of ethnolinguistic groups in remote, harsh, and untrammeled areas is proof that knowledge and communication skills ensure sustainable ways of life. Gorenflo argues that, with a million species at risk of extinction, we should have regard for those who demonstrate a history of conservation success.

“Traditional ecological knowledge provides a glimpse into how people adapt to, and use, resources without destroying them,” Gorenflo tells me.

Along the same vein, Kik is racing against time to document the traditional ecological knowledge of the elders in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. He says it’s an effort to keep language and nature alive.

“Traditional ecological knowledge plays an important role in biodiversity conservation, sustainability, and natural resource management,” he tells me. “It plays a crucial role. If we lose language, we lose knowledge, and then there is a problem for environmental conservation. This will have impacts,” he warns.

Environmentalism, Language, and Culture

As we learn more from the results of interdisciplinary investigations, like those mentioned here, lessons for environmentalists emerge.

The first, of course, is to do more. Conservation biologists and linguists benefit greatly from cross-pollination, and the cause of language and species can profit, too.

In the meantime we know there are key action items that can be focal points for the short term. They include allocating the always-slender conservation monies toward diverse eco-linguistic landscapes, which are now well-documented by the mapping studies of Gorenflo and others.

Other priorities are to support the cataloguing of Indigenous languages and ethnobiological knowledge while speakers can tell their stories. In classroom settings, especially in locations where Indigenous tongues are still spoken, there should be real efforts to include multilingual programming, especially in relation to environmental education. Even better, where elders are able to share, their original voices should be heard.

Undoubtedly today’s environmentalists stand to derive great insights from supporting Indigenous groups in leading their own kinds of conservation. Most importantly, nature and knowledge will be the biggest beneficiaries. But first we must first embrace the idea that the extinction of languages and cultures is an environmental issue.

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

Decolonizing Species Names

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Summer is almost upon us, and with it comes opportunities to enjoy what our planet has to offer — or enhance your understanding of the environmental issues that affect us all.

We’ve collected several great new books about birds, reptiles and amphibians, green gardening, and climate change. They offer wonderful insights into the natural world and how to enjoy and protect it.

We’ve also paired some of these books with related reads for young people, so kids and adults can explore and discuss the beauty and important challenges facing our wildlife and environment together IRL.

We’ve adapted the books’ official descriptions below, and the link in each title goes to the publisher’s page. You can also find any of these titles through your local bookseller and library.

 

Eco Revolution: Climate Justice, Community, and the Fight for Our Planet

by Maya Penn

With 15 years of hands-on experience, award-winning environmental activist Maya Penn writes resoundingly about the ever-growing threat of the climate crisis, putting the world on notice that we’ve not only entered into a once-in-a-generation era of social and environmental justice advocacy but a deep-rooted overlap between environmental crises and inequities.

This book chronicles sustainability history and highlights unsung eco-warriors, offering solutions for a more sustainable and equitable world, exploring our collective connection to the natural world through inherited ecology and Traditional Ecological Knowledge passed down through Indigenous cultures, which used naturally occurring ecosystems to create thriving, functional societies and how this now translates to our modern understanding about sustainability.

Penn looks at the current green movements around the world and how they have discovered new approaches to sustainable living, and how we can use our creativity to bring about real change. Penn also looks at the future — and how we can remain optimistic in the midst of crisis.

 

Owls: Nocturnal Birds of Prey From Around the World

by David Alderton

Owls have been a source of fascination and awe throughout history. In Indian folklore owls represent wisdom and helpfulness, while in Ancient Greece they were seen as a good omen if sighted before a battle. Today owls are often kept as pets by bird lovers and can be found in woodland and forests from the Canadian Arctic to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. Full of fun facts and expert insights, Owls introduces these iconic birds in all their variety. Did you know that owls can rotate their necks 270 degrees, or that an owl’s ears are asymmetrical? Or that owls are considered apex predators? Or that the tiniest owl in the world is the elf owl, a mere five inches tall, while the largest North American owl is the great gray owl at 32 inches tall? Or that barn owls swallow their prey whole — skin, bones, and all — and they eat up to 1,000 mice each year?

With chapters divided into type of owl — barn and grass owls, typical owls, snowy, horned and eagle owls, wood owls, pygmy owls, and owlets and nesting — this book examines these superb aerial hunters in over 200 vivid photographs.

 

Cold-Blooded Murder: Reptiles and Amphibians on the Brink of Extinction

by Craig Stanford

Around the world reptile and amphibian species are facing grave threats to their survival: Habitat destruction due to logging, agriculture, development, commercial exploitation and wildlife trade, to say nothing of climate change. Examples include Galápagos giant tortoises slaughtered for meat, pets and decorative items, Caribbean rock iguanas driven to the brink of extinction by invasive species such as cats and dogs, commercial exploitation of the ploughshare tortoise, severely threatened by poaching for the illegal pet trade, and the critically endangered Cuban crocodile for its valuable skin.

In Cold-Blooded Murder, Craig Stanford tells the stories of dozens of endangered reptiles and amphibians, depicting the ecological roles and unique characteristics of each species. He takes readers on a globe-spanning journey, revealing the diversity and beauty of the creatures with whom we share our world. He also highlights conservation projects that are protecting critically endangered animals, sharing inspiring success stories while acknowledging the challenge of saving species. This gripping and poignant book shows why we should be fascinated by reptiles and amphibians — and strive to prevent their extinction.

 

The Gardener’s Mindset: A Gardening Book Connecting With Nature Through Plants

by Stephen Orr

A reflection on being a gardener, this absorbing collection of essays and photographs by the former editor-in-chief of Better Homes and Gardens examines the restorative power of gardening while recounting Orr’s own challenges in the garden, offering advice on growing green things.

This book helps readers understand not just how to garden but how to think about it. Orr brings his musings and practical advice to gardeners everywhere, no matter what skill level. Gorgeous photographs and easy projects range from cultivating a color scheme to building a wildlife habitat, and Orr gives practical advice on how to cultivate plants that stay resilient in the face of climate change.

On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites

by Alicia Kennedy

Author and journalist Alicia Kennedy’s captivating new book is a deeply personal work that asks: Can we eat and cook in a way that’s true to ourselves, roots us in the places we call home, and helps define our politics and ethics? Guided by curiosity and a hunger for flavor and experience, she posits that we don’t have to choose between what is delicious and what can sustain our planet and ourselves.

On Eating is not only a provocative bildungsroman and a celebration of desire but a challenge to each of us to consider our own relationship with food and how our need to eat — to live — affects the world.

 

Insect Safari: Exploring the Wondrous World of Everyday Bugs

by Margie Patlak

Join veteran science writer Margie Patlak on a fascinating adventure as she explores the ever-more-astounding world of insects — all in her own backyard. It started when she took a close-up snapshot of a bee in her backyard; that was the start of a years-long passion for cataloging and understanding the tiny creatures that were all around her. This book showcases the superpowers, alien anatomies, and striking untold behaviors and thinking abilities of bugs hidden in plain sight in backyards, parks, gardens, and even in the flowerpots that dot city courtyards and balconies.

