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On a gray January day in 2025, miles out in Huntington Beach State Park, I saw the familiar face of a Piping Plover—a tiny, endangered shorebird that spends the winter on South Carolina’s coast...

U.S. Forest Service plans to remove forest protections, ignoring public sentiment

DENVER—The U.S. Forest Service on Tuesday announced its plan to move forward with its repeal of the 2001 Roadless Rule, threatening the fate of 44.7 million acres of national forest across the country.

The proposal, which will be published in the Federal Register tomorrow, would strip road-building bans from roadless areas in every state except Idaho and Colorado, which have their own separate rules, and would carve out the 9.4-million-acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska through a related executive order. Public comments on the rule will be due by September 21, according to USDA.

USDA first floated this plan last August and opened a preliminary comment period on it last September. Americans submitted more than 625,000 comments, 99 percent of which opposed repealing the Roadless Rule, according to a Center for Western Priorities’ analysis. Colorado College’s 2026 State of the Rockies Conservation in the West poll found that 65 percent of voters across eight Western states oppose building new industrial roads in undeveloped public lands for mining, oil and gas development, or timber harvests.

Center for Western Priorities Communications Manager Kate Groetzinger issued the following statement:

“The Trump administration already asked the American public what they thought of this plan, and 99 percent of them said no to repealing the Roadless Rule. Now USDA is back with the same idea, dressed up as a move to reduce wildfire risk even though it will degrade drinking water, fragment wildlife habitat, and increase the Forest Service’s $10 billion road maintenance backlog. This is a giveaway to the timber industry that the public has already rejected once and will reject again.”

Learn more:

• Comment analysis finds over 99% opposition to repealing 2001 Roadless Rule – CWP

• What is the “Roadless Rule”? – Sierra Club Oregon

• Roadless Rule Recission 2025 interactive map – Trout Unlimited

Feature image: Mt. Hood National Forest Trillium Lake

The post Trump admin announces intent to move forward with Roadless Rule repeal appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Interviews series about Radical Democracy Franco Augusto and Shail Sathi conducted these conversations during the “Global Confluence on Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self-Determination (RaDASD)” from 1 to 6 February 2025. The recording were produced by Franco Augusto and Basil, edited by Marco Andrade.

AWL Responds to Draft Environmental Impact Statement on Roadless Rule 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Date: August 18, 2026
Contact: Anja Semanco | anja@alaskawild.org | 724-967-2777

Washington, D.C. — Today, following the administration’s announcement of a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) on the future of the Roadless Rule, Alaska Wilderness League is calling on decision-makers to uphold long-standing protections for some of the nation’s most wild and irreplaceable forests, including the Tongass and Chugach National Forests.

The Roadless Rule has protected nearly 60 million acres of national forest lands across the country for more than two decades, protecting wildlife habitat, clean water, and climate resilience. Now, those protections face renewed uncertainty.

“America’s last great backcountry forests are not bargaining chips,” said Emma Powell, Government Affairs Manager at Alaska Wilderness League. “The Tongass and Chugach National Forests are global treasures, home to thriving salmon runs, abundant wildlife, outdoor enthusiasts from all over our nation, and communities whose cultures and livelihoods are deeply tied to healthy, intact forests. From fisheries to tourism and outdoor recreation, these landscapes also support thousands of jobs and generate billions in economic activity each year. Rescinding Roadless Rule protections puts these irreplaceable public lands at risk.”

The Tongass National Forest, the largest temperate rainforest on Earth, plays a critical role in storing carbon and helping to mitigate the climate crisis. The Chugach National Forest, spanning mountains, glaciers, and coastal ecosystems, supports vital wildlife habitat and world-renowned recreation opportunities.

Opening these forests to road building and industrial logging would fragment critical habitat, threaten subsistence resources, and undermine the natural systems that Alaskans—and people across the country—depend on.

Alaska Wilderness League encourages the public to review the DEIS and submit comments by September 21, 2026 in support of protecting the Tongass and Chugach National Forests for future generations.

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This article What we learned from a US bus tour of judges was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Over four days in July, roughly 30 judges, sitting and retired, state and federal, climbed on and off a bus at courthouses, coffee shops, a Cracker Barrel, and community centers and libraries from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The goal was straightforward — to visit with people in their communities to talk about why the rule of law matters in their everyday lives. They engaged one on one, in small groups and in front of large audiences. 

The tour was called Justice in Motion, and was created and run by our organization, Democracy Rising Collaborative, together with Keep Our Republic. We borrowed the model from judges in Poland, who figured out, the hard way, how to defend an independent judiciary when the traditional tools weren’t enough.

We think that borrowed playbook is worth explaining, because we’re planning to use it again, and we encourage you to take similar bold action during this perilous time.

Where the idea came from

Last October, The Carter Center’s Rule of Law Program brought a delegation of U.S. lawyers to Warsaw for a study tour, to sit down directly with the Polish judges and lawyers who had spent the better part of a decade defending their courts. They were joined by democracy leaders from Georgia, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, as well as the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. 

Participating in that trip was where we first heard in detail how the judges in Poland decided to come out of their courtrooms to march through the streets of Warsaw in support of their judicial independence. They then organized themselves to visit citizens in villages and towns across the country to talk about why the rule of law and an independent judiciary mattered to everyone.

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The tour’s lessons were later written up by two of its organizers — Leanne Webster of the Carter Center’s Rule of Law Program and Melissa Hooper of the German Marshall Fund — in a Harvard Social Impact Review essay, “Turning Back the Tide of Authoritarianism.”

Starting in 2015, Poland’s governing party moved methodically to bring the judiciary under its control: it took over the Constitutional Tribunal, restructured the body that selects judges so that the ruling party effectively chose its members, and created a disciplinary chamber that could punish judges for rulings the government disliked. These tools were used against judges the Carter team met with, to fire them for speaking up for the judiciary or raising questions about judicial appointments, and to replace them with loyalists. All of these actions were framed as democratic accountability rather than capture.

What we found instructive wasn’t the attack — that pattern is familiar by now — it was the response. Polish judges organized through relationship-building, proactive media relations and organizations like Iustitia, a Polish independent judges association, and Themis, another group of judges supporting an independent judiciary. Both were instrumental in mobilizing judges in Poland. 

That work built toward the iconic March of a Thousand Robes on Jan. 11, 2020. Judges, prosecutors and lawyers from roughly 20 countries walked in silence from Poland’s Supreme Court to its parliament building, even passing by the President’s office. Most of them wore their judicial robes, and they were joined by thousands of ordinary Poles lining the route. City officials estimated the crowd at 30,000. They were joined by their judicial brethren from across Europe — a judicial tour de force, judges standing and walking together in a tremendous demonstration of the power of collective action. 

About a year later, judges got into vans, traveling from town to town into places where a sitting judge was someone you might never see. Judges set up in town squares and school auditoriums to hand out pocket copies of the Polish constitution and walk residents through what it actually said. 

Judges who had been forced off the bench did some of the heaviest lifting, since they had nothing left to lose professionally by talking to reporters and shopkeepers. They spoke about what due process meant and why courts weren’t supposed to answer to whichever party held power that year. One of them, suspended from his own courtroom, relentlessly toured the country.

Poland’s governing party lost power in 2023, and most analysts who study the period believe the judiciary’s years-long campaign, including both the vans and the march, was a meaningful part of why.

Why we borrowed this model

Until the last few years, the idea that federal judges in the United States would need to speak to the public beyond the walls of their courtrooms or the words of their opinions was frowned upon, other than periodic school civics classes or university lecture halls. State judges have had more latitude, given that in many states they are elected to office.

But it has become increasingly clear in the U.S. that the role of the independent judiciary — to fairly resolve disputes and act as a check on the other branches of government — is unclear to many Americans. According to Gallup, trust in the judiciary has fallen to 48 percent — down from more than 60 percent before 2022. The Supreme Court’s 33 percent approval rating in July was the lowest since the early 2000s. 

Previous Coverage

How movements can make courts play their role in defending democracy

Furthermore, threats to judges, their families and their staff have risen sharply in recent years. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently testified on Capitol Hill about the surge — the U.S. Marshals Service recorded 564 threats against federal judges in the last fiscal year, up from 509 the year before.

We knew from our own experience the power of visiting communities to listen, learn and engage in dialogue. This same instinct was behind Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s bus trips across the country in 1992. (Steve, one of the co-authors of this article, traveled on each of the 10 bus trips as Al Gore’s deputy press secretary.) Ross Perot’s cross-country “United We Stand” tour drew on the same instinct, as did, decades later, the Tea Party Express. Whatever the cause, the impulse was the same: get off the stage, get on the road and meet people where they live, in their communities and neighborhoods. Engage in dialogue. Listen carefully. Answer questions.

