News Feeds

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott ordered a pause on all border construction inside Big Bend National Park, days after footage of construction within the park sparked bipartisan outrage. “Last night I put a pause on all activity in that park as far as construction goes until I can get down there and do a personal evaluation,” Scott said in a video posted to X.

CBP originally denied any construction was underway, saying bulldozers were simply regrading storm-damaged roads, then acknowledged heavy machinery was working on the barrier project but called it “survey and design work — NOT construction of a wall through the park.” Scott insisted CBP was “NOT building a 30-foot wall or stadium lighting” through the park, though the agency’s map had at one point shown a 30-foot steel bollard wall across Big Bend.

“It’s difficult to trust the words of CBP,” said Bob Krumenaker, a former Big Bend superintendent who chairs Keep Big Bend Wild. “We’re hopeful that they’re honest and we can trust them, but it’s too early to know.” Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson also expressed doubts about CBP’s statement: “We can’t count on what we’re reading or seeing or anything,” he said.

Crews have already bulldozed near Santa Elena Canyon without the thirty days’ notice DHS had agreed to provide under a previous court settlement, causing irreparable damage to the landscape and the archaeological sites it contains.

Quick hits Trump blames vandals for dead grass on lawn where he held Fourth of July event

Washington Post

Public lands are at the forefront of Wyoming’s primaries

Inside Climate News

Border agency pauses construction in Big Bend National Park

NOTUS | Public Domain | E&E News | The Hill | The Travel | Axios | Texas Tribune | NPR | Wes Siler’s Newsletter

Judge denies Tohono O’odham request to halt border wall construction

Arizona Capitol Times

Colorado River plummets as lakes Powell and Mead drop to record lows

New York Times

Policy limiting public information on deaths and injuries at national parks raises concern among journalists

Aspen Times

Colorado’s private 14er

Aspen Journalism

Lower oil and gas bonds on federal land could cost taxpayers billions

Utah Public Radio

Quote of the day

If we lose places like Big Bend, we never get them back. The destruction that will be inflicted here will truly be irreparable.”

— Laiken Jordahl, Center for Biological Diversity, NPR

Picture This
@u.s.forestserviceFire personnel return from the fireline on the Black Canyon Fire in Utah.This photo shows the “fuel type” crews are working in. Building fireline in this terrain requires the use of chainsaws to clear a fuel break and hand tools to dig a fireline down to mineral soil. This is often grueling work requiring long hours under harsh conditions.

We thank all our wildland firefighters, the non-fire staff who support them, and the families at home who stand behind them throughout the fire year.

Featured photo: Big Bend National Park, National Park Service=

The post Border agency halts Big Bend construction, for now appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

As the dusk of summer nears, I feel embodied with a renewed sense of possibility. Summer has a way of inviting us into our bodies and the landscapes we inhabit. With each hike, I feel stronger. I am acutely aware of my heartbeat on steep inclines, sweat rising and drying almost instantly in the summer sun. I am in awe of the orchestra of wildflower bloom, the air alive with aromas of sage, grass, and juniper. Immersion in forests is itself a practice of health.

Summer can bring another kind of abundance through food. Vegetables and fruits that we eagerly await all year pop with the flavors of the landscape. For our family, the long-awaited fruits of the summer are Flathead cherries. Plump, sweet, tart, and minerally. We eat more whole foods grown close to home, carrying memories of soil, season, interactions with other life, and the hands of our community.

This summer, an unknown about my own health shifted the intensity with which I listen to my body. Health is something we wonder about and manage every day, yet sometimes an unknown can bring it into extraordinary focus, reminding us how deeply we value each other and participating in life. It brought me back to three deceptively simple and connected questions: What is health? How do we know what is healthy? And how do we cultivate health?

Across cultures, people have cultivated traditions of health grounded in different epistemologies, worldviews, observations, and forms of evidence. The field of medical anthropology explores this question, examining how health and healing are understood and experienced.

Ayurveda understands health, or svasthya, through balance among body, mind, food, behavior, season, and environment. Food and medicinal plants are integral to maintaining health and treating illness, with transformation central to their effects. The Ayurvedic concept of agni, often translated as digestive fire, considers what we eat and our capacity to digest and transform it, while prana speaks to the vital life force that sustains us. Agni reminds us that the same food may result in different biological exposure in different people depending on their constitution.