Even more intriguing is the book’s reporting on the plethora of recent scientific findings revealing there’s more to the inner lives and behaviors of insects than people ever thought possible. Who knew wasps use tools and recognize faces, bees play with balls and do math, ants invented farming way before we did, and even fruit flies mull over their mating choices? These findings reinforce the notion that we aren’t the only intelligent beings on Earth and tease people’s curiosity about the alien life right here on their own planet.

 

Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are: How Indigenous Cultural Resistance Can Restore the Earth, Recover Community, and Create Sustainable Futures

by Maceo Carrillo Martinet, Ph.D.

Rooted in Indigenous wisdom and a four-element framework, this book invites readers to rediscover and re-embody the truth that caring for ourselves and caring for the living Earth are one and the same. Find how climate solutions are still possible and already exist, practiced by communities around the world. Explicitly decolonial, this book offers a framework rooted in reciprocity, resistance, and kinship with the living Earth and is built around four elements:

1. 1. Water: How ancient Indigenous water-harvesting technologies are vital for sustaining water, land, and community.
   2. Earth: How successful community land stewardship continues to support ecological health and human life in spite of colonial desecration.
   3. Fire: How “Indigenous fire” — frequent, low-intensity burns rooted in deep cultural relationship — functions as a crucial medicine for restoring forest health, preventing wildfires, and sustaining cultural and environmental resilience.
   4. Air: The profound connection between linguistic diversity and biodiversity — and how language can be nurtured to heal and awaken humans.

Combining these four elements shows us how enduring human and ecological systems are built upon the interconnectedness of collective action, cultural appreciation, and diverse, restorative relationships with nature.

 

Noticing: Intimate Encounters With the Natural World

by Richard Louv

Long beloved for his insightful, inspiring nature writing, Richard Louv returns with his most personal book yet. Noticing is about discovering who you are by exploring the natural world. Louv shows how, by tapping into the 30 or more human senses, readers can develop skills — sensory, scientific, artistic, and spiritual —to see and experience the other worlds of nature.

Through personal essays, rich with descriptions of the California wilderness around his home in the most biodiverse county in the nation, Louv draws on wisdom from influences as far-reaching as neuroscience, nature photography, Indigenous traditions, and mindfulness to foster what he calls “bio enchantment.” He offers a new, deeper understanding of what it means to see a tree, know a fox, and to become fully human.

Books for young people to explore this summer, including titles that can be paired with the selections above.

Who’s Making That Big STINK?!

by Darrin Lunde, illustrated by Erica J. Chen

Ages 3-7

Ew! Who smells like rotten eggs and smelly feet? Yuck! Whose burps smell like cow poop? Find out which animals stink (and why) in this reeky, cheeky guessing game. Animals make all sorts of smells for all sorts of reasons. Can you guess the stinker from its stink? Simple clues and laugh-out-loud art make this guessing game perfect for rowdy read-aloud times. Fun facts from a world-class zoologist reveal the science behind the stink. Readers are introduced to the striped skunk, the stink bird, the musk ox, the corpse flower, the bombardier beetle, the sea hare, and the binturong.

 

Plastic Problem: 60 Small Ways to Reduce Waste and Help Save the Earth

By Aubre Andrus, illustrated by Dynamo Ltd Illustrator

Ages 6 to Grown-ups

Learn how to transform yourself from a plastic polluter to a plastic patroller with this practical, easy-to-understand book. Actions are big and small, so what can you do to address climate change? It’s time to step up and end our toxic relationship with plastic. It’s actually easy when you do it in small steps. Whether it’s buying in bulk, bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, or using zero-waste toothpaste, this guide offers advice on the practical ways to minimize your plastics footprint. This guide not only shows you how but why it’s worth investigating our relationship with plastics. A great book for adults and children to work together making changes instead of gaming or doomscrolling.

 

Owls (National Geographic Kids Readers, Level 1)

By Laura Marsh

Ages 4-6

National Geographic presents young readers with an exploration of the feathery world of adorable owls. Follow these curious-looking creatures through their wooded habitats, and learn how owls raise their young, hunt, and protect themselves. Beautiful photos and carefully leveled text make this book perfect for reading aloud or for independent reading.

Pairs well with Owls: Nocturnal Birds of Prey From Around the World

 

The Ultimate Book of Reptiles: Your Guide to the Secret Lives of These Scaly, Slithery, and Spectacular Creatures!

by Ruchira Somaweera and Stephanie Warren Drimmer

Age 8-12 years

Sink your fangs into the hidden worlds of these scaly and sensational creatures with leading reptile scientist and National Geographic Explorer Dr. Ruchira Somaweera as your guide.

Meet the coolest cold-blooded animals ever. From lizards to snakes, turtles to crocodiles, something called a tuatara, and even enormous prehistoric reptiles (think real-life sea monsters!), you’ll discover what makes a reptile a reptile; how these creatures live, hunt, hide, and raise their young, and the wild adaptations that make them so unique. Learn which snake is the most venomous on the planet and which are surprisingly gentle creatures, which reptile is born with a highly developed third eye in its forehead, and which one is so tiny it could balance on the tip of your finger — plus loads of super important conservation information and impactful ways to join the fight to save endangered reptile species right from home.

Pairs nicely with Cold-Blooded Murder: Reptiles and Amphibians on the Brink of Extinction

 

Amphibians and Reptiles: A Compare and Contrast Book

by Katharine Hall

Ages 4-9

What makes a frog an amphibian but a snake a reptile? Both classes may lay eggs, but they have different skin coverings and breathe in different ways. Pages of fun facts will help kids identify each animal in the class like a pro. Using stunning photographs and simple nonfiction text to get kids thinking about the similarities and differences between these two animal classes, this picture book includes a four-page For Creative Minds section in the back of the book and a 67-page cross-curricular Teaching Activity Guide online. Amphibians and Reptiles is vetted by experts and designed to encourage parental engagement. Its extensive back matter helps teachers with time-saving lesson ideas, provides extensions for science, math, and social studies units, and uses inquiry-based learning to help build critical thinking skills in young readers.

Pairs nicely with Cold-Blooded Murder: Reptiles and Amphibians on the Brink of Extinction

 

Force of Nature

by Melissa Clark

Ages 12-18

This fresh, smart, funny young adult book asks the question: What if Mother Nature was a teenage girl? Chloe Lovejoy is a straight-C student, a girl with a crush on the cutie from chorus, an all-powerful being responsible for taking care of the planet … or perhaps all three. Chloe finds out on her 16th birthday, when she unexpectedly inherits the role of Mother Nature from her grandmother. Overwhelmed, when the unthinkable happens and Grandma is gone, Chloe is left to oversee the natural laws of the world all by herself.