As we launched our organization, Democracy Rising Collaborative, to educate, organize and mobilize lawyers, retired judges and civic leaders for collective action, the idea of a bus trip as a kind of listening tour began to take hold. We drafted a concept paper and shared it with a few trusted colleagues in the pro-democracy space, including colleagues who had been on the Warsaw trip. The feedback was universally positive. Before long, we were talking about actually doing a judges’ bus tour with our tremendous partner Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan civic education organization committed to the vitality of U.S. democracy by promoting trust in elections, the rule of law and constitutional checks and balances.

Lessons from Poland, brought to the Great Lakes

1. Organizing matters. One judge speaking out is easy to dismiss as an outlier. Some 30 judges from different states, different courts and both parties, appearing together under one banner, are much harder to write off. That’s when the message stops sounding like an opinion and starts sounding like the profession itself telling you something.

2. Creativity is essential. We owe this one first to Romania’s Funky Citizens, whose team told the delegation that civic engagement has to be joyful and shareable, or it never leaves the room it happened in. Earnestness alone doesn’t travel. We built Justice in Motion as a way to connect with ordinary Americans in their own communities, while keeping in mind that we needed the story of the trip to travel far and wide. 

Communications was key — but getting the experience right for the participants themselves mattered just as much. The judges did this by stopping at a donut shop in Wheeling, West Virginia instead of a podium, and holding purple roses — an international symbol of judicial independence — outside courthouses. These clips spread on social media well past the reporters who were actually there. None of that was decoration. That was the point.

Judges meeting with people in front of the Louis Stokes Federal Courthouse in Cleveland on July 9. (Democracy Rising Collaborative/Keep Our Republic)

We also borrowed from an organizer’s account of the Tour de Konstytucja, Poland’s own cross-country Constitution Tour, and its four rules: citizens at the center, no party politics, no party funds, no politicians on stage. Their judges showed up in jeans and T-shirts, with cake, rock music and a reading of the constitutional preamble at every stop. They wore white T-shirts emblazoned with “Konstytucja,” or “Constitution” in Polish — a clear and simple statement of what they stood for.

As the delegation heard, authoritarian power feeds on alienation and division, and so the project was about rebuilding that connection. We didn’t replicate every element, but the instinct showed up in our events — meant to feel like conversations rather than hearings — and in the purple roses our own judges carried instead of pins, a small visual signature of their own.

3. Locality makes the difference. We didn’t want one press conference in a state capital. We wanted a bus tour through big cities and small towns: a coffee shop and courthouse in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, the LeMoyne Community Center in Washington, Pennsylvania, a barbecue in Cleveland, a nearly 100-year-old bakery in Toledo, Ohio and the Grosse Pointe Public Library in Michigan.

That’s where the Polish campaign actually did its work — not in Warsaw, but in the towns national reporters usually didn’t visit. The delegation came back with the same warning we kept in mind while building our route: democracy defense that stays in a handful of big cities never reaches the people who most need to hear the case for independent courts, because they’re the ones least likely to encounter it otherwise. 

Our Wooster, Ohio meet-and-greet drew about 150 residents to a town square on a very hot Wednesday afternoon. Judicial independence stays an abstraction until someone explains it to you, in a room you’re already in, and patiently answers your questions.

4. Solidarity, solidarity, solidarity. In Poland, solidarity wasn’t just a slogan, it involved taking action. It meant having each other’s backs and showing up, over and over. Lawyers sitting in the gallery at hearings for judges under attack, bar associations funding judges whose salaries had been suspended, campaigns telling the public that people were watching and that no judge stood alone. Judges gathered outside their courthouses on the 18th of every month; supporters mailed postcards that read, in effect, I’ve got your back. 

Justice in Motion tried to build that same solidarity in reverse: Rather than waiting for a judge to come under attack and then rallying to defend them, we sent retired and sitting judges out first to build the civic relationships and public trust that make solidarity possible before it’s ever tested. 

Judges meeting with people at the Third Space Action Lab in Cleveland on July 9. (Democracy Rising Collaborative/Keep Our Republic)

That meant making sure judges weren’t the only ones standing at the front of the room. We mobilized local bar associations at many of our stops — including the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association — so the message came from the legal community as a whole and not just the bench. Attorneys Rachel Cohen and Brenna Trout Frey joined the tour for the same reason: so that judges weren’t out there on their own, but stood with allies who had been through their own reckoning. The business community showed up too, including Leadership Now’s Richard Stoff in Columbus, Ohio, because an independent judiciary isn’t a legal abstraction to employers and local economies; it’s part of what makes a place stable enough to invest in. 

None of this was incidental. It was the same lesson from Poland: no one advocating for courts should stand alone.

5. Remember history. One of the delegation’s hosts pressed a question built for this moment: what freedom-fighting story does America already have on hand and why aren’t we using it? He pointed to the country’s own revolutionary founding, Black civil rights leaders, disability rights advocates and union organizers, who made the case for fairness to people who started off unconvinced. 

Our judges took that instruction literally. At every stop, they didn’t talk about constitutional doctrine; they talked about a longer American habit of ordinary people insisting that the rules apply to everyone — and they did it in a year built for exactly that story, the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.

6. Documentation is power. In Warsaw, we heard how much a short, well-made film can do that a press release can’t. Free Courts (“Wolne Sady” in Polish) was formed by Polish lawyers focused on providing information about the importance of a free and independent judiciary. It had learned it the hard way: their first video of lawyers earnestly explaining the constitution went nowhere. Then they reshot the idea as a soccer match where one team simply stops following the rules and starts attacking the referees. That one traveled. 

A good film gets shared person to person and gives people something to sit with after the news cycle has moved on. We took the lesson seriously enough to put a documentary team on the bus for the entire tour, and we’re now producing a 10-minute film of the trip: the stops, the conversations, the judges themselves explaining, in their own words, why they got on the bus. It’s meant to do after the fact what the tour did in person — reach people who never had the chance to see us live.

What the tour actually did

On the ground, we reached several thousand people directly, meeting them where they already were to talk about why the rule of law matters to their own lives: how your money is there when you go to the bank, how the medicine you buy at the pharmacy is safe — or will be recalled if it isn’t. Turnout exceeded even our best expectations, which told us there’s real appetite for this conversation and that it resonates more coming from someone standing in front of you than from a headline. 

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Pairing sitting judges with retired ones, and keeping every stop strictly nonpartisan, also created a permission structure: judges still bound by codes of conduct could show up and participate without crossing an ethical line.

That local work ultimately translated into a much larger reach. Sarah Wire of USA Today asked if she could join us for the whole trip. Putting a reporter on the bus for four days carried some risk, but it paid off — with a strong story online and then the front page, above the fold, a few days later. 

Justice in Motion also drew coverage from NPR, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and local outlets in every state we visited — along with footage of judges in their robes, holding purple roses outside courthouses that went viral on social media. Altogether we reached millions of Americans, including plenty who don’t follow politics closely, and mobilized local bar associations and legal communities in each location to help carry the message forward.

We can’t yet claim that those four days changed public opinion about the judiciary — no more than the March of a Thousand Robes did on its own in 2020. What that campaign did was compound, over years, into a public that understood enough to act when it mattered. That’s the model we’re building toward. Justice in Motion was our first stop, not our last, and we’re already planning the next route.

This article What we learned from a US bus tour of judges was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

In an update to its formal filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Public Citizen today blasted the Trump administration’s arbitrary, capricious and exploitative campaign to build the Constitution Pipeline, calling the project contrary to the public interest.

The filing comes days after the Trump administration enforced the annulment of a fourth New York offshore wind project, which included a payment of $1.2 billion of taxpayer money to the company to terminate the project.

RWE U.S. Offshore, the company that had previously been set to develop the New York Bight offshore wind project, agreed to end the project because the company stated that it “determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future,” according to a release from the company.

“Based upon President Donald J. Trump’s unambiguous statements, his administration is forcing an end to New York offshore wind energy projects in an effort to coerce the state’s Governor to support the Constitution pipeline,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. “Trump’s coercive quid pro quo campaign is an arbitrary, capricious and exploitative attempt to strongarm unnecessary fossil fuel infrastructure by using taxpayers money to pay off the wind industry. Trump’s entire endeavor to build this pipeline is a massive and unnecessary waste of money.”

The filing today is an update to FERC, expounding on Public Citizen’s initial filing in June, challenging a petition by Oklahoma-based Williams Companies for a certificate of public convenience and necessity to construct and operate Constitution Pipeline. On June 9, on a trip to New York to attend the NBA finals, Trump said that because New York’s governor “broke” a deal to support the Constitution gas pipeline, he would move forward with canceling the wind projects, saying: “so I guess we’re withdrawing those windmills.”

