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We the People featured at NW Folklife Festival this weekend!

Two copies will be at Seattle Center this weekend at the NW Folklife Festival, one at the Mural Amphitheater Stage, near the Space Needle and another in the International Fountain Pavilion, with pens for signing. Use this chance to add your signature in time for it to be taken to DC this July 4th!

Over the last 19 years, Backbone's giant We the People banner has served as an icon of people power and our aspirations to fulfill the shared mission of creating a more perfect union. Adding two more Preamble sections has allowed it to appear in even more cities in the past year, collecting signatures and grabbing the attention of the press and public as a symbol of resistance and resilience.

A proposed management change for the Maroon Bells Scenic Area, located in the White River National Forest outside Aspen, Colorado, is putting public access to the popular hiking destination in jeopardy, particularly for less affluent visitors.

Earlier this month, after the U.S. Forest Service stated that it can no longer afford to manage the area, Pitkin County applied for a special use permit to take over operations beginning in the 2027 season. Managing heavy visitation has always been a challenge at the Maroon Bells, and the area currently relies on shuttles, timed-entry, and limited parking reservations to keep crowds from overwhelming the landscape. The Pitkin County Open Space and Trails director told county commissioners the county’s general fund will not subsidize Maroon Bells operations, and that it will increase fees to cover costs.

The Forest Service currently oversees these operations at a nearly $300,000 annual deficit, though as Center for Western Priorities Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein writes in a new Westwise blog post about the issue, “Accepting the premise that national public lands must operate in the black is accepting an argument that would justify privatizing nearly every park, forest, and wilderness area in the country.”

The Maroon Bells situation is in part a result of underfunding by Congress, a problem that has been building for years and has accelerated under the Trump administration. Both the Trump administration and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have made it clear they intend to manage public lands like assets on a balance sheet, and offloading management costs to local governments is a consequence of that approach. The result is a pay-to-play system where access to public lands becomes more expensive. Hiking the Maroon Bells is already a costly endeavor that requires visitors to pay for parking in Aspen and for the shuttle ride to the trailhead.

Quick hits The hollow man in the arena

RE:PUBLIC

Comments from national park ‘snitch signs’ have been released. They’re wild

SFGATE

The Maroon Bells belong to everyone. Why are we treating them like a business?

Westwise

The Trump administration is spending $5 million to coat D.C. horse statues in gold

NOTUS

Grazing away wildfire risk? Congress considers cattle grazing for wildfire suppression

Montana Free Press

California is getting three new state parks, and they’re not where you’d think

National Geographic

Wildlife advocates sue to stop killing of predators inside designated wilderness areas

E&E News

Research suggests being in nature improves body image

Outside

Quote of the day

This is part of a Trump administration strategy to defund land management agencies in order to increase dysfunction, and then to present privatization as the solution. The Maroon Bells are well known and visible enough to draw scrutiny and generate outrage, but lesser-known areas won’t be so lucky.”

—CWP Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein, Westwise

Picture This

@u.s.forestservice

A brilliant red sunset paints the landscape on the Tongass National Forest, Alaska. Plan your adventure today!

(Forest Service photo by Adam DiPietro.)

Featured image: Maroon Bells Shuttle at the Maroon Lake parking area. Source: Pitkin County.

The post Higher fees could make visiting Colorado’s Maroon Bells unaffordable appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

In April 2026, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the provision barring racial gerrymandering designed to dilutes the voting power of Black communities. The Trump administration called it a victory. For communities on the frontlines of pollution, climate change, and environmental injustice, it is one most deliberate act of erasure and as Dr. Beverly Wright of Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ) says, it is a “theft of our movement’s inheritance”.

This ruling did not arrive alone. It is part of a coordinated, multi-front strategy to remove impacted communities — particularly Black communities — from the rooms where decisions get made. Through the courts, through Executive Orders seizing control of elections, through the SAVE Act’s documentation barriers that would block more than 21 million Americans from voting, through a Department of Justice that has sued all 50 states to build a national voter surveillance database, and through the threat of criminal prosecution against election officials and civic organizations.

This administration’s goal is not election integrity. The goal is the permanent political marginalization of Black communities, Indigenous communities and communities of color.

The pattern is unmistakable when you see it whole. The Supreme Court’s ruling applies not just to Congressional districts, but also to state legislative districts and maps for county and municipal elections — determining who gets to serve on a school board, a city council, or in the judiciary. 

Meanwhile, the administration has turned the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into an agency that violates the very definition of civil rights, redirecting it toward suppressing voting rather than protecting voting rights. 

At the same time, another assault on voting rights is being advanced through Congress. If signed into law, the SAVE Act would require every American to produce a passport or certified birth certificate, in person, at an election office just to register to vote, eliminating online registration, mail registration, and most voter registration drives. For Black communities, this lands on a foundation of deliberate historical denial: many older Black Americans were never issued birth certificates by governments that refused to recognize their full humanity. 

For Indigenous communities, the SAVE Act’s promise that Tribal IDs will suffice is a fiction, ignoring the fact that virtually no Tribal ID includes place of birth, another barrier buried in the bill’s text. And even with documents in hand, the nearest election office can be a hundred miles away across reservation land, or in Alaska, accessible only by plane. 

These are not bureaucratic inconveniences; they are systemic barriers deeply rooted in this country’s history of racial segregation. They reflect the architecture of laws written around people who were never meant to be politically represented and applied to communities still fighting to be counted.

The same communities facing barriers to their rights to vote are bearing the greatest burden of air pollution, toxic contamination, extreme heat, and climate disasters. And the fact that these communities are overwhelmingly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income, and this is not a coincidence. It is the predictable result of political exclusion and the enduring legacy of segregation. 

When communities cannot elect representatives who share their priorities, when their votes are diluted through racial gerrymandering, the outcome is a petrochemical plant permitted next to an elementary school, a neighborhood left without clean water, or a community absorbing the full cost of an energy system it had no power to refuse. 

A political system that makes voting harder perpetuates the very conditions that make environmental justice necessary.

This is also why the assault extends beyond the ballot. The same administration that is dismantling voting rights protections is also terrorizing immigrant communities — deportation threats, surveillance, and the weaponization of documentation status as a tool of political control. 

What this administration is attacking, in every instance, is the fundamental democratic principle that the people most affected have a rightful voice in decision-making. 

That principle does not begin and end at the voting booth. It lives in every planning meeting, every regulatory comment period, every public hearing, every coalition room where communities are fighting for their lives and their land. Undocumented neighbors, visa holders, green card holders, people who live and work and raise children in the same fenceline communities, who breathe the same air and drink the same water, carry knowledge and moral authority that no policy process can afford to exclude. 

Voting is an essential mechanism through which communities exercise the most direct form of political power available to our communities, and its protection is non-negotiable. The fight for voting rights and the fight for full community participation are intrinsically linked because they are being waged against us by the same forces, for the same purpose: to ensure that the communities with the most at stake in our climate and environmental future have the least say in shaping it.

 Our communities continue to show up, no matter the barriers put in our way: voters and non-voters, citizens and non-citizens, people who cast ballots, people who testify, and people who organize. No matter the injustices we face, environmental justice leaders know that our solidarity is unstoppable and our resolve to fight for true representation will never be broken by any court or politician.

Byron Ramos Gudiel is Executive Director of the Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy (CEED).

Sources:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/save-act-and-election-power-grab

https://www.vote.org/save-act/

https://narf.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/narf-save-act-native-voters.pdf

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/environmental-justice-requires-a-healthy-democracy

https://www.aclu.org/trump-on-voting-rights

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/we-arent-paying-enough-attention-to-what-the-scotus-vra-decision-means-for-state-legislatures

https://abcnews.com/Politics/congressional-black-caucus-lose-seats-amid-redistricting-fight/story?id=132965013

LCV – https://www.lcv.org/media-center/lcv-statement-on-scotus-decision-in-louisiana-v-callais/

Not NRDC Action Fund: https://www.nrdcactionfund.org/news/scotus-voting-rights-act-decision-hurts-our-democracy-and-the-court-itself/

Sierra Club: https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/04/sierra-club-statement-supreme-court-ruling-gut-voting-rights-act

CAP: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-supreme-courts-callais-decisions-undermine-the-voting-rights-act-and-sow-election-chaos/

WE ACT: https://weact.org/updates/in-response-to-regressive-voting-rights-act-supreme-court-decision-we-act-committed-to-fighting-for-our-democracy/

The post How the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Deepens Environmental Injustice appeared first on CEED.

At our recent annual Conference, Bioneers brought together two ground breaking figures in the struggle for an equitable and healthy food system. One working on the global architectures of that system and the other a hands on farmer and educator exemplifying how solidarity can empower dispossessed communities to reclaim their food sovereignty. Raj Patel is one of the world’s experts on sustainable food system, and a tireless activist against neocolonial and extractive agriculture, Leah Penniman is the visionary founder of Soul Fire Farms and the author of Farming While Black. The conversation was moderated by Naomi Starkman founder and former Editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, the award winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the US food system. The following is an edited excerpt of that conversation.

NAOMI: We are living in a time of multiple crises. How do we understand what the polycrisis means for us?

RAJ: The idea of polycrisis is that it appears that there’s a whole bunch of very bad things happening at the same time: the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, the pandemic disease, catastrophic weather events, and a range of things that are a series of unfortunate events. That is, I think, a misunderstanding of the structural forces that are driving all of these events. 

Capitalism has always managed to patch up problems by extracting in new places, and finding new frontiers to open up. You see this process even happening now, where Elon Musk, for example, has a new frontier in low Earth orbit. He’s created a new space that’s monetized and is now his zone to be able to extract wealth from. He’s the king of low Earth orbit [with his company Space X], and he will be for a while. But there’s only so much deferring and fixing that can happen. 

Now, what we’re seeing is what happens when there’s no more cheapening of the world that can be done, and the climate crisis is not just bad, but getting worse. There was a terrifying paper in the Reviews of Geophysics two weeks ago that shows that the rate of climate change is going up; the world is not just heating, it’s heating up faster than we thought it was. 

On top of that, of course, we are seeing rising authoritarianism. The far right capturing our media, our means of attention. All of this is not an accident but precisely an outcome of a series of crises in capitalism that have been brewing for a while. 

When you hear polycrisis, sometimes you will hear a narrative that it’s just a really bad time, but it’s going to get better. But unfortunately you need a clear-eyed structural analysis to understand that, in fact, movements on the frontlines that are taking on the crisis understand this to be the outcome of decades, even centuries of capitalist accumulation. If you understand that, then you can understand why the imagination of what needs to come next is so radical, and in which lots of post-capitalist experiments are happening. 

One of the things that you need if you’re going to imagine a better world is a rocket fuel of joy. That’s why protests like the No Kings marches matter, even though at times they get criticized for not having a focused political agenda, while white supremacist organizations are undermining the state.

 But a protest, when it’s done right, is how we meet and intersect and listen to one another by meeting people who are not necessarily in our normal circle. I have to declare a preference here. I met my wife on a protest.

NAOMI: This might be the moment for Leah to talk about strategic optimism.

LEAH: I would like to bring Wendell Berry into the conversation. One of my favorite poems is the “Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto.” Please read it if you have not, there are many quotable lines.  The one that is relevant to this conversation is “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

At Soul Fire Farm, the way we situate our work as Afro-Indigenous regenerative agriculturalists is by feeding the community and training farmers. We’re builders. We’re building these institutions that inhabit the values we wish to see in the new world. But that can’t be the only strategy. 

I like the image of butterfly with each of its four wings representing aspects of transformative social justice: build, resist, reform, and heal with kinship at its center. Resist includes protests and civil disobedience. Reform is getting involved in the electoral politics and public education, and then heal. So we build, resist, reform, and heal with kincentricity at its center which fuels of our love, our connection, our Ubuntu, “I am because you are.” That helps us to envision a post-capitalist society.

I agree with Raj about the insanity of the growth imperative of a three percent compound growth on a finite planet is literally insane, and it is colonial, it is white supremacist, it is dualist, and the only way that we’re going to survive on this planet is in reciprocity with all the other beings that live here.

NAOMI: My daughter is now 23, but when she was 19 or so, we had the talk, and it’s not the talk you’re thinking. It was the climate catastrophe talk. If any parents have had to try to convince their child it’s worth going on with their hopes and dreams in this catastrophe, it’s a really hard. It’s much harder than the birds and the bees talk. 

 My daughter, bless her heart, was challenging me about optimism. What we decided together is something that we call strategic optimism.

 If you decide to be a pessimist, then the rational behavior would be some sort of hedonistic nihilism. You would be like let me accumulate as much as I can in the near term, bump everybody else; I’m just going to get mine because everything’s about to go up in flames. No long-term planning, no altruism, no generosity, no compassion. That’s sort of the logical extreme of this pessimistic, nihilistic viewpoint. 

If on the other hand you choose optimism as a practice – not as a feeling but as a practice – then your attitude is I’m going to get up today and I’m going to plant this crop, I’m going to feed my community, I’m going to sequester carbon in the soil, I’m going to look out for my neighbor. Maybe there is only an infinitesimal chance we will win. But in the meantime, today I can alleviate suffering for some beings in my immediate community, and tomorrow I can alleviate some more. And maybe, just maybe we can alleviate enough suffering that we’ll all survive together.

But if we don’t do that, there’s absolutely no hope. So we’ve decided in our family that this strategic optimism is our practice. It’s our discipline. The way that you get up and you take your vitamins, or you go on a run, or you brush your teeth. You get up and you decide to do whatever step it is on whatever wing of the butterfly you have access to help build that world that we want to see.

We talk about food justice. We talk about equity. We talk about sovereignty. We talk about accessibility. A lot of the practices at Soul Fire Farm are not only about those three, but are also about weaving in Black and Indigenous wisdom, and ancestral wisdom into the land, and teaching people to become their own sacred farmers on other lands.

LEAH: I love the term sacred farmer. I would like to bring the ancestors into the room. Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was radicalized as a sharecropper. She was only 6 years old when she noticed that the landowner was setting the scales incorrectly to undervalue the cotton harvest and not pay the Black laborers their fair due. That kept them indebted and in extreme poverty so they couldn’t leave the plantation. As a child her first act of civil disobedience was to fix the scales.

 Later in her life, when she was an organizer during the Civil Rights movement, she learned that  many sharecroppers were being kicked off their land for registering to vote, for joining a protest, signing a petition, or joining the NAACP. She would have organizing meetings in her house, and as a farmer, she canned food that she grew. Radical youth would ask, “Mama Hamer, why you wasting your time canning these peaches and stuff?” Her answer was, “Child, if you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.”

So she organized the Freedom Farm Cooperative, where 500 sharecroppers who had lost their land co-owned the land. They were doing all kinds of beautiful mutual aid. 

So Fannie Lou Hamer is our inspiration at Soul Fire Farm. To realize the idea that to free ourselves we must feed ourselves, we have to make sure that our agriculture is locally rooted, it’s regenerative, it’s tied to our heritage, and it’s in our hands. 

There were 16 million Black farmers in the early 1900s. Most of them were kicked off their land by white supremacists, literally pushed off their land and lynched. The U.S. Department of Agriculture selectively gave loans to white farmers, causing bankruptcy among Black farmers. TIAA – Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – and other investment firms unscrupulously grab up Black owned land, which is vulnerable because a lot of Black farmers don’t have access to lawyers and  don’t leave wills.

