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“CENSORED NEWS: Shut Down Energy Fuels — Uranium Mining and Radioactive Dumping on Native People”

This article Resistance is only half the equation was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

We no longer live in a world where courts reliably enforce limits on executive power; where media calls out abuse as abuse or where politicians depend on legitimacy to hold power. These conditions are eroding, and power is becoming more and more centralized. 

In the U.S., the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States in 2024 significantly expanded presidential immunity for official acts, raising concerns about accountability. Globally, ruling parties in Hungary and Poland have reshaped judicial systems through court-packing and disciplinary regimes that weaken independent checks on executive authority. And in countries such as India, new laws restrict freedom of the press. 

In response, we see a grinding pattern of reaction from pundits and resisters, but the power of centralized authority remains. Trump has retained power despite his involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, as well as his name being all over the Epstein files. Leaders in Turkey and Egypt have been accused repeatedly of inciting democratic backsliding, yet they maintain power. At the same time, ecological, economic, cultural and political crises expand. 

This moment demands more than opposition. What is needed is not just resistance against corrupt centralized systems, but to create new, local systems that restructure power so it is dispersed throughout society. Because the problem is not only that those in power abuse it. The problem is that power is concentrated in the first place.

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The work of Gene Sharp stands apart in the field of nonviolent theory for one central reason: his understanding of power. For Sharp, justice, equality, freedom and any meaningful form of democracy do not exist simply as ideals or constitutional rights. They exist only when power is actually dispersed throughout society — embedded in the daily practices, institutions and relationships of ordinary people. Without that dispersion, democracy is little more than a substanceless claim.

Many nonviolent activists and scholars have embraced part of Sharp’s insight. They recognize that governments do not rule by force alone, but by the cooperation and support of institutions, organizations and individuals. From this perspective, power is contingent. If people withdraw their cooperation strategically and nonviolently, regimes can be forced to concede, reform or even collapse. This understanding has shaped movements across the world, from civil resistance campaigns to election protection efforts.

And yet, there is an equally important part of Sharp’s insight they are missing.

The problem of concentrated power

We are seeing how deeply dependent we have become on centralized systems that do not have our best interests in mind. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how centralized healthcare and supply chains have become, leaving many without timely access to care and essential goods. And recurring, large-scale electrical outages, such as the 2021 Texas power crisis, show how dependent millions are on centralized grids that can fail. 

When power is concentrated — whether in governments, corporations or some fusion of the two — corruption is not an accident. It is a structural inevitability. Systems organized around concentrated power will, over time, bend toward the interests of those who hold it. Policies, resources and decision-making processes become oriented toward preserving and expanding that power, often at the expense of the broader population.

Previous Coverage

Will the real Gene Sharp please step forward?

Even the most well-intentioned leaders operate within structures that reward consolidation, control and self-preservation. For example, in an effort to make the U.S. government more efficient and effective, President Barack Obama reinstated presidential authority, ushering in an era of consolidated executive power. The result is an unfortunate recurring pattern: Inequality deepens, accountability weakens and public institutions drift away from the people they are meant to serve.

When decision-making is centralized, the distance between those who hold power and those affected by it widens, often to the point where meaningful feedback becomes filtered, delayed or ignored altogether. Over time, this creates an environment where leaders are not only insulated from consequences, but are also operating with an increasingly distorted understanding of reality. Citizens, in turn, become disengaged or disempowered, sensing that their voices carry little weight within systems designed to concentrate authority rather than distribute it. The result is not just corruption in the traditional sense, but a deeper erosion of responsiveness, adaptability and trust — conditions without which meaningful reform from within is exceedingly difficult.

Activism as external correction

In response to the erosion of democracy and the increasing inaccessibility of necessities like food, healthcare and housing, activists organize. They build networks to monitor elections, serve as watchdogs on corporate behavior, defend civil rights and provide essential services where governments fail. These efforts are vital. They protect people from immediate harm and at times, win meaningful reforms.

But rather than transforming how power is organized within society, these efforts often function as external correctives. They attempt to restrain abuse, mitigate harm and fill gaps left by failing institutions. In doing so, they implicitly accept the continued existence of centralized power structures, even as they resist their consequences.

This creates a paradox. Activists devote enormous energy to building parallel systems. Yet the underlying structures that concentrate that power remain largely intact.

The burden of endless resistance

Over time, this dynamic places an unsustainable burden on civil society. Activists become responsible for preventing abuse by those in power, holding institutions accountable and providing services that those institutions fail to deliver.