A unique coming-of-age story about a teen girl rising to the occasion, even when she feels completely in over her head.

Pairs nicely with The Gardener’s Mindset: A Gardening Book Connecting With Nature Through Plants

Make your sunny days (and rainy days) this spring and summer fun and engaging for yourself and those young people in your life. You can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives.

Let us know what you’re reading: Drop us a line at comments@therevelator.org

The post New Environmental Books: Spring-to-Summer Reads to Brighten and Enlighten appeared first on The Revelator.

There’s a particular weight to memory when you’ve lived through a time that others now only reference in shorthand. I don’t mean nostalgia. I mean the physical act of remembering who is missing.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, as AIDS moved through my community with a speed and indifference that still feels impossible to explain, I had address books that became, over time, records of absence. Names crossed out. Numbers that no longer rang. Whole clusters of friends and colleagues gone. Not abstractly, not statistically — specifically. People with voices, habits, jokes, plans. People who should have had the chance to grow older.

They didn’t.

At the same time, I was an undergraduate in marine biology, expected to keep pace — labs, exams, problem sets — as if the world were intact. Animal physiology, genetics, statistics, organic chemistry. Show up. Perform. Pass. All while a plague burned through my community with terrifying precision.

There was no accommodation for grief. No pause. No recognition that anything unusual was happening. The expectation was continuity — business as usual — no matter what was being lost.

And while that was happening, the federal government — under Ronald Reagan — withheld urgency in a way that still feels difficult to describe without anger. Years passed before the crisis was even named at the highest level. The silence was ambient, structural. It told us exactly how much our lives were worth in the hierarchy of concern.

So we filled the silence ourselves.

We marched. We organized. We protested in the streets and in front of federal buildings and in hospital wards. I remember the lines of police in riot gear, the pressure of bodies pushing forward, the stinging waft of tear gas, the sound of voices refusing to be contained. I remember the fear and the adrenaline and the clarity that comes when you understand that no one is coming to save you.

You either act or you disappear.

My generation built something out of that refusal. Not just activism but systems — care networks, research pipelines, legal strategies, cultural shifts. It was blood and sweat and grief. It was also ingenuity and persistence. It forced recognition where there had been none. It changed policy, medicine, and public understanding.

We didn’t win everything. But we won enough to believe that progress, once secured, might hold.

Now I’m in my 60s. There are more years behind me than ahead. This is supposed to be the part where you take a breath. Where you look around and see what endured. Where you enjoy, at least in part, the world you helped fight into being.

Instead I’m watching something else.

A kind of thinning. A quiet unraveling. A great forgetting. I’m watching it in civil rights language. I’m watching it in public institutions. And I’m watching it just as clearly in the environmental work I’ve spent my life in — where the stories we tell about land, water, and who belongs in them are being quietly rewritten.

The language shifts first. What was once widely understood becomes contested again. Terms that carried hard-won meaning — equity, inclusion, justice — are recast as excess, as ideology, as something to be rolled back in the name of neutrality. The current administration under Donald Trump has leaned into that reframing, encouraging a broader cultural move to strip away the very frameworks that made broader participation possible.

It’s familiar, in the way bad patterns often are.

You don’t erase history outright. You erode it. You question its premises. You remove it from curricula. You flatten it into something unthreatening or dismiss it as irrelevant. Over time the edges blur, the urgency fades, and the lessons become optional.

What makes this process so effective is its efficiency. Recast hard-fought struggles under a single dismissive label — “DEI” — and you don’t have to argue against their substance. You simply make them suspect. From there the cascade is predictable. Funding becomes conditional. Curricula are scrutinized. Research agendas narrow. Writing, teaching, and public engagement that reflect lived realities begin to carry professional or financial risk. Not always through explicit bans, but through signals — what is rewarded, what is questioned, what quietly disappears.

Fear does the rest. Institutions grow cautious. Individuals self-edit. The story contracts. And over time a generation comes of age not just without the full history, but with a lingering sense that perhaps those earlier gains were excessive, that something went too far. That equality and justice themselves were the overreach.

And alongside that, something even more unsettling: the return of silence from people who know better.

Allies who once spoke up now hesitate. Institutions hedge. The language becomes cautious, then vague, then absent. Even much of the media — consolidated, risk-averse, and increasingly billionaire-owned — pulls its punches, shaping silence as much as it breaks it. The same dynamic that defined the early years of the AIDS crisis, the gap between what was happening and what was publicly acknowledged, begins to widen anew.

There is, however, a distinction worth naming. The silence of the Reagan years was neglect — devastating in its indifference but defined by what was not done. What we’re seeing now is more deliberate. Federal agencies are being directed to reshape the narrative itself — to remove language, narrow scope, and determine whose experiences are permitted to remain visible. The effect may echo the past, but the mechanism has changed. This is not just silence. It is its construction.

That silence carries a memory for those of us who have seen it before.

As Pride Month arrives, we’re asked — publicly, collectively — to celebrate how far things have come. And there’s been real progress worth marking. But memory doesn’t move on a calendar. For some of us, it remains immediate, shaped by what it took to get here — the years when a “normal” life was never really on offer, when the choice was to fight or risk erasure. Sacrifice isn’t always something you commemorate cleanly. It lingers. It returns. In certain moments, it opens wounds again, often accompanied by a quieter, more persistent weight: the survivor’s question of why I am still here when so many are not.

We learned, very early on, what it meant. “Silence = Death” wasn’t rhetorical flourish. It was observation.

The throughline doesn’t belong only to the LGBTQ+ community. It runs through the broader arc of civil rights in this country.

Black communities fought to be seen in a nation structured to abuse and ignore them. Asian American communities refused to disappear into exclusion and incarceration. Indigenous nations resisted erasure from land and history. Women refused the legal and cultural frameworks that reduced them to property.

None of these struggles were granted recognition voluntarily. Each required pressure against systems that preferred quiet. These histories are not separate from environmental protection. They shaped it. And now, as those same voices are pushed to the margins again, the consequences are showing up in the places we claim to protect.

And here’s where the environmental story enters more fully — because public lands and waters have never just been about scenery. They’re where this country tells itself who it is.

Walk through a national park, a monument, a protected shoreline, and you’re walking through a narrative. These places carry the imprint of who was displaced, who resisted, who built, who endured. They are supposed to hold the full story — messy, uncomfortable, unfinished.

That’s precisely why they are now being rewritten.

What’s less clear to me is what is ultimately gained by narrowing that story. I understand the intent — the impulse to recast this country as the product of a singular lineage, to smooth complexity into something more orderly, more reassuring. There is a kind of counterfeit comfort in that version of history: simpler, less contested, easier to claim. But it comes at a cost. Because the fuller story of American lands and waters — of Indigenous stewardship, of displacement and resistance, of communities shaping and being shaped by these places — is not a burden. It is the substance of what “out of many, one” has always meant. To strip that away is not to clarify who we are. It is to trade a living, contested inheritance for something thinner, quieter, and far less true.