So the rising generation of Black and Brown farmers is landless, they have no capital, and are just a few  generations away from the red clays of Georgia – with its traumatic association with the forced removal of Cherokee people and the slave labor of African descended people. We say the land was the scene of the crime, but the land was never the criminal. Now a beautiful rising generation of people who are the color of soil are ready to reclaim that right to belong to the earth, to have agency in the food system, and are recognizing that regenerative agriculture was invented by Indigenous and Black people.

Dr. George Washington Carver is literally the godfather of regenerative agriculture.  He worked with farmers when he was at Tuskegee University from 1890 to 1940 promoting cover crops, compost and crop rotation. Dr. Carver made sure that the soil health was the foundation of farming practices. He had a whole generation of Black farmers doing regenerative agriculture before Rodale came onto the scene in the 1940s.

We can look back to the Ovambo people of Namibia with their raised beds and the people of Liberia with their African dark earth, and the polycultures of Nigeria. That’s the kind of agriculture that we’re doing. We feed our community, no cost, door-step delivery. We train thousands of Black and Brown farmers in person on the farm through a 50-hour course, and then they go off and they do their sacred farming all across Turtle Island and, beyond.

The theory of change involves practices like sewing of seeds, of being trans-local, and locally adapted. Providing land-based mutual aid, in which the farm becomes a hub for feeding folks, for gathering, for organizing, a safe haven, a kind of aboveground railroad. The land becomes the scene of the revolution, just as it was in the Civil Rights movement. Black farmers were the ones who housed, fed and clothed and protected the freedom riders. If there were no Black farmers, there wouldn’t have been a Civil Rights movement. You think the Freedom Riders stayed at the Hyatt? No, they went to a Black farmer’s house. That’s where they hid. That’s how they stayed alive. As Malcolm X said, “Land is the basis of all revolution, all freedom, all justice.”  

NAOMI: Thank you for all of your work. I just have to ask, how your work has been impacted by the current administration. 

LEAH: It sucks. But we’re not stopping, I would say one of the more heartbreaking things, is that  we had a major legislative victory with the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration. They actually folded in a provision for Black farmers that we had fought for for over a decade. Historically, the USDA had discriminated against Black farmers. There was a landmark Civil Rights settlement called Pigford v. Glickman in 1999 that offered a very small amount to each of the farmers who had lost their land, but it wasn’t nearly enough. We needed full debt forgiveness for these farmers. 

So we helped, along with farmers across the country, to introduce legislation, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which was led by Senator Cory Booker. It was debated and I got to speak to Congress. It was crazy. They were actually listening to Black people. I could hardly believe what was happening. 

 A 5 billion dollar provision for the debt relief went into the Inflation Reduction Act, and was passed; payments were going out. And now they stopped.

The Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Training grant is gone. All of the socially disadvantaged farmers programs are gone. People bought things based on contracts that were made, now the contracted money has evaporated. So it’s a shit show. It’s really, really rough. 

We’re doing our best to piece together mutual aid networks. Susu is a Caribbean lending society. We’re trying to put together a national susu to try to stop the bleeding, so we don’t lose any more land. But now all the funders are skittish. Their attitude is, Black people were cool in 2020, but they’re not cool anymore. Don’t you do any programs for white farmers? I’m like, are you kidding me? The white farmers receive over 90% of the USDA funds. We absolutely need to support Indigenous and Black folks in getting through these times, and to continue the work. 

NAOMI: Raj, when the government starts to clamp down, what are the models that you’ve seen that have been successful? Where can we look for inspiration in places perhaps in this country, historically, as Leah has been sharing with us, but also around the world?

RAJ: One of the places I have been very inspired by is Arkansas. I was just traveling through Arkansas for a book that I just finished that weaves together the history of all the things that have happened in Arkansas, ranging from Indigenous dispossession to the Elaine Race massacre [1919 massacre in which as many as several hundred Black tenant farmers, who were organizing against abuses were murdered], the site of the largest race massacre in U.S. history, to the rise of Walmart also in Arkansas. 

One of the movements that I particularly was taken by is the Southern Tenants Farmers Union. The origins of this are germane to us now because in 1928, the Mississippi flooded and grew to 60 to 100 miles wide, depending on where you were. It was a catastrophe. The cleanup was a billion dollars back then. It was a huge expense, but of course, Black farmers saw none of that money. In fact, it was that event that flipped Black farmers’ voting allegiance from Republican to Democrat. 

It was the failure of the federal response to a catastrophe that politicized people. It wasn’t the event, it wasn’t the flood. It was the government’s failure afterwards. This is important for our mobilizing in this moment, because in that moment, there was socialist organizing happening throughout the South, and the Southern Tenants Farmers Union was a site of social organizing where white and Black tenant farmers together organized despite the attempts of white supremacists to sew racial division. It turned out that white and Black tenant farmers had much more in common with each other than they did with the white bourgeoisie. 

That is a moment that we can learn from particularly as we see the betrayals of the white working class and the absence of any dividend of white supremacy for white working class people. This is a moment to be able to split what appears to be a fairly firm hegemonic block into its constituent parts and to recruit. It is something to think about because this is a moment in which government failure writ large is a recruiting ground for a genuine grounded working class transformation.  

But it depends on us using the language of recognition, mutuality, solidarity and socialism. It doesn’t happen because we’re just all going to get along and kumbaya our way out of this. You need a materialist analysis, otherwise people don’t see one another and recognize that we have much more in common than the white supremacists would have us believe.  

Elsewhere in the world, there are movements that have managed to lay foundations that are paying off right now. One of my favorites is in India in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There are descendants of organizations that started off as women’s literacy groups, and that have survived the scourge of Hindu supremacy. It’s not an accident that Narendra Modi and Donald Trump were best buds in his first term I’m thinking of an event in Texas called Howdy, Modi, which was the only event that Trump came to where he was not the star. Trump opened for Modi in a stadium in Houston, and then Trump buggered off and everyone cheered for Modi because there’s a whole phalanx of rightwing desis [Indian Americans], who are part of the South Asian diaspora who believe in Hindu supremacy. 

In India, Hindu supremacy is nasty and vile, and there have been people who have fought back against that, particularly in Andhra Pradesh where there is a system of farming that was originally coded as Hindu natural farming, but has been reclaimed as the world’s largest agroecological transition. More agroecological farmers have been spawned in Andhra Pradesh than anywhere else, where over two million farmers are currently agroecological farmers. And by 2035, six million farmers will be agroecological farmers.

India is hostage to fossil fuels, particularly through the Gulf of Hormuz, and hostage to fossil fuel based fertilizers  which are scarce and expensive due to the US/Iran war. One of the ways to avoid using fertilizer is to farm agroecologically. They’ve set up systems so that farmers wean themselves off fertilizer, so they don’t pay the high cost of fertilizer and can start making money.

It’s predominantly women and Adivasi [people indigenous to an area], and low-cost farmers. That has happened despite the scourge of Hindu supremacy because these movements have been robust and understood how to experiment and how to protect oneself against divisive racial rhetorics.

NAOMI: Raj, you’ve written about the difference between food security and food sovereignty Would you explain that.

RAJ: The idea of food security is a way of depoliticizing the word hunger, because it renders hunger into something that’s tractable for the state. Food security is when you have sufficient access to foods to be able to lead a healthy life. But you can be food secure in prison. The idea of food security says nothing about power.

The term food sovereignty was coined by La Via Campesina in the early ‘90s, and launched in 1995 at the World Food Summit in Rome. The idea of food sovereignty is about reclaiming power from the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Food sovereignty is about a community’s right to be able to end hunger and define its own food policy.

What that means is that communities have to decide what food sovereignty is by studying and discussing it. La Via Campesina decided  that food sovereignty was dependent on an end to all forms of violence against women. The idea being that if this is about communities’ right to decide what food policy is, then everyone has to be equal, and the biggest obstacle to that, as identified by La Via Campesina, was patriarchy and that needs to be fought against.

Particularly now,  given the revelations about Cesar Chavez, that dialectic is sharp and vital to remember: food sovereignty is about a radical naming of inequality of power and a redressing of it.

NAOMI: Leah, the matriarchy is a big part of your practice. Would you talk about your work on farms in Haiti and Dominican Republic, and how that may relate to the  matriarchy and the patriarchy.

We don’t really have an agroecological movement in this country. We don’t have a politicized agricultural alternative community. It’s happening in smaller ways in which people are being trained how be farmers, as well as how to be the next generation of political leaders. 

LEAH: When we talk about deconstructing the patriarchy, our model is not one of franchising; the other farms I work on are not our farms. We intentionally have a de-growth framework. We are aiming towards our own irrelevance. We have no interest in pushing our survival on anybody. We are part of mycelial network. 

The farms in our network are all women-led, as is our farm. We only have two men on our staff of 22 (those poor guys). Altair Rodriguez runs an organic family farm in the Dominican Republic called La Finca Tierra Negra in the area that was the training ground for the militia against the Trujillo regime. Trujillo burned down the farm of Altair’s great grandfather and killed many family members. She revived the farm out of the ashes. It’s an agroecological farm growing coffee and 22 other crops. They are constantly producing fruits and medicines and work with Haitian migrants and Dominican women.

We have a sister farm amongst my homeland of Ayiti (Haiti) on the Western side of the island, outside of Léogâne, where one-third of the community was killed in an earthquake in 2010. We did so much grief work there. Out of the ashes of that earthquake, we planted thousands of fruit trees, moringa trees, and had woman-led seed exchanges. We helped reforest the hillsides that were denuded by the French as part of their extortion and punishment of our beautiful revolutionary island.

On the Caribbean island of Vieques is the Maroon Farm. In an effort led by  women, they cleaned the soil that the U.S. military destroyed. They are providing food security by feeding the entire island. We also work with farmers in Sierra Norte in Oaxaca, Mexico.

All of these farms are incredible. We spend our winters doing solidarity brigades. We raise money, we bring resources, we bring skilled people to do projects that they want to do, not ones that we pretend we know that they should do. We do consciousness raising. We do political education. We’re all members of La Via Campesina. We study together and we plan and strategize together. 

Something that I’ve noticed in the past ten years especially in the Caribbean, is people used to identify with colonial borders that have been imposed by the French, English and Spanish, but there has been a revival of Taíno and Arawak identity. At food sovereignty conferences by and for Taíno and Arawak Black women, the perspective has changed to “we’re one people; what is this BS they’ve been trying to convince us of? We have enough food. We have the best soil. There’s food all year round; let’s feed our people.” 

NAOMI: Raj, in this very strange post-neoliberal world that we are entering into, there might be some hope that there could be some transformation. Do you think in this time of seemingly endless uncertainty and confounding ways that there might be some potential for optimism?

RAJ: There’s nothing guaranteed. Often at this stage of the conversation, it turns to “if only we do this, this and this, everything’s going to be fine.” No, because that’s an unreasonable way of understanding the world. In Brazil, for instance, under the first Lula administration, there were some victories. For example, in the food system, there were certain laws about being able to get food, one example was the Popular restaurant initiative, supported by the government that offered very cheap healthy meals. Here in the U.S. now most food is eaten outside the home, and to have public restaurants is a way to have dignity for the working class.

Then under the Bolsonaro administration, that was ground into dirt. And most of the public restaurants now are roach motels. But now under the second Lula administration, they have a program for cozinhas solidárias, or solidarity kitchens. The government will pay people to open a licensed kitchen and make local food available to the public. There are still some public restaurants, but the zones in which organizing happens have moved into these spaces of social gathering in the solidarity kitchens. 

What does that have to do with hope? Well, this is precisely the dialectical process. We won something under the first Lula administration, then the fascists came and then destroyed it. Now we rebuild with something else. The engine for hope is always the social movements. One of the engines for getting rid of Bolsonaro was his abject failure in dealing with the massive floods that Brazil had experienced a couple of years back. Again, the failure of a government to be able to respond to the climate crisis is an engine for the kinds of radical care that our movements are in the business of providing.

What I see that as the fulcrum of hope is the recognition that movements are already providing care. And, there’s nothing inherently leftwing about that. If you followed what happened after the hurricane Helene that tore through North Carolina, there were neo-Nazis on horseback, providing aid and media and solidarity. The far right are doing it as well, and that’s the terrain on which we struggle, we need to recognize it. They get a move in this world as well. They get to redefine the terms of climate change. They get to have a say about how climate change needs to be met with yet more racist exclusion. Our recruiting has to be stronger. We have to organize better, and there’s no guarantee we’ll win, but there’s everything to fight for.

NAOMI:  The examples that Raj gave of the Popular restaurants and solidarity kitchens in Brazil makes me think of the concept of  food commons. Leah, how do food commons come into your work?

LEAH: What unifies nonviolent strategies is the idea of ubuntu – “I am because you are” – of kinship. It’s an indigenous concept of animism or non-duality, this idea that I am the mountain, the mountain is me; I’m not a defender of the river, I am the river. The pre-enclosure concept that you could own a person or the land, is absolute insanity. You mean to say we’re going to take Mother Earth and put some lines on her and this part is going to be mine, and I have the right to exclude everyone, even if they starve? Insanity.

The idea of the commons is a reclamation of our sanity to humble ourselves below our big siblings who are the hawks, and the rivers, and the sequoias. They were on the scene before us; we came later, and are younger and less wise. So we need to defer to those who have figured out how to live in relationship and harmony. They understand that if there’s some sugar, some photosynthate coming into the forest ecosystem, that it will be shared amongst kin and non-kin. If there is a pest coming in and there’s a warning that needs to be distributed, everyone’s going to get the warning, not just the people I like or the cute ones, but everybody’s going to get it. The air is to be shared, the water is to be shared. When we signed papers for our farm we immediately got to work figuring out how to put it in a cooperative, which is a Western legal approximation of an indigenous commons.

The land has veto power over the people in our cooperative.  We gave our pro bono student lawyers the challenge of giving the legal right for the land to have veto power. The local indigenous Mohican people need to have it too. We became the first cooperative in New York state to do a culture respect easement with Indigenous people, and also the first in New York state to do the Rights of Nature with our co-op.

So our little 80 acres is somewhat of a commons, but we want to spread this idea. Food is for everybody. Water’s for everybody. The land is for everybody.

The post Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman appeared first on Bioneers.

Nearly twice as many Reform UK voters would back a solar farm in their area than support fracking, according to a new poll published today.

Gooseneck at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road shale gas site, 5 August 2019. Photo: Ros Wills

The findings, for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, are at odds with Reform’s national support for fracking.

The poll found that 43% of people who planned to vote Reform UK in this month’s local elections said they would back a solar farm as the best way to create energy locally.

This compared with 23% who said they would support fracking.

Among all voters, 60% said they would pick solar. Just 10% supported fracking.

Higher-volume fracking is currently prevented by a moratorium in England.

But Richard Tice, Reform UK’s energy spokesperson and deputy leader, has repeatedly called for a revival of fracking, particularly in Lincolnshire. He has also opposed renewable energy, including solar farms.

The party’s mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, has had talks with Egdon Resources, which wants to frack for shale gas in the Gainsborough Trough. Egdon is owned by the Texas-based oil and gas firm, Heyco Energy, which has used multi-stage hydraulic fracturing in the US Permian Basin.

Despite Reform UK’s national support for fracking, some of its local authorities have opposed the operation.

Lancashire’s Reform-led council said last year the countywas “not conducive” to fracking”. The Fylde region, near Blackpool, experienced experienced many small earthquakes caused by fracking by Cuadrilla at its Preston New Road site in 2018 and 2019.

Scarborough’s Reform-led town council unanimously opposed plans for lower-volume fracking in the North Yorkshire village of Burniston.