Traditional Chinese Medicine and Tibetan medical systems offer their own understandings of balance, including relationships among food, medicinal plants, individual constitution, season, and environment.

Years earlier, during fieldwork with Piaroa and Yekuana Amerindian communities in Venezuela’s Amazonas, I had asked this same question: What is health? Their responses expanded health beyond the individual. Health was collective, expressed through the vitality of families and communities, including the number of people in a community, and through relationships with the landscapes that sustained them. In Amazonian shamanic traditions, health extends further into cosmology. Plants, animals, people, spirits, and landscapes inhabit relational worlds in which healing extends beyond the individual body.

Since 1948, the World Health Organization has defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The NIH Whole Person Health framework similarly considers the whole person, emphasizing interconnected biological, behavioral, social, and environmental domains.

These ways of knowing reveal health as biological, personal, collective, and relational, shaped by what we eat, what our bodies make of it, the communities to which we belong, the living world we inhabit, and what we have access to.

And how do we know what is healthy? People have come to know what heals through observation and experimentation, taste and experience, and knowledge and evidence accumulated across generations. Humans learned to navigate landscapes of bitter, astringent, and potentially toxic plants through their senses and trial and error, discovering that some compounds that deter consumption can also have medicinal properties. This knowledge has shaped what people eat, avoid, and use for healing along a food-to-medicine continuum. This chemical diversity continues to shape medicine, with roughly half of small-molecule drugs tracing their structural origins to natural products.

Biomedical and molecular sciences expand how we know what is healthy through measurement. As a first-year doctoral student, I heard the late food chemist Edwin Frankel lecture on inflammation as a root of disease and the role of foods in exacerbating or mitigating inflammation. Over two decades of evidence later, inflammation has emerged as a biological thread across many chronic diseases, while diets rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds are associated with lower inflammation and chronic disease risk. Beyond essential nutrients, these foods contain prebiotic fibers, peptides, and diverse bioactive metabolites that interact with inflammatory pathways, metabolism, and the gut microbiome.

Human health also relies on planetary health. Understanding what is healthy means understanding what health looks like in the living landscapes that produce our food, from soil and biodiversity to the fungi, microbes, and other organisms that sustain food systems.

Omics technologies enable precise characterization of the molecular diversity of foods and their interactions across complex diets, revealing distinct biomolecular signatures. These same tools can measure biological responses to what we eat through biomarkers. AI can also connect food molecular patterns to human proteins and pathways. We can further build new evidence by backtracking to existing epidemiological and clinical studies to link molecular signatures of foods and diets with health outcomes. Predictions can then be tested experimentally and clinically, taking us from food molecular composition to biological exposure and health outcomes.

Ultimately, this growing evidence base is powerful for establishing intake ranges for food molecules whose structures and functions we may not yet know and, where scientifically supported, thresholds for harmful and health-supporting biomolecules to inform dietary guidelines and public health recommendations.

Collectively, this is the frontier of understanding food as biological exposure, one where we should dedicate resources, investments, and capacity strengthening toward healthier food systems. This is perhaps what excites me most about this emerging chapter of my career: the possibility of finally understanding the continuum of soil to food to health at unprecedented resolution and translating that knowledge to improve lives for all.

As our capacity for discovery grows, so must our capacity for stewardship. Access and Benefit Sharing, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and attribution must advance alongside discovery.

I also thought deeply about what it means to cultivate health this summer while developing an opening keynote for the WSU Bread Lab’s Grain Gathering, Cultivating Health and Nourishing Community with Food Intelligence. Amid the dreamy, diversified farms of the Skagit Valley, the idea came alive. At six in the morning on the second day of the gathering, farmers, breeders, millers, bakers, researchers, and makers gathered around a wood-fired oven making whole-grain bagels. At the center was one of humanity’s most ancient and essential crops: wheat.

Wheat offers a lens into how we cultivate health. A breeder selects for flavor, resilience, nutrition, and performance. A farmer cultivates that potential through soil, biodiversity, climate, and management. A miller determines what flows through the system, and a baker transforms flour with water, microbes, and heat. Our emerging work through The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) is revealing how the molecular and health attributes of wheat vary among varieties and shift with production and processing practices, including fermentation. This transformation continues when we eat. Our gut microbes transform components of wheat into metabolites that interact with our immune system, metabolism, and cells.

