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Must whale sanctuary mean the sea? Channel News brendan 23rd October 2026 Teaser Media

'People vote their real lives' Channel Comment brendan 22nd October 2026 Teaser Media

Adapted from Chapter 5 of The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth From the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction (Princeton University Press).

Blame the word wizardry of Charles Dickens. In 1852 the great Victorian novelist described a long-forgotten naval admiral with the coinage “as dead as the Dodo.” The phrase was catchy. It appeared just a few years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which stoked almost as much interest in the ends of species as in their beginnings. The poor dodo then appeared, as a clownish figure, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The bird’s reputation was sealed, and the dodo became not just an emblem of extinction but a byword for doomed obsolescence. To go the way of the dodo meant to succumb to inevitable oblivion.

In truth, the dodo’s fame is out of proportion to its significance. And yet the bird, rightly understood, is the perfect allegory for the fate of island biota in modern times. That is to say, if we understand its story correctly in place and time, the precise way that its evolutionary history intersects our own, the dodo can help us understand the true depth of human impact — and why the conventional ways we measure that impact threaten to understate the damage we have done.

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) lived on the island of Mauritius in the Mascarene archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The species was a flightless member of the pigeon/dove family (Columbidae). Dodos boasted long and colorful beaks. They ate fruit and perhaps small crabs. The portrayal of the dodo as ridiculous or clumsy is absurdly unfair. Mauritius lacked native mammals (with the exception of one bat, now endangered), so the niches normally occupied by mammals were infilled by birds, reptiles, and even crabs. The dodo, far from a defective product of evolution, was a stroke of creative genius, executed under the severest constraints — a plump pigeon playing the part of a mammal. Until we showed up, they thrived.

The Mascarenes make a rich case study in the annals of extinction history because, as Anthony Cheke and Julian Hume have observed, “Their despoilers took good notes.” This is no accident. The Mascarenes were ground zero for some of the first environmental thinking — and activism — in recognizably modern form. Deforestation and defaunation startled European observers. Mauritius, in the words of the historian Richard Grove, acquired “a disproportionate significance in the history of European colonial environmental policy.” The phrase “dead as a dodo” was not only catchy — it had been primed for success by two centuries of awareness and angst about European impact on this exotic landscape.

Even so, the exact date of the most famous extinction is still fuzzy: The dodo was last securely observed in the 1630s, but they may have survived for a few more decades. The precise cause of their demise is also obscure — in large part because the bird suffered all the usual forces of ecological upheaval at once. Their habitat was destroyed by farms. Their eggs were eaten by invasive species. And, certainly, we hunted the dodos.

The dodo symbolizes the total biotic chaos instigated when Europeans showed up on these islands. At some point or another, more than seventeen mammals, roughly three dozen birds, over a dozen reptiles, a handful of frogs, and numerous invertebrates (among them the nasty predator known as the rosy wolf snail) were introduced. The archipelago’s new residents made their presence felt: Pigs ran rampant, rats gorged on birds and their eggs, and the crab-eating macaque, a monkey native to Southeast Asia, feasted on unwary endemic animals. The effects rippled. Since the first caravel cast its shadow on these shores, more than fifty species have vanished from the Mascarenes.

Human arrival unthreaded a unique fabric woven over incomprehensible reaches of geological time. Islands confront us with the active role of geology in evolution. Islands broadly fall into two types, oceanic and continental, with distinctive evolutionary dynamics. Oceanic islands are usually volcanic in origin (e.g., Palmyra, Hawaii, the Mascarenes), though sometimes they are created by uplift (e.g., Cyprus). Continental islands are bits of landmasses that have become stranded (e.g., the British Isles). Unlike oceanic islands, continental islands start with life, a random sample drawn from continental flora and fauna, like a handful of trail mix grabbed in the dark.