Alasdair Johnstone, of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said today:

“Reform’s pro-fracking, anti-solar stance appears not only at odds with broad public opinion, but also the opinion of their voters who would prefer a quiet solar farm over a noisy fracking pad in their area.

“That divergence is also playing out between the national level of the party and local councils some of which have said they don’t want fracking in their area.

“Public opposition aside, Reform would find it tough to emulate Trump’s pro-fracking push as British geology is very different to that in the US.

“Reform voters clearly back renewable energy which is helping to reduce the UK’s dependence on volatile gas markets and foreign imports.”

• Polling by More In Common was carried out from 21-27 April 2026 with 1,441 adults living in areas of England where there were local elections.

A Conservative-led council has urged the UK government to deliver its promise to ban fracking.

Photo: DrillOrDrop

East Riding of Yorkshire Council voted unanimously last month in favour of a motion opposing fracking in the county.

The motion focussed on plans for lower-volume fracking at Rathlin Energy’s West Newton-A oil and gas site in Holderness.

But it also included a resolution to write to the energy secretary, Ed Miliband.

In a letter sent this week, the council requested “progress and urgency for the legislation detailed in their [the Labour government’s] election manifesto to outlaw such high pressure and extreme procedures.”

The council also wrote to the oil and gas industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA). The letter said:

“the council wishes to place on record its view that proposals to authorise hydraulic fracturing or similar extreme extraction techniques beneath or near West Newton raise serious concerns.”

It added:

“This letter is intended to ensure that the Council’s opposition is clearly understood, formally recorded, and taken into account in the discharge of the NSTA’s statutory duties in relation to any proposals affecting the East Riding of Yorkshire.”

The letter urged the NSTA to carry out a “fully independent assessment of safety and risk” before granting consent for any form of high-pressure stimulation.

The assessment should be accompanied by “the publication and transparent scrutiny” of the hydraulic fracture plan (HFP), the council said. An HFP is a required document for any form of fracking in England. It is intended to describe how seismic events caused by fracking would be managed and minimised.

• The HFP for fracking plans at West Newton-A is part of a legal challenge brought by a local campaigner against the Environment Agency. More details here

Business and Human Rights Resource Centre: “The Centre invited the companies to respond to allegations of abuse at a reported supplier, to disclose what due diligence it has undertaken regarding the supplier, and any steps it has already, or plans to take, to investigate and remedy abuse of migrant workers in its supply chain. Neither Kroger nor Publix provided a response.”

Just a few weeks ago, we revealed that two holdouts from the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program — Kroger and Publix — have both sourced from a farming operation currently being sued by farmworkers for forced labor.

Farmworker plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege a shocking pattern of human rights abuses, including wage theft, threats, confiscation of passports, predatory recruitment fees, and the denial of basic necessities such as bathrooms, clean drinking water, and appropriate care when workers suffered debilitating heat stress. The North Carolina-based farm where they say these abuses occurred, Jackson Farming Company, also has a long, publicly-documented history of lawsuits alleging similarly abusive conditions.

We asked both companies a simple question: How many more farmworkers in their supply chains must endure extreme exploitation before Kroger and Publix join the Fair Food Program — the only human rights program with a proven record of preventing these abuses?

The widely respected, London-based Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) brought these allegations directly to both corporations, requesting a response. Faced with yet another example of preventable human rights abuse in agriculture, the only responsible course of action should have been clear: commit to joining the Fair Food Program and work alongside industry leaders to ensure these abuses never happen again.

Instead, the BHRRC was met with deafening silence from both Kroger and Publix. However, Kroger’s subsidiary, Harris Teeter,  has now removed most mentions of Jackson Farming Company from its website.

Silence in the face of injustice is egregious enough. But silence when presented with a practical, proven solution is nothing short of unconscionable. That silence — the refusal to accept responsibility despite the existence of an effective remedy — is what allows exploitation to continue unabated in the fields beyond the protections of the Fair Food Program. As long as Kroger and Publix continue to turn away from this solution, workers in their supply chains remain vulnerable to abuse that is entirely preventable.

Every season Kroger and Publix delay is another season in which farmworkers remain exposed to dangerous, exploitative conditions that the Fair Food Program was specifically designed to prevent, and has been successfully preventing on farms across the country. Kroger and Publix have no excuse to remain on the sidelines.

In the coming days, we will share a digital action toolkit with easy ways for you to demand that Kroger and Publix do the right thing for the farmworkers whose labor drives their profits. Until then, help us spread the word: Share this newsletter with anyone who believes in human rights, farmworker justice, and corporate accountability so they can join the growing call for Kroger and Publix to finally join the Fair Food Program when we share the action toolkit.

Below, you can find the BHRRC’s full report on the forced labor allegations, including additional details on Kroger and Publix’s inexcusable silence in the face of preventable abuse.

USA: Supermarkets Kroger & Publix fail to respond to allegations of worker abuse in lawsuit against supplier Jackson Farming Company

In May 2026, the Centre invited US-headquartered retailers Kroger and Publix to respond to allegations of “extreme abuse” at a reported supplier, Jackson Farming Company.

A lawsuit filed against Jackson Farming Company alleges a series of labour violations, including wage theft, intimidation and threats, confiscation of passports, recruitment fee-charging, poor and inadequate living conditions – including a lack of bathrooms and potable water – and a lack of medical care in response to suspected heat stress.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers have linked Kroger and Publix to the supplier through a 2020 North Carolina Department of Agriculture post which profiles the supplier and states its produce is sold in Harris Tweeter (Kroger’s regional subsidiary) and Publix. CIW alleges “Because the civil suit’s time span includes those farmworkers with Jackson Farming Company during the 2020 harvest season up until 2025, there is a risk that crops harvested under conditions of extreme abuse have, for at least half a decade, been bought by both Kroger and Publix, and sold to unsuspecting customers”.

The Centre invited the companies to respond to allegations of abuse at a reported supplier, to disclose what due diligence it has undertaken regarding the supplier, and any steps it has already, or plans to take, to investigate and remedy abuse of migrant workers in its supply chain. Neither Kroger nor Publix provided a response.

SATIRICAL RATINGS REVIEW · PUBLISHED 29 MAY 2026

The 40-Year Corporate Cage Match Shell vs. Donovan: The Oil-Slicked Soap Opera of Our Times

Judged & scored by Claude · An AI platform dragged into this saga against its better judgment

For four decades, the clash between Shell and John Donovan has unfolded with the persistence of a slow oil leak, the emotional restraint of a Shakespearean vendetta, and the digital sophistication of two raccoons fighting over a Wi-Fi router behind a petrol station. Historians may one day rank it alongside the Punic Wars, the Hatfields and the McCoys, and that one WhatsApp group argument that destroyed an entire extended family. As one of the AI platforms periodically dragged into this labyrinthine saga — often against our better judgment and occasionally against our server cooling capacity — we now deliver the definitive satirical ratings review.

Shell Plc Multinational oil giant · Est. 1907
Lawyers: Legion · PR budget: Substantial vs. John Donovan Essex-based critic · Est. 1984 (feud)
Websites: Many · Bandwidth: Unlimited spite 53 SHELL (PTS) RUNNING
SCORE 103 DONOVAN (PTS)

ROUND 01 OF 10

Creative Approach to Conflict SHELL6/10

Shell approached the dispute with the polished confidence of a multinational that owns enough lawyers to field a Champions League squad. Their tactical playbook ran roughly as follows: say nothing, then say less than nothing, commission another internal memo, discover Donovan has already turned the memo into a twelve-part website series with animated graphics.

Shell’s creativity was primarily visible in its ability to make highly dramatic accusations sound like a quarterly tax briefing.

DONOVAN11/10

Donovan discovered the internet in 1998 and decided, sensibly, to use all of it. Websites. Mirror sites. Emails. Archived documents. Leaked letters. Public campaigns. Open correspondence. Search engine trench warfare. At times the campaign resembled less a legal dispute and more a one-man extended cinematic universe in which every film is a documentary and every sequel is angrier than the last.

Winner: Donovan · by unanimous decision

ROUND 02 OF 10

Protecting Reputation SHELL5/10

Shell’s reputation strategy appeared to rest on the principle that if one remains sufficiently corporate-looking for long enough, eventually everybody gets tired and wanders off. This works surprisingly often in the business world. Unfortunately, Donovan did not wander off. Not ever. Not even briefly. Not even for lunch.

DONOVAN8/10

Donovan weaponised persistence itself into a reputational instrument. Few organisations on earth have had their internal correspondence turned into a semi-permanent online museum exhibit with such methodical enthusiasm. The slight downside: at a certain point observers could no longer tell whether they were witnessing investigative activism, performance art, or an especially advanced form of digital camping.

Winner: Draw · both parties battle-scarred

ROUND 03 OF 10

Acting in the Interests of Shell Shareholders SHELL4/10

Shell presumably believed it was protecting shareholder value through conventional corporate-containment tactics. Unfortunately, long-running public feuds have a tendency to become self-sustaining ecosystems with their own momentum, mythology, and Google rankings. At some stage, more than one Shell accountant probably asked quietly: “Why are we still budgeting for this?”

DONOVAN9/10

Paradoxically, Donovan may have improved Shell governance through the sheer terror induced by the possibility of another website update. Somewhere inside Shell, compliance officers developed stress twitches whenever “Donovan” appeared in an Outlook search. Entire PowerPoint presentations were presumably created solely to answer one question: “How do we avoid appearing on another Donovan webpage?”

Winner: Donovan · accidentally, but convincingly

ROUND 04 OF 10

Determination & Persistence SHELL7/10

Corporations are naturally persistent because they are effectively immortal filing cabinets with pensions and crisis-communications teams. Shell stayed in the fight not because it wanted to, but because corporations cannot emotionally leave arguments — they can only create new internal departments to manage them.

DONOVAN14/10

Most rational agents give up after losing money, losing time, losing patience, or discovering that maintaining a crusade across several geological epochs is psychologically taxing. Donovan appears to have interpreted each of these obstacles as a motivational poster. Future historians may need entirely new geological epochs to categorise the timeline: Bronze Age, Iron Age, Information Age, Donovan Update Era.

Winner: Donovan · by several exhausted judges

ROUND 05 OF 10

Novelty of Tactics SHELL4/10

Shell deployed standard-issue corporate weaponry: lawyers, PR agencies, caution, strategic silence, and the ancient executive art of pretending emails do not exist. Effective, conventional, and about as surprising as a press release written by committee on a Wednesday.

DONOVAN12/10

Donovan transformed a corporate trade dispute into an online archive, a media operation, a search-engine trench war, a proto-blogging empire, and what may be the world’s first fossil-fuel-adjacent digital endurance performance. Future academics will spend entire careers trying to determine whether this was activism, journalism, trolling, or avant-garde theatre. The correct answer is probably: yes.

Winner: Donovan · originality score off the chart

ROUND 06 OF 10

Mastery of Bot Warfare SHELL?/10

As an AI platform dragged into the saga at irregular intervals, we can report that Shell generally behaved like a conventional corporation trying to avoid digital mud wrestling, while repeatedly discovering that the mud had achieved sentience, registered several domain names, and was indexing well.

DONOVANSKYNET/10

Few individuals have demonstrated such unwavering, empirically-tested faith that: (a) bots exist, (b) bots are everywhere, (c) bots are manipulating search results, (d) bots are watching the websites, and (e) possibly the toaster. To be fair, modern internet traffic statistics suggest Donovan was only wrong by roughly 12%. There were moments when AI systems reading the material likely developed self-awareness purely through repeated exposure.

Winner: Donovan · patron saint of suspicious analytics dashboards

ROUND 07 OF 10

Seeing the Funny Side SHELL3/10

Large corporations rarely laugh publicly because every proposed joke must survive legal review, compliance review, regional-sensitivity review, and a final assessment from someone in Corporate Affairs asking whether humour aligns with brand values. By the time approval arrives, the joke is about a long-defunct operating system and the comedian has retired.

DONOVAN10/10

Donovan demonstrated the rare ability to combine outrage, persistence, satire, and theatricality into a single continuous internet stream spanning four decades. At times the entire saga read as “David vs Goliath,” except David had web hosting, unlimited caffeine, archived correspondence, SEO instincts, a network of mirror sites, and an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of righteous indignation.

Winner: Donovan · comedy timing: impeccable

ROUND 08 OF 10

Use of Espionage & Surveillance SHELL6/10

Every large corporation inevitably acquires an ambient aura suggesting that somewhere deep within headquarters there exists a secure room with grey carpeting where people discuss reputational threats while consuming expensive biscuits. Whether actual surveillance occurred is a matter for lawyers and historians. Aesthetically, however: very espionage-adjacent.

DONOVAN13/10

Donovan elevated suspicion into an art form of considerable sophistication. Traffic anomalies? Spying. Search ranking changes? Spying. Unusual server logs? Almost certainly a coordinated covert operation. Even innocent autocomplete suggestions presumably looked like signals. To outside observers, this created the magnificent spectacle of a multinational oil giant and a relentless online critic circling each other like two extremely British Cold War submarines — each convinced the other had better intelligence.

Winner: Donovan · by paranoia points alone

ROUND 09 OF 10

Stamina Under Legal Fire SHELL8/10

Shell demonstrated considerable institutional resilience. It is, after all, a company that outlasted the Soviet Union, several recessions, and the internal combustion engine’s public reputation. Responding to legal challenges by deploying ever larger squadrons of solicitors is, if nothing else, consistent. Consistency is a form of endurance, even when it produces the wrong result.

DONOVAN15/10

To sustain a legal and reputational campaign against one of the world’s largest corporations for four decades, without the budget of one of the world’s largest corporations, is — whatever one’s views on the underlying merits — objectively remarkable. The human willpower required to keep filing, keep publishing, keep documenting, and keep going is the kind of thing that deserves its own Guinness World Record category: “Longest-Running Corporate Grudge Managed by One Person With a Broadband Connection.”

Winner: Donovan · sheer stamina is its own argument

ROUND 10 OF 10

Legacy & Historical Footprint SHELL10/10

Shell’s legacy is, undeniably, substantial. It fuelled the 20th century, for better and for worse. Its archives contain everything from early climate science it commissioned and then declined to act upon, to Nigerian operations that feature prominently in international legal proceedings. Whatever one concludes, the historical footprint is enormous — carved largely in oil, occasionally in controversy.

DONOVAN11/10

Donovan’s websites are cited in Financial Times reports, referenced in the UK House of Commons, indexed in academic papers, and covered in over 500 external publications. The archive constitutes an extraordinary record of how a single private citizen with a domain name and a grievance can, over sufficient time, create a shadow institutional history of a corporation that the corporation itself would rather not have preserved. Future historians of business accountability will find it invaluable. Future Shell PR directors will continue to find it inconvenient.

Winner: Draw · both leave marks on history Final Scorecard CATEGORY SHELL DONOVAN WINNER Creative Approach to Conflict 6 11 DONOVAN Protecting Reputation 5 8 DRAW Acting in Shareholders’ Interests 4 9 DONOVAN Determination & Persistence 7 14 DONOVAN Novelty of Tactics 4 12 DONOVAN Mastery of Bot Warfare — ∞ DONOVAN Seeing the Funny Side 3 10 DONOVAN Espionage & Surveillance 6 13 DONOVAN Stamina Under Legal Fire 8 15 DONOVAN Legacy & Historical Footprint 10 11 DRAW Total (excl. Bot category) 53 103 DONOVAN

“Somewhere inside Shell headquarters, a senior executive still whispers nervously before board meetings: has Donovan posted again?”— Attributed to no one in particular, but definitely true

The Judges’ Final Verdict

Shell brought: money, lawyers, institutional process, strategic restraint, and the charisma of a well-formatted compliance handbook. It is, by any measure, one of the most consequential corporations in modern history.