During the bagel breakfast at the Grain Gathering, I was asked many incredible questions, but one made me stop and reflect: What makes you hopeful? In the face of uncertainty, tragedies, suffering, inequity, and threats to human and planetary health, hope itself can feel audacious. I find hope in the expansive possibility of knowing the continuum from soil to food to health at a resolution we have never known before, toward better lives for all. I find hope in gratitude for this beautiful living world. In love, higher purpose, the greater good, and faith in the goodness of humanity.

I have come to understand cultivation as creating the conditions for flourishing. Health is cultivated in much the same way. We cultivate health through the seeds we select, the landscapes we steward, the foods we grow, the knowledge we generate, the ways we move and rest, and the relationships we nourish. We cultivate it by expanding access, integrating healthy food into healthcare, and creating food systems where the healthy choice becomes the easy choice. Health is deeply personal and collective. Our health cannot be separated from the health of our communities and the living planet we share.

As the dusk of summer nears, I am grateful for the remarkable gift of participating in life. To cultivate health is to cultivate the conditions for life to flourish.

This essay is part of Food Tank’s Flourish Series: Food and Health from Molecules to Systems, authored by Selena Ahmed, exploring how food connects us to the living world while asking what it means to flourish. For more in the series, click here.

Artwork courtesy of Jeannie Ortiz commissioned for The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) and Food Tank’s Flourish Series. All rights reserved.

The post Op-Ed | Cultivating Health: Food, Relationships, and the Living World appeared first on Food Tank.

The migration journeys of Vermont’s neotropical migrants—birds that breed here in the summer and winter in the tropics—are arduous, with birds often flying thousands of miles to their wintering...

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.

Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.

The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.

Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.

The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?

• Aug 14, 2026 News South Africa’s top court blocks Shell’s offshore oil exploration right Constitutional Court rules that Shell and its partners failed to consult affected communities and did not properly consider environmental risks Read more
• Aug 14, 2026 News New coal mine openings slow as East Asian demand plateaus China and Australia drove global decline in new capacity additions in 2025, but planned production kept growing Read more

To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.

Tool for efficient investment

Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.

Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.

Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals

New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.

Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.

What COP31 and COP32 should do

The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.

First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.

Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.

COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification

Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.

This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.

The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.

The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

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.

###

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) has awarded a $2.43bn contract to a joint venture (JV) between Skanska and Stacy Witbeck to deliver the East San Fernando Valley Light Rail Transit Project in Van Nuys, California, US. Read more.

Publications Reports collection Periodically, produces collections of reports that compile stories, accounts, experiences and “case studies” that emerge from the communities and processes of radical alternatives. You can access all our reports collections or specific issues below: 01 02 01 GTATapestryAlternativesalternativesTapestryAlternativesAlternativesTapestryAlternativesGTAAlternativesAlternativesMASSAMASSAAlternativesMASSAalternatives

Hydrogen, viewed by its advocates as a clean fuel and a solution to climate change, is having a “non moment,” but don’t ask anyone in the industry to say that on the record. Read more.

Latest Updates on Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears

 

In our last Redrock Report, we shared news of President Trump’s July 13 evisceration of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments. Quite a lot has happened since then.

Mining Companies Chomp at the Bit
The ink was barely dry on the presidential proclamations when Kimmerle Mining filed 7 mining claims (the very next day) in areas cut out of Bears Ears National Monument (see map). Soon after, Craig Rosequist filed two mining claims on lands cut from Grand Staircase-Escalante (see map). The illegality of the monument reductions aside, the new proclamations don’t even allow the staking of mining claims until 60 days after the date of the proclamation, which is Friday, Sept. 11 (Read the New York Times coverage and see our full press release).

Monument Signs Disappear
Meanwhile, the Trump administration wasted no time attempting to erase both monuments from public awareness. First, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) removed signage from Bears Ears National Monument, starting with the Tribal seals representing the five Tribes of the Bears Ears Commission and quickly escalating to the complete removal of the monument signs themselves. By July 28, signs at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument had also been removed from at least five gateway locations.

The Backlash Builds
People in Utah and across the nation are fighting back. A week after Trump’s attack on the monuments, SUWA and our partners hosted a Statewide Monumental Day of Action in Utah, with over a thousand people turning out in 100-degree heat to attend events in Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, Moab, St. George, Bluff, and Boulder. Meanwhile, the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalitions have strongly condemned the monument reductions, as have 37 senators who signed a letter to President Trump earlier this month.

