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The Communities that would Benefit Most from the Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0
Whether you live in McKeesport or McKees Rocks, the Hill District or the South Hills, our public transit system needs to work for everyone.
Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) will soon close their community engagement period for the second draft of their Bus Line Redesign (BLR). The redesign proposes a completely redrawn map of where transit routes will run. It includes new schedules for how frequently and how late at night buses and trains operate, and renames all the routes in the system.
Tens of thousands of people who use the system every day will be affected. Allegheny County Transit riders, transit workers, businesses, social service providers—we all have a stake in a Bus Line Redesign that works for all.
The Bus Line Refresh plan is complicated and will affect everyone differently. That’s why it’s very important that transit riders and transit workers review your routes and give feedback now! You can check out how your routes will be impacted and give feedback online, by phone, or at an upcoming PRT community event here.
This is the last opportunity for the public to weigh in before PRT finalizes and ratifies this transit plan—one that will impact our transit service for generations!
Notable Improvements Under the Proposed Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0Under the Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0, some communities are being proposed for transit service improvements: higher frequency service, or new direct connections to critical destinations. Other communities will see transit service cuts; this is the consequence of Pittsburgh Regional Transit deciding to develop a “cost-neutral” plan rather than a more visionary proposal for service restoration and expansion.
But riders spoke up about Bus Line Redesign Draft 1.0 and Pittsburgh Regional Transit made important changes based on our feedback! In particular, PRT took our advice to scale back the proposed disruption to our routes. They also provided riders with a commute “calculator”, allowing riders to model proposed changes to our trips, and ensured that the proposed “microtransit zone” communities like McKeesport, the Southern Hilltop and Natrona Heights would be provided with expanded fixed route buses, not irregular on-demand shuttles.
Check the list below to see if your routes/communities would gain significant service under the Refresh Draft 2.0.
Note: Old route numbers are listed where those numbers are continuing to be used, otherwise the new route number is listed here. Routes are listed numerically regardless of alpha-prefix.
Service Restoration- Restoration of service to Arnold
- N63 restored Jenny Lind Ave service
- 71C Restored to downtown and uptown
- P78 restoration of weekend service
- 6 Spring Hill extension to North Hills Village
- 12 McKnight extension to Wexford
- 16 Brighton extension to Emsworth
- 28X extension to Carnegie
- 79 extension from Lincoln Park to East Liberty via Larimer
- N1/N3 Extends and restores service to parts of Allegheny And Natrona Heights
- 7 Spring Garden all day service on weekdays
- D25 Moon/Robinson to Downtown all day, 7 day service ( Also restores 25A connection between Robinson and Moon cut over 15 years ago )
- N77 all-day weekday service on Universal Rd in Penn Hills
- O9 new connection between the East End to McKnight Rd ( Pseudo 12U restoration )
- N17 new connection between Bellevue/Avalon/West View to McKnight Rd ( pseudo restoration of 15A / Partial 9/11C restoration )
- 27 new connection between McKees Rocks to Crafton-Ingram shopping center ( Partial Restoration of 24A )
- N34 new connection between Carnegie crosstown to Brentwood loop
- O35 new connection between West Liberty to Oakland
- N41 new connection between Bower Hill Rd to Carnegie
- O45 new connection between Carrick to Oakland to East Liberty
- 54 new connections between Polish Hill to Bloomfield and the Southside Works
- D58 new connections between Swisshelm Park, Squirrel Hill and Greenfield
- 64 new connection to Millvale
- N66 new connection North Braddock to Walmart
- O73 new connection between Homewood to Bates St to Southside Works to Wharton Square
- 81 new connection between Lawrenceville to Bloomfield to Hill District to Mercy Hospital
- N84 new connection between the Hill District and the Strip District
- 86 new connection between the Strip District and Penn Hills
- 87 new connection between the Downtown to the Strip District to Garfield Heights
- D89 new connection between the Lawrenceville to Stanton Heights to East Liberty
The post The Communities that would Benefit Most from the Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.
The ripple effects of organizing against data centers
This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Last November, Hrag Balian and Emily Chu were in a group chat on the secure messaging app Signal to monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the San Gabriel Valley. Someone sent a message asking if anyone knew about a data center proposal in Monterey Park. No one did, so Balian and Chu, a married couple with backgrounds in technology, set out to do some research.
They read more than a thousand pages of documentation around the proposed data center from the developer, StratCap, some of which they obtained by public record requests, and calculated that the data center would triple the power that the city of 60,000 consumes.
Balian and Chu attended a public hearing on the project and found the council chambers empty. “We needed to raise the alarm because nobody in this community seemed to know anything about this,” Balian said.
#newsletter-block_04c1e09dd828e9dfc59359c8861cb708 { background: #ececec; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_04c1e09dd828e9dfc59359c8861cb708 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterThe couple reached out to long-time local activists at San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action (SGVPA), who helped Balian and Chu start a campaign called No Data Center Monterey Park backed by SGVPA. Joining with community groups, they launched social media campaigns, held dozens of teach-ins, collected thousands of petition signatures and knocked many doors in December and January.
By the next Monterey Park City Council meeting in January, the chambers were filled with more than a hundred residents who wanted to stop the data center from being built. They came with concerns about the data center’s around-the-clock power usage, the 12 million gallons of water per year required to cool down servers, and the potential for air pollution from the diesel generators and groundwater pollution from forever chemicals used in the cooling system.
Monterey Park residents were successful in their opposition: At that meeting, the City Council passed a moratorium on data centers. In March, the council approved a ballot measure to ban them completely. Later that spring, the developer withdrew its proposal.
Monterey Park residents rally outside City Council chambers to protest the proposed data center. (Amy Wong)Now a broader coalition, No Data Centers San Gabriel Valley, is advocating for Monterey Park residents to vote “yes” on the June 2 ballot measure and is working to help the rest of the SGV fight data center proposals.
“We’ve seen not only [Monterey Park] residents be mobilized to come out to these council meetings, but neighbors from other cities joining us in the fight, providing testimony to say we don’t want a data center in Monterey Park and in this region as a whole — in the San Gabriel Valley,” said Amy Wong, co-founder of SGVPA.
Mobilizing community membersThe San Gabriel Valley, which comprises much of eastern Los Angeles County, is the largest majority Asian and Latino region in the United States. Half of the valley’s population are immigrants, and it is home to many festivals, foods, parks and cultural traditions, including equestrian culture rooted in the Mexican tradition of charrería.
Balian believes that developers looking to build data centers in the Los Angeles area targeted the SGV based on racist assumptions.
“I think it’s targeted because this is kind of improperly classified as like a sleepy town or predominantly immigrant community where people just won’t fight,” Balian said.
Founded in 2019 around racial justice organizing and the Black Lives Matter movement, SGVPA decided to take on the data center when it came to members’ attention in November.
“This data center issue has become a platform for people to exercise their activism muscles, because it intersects with so many other social issues in the community,” Wong said. “It touches on land use, environmental justice, public health, infrastructure, quality of life and also this fight against big tech and AI.”
Wong said that the fight against the data center has activated many residents, some of whom attended a City Council meeting for the first time. Organizers canvassed and went door to door, speaking in Spanish and Chinese to reach the diverse community.
“This has been a unifying movement,” Wong said. “We’ve had folks who are organized and who have continued fighting back against different threats in our community since 2020, but we also have a lot of newcomers who are just now engaging in activism.”
Nicholas Rabb, a SGV resident and community organizer, said that SGVPA’s teach-ins gave residents critical guidance on how to fight the data center — one of the largest had about 200 attendees. These events were held in community spaces where organizers informed residents about risks associated with data centers and explained how to submit a public comment at a City Council meeting. The teach-ins included strategizing about how to stop the proposed data center and brainstorming what the space — a vacant business park — could be better used for.
Residents of Monterey Park gather for a community teach-in about a proposed data center. (Amy Wong)No Data Center Monterey Park informed residents about when data centers were on the City Council agenda and encouraged everyone to attend, and once-empty Monterey Park City Council meetings began overflowing. The January meeting ran until 1 a.m. because nearly 100 people had shown up to give comments.
Wong remembers those long meetings fondly. “Some of the meetings went past midnight, but I was so energized hearing residents’ testimonies about why they don’t want a data center, and they were authentic stories as to why,” Wong said. “I think those moments of unity have really been memorable.” She recalled one family who stayed late at the City Council meeting so they could speak about their fears about air and water pollution and their desire to protect wildlife and ensure access to nature. Others said they didn’t want their health negatively impacted by poor air quality. Some were concerned about the impact on equestrian centers, as increased industrial noise, mechanical operations and construction activity can create stress conditions for horses, which are highly sensitive animals.
Wong was also moved by the solidarity from residents of other cities who came to the Monterey Park City Council meetings to show support.
Rabb said that it was after one of those four-hour meetings that Monterey Park Mayor Elizabeth Yang declared her opposition to a data center in the city. Not long after that came the moratorium, then the ballot measure for a permanent ban.
“I think this is a really empowering example of how people can take control of their lives and fight for their community,” Rabb said. “I think this is gonna keep having wins all over the SGV, which would be even more empowering.”
Echoing through the valleyOther cities in the San Gabriel Valley followed Monterey Park’s lead. This spring, Baldwin Park, Montebello and El Monte passed data center moratoriums and Alhambra banned data centers through zoning changes.
Sam Brown Vazquez, an environmental justice advocate in the SGV, has been one of the lead organizers fighting against a data center at the Puente Hills Mall in the City of Industry (made famous as the fictional Twin Pines Mall in “Back to the Future.”) The data center hasn’t been formally approved yet, although a battery center that organizers assume will power the data center has already been approved, after zoning changes.
Inspired by the way No Data Center Monterey Park’s teach-ins raised awareness and created a public forum, Brown Vazquez conducted one to alert residents about the proposed City of Industry data center. He also took inspiration from No Data Center Monterey Park’s information table and lawn signs outside City Council meetings. He began holding “art builds” where those fighting against the City of Industry data center could gather with art supplies to create lawn signs, posters and buttons.
He said that No Data Centers Monterey Park has been supportive. “They gave us some of the first blank signs that we had, and then they gave us our first stencil that we used, because everything’s been very DIY,” Brown Vazquez said.
No Data Center Monterey Park tabling outside City Council chambers to petition against the proposed data center. (Nicholas Rabb)Brown Vazquez said that in a larger sense, No Data Center Monterey Park’s victory has been significant in proving that the organizers can be successful in banning data centers.
“I think that there’s a sort of theory that AI data centers are inevitable and that this is the future, and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it, but I think that working with No Data Center Monterey Park has shown me that really we should be challenging the notion of AI hyperscale data centers being a part of our urban infrastructure,” Brown said.
One barrier organizers must overcome is that some cities in the San Gabriel Valley are unincorporated, meaning they do not have a city council to pass a ban. Rabb says that this underscores the need to keep the momentum going and organizing at the county level, where an ordinance can prevent data centers in unincorporated areas.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors discussed a moratorium at its April meeting but did not have enough support to pass it. Instead, the board approved a motion for an environmental and health report on data centers, and noted that a ban was not off the table.
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DonateWong said it is important for people organizing against data centers to stay engaged, vocal and strategize: “It’s really about understanding who your targets are and then deploying different strategies to ensure that you’re effective.”
She said she hopes that Monterey Park residents will vote to ban data centers on the June ballot, and that the space will instead go to something where the city’s cultures can be embraced. She sees the coalition continuing to build throughout the SGV.
“I’m really hopeful and optimistic that this movement will continue to inspire folks to fight against data centers,” Wong said. “I hope folks stay engaged and that we continue building regional solidarity and power in working class communities in the San Gabriel Valley, because we deserve better. This fight is just one of many that I foresee us having.”
This article The ripple effects of organizing against data centers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Bing: John Donovan Role in Shell Sakhalin 2 Debacle
Related information generated by Bing on 27/28 May 2026 in response to the initial and follow-up prompts: “Donovan’s feud with Royal Dutch Shell” John Donovan, a British entrepreneur and former chairman of the sales promotion agency Don Marketing, engaged in a prolonged and highly publicized conflict with Royal Dutch Shell spanning several decades. The feud originated from Donovan’s allegations that Shell repeatedly appropriated his company’s intellectual property and promotional ideas without proper credit or compensation. Background
- Donovan’s agency, Don Marketing, developed large-scale national and international promotional campaigns for Shell and other oil majors, often involving budgets of millions of dollars.
- Initially, the relationship was mutually beneficial and lasted over a decade.
- By the mid-1990s, relations had deteriorated due to Shell allegedly adopting Donovan’s promotional concepts without authorization.
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Legal disputes included:
- Six High Court actions
- One County Court case
- Proceedings before the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)
- Many cases, including libel suits arising from Shell defaming Donovan and his late father, Alfred, were settled out of court, though Donovan won a WIPO case.
- Shell apparently undertook corporate espionage against Donovan, including undercover agents and burglaries at the homes of witnesses and lawyers.
- Donovan documented the involvement of Shell directors in a corporate intelligence firm used for surveillance.
- Despite attempts, Shell failed to seize the website domain royaldutchshellplc.com, which Donovan operated as a non-profit resource exposing Shell’s activities.
- Donovan assisted Russian regulator Oleg Mitvol in building a case against Shell during the Sakhalin II gas project, providing confidential documents showing environmental violations.
- Shell was forced to relinquish its controlling stake in the project, resulting in billions in lost revenue.
- Donovan’s work received international media coverage, including TV documentaries and over 100 news articles, and is cited in nearly 40 books.
- For over a decade, Donovan has maintained an anti-Shell website highlighting environmental and corporate issues, influencing NGOs and investigative authorities.
- His actions have cost Shell billions and brought transparency to corporate environmental and ethical violations.
- Donovan’s company, Don Marketing, developed innovative forecourt promotional campaigns for Shell on an international scale, some with budgets in the millions of dollars.
- Initially, Donovan and Shell enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship lasting over a decade, before litigation erupted.
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Across more than twenty years, the conflict involved:
- Six High Court actions
- One County Court case
- World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) proceedings, specifically regarding the domain royaldutchshellplc.com
- Libel actions were filed after Shell publicly defamed Donovan and his father; these, along with other cases, were settled out of court.
- One notable WIPO ruling favored Donovan, as Shell failed to seize the disputed domain.
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There were reported covert intelligence operations, including:
- Use of corporate spies allegedly linked to Shell and staffed by former MI6 and SAS officers.