This is, in effect, a permanent state of resistance. It is also a reactive posture. Each new harm requires a new response, a new organization, a new campaign. The work expands endlessly, while the root cause — the concentration of power — remains unaddressed. 

One example of this is the environmental justice movement, particularly the coordinated pushback against federal rollbacks. Coalitions such as We Are Still In and the U.S. Climate Alliance mobilize states, municipalities, businesses and civil society to uphold the commitments of the Paris Agreement. Additionally, environmental groups repeatedly challenge deregulation, while states advance their own regulations. This created a multi-level infrastructure of resistance. Yet, even these efforts are forced into a constant defensive posture, expending vast energy to block or mitigate harms rather than dismantling underlying structures that enable federally sanctioned reversals of policy. 

While it’s true that it matters who holds office — we know that Trump’s policies are far more harmful to the environment than were Biden’s — this distinction does not resolve the deeper problem. The structure of centralized power remains unchanged, meaning that environmental policy can be rapidly advanced or dismantled with each shift in administration. As a result, even hard-won gains remain fragile. This volatility prevents the kind of long-term, consistent action required to address the climate crisis at scale. 

The question that follows is both simple and profound: Why do we accept a system in which people must constantly organize to defend themselves against the very structures meant to serve them?

Reimagining the mainstream structure

If we take Sharp’s theory of power seriously, the answer cannot lie solely in resistance.

Withdrawing cooperation from unjust systems is a vital tool. But it is only half of the equation. The other half is construction: building a society in which power is distributed from the outset, rather than concentrated and then contested.

Previous Coverage

Why building inspiring alternatives is necessary to counter authoritarianism

This requires a shift in orientation. Instead of asking how to better monitor and constrain centralized power, we must ask how to redesign the structures that produce it. What would it mean to organize political, economic and social systems so that decision-making authority is broadly shared? So that communities have direct control over the conditions of their lives? So that power is not something granted from above, but something exercised collectively?

In such a system, the need for vast external networks of resistance would diminish. Not because injustice would disappear, but because the mechanisms for addressing it would be built into the fabric of society itself.

And this is key. When power is disbursed throughout society into local communities — for example, when food is grown locally, housing is owned by cooperatives, health care is operated by neighborhood clinics, and so on — then community members can withdraw from or reduce their dependence on centralized, mainstream agribusinesses or real estate corporations or medical institutions. Empowering communities to take care of more and more of their own essential needs is a grassroots process that restructures how power is distributed in society. And the more communities that are empowered by these local initiatives, the more dispersed and decentralized power becomes. 

Addressing concerns of centralized power

The task ahead then is not only to resist concentrated power, but to replace it with distributed forms of governance and organization. To shift from a model of external oversight to one of internal design. In other words, the goal is not merely to challenge power, but to reconfigure it.

Around the world, communities are already doing this. They are realizing Sharp’s theory of decentralized power. By developing community gardens, housing coops and health centers, people can opt out of mainstream institutions and systems, greatly weakening the power those systems have over them. This is not merely an effort to fill in gaps. Instead, it deliberately shifts how power is distributed in society. Because, as dependency decreases, so does the ability of centralized authorities to command compliance. What emerges is not a parallel safety net, but a reconfiguration of power itself, one in which legitimacy flows from local and collective production and governance rather than from those who live far away.  

In the examples below, we see communities around the world building local control over essential needs such as housing, food, health care, energy, technology and safety. Each project that enables people to meet these needs locally — rather than through international corporations or federally controlled institutions — is a step toward local empowerment. As more communities adopt this approach, power becomes increasingly distributed across society.

Housing: Community control over land and shelter A Zapatista slogan on a mural in the autonomous town of Marinaleda, Spain, translates “the land belongs to those who work it.” (Turismo de la Provincia de Sevilla)

In southern Spain, the town of Marinaleda has created a radically different housing model. Following the election of Mayor Manuel Sánchez Gordillo — a labor leader pivotal to the town’s fight for self-governance — Marinaleda expropriated a significant amount of land from the state and launched a de-commodified housing system. Residents build their homes on collectively owned land; the town supplies construction materials and labor while occupants pay minimal mortgage payments tied to maintenance rather than profit. While operating within a broader national system, the town has effectively removed housing from market forces, placing control in the hands of the community itself.

In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson is working to build a solidarity economy rooted in worker ownership and community land control. Based on the model of Mondragon, Spain, residents are reducing dependence on both state and corporate systems.