The Trump administration has now stopped two New York offshore wind projects since that threat. Public Citizen’s filing warns that FERC’s inaction to investigate this unlawful shakedown violates the public interest and threatens electric grid resource adequacy.

On Tuesday, Demand Progress and IMEU Policy Project released a poll, first reported in Zeteo, showing that a clear majority of voters oppose a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, known as Section 219, that would further integrate the Israeli military and Israeli military companies into the Pentagon—giving them special access to U.S. military systems, sensitive technologies and defense supply chains. The military authorization bill, which includes Section 219, was passed by the House in July and awaits a vote in the Senate.

• Read the Full Poll Results

The online poll of 1,217 U.S. likely voters nationwide was conducted by Data for Progress from August 3 to 7, 2026. The poll found that:

• 61 percent of voters oppose a military authorization bill that would deepen the integration of Israeli weapons companies into the Pentagon at a level higher than any other country—this includes 78 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of independents
• 52 percent of voters agreed with members of Congress who voted in July to cut $3.3 billion in taxpayer funding for weapons to the Israeli military—this includes 60 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independents
• 51 percent of voters believe that Israel benefits more from the relationship between the U.S. and Israel—this includes 58 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independents
• A plurality of voters, 49 percent, believe President Donald Trump is providing too much support to the Israeli government, compared to only 33 percent who said the president is giving Israel the right amount of support and just eight percent who say he’s giving Israel too little support

“This poll is a flashing red warning sign for any member of Congress who supports the defense authorization bill. A clear majority of voters do not support further integrating the Israeli military and Israeli military companies into the Pentagon, which the NDAA is set to do,” said Demand Progress Senior Policy Advisor Cavan Kharrazian. “It’s time for Congress to listen to the American people for once, and not the same voices who always want to cut Israel a blank check.”

“Israel is a nation committing genocide that just dragged the American people into a disastrous war that is still hitting our pocketbooks. It is the height of absurdity that Congress is even considering a proposal to become more entangled with the Israeli military and use our tax dollars to subsidize their weapons companies,” said IMEU Policy Project Executive Director Margaret DeReus. “Senators take an oath to do what is best for the American people above all; to uphold that oath, they must scrap this ridiculous proposal.”

Our August Common Sense monthly newsletter reveals how a prayer walk alone will not stop the destruction of the Columbia River. But it is a precursor to action. One cannot take bold action — especially action involving sacrifice — without spiritual commitment. 

The post “Common Sense” Newsletter – August 2026: Walking the Columbia River with Julie Lomboy appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

Delicious milkshakes shouldn’t come at the cost of sea life.

The August of Oversight for the President’s Mining “Deals”

The Trump Administration’s corruption and self-dealing went on full display during the August 7  Critical Minerals Roundtable at the State Department.

The President received gifts of magnets from MP Materials and a solid gold ball from American Ocean Minerals Co., shaped to look like a nodule of minerals on the ocean floor. Real nodules do not contain gold, and mining them is a bad idea. 

Administration Officials Public Spending on Questionable Mining Deals

Commerce Secretary Lutnick spoke during the Roundtable to praise the $1.4 billion taxpayers spent from the One Big Beautiful Bill. That money bought a piece of minerals company, Vulcan Elements. That purchase and other taxpayer financed minerals “deals” have enriched top Administration officials and their family members, including Secretary Lutnick’s son. 

Secretary of State Rubio discussed the Export-Import Banks’s (EXIM) Project Vault, which would stockpile minerals for civilian projects. A March 2025 Executive Order opens up pots of EXIM’s public money to finance more risky minerals deals through the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE), a coalition of international banks he convened.

Elected Officials Call for Action 

With widespread reporting of corruption, at taxpayer expense, comes increasing scrutiny from Congress. 

• On July 30, Senators Blumenthal, Schiff, and Warren expressed concern about $8.9B in investments in mining companies tied to President Trump’s family, Secretary Lutnick’s family, or both. The Senators requested that Secretary Lutnick and other Cabinet officials preserve records and communications related to Vulcan and more than a dozen more minerals deals.  
• On August 10, Representatives Huffman and Garcia demanded Vulcan’s records related to investments received from Donald Trump Jr.’s firm just days before the Government’s funding announcement. The Representatives expressed concern about corruption in government contracting.
• Also August 10, Representatives Huffman and Dexter announced their committee’s investigation into alleged insider trading at Energy Fuels. The company owns uranium claims that will be opened up  by the President’s decision to shrink the Bear Ears National Monument. 
• On August 12, Senator Heinrich and Representative Huffman requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigate potential conflicts of interest when agencies buy ownership in public lands mines. They asked the GAO to investigate how the EXIM makes sure mineral investments only go to feasible projects. 
• On August 17, fifty-four House Democrats wrote again to Secretary Lutnick and other officials demanding transparency, accountability, and high-road environmental standards for EXIM’s domestic and foreign minerals “deals.” 

These investigations will continue until Congress stops the money fueling this apparent corruption. 

Congress Can Put Up Guardrails

Funding for EXIM expires on September 30, unless Congress acts. To tame the corruption and risks in these minerals deals, Congress should make the EXIM’s next round of funding dependent on the requirement to follow the highest standards for accountability and social performance, especially respect for Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

Placing guardrails on these investment deals will allow Congress to protect taxpayers from losing money in risky mine projects that waste taxpayer money, harm communities, and enrich the Trump Administration’s allies. 

The Next Generation of Mining Executives Can Learn a Different Lesson

The President did announce one deal that will genuinely serve the public interest, although it was overshadowed by the lavish gifts. The Administration awarded $100 million to selected mining schools. This support can enable new generations of miners to learn and innovate material efficiency techniques using less water and energy. 

This is also a good down payment on educating future miners on a lesson they would not have learned at the President’s roundtable: A mining company’s greatest asset is approval from the public and affected communities, not insider connections.

The post Golden Gifts, Sweetheart Deals, and Demands for Investigations appeared first on Earthworks.

Before people can reduce their carbon footprint, they need to know what actions will most help them do so. Research has shown that this domain of knowledge, known as “carbon competence,” is relatively low among the general public. But until recently there hasn’t been much investigation of why, or how to improve it.

A new study identifies two familiar cognitive biases as psychological barriers to improving carbon competence, “meaning inaccurate understanding of climate impact is not just a knowledge gap but also a behavioral and communication challenge,” says study team member Claudia Schneider, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

The team’s findings suggest that simply telling people which climate actions are most effective—until now the gold standard of climate communication—won’t move the needle for everyone. Instead, boosting carbon competence might require an individualized approach.

Schneider and her collaborators conducted an online study of more than 500 U.S. citizens in which they asked participants to estimate what percentage of the average North American’s carbon footprint could be saved by each of 34 different actions.

“Many people misjudge which personal climate actions cut emissions most, often overrating familiar actions like recycling and underrating higher-impact changes such as flying less and eating less red meat,” Schneider says. Those findings are in line with previous studies.

 

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In the new work, people tended to overestimate the effectiveness of actions that were top of mind and those they themselves participated in, and people with higher environmental values were likely to rate all actions more highly, reflecting optimism about the impact they can have as individuals.

Taken together, the results suggest that two well-known cognitive biases, the availability heuristic and motivated reasoning, distort people’s understanding of the effectiveness of climate actions.

The researchers then designed two more studies, each involving about 1,200 participants, to test strategies to overcome these psychological barriers. Reasoning that people like heuristics—rules of thumb used to speed and simplify decision-making—the researchers decided to offer more accurate ones.

They told one group of participants that more effective climate actions tend to have higher costs in terms of time, money, or comfort. Another group was informed that more common climate actions tend to be less effective at reducing emissions. For a third group, the researchers simply listed the four most impactful personal climate actions.

The researchers found some heartening evidence that people are willing to try to overcome a tendency for motivated reasoning: in one of the studies, people who were told that more common actions tend to be less effective were then able to avoid overestimating the impact of their own actions.

But overall, the interventions didn’t improve people’s ability to assess the effectiveness of climate actions as much, or at least as reliably, as hoped. Surprisingly, even straight-up telling people which actions were most effective didn’t necessarily enable them to later identify which actions were most effective.

Instead, the impact of the interventions varied a lot from person to person. “Our data suggests that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to overcoming these psychological barriers,” Schneider says.

As well as figuring out how to tailor messages for different audiences, the search for a broadly effective strategy to improve carbon competence needs to continue, the researchers say.

“An important follow up question concerns the factors that drive engagement in climate actions, above and beyond judging their impact,” Schneider adds. She and her collaborators are investigating the role that perceptions of fairness play in these decisions, she says.

Source: Herberz M. et al. “Psychological barriers to improving carbon competence.” Nature Sustainability 2026.

Image: Based on photo by Am on Unsplash.