Recent directives have pushed federal agencies to scrub or soften references to slavery, Indigenous dispossession, civil rights struggles, LGBTQ+ history, and even climate science from the very places meant to preserve them. Exhibits have been altered, language removed, context narrowed. In some cases the stories of entire communities are being reduced or erased in the name of removing “divisive” narratives.

This isn’t just cultural housekeeping. It’s structural.

Because those same communities — the ones whose stories are now being minimized — were often central to the modern conservation movement itself. Indigenous stewardship shaped landscapes long before they were designated as parks. Black, Latino, and Asian communities have borne disproportionate environmental burdens while also driving environmental justice movements that expanded what conservation even means. LGBTQ+ advocates helped build coalitions, institutions, and public will at moments when environmental protection needed it most.

To erase those voices from the story of public lands is to do more than distort history. It is to narrow the present.

If conservation is recast as something neutral, apolitical, and disconnected from lived experience, then it becomes easier to exclude. Easier to decide who belongs in decision-making spaces and who does not. Easier to ignore whose communities are most affected by pollution, climate change, and ecological decline.

The land doesn’t just lose its history. It loses its witnesses. And once that happens, the decisions that follow begin to reflect that absence.

We see it in policy rollbacks framed as efficiency. In weakened protections justified as balance. In the sidelining of environmental justice as unnecessary complication. The same logic that dismisses DEI as “woke” is being applied to conservation — stripping away the very perspectives that made the field more honest, more effective, and more accountable.

Remove those perspectives and the system doesn’t become clearer: It becomes more brittle. Because ecosystems don’t exist in isolation from people. And conservation that refuses to see people clearly will fail to protect either.

This is the same pattern I watched unfold decades ago. Information existed. Communities spoke. The impacts were visible to those closest to them. But the systems in power chose not to see, not to listen, not to act.

That gap — between reality and recognition — is where harm multiplies.

There came a point when I threw my old address books away. The accumulation of loss had become unbearable — page after page of names, each one a life interrupted, a story cut short.

I think about it now as a warning. What we’re seeing this time around is a different kind of erasure. It starts quietly: histories softened, contexts removed, voices pushed to the margins. By the time the loss is visible, the record has already been rewritten.

What I carry from that time isn’t just grief. It’s a kind of pattern recognition — the moment systems begin to look away, the subtle softening of language to avoid discomfort, the speed with which urgency dissolves into ambiguity and then into silence.

And I know what it takes to interrupt that erasure. It takes people willing to challenge the rewriting of the story, to hold onto memory even as it’s being erased, and allies who understand that silence is not neutrality — it is participation in the outcome.

Because silence is still available as an option. It always is.

You can choose to look away. You can tell yourself that things aren’t that bad, or that they’ll correct themselves, or that it’s someone else’s fight. You can let the language erode, let the policies shift, let the history blur.

Or you can recognize the pattern and decide, again, not to accept it.

For those of us who have lived through earlier versions of this, that decision feels less like a choice and more like a reflex. We’ve seen where silence leads. We know what it costs.

And we know, just as clearly, what it takes to break it.

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

Environmental Groups: Earn Your Place at Pride

The post The Great Forgetting appeared first on The Revelator.

This may be true: That we live in a time of cosmic tragedy, when heedless human expansion has pushed many of the planet’s lives beyond bearing. Marvels such as the universe has never seen before — angels’ trumpets and vaquita porpoises — may be past saving. As ecosystems unravel, so do the cultures that depend on them, and the dreadful, dangerous human genius has not yet found the imagination or will to rescue them. I fear that this is so.

But this also is true: That a flock of butterflies is dancing around purple lupine in our field. They are tiny, the size of a buttercup, but blue. So blue they look like slips of summer sky, taken flight. Fender’s blue butterflies, Icaricia icarioides fenderii. They once seemed to have vanished from the world in the 1930s, when farmers plowed up most of the prairie flowers. Scientists got ready to pronounce them extinct. But then, in 1989, a young U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist named Jarod Jebousek found a few butterflies on feral land next to our field.

So now, here they are. We see them lapping up nectar from the furry throats of wild iris. We find their eggs on the undersides of Kincaid lupine leaves. Butterflies gather to lick the mud. There are thousands, and it’s all because young acronym-agency scientists teamed up with landowners to save them. I know that this is so.

How is a person supposed to think about that? How do you hold both truths at the same time — the horror and the hope? How can you accept the truth that destroys hope and at the same time hold the hope that may be the only route toward recovery?

Essayist E.B. White made a joke of it: I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But it isn’t funny. It tears me apart. How can you love Earthly lives and know that forces are advancing to destroy them?

This is the question at the center of my life.

I once asked a group of students to pull out their pens and start writing a list of what they loved too much to lose. They started strong. My daughter. Smell of wet oak leaves. Bees in foxgloves. But the students couldn’t keep it up. Salmon coming home. Nettle soup. Sticky cottonwood buds. A student put his head in his hands. Do we have to do this, he asked. Dragonflies.

Yes, we have to do this, I whispered. We have to keep a list. We have to keep them in mind, all the small glories. We can’t let any of them escape our attention. Every day, every moment, we have to name what we love and stand to lose.

Here is what we will have to do: We will love the world with a tender and ferocious love, and we will do what we can to protect and renew it. Both of these. Even if it breaks our hearts. Even if we fail in the end. That’s what love means. That is why we are here.

That conviction may explain why my husband and I were standing in the center of the field with Kathleen Westly, in that nasty cold fog that afflicts Oregon’s Willamette Valley in December. Up until her retirement this year, Kathleen was the restoration program director of the Marys River Watershed Council, so she was the one coordinating the restoration of habitat for the Fender’s blue butterfly across agencies and landowners.

We were excited because we’d just learned that the Fender’s blue had been promoted from endangered to threatened. A small, even pitiable, victory, maybe, but a significant one, and who wouldn’t be glad for that? Kathleen held a field notebook and pointed with a pencil, as she sketched out how we might change the landscape to make it more welcoming for the butterflies.

Lupines in the field. Photo: KDMoore

Fender’s blue butterflies are rarely found more than 50 yards from Kincaid’s lupines. They may sip nectar from other plants, especially white or yellow composites, and they may lick roadkill, mud, or animal droppings for their mineral nutrients, but it’s Kincaid’s lupines that provide home and sustenance. Fender’s blues need Kincaid’s lupines, and the lupines need open prairie and sunshine. Only 1% of the Willamette Valley’s prairies are left, and these are small islands in a sea of subdivisions and grass seed farms.

So our first goal for us was to keep our prairie intact and connect it with other prairie land along the Marys River.

Kathleen pointed to a Douglas fir that shaded the oaks at the western boundary of our land. Shall we take this out? And this one? Before long, most of the tall evergreens on that border were goners. Frank and I gulped, but we understood that she wanted to give the butterflies an open, unshaded passage, so they could fly from one lupine patch to another.