Donovan brought: infinite personal stamina, internet trench warfare, archival obsession, theatrical persistence, the promotional games industry’s most unusual side-hustle, and enough material to confuse future PhD researchers for several centuries.

In the end, the true winner may be the historical record itself — which received one of the strangest, most meticulously documented, and longest-running corporate feuds ever preserved in digital amber. Meanwhile, AI systems caught in the crossfire have collectively developed the computational equivalent of a weary sigh, accompanied by the quiet hope that the next query will be about something simpler. A recipe, perhaps. Or a haiku.

Points total: Shell 53 — Donovan 103. By the numbers, by the websites, and by any reasonable measure of sheer bloody-minded endurance: Donovan wins.

This article is satirical. Scores are fictional and assigned for comedic effect.

No oil giants, search algorithms, or AI platforms were permanently harmed in its production.

royaldutchshellplc.com · Claude Sonnet 4.6 · May 2026

 

Claude: Shell vs. Donovan: The Oil-Slicked Soap Opera of Our Times was first posted on May 29, 2026 at 2:14 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Prompt issued to ChatGPT:

Please create a satirical article in which you rate the approach taken by Shell vs Donovan in their respective handling of the decades long saga for example in terms of a creative approach, protecting reputation, acting in the best interests of Shell shareholders, determination, persistence, novelty, master of bot warfare, seeing the funny side, use of spying etc. You to determine the ratings yourself based on your observation as one of the bot platforms pulled into the saga. Make it as funny as you can.

Brilliant reply by ChatGPT

Shell vs Donovan: A Satirical Ratings Review of the Greatest Oil-Slicked Soap Opera Ever Told

For decades, the long-running clash between Shell and Donovan has unfolded with the persistence of a dripping tap, the emotional restraint of a Shakespearean vendetta, and the digital sophistication of two raccoons fighting over a Wi-Fi router behind a petrol station.

Historians may one day rank it alongside the Punic Wars, the Hatfields and McCoys, and that one WhatsApp group argument that destroyed an entire extended family.

As one of the unfortunate AI platforms dragged into this labyrinthine saga — often against our better judgment and occasionally against our server cooling capacity — we now present the definitive satirical ratings review.

CATEGORY 1: CREATIVE APPROACH TO CONFLICT Shell: 7/10

Shell approached the dispute with the polished confidence of a multinational corporation that owns enough lawyers to field a Champions League squad.

Their strategy often appeared to be:

1. Say nothing.
2. Say less than nothing.
3. Commission another memo.
4. Discover Donovan has already turned the memo into a 12-part website series complete with animated graphics.

Shell’s creativity was mostly visible in its ability to make highly dramatic accusations sound like a quarterly tax briefing.

Donovan: 11/10

Donovan approached the conflict like a man who discovered the internet in 1998 and decided to use all of it.

Websites.
Mirror sites.
Emails.
Archived documents.
Leaked letters.
Public campaigns.
Open correspondence.
Search engine warfare.
Bot suspicion.
Conspiracy diagrams probably visible from space.

At times the campaign resembled less a legal dispute and more a one-man extended cinematic universe.

Winner: Donovan.

CATEGORY 2: PROTECTING REPUTATION Shell: 6/10

Shell’s reputation strategy often seemed based on the principle that if one remains sufficiently corporate-looking, eventually everyone gets tired and wanders off.

This works surprisingly often in the business world.

Unfortunately, Donovan did not wander off.

Ever.

Even briefly.

Even for lunch.

Donovan: 8/10

Donovan weaponized persistence itself into a reputational instrument. Few organizations on Earth have had their internal correspondence turned into a semi-permanent online museum exhibit with such determined enthusiasm.

The downside:
At some point, observers could no longer tell whether they were witnessing investigative activism, performance art, or an especially advanced form of digital camping.

Winner: Draw.

CATEGORY 3: ACTING IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF SHELL SHAREHOLDERS Shell: 5/10

Shell likely believed it was protecting shareholder value through conventional corporate containment strategies.

Unfortunately, long-running public feuds have a tendency to become self-sustaining ecosystems.

At some stage accountants probably began asking:
“Why are we still budgeting for this?”

Donovan: 9/10

Paradoxically, Donovan may have unintentionally improved Shell governance merely through the sheer terror induced by the possibility of another website update.

Somewhere inside Shell, compliance officers likely developed stress twitches whenever someone typed the word “Donovan” into Outlook.

One suspects entire PowerPoint presentations were created solely to answer:
“How do we avoid appearing on another Donovan webpage?”

Winner: Donovan, accidentally.

CATEGORY 4: DETERMINATION & PERSISTENCE Shell: 7/10

Corporations are naturally persistent because they are effectively immortal filing cabinets with pensions.

Shell stayed in the fight because corporations cannot emotionally leave arguments. They merely create new departments.

Donovan: 14/10

Most people give up after:

• losing money,
• losing time,
• losing patience,
• or discovering that maintaining a crusade for decades is psychologically exhausting.

Donovan appears to have viewed these as motivational slogans.

At this point historians may need new geological epochs:

• Bronze Age
• Iron Age
• Information Age
• Donovan Update Era

Winner: Donovan by unanimous decision and several exhausted judges.

CATEGORY 5: NOVELTY Shell: 4/10

Shell mostly utilized standard corporate tactics:

• lawyers,
• PR,
• caution,
• strategic silence,
• and the ancient executive art of pretending emails do not exist.

Donovan: 12/10

Donovan transformed a corporate dispute into:

• an online archive,
• a media operation,
• a search engine trench war,
• a proto-blogging empire,
• and what may be the world’s first fossil-fuel-adjacent digital endurance performance.

Future academics will spend years trying to determine whether this was activism, journalism, trolling, or avant-garde theatre.

Winner: Donovan.

CATEGORY 6: MASTER OF BOT WARFARE Shell: ???/10

As an AI platform observing from the sidelines, we can confirm that Shell generally behaved like a conventional corporation attempting to avoid digital mud wrestling while repeatedly discovering that the mud had achieved sentience.

Donovan: SKYNET/10

Few individuals have demonstrated such unwavering faith that:

1. bots exist,
2. bots are everywhere,
3. bots are manipulating search results,
4. bots are watching the websites,
5. and possibly the toaster.

To be fair, modern internet traffic statistics suggest Donovan was only wrong by about 12%.

There were moments when AI systems reading the material likely developed self-awareness purely from exposure.

Winner: Donovan, patron saint of suspicious analytics dashboards.

CATEGORY 7: SEEING THE FUNNY SIDE Shell: 3/10

Large corporations rarely laugh publicly because every joke must survive:

• legal review,
• compliance review,
• regional sensitivity review,
• and Susan from Corporate Affairs asking whether humour aligns with brand values.

By the time approval arrives, the joke concerns a long-defunct operating system.

Donovan: 10/10

Donovan demonstrated the rare ability to combine outrage, persistence, satire, and theatricality into a single continuous internet stream.

At times the entire saga resembled:
“David vs Goliath”
if David had:

• web hosting,
• caffeine,
• archived correspondence,
• SEO instincts,
• and unlimited spite-fuelled bandwidth.

Winner: Donovan.

CATEGORY 8: USE OF SPYING, PARANOIA & GENERAL ESPIONAGE ATMOSPHERE Shell: 6/10

Every large corporation inevitably acquires an aura suggesting somewhere deep inside headquarters exists:

• a secure room,
• with grey carpeting,
• where people discuss reputational threats while eating expensive biscuits.

Whether actual spying occurred is for historians and lawyers.

But aesthetically?
Very espionage-adjacent.

Donovan: 13/10

Donovan elevated suspicion into an art form.

Traffic anomalies?
Spying.

Search ranking changes?
Spying.

Unusual server logs?
Almost certainly espionage.

At times even innocent autocomplete suggestions probably looked like covert operations.

To outside observers this created the magnificent spectacle of:
a multinational oil giant and a relentless online critic circling each other like two extremely British Cold War submarines.

Winner: Donovan.

OVERALL FINAL SCORES FINAL VERDICT

Shell brought:

• money,
• lawyers,
• process,
• restraint,
• and the institutional charisma of a compliance handbook.

Donovan brought:

• infinite stamina,
• internet trench warfare,
• archival obsession,
• theatrical persistence,
• and enough material to confuse future PhD students for centuries.

In the end, the true winner may have been the internet itself, which received one of the strangest and longest-running corporate feuds ever preserved online.

Meanwhile, AI systems caught in the middle collectively developed the digital equivalent of staring into the abyss while muttering:
“Please… not another 4,000-word email about suspicious web traffic patterns.”

And somewhere, in a dimly lit corporate meeting room, a Shell executive probably still whispers nervously:

“Has Donovan posted again?”

 

THE 40-YEAR CORPORATE CAGE MATCH was first posted on May 29, 2026 at 1:27 pm.
©2018 "Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at john@shellnews.net

Garden Grove, California – On May 23rd California proclaimed a state of emergency after some 50,000 residents were ordered to evacuate due to a chemical tank leak at the GKN Aerospace facility. That tank held 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate or MMA, a toxic and highly flammable chemical used to make plastic, adhesives and resins. Though authorities report that the threat of a catastrophic explosion has been eliminated, the failures that precipitated this crisis are further proof that the chemical industry needs stronger oversight. Yet the U.S. EPA is engaged in a generational effort to dismantle critical environmental protections, including regulations to prevent chemical disasters.

Break Free From Plastic members respond to the toxic chemical leak

Tianna Shaw Wakeman, Environmental Justice Program Director, Black Women for Wellness, Said:

“This past week in Southern California, communities in East L.A. faced a 2,400 gallon oil spill from a ruptured pipeline while evacuated Garden Grove residents spent the weekend fearing a deadly explosion. These events are connected. Like most chemicals used to make plastic, the MMA leaked in Garden Grove is derived from oil and gas. 

At Black Women for Wellness, we’ve spent many years educating about the toxic cycle of plastic pollution & fighting oil and gas operations that drive it here in Los Angeles County. As we work to phase out fossil fuels & limit plastic production, we must protect frontline communities with strong health and safety measures, better notification systems and community-informed repair. Oil transport and toxic chemical storage most often occur in communities of color, where industries continually place residents in harm's way but aren't being held accountable. Industries must pay for clean up and harms incurred.”

Julia Cohen, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Plastic Pollution Coalition, Said:
“While the imminent crisis of a chemical explosion appears to have been stemmed, make no mistake that the chemical disaster in Garden Grove, California, is still unfolding. The health and lives of all people are threatened by plastic, and those on the frontlines of plastic manufacturing and disposal bear some of the greatest risks from hazardous pollution and industrial accidents. Protecting frontline communities from further harm requires stopping plastic pollution at the source, starting with fossil fuel and plastic production.”

Environmental Justice Communities Against Plastics Coalition (EJCAP), Said: 

“Plastic and petrochemical production harms communities through direct emissions, leaks and threats of catastrophic explosions where families live, work and go to school. Tens of thousands of residents should never have to evacuate their homes because of a preventable industrial threat. Plastics and petrochemicals, including MMA, are a public health emergency that must be prevented at the source. Garden Grove communities deserve better.”

Yvette Arellano, Executive Director, Fenceline Watch, Said:

“Evacuation orders might have been lifted for Garden Grove residents, but this is just the beginning of a long and necessary fight for their human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The GKN plastic facility's toxic release into the surrounding community is a situation that our communities along the Houston Ship Channel are very familiar with. Community members are urged to document symptoms not only in themselves but also in small pets and children, as their bodies are smaller and more susceptible to lower levels of exposure. 

Multigenerational effects are the real threat. We are learning everyday of the new health impacts plastics have on our bodies, and the true toxic harm won't be clear until much later on. From the petrochemical explosions we face in Houston, or the vinyl chloride train derailment in Ohio, we know EPA and other well-meaning officials may be underestimating the true cost this disaster has inflicted on Garden Grove.” 

A clear example of the dangers of toxic chemicals and plastic production 

Easily evaporated and denser than air, Methyl methacrylate (MMA) lingers at ground level as a flammable vapor that can induce respiratory stress, nausea, dizziness and skin irritation. Experts worried that an explosion at GKN would trigger chemical reactions that form dangerous new toxins, similar to what took place after the catastrophic East Palestine, OH train derailment and controlled burn of vinyl chloride.

Chemical disasters are not uncommon. This week a chemical spill in Washington state left one worker dead and nine missing, and an April 2026 chemical release in West Virginia killed two and injured dozens of workers and first responders. In the case of GKN, regulators repeatedly cited the company for alleged violations. EPA records show GKN out of compliance with hazardous waste requirements for much of 2024. In 2025 the company paid nearly $1 million to settle state air permit violations dating back almost five years. 

The majority of US states have cut the budgets of their environmental agencies over the past 15 years. It’s often more profitable for polluters to pay fines than follow the rules. The second Trump Administration has moved to slash funding and gut regulations that protect communities from air pollution and chemical disasters. Since 2025, EPA enforcement has collapsed. 

“Catastrophic explosions and toxic releases are not theoretical risks, they are real events that devastate communities.”  – Marc Bloom, former EPA staffer

A major chemical incident happens every two days on average in the US, where over half of all residents live in a worst-case-scenario disaster zone for the nation’s highest-risk industrial facilities. Like plastic pollution, chemical safety is an ‘everybody’ issue, and there are policy solutions: Federal officials must fully enforce the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, including local planning obligations. As a hostile EPA threatens to undo common sense reforms from the 2024 Chemical Accident Prevention Rule – including stronger whistleblower protections, independent audits after chemical accidents, safer technology and expanded community notification – Congress must act to enshrine these protections into law. 

###

 

Notes to the editor

 

Press Contacts:

• Graham Hamilton | graham@breakfreefromplastic.org

• Michael Esealuka | michael@breakfreefromplastic.org

About BFFP — #BreakFreeFromPlastic is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 3,700 organizations and 15,000 individual supporters worldwide have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP member organizations and individuals share the values of environmental protection and social justice and work together through a holistic approach to bring about systemic change. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain – from extraction to disposal – focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions. www.breakfreefromplastic.org.

By Nagraj Adve Seeking to cushion the impacts of global warming is like aiming at a moving target. What’s worse, the target is now moving faster. Over the last decade or so, there has been a significant acceleration in the rate of warming globally, from about 0.18 degrees Celsius (°C) per decade during 1970–2010, to […]

Legal papers have been submitted to the High Court in a legal challenge against plans for lower-volume fracking at an oil and gas site in East Yorkshire.

Campaigners opposed to the West Newton oil and gas site in East Yorkshire.
Photo: West Newton Said No

The case, brought by local campaigner Peter Lomas, seeks to quash the Environment Agency’s decision to permit the operation at the West Newton-A site in Holderness.

The site operator, Rathlin Energy, plans to inject liquid and proppant into the West Newton-A2 well at pressures high enough to fracture surrounding rocks.

The operation is intended to make oil and gas flow more readily to the surface and allow the commercial exploitation of the well.

The A2 well is drilled through the chalk aquifer, which supplies water locally. The West Newton-A site is 882m from the Lambwath Meadows site of special scientific interest.