The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.

El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.

This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.

The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.

El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.

The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.

Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.

The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.

A vast system of Atlantic currents appears to be weakening, and scientists say its collapse could lead to dramatic cooling in northern Europe. A new study suggests an additional risk: a surge in warming across the rest of the globe.

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Request for Expression of Interest (EOI) To Undertake a Six-Country Study on Financial Services And Income-Enhancing Opportunities for African Agroecological Enterprises (AAEs)

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) intends to commission a consultancy to map financial services and income-enhancing opportunities available to African Agroecological Enterprises (AAEs) in Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Senegal and Togo. The study will identify and profile relevant providers, assess how accessible and suitable their services are for AAEs, and recommend practical service designs, partnerships and referral ways that respond to enterprise realities.

AFSA invites eligible individual consultants or consulting firms to submit technical and financial proposals for this assignment. The application should include:
• A signed letter of bid.
• A technical proposal of not more than six pages, excluding annexes, showing the applicant’s understanding of the assignment, proposed methodology, sampling approach, work plan, team organization and quality-assurance arrangements.
• A profile of the consultant or firm and evidence of relevant experience in inclusive finance, agricultural or enterprise finance, agroecology, food systems and multi-country research.
• At least two samples of comparable assignments, which AFSA will treat confidentially.
• Curricula vitae of the proposed team members, clearly indicating their roles and relevant experience.
• A financial proposal in United States dollars, showing professional fees, country-level costs, travel, translation, validation, taxes and any reimbursable expenses.

Technical and financial proposals should be submitted by email to afsa@afsafrica.org

The email subject should read: ‘AFSA – Financial Services and Income-Enhancing Opportunities Study’.

The submission deadline is 28 August 2026 at 5:00pm East African Time. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted.

The detailed Terms of Reference are provided below.

Download the TOR

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, English edition of 1888

As the deadly toll of Israeli/U.S. genocide on Palestinian children became widely known, it served as yet another horrific example of just how expendable and vulnerable our children are to imperial imperatives and capitalist greed. In response to these atrocities, young people raised their voices in loud protest, including elementary school kids, and took up the struggle to stop the bombing, stop the money flowing to Israel, and to free Palestinian children and their families.

Children are far too often victims of a system that values only profit, not humanity. But children are also actors in their world, and at times are powerful voices of dissent in both individual and collective ways. There has been renewed interest on the left in the questions of the oppression of children within the context of the privatized family, the economy, and the state. How can the radical ideas of Marxism be used as a tool to help us understand and advance these discussions?

Contradictions and precarity of childhood today

The images and realities of childhood today are rife with contradictions.

On the one hand, we have the idealized image of childhood as a state of happy innocence and yet, the United States stands alone as a place where over 400 people remain imprisoned serving life sentences for crimes they allegedly committed as children. Seventy-six percent of them are African American.

Contrast this with the image of the child as one of living in a state of constant vulnerability and fragility demanding adult care and protection in the safe refuge of the family.

Of course, this image of vulnerable child and protecting family runs up against a tragic reality that the U.S. has one of the highest, if not the highest, rates in the industrialized world of deaths from child abuse and neglect and that most deaths occur at the hands of parents and step parents. Not coincidentally, the U.S. provides the least amount of government support of families with children (parental leave, childcare, income support for poor families, mental health services, and healthcare).

A corollary to this family-as-safe-refuge-for-vulnerable-child narrative is the notion that outside the family exist adults who threaten children’s safety and wellbeing on a daily basis: from the greedy and lazy teachers who seek to deny them an education to sexual predators (often overlapping in the rightwing imagination with LGBTQA+ people) that lurk around every playground corner and in every daycare center. These fears predate the rise in rightwing conspiracy theories that have become such a big factor in U.S. politics or the very real conspiracy of Epstein and his rich, well-connected friends to traffic, rape, exploit, and abuse young women for their entertainment.

Of course, another very real threat to millions of children’s well being, high rates of child poverty and food insecurity, makes them more vulnerable to abuse of all kinds. The U.S. is a leader in infant mortality rates in the industrialized world. This is routinely ignored or blamed upon the victims of that poverty themselves by our politicians, media, and churches.

This notion that children are simply victims-in-waiting has a two-pronged effect; first, of making parents and children fearful and mistrustful of others in their communities—particularly the workers whose jobs it is to care for and educate our children; and second, of pressuring families to assume more and more of the responsibility for their children’s care within the confines of the privatized family structure and to blame themselves when this responsibility becomes more than they can financially or emotionally bear.

This other dominant image of children runs counter to that of the innocent and vulnerable. In this image, the child is untamed, rude, impolite, nagging, whiney, bratty, spoiled, undisciplined, unpleasant, and at times, down-right dangerous. For these images we can thank both the inheritance of early U.S. settler-colonialists’ Puritan belief in children as sinners in need of having the devil beaten out of them, but even more directly, to the modern capitalist market’s exploitation and degradation of children.

All these images—from the “precocious brat” stock character of television sit-coms to the Fox News hysteria over the Black “teen takeovers” on Chicago’s Gold Coast—are highly charged with racial and class overtones. The annoying spoiled brat is usually a white upper-middle-class child with somehow well-meaning but over-indulgent parents, and the gangs are always low-income inner-city kids of color with neglectful parents. In the latter instance, the child is seen as displaying the worst of what commentators consider to be human nature or a biological predisposition to anti-social behaviors. In the former, spoiled children are products of human nurture gone terribly wrong (they’ve had their egos artificially raised by too much praise and love). In both instances, tougher, more punitive parenting and schooling, and in the case of the poor and Black kids, carceral solutions are required to overcome these defects.

It is also important to note that transgender children and youth are seen both as a threat to society and victims of permissive parenting simultaneously–think gender-neutral bathroom bans in elementary schools, the attacks on trans kid athletes, and the criminalizing of gender affirming care sought out by parents of transgender kids. As well, the arrest and detention of thousands of children by the Department of Homeland Security and its thugs should make all of us question which children deserve protection and from whom.

Underlying all of this is the assumption in contemporary capitalist society that the child exists as incomplete, a lump of clay in need of shaping, training, sanctifying, schooling, parenting, or jailing to mold the future adult, and worker, they will become.

Nowhere is the child as they exist in the present considered important or worthy of contemplation.There is an explanation for this “child-of-the-future-not-the-present” outlook, rooted in the economic structures of society and the corresponding political and social institutions the economic system gives rise to. Marxism gives us a tool to help us understand how these forces impact actually existing children and the people who care about them.

When confronted with these reactionary images of childhood, it would be wise to remember the words of the great Italian educator and left-wing educational philosopher Loris Malaguzzi, who wrote;

It is necessary that we believe that the child is very intelligent, that the child is strong and beautiful and has very ambitious desires and requests. This is the image of the child that we need to hold. Those who have the image of the child as fragile, incomplete, weak, made of glass, gain something from this belief only for themselves. We don’t need that image of children. Instead of always giving children protection, we need to give them recognition of their rights and strengths.1“Your Image of the Child: Where Teaching Begins” Child Care Exchange 3/94, pg. 55 https://hub.exchangepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/5009652.pdf

With this framing in mind, let’s turn to the question of how ‘childhood’ has been culturally constructed and reconstructed throughout history.

Prehistory to class Society: The construction of childhood

Let’s define childhood for the purposes of this article. I will use the general term childhood to cover a big portion of the human lifespan, from birth to young adulthood, roughly 0-18, corresponding with the legal definition in the U.S.. Within that span, there is obviously a big difference, on the one hand, between infancy and toddlerhood (when there is complete dependence on caregivers) and, on the other hand, adolescence/post sexual maturation (when independence from caregivers is a biological, if not an economic, possibility).

There are both continuities and divergences across time and place in how human societies have defined childhood in relationship to adulthood. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the human lifespan was roughly 30-35 years, and most people eked out a living doing hard physical labor requiring no schooling. It would make no sense in such a society to consider a 17-year-old a child. But it is also true that no society anywhere ever has viewed a 4-year-old as an adult or a 21-year-old as a child. Every society has had a view of children as comprising a somehow distinct phase of life, although the contours of that distinction vary substantially depending on how families produced and reproduced their existence.

One of the key things that makes human development unique among mammals, even among our closest relatives, the primates, is the huge amount of time between birth and sexual maturity. This represents a big investment from an evolutionary standpoint where infants and children (as well as nursing mothers to some degree) need care and are not a fully productive part of the group.

Why is this beneficial? Humans have evolved with many physical limitations compared to our closest cousins but with one huge advantage: big brains that can think and learn, which in turn evolved to allow us to communicate through spoken language and symbols. These capacities are necessary to collaborate to transform our environment through socialized labor in order to survive. These big brains are designed to learn from their environment and social interaction rather than to operate primarily from instinct, and this process of acculturation—of learning what needs to be known in order to survive—takes a relatively long time to achieve.