Food: Feeding communities without external control

Few examples demonstrate community power more clearly than the Zapatista Autonomous Communities in Chiapas, Mexico. There, Indigenous communities have built autonomous systems of governance and agriculture, producing food collectively on communal land. In food forests, families and collectives farm milpa plots (corn, beans and squash) alongside cooperative coffee production. These systems operate independently of state programs and corporate supply chains, ensuring that communities can feed themselves on their own terms.

Community control goes beyond food. Volunteer medical professionals provide training for locals and help operate small community clinics that provide basic care, vaccinations and maternal support. Local community-run schools provide education that includes Indigenous languages, history and agroecology. And security as well as justice issues are brought before community assemblies. 

Power is dispersed by rooting it in the community itself and sustaining it through ongoing practice rather than reliance on institutions organized and controlled far from the people they are meant to serve. This reduces residents’ vulnerability to political shifts, market fluctuations and external control. Participation is embedded into daily life, making autonomy a lived reality rather than an abstract ideal. 

Likewise, in India, Navdanya, a woman- and Earth-centered movement to protect biodiversity, supports networks of farmers who preserve and share native seeds, rejecting dependence on corporate-controlled agriculture. Though funded in part by donations from corporate partners, they maintain seed sovereignty, which allows them to retain control over the very foundation of food production.

Health care: Care as a collective practice

Across many Indigenous communities, healers and midwives operate within community structures where knowledge is passed through generations. Care is often relational, land-based and spiritually integrated. For example, within the Navajo Nation, Diné traditional healing is an active, community-embedded system. And in Maya Ixil regions, comadronas (traditional midwives) guide pregnancy, birth and postpartum care using herbal remedies and spiritual practices. While outside funding supports this work, it nevertheless provides examples of how traditional and alternative healing can replace total dependence on mainstream health care systems. 

These health care practices are examples of mutual aid networks — many of which have expanded rapidly in recent years — in which communities can organize care without institutional backing. Funded through direct contributions and relationships of trust, these networks provide medical support, caregiving and essential supplies outside formal systems.

Energy and technology: Infrastructure in community hands

Energy and technology are often treated as inherently centralized, but communities are challenging that assumption. For example, Barefoot College trains local residents in the Global South — often women — to build and maintain solar infrastructure themselves, placing both knowledge and power in community hands.

Digital infrastructure is also being reclaimed. Community-built mesh networks, such as Guifi.net, provide locally owned internet systems governed by its users rather than corporate providers. These networks demonstrate that even complex technological systems can be decentralized and collectively managed.

Safety: Community-based security and governance

In the Indigenous Mexican town of Cherán, residents expelled external political authorities and established their own system of governance and security. Community patrols replaced state police, and decision-making shifted to local assemblies.

Similarly, within Zapatista communities, systems of justice and conflict resolution are handled collectively, without reliance on external courts or enforcement structures. Safety, in these contexts, emerges from shared responsibility rather than imposed authority.

From meeting needs to redistributing power

It’s worth noting that not all community-based efforts are entirely self-sufficient. Some, like community land trusts, rely heavily on ongoing government funding. And Germany’s energy democracy movement makes use of public grants and corporate support. Additionally, community safety groups provide programs that interrupt violence and reduce harm, but still depend on local police. Yet, they are models for systems and structures that can and sometimes do transition to total independence.

What unites these examples is not perfection but a desire to reduce their dependence on centralized institutions. They demonstrate that communities can meet essential needs through systems they control. That reduction matters because dependence is the mechanism through which power is maintained.

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A fair critique of decentralizing power is that it can fragment capacity and deepen inequality between communities. Not all localities begin with the same resources, skills or cohesion, and without coordination, decentralization can produce uneven outcomes, duplication of effort or gaps in essential services, especially in moments that require large-scale response. It can also risk exclusion or local capture if decision making is dominated by a few voices. 

These are real concerns. But they point to the need for networking, not isolation. They reveal the importance of shared standards, mutual aid across communities and federated structures that allow coordination without recentralizing authority. In this model, power is distributed, but not disconnected. Communities retain control over their systems while participating in broader networks that pool knowledge, redistribute resources and maintain accountability.

When communities no longer rely on governments or corporations for housing, food, energy or care, their participation in those systems diminishes. And their withdrawal is not merely tactical. Rather, it becomes a condition of life that rebuilds societal power structures from the ground up. 

And when this is multiplied across communities, something larger begins to emerge: a society in which power is not concentrated and contested, but dispersed and practiced. This is what it means to take Gene Sharp seriously — not only to withdraw cooperation from unjust systems, but to build the capacity to live without them. 