Evolution will work with whatever it is given, and since the constraints are heavy, island biogeography is, in the words of David Quammen, “a catalogue of quirks and superlatives.” Physical barriers drive evolutionary divergence; island populations, separated from the continents, follow unique evolutionary paths. With predators absent and competition sparse, natural selection tilts in unexpected directions. Traits that make no sense on continents — like flightlessness in birds — flourish. Entire systems of interdependence evolve around these peculiarities. And the result is that a staggering share of the world’s species diversity has been hatched on islands.

With great distinctness comes great fragility. Small populations on islands are always vulnerable to shocks, and island species often lack defenses that continental animals must acquire in constant competition against predators, parasites, and even disease. In sum, it is exactly that which makes islands different that leaves them especially vulnerable to us. Their essence is isolation; ours is connectivity. Their tempo is Earth time; our schedules are manic. And when the two collide, the result is often catastrophic.

The Portuguese first set foot on Mauritius around 1507 CE. This timing is of enormous consequence. The year 1500 has come to denote a stark boundary in the literature on the Sixth Extinction (in essence, because the IUCN started noting known extinctions since that date in its Red List). In order to compare past and present rates of extinction, it is commonplace to start tallying species that have disappeared since that time. Round numbers are always suspect, but this one is unusually complicated. Scientists, with a solemn duty to measure things precisely, must start somewhere. Historians, whose tapestry is woven of countless threads, prefer to linger over complexity, to insist on a mix of continuity and change in all human affairs. As a scholar of divided loyalties, I can sympathize with, and become frustrated by, both sides.

Even if the year 1500 is asked to bear an unrealistic amount of weight, the choice is not arbitrary. Around this time, Europeans started crossing oceans with some regularity. The pace of change accelerated. The human impact on biodiversity not only became more pronounced in the Age of Discovery, but the record of our impact also became much richer. No one denies that something dramatically changes around the year 1500, but as the ecologist Robert Whittaker put it, “Using a baseline of AD 1500 is to begin in the middle of the movie.” Whittaker describes our impact on islands in terms of “successive waves of transformation, a form of anthropogenic ratchet effect.”

Human impact on island fauna goes back to the original Ice Age dispersal of humans. Since the Pleistocene, colonization has often meant the onset of hunting and the beginning of the end for large animals, like the pygmy hippos and dwarf elephants on Cyprus. In general, the bigger the animal and the higher up the food web, the more likely it was to vanish. Flightless birds and big reptiles bore the brunt. The giant ground birds of New Zealand, the moas, are a striking case. Geology destined it to be a land of birds. With no mammals (apart from a few bats), the avian fauna of New Zealand gives us a sense of what evolution might have done if the asteroid had wiped out the mammals. The Polynesians who arrived found an Edenic landscape: nine moa species, some towering up to 12 feet tall and weighing hundreds of pounds. Tens to hundreds of thousands of these birds roamed the islands. Within two or three centuries, every species of moa was extinct.

European colonization in the Age of Discovery marked a new era within this much longer story. What makes this period stand out is that the fate of island biodiversity became entangled with novel power dynamics between human societies. Virgin islands like Mauritius were long since rare by 1500 CE, so in most cases, Europeans arrived on already-inhabited islands, disrupting socioecological balances of long standing. The Caribbean offers a quintessential case. Even before European contact, human impact unfolded in distinct waves, but the arrival of Columbus brought a cascade of new pressures: invasive animals, unfamiliar pathogens, and extractive technologies. Indigenous societies and island ecosystems were thrown into turmoil.

The result is measured in rapid faunal turnover. In the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico), there were 116 species of mammals at the beginning of the Holocene. Around 60 of them are gone. If bats are excluded, more than 4 out of every 5 mammals have gone extinct. Cuba, which includes the largest island in the Caribbean plus an archipelago of more than three thousand small islands, has seen approximately 24 of its 59 native mammals go extinct. Deforestation and direct exploitation were important drivers, but the role of invasive species was primary: Over 40 nonnative mammals have been introduced. To the east, on Hispaniola, virtually all the nonflying mammals are gone. On Puerto Rico, all seven are gone.