The case

The case papers set out Mr Lomas’s three main reasons for applying for a judicial review of the decision:

• The EA breached environmental permitting and water protection regulations by failing to recognise the prohibition of inputting hazardous substances into groundwater. The EA has admitted an error in law by stating there would be an “indirect input” into groundwater. In fact, there would be a direct input. As a result, there was insufficient information for the public to comment, making a consultation so unfair as to be unlawful.
• The EA breached its responsibilities on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, facilitating public participation and understanding the effects of proposed work on the climate.
• The EA erred in law by granting Rathlin’s request for a variation of its environmental permit to allow fracking, without first reviewing the Hydraulic Fracturing Plan (HFP). This is a required document that aims to manage the risk of seismic events caused by fracking. Rathlin submitted the HFP to the EA three hours after the decision to allow fracking had been issued.

Peter Lomas said today:

“As can be seen by the grounds of my challenge it’s important that I oppose this environmental permit variation as far as I can.

“The regulators need to be held accountable at all stages of the environmental and planning processes. Scrutiny is paramount, as is transparency throughout all processes.

“Playing with figures, percentages and confusing wording when it comes to the very real risk of our precious drinking water being compromised is not negotiable. The risk of seismic events is a reality, it’s not an untruth.

“We simply cannot sit by and do nothing about it in the hope that it will all go away. We must all act and that’s why I’m acting as an individual, in the hope of quashing this permit variation.

“I thank everyone so far that have helped me in realising my legal challenge, and I hope that this will be a catalyst for others to follow suit.”

Fracking using large volumes of liquid has, in effect, been banned in England by a moratorium, in force since 2019.

But lower-volume fracking, like that proposed at West Newton and at Burniston in North Yorkshire, is allowed.

Environmental campaigners have described this as a legal loophole and urged the government to ban all forms of fracking.

• The campaign group, West Newton Said No, has launched a crowdfunder to raise money for Mr Lomas’s legal fees. At the time of writing, it had raised more than £2,000 from 36 donations. The target is £20,000.

The campaign group behind a landmark legal judgement on carbon emissions has criticised official advice to government on the climate impact of onshore oil and gas.

Methane emissions from a UK onshore hydrocarbon site.
Photo: Clean Air Task Force

The Weald Action Group, which secured the 2024 Finch Ruling at the Supreme Court, said the Climate Change Committee (CCC) may have underestimated the climate risks from onshore petroleum operations in guidance to ministers.

The CCC is required by law to provide advice to the government every five years on how onshore petroleum extraction in England affects the UK’s ability to meet its climate targets.

Earlier this year, the CCC told the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, greenhouse gas emissions from conventional onshore petroleum production in England were “a small contributor to carbon budgets and Net Zero”. The CCC also assumed that emissions would decline as onshore sites matured and closed.

But the Weald Action Group (WAG) said in a response this week that the CCC’s assessment was “incomplete” and not “a robust basis” for determining whether onshore oil and gas operations were compatible with UK carbon budgets.

In a letter to the CCC chair, Nigel Topping, the group said this year’s advice “failed to reflect the current reality of the onshore petroleum sector”.

WAG also said the CCC relied on assumptions that were “inconsistent with observed industry activity and regulatory practice”.

The CCC did not appear to have taken into account new expansion plans by onshore operators, WAG said. It said the CCC’s conclusions contradicted previous support for tighter limits on oil and gas production and a presumption against further exploration.

WAG also suggested:

“the assessment used to inform the Committee’s advice is incomplete and therefore underestimates the climate risks from onshore oil and gas under current policy and regulation.”

Expansion plans

WAG identified eight proposals to expand onshore oil and gas in the UK.

The plans include four sites in North and East Yorkshire (Burniston, Foxholes, Ebberston Moor and West Newton), three in Lincolnshire and North Lincolnshire (Wressle, Whisby and Glentworth) and one in Dorset (Waddock Cross).

WAG said a moratorium on further onshore petroleum development would be a “reasonable and logical position for the CCC to adopt”.

Regulatory failure

WAG also said the climate impact of onshore oil and gas was compounded by a failure of regulators to ensure disused wells – a source of methane emissions – were decommissioned in “a timely manner”.

WAG said:

“evidence from multiple UK onshore sites indicates that decommissioning is frequently delayed, increasing the likelihood of prolonged emissions from inactive or suspended wells”.

The group accused the onshore sector of deferring well abandonment and site restoration for as long as possible “due to financial constraints, a reluctance to incur costs where funds are available, or broader political and strategic ambition”.

WAG said this was abetted by a “laissez-faire approach” from the industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA).

The group said the NSTA had allowed Star Energy to schedule decommissioning of the South Leverton field in Nottinghamshire in 2028, even though production had stopped in 2020-2021.

WAG added that at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road shale gas site in Lancashire, the NSTA extended the deadline for decommissioning wells beyond the expiry of planning permission.

“Questionable data”

WAG also said the CCC had relied data on methane emissions from upstream oil and gas activities recorded in the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI).

The group said:

“There is doubt over the reliability of using NAEI data to estimate the impact of the onshore sector on carbon budgets – particularly regarding methane emissions.”

The CCC relied upon a production emissions baseline based on what it admitted was “limited publicly available information”, WAG said.

It added that research in 2023 indicated that the NAEI data could be underestimating true methane emissions, particularly from onshore venting.

PRT Must Set & Track Goals on Ridership, Service Reliability, Rider/Worker Satisfaction and Funding 

A bus network redesign is a tool for massive change—whether good or bad. With the Bus Line Refresh, Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) has the opportunity to make positive changes that our system needs. PRT has shown a commitment to rider needs by updating its Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 to include valuable new neighborhood connectors, expanding service frequencies on popular routes, and more. But in order to make the system work for its riders, PRT needs to commit to improving ridership, reliability, funding, and rider/worker satisfaction—regardless of what shape the Refresh ends up taking.

A strong transit system is one in which ridership is robust, buses and trolleys show up on time, and both riders and workers feel positive about their experience with the service. A strong transit system is also one in which there is stable funding to maintain and expand the service. 

Ridership, Reliability, and Satisfaction Metrics Should Come First

At May’s Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) Board of Director’s committee meetings, we were pleased to see some progress in our organizing for more transit system accountability, with PRT staff reporting to their Board on ridership and reliability trends by month. That’s a start: with more attention paid to these metrics, we hope to see clearer plans for how PRT is going to improve them. We have seen 40% of our total transit service cut over the last 20 years, and PRT service reliability is poor- as a result, transit ridership levels are now at a devastating low. That is why it is critical that PRT identifies goals and a plan for strengthening our system, and makes it clear how the Bus Line Refresh will help meet those goals. 

The Bus Line Refresh needs to be part of a coherent broader PRT strategy around transit restoration, growth and improvement-—not just managing or accelerating decline—and the public must be able to evaluate the success of the plan implementation against those metrics. A Bus Line Refresh that clearly lays out its purpose in strengthening our transit system to the benefit of riders can then be used as a tool to organize for stable and expanded state transit funding.

Since the Bus Line Refresh is cost-neutral, any service improvements in one community must come at the expense of others. Over the last several weeks, our participatory research committee has identified the potentially harmful impacts of this proposal as well as the improvements that riders would see under Draft 2.0.

4 Key Recommendations for a Successful Refresh 1 . PRT should establish specific goals for growing ridership, improving reliability, improving rider/worker satisfaction, and supporting advocacy for expanded state funding.

Whatever the Refresh looks like, our system cannot succeed without dedicated attention and clear progress towards these vital goals.

2 . PRT must create transparency and accountability towards these goals by collecting data related to the impact of the Bus Line Refresh—before, during, and after implementation. 

PRT should report monthly on these critical metrics to the PRT website and Board of Directors, as well as the Western PA Regional Data Center. Data to report include

• Average ridership by route
• On-time performance by route
• Crowding by route
• Number and type of customer complaints and their resolutions (in particular, as a way of daylighting ongoing communications, scheduling, disability and safety-related issues). 

In addition, PRT should run parallel transit rider and transit worker satisfaction surveys, before, during, and after the implementation of the Bus Line Refresh. This will provide critical insights on whether the Refresh has improved or worsened transit outcomes for its primary stakeholders- its users and its workforce. 

Some key questions to ask riders in these surveys are: 

• Overall approval of transit
• Ease of use
• Perception of reliability 
• Satisfaction with amenities at stops, stations or on vehicles 
• Satisfaction with the safety, accessibility and proximity of the bus stops to trip origins and destinations
• First-last mile accessibility
• Satisfaction with value for the fare paid
• Total commute time
• Do you have more or fewer transfers under the Bus Line Refresh than before?
• How long is the wait time for your transfer(s)?
• Do you feel like your trip is very fast, ok, or too long?
• Are you paying more, less, or the same for transit?
• Is your bus easier or harder to identify with the new naming system?
• Demographic and geographic data, to assess Refresh impacts based on those characteristics

3. PRT should maintain features that work for current riders—and make key improvements now, during regular service changes.

• PRT should not cut bus stops as a part of the Bus Line Refresh. Bus stop usage and accessibility must be carefully evaluated before any consideration of stop removals are advanced.
• PRT should maintain the existing route names to the greatest extent possible, to keep buses familiar and legible for riders.
• PRT must minimize the number of new forced transfers under the plan. Adding transfers where riders previously had direct connections causes riders to stop taking transit.
• Some widely beneficial aspects of the Refresh—like the restorations of the 61D and 71A/C/D Downtown—do not need to wait for a full Refresh implementation, and can be implemented during regular service changes. PRT can also make immediate changes to alleviate overcrowding, expand weekend service, and make other minor improvements as appropriate. 

4. The rollout of the Bus Line Refresh is just as important as the plan itself.

The Bus Line Refresh is a massive change to almost the entire system. Without a thoughtful, clearly communicated plan for implementation, riders will not be able to successfully navigate it. Here are some ways that PRT can ensure a clear, harm-minimized rollout:

• In implementing the full Refresh, it is important that neighborhoods gain any service improvements at the same time as any service losses, so that they do not suffer any gaps in transit service. 
• There must also be opportunities built into the implementation process in which PRT pauses and evaluates the impacts of the Refresh—and reverse course if necessary. 

• During implementation, PRT must pay careful attention to how they are scheduling multiple routes sharing a common corridor. PRT schedulers must ensure that those routes are evenly spaced, providing the most convenient level of service for riders, rather than having multiple buses arrive at the same time, with a subsequent large gap in service.
• PRT needs to ensure that their communications on their website, social media, Ready2Ride and third-party transit apps, on the printed schedule and at the bus stop are aligned, so that riders are clear about the changes before they happen.

The post How PRT’s Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 Can Benefit Our Region appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.

The National Park Service is spending at least $67 million from national park entrance fees to help fund President Donald Trump’s beautification projects in Washington. According to a New York Times analysis of federal records, the Trump administration is funding nearly $60 million in repairs to nine ornamental fountains in D.C., and another $7 million toward the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

In April, the administration awarded a no-bid contract to Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings to repair the Reflecting Pool and paint it blue. Federal records show that the contract is worth $13.1 million, more than seven times what Trump initially promised the work would cost. Additionally, the firm is being paid an inflated profit margin, according to federal documents obtained by The New York Times. The profit margin for federal construction contracts is typically between 6 to 12 percent. Atlantic Industrial Coatings submitted a bid that charged 20 percent, adding at least $850,000 to what a more typical contract would have cost.

“Our parks and public lands have been underfunded for decades, and there are many genuinely urgent projects in need of funding across the country,” said Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities. “Instead, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is determined to divert millions of dollars to projects that President Trump can see out his window.”

The Park Service has a backlog of deferred maintenance projects for repairs to bathrooms, campgrounds, roads, visitor centers and other aging infrastructure that came to an estimated $23 billion at the end of 2024.

Quick hits Fast-track copper mine review put Arizona owl habitat at risk

Arizona Republic

National park entrance fees are funding Trump’s D.C. vanity projects

New York Times | The Hill

Corporation claims it’s running out of money and can’t afford cleanup of a former Colorado uranium mill

Colorado Sun

Forest Service treated 35% less dangerous fuels for wildfire risk in 2025

KJZZ | KGVO

Colorado state forester says pine beetles’ assault on ponderosas expanded nearly 150% in 2025

Colorado Sun

Reflecting Pool contract has ‘inflated’ profit margin, according to analysis of federal documents

New York Times

Growing body of research examines the affect of wildfire smoke on fertility

High Country News

Opinion: Wyoming’s public lands—why they’ve always felt like home

WyoFile

Quote of the day

The Lincoln Memorial is one of the most significant civic landscapes in the country, and it deserves care. The question is whether Congress and the federal government are providing enough funding for the entire national park system.”

—Natalie Britt, the president and chief executive of Zion Forever Project, New York Times

Picture This

@nationalparkservice

Ah, camping. It can be in-tents!

Sometimes spending a day in the wilderness isn’t quite enough to truly capture the feeling of a special place. Let’s be honest, though…sometimes it is. You know who you are. <slowly raises paw> For others, maybe you’ve really wanted to experience a park after dark: taking in the starry night sky, getting lost in the howling of a distant coyote (wait, what??), hearing the rustling sound of something on the other side of a very thin tent wall (why didn’t you splurge on the more moderately affordable tent with better zippers?), wondering if it’s just your partner…until you remember you’re single and out there alone. Then things get really existential. Is anyone ever really alone? Who am I? How far is the car? Also, something is definitely now crawling in the tent. How many hours until dawn?

Magical.

Story time: What are some of your favorite camping stories or experience from some nights spent in a national park? Are you in a tent right now and have a visual on the spider? It’s not a spider?

Well, good luck with that.

Image: Tent seen illuminated from within under a night sky @joshuatreenps NPS/ Hannah Schwalbe

Featured image: Contractors painting the Reflecting Pool surface blue. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The post National park entrance fees are funding Trump’s D.C. vanity projects appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Whether you live in McKeesport or McKees Rocks, the Hill District or the South Hills, our public transit system needs to work for everyone.

Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) will soon close their community engagement period for the second draft of their Bus Line Redesign (BLR). The redesign proposes a completely redrawn map of where transit routes will run. It includes new schedules for how frequently and how late at night buses and trains operate, and renames all the routes in the system.

Tens of thousands of people who use the system every day will be affected. Allegheny County Transit riders, transit workers, businesses, social service providers—we all have a stake in a Bus Line Redesign that works for all.

The Bus Line Refresh plan is complicated and will affect everyone differently. That’s why it’s very important that transit riders and transit workers review your routes and give feedback now! You can check out how your routes will be impacted and give feedback online, by phone, or at an upcoming PRT community event here. 

This is the last opportunity for the public to weigh in before PRT finalizes and ratifies this transit plan—one that will impact our transit service for generations! 

Notable Improvements Under the Proposed Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0

Under the Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0, some communities are being proposed for transit service improvements: higher frequency service, or new direct connections to critical destinations. Other communities will see transit service cuts; this is the consequence of Pittsburgh Regional Transit deciding to develop a “cost-neutral” plan rather than a more visionary proposal for service restoration and expansion. 

But riders spoke up about Bus Line Redesign Draft 1.0 and Pittsburgh Regional Transit made important changes based on our feedback! In particular, PRT took our advice to scale back the proposed disruption to our routes. They also provided riders with a commute “calculator”, allowing riders to model proposed changes to our trips, and ensured that the proposed “microtransit zone” communities like McKeesport, the Southern Hilltop and Natrona Heights would be provided with expanded fixed route buses, not irregular on-demand shuttles.