SUWA will take Trump to court over these illegal reductions, as we did in 2017 (that case was not resolved by the time President Biden restored the monuments in 2021). We’re also ramping up efforts to promote America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, which would protect much of the land included in the monuments as wilderness. We’ll share updates as we continue to fight every day, and in every way we can, for the places we all love.

Photo © Ray Bloxham/SUWA

BLM Withdraws 10 New Backcountry Airstrip Designations

 

Good news! After SUWA filed an appeal, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Canyon Country District withdrew its June 2026 decision approving 10 backcountry airstrips in the heart of Utah’s redrock country (this does not include the Keg Knoll airstrip approved in the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness).

These airstrips, which were never officially designated by the agency, are scattered across some of the most remote and ecologically sensitive landscapes in southern Utah—including the Gemini Bridges/Labyrinth Canyon area and the remote backcountry immediately adjacent to Bears Ears National Monument. Many are now reclaimed, with no signs of recent use. Though there was no formal public comment process, SUWA members submitted over 2,500 comments opposing the designations.

“This is a case of ‘better late than never.’ We’re glad to see the agency pull back its decision, which would have authorized more motorized use in remote, wilderness-quality landscapes,” said SUWA Wildlands Director Neal Clark. “BLM’s decision would have benefitted a handful of private pilots to the detriment of wildlife, native vegetation, and public lands users seeking quiet, backcountry experiences. We appreciate BLM’s reconsideration and will work to ensure that these airstrips are not authorized for use in the future”

>> Read our full press release

Photo © James Kay

New: Unique, Staff-Designed Sticker Packs Celebrate Utah’s Wild Places

 

Looking for a new way to show your love for the redrock? Check out our brand-new stickers, designed by SUWA staffer Kelly Burnham. Each one features a different wild landscape: the Bridger Jacks in Bears Ears National Monument, the towering corridors of the Colorado River, toadstool hoodoos and black chinned hummingbirds in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and a burrowing owl hovering over rabbitbrush in the West Desert. Get a pack of all four for just $10! Find them on our website at suwa.org/shop.

Opportunities to Get Involved (in Salt Lake City) this Fall

 

It’s shaping up to be a busy fall season for SUWA in Salt Lake City, with many ways for you to get involved! Volunteer with us at the 9th & 9th Street Festival on September 19, where we’ll connect with our neighbors about the fight to protect Utah’s wild places. Then, in celebration of National Public Lands Day, roll up your sleeves for a hands-on way to give back on September 26 at the Stansbury Island Clean Up. Finally, wrap up the season with us at the SLC Book Festival on October 17, where we’ll be spreading the word to fellow readers and community members about how protecting wilderness and public lands is the perfect way to get offline.

In early September (date and time TBD—stay tuned!), we’re also inviting our community to help us give the SUWA Headquarters office a little love. We’re transforming our front lawn into a water-conscious landscape and could use a few more hands digging and planting as we give some waterwise perennials a new home. At a time when so much is asked of us, we’re holding space for a little joy and a chance to slow down, get to know each other, and build something beautiful together.

These events are a great way to meet fellow wilderness advocates, learn more about SUWA’s campaigns, and show up for Utah’s wild places. Ready to sign up? Reach out to our Utah Organizer, Mimi Ortega, to grab a volunteer slot. Spots fill up fast, so don’t wait!

Photo © SUWA

Support SUWA and Live Local Theater at the Same Time!

 

Come find SUWA tabling at Footpath Theatre Company’s production of Western Minerals & Their Origins, running its final Utah engagement from August 27-29 at Kingsbury Hall in Salt Lake City. 

While clearing out her canyoneer brother’s garage, a young woman is pulled deep into memory and the redrock landscape that shaped her. Rhetorical Review calls it “a love letter to the canyons, to the outdoors, to Utah itself.” We hope to see you there!

>> Click here for tickets and more information

The post August 2026 Redrock Report appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

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.

#newsletter-block_7296598997129cb46e395810d9919018 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_7296598997129cb46e395810d9919018 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

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. 

#support-block_5926fd0584128842d11b649eda2fb342 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

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.