Prior to settlements of human beings into agricultural communities (which, in its turn, ushered in the development of class-stratified society), human beings lived in foraging or hunting-gathering nomadic bands: 99 percent of human history has been spent in foraging societies or the smallest of settled agricultural communities. Through anthropological study among the tiny number of these societies which continued to exist until the present, we know a few very interesting and important things about how our ancestors viewed children and childhood. (We also know some falsehoods, as anthropology has messy, sometimes very chauvinist strains as well.)

Across varying social groups in varied terrain, we see these commonalities:

Care of children in these societies is communalized, not privatized. Although nursing infants are held almost continually and breastfeeding occurs on demand (necessarily in close proximity to the mother), they are held by many members of the band, and this sharing of care labor increased as the infant matured. Many anthropologists use the term “allomothering” or “alloparenting” to describe the common practice of shared infant and child care. It is theorized that this sort of practice, where even young infants are in close contact with multiple caregivers, has an important role in helping develop strong social bonds and social intelligence (the ability to discern intention in another through their facial expressions, etc.) among the young. This skill set is very valuable to a species dependent on cooperative labor to survive.

People in these societies live in mixed-age groupings of 20 to 40 people with no peer segregation. People work, have leisure, sleep, and eat in mixed-age groups. Older children are often involved in caretaking and playing with younger children.

Children (as well as adults) gain skills and knowledge without formal schooling or specialized instruction but through what can broadly be termed “play and exploration.” Children learn the skills required in their communities through play in which they imitate adult activities: playing at foraging, hunting, and toy making (tool making).

Children (weaned infants through puberty) spend most of their time in “play” in mixed aged groups with other children, but often within visual range of and interacting with adults.

Children, for the most part, are not expected to be productive (hunting/gathering of food to feed others) until adulthood, although in most of these societies, depending on resources available, children do provide some foodstuffs, provide care for younger children, and play important roles in groups in distributing food and other tasks.

Barry Hewlett and Michael Lamb write their edited book Hunter Gatherer Childhoods: Evolutionary, Developmental, and Cultural Perspectives,2See also: Meredith Smalls, Kids, How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Young Children; Peter Gray, a developmental and evolutionary psychologist,and expert on play in American Journal of Play, 1, 476-522, 2009.

Interestingly, although human offspring are more dependent on adult(s)…than the young of other species, children in hunter-gatherer societies are clearly much more independent than are children in industrial societies like our own, and they contribute to the welfare and provisioning of the groups in which they live much more extensively than one might expect. Many of the contributors to this collection describe a gradual transition from being a dependent recipient of care and provisions to being a participant in the care and provisioning of others—a transition that facilitates the transfer of social and survival skills more seamlessly than the typical patterns of socialization in Western industrial cultures…Comparisons among these chapters underscore a permeability of boundaries between play and work, as well as the gradual nature of the transitions between childhood and adulthood. (p. 412)

This “permeability of boundaries” that characterized early human societies stands in direct contrast to the rigid divisions that capitalism imposes upon both the lifespan and the day-to-day: First, we have the isolation of children and childhood within the privatized family structure, separated from other members of their communities. On a fundamental level, the world of the child and the world of the adult are intensely separated from each other within the family as well.

Children are not just segregated from adults, but also from each other in a multiplicity of ways: same-age classrooms, segregated schools, ability groups (honors classes, special education classrooms, magnet schools, etc.) and in highly gender-specified activities. Today, even children’s book stores contain different boys and girls book sections and legos are colored so we can tell the difference between boys’ and girls’ bricks.

The rigid demarcation between leisure/school/work has been described by Marx and other radical writers as central to the process of how labor is alienated under capitalism. This is becoming more extreme for children today as anything resembling play is taken out of our schools to make more room for more “work” on narrower and narrower bands of subject matter.

Clearly, by looking back at human history we can see that the idea that the private family as the only way to organize childrearing as well as the role of children in society are human constructions that correspond to a definite historical epoch. Therefore, these relations can be reconstructed by humans given new historical, political, economic, and social circumstances.

One of the things that the evidence from foraging societies doesn’t offer us is a roadmap for better parenting or schooling today. While there is much to be gleaned about how children and adults learn and live from this record, it would be a mistake to think we can easily apply these insights within our current contexts. I believe that some of the most well-meaning, sometimes insightful, but also highly moralistic parenting advice and educational philosophy can fall into this trap. For example, many of the insights of “attachment parenting” are based upon the way prehistoric peoples held, slept with, nursed, and reared their young. For working mothers and fathers today who work outside the home, attachment parenting can be held up as an ideal that most families could not attain, thus reinforcing the sense of inadequacy and corresponding guilt that leads one away from the sort of collective solutions based in struggle for a different kind of society that makes parenting easier and more attuned to the needs of children. I think there is much within the left wing “unschooling” philosophy and practice which runs into this same kind of cul de sac.

Children and capitalism

From Marx and Frederick Engels’ historical vantage point, the industrial revolution appeared to be destroying the proletarian family as it pulled men, women, and children out of their previous roles as peasants into modern factory work. All members of families, including children as young as four years old, were forced off the land and into brutal 14-, 15-, and 16-hour shifts, around the clock, in mine and mill. Traditional familial relationships broke down under this system. But, as we will talk about in a moment, capital found that it could not do without the role of the family as a tool for the reproduction of labor; Marx may have overestimated the “breakdown” of the proletarian family in this regard.

The development of capitalism, as Marx writes, “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” The role of child labor—both within the so-called “free” labor market and within the plantation slave system at the dawn of the industrial revolution was certainly one of the essential pillars of capitalist accumulation of profit. British industries, Marx wrote, “live by sucking blood, and children’s blood too,” and, he went on, U.S. capital was financed by the “capitalized blood of children.”

Louis Hine, the anti-child labor campaigner and photographer whose iconic images of children’s exploitation helped popularize and expand the struggle against child labor in the U.S. in the early 20th century, described a 1911 scene, repeated tens of millions of times over, “Manuel is 5 years old but big for his age. When the whistle blows at 3 o’clock in the morning, he pulls on his clothes and hurries to the shrimp and oyster cannery where he spends the day peeling the shells off iced shrimp. He has been working as a shrimp picker since he was four.” 3Kids At Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor,  Russell Freedman, p. 1)

Marx identified the tendency of capital to transform any and all people and things—including children—into commodities. Child labor was considered desirable for dual reasons: In some industries and services, such as chimney cleaning, small physical stature was desirable. You have to be tiny to climb up small, dirty chimneys and scrub out the soot. But child labor was also desirable because children were considered more easily coerced, less assertive of their rights, and cheap.

Capital was right about the profitability of child labor but was wrong about children’s passivity in the face of their exploitation. Children have joined the labor movement to fight against their own and their fellow workers’ exploitation in every historic upsurge of labor, from the Chartist Movement in Britain to the Lawrence Strike of women textile workers in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, to farm workers struggles in the 1960s to the Indian, Chinese, African, and Latin American labor movements today. Where workers struggle, and where children work, children join—and in some instances lead—the struggle.

The 1899 Newsboy Strike is but one example, when New York City newspaper sellers—some as young as six years old—went on strike for two weeks against the most powerful media titans of their day, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. They faced down vicious repression by police and hired thugs. The strike was sparked by a ten-cent increase charged to the newsboys for a bundle of papers, a fortune to them. A leader of the strike, Kid Blink, said, “Ain’t that ten cents worth as much to us as it is to Hearst and Pulitzer who are millionaires? Well, I guess it is. If they can’t spare it, how can we?” In a mass march across the Brooklyn Bridge, they shut down traffic and brought one of the world’s most populous cities to a stand still for two days. The strike was eventually victorious as the “newsies” forced concessions from the newspaper bosses.

In another example, a mass workers movement across Europe and the U.S. fought for and eventually won laws first limiting the conditions under which child labor was legally employed and eventually outlawing the use of child labor in most cases altogether. This corresponded with the demands by the workers’ movement for universal public education, a demand, which (after decades of struggle), by the end of World War I, was mostly won. Marx and other socialists of his day were at the forefront of these struggles. It might surprise some then to learn that Marx wrote in 1866,

We consider the tendency of modern industry to make children and juvenile persons of both sexes co-operate in the great work of social production as a progressive, sound, legitimate tendency, although under capital it was distorted into an abomination. In a rational state of society every child whatever, from age of 9 years, ought to become a productive laborer in the same way that no abled bodied adult person ought to be exempted from the general law of nature, viz. to work in order to be able to eat, and work not only with the brain, but with the hands too.