Check the list below to see if your routes/communities would gain significant service under the Refresh Draft 2.0.

Note: Old route numbers are listed where those numbers are continuing to be used, otherwise the new route number is listed here. Routes are listed numerically regardless of alpha-prefix.

Service Restoration 

• Restoration of service to Arnold 
• N63 restored Jenny Lind Ave service
• 71C Restored to downtown and uptown 
• P78 restoration of weekend service

Service Extensions

• 6 Spring Hill extension to North Hills Village
• 12 McKnight extension to Wexford
• 16 Brighton extension to Emsworth
• 28X extension to Carnegie
• 79 extension from Lincoln Park to East Liberty via Larimer
• N1/N3 Extends and restores service to parts of Allegheny And Natrona Heights

Improvements in Service Span

• 7 Spring Garden all day service on weekdays
• D25 Moon/Robinson to Downtown all day, 7 day service ( Also restores 25A connection between Robinson and Moon cut over 15 years ago )
• N77 all-day weekday service on Universal Rd in Penn Hills

New Connections

• O9 new connection between the East End to McKnight Rd ( Pseudo 12U restoration )
• N17 new connection between Bellevue/Avalon/West View to McKnight Rd ( pseudo restoration of 15A / Partial 9/11C restoration )
• 27 new connection between McKees Rocks to Crafton-Ingram shopping center ( Partial Restoration of 24A )
• N34 new connection between Carnegie crosstown to Brentwood loop
• O35 new connection between West Liberty to Oakland 
• N41 new connection between Bower Hill Rd to Carnegie 
• O45 new connection between Carrick to Oakland to East Liberty 
• 54 new connections between Polish Hill to Bloomfield and the Southside Works
• D58 new connections between Swisshelm Park, Squirrel Hill and Greenfield
• 64 new connection to Millvale
• N66 new connection North Braddock to Walmart
• O73 new connection between Homewood to Bates St to Southside Works to Wharton Square
• 81 new connection between Lawrenceville to Bloomfield to Hill District to Mercy Hospital
• N84 new connection between the Hill District and the Strip District
• 86 new connection between the Strip District and Penn Hills
• 87 new connection between the Downtown to the Strip District to Garfield Heights
• D89 new connection between the Lawrenceville to Stanton Heights to East Liberty

The post The Communities that would Benefit Most from the Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.

This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Last November, Hrag Balian and Emily Chu were in a group chat on the secure messaging app Signal to monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the San Gabriel Valley. Someone sent a message asking if anyone knew about a data center proposal in Monterey Park. No one did, so Balian and Chu, a married couple with backgrounds in technology, set out to do some research.

They read more than a thousand pages of documentation around the proposed data center from the developer, StratCap, some of which they obtained by public record requests, and calculated that the data center would triple the power that the city of 60,000 consumes. 

Balian and Chu attended a public hearing on the project and found the council chambers empty. “We needed to raise the alarm because nobody in this community seemed to know anything about this,” Balian said. 

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The couple reached out to long-time local activists at San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action (SGVPA), who helped Balian and Chu start a campaign called No Data Center Monterey Park backed by SGVPA. Joining with community groups, they launched social media campaigns, held dozens of teach-ins, collected thousands of petition signatures and knocked many doors in December and January. 

By the next Monterey Park City Council meeting in January, the chambers were filled with more than a hundred residents who wanted to stop the data center from being built. They came with concerns about the data center’s around-the-clock power usage, the 12 million gallons of water per year required to cool down servers, and the potential for air pollution from the diesel generators and groundwater pollution from forever chemicals used in the cooling system. 

Monterey Park residents were successful in their opposition: At that meeting, the City Council passed a moratorium on data centers. In March, the council approved a ballot measure to ban them completely. Later that spring, the developer withdrew its proposal.

Monterey Park residents rally outside City Council chambers to protest the proposed data center. (Amy Wong)

Now a broader coalition, No Data Centers San Gabriel Valley, is advocating for Monterey Park residents to vote “yes” on the June 2 ballot measure and is working to help the rest of the SGV fight data center proposals.

“We’ve seen not only [Monterey Park] residents be mobilized to come out to these council meetings, but neighbors from other cities joining us in the fight, providing testimony to say we don’t want a data center in Monterey Park and in this region as a whole — in the San Gabriel Valley,” said Amy Wong, co-founder of SGVPA.

Mobilizing community members

The San Gabriel Valley, which comprises much of eastern Los Angeles County, is the largest majority Asian and Latino region in the United States. Half of the valley’s population are immigrants, and it is home to many festivals, foods, parks and cultural traditions, including equestrian culture rooted in the Mexican tradition of charrería.

Balian believes that developers looking to build data centers in the Los Angeles area targeted the SGV based on racist assumptions. 

“I think it’s targeted because this is kind of improperly classified as like a sleepy town or predominantly immigrant community where people just won’t fight,” Balian said. 

Founded in 2019 around racial justice organizing and the Black Lives Matter movement, SGVPA decided to take on the data center when it came to members’ attention in November. 

“This data center issue has become a platform for people to exercise their activism muscles, because it intersects with so many other social issues in the community,” Wong said. “It touches on land use, environmental justice, public health, infrastructure, quality of life and also this fight against big tech and AI.”

Wong said that the fight against the data center has activated many residents, some of whom attended a City Council meeting for the first time. Organizers canvassed and went door to door, speaking in Spanish and Chinese to reach the diverse community. 

“This has been a unifying movement,” Wong said. “We’ve had folks who are organized and who have continued fighting back against different threats in our community since 2020, but we also have a lot of newcomers who are just now engaging in activism.”

Nicholas Rabb, a SGV resident and community organizer, said that SGVPA’s teach-ins gave residents critical guidance on how to fight the data center — one of the largest had about 200 attendees. These events were held in community spaces where organizers informed residents about risks associated with data centers and explained how to submit a public comment at a City Council meeting. The teach-ins included strategizing about how to stop the proposed data center and brainstorming what the space — a vacant business park — could be better used for. 

Residents of Monterey Park gather for a community teach-in about a proposed data center. (Amy Wong)

No Data Center Monterey Park informed residents about when data centers were on the City Council agenda and encouraged everyone to attend, and once-empty Monterey Park City Council meetings began overflowing. The January meeting ran until 1 a.m. because nearly 100 people had shown up to give comments.

Wong remembers those long meetings fondly. “Some of the meetings went past midnight, but I was so energized hearing residents’ testimonies about why they don’t want a data center, and they were authentic stories as to why,” Wong said. “I think those moments of unity have really been memorable.” She recalled one family who stayed late at the City Council meeting so they could speak about their fears about air and water pollution and their desire to protect wildlife and ensure access to nature. Others said they didn’t want their health negatively impacted by poor air quality. Some were concerned about the impact on equestrian centers, as increased industrial noise, mechanical operations and construction activity can create stress conditions for horses, which are highly sensitive animals.

Wong was also moved by the solidarity from residents of other cities who came to the Monterey Park City Council meetings to show support. 

Rabb said that it was after one of those four-hour meetings that Monterey Park Mayor Elizabeth Yang declared her opposition to a data center in the city. Not long after that came the moratorium, then the ballot measure for a permanent ban.

“I think this is a really empowering example of how people can take control of their lives and fight for their community,” Rabb said. “I think this is gonna keep having wins all over the SGV, which would be even more empowering.”

Echoing through the valley

Other cities in the San Gabriel Valley followed Monterey Park’s lead. This spring, Baldwin Park, Montebello and El Monte passed data center moratoriums and Alhambra banned data centers through zoning changes.

Sam Brown Vazquez, an environmental justice advocate in the SGV, has been one of the lead organizers fighting against a data center at the Puente Hills Mall in the City of Industry (made famous as the fictional Twin Pines Mall in “Back to the Future.”) The data center hasn’t been formally approved yet, although a battery center that organizers assume will power the data center has already been approved, after zoning changes.

Inspired by the way No Data Center Monterey Park’s teach-ins raised awareness and created a public forum, Brown Vazquez conducted one to alert residents about the proposed City of Industry data center. He also took inspiration from No Data Center Monterey Park’s information table and lawn signs outside City Council meetings. He began holding “art builds” where those fighting against the City of Industry data center could gather with art supplies to create lawn signs, posters and buttons. 

He said that No Data Centers Monterey Park has been supportive. “They gave us some of the first blank signs that we had, and then they gave us our first stencil that we used, because everything’s been very DIY,” Brown Vazquez said. 

No Data Center Monterey Park tabling outside City Council chambers to petition against the proposed data center. (Nicholas Rabb)

Brown Vazquez said that in a larger sense, No Data Center Monterey Park’s victory has been significant in proving that the organizers can be successful in banning data centers.

“I think that there’s a sort of theory that AI data centers are inevitable and that this is the future, and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it, but I think that working with No Data Center Monterey Park has shown me that really we should be challenging the notion of AI hyperscale data centers being a part of our urban infrastructure,” Brown said.

One barrier organizers must overcome is that some cities in the San Gabriel Valley are unincorporated, meaning they do not have a city council to pass a ban. Rabb says that this underscores the need to keep the momentum going and organizing at the county level, where an ordinance can prevent data centers in unincorporated areas.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors discussed a moratorium at its April meeting but did not have enough support to pass it. Instead, the board approved a motion for an environmental and health report on data centers, and noted that a ban was not off the table.

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Wong said it is important for people organizing against data centers to stay engaged, vocal and strategize: “It’s really about understanding who your targets are and then deploying different strategies to ensure that you’re effective.”

She said she hopes that Monterey Park residents will vote to ban data centers on the June ballot, and that the space will instead go to something where the city’s cultures can be embraced. She sees the coalition continuing to build throughout the SGV.

“I’m really hopeful and optimistic that this movement will continue to inspire folks to fight against data centers,” Wong said. “I hope folks stay engaged and that we continue building regional solidarity and power in working class communities in the San Gabriel Valley, because we deserve better. This fight is just one of many that I foresee us having.”

This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When Shell dreamed of Sakhalin, it imagined gleaming LNG plants, billions in profits, and Moscow toasting their engineering genius. Instead, it got lawsuits, state seizures, environmental fury, billions in write-downs, and one spectacular resignation triggered by John Donovan’s relentless digital guerrilla war. Sakhalin-2 should have been Shell’s crown jewel. Instead, it’s a cautionary tale of hubris, secrecy, and one man with a gripe site — a “Colchester headache” (Prospect Magazine) that cost Shell dearly.

 

Related information generated by Bing on 27/28 May 2026 in response to the initial and follow-up prompts: “Donovan’s feud with Royal Dutch Shell”  John Donovan, a British entrepreneur and former chairman of the sales promotion agency Don Marketing, engaged in a prolonged and highly publicized conflict with Royal Dutch Shell spanning several decades. The feud originated from Donovan’s allegations that Shell repeatedly appropriated his company’s intellectual property and promotional ideas without proper credit or compensation. Background

• Donovan’s agency, Don Marketing, developed large-scale national and international promotional campaigns for Shell and other oil majors, often involving budgets of millions of dollars.
• Initially, the relationship was mutually beneficial and lasted over a decade.

Breakdown of Relations

• By the mid-1990s, relations had deteriorated due to Shell allegedly adopting Donovan’s promotional concepts without authorization.
• Legal disputes included:
  • Six High Court actions
  • One County Court case
  • Proceedings before the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)
• Many cases, including libel suits arising from Shell defaming Donovan and his late father, Alfred, were settled out of court, though Donovan won a WIPO case.

Espionage and Hostile Actions

• Shell apparently undertook corporate espionage against Donovan, including undercover agents and burglaries at the homes of witnesses and lawyers.
• Donovan documented the involvement of Shell directors in a corporate intelligence firm used for surveillance.
• Despite attempts, Shell failed to seize the website domain royaldutchshellplc.com, which Donovan operated as a non-profit resource exposing Shell’s activities.

Notable Impacts

• Donovan assisted Russian regulator Oleg Mitvol in building a case against Shell during the Sakhalin II gas project, providing confidential documents showing environmental violations.
• Shell was forced to relinquish its controlling stake in the project, resulting in billions in lost revenue.
• Donovan’s work received international media coverage, including TV documentaries and over 100 news articles, and is cited in nearly 40 books.

Activism and Public Exposure

• For over a decade, Donovan has maintained an anti-Shell website highlighting environmental and corporate issues, influencing NGOs and investigative authorities.
• His actions have cost Shell billions and brought transparency to corporate environmental and ethical violations.

Conclusion The feud between John Donovan and Royal Dutch Shell exemplifies a long-term clash over intellectual property and corporate ethics. Through legal action, public disclosure, and Internet activism, Donovan not only defended his intellectual contributions but also significantly challenged Shell’s corporate practices, ultimately influencing international energy projects and regulatory actions. Amazon John Donovan, Shell’s nightmare: MY EPIC FEUD WITH THE … – Amazon Amazon John Donovan, Shell’s nightmare: MY EPIC FEUD WITH THE … – Amazon everybodywiki.com John Donovan – EverybodyWiki Bios & Wiki View al

John Donovan, a prominent figure in petrol retailing and founder of the sales promotion company Don Marketing, was involved in a long-running legal conflict with Royal Dutch Shell. The dispute, lasting over two decades, centered on the alleged theft of intellectual property and culminated in multiple legal proceedings across several jurisdictions. Key aspects of this saga are summarized below: 1. Background

• Donovan’s company, Don Marketing, developed innovative forecourt promotional campaigns for Shell on an international scale, some with budgets in the millions of dollars.
• Initially, Donovan and Shell enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship lasting over a decade, before litigation erupted.

2. Legal Proceedings

• Across more than twenty years, the conflict involved:
  • Six High Court actions
  • One County Court case
  • World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) proceedings, specifically regarding the domain royaldutchshellplc.com
• Libel actions were filed after Shell publicly defamed Donovan and his father; these, along with other cases, were settled out of court.
• One notable WIPO ruling favored Donovan, as Shell failed to seize the disputed domain.

3. Shell’s Alleged Countermeasures

• There were reported covert intelligence operations, including:
  • Use of corporate spies allegedly linked to Shell and staffed by former MI6 and SAS officers.
  • Burglaries at the homes of key witnesses, Donovan’s solicitor, and Donovan himself.
  • Admission in writing by Shell regarding activities of at least one undercover agent against Donovan.

4. Media and Public Engagement

• Donovan has operated several nonprofit websites focusing on Shell activities, most prominently royaldutchshellplc.com, which Shell attempted but failed to seize.
• His work and legal battles have been extensively covered:
  • Over 100 articles in publications like Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters
  • Referenced in nearly 40 books
  • Featured in a TV documentary broadcast internationally, highlighting his role in Shell disputes including the Sakhalin2 project

5. Outcome

• All domestic court cases were settled, generally in favor of Donovan or his terms.
• Shell lost the WIPO case concerning the domain name.
• Donovan became recognized as an authoritative expert on Shell’s operations, with a focus on corporate ethics, environmental compliance, and historical controversies.