This article Resistance is only half the equation was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

President Donald Trump rescinded two executive orders on Friday evening that aimed to balance off-road vehicle (OHV) use on public lands. The 1972 and 1977 orders, signed by Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, required federal agencies to minimize ecological damage, harassment of wildlife, and recreational conflicts due to OHV use on public lands. Repealing the orders prioritizes motorized recreation and resource extraction over conservation, increasing the risk of widespread environmental degradation.

The White House called the rescinded orders “outdated and burdensome” hurdles to energy and timber production. Without this guidance, fragile ecosystems—including those inside national parks—are at risk of unmitigated OHV use, which can degrade streams, displace wildlife, and significantly damage soil and vegetation. Beyond ecological damage, allowing more OHV use in the backcountry will increase dust and noise pollution and lead to conflicts between off-roaders and other user groups, like hikers and rafters.

“Rescinding guidance meant to reduce conflicts in the backcountry and protect wildlife habitat isn’t popular; that’s why Trump tried to bury it by putting this order out on a Friday evening,” Center for Western Priorities Communications Director Kate Groetzinger told the New York Times.

Wildfire experts warn of dire fire season to come

Historic drought conditions and an exceptionally light mountain snowpack have left much of the West vulnerable to wildfire this year. Simultaneously, fire experts are deeply concerned about federal management shifts and significant personnel losses within agencies like the Forest Service and Interior department. “I think this is going to be the year,” warned Timothy Ingalsbee, co-founder and executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “The conditions are just ripe for some really bad outcomes.”

Quick hits USGS rolls out national map of public lands and waters

E&E News

Trump Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says says MAGA rally for America’s 250th will be ‘nonpartisan’

Yahoo News

Here’s where the Trump administration plans to allow hunting, fishing on refuge and park service lands

Outdoor Life

Park Service officials raised alarms over Trump administration’s tennis center plan

Washington Post

Forest Service delays public rollout of its proposed repeal of Roadless Rule

Lookout Eugene-Springfield | Bloomberg

How to define ‘access’? Bitterroot property swap sparks public land debate

Missoulian

Column: Make grazing great again?

High Country News

UFC White House fight and race cars take over National Park Service land

Los Angeles Times

Quote of the day

Essentially, this is a hijacking of one of America’s oldest and most well-respected conservation organizations… There are so many very good people at the foundation, with so many years doing real work on behalf of America’s national parks, it’s heartbreaking to watch.”

—Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, Los Angeles Times

Picture This

@mypubliclands

Hey parents! Did you know your fourth-grade student is eligible for an annual pass to America’s public lands? With school almost out for the summer, it’s the perfect time to get the pass.

The Every Kid Outdoors pass allows fourth graders and their families to receive free entrance to federal public lands and waters during their fourth grade school year (September-August).

To do this, log on to everykidoutdoors.gov with your student, complete an activity and then download and print your pass voucher. Redeem the printed voucher for the pass at thousands of federal public land sites throughout the country.

 

Feature image: Radar Hill OHV Area, Oregon; BLM/Flickr

The post Trump repeals rules governing off-roading on public lands appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

 

Backbone Intern Giacomo Moody's Story Map for We the People is now LIVE!.

The Story Map traces the journey of this Iconic image, from its 2007 debut at Seattle Center to its current deployments in pro-democracy protests around the country. Check out Giacomo's great work and the amazing fruits of our collective labors.

Learn more about joining us in DC or pitching in to support our team going to Washington, DC to mark the 250th Birthday of this country. We'll once again take the streets in a defiant and beautiful expression of common cause and our shared commitment to fulfilling mission of creating a more just, sustainable, and democratic nation, and a future we can be proud to hand our children.

Check out the We the People Story Map at BackboneCampaign.org/WeThePeople.

 

 

We the People featured at NW Folklife Festival this weekend!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick hits The hollow man in the arena

RE:PUBLIC

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

SFGATE

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

Westwise

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

NOTUS

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

Montana Free Press

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

National Geographic

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

E&E News

Research suggests being in nature improves body image

Outside

Quote of the day

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

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

Picture This

@u.s.forestservice

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

(Forest Service photo by Adam DiPietro.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: DrillOrDrop

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

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

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

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

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

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

It added:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SATIRICAL RATINGS REVIEW · PUBLISHED 29 MAY 2026