Mammals were not the only victims. Caribbean birds were threatened by new predators like rats and cats, and they were evicted from their shrinking forests. More than 60 species of birds have certainly gone extinct, and most that remain are threatened or endangered. Over half of the endemic parrots of the Caribbean have been snuffed out. Reptiles have suffered a similar fate. Although modern research has skewed away from our cold-blooded cousins, reptiles are integral to Caribbean ecosystems. Yet since European arrival, turtles, snakes, and lizards have been in freefall. On Guadeloupe, for instance, half to two-thirds of snakes and lizards have gone extinct. Many of the ecological jobs undertaken by reptiles go unreplaced, making the loss of functional diversity even greater.

The story of island biodiversity will thread through future chapters too. As steam replaced sail, the problem of invasive species only became more acute. In the last century, pollution and climate change have become new threats. There was a long pre-history to human impact before 1500 CE; European colonization marks not a beginning but a distinct new phase, a speeding up; and now the Anthropocene is somehow accelerating human impact again.

All in all, the human-dominated planet leaves less life on islands. What endures is quieter, more uniform, less exuberant than before. The raw numbers are revealing. Consider that since the beginning of the late Pleistocene — roughly 126,000 years ago — about 600 bird species are known to have gone extinct, and the real number is probably twice as high. Around 80% of the extinct species were island endemics. Even more generally, around three out of every four anthropogenic extinctions to date have involved island species. If global biodiversity is a great library, written over tens of millions of years, then we have erased an inordinate portion of its rare books collection — the most archaic, most colorful, and most singular volumes.

The year 1500 always saw a speeding up of human impact on ocean life, but the contrast between oceans and islands puts the proposition of the Sixth Extinction, its limits and its strengths, in a distinct light. Oceans are vast and resilient. Islands are small and fragile. If we measure human impact by counting extinctions alone, we will underestimate what we have done to life in the oceans. At the same time, extinction is a reasonable measure of our impact on islands, at least so far, even if we rarely count or even consider the losses before 1500 CE. And counting extinctions is only one crude measure of what we care about. Conceivably, the rate of island extinction could slow down, only because we have already done so much damage to the most vulnerable ecosystems. This is hardly cause for complacency. In fact, just the opposite: Because we have already lost so much diversity on islands, we might strain all the more to protect what remains.

Previously in The Revelator:

For Bald Eagles, the Descendants of the Destroyers Became the Restorers

The post The Way of the Dodo: Thinking Historically About Extinction appeared first on The Revelator.

'A betrayal of all of our futures' Channel News brendan 21st October 2026 Teaser Media

Oil and indigenous communities Channel News brendan 21st October 2026 Teaser Media

After Europe’s summer heatwaves, climate salience is at its highest in years, yet it’s clear the past frameworks used to mobilise majorities are crumbling amid an ongoing cost of living crisis and energy insecurity. To penetrate politically, climate communications must fit within the material realities of voters’ lives. In other words, the key to mobilising climate action is to demonstrate that the green transition can make European countries more secure and people’s lives cheaper.

The salience of climate change has been on a downward trajectory post-2019. That year is remembered by many as the moment climate politics broke containment: Ursula von der Leyen’s newly elected European Commission mandated Net Zero by 2050 after mass mobilisations in the streets demanding climate action and a strong performance by Green parties in that year’s European elections.

The years that followed could not have been more different. Pandemic lockdowns broke the wave of climate protests, and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis forced climate down the political agenda. There, the issue languished, rarely emphasised by mainstream parties except occasionally by far-right agitators attempting to stir up “greenlash”. 

Even before the cost of living crisis, climate struggled to get more than 10 per cent of European electorates ranking it among their top issues. While polling shows that people hold ambient concern for the climate crisis, it remained a second-order issue. The movement has thus existed in political purgatory: marked by high awareness and intense polarisation, yet devoid of broader electoral momentum.