We had planted the Doug firs that were in the way of the butterfly movements, and if that was a mistake, then we decided we should make it up.

Frank Moore looks for butterflies in the meadow. Photo: KDMoore

The wonderful surprise of this restoration work was to see so many people of skill and good will come together to create a connected corridor of lupine prairie. Along with the Marys River Watershed Council, credit many agencies and nonprofits, including Benton County, Starker Forests, the Greenbelt Land Trust, the Institute for Applied Ecology, and landowners all along the river. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Recovery Program is a big player, providing most of the funds.

The process has been complicated; I do not pretend to understand the acronyms or responsibilities of all the agencies that were involved, but they somehow came together to get the grants written and the work accomplished, from young Indigenous fire crews to those solid-shouldered, old timey ecologists who know everybody and everything. Along with the new butterfly/flower communities, the growing communities of caring people lifted my spirits, at a time when they could use a bit of lifting.

Long tongues that retract and roll up like measuring tapes. Bulgy eyes that see ultraviolet pathways to the heart of a flower. Intestines that collect the remains of the caterpillar that a butterfly used to be. Clear blood. Hairy feet that can taste sweetness. Two eyes that coordinate images from 6,000 lenses. Transparent wings with scales in some of the loveliest patterns and colors on the planet.

These are grand and glorious beings, complicated and clever beyond imagining. I want to ask, who thinks up these extraordinary creatures? But it’s not like that, I know. Butterflies evolved in the Cretaceous period, 100 million years ago. They danced around the feathered crests of dinosaurs, dipped their tongues in the blood of wounded pterosaurs, and drank from newly evolved flowers. Were butterflies beautiful then? Of course they would have been, because there’s survival value in bright beauty that mimics glaring eyes or warns of poison hairs.

The improbable, beautiful complexity of a butterfly seems like a miracle. But that’s the great miracle of biodiversity, isn’t it? That it’s no miracle at all — just nature doing what it does, according to the only rule it knows, which is to live long enough to produce more life.

The storms of the Cretaceous period could not kill the butterflies. The asteroid that set the world on fire did not kill the butterflies. They survived ice age after ice age, flood after flood, drifting continents and fire-breathing volcanoes. Even with their axes and plows, the homesteaders did not kill the butterflies. Tiny things, delicate as paper lanterns, each allotted only one year to live before they blink out, the butterflies on this land survived everything that 100 million years could throw at them.

I don’t know where or when their journey will end. But it will not be here, and it will not be now.

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

Insects Are Disappearing — Here’s How to Help

The post When the Butterflies Come Home Again appeared first on The Revelator.

Songbirds generally make their migratory flights at night, and during spring migration tens of millions of birds may be streaming north above us as we sleep. But when the sun rises, where do these tired birds choose to stop, rest, and refuel?

You may picture a nature preserve or grassy field, but a study published earlier this year in the journal Nature Cities shows that a large percentage of these birds are making their “stopovers” in cities, illustrating the importance of urban conservation efforts.

Ornithologist Miguel Jimenez was a Ph.D. candidate at Colorado State University when he led the study as part of his dissertation. The project was inspired by his desire “to do work that was useful to people who are actively working to conserve birds,” he says. “So I had a bunch of conversations with different folks doing that work, and one thing I consistently heard was that it’s often really hard to convince people that bird conservation in cities matters.”

Jimenez’s dissertation focused on studying bird migration using weather radar. Large masses of migrating birds show up clearly on the nationwide radar system used by meteorologists, and this data isn’t subject to the same biases as bird counts carried out by people. If you capture a radar image just as migrating birds are starting out in the morning, Jimenez explains, you can pinpoint the stopover locations from which they’re leaving.

“You see this kind of mushroom cloud of birds taking off, and then they start to dissipate over the landscape.”

Jimenez and his colleagues used data from 143 radar sites to identify stopover hotspots across the continental United States for both spring and fall migration, then calculated how many of those sites fell within urban areas.

“To be totally honest, I ran this analysis originally expecting, like, I’ll probably figure out that most of it doesn’t happen in cities,” says Jimenez.

Instead, nearly half of the stopover sites he found were within what the U.S. Census Bureau has defined as Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Other ways of statistically defining cities showed a similarly disproportionate number of migrating birds using urban stopover sites.

So why would migrating birds choose city habitats?

“Probably a good chunk of my career is [going to be spent] on that question,” says Jimenez.

But there are already some indications. Cities often develop along coastlines and rivers, places that already have high biodiversity, he points out. And birds are attracted to artificial light at night (though scientists aren’t sure exactly why), so perhaps they’re being drawn in by city lights.

Taking things a step further, Jimenez and his colleagues searched for signs of the so-called “luxury effect,” the tendency of urban wildlife to congregate in high-income neighborhoods due to the greater amounts of green space. Analyzing bird stopover use of more than 2,000 parks across 88 urban areas, they found that stopover density was indeed higher, on average, in areas with higher-income residents.

These nationwide averages, however, don’t tell the full story. Both the overall density of urban stopovers and the strength of the luxury effect varied considerably from one U.S. region to another, and the reason may have something to do with water.

Cities where the luxury effect was most pronounced, such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, were in regions where surface water can be scarce. Dryer regions also had a higher overall proportion of urban stopover sites. It seems in dry places, the way that humans concentrate the available water (and the resulting vegetation) in the places where we live — and especially in the highest-income neighborhoods — may also attract high concentrations of migrating birds.

“This area, where ecology meets the social forces that shape biodiversity, is really important and interesting,” says Emily Cohen, a bird migration expert and faculty member University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who was not involved in the project. “Not only are cities important for birds, but the connection between people and birds [that can happen in cities] is just a really powerful tool for conservation.”

Cohen says she’d love to see follow-up research on the regional variations uncovered by Jimenez’s work, as well as on how the birds using these urban habitats are actually faring.

“I would describe this paper as more opening up questions than giving answers,” agrees Jimenez. Having completed his Ph.D., he has moved on to a postdoctoral research position at the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute in Chicago, where he hopes to continue pursuing answers.

But what we definitely know, he says, is that “the actions that we take where we live, which for most people today is in cities — those matter a lot for migratory birds.”

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

What City Birds Around the World Have in Common

The post City Birds: New Study Shows Urban Habitat Matters for Migrating Species appeared first on The Revelator.

Editor’s note: This edition of our ‘Protect This Place’ column is produced in collaboration with the Climate Listening Project, whose short film appears below.

The Place:

We’re on the Florida Panhandle, from the rare coastal dune lakes of Scenic 30a to the Forgotten Coast, where communities are coming together to stop the petrochemical buildout and preserve this biodiversity hotspot.