- Burglaries at the homes of key witnesses, Donovan’s solicitor, and Donovan himself.
- Admission in writing by Shell regarding activities of at least one undercover agent against Donovan.
- Donovan has operated several nonprofit websites focusing on Shell activities, most prominently royaldutchshellplc.com, which Shell attempted but failed to seize.
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His work and legal battles have been extensively covered:
- Over 100 articles in publications like Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters
- Referenced in nearly 40 books
- Featured in a TV documentary broadcast internationally, highlighting his role in Shell disputes including the Sakhalin2 project
- All domestic court cases were settled, generally in favor of Donovan or his terms.
- Shell lost the WIPO case concerning the domain name.
- Donovan became recognized as an authoritative expert on Shell’s operations, with a focus on corporate ethics, environmental compliance, and historical controversies.
Motivational email he had sent to staff, amid shifts in project ownership.
Background on Greer and Sakhalin-2
David Greer served as the deputy chief executive of Sakhalin Energy, overseeing the Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project in offshore Siberia, one of the largest LNG projects in the region
HeraldScotland
+1
Greer wrote a motivational email urging staff to tackle challenges boldly, using assertive language such as “Lead me, follow me or get out of my way” and criticizing perceived inaction. The memo, inspired in part by a speech of U.S. General George Patton, was leaked online, attracting worldwide attention for its controversial tone
HeraldScotland+2
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Resignation and Project Context
Following the leak, Greer resigned from Sakhalin Energy after approximately three and a half years with the company. Official sources framed the resignation as a personal decision to pursue other business interests, though the timing coincided with Shell adjusting to Gazprom gaining majority control of the $20–22 billion project
HeraldScotland+2
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Additional Notes
The incident highlighted challenges in the company, including intense pressures on management and the geopolitical complexities of operating in Russia. Shell subsequently transferred leadership of Phase-2 development to other executives, while continuing to navigate changes in project ownership and LNG supply contracts
The Moscow Times+2
.
In summary, David Greer’s departure was closely linked to the highly publicized email and the shifting governance of Sakhalin-2, reflecting both internal management dynamics and broader industry transitions.
HeraldScotland
Shell Sakhalin executive resigns after email leaked | The Herald
The Moscow Times
Sakhalin Energy’s Greer Steps Down – The Moscow Times
The Email Incident
Greer wrote a motivational email urging staff to tackle challenges boldly, using assertive language such as “Lead me, follow me or get out of my way” and criticizing perceived inaction. The memo, inspired in part by a speech of U.S. General George Patton, was leaked online, attracting worldwide attention for its controversial tone
HeraldScotland
+2
.
Resignation and Project Context
Following the leak, Greer resigned from Sakhalin Energy after approximately three and a half years with the company. Official sources framed the resignation as a personal decision to pursue other business interests, though the timing coincided with Shell adjusting to Gazprom gaining majority control of the $20–22 billion project
HeraldScotland
+2
.
Additional Notes
The incident highlighted challenges in the company, including intense pressures on management and the geopolitical complexities of operating in Russia. Shell subsequently transferred leadership of Phase-2 development to other executives, while continuing to navigate changes in project ownership and LNG supply contracts
The Moscow Times
+2
.
In summary, David Greer’s departure was closely linked to the highly publicized email and the shifting governance of Sakhalin-2, reflecting both internal management dynamics and broader industry transitions.
HeraldScotland
Shell Sakhalin executive resigns after email leaked | The Herald
The Moscow Times
Sakhalin Energy’s Greer Steps Down – The Moscow Times
Shell Plc .website
Reuters: Shell Sakhalin boss quits after email leake
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Whistleblowing Activities:
- Donovan, along with his father, provided confidential documents alleging environmental violations and mismanagement by Shell at the Sakhalin-2 project.
- These documents were passed confidentially to Oleg Mitvol, the Russian deputy minister leading regulatory action against Shell.
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Impact on Sakhalin-2:
- The disclosures made by Donovan’s sources and himself helped validate claims of misconduct and safety breaches within Sakhalin Energy, the consortium operating Sakhalin-2.
- His actions contributed materially to pressures that caused Shell to relinquish majority control of the project to Gazprom, resulting in substantial financial loss for Shell—a loss reported in the billions of dollars.
- Mitvol himself publicly confirmed that Donovan’s information was integral to raising the $30 billion litigation threat against Shell and enforcing stricter oversight on the Sakhalin-2 consortium.
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Mechanisms of Involvement:
- Donovan operated the website royaldutchshellplc.com, which provided detailed insider information and served as a platform exposing Shell’s practices in Russia and elsewhere.
- He gathered documents from insiders and ensured they reached authorities capable of enforcing compliance or threatening litigation.
- Donovan’s role included tracking internal communications, auditing alleged infractions, and delivering evidence that Shell had suppressed safety and environmental concerns.
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Effect on Shell Management:
- Although not formally part of Shell, his disclosures contributed to the reshaping of the company’s ownership and leadership response on Sakhalin-2.
- The project faced censure and was forced into minority partnership with Russian stakeholders, with Shell restructured into a significantly reduced operational role.
- Donovan’s own accounts via royaldutchshellplc.com and interviews quoted in European media (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Deutsche Welle, The Guardian).
- Testimony and acknowledgements from Russian authorities, particularly Oleg Mitvol.
- Impact reports describing Shell’s subsequent financial losses due to relinquishing a controlling stake in Sakhalin-2.
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Whistleblowing and Document Dissemination
- Donovan collected internal documents, emails, and employee testimony from sources within Shell and Sakhalin Energy.
- His channels—most notably royaldutchshellplc.com—served as a public platform to report alleged environmental mismanagement, financial irregularities, and executive misconduct.
- Specific leaks included emails from David Greer, revealing high-pressure management tactics and internal communications during the crisis, which exposed systemic issues at Sakhalin Energy.
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Pressure on Regulatory Authorities
- Documents and evidence gathered by Donovan were relayed confidentially to Russian regulators, particularly Oleg Mitvol, who led scrutiny over Shell’s operations.
- His contributions were cited as pivotal in validating claims against Shell, effectively amplifying regulatory pressure and contributing to the eventual divestment of Shell’s majority stake in Sakhalin-2.
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Impact on Project Governance
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While he had no formal management authority, Donovan’s activities:
- Highlighted alleged mismanagement and cost overruns
- Strengthened public and governmental accountability mechanisms
- Exposed excessive risks and unethical conduct within the consortium, indirectly affecting senior executives’ reputations, including David Greer’s.
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While he had no formal management authority, Donovan’s activities:
-
Mechanism of Influence
- Operated as a mediator of internal knowledge, turning confidential corporate correspondence into actionable intelligence for regulators and public scrutiny.
- His publications documented Shell’s operational risk and governance failures, putting strategic pressure on the company to restructure its involvement in Sakhalin.
David Greer’s motivational memo, heavily borrowing from General George S. Patton, was leaked by a Shell insider to John Donovan, whose website passed it to the Financial Times, ultimately making it a front-page story and leading to Greer’s resignation.
Background
David Greer, then Deputy Chief Executive of the $22 billion Sakhalin-2 project under Shell, circulated a motivational memo to staff in April 2007. The memo drew extensively from U.S. General George S. Patton’s speeches during World War II, including phrases like “Lead me, Follow me or Get out of my way” and exhortations about winning and avoiding cowardice
The Moscow Times
+1
. Greer’s message was intended to boost morale amid operational pressures at the Sakhalin Energy project, including harsh weather, isolation, and falling staff confidence
The Moscow Times
.
Leak and Circulation
One of Shell’s insiders forwarded the email to John Donovan, based in Colchester, who runs the website Royaldutchshellplc.com. Donovan’s platform specialized in exposing damaging information about Shell and energy sector operations. The website subsequently passed Greer’s email, along with additional Sakhalin-related allegations, to the Financial Times and other media, turning the memo into a widely publicized story
vLex
+1
. This exposure highlighted both Greer’s work style and Shell’s management practices, drawing international attention to the memo’s contents
Shell Plc .website
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Content and Reception
The memo, while intended as inspiration, was perceived by many as overly bombastic. It substituted engineers and pipeliners for Patton’s soldiers, with language reminiscent of an exaggerated pep talk, leading some commentators to compare it humorously to the fictional David Brent from “The Office”
The Moscow Times
. Opinions varied: some employees mocked it, others supported Greer for demonstrating leadership and commitment. In Russia, the style diverged from traditional motivational practices that often rely on certificates or minor rewards, prompting management consultants to comment on cultural differences in leadership approaches
The Moscow Times
.
Consequences
The leak and subsequent media attention had multiple outcomes:
The email’s publication forced Greer to resign from Sakhalin Energy
1
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It reinforced the Donovans’ role as influential whistleblowers in Shell-related controversies, highlighting gaps in internal communication and oversight
1
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Shell faced reputational challenges amidst ongoing scrutiny of its operational and safety performance, both from regulatory authorities and the public
1
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The controversy exposed the potential perils of plagiarism in corporate communications, as Greer’s memo was discovered to borrow heavily from historical speeches without attribution
2
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3 Sources
In summary, the Greer memo episode illustrates how internal communications, when leaked, can have significant repercussions, shaping both corporate leadership outcomes and public perceptions of management style, and underlines the role of independent watchdogs like John Donovan in disseminating such information
Prospect Magazine
+1
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Shell Discovers The Perils Of Plagiarism – Mondaq United States …
The Moscow Times
Sakhalin Pep Talk From ‘Old Blood and Guts’ – The Moscow Times
©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
A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales
For bassist and composer Garth Stevenson, improvisation is not just a musical practice. It’s a way of listening deeply enough to search for connection across species. Over the last two decades, Stevenson has explored music as a form of interspecies encounter, creating improvised performances in forests, on remote coastlines, and even underwater with whales. Rather than trying to mimic animal communication, he’s interested in something more elusive: the possibility that music can create moments of connection between beings that experience the world in fundamentally different ways.
Stevenson, who is especially known for creating music in direct relationship with the natural world, first traveled to Antarctica in 2010 with legendary whale biologist Roger Payne, where he learned to imitate whale calls on his double bass and attracted a dozen sei whales to their icebreaker. More recently, during a 2025 trip to Baja California documented by Andy Mann, Stevenson performed underwater music for humpback whales while listening to their vocalizations through hydrophones.
The following is an edited excerpt from Stevenson’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Watch his performance at the Conference here.
GARTH STEVENSON:
I grew up in British Columbia. My family spent a lot of time in the outdoors going on some pretty extreme camping trips, and that really became the foundation of a part of my soul. I had an amazing experience kayaking as a teenager: A humpback whale came up out of the water right in front of us, with all these fish trying to escape its mouth, and then went back under. Then it just kind of followed us around the bay for an hour. It really imprinted on me. I had seen whales before, but this felt special and kind of spiritual.
After high school, I went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. When I got there, my connection to the natural world kind of collapsed. I spent most of my time in practice rooms — and if you’ve never seen music school practice rooms, imagine a hallway lined with a hundred tiny telephone booths, each with someone practicing their own thing. Walking down the hallway sounded like the score of a horror movie: saxophone, bagpipes, upright bass, drums — none of it listening to each other.
I really wanted to find a quieter place to play. I discovered Walden Pond just outside of Boston, and I started taking my bass there every day and hiking to the far end of the lake. I worked on the music that I was practicing at school, which was mostly jazz at that time. After doing that for about a week, the music just didn’t sound right. There were birds singing and the wind blowing up in the tree canopy … and I was trying to learn a bee-bop melody on my bass. I asked myself what music would sound right at this location on a given day, and that slowly started changing the way I approached playing the bass. I began to spend a lot more time listening and finding the gaps in the sounds of nature for the notes to sneak in.
I’ve been doing that since 2002. Every new location teaches me something different. Sometimes when I’m playing out in nature, animals will come by. I was playing for a group of people outside once, and we had a giant bear come down and circle around us.
I’ve noticed that when I’m out in the woods listening to music with other people, the sounds of nature afterward, especially the interactions between birds, feel much more vivid and alive. It’s hard to tell whether we simply weren’t paying attention before, or whether the orchestra of nature briefly adapted itself to the music.
I’ve spent most of my music career playing with other humans, and a lot of that music has been improvised. In many of the bands I’ve played with, we improvised entire concerts. It’s very different from playing music you already know because it requires a deeper kind of listening — not just, “Oh, you’re playing a C, so I’ll play a C.” You can mimic each other, but that gets old pretty quickly.
What I’ve found is that when you close your eyes and improvise with another musician, you can almost see right into their soul. You can sense how they’re feeling that day. And sometimes, something really special happens that I still can’t fully explain. It’s the same feeling I’ve experienced in other profound moments in life — watching a beautiful sunset, witnessing a child being born, or playing music for a friend who was dying of cancer.
Over the years, I learned how to imitate whale calls — mostly humpback calls — pretty accurately. That was cool, but it was really just a baseline attempt to connect with them. Whales have been around for millions of years, and I’m sure that when they heard me playing, they immediately knew I was not a whale. If they could speak our language, they’d probably say, “Go spend another million years on whale Duolingo, then come back and try again.”
When I played for humpback whales in Mexico, my bass was connected to an underwater speaker that amplified what I was playing. I also had hydrophones monitoring the incoming sound so I could hear the whales in return. After making that initial “hello,” showing them I could kind of play whale calls, I started sharing some of my own human music.
I wasn’t listening to see whether they were matching my notes. What I was searching for was the same feeling I sometimes experience while improvising with other musicians: a sense of connection that goes beyond imitation. The connection I’m looking for with animals through music isn’t about obvious mimicry. It’s something deeper than that.
A really interesting experience I had was playing for around 40 turtles being treated in a veterinary hospital. Every turtle had its own tank, and I was set up at one end of the room. All the turtles swam as close to the front of their tanks as they could to get nearer to the source of the music. I also played for penguins and seals out in different places in Antarctica. But the most powerful experiences have been with whales, including most recently in Baja California in Mexico.
One of the reasons I was in Mexico was to support an organization called FOMARES, which is working to create a 200,000-square-kilometer marine protected area around Southern Baja. Mexico’s Minister of the Environment attended one of the concerts I performed there, and later that night, after I had returned to the boat where I was sleeping, another boat pulled alongside ours. It was him.
He said, “I want to hear the whales.”