The recent summer of extreme weather may have broken that impasse. New research we conducted in August at Mandate Research, a strategy consulting firm for political campaigns, shows a definite spike in voters’ climate concern during this summer’s heatwaves. Among the countries we polled,1 this effect was particularly visible in Hungary and across Southern Europe, where Spain and France in particular were hit by devastating wildfires. In Hungary, 91 per cent of voters report being worried about climate change, followed closely by Italy (81 per cent), France (80 per cent), and Spain (68 per cent).

This worry translated directly into issue salience. In Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and the UK, roughly a fifth of voters now rank the environment and climate change among their top two issues. In Hungary, salience catapulted from a spring baseline of 3 per cent to a staggering 25 per cent, making it the second most important issue in the country in August. Hungarian citizens have had a particularly shocking confrontation with energy precarity this summer. The most severe drought in over a century partially dried up the Danube, causing a temporary shutdown of the nuclear facility supplying nearly half the country’s power.

Salience numbers are famously difficult to budge. The belief that climate politics had hit a saturation point, with returns diminishing as voters grew accustomed to extreme weather rather than increasing with the severity of the climate crisis, had convinced many mainstream parties that the issue was a vote loser. However, double-digit salience increases in the span of a few months demonstrate that European voters are not yet numb to peril.

This momentum is unlikely to fully evaporate in the colder months. With El Niño intensifying towards historic peaks and European gas storage levels concerningly low ahead of the winter season, the climate conversation is poised to shift from record heatwaves to heating bills and the threat of more extreme weather events.

The failure of old stories

Reclaiming a seat at the table is good news, but squandering this moment with outdated messaging would be fatal.

While rising salience presents an undeniable political opening, progressives must not misread the room. Affordability, immigration, housing, and healthcare still rank above climate in most of the countries we surveyed, and overall concern has met but not surpassed the 2019 peak.
More importantly, the world has changed significantly since then, and so have the ways people relate to the climate crisis. The failures of green policies, the rise of the far right (with its own narratives and solutions to the climate emergency) and the shifting geopolitical landscape all demand a different approach from progressives. Reclaiming a seat at the table is good news, but squandering this moment with outdated messaging would be fatal.

This risk is most visible with “Net Zero”, a 2050 target enshrined in both the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal. When asked to rank environmental policy goals from highest to lowest priority, “achieving Net Zero emissions” ranked dead last across every single country surveyed. In Germany (-37), the UK (-42), France (-35), and the US (-40), Net Zero received deeply negative net priority ratings. Voters overwhelmingly prefer tangible, immediate objectives: building clean energy, protecting nature and wildlife, and reducing energy costs.

Furthermore, the public is deeply sceptical about the feasibility of Net Zero targets. Well over half of respondents believe it is unlikely their country will make meaningful progress towards the 2050 goal. The attempt to bundle various policy aims together and rebrand it as Net Zero has clearly failed to reach voters; repetition has led to abstraction and meaninglessness.

Even more troubling is the perceived distribution of economic costs. Almost half of Europeans surveyed believe that pro-environmental policies have left ordinary people in their country worse off, including 54 per cent in the Netherlands, 46 per cent in Spain, 45 per cent in Germany, 45 per cent in France, and 42 per cent in the UK.

This perception persists despite measurable, real-world improvements in air quality, public health indicators, and biodiversity conservation across Europe. Policies that treated emissions reductions as the target and affordability as an afterthought have clearly reached their limit, and they are even less likely to succeed amid a prolonged cost of living crisis.  Relentless far-right framing that depicts environmentalism as technocracy has also played its part in convincing people that green policy is synonymous with meaningless sacrifice and elite control.

Today, progressives have to contend with thin, transactional support for climate action. When asked if they would support renewable energy, people respond positively. However, when renewable investment is posited as requiring taxation or public service cuts, this support turns sharply negative across nearly all European countries.