Photo by Dayna Reggero Why it matters:

This part of Florida has the greatest diversity of carnivorous plants on Earth, wildlife that lives in both fresh and salt water, and many species that only exist here — endemics. There are more than 2,500 plant species, too, and the Panhandle is an important part of the route of migratory birds and monarch butterflies. The dunes here are critical nesting sites for five endangered species of sea turtles: green, loggerhead, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, and hawksbill. The endangered Choctawachee Beach mouse plays an important role in creating dunes on the beach by eating the fruits of sea oats and spreading their seeds.

Pelican by Dayna Reggero

Amidst these and other natural wonders, communities have come together over decades to say “no” to offshore oil drilling and gas exports and protect state parks from golf courses. The state has also created the Florida Wildlife Corridor down the peninsula, protecting Florida panthers, and the Northwest Florida Greenway Corridor, with longleaf pine forests going north protecting black bears.

The threat:

The Panhandle, in Seaside, Florida, was where Hands Across the Sand was founded in 2010, with thousands of people coming together along the entire Florida coastline to stop offshore oil drilling. Just down the street, in North Port St. Joe, another movement inspired communities to join in 2024 to stop liquid natural gas exports off the coast. These communities are very different, but the Florida Panhandle inspires a love of place. A petrochemical buildout along the Panhandle threatens the health of our communities and environment.

My place in this place:

I studied environmental communications on the Florida Panhandle in Pensacola. My first job was at the Northwest Florida Zoo in Gulf Breeze, where I worked with endangered species like Bengal tigers, often taking animals on television to talk about problems like poaching. My first board position was with the Emerald Coast Wildlife Refuge, where I worked with local media from Fort Walton Beach to Port St. Joe to share stories about local species through my first blog, Wild Woman. I’ve lived in Walton County and helped to protect the rare coastal dune lakes there — with people like E.O. Wilson, who popularized the term biophilia: the love of all living things. I was recently invited to listen in North Port St. Joe on the Forgotten Coast for my new film, “Apology to Earth.”

When I first moved to the Florida Panhandle 25 years ago and began working along Scenic Route 30a, local people were just beginning to research and understand the rare coastal dune lakes that exist here and in five other places on Earth. These lakes have outfalls through the dunes that open to the gulf and release brackish lake water in exchange for saltwater, resulting in a unique ecosystem. People came together to protect the lakes and stop development from closing more of the outfalls.

Who’s protecting it now:

We need to continue to protect the Florida Panhandle. I’m inspired by the North Port St. Joe community taking care of St. Joseph’s Bay and the Forgotten Coast. Florida Panhandle Minority Communities Climate Change Coalition (FPM4C) is working with individuals and groups along this coast to create sustainable solutions.

North Port St. Joe community / photo by Dayna Reggero What this place needs:

“Together we must stand with one voice against any organization or industrial entity that attempts to locate unhealthy and unsafe environmental and hazardous conditions in or near our community,” says Dannie Bolden of FPM4C.

Dannie Bolden and Dayna Reggero / Photo by Zachary Kanzler See more:

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https://therevelator.org/protect-this-place-connected-communities/

The post Protect This Place: The Florida Panhandle vs. Petrochemicals appeared first on The Revelator.

What is cult behavior? As we see from this reader’s question, it can frustrate and confound us when people we know embrace ideas that fly in the face of reality and reason. From NXIVM to Heaven’s Gate to extreme right-wing groups, these ideologies can appear frightening when their members can’t be reasoned with in common-sense conversation.

It’s a tough sociological topic. If you’ve watched friends or family members become indoctrinated by a cult, then you know it’s often shocking and traumatic. Let’s look at the dynamics of cults and demystify them so we can see (and talk to) individuals with compassion and patience.

Dr. Green,

Thank you for this interesting column. I have a question kind of around the antivax movement, but related to MAGA, MAHA, conspiracies, right-wing news, etc. What is happening, psychologically, when people form these closed information ecosystems? Is it a form of self-protection? An element of identity? Fear? I think if I understand it better, I won’t get so frustrated trying to talk with some of these people. Thanks!

Hello Friend,

I completely understand, having had some of my loved ones and best friends “go to the cult side.” Let’s look at the latest research and science on the dynamics of cults so we can understand how they begin and evolve and why people gravitate toward them.

Who Is Susceptible to Joining a Cult?

Vulnerable people join cults. That’s the simple answer, but it’s packed with a host of fascinating variables and personalities.

Vulnerable doesn’t always mean gullible; it can also mean intelligent and idealistic. Any one of us can be attracted to a cult if timing and circumstance conspire. Catalysts can include:

• Major life transitions like divorce, the death of a loved one, moving to a new city, job loss, becoming a refugee from your home country through war and political unrest, or experiencing a near-death experience — can knock us off course in life. All of us experience crossroads or pivot points in our lives that make us question the life we thought we knew and make us insecure about what the “meaning of life” is and where we fit in.
• Isolation and a loss of sense-of-self can become existential after we’ve achieved a goal and are wondering what’s next (or if we’re marginalized in our careers or by society). We start seeking a new sense of purpose, belonging, or higher power, and have weak, disintegrating, or nonexistent support networks that might otherwise protect us from the “love bombing” tactics of cults. Cults fill a void of loneliness with artificial family structures, often using interpersonal terms such as “brothers,” “sisters,” “fathers,” and other kinship identifiers.
• Upbringings filled with neglect, abuse, or the loss or absence of one or both parents can produce runaways or victims of broken, underfunded foster care systems who are attracted to cults partly for the family pronouns that offer to make them feel whole again.
• Some individuals with idealistic worldviews, often the result of growing up in sheltered settings, are overly trusting of strangers and naïve about basic social realities. They may ignore “red flags” or that “gut feeling” to be cautious when a charismatic, manipulative person or group presents themselves. This lack of street smarts and suspension of critical thinking make them easy targets for groups that seem loving and accepting.
• Studies indicate that cult members are often well-educated from middle-to-upper classes and have more resources to “find themselves.” With resources like money readily available, and lack of motivators to achieve, cults become a substitute for meaningful work and hard-earned achievements.

Anyone can be recruited by a cult under the right circumstances because these groups target basic human needs for love, safety, and belonging.

How Do Cults Start?

Cults usually start with a charismatic, narcissistic leader who exploits social or individual vulnerabilities to establish a high-control group, typically promising exclusive enlightenment, salvation, or utopian community.

The leader then cultivates a small group of devotees instructed to “recruit” new members. Recruiters focus on individuals experiencing loneliness, life transitions, etc. (see above). Cults develop during times of social, economic, or spiritual crisis, filling a void left by declining traditional structures. When an individual is recruited, the group gradually isolates them from friends and family, demanding increasing loyalty to the leader, who often becomes a source of absolute truth.

Ideological Transformation is a process by which old beliefs are replaced with a new, closed-system ideology. Aided by social networking technology, an “us versus them” mentality has increased the rate at which vulnerable people are exposed to undue influence in cults. This redefines one’s reality and self.