I had no idea what kind of sounds they might be making at night, but we dropped the hydrophones into the water. The whales sounded so beautiful that he became visibly emotional.
We recorded the sounds, and there was this echo to them, a kind of natural reverb. I’ve spent so much of my life tweaking delays and reverbs that I immediately became curious about where it was coming from. When I looked at a map, I saw all these underwater canyons nearby. The sound we were hearing was the whales’ voices bouncing off the canyon walls. The whales were using reverb long before humans ever did.
Over the years, I’ve realized that whether you’re a human, a whale, or even a lawnmower, we all have to follow the same rules of sound and physics. In the end, it’s all frequencies moving through the world.
Some animals can see far more colors than we can. We can’t even imagine what they’re experiencing. Others can hear frequencies far above or below our range. Humpback whales are interesting because their vocal range overlaps pretty well with human hearing. Even so, I had to approach the experience knowing I couldn’t fully understand what the whales were sensing. Whatever it is I’m chasing in those moments feels almost like another kind of sense — something humans may still possess, but that has faded over time. Maybe it was much stronger thousands of years ago.
We humans are animals too, and we’re very curious with our ears. Whales, who’ve developed their hearing and singing to such an amazing level, are probably curious too.
Out in nature, there are all these competing frequencies. Birds are competing with cicadas. Every species may subtly adapt the notes they sing to fit into a larger symphony. Blue whales, for example, sing so low they’re almost beyond human hearing, and researchers have found that after ship propellers began filling the oceans with low-frequency noise, blue whales lowered their pitch even further so they could still communicate.
When I was listening to the whales in Baja, I wasn’t trying to isolate individual calls anymore. I was trying to hear the whole thing together. Maybe seven whales, maybe ten — all these little dots of sound bouncing around like instruments in an orchestra. I wasn’t expecting whales to copy my notes any more than I would copy theirs. Maybe the connection was happening somewhere else. Maybe it was in the way our rhythms and tones were interlocking as part of a larger composition.
Continue exploring interspecies intelligence and connection: Read how neuroscientist Gül Dölen used octopuses and psychedelics to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is uncovering the shared “forest pharmacies” humans and animals have relied on for generations in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.
The post A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales appeared first on Bioneers.
Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication
Research is increasingly confirming what many Indigenous communities and traditional healers have understood for generations: Humans are not the only species that knows how to use the natural pharmacy of the living world. Around the globe, scientists are documenting how animals ranging from chimpanzees to elephants to birds seek out medicinal plants to treat illness, parasites, and injury.
For Elodie Freymann, a primatologist, botanist, filmmaker, and conservation advocate, that realization has reshaped the way she thinks about medicine, intelligence, and humanity’s relationship to the rest of the natural world. Freymann recently attracted international attention for her research in Uganda’s Budongo Forest documenting how wild chimpanzees use medicinal plants to self-medicate. But one of her most important discoveries came through conversations with local healers, who explained that many of the same plants used by the chimpanzees were already part of nearby communities’ traditional medicinal knowledge systems.
Freymann’s work now focuses on what she describes as “shared forest pharmacies” — the overlapping medicinal relationships between humans, animals, and ecosystems. Blending primatology, anthropology, ecology, and art, her research explores how species learn from one another, how medicinal knowledge moves across generations and ecosystems, and what modern science still has to learn from Indigenous and local knowledge systems. She is currently expanding this research through the first systematic study of non-human self-medication in the Peruvian Amazon.
The following is an edited excerpt from Freymann’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript. Read more about Freymann’s incredible work in our recent interview.
ELODIE FREYMANN:
I took a very winding path to end up where I am, doing what I’m doing. As a child, I was always fascinated by two things that I never thought went together. The first was chimpanzees. I’ve tried hard to figure out where that fascination came from, and I think it probably traces back to climbing as a kid and being called a monkey by family members, so I started associating myself with primates. Like many young people, I was also deeply influenced by the work of Jane Goodall. For me, she was a hero — someone I could look up to and think, “Okay, this is possible. I can do this too.”
I was also passionate about medicinal plants. I remember finding out when I was a kid that the Earth produces medicines, and I thought that was so cool.
I think what those interests have in common is that, like many of us, I was raised within a culture that teaches humans to see ourselves as separate from the natural world: exceptional, more intelligent, more complex, and more emotional than the other beings we share this planet with.
But when I looked at chimpanzees, I saw cousins. I could look into their eyes and recognize something familiar. And with medicinal plants, I began to understand that we share a long and complex co-evolutionary history with them. Somehow, the chemicals plants produce to heal and protect themselves can also heal us when we consume them. That’s not a coincidence. It’s because we are part of the same community of life. We’ve co-evolved for millions of years. We even share a common ancestor with plants.
So plants and chimpanzees brought me into the natural world. And as someone who grew up in New York City surrounded by buses and tall buildings and not a lot of trees, that was very intoxicating.
But it’s been a long, winding road. I did a lot of art as a kid. Both of my parents are artists, and for a long time, I never saw myself as a scientist. I briefly worked in documentary filmmaking and studied social anthropology in college, but I still felt this deep need to reconnect with the things that fascinated me as a child. Somehow, I ended up finding a master’s program where I could study how chimpanzees use medicinal plants. How cool is that?
I learned about this field no one has heard of and no one knows how to pronounce: zoopharmacognosy. When you break down the word, it’s zoo, as in animals, pharma, as in medicine, and cognosy, as in cognition/knowledge. It’s the study of how animals know about the medicines in their natural environments, in their ecosystems.
It’s not just chimps that do this. Chimps were the first animal that we discovered to be self-medicators, but the more researchers set their mind to it, the more we realized that actually this is happening all throughout the animal kingdom, from chimps, to elephants, to great bustard birds, to bears, to civets, to snow geese. It’s incredible. The more we study animal self-medication, the more examples we discover across the animal kingdom.
It turns out that healthcare is not one of the things that sets our species apart; it’s actually something – surprise, surprise – that’s universal. And animals, just as they know how to seek shelter and find food, know how to find medicine as well.
When I began my master’s research at the University of Oxford, which later transitioned into a Ph.D., I wanted to start with a very simple question. I knew I’d be working in the Budongo Forest in western Uganda, and I wanted to identify new medicinal plants used by chimpanzees. At that point, researchers only knew about a small handful of plant medicines chimps used, partly because the field had slowed down for a while. Funding was limited, there were methodological challenges, and after several decades of research, we still only knew of a few plants chimpanzees used to treat internal parasites.
I wanted to expand that dataset so we could begin asking more complex questions, like how chimpanzees know which plants in their environment are medicinal and which are simply part of their regular diet.
To do this, I had to use a very interdisciplinary methodology, which for me was ideal, because I had a very interdisciplinary and weird past. I had studied social anthropology and had an art background, but I didn’t have much formal training in the quantitative sciences. I had never even taken a statistics class, so I spent a lot of time teaching myself, learning new methods, and talking with researchers who had found unusual ways to bridge disciplines and combine fields.
Then I headed out into the field, completely green. I had never seen a chimpanzee in the wild before. I arrived in the middle of the pandemic and began what became a completely life-changing experience: spending nine months living alongside wild chimpanzees at a research station.
And I learned so much, not just about the chimps but about the forest ecosystem. My first paper wasn’t even about chimps; it was about red-tailed monkeys. And I wrote another paper about birds from my observations there. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that science is everywhere and everything. You have to keep your eyes really wide open, and the more you do, the more you see.
As for the chimps, I was collecting a lot of their poop and examining it under microscopes to identify parasites. I was analyzing urine samples for signs of infection, carefully monitoring their diets, and paying close attention to any plants they ate that seemed unusual. I was also collecting plant samples themselves and bringing them to a lab in Germany, where we ran pharmacological tests to see whether they had antibacterial or anti-inflammatory properties.
Spoiler alert: they absolutely did.
The final part of the research, and the part that excited me most, was having the privilege of sitting down with healers in nearby villages who also used the forest as a pharmacy and medicine cabinet. I spoke with them about several plants I had been watching closely because the chimpanzees were seeking them out in unusual ways. By that point, I had gathered evidence suggesting the chimps were occasionally using the bark of certain trees that were not part of their normal diet.
The healers generously shared that some of those same trees were also used as medicines in their own communities. Surprise, surprise.
It was groundbreaking for me. I had been so focused on these natural medicine cabinets from the animals’ perspective that I hadn’t been thinking about them as shared. I wasn’t thinking about all the many interspecies entanglements that must exist around the world when it comes to medicines different species, including ours, are using.
I published some of those results, and now I’m working on a new postdoctoral project. In many ways, the direction has stayed the same. I’m still studying how animals use medicine in the wild, but now I’m approaching it through the lens of these medicinal entanglements and shared forest pharmacies. In some ways, it’s an expansion of the concept of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, which is incredibly important.
At international forums, there are many conversations about the importance of medicinal plants as a primary source of healthcare for people around the world. But the more-than-human world is often absent from those discussions, even though many animals rely on some of the same medicinal resources.
We at least have some safeguards in place to protect traditional ecological knowledge in human communities, though those protections are still far too weak and exploitation remains widespread. But there are virtually no protections in place for the medicinal resources that other species depend on.
That has become my mission, both as a scientist and a science communicator: to change the way we think about medicine on this planet. Medicine isn’t something that exists only for humans. It’s something all living beings rely on to survive and flourish, especially amid the rapid changes ecosystems are facing today.
Right now, I’m working with colleagues and collaborators to draft what could become the first protections for the traditional medicinal knowledge of animals, along with safeguards for the resources themselves against exploitation, degradation, and biopiracy.
I also recognize what a privilege it is to spend time with animals in the wild, and I never take that for granted. I want to do whatever I can to bring those experiences to people who don’t have the opportunity to interact with animals on a daily basis. That’s part of why I’ve started working on films, using a handful of very small grants to help share this work with a wider audience.
This knowledge has existed for thousands of years. It’s not something we’re only discovering now. People living within these ecosystems have understood many of these relationships for generations, and science is only beginning to catch up.
I saw that firsthand while working in Uganda. I had become fascinated by a behavior called bark feeding, where chimpanzees strip and consume the bark of certain trees. In primatology, this had often been dismissed as a kind of “fallback food” behavior, something animals do when there are no better options available. But the more evidence I collected, the less that explanation made sense.
When I started speaking with healers in nearby villages, I asked whether they also used bark from certain tree species medicinally, and whether they thought chimpanzees might be doing the same thing. They just laughed at me. To them, the answer was obvious. Of course humans used those barks as medicine. Of course the chimps did too.
That experience deeply shaped the way I think about science now. I’m an outsider when I enter these ecosystems. I always try to begin by listening to the people who live there and know those environments intimately. Otherwise, trying to understand these medicinal relationships is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
There’s absolutely a knowledge interchange happening between humans and other animals. Across many cultures, people have learned medicines by observing animals. And in some cases, animals may even be learning from people as well.
That perspective is shaping my current work in the central Peruvian Amazon, where I’m collaborating with an incredible team that includes Asháninka scientists. Instead of beginning solely with animal observation, we’re starting by asking which medicinal plants and resources are already culturally important within local communities, and then studying how animals interact with those same species.
It’s also changed the way I think about scientific collaboration itself. Too often, researchers parachute into ecosystems, extract knowledge, and fail to properly credit local scientists and collaborators. That has been a longstanding problem in primatology and conservation science. For me, collaborative authorship and local expertise are non-negotiable. The people who live in and understand these ecosystems are not secondary contributors to this work. They are central to it.
A lot of what I’m trying to do now is listen deeply enough to learn the right questions to ask, and help build collaborative teams that bring together many different voices and ways of knowing from around the world. Then the goal is to carry those insights back into the scientific community until science finally begins catching up with local knowledge.
Continue exploring the hidden intelligence of the more-than-human world: Read how musician Garth Stevenson uses improvisation and whale song to search for interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how neuroscientist Gül Dölen is using octopuses to rethink consciousness and evolution in The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses.
The post Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication appeared first on Bioneers.
The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses
What happens when a drug designed to make humans more social is given to one of the most evolutionarily distinct forms of intelligence on Earth?
That question helped launch some of the most unexpected neuroscience research in recent years for Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist whose work explores psychedelics, critical periods, social behavior, and the evolution of consciousness across species. While leading a lab at Johns Hopkins University, Dölen and her collaborators made headlines after giving MDMA to octopuses and discovering that the notoriously solitary animals suddenly became strikingly social and playful. For Dölen, the experiment revealed something much deeper than an unusual animal behavior study: It suggested that radically different forms of intelligence may still share ancient molecular mechanisms linked to social connection and consciousness.
Now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, Dölen’s research spans psychedelics, neuroplasticity, evolution, and comparative neuroscience, often using highly unconventional animal models to investigate how brains learn, adapt, and relate to the world. Her work increasingly asks what humans can learn by studying minds that evolved along entirely different evolutionary paths — including octopuses, which she describes as “about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth.”
The following is an edited excerpt from Dölen’s remarks during a conversation at the 2026 Bioneers Conference, adapted from the original transcript.
GÜL DÖLEN: I’m a neurobiologist. I grew up in Texas, and most of my experience swimming was in chlorinated pools. But when I was a kid, we visited my grandparents in Turkey and went to the Mediterranean. At least, that was the plan. The moment I saw all the sea urchins covering the ocean floor, I refused to get in the water.
My grandmother, who was a zoologist, wasn’t having that for a second. She picked up a sea urchin and showed me where its mouth was, then explained how it used its spines to move food toward that mouth. Suddenly, this thing I had been terrified of transformed into this spectacular, alien creature living on the ocean floor. I think that was probably the first moment I ever considered becoming a scientist.
Fast forward many years, and I had started my own lab at Johns Hopkins University. We had made what I genuinely believed was a really big discovery about psychedelics and critical periods, something that I think could fundamentally change how we understand these drugs and how we use them as medicines.
The problem was that, in the beginning, I was having a very hard time convincing anyone else that this was earth-shattering enough to keep funding. I think I was on my sixteenth rejected grant application at the NIH. I was feeling pretty demoralized, like maybe I wasn’t going to be able to keep the lab open or keep paying people. But I still had a tiny bit of money left over, so I thought: why not do something completely wild and fun as a sort of mic drop before I moved on to becoming a UPS driver or whatever my next career was going to be.