Moralistic, future-focused arguments and lofty green targets celebrated in the Fridays for Future past have lost momentum. The timelines environmental policies require are inescapable, but so is the need to have people on board a green project. Voters want a green future, but they want a job and food on the table for their families an order of magnitude more.

Reconfiguring climate politics

While affordability concerns overshadow melting ice caps, they also provide an opportunity for the climate movement to execute a strategic pivot. The convergence of climate extremes, geopolitical volatility, and rising utility bills creates a narrow window to reframe clean energy as a practical, necessary alternative to fossil fuels. Low riverbeds impact the cost of transportation, hot summers make it hard to cool power plants, and a warming atmosphere yields bad harvests and increases the price of everyday goods such as olive oil, coffee, and chocolate. Framed this way, the green transition is less a matter of global leadership and blue-sky thinking than a shield against further economic insecurity.

Voters do make the connection between renewable power and structural affordability. Clear majorities across Europe agree that transitioning to renewable energy will lower energy bills and reduce dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets. In a similar vein, expanding renewable capacity is consistently ranked by voters as the single most effective action governments can take to lower energy costs.

This is reflected in message testing across Europe. Narratives focused on immediate material outcomes, such as capping household energy bills by taxing fossil fuel windfall profits, or protecting national energy security from foreign autocrats, consistently outperform abstract moral appeals.

Right-wing figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Kemi Badenoch in the UK have attempted to present themselves as pragmatic leaders defending working families against “arbitrary climate targets”. Support for nuclear energy as part of the solution is often featured in this kind of discourse – and it resonates among voters, ranking as the top climate priority in Sweden and Poland, and a close second in the UK, France, and the Netherlands.

During this summer’s heatwaves, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen also tried to pitch herself as a pragmatic leader by advocating a “grand plan” for air conditioning. While this will neither solve the climate crisis nor adapt our cities to the heat, it put her opponents on the defensive.

All this shows that progressives can no longer lay exclusive claim to the climate issue. The newfound salience of the climate crisis will only translate into votes if they offer solutions to people’s material concerns. In this context, conceding the language of pragmatism to the Right would be a strategic mistake.

Voters want a green future, but they want a job and food on the table for their families an order of magnitude more.

Rebuilding majorities

Europeans have not abandoned the green transition. Across the continent, solid majorities recognise that drastic change is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and they believe that green investment can help make their lives easier.

However, voters are no longer responding to the argument as it has been framed and delivered over the past decade, and hoping that extreme weather will shock electorates back to reason is bad politics. Many Europeans are providing the movement an opening because of the energy and cost of living crisis and security concerns. The climate movement must take heed of this, and meet voters where they are.

Civil society and climate movements can continue to highlight immediate threats from extreme weather to maintain emotional urgency – after all, this type of messaging still proves the most effective in boosting the salience of the climate crisis. But political parties competing for government must ground their vision in tangible economic benefits. By dismantling the abstract vocabulary of Net Zero, confronting corporate profiteering, and presenting renewable energy as a tool for bill reduction and sovereign security, progressives can begin to rebuild a majority for climate action.

1. Sweden, The Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Hungary, Poland, and the US. ︎

England enters the pyrocene Channel News brendan 20th October 2026 Teaser Media

Indonesia is a young country — in more ways than one.

Its current democratic government dates back under three decades to 1998, after the fall of Soeharto, the military dictator who led the country for 32 years.

It’s also demographically young, with a median age of just 31. That means fewer and fewer people in Indonesia remember the time they were under Soeharto’s ‘New Order’ rule.

But despite the fading memory of Soeharto’s reign, one of the decisions he made in the later years — selecting a National Precious Bird — is outlasting his regime.

Ten days into January 1993, President Soeharto signed his fourth Presidential Decree of that year. The first three dealt with setting the domestic retail sale prices of petroleum and tariffs for electricity and public transportation. The fourth declared an until-then largely unknown bird, the Javan hawk-eagle (Nisaetus bartelsi), as Indonesia’s national bird. The United States had its bald eagle, China had its giant panda, and now Indonesia had its hawk-eagle.