“Undue Influence does NOT erase the person’s old identity but rather creates a new identity to suppress the old one. After different types of manipulation, the creation of a new identity is done step-by-step by formal indoctrination sessions and informally by members, videos, games, movies, publications, and social/digital media. Behavior modification techniques are employed, such as rewards/punishments, thought-stopping, and control of environment (isolation or restriction of access to others). And then the new identify is reinforced and the old identify suppressed.”

                              – Steven A Hassan, Ph.D.  “Understanding Cults: The Basics” Psychology Today, June 5, 2021

How Can We Convince Someone to Leave a Cult?

In the 1970s-1990s, cult deprogramming involved often unlawful involuntary abduction and coercion; it had a low success rate due to its forceful and controversial techniques. This morphed into “exit counseling,” which involves education, building trust, and reality testing.

The Strategic Interactive Approach, developed by mental health expert Steven Hassan, is a non-coercive, empowering approach to helping people leave cults that encourages a positive, warm relationship between cult members and their families while helping to raise essential questions for cult members to consider. This recovery model helps participants identify and distinguish their cult identity from their authentic identity, working toward integrating parts of the authentic identity (that were coopted by the cult identity) into a whole mind.

Is Social Media Toxic?

Social media has made self-created social or navel-gazing bubbles intense and addictive. Worse, some of the current online gatherings of like-minded people have become noxious and malignant, creating cult-like echo-chambers that concentrate and distort negative, violent, and nihilistic emotions. This situation has motivated people with mental health problems to commit horrible crimes, murders, stalking, terrorism, and empowers emotions of general hate for society. Social media distorts reality and is destroying the universal social contract between humans. And it’s addictive, by design, for the profit of the social network titans on a global scale.

Social media can be a double-edged sword. Tech giants and their social media platforms have very little oversight by the government because of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, a U.S. law protecting online platforms from liability for user-generated content and allowing them to moderate content in “good faith.” It provides immunity for hosting, promoting, or removing third-party content. Many experts argue Section 230 should be abolished and more federal oversight on social media should be enacted to prevent what has become a very toxic and harmful psychological poison in our global society.

How Can I Respond to Radical People, Such as MAGA Fans, Climate Deniers, or Anti-Vaxxers?

Understanding how people get into cults and cult-like movements is critical to help guide future conversations.

When we see that a person’s visions, values, and missions feel averse to what we understand of real science and even reality itself, we can try to socialize with them using a mix of boundaries, gently targeted questions (that may seem confrontational to them), and compassion. Focus on specific, shared values to find common ground to build rapport before addressing differences. Maintain calm and self-control over aggressiveness and don’t let them monopolize the conversation.

One approach is to use the Socratic Method, in lay terms: Instead of stating opposing facts, which are often dismissed as “fake news,” ask questions that encourage them to think through their own logic or critical thinking.

If you’re speaking with someone close to you who has changed, try to remember who they were before and guide the conversation with little reminders of how they used to be. Changing a viewpoint is a slow process. You may need to make some distance or disengage for a period of time to protect yourself from frustration and anger; these conversations can become confrontational with folks trying insistently to drive home their point of view. Don’t ratchet up your level of frustration in response — that never works.

If a conversation becomes unproductive, emotional, or disrespectful, you have the right to end it by simply walking away. Protect your own mental peace by accepting what you can’t control.

I hope these concepts and approaches are helpful.

Dr. Green

What are you struggling with as a dedicated environmentalist and global citizen? Let us know by sending your questions and success stories in the text box below.

All participants are anonymous. Even Dr. Green has no idea who you are.

Send Dr. Green your questions and stories below:

All questions are considered intended for publication; published questions will be kept anonymous. Individual replies are not possible.

See you next time!

Disclaimer: This column is not a replacement for therapy, and the advice given is educational in nature, not a replacement for professional psychological or psychiatric therapy. This is a peer-driven support effort by The Revelator to inform and build community with environmental and wildlife defenders.

If you are feeling critically depressed and suicidal, it’s time to immediately find professional help. Go to your closest emergency room or call the following numbers to get immediate help in your area:

SUICIDE HOTLINES

Worldwide: http://www.befrienders.org/support/

United Kingdom: http://www.samaritans.org

USA: https://988lifeline.org

1-800-273-TALK

Resources:

Factors related to susceptibility and recruitment by cults   National Institutes of Health. (Curtis, J M, and M J Curtis. “Factors related to susceptibility and recruitment by cults.” Psychological reports vol. 73,2 (1993): 451-60. doi:10.2466/pr0.1993.73.2.451).

The International Cultic Studies Association  ICSA is not an activist or advocacy group, but a unique nonprofit organization grounded in three pillars: advancing knowledge, fostering open dialogue, and supporting recovery from cultic and coercive influence.

The Center for Humane Technology   This nonprofit is dedicated to ensuring that today’s most consequential technologies, such as AI and social media, actually serve humanity. We bring clarity to how the tech ecosystem works in order to shift the incentives that drive it.

Film: “The Social Dilemma”

Film: “The Brainwashing of My Dad”

The Definitive Guide to Helping People Trapped in a Cult: Learn how to help friends and family being influenced by harmful cults.

The Freedom of Mind Resource Center   Founded by leading cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan, a former member of the notorious Moonies cult in the 1970s who experienced firsthand the devastating effects of undue influence and coercion. His escape from the Moonies and subsequent recovery process inspired him to dedicate his life to understanding and exposing the deceptive tactics used by cults and manipulative groups.

“Why do people join cults?” TedEd with Janja Lalich

“Why People Join Cults and Why They Stay” by Stephen Mather

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

Feeling Anxiety About Climate Change and Other Environmental Threats? These Five New Books Can Help

The post Dr. Green: Why Some People and Groups Become Resistant to Science appeared first on The Revelator.

The global annual production of plastics rose to 400 million metric tons in 2022 and is projected to double by 2050. Many items produced are used once and then thrown away, including more than 30 billion plastic water bottles sold each year in the United States alone. Less than 10% of plastic waste is recycled.

Clearly the problem of plastic pollution in land and marine environments isn’t going away. This series looks at some approaches to dealing with it, including this examination of the increasing demand for water in disposable bottles.

A whopping 88% of Americans say they consume bottled water, according to an industry survey released in 2024. In fact that year we drank an estimated 16.4 billion gallons of it — 47.1 gallons and a shocking average of about 340 individual bottles per person. The retail cost of all those bottles reached $50.6 billion.

But there’s another cost to this practice: serious effects on our health.

Recent research from Concordia University in Canada shows that people who drink bottled water ingest up to 90,000 more microparticles of plastic a year than those who drink tap water. Microplastic particles range in size from 1 micron (a thousandth of a millimeter) to 5 millimeters. For perspective, a credit card is about 1 millimeter thick.

More concerning is another study that found higher amounts of nanoparticles in water bottles than previously reported. Nanoparticles are smaller than 1 micron.

An ever-growing body of research suggests that exposure to these particles, particularly the nano-sized ones, affects our immune systems, causes reproductive issues, impairs cognitive function, and increases cancer risk.