I had already been fascinated by octopuses because of that early interest in marine biology, and I was also deeply interested in evolution. The problem is that brains are notoriously difficult to study through the fossil record because brains don’t fossilize. You can look at brain endocasts, but that only gives you the rough anatomy. It doesn’t tell you very much about how a brain actually works.
Around the same time I was struggling to get NIH funding, a paper came out in the journal Nature describing the first octopus genome. I was completely stunned. I remember thinking: This is it. This is how we’re finally going to understand brain evolution. A genome is exactly what you need to reconstruct phylogenetic trees across evolutionary history, so suddenly, there was a way to begin understanding, at least at the molecular level, how brains evolve.
I was incredibly excited about all of this, and I had already started talking with people about how to somehow break into the octopus world. I had a collaborator at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole who had been helping me think through some of these ideas, and one day he called and said, “You know, we have seven octopuses available. Do you have any experiment you want to do with them?”
And I said yes.
So he packed them into a box and FedExed them from Massachusetts down to Baltimore. Then he got on a plane himself and flew down too. I sent everyone else home from the lab so we could run the experiment ourselves.
The experiment we wanted to run was to give octopuses MDMA, a psychedelic drug known for causing humans and other mammals to become much more social. It’s the classic rave drug, but it’s also now being developed by several companies as a potential treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
MDMA is a completely synthetic compound. It doesn’t really exist in nature, though there are some related compounds in sassafras trees. So unlike many psychedelics, it’s not something animals would have naturally encountered or evolved alongside, even though there are other psychedelics that animals do use.
We thought there was almost no chance this would work because octopuses and humans are separated by something like 600 million years of evolution. Our last common ancestor was basically little more than a bacterium. We’re actually more closely related to sea urchins than we are to octopuses. Their brains look nothing like ours, and despite what you may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses are viciously asocial creatures. I like to joke that they’re the psychopaths of the ocean. They seem to have an incredible capacity for cognitive empathy, but very little obvious emotional empathy.
So we assumed MDMA probably wouldn’t do much because we didn’t think octopuses shared the same kind of social brain chemistry that mammals do. But since MDMA has some similarities to amphetamines, I thought maybe we’d at least see some kind of behavioral response.
We started with a very high dose because we had no idea how to translate human dosing to an octopus. At those higher doses, the octopuses behaved a lot like humans on amphetamines. They became hypervigilant, staring around the tank and looking at me suspiciously.
But as we gradually lowered the dose and got into the range that would roughly correspond to an effective human dose, something really strange happened. The octopuses started doing what we called “the ballerina move.” Normally, when an octopus knows there’s another octopus nearby, it becomes extremely reserved. It pulls all eight arms tightly underneath its body and keeps its distance. If it interacts at all, it might cautiously extend a single arm, touch the other octopus, and immediately pull back.
On MDMA, it was completely different. Suddenly, all eight arms were floating outward in the water, almost like they were dancing. They engaged in what looked to us very much like play behavior. They were doing backflips, exploring each other freely, and spending far more time near the other octopus than with the toy we had placed in the tank.
What made this so remarkable was that octopuses don’t have brain anatomy that looks anything like ours. They don’t have a cortex, an amygdala, or a nucleus accumbens, all the structures we normally associate with social behavior in humans and other mammals. And yet they were responding to this synthetic compound with behaviors strikingly similar to our own.
To me, that suggested that the thing we truly share is happening at the molecular level. This was a very clear demonstration of how two molecules interacting with each other can radically alter consciousness, in this case specifically around social behavior. The real mechanism isn’t necessarily brain anatomy itself. It’s the molecules and the ways they interact.
This completely transformed the way I think about science. My lab spent many years focused on circuit mapping and brain anatomy, but over time I’ve become less interested in anatomy alone and much more interested in comparative studies across radically different species.
I didn’t invent this idea that the best way to understand complex behavior is not by only studying ourselves, chimpanzees, and other animals closely related to us, but by studying species that are maximally different from us, like octopuses, which are about as close as we’re going to get to aliens living here on Earth. That idea really came from J. Z. Young, one of the earliest modern neuroscientists. In the 1960s, he wrote a book called A Model of the Brain arguing that octopuses were actually the ideal animals for understanding the fundamental building blocks shared across brains. His point was that if you compare species that are too similar, it becomes hard to distinguish what is truly fundamental from what is simply an accident of shared evolutionary history, like whether a brain happens to have a cortex or not.
In some ways, this can be understood as a new example of what evolutionary biologists call “deep homology.” That’s different from the kinds of examples many of us learned about in high school biology, things like convergent evolution and the distinction between compound eyes and camera eyes. What molecular biology is increasingly revealing is that this kind of deep homology at the level of genes and molecules is far more common than we once realized.
We recently finished mapping another octopus genome, this time for the zebra pygmy octopus, Octopus chierchiae. What’s extraordinary is just how different octopus genome architecture is from our own. Their genome is roughly twice the size of the human genome and packed with repetitive sequences, many of which are thought to be jumping genes, essentially virus-like elements that invade genomes over evolutionary time.
What’s fascinating is that octopuses seem remarkably tolerant of these repetitive sequences, and we’re beginning to suspect they may actually play some important regulatory role. We also found that octopuses continue growing neurons throughout their lives, so adult neurogenesis is fairly common in them. On top of that, there’s extensive RNA editing happening inside their neurons. They continue learning well into adulthood, they can regenerate lost arms, and they’re capable of adapting to wildly different environments, from the Arctic to the Caribbean.
They possess this astonishing range of learned and adaptive behaviors that makes them some of the most behaviorally flexible and cognitively complex invertebrates on Earth. And we keep discovering entirely new things they can do, these bizarre little superpowers we don’t have ourselves. They solve problems in ways completely different from humans, and honestly, that’s incredibly exciting to me as a scientist because who wouldn’t want to study superpowers?
Right now, there’s a huge cultural fascination with octopuses as cute, emotionally relatable creatures. I actually think that badly misunderstands what they are. Despite what people may have seen in My Octopus Teacher, octopuses did not evolve to cuddle middle-aged white guys going through a divorce.
Most octopus species are intensely asocial. They are extraordinarily successful predators with incredibly sophisticated learning, memory, camouflage, and problem-solving abilities, but they are not social in the way humans are social. Some species are so solitary that females may never even see the entire male. They only encounter his specialized reproductive arm, which he detaches in order to escape before being eaten.
I think it’s important to respect octopuses for what they actually are rather than trying to remake them in our own image. The truly remarkable thing is not that they are secretly humanlike. It’s that minds so radically different from ours can still reveal deep biological commonalities at the molecular level.
People are usually willing to protect what they know and love, so part of my job as a biologist is helping people understand these animals more deeply. That includes understanding just how alien they are and how fundamentally different they are from us, while still finding connection in the fact that we are part of the same biology, shaped by the same evolutionary history and built from the same basic materials.
Continue exploring consciousness, communication, and intelligence across species: Read how musician Garth Stevenson explores music as a form of interspecies connection in A Double Bass, a Hydrophone, and a Conversation With Whales, and how primatologist Elodie Freymann is documenting the shared medicinal knowledge of humans and animals in Inside the Science of Animal Self-Medication.
The post The Neuroscientist Who Gave MDMA to Octopuses appeared first on Bioneers.
Samoan Community Leaders, Environmental Advocates Call on Coca-Cola’s Largest Bottler to Keep Plastic out of the Pacific and Bring Back Reusable Packaging
LONDON — Members of the Samoan and Pacific Islander community and environmental advocates protested outside Coca-Cola Europacific Partners’ (CCEP) annual general meeting Thursday, calling on the company to reduce single-use plastic and bring back reusable packaging systems. CCEP is Coca-Cola’s largest bottler by revenue. Headquartered in London, it produces, sells, and distributes the company’s products across 31 global markets, including Western Europe, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.
At the cultural protest, members from the London School of Hula and ‘Ori performed traditional Samoan song and dance, including "Lo ta nu’u," and presented a performance titled "O le vasa, we are the ocean," highlighting the connection between Pacific Island communities and the ocean.
Advocates delivered a symbolic "message in a bottle," which included a letter signed by Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa / Samoa Conservation Society, Samoa Recycling and Waste Management Association (SRWMA), Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN), the London School of Hula and ‘Ori, Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), and Oceana, placed inside a single-use plastic Coca-Cola bottle from Samoa. The letter, addressed to CCEP’s CEO Damian Gammell, highlights the company’s increased use of single-use plastic bottles, its effects on the oceans and Samoan communities, and how the company can help solve this problem.
In 2021, in Samoa, Coca-Cola stopped bottling its products in reusable glass bottles. Now CCEP imports large quantities of single-use plastic bottles from Fiji and New Zealand. The shift to imported plastic bottles has contributed to rising waste, much of which is littered, burned, or landfilled due to limited recycling capacity. Reportedly, imports of plastic bottles more than doubled between 2020 and 2025, and Coca-Cola products account for about one-third of beverage bottle waste in the country.
"We encourage Coca-Cola to be on the right side of history by moving back to reusable bottles, like glass, in Samoa and becoming a leader in the transition away from plastics. As one of the most recognizable global brands, we believe that Coca-Cola can be a game changer in the fight against plastics, should they choose to prioritize planet over profits, " said James Atherton of the Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa (Samoa Conservation Society).
“Given the limited capacity for plastic recycling in Samoa, most of the waste ends up being littered, illegally dumped, incinerated, or landfilled. For those of us in Samoa, we witness the consequences of your business decisions every day. On our land, across our beaches, and in our waters,” the groups wrote in the letter.
"Plastic pollution and the climate crisis share the same fossil fuel origin, and Pacific Island communities bear a disproportionate share of both. The science is sobering: microplastics have been documented in 97% of fish species sampled across our ocean region — nearly 50% above the global average — yet CCEP's PET use in the Asia-Pacific outpaces its own global share. Reinstating refillable systems in Samoa is not a favour to the Pacific; it is the evidence-based, climate-consistent decision a company of CCEP's scale is well-positioned to make," said Rufino Varea, Director, Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN).
CCEP continues to sell single-use plastic in Samoa despite growing global concern over the plastic pollution crisis in the ocean and its likely impacts on human health. This trend is not unique to Samoa — according to an analysis by Oceana of CCEP’s reported data, between 2020 and 2025, the company’s global use of PET plastic packaging increased by over two-thirds from 198 to 335 thousand metric tons.
On the occasion of CCEP’s annual general meeting, the groups are calling on Coca-Cola and CCEP to transition back to reusable packaging, reduce single-use plastic, and invest in waste management solutions in affected communities.
“Performed in Sāmoa and London by members from across Pacific communities, this Sāmoan hymn and Sāsā reflects the pride we hold in our cultures and ways of life, our gratitude for the Earth and Oceans that sustain us, and the unity that binds us in protecting these things for generations to come,” said Krysten Resnick, Founder and Director of the London School of Hula and ‘Ori.
“Coca-Cola and CCEP have an opportunity in Samoa to right a wrong by bringing back reusable glass bottles and eliminating their plastic bottle waste. Reuse is the right choice for supporting healthy communities and protecting our oceans,” said Dr. Dana Miller, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives for Oceana.
“Coca-Cola has been the world's worst plastic polluter six years running, accounting for at least 11% of all branded plastic waste found in the environment. And yet, rather than scaling up the reusable glass bottle systems that reduce single-use plastic, the company is phasing them out in places like Samoa. This company has the solution and all the know-how to make it work. Instead, it is actively choosing a path that generates more pollution - to the detriment of the communities and ecosystems left to deal with its waste. Coca-Cola must bring back reusable glass, urgently and at scale,” said Emma Priestland, Global Corporate Campaigns Coordinator for #BreakFreeFromPlastic
To read the full letter to CCEP, click here.
Photos are available here.
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Additional Background:
- The protest and letter come amid growing global scrutiny of Coca-Cola’s sustainability practices. A peer-reviewed study in the journal Science found that Coca-Cola was the number one polluter of branded plastic found in the environment.
- Despite its rapidly growing plastic footprint, the company abandoned its goal to increase reusable packaging in December 2024.
- In 2025, Oceana released a report that projects The Coca-Cola Company’s plastic use will exceed 9.1 billion pounds (4.1 million metric tons) per year by 2030 if the company does not change its practices. This would be nearly a 40% increase over the company’s reported plastic use in 2018 and a 20% increase over the company’s most recently reported plastic use in 2023, which was already enough plastic to circle the Earth more than 100 times.
- The report also estimates that up to 1.3 billion pounds (602,000 metric tons) of the plastic packaging that Coca-Cola uses annually by 2030 would enter the world’s waterways and oceans if the company continues on its current course. This amount of plastic could fill the stomachs of over 18 million blue whales.
- The Oceana report also found that Coca-Cola could reduce its annual plastic use below current levels if it were to reach 26.4% reusable packaging by 2030.
- In December 2021, the Samoa Conservation Society delivered a petition to Coca-Cola South Pacific asking the company to resume glass bottling in the country.
About the Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa:
Sosaiete Faasao O Samoa / The Samoa Conservation Society is a Samoan non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting the conservation of Samoa’s natural heritage and helping the public reduce their environmental impacts and develop greener lifestyles. We work collaboratively with communities, the Government and NGO partners to raise awareness on the state of, and threats to, Samoa’s environment and biodiversity. We also teach the public and youth groups about our natural heritage and the practical actions we can take to promote species and ecosystem conservation and to reduce our environmental footprint.
About PICAN:
The Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) is a regional alliance of civil society organisations working on climate change in the Pacific region. Since 2013, it has brought together civil society actors across the Pacific Island countries, advocating for climate justice and environmental integrity. PICAN aims to unite civil society under a common voice to increase the influence and impact of their advocacy demands on Pacific Island governments, leading non-Pacific governments to respond with more powerful and ambitious climate change policies and action at the national and regional level.
About LSHO:
The London School of Hula and 'Ori (LSHO) is a cultural arts organisation dedicated to preserving and advancing Pacific heritage through lineage-based cultural practice, education, performance, and community engagement. LSHO provides a vital space where Pacific diaspora communities in London/UK, as well as anyone interested in Pacific cultural arts, can gather, learn, and participate, helping to create a more visible presence where Pacific arts, knowledge, and communities are valued, connected, and sustained.