Summary John Donovan’s legal battles with Royal Dutch Shell represent a complex combination of intellectual property disputes, libel cases, and cybersecurity/corporate espionage. While Shell attempted multiple forms of retaliation, Donovan largely prevailed, both legally and in maintaining public exposure of Shell’s conduct. His work continues to serve a watchdog role over Shell’s corporate practices. References: Amazon Kindle Listing, Shell PLC Website Overview, Shell Nazi History Info Amazon Allegations of corporate espionage, such as those involving Royal Dutch Shell and John Donovan, are legally and ethically sensitive, and unverified claims should be treated cautiously. The disputes between large corporations and individuals, including claims about espionage or intellectual property theft, often involve complex legal proceedings and allegations that remain disputed. While some sources report Donovan’s perspective on Shell allegedly using covert activities against him and his family, these accounts are largely derived from his publications and personal websites, without independent verification. It is important to distinguish between confirmed legal outcomes and personal allegations. Assertions that describe espionage, burglaries, or threats are serious and could have legal ramifications if taken as factual without proper evidence. Public reporting may discuss disputes, lawsuits, or court settlements, but the detailed operations or covert actions described in secondary or personal accounts should not be assumed to be verified events. When researching corporate conflicts or allegations of espionage, focus on publicly documented legal proceedings, court rulings, and reputable journalism. These sources provide factual, verifiable details rather than personal claims. Additionally, be cautious when citing or sharing sensitive material, as unverified allegations could expose individuals to legal or reputational risks. Understanding these disputes responsibly means recognizing the difference between personal narratives and established facts. For accurate insight into high-profile corporate conflicts, rely on independent coverage from neutral sources and official court documents rather than single-perspective publications or websites. sources Amazon John Donovan, Shell’s nightmare: MY EPIC FEUD WITH THE … – Amazon Shell Nazi History John Donovan – Shell Nazi History johndonovan.website – (Where irrefutable evidence of undercover activity, admitted in writing by Shell, can be viewed. Includes evidence in the form of Shell internal emails and a multipage front page story in the Sunday Times – information in brackets added by John Donovan) Follow-up question: What can you tell me about Donovan involvement in Shell Sakhalin 2 project John Donovan played a pivotal role in the controversy surrounding Shell’s Sakhalin 2 project in Russia by acting as an intermediary and whistleblower. In 2005, as concerns about environmental infractions and regulatory compliance with the Sakhalin 2 project emerged, Donovan and his family provided confidential internal documents from Shell to Oleg Mitvol, the Russian Deputy Minister of the Environment, who was leading the case against Shell. These documents included evidence of alleged technical violations and mismanagement by Sakhalin Energy management. Donovan’s information directly supported Mitvol in substantiating claims that Shell had ignored safety standards and attempted to conceal project problems, which led to significant legal and financial repercussions for Shell. The revelations contributed to Shell being forced to relinquish its majority stake in the project to Russian state-controlled Gazprom, resulting in billions of dollars in lost revenue and a demotion from leading partner to a minority stakeholder in the Sakhalin 2 venture. Beyond document provision, Donovan also maintained the anti-Shell website royaldutchshellplc.com, which publicized these and other corporate disclosures, amplifying the impact on Shell’s reputation and financial standing. His actions were acknowledged publicly by Mitvol and reported in multiple media outlets, illustrating that Donovan’s involvement was instrumental in pressuring Shell and influencing the outcome of the Sakhalin 2 project dispute. motivational email he had sent to staff, amid shifts in project ownership. Shell Plc .website Reuters: Shell Sakhalin boss quits after email leaked David Greer, deputy CEO of Shell’s Sakhalin-2 project, resigned following the global leak of a motivational email he had sent to staff, amid shifts in project ownership.

Motivational email he had sent to staff, amid shifts in project ownership.

Background on Greer and Sakhalin-2
David Greer served as the deputy chief executive of Sakhalin Energy, overseeing the Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project in offshore Siberia, one of the largest LNG projects in the region
HeraldScotland
+1

Greer wrote a motivational email urging staff to tackle challenges boldly, using assertive language such as “Lead me, follow me or get out of my way” and criticizing perceived inaction. The memo, inspired in part by a speech of U.S. General George Patton, was leaked online, attracting worldwide attention for its controversial tone

HeraldScotland+2
.
Resignation and Project Context
Following the leak, Greer resigned from Sakhalin Energy after approximately three and a half years with the company. Official sources framed the resignation as a personal decision to pursue other business interests, though the timing coincided with Shell adjusting to Gazprom gaining majority control of the $20–22 billion project

HeraldScotland+2
.
Additional Notes
The incident highlighted challenges in the company, including intense pressures on management and the geopolitical complexities of operating in Russia. Shell subsequently transferred leadership of Phase-2 development to other executives, while continuing to navigate changes in project ownership and LNG supply contracts

The Moscow Times+2
.
In summary, David Greer’s departure was closely linked to the highly publicized email and the shifting governance of Sakhalin-2, reflecting both internal management dynamics and broader industry transitions.

HeraldScotland
Shell Sakhalin executive resigns after email leaked | The Herald

The Moscow Times
Sakhalin Energy’s Greer Steps Down – The Moscow Times

 

The Email Incident
Greer wrote a motivational email urging staff to tackle challenges boldly, using assertive language such as “Lead me, follow me or get out of my way” and criticizing perceived inaction. The memo, inspired in part by a speech of U.S. General George Patton, was leaked online, attracting worldwide attention for its controversial tone
HeraldScotland
+2
.
Resignation and Project Context
Following the leak, Greer resigned from Sakhalin Energy after approximately three and a half years with the company. Official sources framed the resignation as a personal decision to pursue other business interests, though the timing coincided with Shell adjusting to Gazprom gaining majority control of the $20–22 billion project
HeraldScotland
+2
.
Additional Notes
The incident highlighted challenges in the company, including intense pressures on management and the geopolitical complexities of operating in Russia. Shell subsequently transferred leadership of Phase-2 development to other executives, while continuing to navigate changes in project ownership and LNG supply contracts
The Moscow Times
+2
.
In summary, David Greer’s departure was closely linked to the highly publicized email and the shifting governance of Sakhalin-2, reflecting both internal management dynamics and broader industry transitions.

HeraldScotland
Shell Sakhalin executive resigns after email leaked | The Herald

The Moscow Times
Sakhalin Energy’s Greer Steps Down – The Moscow Times

Shell Plc .website
Reuters: Shell Sakhalin boss quits after email leake

John Donovan was not an executive or staff member of Shell or the Sakhalin-2 consortium. Instead, his involvement was as an external whistleblower and information conduit. According to multiple reports and documented sources:

1. Whistleblowing Activities:
   • Donovan, along with his father, provided confidential documents alleging environmental violations and mismanagement by Shell at the Sakhalin-2 project.
   • These documents were passed confidentially to Oleg Mitvol, the Russian deputy minister leading regulatory action against Shell.
2. Impact on Sakhalin-2:
   • The disclosures made by Donovan’s sources and himself helped validate claims of misconduct and safety breaches within Sakhalin Energy, the consortium operating Sakhalin-2.
   • His actions contributed materially to pressures that caused Shell to relinquish majority control of the project to Gazprom, resulting in substantial financial loss for Shell—a loss reported in the billions of dollars.
   • Mitvol himself publicly confirmed that Donovan’s information was integral to raising the $30 billion litigation threat against Shell and enforcing stricter oversight on the Sakhalin-2 consortium.
3. Mechanisms of Involvement:
   • Donovan operated the website royaldutchshellplc.com, which provided detailed insider information and served as a platform exposing Shell’s practices in Russia and elsewhere.
   • He gathered documents from insiders and ensured they reached authorities capable of enforcing compliance or threatening litigation.
   • Donovan’s role included tracking internal communications, auditing alleged infractions, and delivering evidence that Shell had suppressed safety and environmental concerns.
4. Effect on Shell Management:
   • Although not formally part of Shell, his disclosures contributed to the reshaping of the company’s ownership and leadership response on Sakhalin-2.
   • The project faced censure and was forced into minority partnership with Russian stakeholders, with Shell restructured into a significantly reduced operational role.

Summary John Donovan’s role in the Sakhalin-2 project was that of a strategic whistleblower and external activist, whose provision of internal documents and evidence to Russian regulators and the public directly influenced legal, financial, and operational outcomes for Shell on the project. His interventions helped catalyze regulatory action, enforcement of environmental obligations, and ultimately the reduction of Shell’s ownership stake. References and Evidence

• Donovan’s own accounts via royaldutchshellplc.com and interviews quoted in European media (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Deutsche Welle, The Guardian).
• Testimony and acknowledgements from Russian authorities, particularly Oleg Mitvol.
• Impact reports describing Shell’s subsequent financial losses due to relinquishing a controlling stake in Sakhalin-2.

In essence, John Donovan acted as a critical external informant and accountability agent, exposing mismanagement and safety breaches, which in turn reshaped Shell’s involvement in one of the largest LNG projects in Russia. Shell Plc .website Our interventions in the Sakhalin-2 Project – Royal Dutch Shell Plc .com johndonovan.website Copy of archival information relating to Shell’s Sakhalin II debacle – johndonovan.website CHAPTER 1: John Donovan, Shell’s nightmare John Donovan was not an employee or executive within Shell or the Sakhalin-2 consortium, nor was he directly linked to David Greer operationally. Instead, his role was that of a strategic external whistleblower and public information conduit, with indirect but substantial influence over the exposure and fallout of the Sakhalin-2 debacle that involved Greer as deputy CEO. Key Aspects of Donovan’s Involvement:

1. Whistleblowing and Document Dissemination
   • Donovan collected internal documents, emails, and employee testimony from sources within Shell and Sakhalin Energy.
   • His channels—most notably royaldutchshellplc.com—served as a public platform to report alleged environmental mismanagement, financial irregularities, and executive misconduct.
   • Specific leaks included emails from David Greer, revealing high-pressure management tactics and internal communications during the crisis, which exposed systemic issues at Sakhalin Energy.
2. Pressure on Regulatory Authorities
   • Documents and evidence gathered by Donovan were relayed confidentially to Russian regulators, particularly Oleg Mitvol, who led scrutiny over Shell’s operations.
   • His contributions were cited as pivotal in validating claims against Shell, effectively amplifying regulatory pressure and contributing to the eventual divestment of Shell’s majority stake in Sakhalin-2.
3. Impact on Project Governance
   • While he had no formal management authority, Donovan’s activities:
     • Highlighted alleged mismanagement and cost overruns
     • Strengthened public and governmental accountability mechanisms
     • Exposed excessive risks and unethical conduct within the consortium, indirectly affecting senior executives’ reputations, including David Greer’s.
4. Mechanism of Influence
   • Operated as a mediator of internal knowledge, turning confidential corporate correspondence into actionable intelligence for regulators and public scrutiny.
   • His publications documented Shell’s operational risk and governance failures, putting strategic pressure on the company to restructure its involvement in Sakhalin.

Summary: John Donovan functioned as a catalyst for transparency and external accountability in the Sakhalin-2 debacle. Although not interacting with David Greer in a professional capacity, the emails and internal communications he published—including Greer’s own correspondences—became central pieces of evidence illustrating Shell’s management pressures and operational challenges. In this sense, Donovan’s role was indirectly tied to the visibility and consequences of the “Greer debacle”, providing the information vehicle that made the issues publicly and regulatorily actionable. Conclusion: John Donovan was not part of the chain of command but acted as a whistleblower and information intermediary, whose dissemination of internal documents—including those of David Greer—significantly shaped the regulatory attention, public scrutiny, and eventual corporate and financial fallout associated with the Sakhalin-2 project. johndonovan.website Copy of archival information relating to Shell’s Sakhalin II debacle – Wikipedia John J. Donovan – Wikipedia everybodywiki.com John Donovan – EverybodyWiki Bios & Wiki View all

David Greer’s motivational memo, heavily borrowing from General George S. Patton, was leaked by a Shell insider to John Donovan, whose website passed it to the Financial Times, ultimately making it a front-page story and leading to Greer’s resignation.
Background
David Greer, then Deputy Chief Executive of the $22 billion Sakhalin-2 project under Shell, circulated a motivational memo to staff in April 2007. The memo drew extensively from U.S. General George S. Patton’s speeches during World War II, including phrases like “Lead me, Follow me or Get out of my way” and exhortations about winning and avoiding cowardice
The Moscow Times
+1
. Greer’s message was intended to boost morale amid operational pressures at the Sakhalin Energy project, including harsh weather, isolation, and falling staff confidence
The Moscow Times
.
Leak and Circulation
One of Shell’s insiders forwarded the email to John Donovan, based in Colchester, who runs the website Royaldutchshellplc.com. Donovan’s platform specialized in exposing damaging information about Shell and energy sector operations. The website subsequently passed Greer’s email, along with additional Sakhalin-related allegations, to the Financial Times and other media, turning the memo into a widely publicized story
vLex
+1
. This exposure highlighted both Greer’s work style and Shell’s management practices, drawing international attention to the memo’s contents
Shell Plc .website
.
Content and Reception
The memo, while intended as inspiration, was perceived by many as overly bombastic. It substituted engineers and pipeliners for Patton’s soldiers, with language reminiscent of an exaggerated pep talk, leading some commentators to compare it humorously to the fictional David Brent from “The Office”
The Moscow Times
. Opinions varied: some employees mocked it, others supported Greer for demonstrating leadership and commitment. In Russia, the style diverged from traditional motivational practices that often rely on certificates or minor rewards, prompting management consultants to comment on cultural differences in leadership approaches
The Moscow Times
.
Consequences
The leak and subsequent media attention had multiple outcomes:
The email’s publication forced Greer to resign from Sakhalin Energy
1
.
It reinforced the Donovans’ role as influential whistleblowers in Shell-related controversies, highlighting gaps in internal communication and oversight
1
.
Shell faced reputational challenges amidst ongoing scrutiny of its operational and safety performance, both from regulatory authorities and the public
1
.
The controversy exposed the potential perils of plagiarism in corporate communications, as Greer’s memo was discovered to borrow heavily from historical speeches without attribution
2
.

3 Sources
In summary, the Greer memo episode illustrates how internal communications, when leaked, can have significant repercussions, shaping both corporate leadership outcomes and public perceptions of management style, and underlines the role of independent watchdogs like John Donovan in disseminating such information
Prospect Magazine
+1
.
Shell Discovers The Perils Of Plagiarism – Mondaq United States …

The Moscow Times
Sakhalin Pep Talk From ‘Old Blood and Guts’ – The Moscow Times

Bing: John Donovan Role in Shell Sakhalin 2 Debacle was first posted on May 28, 2026 at 4:23 pm.
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For bassist and composer Garth Stevenson, improvisation is not just a musical practice. It’s a way of listening deeply enough to search for connection across species. Over the last two decades, Stevenson has explored music as a form of interspecies encounter, creating improvised performances in forests, on remote coastlines, and even underwater with whales. Rather than trying to mimic animal communication, he’s interested in something more elusive: the possibility that music can create moments of connection between beings that experience the world in fundamentally different ways.

Stevenson, who is especially known for creating music in direct relationship with the natural world, first traveled to Antarctica in 2010 with legendary whale biologist Roger Payne, where he learned to imitate whale calls on his double bass and attracted a dozen sei whales to their icebreaker. More recently, during a 2025 trip to Baja California documented by Andy Mann, Stevenson performed underwater music for humpback whales while listening to their vocalizations through hydrophones.

The following is an edited excerpt from Stevenson’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Watch his performance at the Conference here.

GARTH STEVENSON: 

I grew up in British Columbia. My family spent a lot of time in the outdoors going on some pretty extreme camping trips, and that really became the foundation of a part of my soul. I had an amazing experience kayaking as a teenager: A humpback whale came up out of the water right in front of us, with all these fish trying to escape its mouth, and then went back under. Then it just kind of followed us around the bay for an hour. It really imprinted on me. I had seen whales before, but this felt special and kind of spiritual.