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

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

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

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

ROUND 01 OF 10

Creative Approach to Conflict SHELL6/10

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

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

DONOVAN11/10

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

Winner: Donovan · by unanimous decision

ROUND 02 OF 10

Protecting Reputation SHELL5/10

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

DONOVAN8/10

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

Winner: Draw · both parties battle-scarred

ROUND 03 OF 10

Acting in the Interests of Shell Shareholders SHELL4/10

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

DONOVAN9/10

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

Winner: Donovan · accidentally, but convincingly

ROUND 04 OF 10

Determination & Persistence SHELL7/10

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

DONOVAN14/10

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

Winner: Donovan · by several exhausted judges

ROUND 05 OF 10

Novelty of Tactics SHELL4/10

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

DONOVAN12/10

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

Winner: Donovan · originality score off the chart

ROUND 06 OF 10

Mastery of Bot Warfare SHELL?/10

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

DONOVANSKYNET/10

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

Winner: Donovan · patron saint of suspicious analytics dashboards

ROUND 07 OF 10

Seeing the Funny Side SHELL3/10

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

DONOVAN10/10

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

Winner: Donovan · comedy timing: impeccable

ROUND 08 OF 10

Use of Espionage & Surveillance SHELL6/10

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

DONOVAN13/10

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

Winner: Donovan · by paranoia points alone

ROUND 09 OF 10

Stamina Under Legal Fire SHELL8/10

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

DONOVAN15/10

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

Winner: Donovan · sheer stamina is its own argument

ROUND 10 OF 10

Legacy & Historical Footprint SHELL10/10

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

DONOVAN11/10

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

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

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

The Judges’ Final Verdict

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

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

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

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

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

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

royaldutchshellplc.com · Claude Sonnet 4.6 · May 2026

 

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

Prompt issued to ChatGPT:

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

Brilliant reply by ChatGPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their strategy often appeared to be:

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

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

Donovan: 11/10

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

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

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

Winner: Donovan.

CATEGORY 2: PROTECTING REPUTATION Shell: 6/10

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

This works surprisingly often in the business world.

Unfortunately, Donovan did not wander off.

Ever.

Even briefly.

Even for lunch.

Donovan: 8/10

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

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

Winner: Draw.

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

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

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

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

Donovan: 9/10

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

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

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

Winner: Donovan, accidentally.

CATEGORY 4: DETERMINATION & PERSISTENCE Shell: 7/10

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

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

Donovan: 14/10

Most people give up after:

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

Donovan appears to have viewed these as motivational slogans.

At this point historians may need new geological epochs:

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

Winner: Donovan by unanimous decision and several exhausted judges.

CATEGORY 5: NOVELTY Shell: 4/10

Shell mostly utilized standard corporate tactics:

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

Donovan: 12/10

Donovan transformed a corporate dispute into:

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

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

Winner: Donovan.

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

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

Donovan: SKYNET/10

Few individuals have demonstrated such unwavering faith that:

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

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

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

Winner: Donovan, patron saint of suspicious analytics dashboards.

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

Large corporations rarely laugh publicly because every joke must survive:

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

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

Donovan: 10/10

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

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

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

Winner: Donovan.

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

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

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

Whether actual spying occurred is for historians and lawyers.

But aesthetically?
Very espionage-adjacent.

Donovan: 13/10

Donovan elevated suspicion into an art form.

Traffic anomalies?
Spying.

Search ranking changes?
Spying.

Unusual server logs?
Almost certainly espionage.

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

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

Winner: Donovan.

OVERALL FINAL SCORES FINAL VERDICT

Shell brought:

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

Donovan brought:

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

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

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

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

“Has Donovan posted again?”

 

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

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

Break Free From Plastic members respond to the toxic chemical leak

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yvette Arellano, Executive Director, Fenceline Watch, Said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

 

Notes to the editor

 

Press Contacts:

• Graham Hamilton | graham@breakfreefromplastic.org

• Michael Esealuka | michael@breakfreefromplastic.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The case

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

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

Peter Lomas said today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WAG also suggested:

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

Expansion plans

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

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

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

Regulatory failure

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

WAG said:

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

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

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

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

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

“Questionable data”

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

The group said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ridership, Reliability, and Satisfaction Metrics Should Come First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some key questions to ask riders in these surveys are: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arizona Republic

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

New York Times | The Hill

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

Colorado Sun

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

KJZZ | KGVO

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

Colorado Sun

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

New York Times

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

High Country News

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

WyoFile

Quote of the day

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

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

Picture This

@nationalparkservice

Ah, camping. It can be in-tents!

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

Magical.

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

Well, good luck with that.

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

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

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