While we can quibble over ages at which this kind of integration into productive labor is developmentally appropriate, Marx was essentially arguing that in a sane society, one not built on profit but upon meeting human need, it is wrong to exclude youth as they grow physically and cognitively from socially necessary labor alongside other members of their community. To do so would be to deny them both the rights and responsibilities of full members of that society.

He goes on later in this passage to make clear that all work–for children and adults alike—must include time for the broadest kind of progressive education and that work hours must be limited to make leisure a possibility for all. In a socialist society under worker’s direct democratic control of the economy, the corresponding transformation of work and school into places that actually fulfill, rather than destroy, human potential, the divisions between mental and manual labor, between schooling/working/playing/leisure/creative endeavor, would dramatically decrease. Alongside this there would be a corresponding decrease in the sharp way in which we demarcate child from adult. Why shouldn’t there be a lifelong process of labor and learning, side by side?

Today, under capitalism, children continue to be utilized for the worst kinds of exploited labor, as some of the most profitable corporations and most well known brand names on Earth knowingly utilize children in either direct production or as part of their “supply chain,” including Nike, Apple, McDonald’s and Hershey’s. Even in the U.S., despite laws on the books banning child labor, child labor continues to be a source of profits, especially in the agricultural industry. In Sub-Saharan Africa, which not coincidentally has the world’s lowest standard of living, 25 percent of children under the age of 14 work.

Children in the industrialized global north do not primarily generate profits through their labor for capital. But as a consumer group, children are considered an extremely important market. In the U.S. market, children aged eight to eighteen annually spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 billion dollars of their own money annually. Children under twelve directly influence household spending of an additional $196 billion each year, more than half of which goes to soft drinks and fast food. They indirectly influence the spending of over $400 billion annually, all this according to a report for the advertising industry entitled, “The Kids Market” (quoted in Susan Linn, Consuming Kids, 2004, p.1). Little wonder that children, on average, see 40,000 commercials on television alone in a given year. Think back to the image of a child as whiney, nagging, and spoiled that I mentioned at the beginning of this article and put the blame where it squarely belongs, not primarily on bad parenting but on corporate America’s insatiable greed.

Social Reproduction

I now want to turn to children as another source of profit for capitalists: future profits. Children are the exploited workforce of tomorrow, and both their current care and preparation for their future roles in society is a burden borne not by capitalists or their state but instead placed upon the backs of the working-class family, and in particular, women within the family. All of this is propped up by an overgrowth of ideology proclaiming this as the only possible, natural way to organize our lives and relationships.

In most U.S. families today, all of the adults work outside the home. Because most parents work outside the home, most children under five years old receive child care from someone other than a parent. Almost one-quarter of those children under the age of five are in some form of organized child care arrangement, which includes day care centers, nurseries, and preschools.

The average yearly cost of childcare for an infant in Cook County is more than $13,000. Because so few receive any form of government assistance to help pay for childcare, that cost falls on the families of young children themselves. Low-income families spend a much larger portion of income on child care than do others—more than half of their income in cases with parents of children under 5 years old. Half of all childcare workers who care for these children make so little they qualify for public assistance.

No wonder that most families in the U.S. today depend on what is termed a “patchwork” of childcare arrangements for their children, resulting in a constant shuffle between care centers and care givers, with such correspondingly complicated schedules that one caregiver’s illness or car problem can result in a cascade of missed work, missed school, missed appointments and an almost constant state of stress and anxiety for parents and children alike. Some of the most common patchwork solutions for lack of accessible and affordable childcare are reliance on other family members of young children’s care (including a small but significant percentage of under 5s who are cared for at least some portion of the day by older siblings) and alternating shift-work for parents (extremely damaging from social-psychological perspective).

The investment that the United States makes in early childhood care and education pales by comparison to the investments being made by other capitalist countries. One recent study found that the United States spends $600 per year per preschool-age child on early childhood care and education, whereas France spends five times that amount, and Sweden spends seven and one-half times that amount.

Little wonder that so many of the products marketed to children and their families revolve around two things: fast food so that you can simultaneously drive and feed your child, and passive entertainment–iPad and TV being the cheapest babysitters around.

It is absolutely fundamental to the socialist and working class movement more generally that we place socialized childcare—fully funded, accessible in all senses of the word, and of high quality—at the top of our demands for reforms we seek within the confines of capitalism as well as in our planning and vision of a future socialist society.

This overview of the sorry state of childcare in capitalist U.S. gives a description of the reality facing working class families. To understand why we live in a society which refuses to take responsibility for the care of its young, we need a deeper explanation. For this, we need to look at the structure of capitalism itself and within it, the special role of the family.

In the U.S., capitalist profits result from labor power, but capitalism does not produce that labor power. There is no mechanism to ensure labor’s daily and general renewal. The capitalist state therefore develops ideological, legal, and material “support” for unpaid labor in the home, performed for the most part (though not exclusively) by women.

Under capitalism workers are “free”: Our free time is ours–sort of. But the burden for reproduction resting on the shoulders of families necessitates that even this “free” time is in service to capitalism. Capitalism permits a limited range of options—daycare, divorce, and single parenting, for example. Twenty-eight percent of children now live in single parent, overwhelmingly single-mother households, and a majority of children will at some point reside in a single parent household. Yet, all of those forms are still driven and shaped by the capital/labor relationship. For example, public services like government-funded daycare are increasingly driven back into private families under neo-liberal austerity, women’s work is paid less, and therefore the single mother supports her children with fewer and fewer resources.

This doesn’t mean that the sphere of paid work or production is more important than, or superior to, the private sphere and social reproduction. Indeed, Marxist theory shows the reverse to be true: Production in the formal economy is made possible only because of reproductive labor. It is through care and nurturing (reproductive labor) received in the private sphere that capital receives a full functional being–the worker–ready to work at the point of production, while having to pay nothing for her/his/their work-readiness.

Children’s rights

In a very interesting book Seen and Heard, Children’s Rights in Early Childhood Education (2011), author and preschool teacher Ellen Lynn Hall recounts a study in her preschool classroom that sparked her interest in writing on this topic.

Shortly after the United States began its military campaign in Iraq (2003) a 4 year old boy who demonstrated with his parents against the war carried a protest sign into his class and declared, “1,2,3,4 We don’t want your muddy war.” The sign intrigued his classmates, one of whom asserted, “Soldiers don’t have the right to kill people.”

The teachers became interested in this question of “rights” and what the children thought about them. They initiated a conversation among the preschoolers, who had lots to say:

“A right is like you know in your heart it’s okay to do it…you can do it if you want and that’s it.”

“But you can do that only if it’s okay, like you won’t hurt somebody and it’s not safe.”

“People have the right not to be hurt too, right?”

This conversation sparked a week-long project where children in the school compiled a list of all their rights, 61 in all, including:

“Children have the right to have friends.”

“Children have the right to pretend everything and to pretend there’s a beach anywhere.”

“Children have the right to say ‘No!’ or ‘Stop it’ when someone tickles them without asking.”

“Children have the right to say ‘Yes’ when people tickle them too.”

“Children have the right to be listened to.”

“Children have the right to good stuff that makes them happy.”

Children are rarely asked to comment on their desires for their world in the way these thoughtful teachers did, but despite that we have ample evidence that children have very strong opinions on how they want to live. In Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004), Steven Mintz quotes this passage from Benjamin Franklin on the common phenomenon of English colonists who who ran away from home or were taken captive and decided to stay with Native Americans:

When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them…in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. (p. 8)

Quoted in the same book, a 19th century children’s rhyme speaks to the political thoughts and aspirations of slave children:

My old mistress promised me,

When she dies she would set me free

Now she’s dead and gone to hell

I hope the devil will burn her well. (p. 107)

Working children have been and continue to be participants in the labor movement. They have also been, and will continue to be, participants and leaders in the struggles for social justice across society. The Children’s Crusade during the 1963 Birmingham desegregation campaign is a well known part of the civil rights movement in this country. Over 2000 children and youth were arrested that spring and summer as marchers attempted to shame the white supremacists by forcing them to arrest and attack kids. Of course, the racists had no shame, and so children also paid the highest price in that movement. The KKK firebombing that killed four little girls in a Birmingham church that September was a direct retaliation for the role that young people had played in pushing forward the movement against Jim Crow.

The U.S. is the only country in the world that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. For this we can thank the U.S. right wing, including so-called “parents’ rights” groups, which mobilize every year against ratification because, as it is argued, recognition of children’s rights drives a wedge between parent and child. This is a scary admission on the part of the right wing that all might not be right between parent and child to begin with if this would be the result of signing the treaty. In fact the UN Rights of the Child is a very un-radical document in many respects, placing the child’s “right to a family” at the top of the list of rights. While the UN’s rights of the child contain many progressive ideals, including the right to adequate nutrition, 25 years after its initial ratification by the vast majority of the world’s countries, five million children die every year from hunger in a world literally awash in food. Clearly, more than a document asserting children’s rights is needed–movements that fight for those rights are an urgent necessity.