Why We Drink Bottled Water

Why do we drink so much water from plastic bottles in the first place?

In one survey reported by Statista, reasons given by consumers included convenience, better taste, mistrust of household water quality, unsuitability of tap water, preference for sparkling or flavored water, and the fact that some of the bottled stuff has more minerals.

Researchers at Canada’s University of Waterloo suggest that the choice also taps into something deeper: our fear of death. Their 2018 paper argued that this fear makes us want to avoid risks — and many people see bottled water as safer, purer, or more controlled.

The industry promotes those perceptions with marketing campaigns using celebrities and feel-good imaging. Some even directly play on fears about the safety of tap water and mistrust in government entities (think Flint, Michigan), according to Peter H. Gleick, president emeritus and chief scientist at the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security and author of the 2010 book Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water.

But is bottled water truly safer than tap?

Image by Wilson Blanco from Pixabay Bottled Versus Tap

In the United States, tap water is significantly more regulated than the bottled stuff. The Environmental Protection Agency oversees municipal tap water systems, which must meet safety standards and are regularly inspected.

The water itself is treated to remove particles, chemicals, bacteria, and other contaminants and must be frequently tested. Water suppliers are required to provide testing results to customers every year in the form of Consumer Confidence Reports, also published online.

Not that there haven’t been problems with tap water systems. A 1986 EPA report, Reducing Lead in Drinking Water, showed that 36 million Americans were using tap water with high levels of lead. Much of that exposure came from lead pipes in homes. Congressional investigations and updates to the Safe Drinking Water Act followed and most of the problems were fixed, but not all (again, Flint).

More recently per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known as “forever chemicals,” have been found in water sources around the world. These chemicals break down very slowly and have turned up in the blood of people and animals and at low levels in a variety of food products and soil. Studies have linked exposure to some PFAS to harmful health effects.

In 2024 the EPA adopted national standards for acceptable levels of PFAs in tap water, requiring water utilities to test for it until 2027. Testing results will be used to determine future regulations for regular PFAS sampling and reporting, and after 2029 utilities must use treatment processes to remove PFAS from drinking water. Researchers are studying the effectiveness of various removal technologies.

Contaminants or pathogens sometimes end up in municipal water supplies due to issues such as flooding or equipment malfunctions. Thankfully we know about these incidents because of the required testing. But hearing about them can sow doubt, causing people to switch to bottled water even if their water source is safe.

The Food and Drug Administration regulates bottled water, but only if it’s sold across state lines. Water that is both packaged and sold within the state of origin represents most of the bottled water market, according to Erik Olson, senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Individual states are responsible for these products, but 1 in 5 states have no regulations covering them, he adds.

And while the PFAS standards are supposed to apply to bottled water as well, Olson says: “As far as we know they haven’t been. Most bottled water probably doesn’t have PFAS, but how do we know?”

A study led by New York University researchers found that plastics — including but not limited to water bottles — are responsible for 93% of the exposure to PFOA, one of the most widely studied PFAS.

NRDC also found that about 22% of bottled water brands they tested contained chemicals at levels above state health limits or industry recommendations in at least one sample.

Ironically, an estimated 25 to 45% of bottled water is simply municipal tap water, repackaged and marked up in price, sometimes further treated, sometimes not. PepsiCo’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani, for example, are filtered tap water. Some brands, like Smartwater, promote that they use distillation to purify their water, but that process uses a lot of energy. Spring water typically requires minimal treatment but may come from stressed natural springs. The process of bottling water can be wasteful; for example, it takes 1.63 liters of water to make every liter of Dasani.

Olson points out that making and shipping plastic bottles uses a lot of fossil fuel, too. “It’s incredibly wasteful. Consuming tap water is more energy efficient and has a lower carbon footprint.”

Then there are those particles.

On April 2 the EPA announced plans to study microplastics and added microplastics as a priority contaminant group on a draft list under consideration for regulation in drinking water (along with pharmaceuticals as a group, 75 individual chemicals, and nine microbes). However, the agency has had significant layoffs and attrition under the second Trump administration. It is dispersing staff in its defunct Office of Research and Development to other programs and faces a proposed 52% cut to its budget. Food and Water Watch, a safe food, water, and climate advocate, warned that the announcement falls short of what we really need, which is a comprehensive nationwide monitoring program.

On top of that, the effort will address microplastics but not nanoplastics.

Sarah Sajedi, Ph.D., coauthor of the previously mentioned particle studies, has done experiments that found as many as 10 million nanoparticles in a liter water bottle. A major concern, she says, is that these particles accumulate in human tissues. Nanoparticles can enter the bloodstream and reach vital organs, causing chronic inflammation, oxidative stress on cells, hormonal disruption, impaired reproduction, neurological damage, and various kinds of cancer.

“We’ve only had technology in the past three to five years to detect the nanosized particles,” Sajedi says. “First you have to prove there is exposure, and now we have shown that it exists with bottled water.”

In another ironic twist, when companies started using thinner plastic in water bottles to help reduce plastic pollution, it made the particle problem worse.

Bottled water containers now typically use almost a third less PET plastic on average than other packaged beverages like soft drinks, which need thicker containers due to carbonation. But these thinner bottles shed more particles. Movement, such as from being carried around, and exposure to sunlight both increase release of particles.

“Shaking the bottle or UV exposure from leaving it in your car increases tenfold the shedding of the plastic,” says Sajedi.

Improving the quality of material used in bottles would reduce particle exposure but exacerbate the problem of plastic waste. Gleick’s book noted that people in the United States throw away 30 billion plastic water bottles each year. Only a small percent of those are recycled; many end up in the environment, often the ocean. The harms caused by this plastic pollution are well documented, with the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimating its environmental damages at about $75 billion per year back in 2018 and a 2025 study blaming it for over $1.5 trillion in health-related economic losses per year.

Image by Hans from Pixabay So What’s a Thirsty Person to Do?

In general the safest thing to do is drink tap water — absent any specific problems in your area — and drink bottled water only on (rare) occasions.

“Say you’re at a baseball game and there’s no drinking fountains,” Olson says. “You’re not evil for consuming it once in a while. We just encourage people to think about it.”

If you’re concerned about your tap water, he suggests using a home filter system, which costs much less overall than bottles. One example shows that a family of four could save $2,878 a year using a pitcher-style filter system instead of bottled water.

“Another thing is, don’t be fooled by the names and pictures on the label that imply the water is from a mountain stream or pristine spring,” Olson says. “If the label says it is from a municipal source, it probably is just untreated tap water because that’s what rules require they say.”

When you need to buy bottled water, Sajedi suggests buying larger containers. “The quality of plastic is better with the jugs, which cuts down on your exposure to particles.”

Water is an essential human need. In places without reliable, safe water sources, many of these issues are moot, although experts argue the solution is to provide or improve infrastructure rather than relying on bottled water. But for the rest of us, it may be time to rethink our drinking habits.

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