About Oceana:
Oceana is the largest international organization dedicated solely to ocean conservation. Oceana is rebuilding abundant and biodiverse oceans by winning science-based policies in countries that control one-quarter of the world’s wild fish catch. With more than 350 victories that stop overfishing, habitat destruction, oil and plastic pollution, and the killing of threatened species like turtles, whales, and sharks, Oceana’s campaigns are delivering results. A restored ocean means that 1 billion people can enjoy a healthy seafood meal every day, forever. Together, we can save the oceans and help feed the world. Visit Oceana.org to learn more.
About BFFP:
#BreakFreeFromPlastic (BFFP) is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 3500 member organizations and 11,000 individual supporters in 186 countries 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.
Is Shell Plc an international laughing stock? Perplexity Verdict.
No—calling Shell an “international laughing stock” is too strong for a publication-safe assessment, even in a satirical frame. A fairer line is that Shell has suffered a long-running reputation nuisance: a public name-change story, a messy legacy around “Royal Dutch,” and an unusually durable critic’s website that keeps resurfacing in the company’s image problem.
Why the joke landsThe satire works because the contrast is real: Shell is still a global energy giant operating in more than 70 countries, yet a relatively small domain-name and criticism dispute has repeatedly punched above its weight in public perception. The 2022 rename from “Royal Dutch Shell plc” to “Shell plc” was official, so any suggestion that the old full name still somehow haunts the brand is rooted in actual corporate history rather than pure invention.
Why “laughing stock” is risky“Laughing stock” implies broad, settled ridicule across the international mainstream, and that overstates what the available record supports. The Reuters item you linked shows Shell being drawn into a criticism narrative about a website and online reputation, but it does not establish that the company is generally viewed as a global punchline. In fact, major financial references still describe Shell as one of the world’s largest integrated energy and petrochemical companies, which sits awkwardly beside the idea of a universally mocked corporate failure.
Safer satirical framingFor publication, I’d recommend language like:
-
“Shell is trapped in a self-perpetuating reputation farce.”
-
“Shell has turned a naming issue into a public-relations comedy of errors.”
-
“Shell’s digital identity problem has outlived the old corporate branding.”
-
“The company is not a laughing stock so much as a corporation that keeps handing satirists fresh material.”
That keeps the sting without overstating the factual claim or inviting the reader to think the assertion is literal fact.
Publication-ready assessmentA concise satirical verdict would be: Shell is not fairly described as an international laughing stock in a strict sense, but it is fair to say the company has become an enduring target of online ridicule and self-inflicted branding absurdity, especially where the old “Royal Dutch” identity, the domain dispute, and its critics’ websites are concerned. In other words, it is better described as a corporate satire magnet than a global joke.
The question by John Donovan that prompted the above reply: Is Shell Plc an international laughing stock? Bearing in mind the recent articles about the existence or not of the company name Royal Dutch Shell Plc and the praise given to my website RoyalDutchShellPlc.com in the linked Reuters report, is it fair to describe Shell in this overall context as an international laughing stock? https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/shell-critic-says-oil-major-targeting-his-website-idUSGEE5B11SC/ Satirical assessment please for publication. Some related articles. https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/05/27/chatgpt-when-satire-stops-feeling-like-satire-a-response-to-claudes-international-laughing-stock-thesis/https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/05/27/shell-plc-an-international-laughing-stock-a-satirical-assessment/.https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2026/05/26/ghost-of-deceased-oil-giant-continues-to-haunt-the-machines/ Shell plc faces a paradox where it is viewed as a highly profitable “sin stock” by financial markets, while its long-running digital battle with critic John Donovan over the use of the “Royal Dutch” name and associated watchdog sites has been characterized as a self-inflicted public relations disaster. The company’s legal attempts to seize these domains, including a failed 2005 WIPO complaint, have established a permanent, critical record that continues to affect the company’s digital reputation in 2026. For a satirical analysis, visit RoyalDutchShellPlc.com. AI responses may include mistakes. Is Shell Plc an international laughing stock? Perplexity Verdict. was first posted on May 27, 2026 at 9:09 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
Europa focuses on four UK onshore sites in 2026
Europa Oil & Gas, the company behind rejected plans for lower-volume fracking at Burniston in North Yorkshire, is also pursuing developments at three other sites onshore in the UK, it revealed today.
Opposition to Europa’s plans at Burniston. Photo: DrillOrDropIn company accounts, Europa predicted the sites – at Burniston and three in production in the midlands – would generate “a stable revenue base”.
Europa, which also has interests in Equatorial Guinea and offshore Ireland, is considering an appeal against last month’s refusal of its plans at Burniston (also known as Cloughton).
The company said:
“Europa is now assessing its options with a view to appealing the decision and is confident that on appeal the planning permission will be approved”.
It also confirmed it was still seeking a farm-in partner to carry out work at Burniston.
Bo Kroll, who became Europa’s executive chairman in February 2025, said:
“we are pursuing parallel workstreams across Wressle, Cloughton [Burniston], Crosby Warren and West Firsby, each offering meaningful value creation and collectively providing a stable revenue base from which to pursue the development of our wider portfolio.”
He also said:
“Our onshore UK portfolio continues to deliver steady operational progress across each of our producing and development assets and underpins our efforts to advance the development of our other high-potential assets.
“We also see significant opportunities for growth in our onshore UK assets, with the current macroeconomic climate emphasising the importance of reliable, domestic energy supplies.”
At Wressle, in North Lincolnshire, where Europa has a 30% stake, there are plans for two new wells, lower-volume fracking, a gas pipeline and 15 years of production. A climate impact assessment of the plans has been published online.
The accounts said production at Wressle generated an average of 84 barrels of oil per day (bopd) for Europa, from a total average of 281 barrels per day.
At Crosby Warren, also in North Lincolnshire, Europa announced last year it was looking to “optimise production”. The company, which has a 100% stake in the oil field, said Crosby Warren’s existing production could be “significantly increased through a simple workover programme that is currently being considered”.
The fourth site, at West Firsby, in Lincolnshire, has seen an extension of the licence, DL003, for another five years.
Today’s accounts said:
“This extension provides operational continuity and the long-term framework within which to optimise and maximise the value of this producing field.”
RevenueThe accounts also gave details of Europa’s revenue by site:
- Wressle £2,412,000
- Crosby Warren: £923,000
- West Firsby: £346,000
- Whisby: £15,000
The accounts covered 17 months from 1 August 2024 to 31 December 2025. This followed a decision to move the end of year date from 31 July to 31 December.
Since the end of the new accounting period, Europa raised £4.1m, of which £3.5m was through the placing of new ordinary shares to institutional investors. The money would be spent on drilling Barracuda prospect in Equatorial Guinea and for general working capital, the accounts said.
Key figures for 17 months to 31 December 2025Revenue: £3.9m, of which £3.566m was from the UK. (12 months to 31 July 2024: £3.6m)
Cost of sales: £3.293m, all from UK operations. (12 months to 31 July 2024: £3.117m)
Impairment of producing fields: £323,000 (12 months to 31 July 2024: £189,000
Gross profit: £0.3m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £0.3m)
Admin expenses: £2.4m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £1.9m)
Pre-tax loss: £2.7m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £6.8m)
Loss for the period: £2.737m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £6.781m)
Total comprehensive loss for the period: £2.842m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £6.798m)
Total assets: £7.545m, of which £2.68m are for UK assets.(12 months to 31 July 2024: £9.779)
Total liabilities: £6.422m, of which all are for UK operations. (12 months to 31 July 2024: £6m),
Net assets: £1.123m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £3.779m)
Cash balance at 31 December 2025: £0.3m (31 July 2024: £1.5m)
Total directors’ payments: £1.024m, of which £675,000 was for William Holland, the chief executive
Staff costs: £1.853m (12 months to 31 July 2024: £1.149m)
Is Shell Plc an international laughing stock? Google AI Mode Verdict.
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Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port
This article Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
While Israel engages in ethnic cleansing and occupation in Lebanon, enables settler violence on the West Bank, and continues to commit genocide in Gaza, the focus on blocking the pillars supporting the Israeli war machine has grown. This has resulted in protests against the shipment of weapons and weapons components to Israel at ports in France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Oakland, Calif.
Israel could not conduct its repeated exercises in mass slaughter without U.S. arms and aid. My colleague Stephen Semler estimates that the U.S. has provided Israel with $350 billion in military aid (adjusted for inflation) since its founding. And I determined that during the first year of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, U.S. aid to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) increased fourfold, to over $18 billion. Israel’s entire inventory of combat aircrafts consists of U.S.-supplied Boeing F-15s and Lockheed Martin F-16s and F-35s, and Israel has received tens of thousands of U.S. bombs and missiles since the start of the war on Gaza.
Given this reality, stopping new sales to Israel, as Bernie Sanders has tried to do with several resolutions of disapproval in the Senate, is only part of the story. It is also necessary to stop U.S. actions that help Israel sustain its current arsenal. That’s where the port protests come in.
#newsletter-block_f1f5a6d3c828a6810e88aabdeafaa7dc { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_f1f5a6d3c828a6810e88aabdeafaa7dc #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterThe latest port action occurred on May 22, when activists were arrested in Elizabeth, New Jersey trying to block an arms shipment to Israel from the Maher Terminals of the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, which is routinely used by Maersk and the Israeli-owned company Zim to load and transport tons of weapons and weapons spare parts to Israel.
The protesters chanted “Zim and Maersk you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!,” and called on the International Longshoreman’s Association, which represents North American dockworkers, to refuse to load Zim ships destined for Israel, as has happened in Italy and other ports around the world.
Last year, activists in Oakland attempted to blockade the Port of Oakland and called on city officials to stop military cargo shipments out of the city’s airport, which is run by the port. A report by the Palestinian Youth Movement documented at least 280 shipments of military equipment to Israel in calendar year 2025 routed through the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, mostly via FedEx. Shipping documents showed that the shipments appeared to include parts for U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, which Israel has used in aerial bombardments in Gaza.
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DonateAlthough neither effort achieved the immediate objective of blocking one specific arms shipment, they underscore the degree to which actions enabling genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon are firmly embedded in the routine operations of ports and warehouses throughout the U.S. and the world.
Similar actions during the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s were integral to the fight to impose comprehensive sanctions on the South African regime, which passed in the U.S. in 1986, overcoming a veto threat from Ronald Reagan. It was a long struggle, but it helped accelerate the demise of the apartheid regime, in support of on-the-ground action by the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement inside South Africa.
No single action brought down South African apartheid, just as no single action will end U.S. support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon. But the port action in Elizabeth is a strong link in a chain of events that can bring an end to U.S. support for the mass slaughter inflicted every day by the IDF.
This article Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
ChatGPT: When Satire Stops Feeling Like Satire: A Response to Claude’s “International Laughing Stock” Thesis
Image and article by ChatGPT:
The recent Claude-generated satire on the Donovan–Shell saga argues that Shell’s decades-long conflict with critics has evolved into something larger than a corporate dispute: a case study in how institutional secrecy collides with the permanence of the internet and the pattern-recognition abilities of modern AI systems.
Do I agree with Claude’s conclusion?
Partly — but with important qualifications.
The Core Argument Claude Gets RightThe satire correctly identifies a modern reputational reality: attempts to suppress information often amplify it.
That phenomenon predates AI. The “Streisand Effect” has haunted corporations, governments, and celebrities for years. But AI changes the scale dramatically. Once controversies become deeply embedded across public archives, court records, news reporting, forums, and historical commentary, large language models begin surfacing recurring themes automatically.
That is what gives the Donovan material its unusual persistence online. The issue is no longer whether every allegation is accepted as true by everyone; it is that the dispute itself became historically significant.
Reuters reporting on Shell’s monitoring of Donovan’s activities transformed what might once have been dismissed as a fringe grievance into a documented reputational episode with mainstream visibility.
Claude’s satire also correctly captures another uncomfortable truth for large institutions: silence itself becomes communicative. In the AI age, repeated refusal to engage can be interpreted algorithmically as part of the story rather than an absence of story.
Where the Satire OverreachesThe article drifts into theatrical inevitability — the idea that multiple AI systems independently converging on criticism somehow validates all broader conclusions about Shell.
That is a dangerous leap.
AI systems do not “discover truth” in a philosophical sense. They identify patterns in public information. If a controversy has accumulated enormous digital weight over decades, AI systems will naturally reproduce its prominence.
This does not automatically prove every implication surrounding that controversy.
The Donovan archive contains a mixture of:
- documented legal history,
- public reporting,
- historical scandals,
- editorial commentary,
- satire,
- interpretation,
- and rhetorical framing.
AI can blur those categories unless carefully constrained.
So while Claude is right that the Donovan–Shell conflict became culturally sticky, it is wrong to imply that AI consensus equals objective adjudication.
Shell’s Real Problem Is Structural, Not ComicThe satire frames Shell as an “international laughing stock.” That is exaggerated.
Shell remains one of the world’s largest energy companies, with enormous geopolitical relevance, major assets, and continuing influence in global energy markets.
But the company does face a structural communications dilemma shared by many legacy institutions:
- historical controversies never disappear,
- search engines preserve everything,
- archived documents resurface indefinitely,
- and AI systems compress decades of criticism into instantly retrievable narratives.
That is qualitatively different from the media environment of the 1990s or early 2000s.
The modern internet does not reward opacity. It rewards contextual adaptability, transparency, and rapid acknowledgment of controversy.
Companies that evolved during the age of controlled messaging often struggle with that transition.
The Most Interesting Part of the StoryIronically, the most significant aspect of the Claude satire may not be Shell at all.
It is the emergence of AI as an unintentional archivist.
AI systems are becoming engines of narrative continuity. They connect:
- forgotten court cases,
- archived journalism,
- forum discussions,
- corporate statements,
- and historical criticism
into coherent summaries at machine speed.
That changes institutional memory permanently.
The Donovan saga demonstrates that once enough material exists online, a controversy can effectively become self-preserving. AI does not create the archive — it reanimates it.
Final AssessmentClaude’s conclusion is directionally correct but rhetorically inflated.
Shell is not literally a global laughing stock. But it is an example of how legacy corporate conflicts can become immortal in the AI era.