A welcome discussion among radical thinkers and activists is developing on the question of children’s rights and liberation, the family and care, and how solidarity, mutual aid, and reciprocity could shape our thinking and practice alongside children in struggle. This article hopes to contribute in small part to those hopeful discussions.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: verkeorg; modified by Tempest.

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ABORIGINAL TITLE has recently become the subject of intense national attention—and has attracted widespread misconceptions. Following the decisions in Cowichan Tribes v Canada and Wolastoqey Nation v New Brunswick, public commentary has frequently portrayed Aboriginal title as an immediate threat to private homeowners. In British Columbia, this misconception has included misinformation that has bordered on the absurd, including fake letters purporting to be sent by Indigenous peoples ordering homeowners from their properties, municipal councillors claiming some residents can no longer get home-related insurance, and even the Wall Street Journal arguing the Cowichan Tribes case “threatens billions in real-estate investment.” This public debate often presents Indigenous peoples and private landowners as opposing parties competing for the same land. That framing obscures the role of the Crown, which is responsible for any conflict because it grants private property on lands subject to Aboriginal title. 

In this Brief, we explain why neither of the decisions in Cowichan Tribes and Wolastoqey conclude that recognizing Aboriginal title entails displacing fee simple titles and, more fundamentally, these decisions turn our minds to pathways that do not require choosing between Aboriginal title and fee simple title. We also explain that despite these decisions leaving many issues unresolved and creating some practical uncertainty, bringing clarity to these issues cannot be achieved without recognizing that the Crown is ultimately responsible, because it grants fee simple title over lands subject to pre-existing and underlying Aboriginal title. Throughout Canada, there are many important questions about where these decisions might bring us and how the relationship between Aboriginal and fee simple can be clarified. We suggest that clarity, stability, and certainty come from looking to Indigenous legal orders for solutions.

Aboriginal Title and Fee Simple Private Property 

Although fee simple (a type of common law land ownership) and Aboriginal title are both concerned with rights to the land, they remain distinct in various ways. 

For instance, the sources of these rights are different. Aboriginal title is not a right granted by the Crown. It is a constitutionally protected interest in the land that arises from Indigenous peoples’ occupation and governance of their territories before the Crown asserted sovereignty. Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes and affirms Aboriginal title, but it is not the source of that title. A court also does not create Aboriginal title when it issues a declaration, because that declaration simply legally confirms the right exists.

This distinction matters when lands are subject to both Aboriginal title and fee simple interests. Private property interests do not simply arise independently of the Crown. They are created through Crown grants and registered in provincial land-registration systems. Those same systems contribute to the continued denial of Aboriginal title, while the Crown itself actively denies or disregards its continuing existence.

The central legal problem is therefore a conflict not created by Indigenous peoples, but by the Crown. 

Provincial private property regimes have not effectively considered pre-existing Aboriginal title rights—and this results in fee simple titles being granted over lands subject to Aboriginal title. Cowichan Tribes and Wolastoqey illustrate two judicial efforts to address that overlap, while demonstrating the limits of exclusively relying on Canadian law and courts.

The Cowichan Tribes and Wolastoqey Decisions

Cowichan Tribes v Canada is a case concerning whether the Cowichan Nation (comprising five First Nations bands) has Aboriginal title to a seasonal village that is known as Tl’uqtinus and located near the mouth of the Fraser River. The issues present were extensive, but the British Columbia Supreme Court ultimately recognized Cowichan Nation’s Aboriginal title over a portion of Tl’uqtinus lands held privately by the Crown and a municipal government. Contrary to claims that the decision invalidated third-party property rights, the Plaintiffs (collectively the Cowichan Nation) expressly limited the relief they sought:

“the plaintiffs seek a declaration that the fee simple titles held by Canada, the VFPA [Vancouver Fraser Port Authority] and Richmond are defective and invalid… They do not seek the same declaration in respect of privately-owned lands.”

In addition to this, the Court did not declare privately held lands invalid or interfere with the continued use and occupation by private property owners. The Court did, however, declare that the Cowichan Nation has Aboriginal title rights over lands that Canada and Richmond hold in fee simple. The Court ultimately decided that a portion of Canada and the City of Richmond’s lands held in fee simple are defective and invalid, because the originating Crown grants were made without the proper statutory and constitutional authority.

In reaching this conclusion, the Court rejected the proposition that provincial land grants had extinguished the underlying Aboriginal title. 

Before the Constitution Act, 1982, extinguishment required the Crown’s “clear and plain” intention to extinguish Aboriginal rights (e.g. through legislative extinguishment). A province could not extinguish Aboriginal title because doing so would intrude upon Parliament’s jurisdiction over “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians.” As the Supreme Court stated in Delgamuukw (1997), “a provincial law could never, proprio vigore [of its own force], extinguish aboriginal rights.” Provincial fee simple grants and land title legislation therefore could not have, by themselves, extinguished Cowichan title.

Considering this, the question turns to the relationship between the two forms of title: Aboriginal title (which pre-dates, and was not extinguished by, exertion of Crown control over the land) and fee simple title (an interest in land created by the Crown and capable of being vested in private property owners). 

Because the Plaintiffs did not seek to invalidate third-party private property, the Court kept its analysis of this relationship general. The Court decided that a declaration of Aboriginal title is not precluded by the existence of fee simple title over those same lands. A declaration of this kind need not displace fee simple rights but can result in legal coexistence between Aboriginal title and fee simple title. If such coexistence is recognized, the Court stated that “the exercise of one form of title must yield to the other…” 

Coexistence was found in Cowichan Tribes, and because the Cowichan Nation did not challenge third-party private property, Justice Young held that the exercise of Cowichan Aboriginal title yields to private interests: 

“[S]o long as the fee simple interests exist, the ability of the Cowichan to exercise the incidents of Aboriginal title are constrained to the extent they conflict with the rights of the private fee simple title holders.”

Where a court recognizes coexistence, such a recognition can be a catalyst for negotiated solutions between the Aboriginal title holders and the Crown. 

The judgment, currently under appeal, thus recognized the coexistence of both Aboriginal title and private property interests and held that conflicts in the exercise of those coexisting interests results in a question of which one gives way to the other. Because the Cowichan Nation did not question those private interests, the Court protected private fee simple rights by limiting how Aboriginal title could be exercised where the two conflict.

Wolastoqey raised a different issue. This case is concerned with whether the Wolastoqey Nation (comprising six First Nations bands) has Aboriginal title rights over an expansive portion of western New Brunswick. The case, however, was not yet at the stage of the Plaintiffs needing to prove a right of Aboriginal title, but at the stage of deciding whether corporate private property owners added as defendants needed to remain parties to the claim. Ultimately, the Plaintiffs did not seek to invalidate the titles of private owners who were not parties, and they even characterized the corporate defendants as “innocents.”

At first instance, the Court of King’s Bench in New Brunswick held that the responsibility for addressing any conflict between Aboriginal title and private property rests with the Crown, not private parties. Because Aboriginal title is a constitutional and sui generis (unique) interest, the Court concluded that the corporate landowners need not participate in the proceeding because there is no direct legal link. In essence, the Court decided that “[a]ll roads lead to the Crown.”

On appeal, the New Brunswick Court of Appeal adopted a qualified approach. It held that a binding declaration of Aboriginal title over privately held land would generally require the affected owner to participate in the proceeding. Where private owners were absent, however, a court could still make findings of Aboriginal title, which do not confer ownership rights but are capable of supporting compensation or other relief against the Crown. The Court of Appeal also held that Aboriginal title and fee simple rights are fundamentally incompatible, such that the former, once declared, is unable to coexist with the latter. 

On May 28, 2026, the Supreme Court of Canada denied leave to appeal, without reasons. The Court of Appeal’s decision therefore remains in force in New Brunswick, although the denial of leave does not indicate whether the Supreme Court agreed or disagreed with the Court of Appeal’s reasoning.

What Canadian Law Leaves Unresolved

Taken together, neither Cowichan Tribes nor Wolastoqey establish that recognizing Aboriginal title displaces private property rights. Despite this, both decisions offer different and incomplete responses to the intersection of Aboriginal title and fee simple interests where the Crown has granted fee simple interests over lands subject to pre-existing Aboriginal title.