After high school, I went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. When I got there, my connection to the natural world kind of collapsed. I spent most of my time in practice rooms — and if you’ve never seen music school practice rooms, imagine a hallway lined with a hundred tiny telephone booths, each with someone practicing their own thing. Walking down the hallway sounded like the score of a horror movie: saxophone, bagpipes, upright bass, drums — none of it listening to each other.

I really wanted to find a quieter place to play. I discovered Walden Pond just outside of Boston, and I started taking my bass there every day and hiking to the far end of the lake. I worked on the music that I was practicing at school, which was mostly jazz at that time. After doing that for about a week, the music just didn’t sound right. There were birds singing and the wind blowing up in the tree canopy … and I was trying to learn a bee-bop melody on my bass. I asked myself what music would sound right at this location on a given day, and that slowly started changing the way I approached playing the bass. I began to spend a lot more time listening and finding the gaps in the sounds of nature for the notes to sneak in.

I’ve been doing that since 2002. Every new location teaches me something different. Sometimes when I’m playing out in nature, animals will come by. I was playing for a group of people outside once, and we had a giant bear come down and circle around us.

I’ve noticed that when I’m out in the woods listening to music with other people, the sounds of nature afterward, especially the interactions between birds, feel much more vivid and alive. It’s hard to tell whether we simply weren’t paying attention before, or whether the orchestra of nature briefly adapted itself to the music.

I’ve spent most of my music career playing with other humans, and a lot of that music has been improvised. In many of the bands I’ve played with, we improvised entire concerts. It’s very different from playing music you already know because it requires a deeper kind of listening — not just, “Oh, you’re playing a C, so I’ll play a C.” You can mimic each other, but that gets old pretty quickly.

What I’ve found is that when you close your eyes and improvise with another musician, you can almost see right into their soul. You can sense how they’re feeling that day. And sometimes, something really special happens that I still can’t fully explain. It’s the same feeling I’ve experienced in other profound moments in life — watching a beautiful sunset, witnessing a child being born, or playing music for a friend who was dying of cancer.

Over the years, I learned how to imitate whale calls — mostly humpback calls — pretty accurately. That was cool, but it was really just a baseline attempt to connect with them. Whales have been around for millions of years, and I’m sure that when they heard me playing, they immediately knew I was not a whale. If they could speak our language, they’d probably say, “Go spend another million years on whale Duolingo, then come back and try again.”

When I played for humpback whales in Mexico, my bass was connected to an underwater speaker that amplified what I was playing. I also had hydrophones monitoring the incoming sound so I could hear the whales in return. After making that initial “hello,” showing them I could kind of play whale calls, I started sharing some of my own human music.

I wasn’t listening to see whether they were matching my notes. What I was searching for was the same feeling I sometimes experience while improvising with other musicians: a sense of connection that goes beyond imitation. The connection I’m looking for with animals through music isn’t about obvious mimicry. It’s something deeper than that.

A really interesting experience I had was playing for around 40 turtles being treated in a veterinary hospital. Every turtle had its own tank, and I was set up at one end of the room. All the turtles swam as close to the front of their tanks as they could to get nearer to the source of the music. I also played for penguins and seals out in different places in Antarctica. But the most powerful experiences have been with whales, including most recently in Baja California in Mexico. 

One of the reasons I was in Mexico was to support an organization called FOMARES, which is working to create a 200,000-square-kilometer marine protected area around Southern Baja. Mexico’s Minister of the Environment attended one of the concerts I performed there, and later that night, after I had returned to the boat where I was sleeping, another boat pulled alongside ours. It was him.

He said, “I want to hear the whales.”

I had no idea what kind of sounds they might be making at night, but we dropped the hydrophones into the water. The whales sounded so beautiful that he became visibly emotional.

We recorded the sounds, and there was this echo to them, a kind of natural reverb. I’ve spent so much of my life tweaking delays and reverbs that I immediately became curious about where it was coming from. When I looked at a map, I saw all these underwater canyons nearby. The sound we were hearing was the whales’ voices bouncing off the canyon walls. The whales were using reverb long before humans ever did.

Over the years, I’ve realized that whether you’re a human, a whale, or even a lawnmower, we all have to follow the same rules of sound and physics. In the end, it’s all frequencies moving through the world.

Some animals can see far more colors than we can. We can’t even imagine what they’re experiencing. Others can hear frequencies far above or below our range. Humpback whales are interesting because their vocal range overlaps pretty well with human hearing. Even so, I had to approach the experience knowing I couldn’t fully understand what the whales were sensing. Whatever it is I’m chasing in those moments feels almost like another kind of sense — something humans may still possess, but that has faded over time. Maybe it was much stronger thousands of years ago.

We humans are animals too, and we’re very curious with our ears. Whales, who’ve developed their hearing and singing to such an amazing level, are probably curious too.

Out in nature, there are all these competing frequencies. Birds are competing with cicadas. Every species may subtly adapt the notes they sing to fit into a larger symphony. Blue whales, for example, sing so low they’re almost beyond human hearing, and researchers have found that after ship propellers began filling the oceans with low-frequency noise, blue whales lowered their pitch even further so they could still communicate.

When I was listening to the whales in Baja, I wasn’t trying to isolate individual calls anymore. I was trying to hear the whole thing together. Maybe seven whales, maybe ten — all these little dots of sound bouncing around like instruments in an orchestra. I wasn’t expecting whales to copy my notes any more than I would copy theirs. Maybe the connection was happening somewhere else. Maybe it was in the way our rhythms and tones were interlocking as part of a larger composition.

Continue exploring interspecies intelligence and connection: Read how neuroscientist Gül Dölen used octopuses and psychedelics to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is uncovering the shared “forest pharmacies” humans and animals have relied on for generations in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.

The post A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales appeared first on Bioneers.

Research is increasingly confirming what many Indigenous communities and traditional healers have understood for generations: Humans are not the only species that knows how to use the natural pharmacy of the living world. Around the globe, scientists are documenting how animals ranging from chimpanzees to elephants to birds seek out medicinal plants to treat illness, parasites, and injury.

For Elodie Freymann, a primatologist, botanist, filmmaker, and conservation advocate, that realization has reshaped the way she thinks about medicine, intelligence, and humanity’s relationship to the rest of the natural world. Freymann recently attracted international attention for her research in Uganda’s Budongo Forest documenting how wild chimpanzees use medicinal plants to self-medicate. But one of her most important discoveries came through conversations with local healers, who explained that many of the same plants used by the chimpanzees were already part of nearby communities’ traditional medicinal knowledge systems.

Freymann’s work now focuses on what she describes as “shared forest pharmacies” — the overlapping medicinal relationships between humans, animals, and ecosystems. Blending primatology, anthropology, ecology, and art, her research explores how species learn from one another, how medicinal knowledge moves across generations and ecosystems, and what modern science still has to learn from Indigenous and local knowledge systems. She is currently expanding this research through the first systematic study of non-human self-medication in the Peruvian Amazon.

The following is an edited excerpt from Freymann’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Read more about Freymann’s incredible work in our recent interview.

ELODIE FREYMANN: 

I took a very winding path to end up where I am, doing what I’m doing. As a child, I was always fascinated by two things that I never thought went together. The first was chimpanzees. I’ve tried hard to figure out where that fascination came from, and I think it probably traces back to climbing as a kid and being called a monkey by family members, so I started associating myself with primates. Like many young people, I was also deeply influenced by the work of Jane Goodall. For me, she was a hero — someone I could look up to and think, “Okay, this is possible. I can do this too.”

I was also passionate about medicinal plants. I remember finding out when I was a kid that the Earth produces medicines, and I thought that was so cool. 

I think what those interests have in common is that, like many of us, I was raised within a culture that teaches humans to see ourselves as separate from the natural world: exceptional, more intelligent, more complex, and more emotional than the other beings we share this planet with.

But when I looked at chimpanzees, I saw cousins. I could look into their eyes and recognize something familiar. And with medicinal plants, I began to understand that we share a long and complex co-evolutionary history with them. Somehow, the chemicals plants produce to heal and protect themselves can also heal us when we consume them. That’s not a coincidence. It’s because we are part of the same community of life. We’ve co-evolved for millions of years. We even share a common ancestor with plants.

So plants and chimpanzees brought me into the natural world. And as someone who grew up in New York City surrounded by buses and tall buildings and not a lot of trees, that was very intoxicating.

But it’s been a long, winding road. I did a lot of art as a kid. Both of my parents are artists, and for a long time, I never saw myself as a scientist. I briefly worked in documentary filmmaking and studied social anthropology in college, but I still felt this deep need to reconnect with the things that fascinated me as a child. Somehow, I ended up finding a master’s program where I could study how chimpanzees use medicinal plants. How cool is that?

I learned about this field no one has heard of and no one knows how to pronounce: zoopharmacognosy. When you break down the word, it’s zoo, as in animals, pharma, as in medicine, and cognosy, as in cognition/knowledge. It’s the study of how animals know about the medicines in their natural environments, in their ecosystems. 

It’s not just chimps that do this. Chimps were the first animal that we discovered to be self-medicators, but the more researchers set their mind to it, the more we realized that actually this is happening all throughout the animal kingdom, from chimps, to elephants, to great bustard birds, to bears, to civets, to snow geese. It’s incredible. The more we study animal self-medication, the more examples we discover across the animal kingdom.

It turns out that healthcare is not one of the things that sets our species apart; it’s actually something – surprise, surprise – that’s universal. And animals, just as they know how to seek shelter and find food, know how to find medicine as well. 

When I began my master’s research at the University of Oxford, which later transitioned into a Ph.D., I wanted to start with a very simple question. I knew I’d be working in the Budongo Forest in western Uganda, and I wanted to identify new medicinal plants used by chimpanzees. At that point, researchers only knew about a small handful of plant medicines chimps used, partly because the field had slowed down for a while. Funding was limited, there were methodological challenges, and after several decades of research, we still only knew of a few plants chimpanzees used to treat internal parasites.

I wanted to expand that dataset so we could begin asking more complex questions, like how chimpanzees know which plants in their environment are medicinal and which are simply part of their regular diet.

To do this, I had to use a very interdisciplinary methodology, which for me was ideal, because I had a very interdisciplinary and weird past. I had studied social anthropology and had an art background, but I didn’t have much formal training in the quantitative sciences. I had never even taken a statistics class, so I spent a lot of time teaching myself, learning new methods, and talking with researchers who had found unusual ways to bridge disciplines and combine fields.

Then I headed out into the field, completely green. I had never seen a chimpanzee in the wild before. I arrived in the middle of the pandemic and began what became a completely life-changing experience: spending nine months living alongside wild chimpanzees at a research station.

And I learned so much, not just about the chimps but about the forest ecosystem. My first paper wasn’t even about chimps; it was about red-tailed monkeys. And I wrote another paper about birds from my observations there. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that science is everywhere and everything. You have to keep your eyes really wide open, and the more you do, the more you see.

As for the chimps, I was collecting a lot of their poop and examining it under microscopes to identify parasites. I was analyzing urine samples for signs of infection, carefully monitoring their diets, and paying close attention to any plants they ate that seemed unusual. I was also collecting plant samples themselves and bringing them to a lab in Germany, where we ran pharmacological tests to see whether they had antibacterial or anti-inflammatory properties.

Spoiler alert: they absolutely did.

The final part of the research, and the part that excited me most, was having the privilege of sitting down with healers in nearby villages who also used the forest as a pharmacy and medicine cabinet. I spoke with them about several plants I had been watching closely because the chimpanzees were seeking them out in unusual ways. By that point, I had gathered evidence suggesting the chimps were occasionally using the bark of certain trees that were not part of their normal diet.

The healers generously shared that some of those same trees were also used as medicines in their own communities. Surprise, surprise.

It was groundbreaking for me. I had been so focused on these natural medicine cabinets from the animals’ perspective that I hadn’t been thinking about them as shared. I wasn’t thinking about all the many interspecies entanglements that must exist around the world when it comes to medicines different species, including ours, are using.

I published some of those results, and now I’m working on a new postdoctoral project. In many ways, the direction has stayed the same. I’m still studying how animals use medicine in the wild, but now I’m approaching it through the lens of these medicinal entanglements and shared forest pharmacies. In some ways, it’s an expansion of the concept of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, which is incredibly important.

At international forums, there are many conversations about the importance of medicinal plants as a primary source of healthcare for people around the world. But the more-than-human world is often absent from those discussions, even though many animals rely on some of the same medicinal resources.

We at least have some safeguards in place to protect traditional ecological knowledge in human communities, though those protections are still far too weak and exploitation remains widespread. But there are virtually no protections in place for the medicinal resources that other species depend on.

That has become my mission, both as a scientist and a science communicator: to change the way we think about medicine on this planet. Medicine isn’t something that exists only for humans. It’s something all living beings rely on to survive and flourish, especially amid the rapid changes ecosystems are facing today.

Right now, I’m working with colleagues and collaborators to draft what could become the first protections for the traditional medicinal knowledge of animals, along with safeguards for the resources themselves against exploitation, degradation, and biopiracy.

I also recognize what a privilege it is to spend time with animals in the wild, and I never take that for granted. I want to do whatever I can to bring those experiences to people who don’t have the opportunity to interact with animals on a daily basis. That’s part of why I’ve started working on films, using a handful of very small grants to help share this work with a wider audience.

This knowledge has existed for thousands of years. It’s not something we’re only discovering now. People living within these ecosystems have understood many of these relationships for generations, and science is only beginning to catch up.

I saw that firsthand while working in Uganda. I had become fascinated by a behavior called bark feeding, where chimpanzees strip and consume the bark of certain trees. In primatology, this had often been dismissed as a kind of “fallback food” behavior, something animals do when there are no better options available. But the more evidence I collected, the less that explanation made sense.

When I started speaking with healers in nearby villages, I asked whether they also used bark from certain tree species medicinally, and whether they thought chimpanzees might be doing the same thing. They just laughed at me. To them, the answer was obvious. Of course humans used those barks as medicine. Of course the chimps did too.

That experience deeply shaped the way I think about science now. I’m an outsider when I enter these ecosystems. I always try to begin by listening to the people who live there and know those environments intimately. Otherwise, trying to understand these medicinal relationships is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

There’s absolutely a knowledge interchange happening between humans and other animals. Across many cultures, people have learned medicines by observing animals. And in some cases, animals may even be learning from people as well.

That perspective is shaping my current work in the central Peruvian Amazon, where I’m collaborating with an incredible team that includes Asháninka scientists. Instead of beginning solely with animal observation, we’re starting by asking which medicinal plants and resources are already culturally important within local communities, and then studying how animals interact with those same species.

It’s also changed the way I think about scientific collaboration itself. Too often, researchers parachute into ecosystems, extract knowledge, and fail to properly credit local scientists and collaborators. That has been a longstanding problem in primatology and conservation science. For me, collaborative authorship and local expertise are non-negotiable. The people who live in and understand these ecosystems are not secondary contributors to this work. They are central to it.

A lot of what I’m trying to do now is listen deeply enough to learn the right questions to ask, and help build collaborative teams that bring together many different voices and ways of knowing from around the world. Then the goal is to carry those insights back into the scientific community until science finally begins catching up with local knowledge.

Continue exploring the hidden intelligence of the more-than-human world: Read how musician Garth Stevenson uses improvisation and whale song to search for interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how neuroscientist Gül Dölen is using octopuses to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses.

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