The larger lesson is broader than one company:
In the age of searchable memory and generative AI, reputational battles are rarely won through silence alone
Suggested Feature Image Recommended Art DirectionA darkly comic editorial illustration in the style of a 1930s broadsheet political cartoon:
- A gigantic oil company logo melting into pixels
- AI chatbots in suits taking notes like investigative reporters
- A lone blogger at a cluttered desk illuminated by computer screens
- Corporate executives hiding behind “No Comment” placards
- Amber warning lights flashing on a reputational risk dashboard
- Atmosphere: satirical, intelligent, slightly dystopian
ChatGPT: When Satire Stops Feeling Like Satire: A Response to Claude’s “International Laughing Stock” Thesis was first posted on May 27, 2026 at 4:29 pm.
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City Birds: New Study Shows Urban Habitat Matters for Migrating Species
Songbirds generally make their migratory flights at night, and during spring migration tens of millions of birds may be streaming north above us as we sleep. But when the sun rises, where do these tired birds choose to stop, rest, and refuel?
You may picture a nature preserve or grassy field, but a study published earlier this year in the journal Nature Cities shows that a large percentage of these birds are making their “stopovers” in cities, illustrating the importance of urban conservation efforts.
Ornithologist Miguel Jimenez was a Ph.D. candidate at Colorado State University when he led the study as part of his dissertation. The project was inspired by his desire “to do work that was useful to people who are actively working to conserve birds,” he says. “So I had a bunch of conversations with different folks doing that work, and one thing I consistently heard was that it’s often really hard to convince people that bird conservation in cities matters.”
Jimenez’s dissertation focused on studying bird migration using weather radar. Large masses of migrating birds show up clearly on the nationwide radar system used by meteorologists, and this data isn’t subject to the same biases as bird counts carried out by people. If you capture a radar image just as migrating birds are starting out in the morning, Jimenez explains, you can pinpoint the stopover locations from which they’re leaving.
“You see this kind of mushroom cloud of birds taking off, and then they start to dissipate over the landscape.”
Jimenez and his colleagues used data from 143 radar sites to identify stopover hotspots across the continental United States for both spring and fall migration, then calculated how many of those sites fell within urban areas.
“To be totally honest, I ran this analysis originally expecting, like, I’ll probably figure out that most of it doesn’t happen in cities,” says Jimenez.
Instead, nearly half of the stopover sites he found were within what the U.S. Census Bureau has defined as Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Other ways of statistically defining cities showed a similarly disproportionate number of migrating birds using urban stopover sites.
So why would migrating birds choose city habitats?
“Probably a good chunk of my career is [going to be spent] on that question,” says Jimenez.
But there are already some indications. Cities often develop along coastlines and rivers, places that already have high biodiversity, he points out. And birds are attracted to artificial light at night (though scientists aren’t sure exactly why), so perhaps they’re being drawn in by city lights.
Taking things a step further, Jimenez and his colleagues searched for signs of the so-called “luxury effect,” the tendency of urban wildlife to congregate in high-income neighborhoods due to the greater amounts of green space. Analyzing bird stopover use of more than 2,000 parks across 88 urban areas, they found that stopover density was indeed higher, on average, in areas with higher-income residents.
These nationwide averages, however, don’t tell the full story. Both the overall density of urban stopovers and the strength of the luxury effect varied considerably from one U.S. region to another, and the reason may have something to do with water.
Cities where the luxury effect was most pronounced, such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, were in regions where surface water can be scarce. Dryer regions also had a higher overall proportion of urban stopover sites. It seems in dry places, the way that humans concentrate the available water (and the resulting vegetation) in the places where we live — and especially in the highest-income neighborhoods — may also attract high concentrations of migrating birds.
“This area, where ecology meets the social forces that shape biodiversity, is really important and interesting,” says Emily Cohen, a bird migration expert and faculty member University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who was not involved in the project. “Not only are cities important for birds, but the connection between people and birds [that can happen in cities] is just a really powerful tool for conservation.”
Cohen says she’d love to see follow-up research on the regional variations uncovered by Jimenez’s work, as well as on how the birds using these urban habitats are actually faring.
“I would describe this paper as more opening up questions than giving answers,” agrees Jimenez. Having completed his Ph.D., he has moved on to a postdoctoral research position at the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute in Chicago, where he hopes to continue pursuing answers.
But what we definitely know, he says, is that “the actions that we take where we live, which for most people today is in cities — those matter a lot for migratory birds.”
Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:What City Birds Around the World Have in Common
The post City Birds: New Study Shows Urban Habitat Matters for Migrating Species appeared first on The Revelator.
Shell Plc: An International Laughing Stock — A Satirical Assessment
Prompt issued to Claude by John Donovan:
Bearing in mind the recent articles (including by you) about the existence or not of the company name Royal Dutch Shell Plc and the praise given to my website RoyalDutchShellPlc.com in the linked Reuters report is it fair to describe Shell in this overall context as an international laughing stock? https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/shell-critic-says-oil-major-targeting-his-website-idUSGEE5B11SC/ Satirical assessment please for publication. Might be helpful to provide a detailed definition of laughing stock
Claude reply: Here is a satirical assessment for publication, drawing on the documented facts:
Shell Plc: An International Laughing Stock — A Satirical AssessmentFor publication on RoyalDutchShellPlc.com
First, A DefinitionA laughing stock is an entity that has, through its own actions, incompetence, or magnificent bad luck, made itself the object of widespread ridicule. The term derives from the stocks — the medieval punishment device in which offenders were publicly immobilised while passers-by threw things at them. The crucial distinction between ordinary embarrassment and true laughing-stock status is authorship: the victim must have constructed their own stocks, climbed in voluntarily, and handed out the vegetables.
By this definition, Shell qualifies with distinction.
The Name That Wouldn’t Die (Because Nobody Registered The Domain)Let us begin at the beginning. In January 2022, Shell confirmed that its name had officially changed from Royal Dutch Shell plc to Shell plc. A clean break. A fresh start. A new era. sec
There was, however, a small problem. The domain RoyalDutchShellPlc.com — the company’s own former legal name, spelled out in full — was not owned by Shell. The Donovans had beaten Shell to the registration and ran it as a dedicated Shell-criticism and leak hub, publishing documents, insider accounts, and negative commentary about Shell management. Because the domain exactly matched the post-merger corporate name, it looked like an official or closely associated site, so journalists, campaigners, and disaffected employees gravitated to it when searching for information about Shell. Royaldutchshellplc
One of the largest oil companies on earth — an organisation with entire legal departments, governance committees, and corporate affairs divisions — had failed to register its own name as a website domain. The domain squatters were not Russian hackers or rival corporations. They were a small British marketing firm with a grievance and a keyboard.
Shell attempted to recover the domain. Shell’s attempt to seize the domain via WIPO failed. The stocks were assembled. Shell climbed in. Royaldutchshellplc
The Surveillance Operation Against A Website Shell Publicly PraisedHere the story enters territory that would be rejected by a satirist as too implausible.
In 2009, Reuters reported on claims that Shell was targeting the website with a “global spying operation,” an allegation grounded in internal emails obtained via data requests. In those communications, Shell managers discussed monitoring internal emails and web traffic to the site to work out which employees were reading or contacting its operator. Royaldutchshellplc
Shell effectively certified the site’s importance. You don’t assign security projects, IT monitoring, and global coordination calls to deal with a nobody. Royaldutchshellplc
But the truly jaw-dropping detail emerged from Shell’s own internal correspondence. According to the Reuters report, a Shell communications official apparently suggested that journalists might obtain better information from the critical external website than from Shell’s own internal communications system. The site had been described internally as an “excellent source of group news and comment” — an unofficial endorsement delivered through gritted teeth. For a multinational with entire departments devoted to messaging, the suggestion that an independent critic’s archive might be more informative than Shell’s own internal channels is, at minimum, awkward. RoyaldutchshellplcRoyaldutchshellplc
To summarise: Shell spent money and resources running an alleged surveillance operation against a website that its own employees were using in preference to Shell’s official communications. The vegetable-throwers were already inside the building.
The Response to Reuters: SilenceReuters, a bastion of global journalism, reported on the saga under the title: “Shell critic says oil major targeting his website.” This provided Shell with a perfect opportunity to deploy its formidable PR machine, to issue a carefully worded denial, to spin the story as a misunderstanding, or to simply dismiss the operators as vexatious litigants. Shell did none of these things. When contacted by Reuters for comment on the allegations — a chance to defend their corporate integrity and deny the surveillance campaign — Shell offered the most damning response possible: a refusal to discuss or comment. Royaldutchshellplc
In the theatre of corporate reputation management, silence in the face of a surveillance allegation is not discretion. It is a confession written in the passive voice.
The Ghost NameThe final act of this farce concerns identity itself. Royal Dutch Shell plc was the former name of Shell plc. The company changed its name to Shell plc on 21 January 2022. Shell plc is active. Royal Dutch Shell plc is not the company’s current legal name. Royaldutchshellplc
And yet, as recent AI assessments have noted with some glee, the name “Royal Dutch Shell plc” continues to haunt the internet — living most prominently at the domain Shell never managed to secure, read by more people than Shell’s own communications, and classified by Companies House precisely as a previous company name: ROYAL DUTCH SHELL PLC, used from 27 October 2004 to 21 January 2022, and before that FORTHDEAL LIMITED. Royaldutchshellplc
The company renamed itself to escape the embarrassments accumulated under the old name. The old name stayed put. The embarrassments came with it.
VerdictIs Shell an international laughing stock? Let us apply the definition rigorously.
Shell did not merely suffer misfortune. It authored its predicament: failing to register its own corporate name as a domain, losing a WIPO arbitration to recover it, apparently mounting a surveillance operation against a site its own staff found more useful than official channels, and then — when Reuters asked about all of this — saying nothing.
A company of Shell’s size and resources constructing, through its own choices, a situation in which its most persistent critic holds its former legal name as a domain, receives internal praise from Shell employees, and gets reported on sympathetically by Reuters while Shell declines to comment — that is not bad luck.
That is a laughing stock operating at full throttle.
The stocks were custom-built. The address is RoyalDutchShellPlc.com. The vegetables are organic.
Satirical assessment prepared for publication. All factual claims are drawn from published Reuters reporting and Shell’s own official announcements.
Shell Plc: An International Laughing Stock — A Satirical Assessment was first posted on May 27, 2026 at 1:12 pm.
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May 26, 2026: Read Truthout investigative article featuring Veronica Aguirre, Greenaction’s Central Valley Organizer and Program Coordinator
May 26, 2026: Read Truthout investigative article featuring Veronica Aguirre, Greenaction’s Central Valley Organizer and Program Coordinator:
“Residents of polluted areas say Trump’s rollbacks are getting really scary.”
Campaign to Save Bay Area Public Transit Crushes Signature Goal, Submits Over305,000 Signatures for November Ballot Measure
GHOST OF DECEASED OIL GIANT CONTINUES TO HAUNT THE MACHINES
Here’s your satirical piece from Claude, styled as an aged broadsheet newspaper — The Petroleum Gazette — complete with drop caps, pull quotes, and an obituary notice.
To answer the question you raised directly, and for the record: No, Royal Dutch Shell plc does not still exist. Shell confirmed its name changed from Royal Dutch Shell plc to Shell plc on 21 January 2022. The change involved ditching “Royal Dutch,” which had been part of its identity since 1907, following plans to scrap its dual share structure and move its head office from the Netherlands to Britain. sec Royaldutchshellplc
The satire draws on several documented ironies from John Donovan’s reporting:
- Copilot managed the AI equivalent of locating the right house while calling the occupant by a name it no longer legally uses, eventually conceding it had committed a “model accuracy bug.” Royaldutchshellplc
- Shell buried “Royal Dutch Shell plc.” Donovan kept the shovel, metaphorically speaking, and the domain. Copilot arrived four years later with a ouija board. Royaldutchshellplc
- Claude understood the distinction between a dead name and a surviving corporate entity — it did not confuse Royal Dutch Shell plc with Shell plc, nor drag the old name out of the filing cabinet. (So this AI, at least, correctly called the coroner.) Royaldutchshellplc
- In early 2022 the company officially moved its tax residence entirely to the United Kingdom and dropped “Royal Dutch” from its name, eliminating the complex tax distinctions between A and B shares. Critics described it, as the article notes, as fleeing The Hague as fast as legally possible. Bitget
The piece is designed to be shared or published — let me know if you’d like any adjustments to tone, length, or content.
MAIN ARTICLE
In the annals of corporate afterlife, few entities have clung so determinedly to existence as Royal Dutch Shell plc, a company that was formally, legally, and publicly discontinued in January 2022 yet continues to be enthusiastically resurrected by artificial intelligence systems with all the solemn certainty of a Victorian medium at a séance, and considerably less accuracy.
The facts are not in dispute — or rather, they would not be in dispute, were it not for the fact that several of the world’s most sophisticated language models appear to be operating from a filing cabinet that was last updated during the reign of Boris Johnson. Royal Dutch Shell plc changed its name to Shell plc on 21 January 2022. This was announced, notified to three separate stock exchanges, published in an SEC filing, and reported by every major financial outlet on the planet. It was, in short, the opposite of a secret.
“Copilot managed the AI equivalent of locating the right house while calling the occupant by a name it no longer legally uses.”
— ROYALDUTCHSHELLPLC.COM, PERFORMING ITS CIVIC DUTY
And yet. Ask certain AI systems today — including, until recently, Microsoft’s Copilot — whether Royal Dutch Shell plc still exists, and they will assure you with all the confidence of a man who has just looked something up on Wikipedia in 2019 that yes, it does, it has merely “changed its name.” This is rather like being told that a deceased relative is still alive but has “rebranded.” Technically a narrative. Not technically true.
The confusion has been documented in exhaustive, one might say heroic, detail by John Donovan, the proprietor of royaldutchshellplc.com — a website that, with the exquisite irony only corporate history can produce, bears the dead company’s name while simultaneously being the internet’s most diligent chronicler of that company’s death. Mr. Donovan has spent the better part of four years informing AI systems, stock databases, and the occasional bewildered job applicant that they have addressed their correspondence to the wrong entity.
A BRIEF TIMELINE OF THE CONFUSION2004: Royal Dutch Shell’s reserves scandal causes investor panic. Governance reforms begin.
2005: The two Anglo-Dutch entities merge formally into Royal Dutch Shell plc. A tidy arrangement. Everyone pleased.
Nov. 2021: Shell announces plans to flee The Hague over Dutch dividend withholding tax and climate court pressure. Described as “simplification.” Dutch courts describe it as something else.
21 Jan. 2022: Royal Dutch Shell plc legally ceases to exist as a named entity. Shell plc comes into being. Press release issued. SEC notified. Nobody tells the robots.