The approach in Wolastoqey promotes judicial discretion in making declarations and findings of Aboriginal title. Where third parties do not participate in the proceeding, a court may only make findings of Aboriginal title, which do not confer ownership rights but can support “damages and compensation against the Crown.” This approach protects absent landowners and limits the remedies available to Indigenous peoples. Professor Emeritus Kent McNeil, who is a leading authority on Aboriginal title, argues that the Court mistakenly treated declarations of Aboriginal title as discretionary “bare declarations,” when, in fact, they are non-discretionary in nature (with consequential relief). The result of this mistaken understanding, Professor McNeil argues, is a decision that stands for courts exercising non-existent discretionary authority to not grant a declaration after making a positive finding of Aboriginal title. 

In addition to this, the Court in Wolastoqey provided only a partial incompatibility analysis regarding shared rights from an operational perspective between Aboriginal title and fee simple interests, without fully considering Aboriginal title’s sui generis nature. For example, the Court did not consider rights of governance and jurisdiction that may flow from or are parasitic to Aboriginal title, which would not be shared rights with private property and therefore their legal coexistence could not be incompatible.

Nevertheless, both decisions are the result of a sole reliance on the principles of Canadian property and constitutional law and effectively ask how Aboriginal title can be molded around private interests created by the Crown. Neither decision asks how the relevant Indigenous legal order, or any alternative legal orders, would understand or govern the relationship between Aboriginal title and private property, nor what Indigenous legal remedies exist within those legal systems to manage issues such as these. 

The Cowichan Tribes and Wolastoqey decisions demonstrate both what litigation can accomplish and what it leaves unresolved. Courts can confirm Aboriginal title, protect procedural rights, and assign liability to the Crown. But neither decision provides a complete framework for how Aboriginal title and existing fee simple interests are to operate alongside one another. That gap leaves legal and practical uncertainty that can be transformed through public debate into claims that recognizing Aboriginal title necessarily threatens private ownership. The problem is not that either court has displaced private property, but the many practical questions that remain following the release of these decisions about how these disparate systems can coexist.

Questions concerning continued possession, future transfers, land use, jurisdiction, compensation, and coordination between governments cannot be resolved through declarations or findings of title alone. They will require negotiation. And because the relationship between Aboriginal title and fee simple interests is not solely a question of Canadian property and constitutional law, those negotiations should not be governed by Canadian law alone. Indigenous legal orders are themselves sources of law and authority capable of determining how existing interests may be protected, regulated, compensated, or otherwise governed. The questions left unresolved by Cowichan Tribes and Wolastoqey therefore point toward negotiated solutions in which Indigenous legal orders form part of the law governing the relationship.

Looking Beyond Canadian Courts: Indigenous Legal Orders and Negotiated Solutions

Against the backdrop of Canadian property law, the framing of the relationship between Aboriginal title and fee simple interests tends to be founded upon the understanding that they are competing interests in the same land.

But Indigenous legal orders often begin with different questions: what relationships, responsibilities, and lawful arrangements should govern the people who now share a territory?

John Borrows, an Anishinaabe law scholar and leading authority on Aboriginal rights, rejects the zero-sum approach to the relationship between Aboriginal title and private property. In presenting Indigenous legal orders as sources to bring clarity to the relationship between Aboriginal title and private property, Professor Borrows observes that “most Indigenous peoples recognize that the dispossession of their non-Aboriginal neighbours would not be just, fair, honourable or in accord with their society’s own law and morality.”

While some may take issue with the language of “dispossession” applied to non-Indigenous private property owners, the sentiment is nonetheless relevant, as third-party private property holders were intentionally excluded from the claim in Cowichan Tribes and were excluded or described as innocents in Wolastoqey. As Professor Borrows explains, “private property’s relationship with Aboriginal title may be constitutionally protected through Aboriginal governance.” 

This does not mean that Aboriginal title, in effect, becomes irrelevant over areas where fee simple interests have been conveyed. Rather, this means that Indigenous legal orders provide solutions that have yet to be contemplated by Canadian courts, and these solutions are not limited to choosing between Aboriginal title and fee simple title. For instance, private interests could instead be recognized, mediated, or transformed through Indigenous constitutional arrangements, legislation, land-management institutions, or dispute-resolution processes. At the same time, Indigenous legal orders could recognize Aboriginal title rights and governmental rights over lands that the Crown has conveyed privately. 

There are limitless solutions within Indigenous legal orders that are innovative, practical, considerate, rigorous, and just. They can provide pathways to bring certainty, stability, and clarity to questions of possession, jurisdiction, land use, compensation, lawful transition, and relationships among those who share the land. 

The need for Indigenous legal orders bringing clarity to Canadian law issues is growing. This became especially apparent recently in the British Columbia Court of Appeal in R v Dsta’hyl, which is a case concerned with whether Indigenous law can establish a novel common law defense. Although not related to Aboriginal title and private property, the decision in Dsta’hyl provides an important opening for the analysis of the role of Indigenous legal orders in Canada. The Court affirmed that “Canada has a multi-juridical tradition” and that, subject to limits articulated through Canadian law, “Indigenous legal orders operate alongside the Canadian common law.” 

Chief Justice Marchand writing on behalf of the Court (Fleming and Iyer JJ concurring) acknowledged that, following a long history of denial and suppression, “we are all at a fairly early stage of sorting out how state law and Indigenous law interact.” The aspiration, he wrote, is for the two legal systems “to apply symmetrically and in harmony,” even though their perspectives, rights, and interests may sometimes “diverge or collide.”

That recognition is significant, but incomplete. Dsta’hyl continues to describe the operation of Indigenous law through imposed limits, such as compatibility with Crown sovereignty. It creates space for multi-juridical reasoning without resolving the deeper issue of who determines the boundaries between Indigenous and Canadian law.

Those boundaries between Canadian and Indigenous law should not be determined through litigation alone, but through Indigenous legal orders and good faith negotiations. The honour of the Crown “requires the Crown, acting honourably, to participate in the process of negotiation,” and the Supreme Court has held that the Crown has “not only a moral duty, but a legal duty to negotiate in good faith to resolve land claims.” Negotiations must therefore do more than invite Indigenous principles into a Crown-designed process. Indigenous laws must shape the governing norms, institutions, remedies, and decision-making authority of those processes. 

Consistent with the principles canvassed in Dsta’hyl, Professor Borrows suggests that bringing clarity to the relationship between Aboriginal title and private property through Indigenous legal orders requires dabaadendizowin, or humility, because no property interest within Canada is absolute. Humility can set aside the highly politicized and zero-sum logic in favour of reasonable, reasoned, practical, effective, considerate, and just paths forward. These solutions can be mutually developed by Indigenous peoples, private property owners, and the Crown. Depending on each community and its laws, negotiated arrangements that equally rely on Canadian and Indigenous law could include Indigenous land registries, protections for continued residential possession, recognized Aboriginal title, coexistence, laws governing future transfers and development, shared land-use institutions, Indigenous dispute-resolution processes, and Crown-funded compensation. 

These solutions are not universal prescriptions but are highly context driven and require humility in achieving certainty for Indigenous peoples, private property owners, and the Crown. Such solutions will necessarily arise through rigorously relying upon existing Indigenous legal principles in relation to being a good neighbour, maintaining good faith conduct, seeking truth, and fostering proportionate and reasoned responses to wrongs. 

Although attempts to bring clarity to the relationship between Aboriginal title and private property have so far largely centered on misconceptions and, at times, misinformation, this does not have to be the case.

Continuing with highly politicized, zero-sum, and misleading information about Aboriginal title and private property does anything but bring clarity to property rights in Canada.

There is good reason to look to multi-juridical arrangements and Indigenous legal orders for diligent, just, practical, and innovative solutions to these undoubtedly complex issues. 

All Roads Lead to the Crown

The practical uncertainty that has emerged concerning the relationship between Aboriginal title and private property manifests from the Crown’s erroneous decisions in granting fee simple title over lands subject to underlying, pre-existing Aboriginal title. The decisions in Cowichan Tribes and Wolastoqey provide two distinct approaches to address such overlap, and neither conclude that recognizing Aboriginal title requires displacing private property interests. These decisions have also created no shortage of concerns and misconceptions, both in relation to the decisions themselves and what they might mean. Indigenous legal orders can provide stability, certainty, and clarity to the relationship between Aboriginal title and private property through practical, fair, and innovative solutions. These solutions, however, should not detract from the Crown’s responsibility for creating such issues in the first place. As succinctly stated by New Brunswick’s Court of King’s Bench, “[a]ll roads lead to the Crown.”

Endnotes

For the full list of endnotes, please see the PDF attached.

Citation:

Ambers, Andrew and Charlotte Weston.”All Roads Lead to the Crown: Aboriginal Title, Private Property, and Indigenous Legal Orders,” Yellowhead Institute. Aug 18 2026. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2026/all-roads-lead-to-the-crown-aboriginal-title-private-property-and-indigenous-legal-orders

Artwork by Rande Cook @rande_cook 

 

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