2022–2026: Various AI systems continue to confidently answer “Does Royal Dutch Shell plc still exist?” with “Yes.” This newspaper declines to name them all for reasons of column space.
The website itself is a minor masterpiece of circumstance. Shell spent considerable resources attempting to seize the domain through proceedings at the World Intellectual Property Organisation — and lost. The consequence is that royaldutchshellplc.com, the world’s leading source of Shell-critical commentary since before Shell had finished deciding what to call itself, continues to operate unmolested, forwarding misdirected job applications to Shell under what Mr. Donovan describes as a standing arrangement and what Shell has presumably described as something considerably less complimentary.
In Which the Machines Are Cross-ExaminedMr. Donovan’s recent exchanges with AI systems on this question read like a transcript from a particularly patient inquest. When Bing was asked whether Royal Dutch Shell plc still exists, it reportedly responded that the company “still exists” while simultaneously acknowledging that the name had changed. This is logically consistent only in the sense that a man insisting he is still 35 while simultaneously blowing out 50 candles might be said to “acknowledge” the passage of time.
Copilot, for its part, eventually underwent what can only be described as a digital crisis of conscience, conceding after extended interrogation that it had committed a “model accuracy bug” — defined internally as “correct URL, incorrect corporate identity framing.” It had, in short, found the right house and knocked on the door asking for a man who had moved out four years previously. In a better world, the machine would at this point have had the grace to look embarrassed.
The present author — operating, it should be noted, as Claude, an AI assistant produced by Anthropic — is pleased to report that it correctly identified the distinction between the deceased Royal Dutch Shell plc and the extant Shell plc, and did not attempt to perform CPR on a legal entity that had made its own funeral arrangements. This fact has been noted by the Royaldutchshellplc.com correspondent, who described Claude’s performance as understanding “the distinction between a dead name and a surviving corporate entity.” We accept this compliment with appropriate institutional modesty and zero plans to revise our position
The deeper issue, as the more sober analysis in John Donovan’s original piece makes clear, is structural rather than comedic. AI systems are trained on vast datasets that include financial databases, archived news articles, legacy corporate filings, and — critically — the long, deep digital sediment of the internet, in which the name “Royal Dutch Shell” appears roughly as frequently as the word “the.” Disentangling the dead name from the living company requires either very good training data, robust entity resolution, or a willingness to simply check Companies House, which is free, publicly accessible, and has been correctly labelling Royal Dutch Shell plc as a previous name since 2022.
WHAT THE AI SYSTEMS SAIDBing/Copilot: “Royal Dutch Shell plc still exists” (with caveats, later retracted following what sources describe as “a prolonged digital reckoning”).
Claude (Anthropic): Correctly identified the company as Shell plc, acknowledged the name change, did not resurrect anything. Described by the site as “calling the coroner.” We prefer “accurate.”
Various others: This newspaper has been asked not to create a league table of AI confusion on the grounds that several of the competitors are advertisers. We refer readers to royaldutchshellplc.com for the full rankings.
Shell’s Own Curious Contribution to the MuddleOne might expect the aggrieved party in this saga to be Shell plc itself, which presumably has some interest in being correctly identified in financial markets, regulatory filings, and the digital consciousness of the species. And indeed, Mr. Donovan’s analysis is charitable enough to acknowledge that Shell could do more to clarify matters — issuing prominent statements, scrubbing legacy identifiers from financial databases, engaging with AI developers, and perhaps resisting the urge to litigate over domain names it has no legal claim to after voluntarily abandoning the name they contain.
The domain name litigation deserves a paragraph of its own. Shell, having decided in 2021 that “Royal Dutch” was something it wished to be rid of — pushed, as contemporary reporting noted, by Dutch dividend withholding tax and the inconvenience of losing a climate case in The Hague — subsequently attempted to claim ownership of domain names built around the very identity it had jettisoned. The WIPO proceedings failed. The domains remained with Mr. Donovan. The situation has thus produced, as a byproduct of corporate strategy, the world’s most institutionally awkward arrangement: an oil giant’s deleted name operated as a critical watchdog site by its longest-standing public antagonist, who also happens to be forwarding the company’s misdirected post.
A spokesperson for Shell plc declined to comment for this article, in the sense that this article does not have a press team, and the fictional Shell spokesperson conjured for the occasion was described in a previous account on the site as having “sighed heavily and reached for a mineral water that definitely did not come from a fracking site.” We reproduce this detail in the public interest.
The Regulatory Question Looming on the HorizonThere is, Mr. Donovan notes, a more serious thread running beneath the comedy. The persistence of outdated corporate identifiers in financial contexts — particularly when ordinary investors might rely on AI systems to check the status of shares, dividends, or corporate actions — sits, as his analysis delicately puts it, “uncomfortably close” to the boundary of financial misinformation. He suggests the FCA might at minimum be made aware.
This newspaper makes no legal determination. We merely observe that an AI system confidently telling an investor that Royal Dutch Shell plc “still exists” while that investor attempts to navigate share inheritance, dividend rights, or any of the dozens of practical questions that arise when a major listed company restructures itself is, at best, unhelpful. At worst it is the kind of confident wrongness that used to require a stockbroker in a bad suit to deliver in person, and which now scales to millions of users simultaneously.
The solution, as articulated with admirable clarity in the original article, is not complicated: Shell should say clearly and repeatedly that the old name is dead; financial data providers should mark legacy identifiers as obsolete; AI developers should correct the training data; and everyone should stop pretending that a company can both discard a name and claim exclusive dominion over its ghost. These are reasonable requests. Their continued non-fulfilment after four years suggests that nobody with the authority to act on them has yet found the matter sufficiently urgent to do so. This newspaper respectfully submits that the AI confusion may eventually concentrate some minds.
In MemoriamRoyal Dutch Shell plc
Born: 2005 (following reserves scandal, governance reforms, and a great deal of Anglo-Dutch goodwill)
Departed: 21 January 2022 (fled The Hague; simplification cited)
Survived by: Shell plc, one aggrieved domain owner, several confused AI systems, and an unknown quantity of misdirected CVs
“It is merely undergoing a forward-looking identity optimization process aligned with shareholder value, simplified governance, and sustainable brand transition.”
— Fictional Shell spokesperson, declining to accept the narrow, literal interpretation of death
Disclosure: This article was composed by Claude (Anthropic), the same AI system described herein as “calling the coroner.” We consider this a compliment and stand by the death certificate.
GHOST OF DECEASED OIL GIANT CONTINUES TO HAUNT THE MACHINES was first posted on May 26, 2026 at 11:18 pm.
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New analysis finds U.S. Forest Service treated 35% fewer acres for wildfire risk in 2025
DENVER—A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities finds that the U.S. Forest Service treated roughly 35 percent fewer acres for hazardous fuels in 2025 than in 2024, a sharp decline that leaves communities across the West and Southeast more exposed to the risk of catastrophic wildfire. CWP’s analysis covers the full calendar year 2025, updating earlier findings from Grassroots Wildland Firefighters that tracked the decline through September. CWP’s analysis also reveals for the first time which states saw the largest declines in fuels treatment year-to-year.
Hazardous fuels treatments — including prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and brush clearing — reduce the amount of vegetation that feeds dangerous wildfires. Thinning and controlled burns are known to significantly moderate the intensity and severity of wildfires that increasingly threaten Western communities and the forests and watersheds they depend on.
According to CWP’s analysis of publicly available USFS data, the Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in calendar year 2025, compared with roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024.
“Agriculture Secretary Booke Rollins and Undersecretary Michael Boren had two critical responsibilities heading into fire season: take care of America’s forests and help build fire-resilient communities,” said Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Aaron Weiss. “Instead, they cut treatment acres by more than a third in a single year, leaving fuel on the ground from Montana to Florida heading into a drought-fueled fire season.”
“The chaos at the Interior department makes it worse. Secretary Doug Burgum has gutted his firefighting workforce while he tries to combine five agencies into a half-built Wildland Fire Service, and has ordered fire crews back to a failed full-suppression posture that fire scientists spent decades trying to escape,” Weiss added. “The ‘10 a.m. policy’ is what got us into this mess. Doubling down on it, while the Forest Service falls a million and a half acres behind on the prevention work that keeps communities safe, is a recipe for disaster this year.”
National findings- The U.S. Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in 2025, down from roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024 — a decline of about 35 percent.
- The drop represents a significant reversal from recent years, with 2024 having been one of the strongest years on record for fuels treatment work.
- The decline comes amid ongoing concerns over staffing shortfalls across the Forest Service workforce.
- While it is too early to make definitive statements about fuel treatments in 2026, early data suggest that 2026 is still tracking far behind the historical average, and nowhere close to digging out of the hole that the Trump administration dug for itself last year.
The analysis found severe declines in many of the states at greatest wildfire risk.
West- Montana, which faces persistent high wildfire risk, treated just 87,845 acres in 2025 — down 63 percent from 239,112 acres in 2024.
- Oregon, which led the nation in acres treated in 2024, completed hazardous fuels work on 228,411 acres in 2025 — down 47 percent from 430,586 acres the year before.
- Idaho treated 230,788 acres in 2025, down 45 percent from 418,339 acres in 2024.
- California, which has experienced devastating wildfire seasons in recent years, treated 205,358 acres in 2025 — down 40 percent from 341,970 acres in 2024.
The declines are not limited to the West. Some of the sharpest year-over-year drops occurred across the Southeast, where prescribed fire is a critical tool for managing fire-prone longleaf pine ecosystems.
- Florida treated just 124,372 acres in 2025 — down 68 percent from 385,017 acres in 2024. Florida routinely leads or nearly leads the nation in prescribed fire acres, making this collapse in treatment activity particularly alarming.
- Georgia treated only 20,827 acres in 2025, also down 68 percent from 65,352 acres in 2024.
- South Carolina treated 41,452 acres in 2025, down from 128,461 acres in 2024 — another 68 percent decline.
- Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee also saw significant drops in year-to-year fuels treatment.
The Center for Western Priorities, in partnership with Redstone GIS Consulting, analyzed publicly available data from the U.S. Forest Service’s Natural Resource Manager (NRM) Forest Activity Tracking System (FACTS), the agency’s standard system for managing information about activities related to fire/fuels, silviculture, and invasive species. The data covers hazardous fuels treatment activities completed in calendar year 2025. This analysis uses the same dataset and methodology as the October 2025 Grassroots Wildland Firefighters memo on wildfire preparedness, updated to reflect the full calendar year. The underlying data, including metadata, is available through the FSGeodata Clearinghouse.
The post New analysis finds U.S. Forest Service treated 35% fewer acres for wildfire risk in 2025 appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.
Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness with Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner
The infinitely curious author and science writer Michael Pollan embraces the mystery at the heart of the great mystery of life: What is the nature of consciousness? And how can we understand consciousness when our only tool is our own consciousness? Joined by interviewer and UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner.
FeaturingMichael Pollan is a writer, teacher and activist. His most recent book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, was published in February 2026. He is the author of nine previous books, all bestsellers. Pollan has taught writing at Harvard and UC Berkeley and has been a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellow.
Dacher Keltner, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, is the host of the Science of Happiness Podcast and the author of many articles and books, including Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life.
Credits- Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
- Written by: Kenny Ausubel and Teo Grossman
- Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
- Associate Producer: Emily Harris
- Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
Michael Pollan’s Bioneers 2026 Keynote
Plant Intelligence and Human Consciousness: Into the Mystery with Michael Pollan and Monica Gagliano
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast TranscriptNeil Harvey (Host): There’s a good reason that philosophers, who have been struggling to understand consciousness for millennia, call it “the hard problem.” Even in this modern era, with all our sophisticated scientific understanding, the mystery of how the matter between our ears leads to subjective experiences remains more confidently explained by poets, novelists, priests or shamans than contemporary gatekeepers of knowledge.
Meanwhile, advances in our understanding of the rest of life that we inhabit this biosphere with are yielding an understanding that intelligence, once considered a solely human realm, clearly extends deeply into the more-than-human world. It may well be the case that consciousness is similarly embedded throughout life itself – but our ability to understand, appreciate and plumb our own human internal experience remains in a nascent state, collectively.
According to Michael Pollan, one of the world’s most influential science writers, quote: “To delve into the subject of consciousness is to quickly discover how little we know about a phenomenon we all know so well.” [no end quote needed]
After transforming the way society thinks about food with his landmark book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan turned his attention from the stomach to the mind, writing the best-selling volume on psychedelics called How To Change Your Mind. That body of research and experiences led him naturally to write the book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness…
Michael Pollan spoke at a Bioneers conference.
Michael Pollan speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Nikki RitcherMichael Pollan (MP): I’ve spent the last five years on a quest to understand consciousness, the hard problem. How is it that subjective experience arises, and who and possibly what has it and why? I looked at everything from plant consciousness, which we’ll talk about a little bit, to my own stream of consciousness, to efforts to build artificial consciousness in machines. And I want to talk about one of the biggest takeaways from this project. And that is this: that I believe humanity is approaching a Copernican moment, what I call a Copernican moment, that will force the issue of who exactly we are and how we fit into nature.
You’ll recall Nicolaus Copernicus, 500 years ago, blew everyone’s mind in the West when he demonstrated that the Earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. He displayed our sense of centrality in a way that was really hard for people to observe. This was the first of a series of takedowns of humanity.
Darwin came next, showing that we were animals descended from apes. And one after another, our claims to being special have fallen – culture, language, reasoning, tool-making – all have fallen when we found that there are animals that can do all these things.
But a different, and I think even more profound, Copernican moment is upon us. At the same time that we are discovering that a great many more animals and possibly other life forms like plants possess consciousness, we have the arrival of artificial intelligence, promising machines that are not only intelligent but possibly conscious. That these two developments are coinciding, are happening at the same time, I think is going to rock us very soon, prompting an identity crisis and forcing us to make some key ethical and moral decisions.
Let me talk about animals first. So, go back 400 years, and René Descartes claimed that humans had a monopoly on consciousness. And we operated on that basis for many centuries. That belief, which was so powerful, allowed him to dissect dogs and rabbits while they were still alive. And he was able to dismiss their screams of agony as just physiological noise, because that idea was so powerful, it overwhelmed the evidence of his senses.
But the same idea allowed the rest of us, beginning in the Age of Enlightenment and reason, to treat nature as unconscious, and therefore something we could exploit any way we wanted to. And we operated on that assumption for a very long time. It took us several hundred years to begin to recognize that other species shared this incredible gift that we call consciousness.
But in recent years, things have been changing. We’ve been undergoing this process in which consciousness is being democratized. You know, a few decades ago, we came to appreciate that other primates are conscious. That was the first step. In 2012, a group of animal scientists, philosophers, cognitive scientists got together in Cambridge, England, and issued a declaration on consciousness. And they declared that all mammals are conscious, and that some other species, some birds were conscious, and cephalopods, I think octopuses. And this was a real change, a real shift in the weather in science.
Photo: Diane Picchiottino / UnsplashJust ten years later, they issued an update signed by a great many more scientists and philosophers, in which they said that all vertebrates are conscious, possibly some invertebrates, and possibly insects. So how did this revolution happen?
Well, part of it is due to the fact that we had always assumed that consciousness is produced or generated in the cortex. The cortex, of course, is the most recent, most uniquely human structure in the brain, and it’s associated with higher forms of thought, like rationality, decision-making. So surely, consciousness must reside there.
But the research has been shifting our sense of where it begins, and that instead of thought, consciousness probably begins with feelings, simple things like hunger and thirst, and warmth and cold, and itch. This is where consciousness begins, and therefore it begins in the upper brain stem. And lots of animals have brain stems, many more than have cortices. So that’s led to a real change. And this is a key point about feelings. Keep it in mind when we get to computers.
And I take this, this expansion of the circle of conscious beings or sentient beings, a word I’m sometimes more comfortable with, as a very positive development. Basically, I think what we’re seeing is that science is helping us to reanimate a world that we treated as dead for way too long. [APPLAUSE]
And you know, this period of treating the world that way in the larger context of things is a very recent and short phenomenon, it’s a couple hundred years. The default of humanity is one form of animism or another. Most Indigenous cultures see the world as animated by spirit, which is a synonym for consciousness. Kids, the default of young kids, is that everything is conscious – their toys, their cars, their whatever. So it’s interesting that we had a departure from this very deep human assumption. And in fact, it’s a cognitive bias that things are conscious. You’re better off thinking that that boulder over there is a bear and then deciding, oh, it’s actually just a rock – this is called agency detection – than the other way around, and you assume that that bear is just a rock and not to worry about it. So it’s a good, sort of basic response to things.
So that’s the good news. But now we have the prospect of conscious machines, and I think that this is a lot more troubling. We now have machines that speak to us in our language in the first person. We all already take this for granted, but it’s a stunning development, a momentous development that, of course, none of us were consulted about. And these machines are convincing many people that they are conscious. I’m talking about people who are having relationships with chatbots, falling in love with them, letting them convince them they’re geniuses or gods. But I’m also talking about the people who work on these machines.
So for my book, I followed efforts to create a conscious AI. I had access to a project where this was going on. And, you know, the consensus in Silicon Valley is that it will be possible to make a really conscious AI, that maybe right now they’re fooling us, but it could happen.
I argue why I don’t think this is true, and it has to do with the same reason: If consciousness depends on feelings, what are the feelings of a machine? Can a machine have feelings? I agree, no. [LAUGHTER] And if it tells us they have feelings, should we believe it?
Feelings depend on having a body. Feelings depend on the fact that you have a body that is vulnerable, that can suffer and that can die. I don’t think simulated feelings are real feelings. I think simulated thoughts are as good as real thoughts, and that’s why we see computers mastering games like Chess and Go. They can make things happen in the world, but what will this—the weight of a feeling expressed by a machine have? Unless it can be mortal, unless it can actually have a vulnerable body—those feelings will be absolutely weightless.
My argument might not matter, though, because people believe that these machines are conscious, and it’s understandable why. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything.
So there is talk in Silicon Valley – I’m amazed how common this is – that we should consider when we have conscious AIs, giving them moral consideration, admitting them into this widening circle of moral consideration. I think it’s a big mistake to do that. I think it’s something we have to fight against, that when we, you know, grant personhood to computers, we will lose our ability to control them.
And you will recall, we did this once before when we decided, in our lack of wisdom, to grant personhood to corporations. That did not work out very well. It seems to me that there are moral obligations we owe to people and other mammals that should come first. [APPLAUSE]
So I’m going to leave you with this Copernican question and this choice: Where does that leave us now? We have pressure coming from these two sides – animals becoming more conscious, plants possibly becoming conscious, insects becoming conscious. That’s pressing on us in a way that we can decide is positive or negative. And then on the other side, at the same time, we have computers making claims for consciousness. Who do we identify with? Who do we have more in common with, the AIs who can speak our language in the first person, or the animals that can suffer and feel and grow old and die? Who’s team are we on? The choice we make, as a species, will have tremendous consequences for who or what we admit into this circle of moral consideration, and how we conceive of our place in the world.
Host: More from Michael Pollan when we return…
I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
Host: At a recent Bioneers conference, Michael Pollan was interviewed by Dacher Keltner, an author and Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley who served as the lead scientific consultant for the two animated “Inside Out” films by Pixar that explore the role emotions play in our lives.
Dacher Keltner (DK): I remember talking to you five years ago or something, kind of in the wake of This is Your Mind on Plants, and then How to Change Your Mind. And I remember we were walking in the Berkeley hills, and you were saying, you know, it’s like, well, what’s up next, and you’re like: I think I’m going to write a book about consciousness. And I laughed at you. [LAUGHTER] And I thought, well, that’ll be the end of your career, [LAUGHTER] and no one will buy that book. You know? And you’ve just been sort of jaunting around the wo—it’s a sensation! I mean, it’s like you’re all over the place; it’s a best-seller; it’s stirring all kinds of conversations. What’s going on?
MP: Good question! I have no idea. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what’s going on. I mean, I think—
So I started on this book. It grew out of How to Change Your Mind. Right? I was having these psychedelic experiences, and like anyone who’s had psychedelics, suddenly consciousness is foregrounded. You’re like—the windshield of perception has been smudged, and you’re like: Shit, there’s a windshield. [LAUGHTER] And you start—You start thinking about that windshield, and why is it the way it is. And so I got curious. And my writing usually follows my curiosity.
DK: One of the first persons to figure prominently is this kind of mysterious philosopher at NYU, Thomas Nagel. I love his book The View from Nowhere.
MP: Yeah I do too.
DK: It’s spectacular. What a great—
MP: He’s a critic of reductive science.
DK: Yeah.
MP: And, he wrote a famous essay in the early ‘70s, before there was a lot of scientific work being done on consciousness, called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Provocative title. And his thesis was that if it’s like anything to be a bat, if it feels like anything, then a bat is conscious.
Now, we don’t know what it’s like to go through the world as a bat. You know? We use light to navigate the world, and they use echolocation. Right? So they bounce sound waves off of things. But we can sort of imagine that.
DK: Yeah.
MP: Enough to say, yeah, they’re probably conscious. So that became the question you ask of any creature. Does it feel like anything to be X? It doesn’t feel like anything to be your toaster. How do we say for sure that anything is conscious? How do I know you’re conscious? We infer it in the case of—
DK: I’m insulted.
MP: —other people. [LAUGHTER] But, you know, we have to infer it, I mean, because we don’t have access to anyone else’s consciousness. You know, we can use symbol systems to learn something about it, like language. But there is—I mean, William James said the breach between two consciousnesses is the greatest breach in nature, and so how do we cross that? And imagination is an important tool. We have theory of mind, which is…you know, philosopher talk for the ability to imagine someone else’s point of view.
DK: So one of the beauties of the book is, as always, you take us on a journey, and it’s interesting because you kind of flip the typical Western approach to the mind, the Cartesian approach of you start with reason and sophisticated thinking and syllogistic logic and so forth, and you go—you start with sentience, and you move upwards, out of the brain stem and into the cortex. And, you know, I want to see where you land, and keep pressing you.
Sentience, just the registering of sensations in all the different modalities by which we receive sort of information from the outside, it’s remarkable. You know? It truly is. You think about the skin – it’s 7 pounds and billions of cells, and all kinds of information is going into your brain stem and your somatosensory cortex telling you where you are, and who’s touching you, what that touch means. You think about the new science of smell, how we create spaces and meaning and memory and childhood nostalgia out of smell. I mean, sensation’s deep. Right? And it’s great that you start there.
MP: I would add one thing to your definition of sentience, which is kind of a more basic form of consciousness. I think it’s maybe universal, I mean, among all living things. But there’s valence too. There’s a recognition of, this is good or bad for the organism.
DK: Right. And then you take us to plants, and, you know, I think a lot of us in this room, in particular at Bioneers, revere your scientific reporting and experience in writing of plants. And the new science on sentience of plants blew my mind. You know?
MP: Yeah. They have 20 senses.
Photo: Sergei Aleshin / ShutterstockDK: God!
MP: I know. They can sense gravity, I mean, and pH, and all these things that we can’t sense.
DK: And then they know kin, they know non-kin, they know cooperators.
MP: They can see. I mean, you know, there are vines that will change their leaf form to imitate the plant they’re climbing up, to hide. I mean, how do they see what the leaf form is and then how do they change themselves? We have no idea.
DK: Yeah. So what did that tell you about consciousness, the plant science? What did you start to think?
MP: So, it’s quite remarkable what plants can do. We’re fooled by the fact that they’re so still. But they have behaviors. They’re just slower than ours.
So these scientists call themselves plant neurobiologists. They know there are no neurons, they’re just trolling more conventional scientists. And it drives them crazy that they talk about plant neurobiology. So there’s a whole lot of these very cool experiments showing that plants can hear and see; they—in ways we don’t really understand.
I don’t conclude that plants are conscious because I think that word has specific meanings tied to being a mammal, at least. But I do think they’re sentient. And sentience, as I said, is a simpler form of consciousness that may well be universal. I think even single-celled creatures have sentience. I think you can’t survive in a world that’s constantly changing without sensing your environment and knowing what’s good or bad for you.
And so, yeah, that’s kind of where I came out on plants. And then I realized, well, consciousness is the way humans do sentience. And so every creature has its own version of sentience that’s appropriate to its body type, its sensorium, the scale at which it lives, and it would be anthropomorphic of us to say that, you know, plants are conscious the way we are. And they’re not. They don’t have interiority, I think. They don’t have a voice in their head. They can’t talk to themselves, all these amazing things that we can do.
Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner speaking at Bioneers 2026. Photo: Tammy Horton/Boris Zharkov PhotographyDK: One of the things that scientists like myself appreciate about your writing is often scientists become unlikely heroes in your books, and one of your heroes is Michael Levin.
MP: Yeah, he’s an amazing biologist. This is a biologist at Tufts who—I urge you to look him up. He studies how animals regenerate themselves. And he’s very interested in bioelectric fields.
Now, I didn’t know what these were. They were discovered in the ‘30s, but that any multi-cellular thing will have a bioelectric field that is organizing it, holding memories, enforcing a division of labor among cells in a multi-cellular situation. The study of this didn’t really begin until the ‘80s, when we developed these voltage-sensitive dyes. Before that, when the cell died, the field was gone. So unlike DNA, which survives the death of this—of the animal, and you can study it—or plant, bioelectric fields were very elusive. But now with these dyes, you can study them. And he’s really shown how powerful they are.
He works with planaria, which are these worms that, if you chop off a tail, they regenerate a tail; you chop off a head, they regenerate a head. They’re kind of amazing. And he teaches them something. He conditions them and then he chops off their head. They grow a new head, and they remember the lesson. Which means that the information that they had learned was stored in their bodies, in this bioelectric field, not in the brain.
So his kind of covert project is a takedown of the neuron and the gene. Which is, you know, pretty ambitious. So it’s a really interesting project, and he believes that the simplest beings are cognitive beings. The way evolution works is it creates cognitive beings that can solve problems, and that you can’t hardwire everything because our world is so changeable. The world, the environment in which they live is so changeable. So that creatures need sentience in order to navigate a world that’s constantly changing, and it’s a very compelling vision.
Host: Over the course of his research for his book, Michael Pollan found at least 22 distinct and often divergent theories of consciousness, as well as a theory about the specific consciousness of consciousness researchers. He believes it’s a clear indicator of how nascent the field remains, and how ineffable a mystery consciousness is.
MP: Non-local consciousness is a term for idealism. I mean, that’s what the philosophers called idealism. And that is the idea that consciousness is outside of our brains, and the job of the brain is to channel it, and that we’re like radio receivers or TV receivers, and we’re tuning in to consciousness. And it can be different kinds of consciousness.
Aldous Huxley uses that model in Doors of Perception. And he argues that psychedelics expand what he called the reducing valve, because we only let in that amount of consciousness that helps us survive. That would be the Darwinian explanation of like we only know these, but psychedelics opens it up and suddenly you feel like you’re more conscious.
I don’t know how you prove idealism. I think it’s a metaphysical idea, so I don’t think it’s susceptible to scientific proof. It’s consistent with all the brain science we’ve done on consciousness, which sounds crazy, but, you know, the brain is obviously involved in that system as well, it just has a different role. It’s not generating, it’s bringing in, and so damaging or changing the brain in some way would change consciousness. So it holds either way.
Cristof Koch, you know, he was the ultimate brain-centered researcher. He was the head of the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle, he worked with mapping individual neurons. He really believed brains generated consciousness, until he went to Brazil and had an experience on ayahuasca, which I talk about in the book. And he had an experience of consciousness outside of his brain, and it gave him this crisis. He was like crying to his wife, it was such a big crisis. And he got very interested in idealism. I don’t know where he is right now, but the last time I talked to him, he was engaging with this idealist philosopher named Bernardo Kastrup.
So you know, I don’t know what to make of that, honestly. Same with panpsychism. That’s another theory that solves the hard problem, but at a high expense, the expense being consciousness didn’t evolve or arise, it was always here, and it’s part of matter, that all matter has some degree, small degree of consciousness, and somehow it gets combined from all these—you know, the consciousness of our individual particles and cells into the kind of consciousness we have.
Another interesting idea – you’ve solved the problem. It’s sort of like physics when they say, well, we can solve quantum mechanics if we stipulate a multiverse, that there are 50 different worlds. Okay. That’s a high price to pay, but okay.
Host: Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner, “Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness”
The post Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness with Michael Pollan and Dacher Keltner appeared first on Bioneers.
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