Photo: Vincent Nijman

Three reasons favored giving the Javan hawk-eagle this title.

First, their appearance and prominent crest mirrors the mythical bird Garuda, which is central to Indonesia’s national coat of arms, the Garuda Pancasila.

Second, the loss of rainforest on Java — Indonesia’s most densely populated and least forested island — meant very few hawk-eagles remained, and increased attention could be beneficial to their conservation.

Third, a national bird had to be found exclusively within Indonesia, and Soeharto’s regime heavily favored Java, leading to a “Javanization” of Indonesian politics, culture, and economic development. The Javan hawk-eagle fit like a glove.

Photo: Vincent Nijman

Ornithologist Bas van Balen, one of the first people to study the species, recalls that the decree established three national “mascots” — a popular animal, a charming one, and a rare one. The animals were selected “during a workshop in 1993, attended by representatives of various governmental bodies, such as the Forest and Environmental departments, the parliament, the scientific authority, local universities, media mass, NGOs and various experts. Worries that the eagle would undergo the same fate as for instance the black-naped oriole — provincial faunal symbol of Central Java, which was much sought after for the bird trade in the years after its nomination — were discounted, as its protection was believed by the committee to be the authorities’ responsibility.”

In 1993 I was a young biologist, eager to study birds in the rainforest. The announcement of the Javan hawk-eagle as Indonesia’s national bird, and the observation by French naturalists of a juvenile on a mountain in central Java, spurred me on to make the move to Indonesia.

At the time there were no photographs of the bird — either in the wild or in captivity — and I had to rely on some 30 preserved skins in Dutch museums to get a good idea what the bird looked like. I also had the fortune to become acquainted with the then 87-year-old ornithologist Hans Bartels, the middle of the Bartels family (Max Sr, Max Jr, Hans, and Ernst) after which Javan hawk-eagles received their taxonomic name.

Javan hawk-eagles were already legally protected — all birds of prey in Indonesia were put on the county’s protected species list in 1970, signed by Soeharto’s long-trusted Minister of Agriculture, Toyib Hadiwinata — and none lived in zoos or private collections. After the national bird declaration, any individuals or institutions that wanted to keep a Javan hawk-eagle had to receive presidential permission. Only one person was granted this: Ibu Tien, Soeharto’s wife. Her Javan hawk-eagle, a juvenile bird almost certainly illegally taken from its nest, was displayed at a Jakarta zoo run and managed by one of many Soeharto family foundations.

In those first years during many of my visits, more zoo directors expressed the desire to display Javan hawk-eagles and even breed them. Of course zoos were not allowed to obtain them, but “gifts by anonymous donors” created a loophole. Two years after the declaration, three zoos on Java displayed or had displayed a total of 14 Javan hawk-eagles, six of whom died within one year.

Photo: Vincent Nijman

Zoos were not the only ones eager to own a national bird. In an Indonesian context, owning and displaying legally protected species was, and perhaps still is, seen as a sign of status, of “being untouchable” or above the law. Ibu Tien’s display of a Javan hawk-eagle could be interpreted in this context, as was the decision by a national celebrity to have himself photographed in traditional dress next to his pet Javan hawk-eagle for the women’s magazine Femina.

It was, and still is, challenging to keep a rainforest eagle in captivity, as attested by the high mortality rates in Indonesian zoos. Most of the Javan hawk-eagles I saw in zoos in the 1990s and 2000s were first-year birds — easily recognizable as such because young birds have blueish eyes that turn yellow as they get older.  This was not evidence of captive breeding but attested to them being poached from their nests.

Looking back, the decision to declare such a rare bird as a national symbol, without first putting proper protection and management in place, may not have been wise. When I started my research on Java, every large eagle regardless of species was described as a “Javan eagle,” but this changed rapidly and the Javan hawk-eagle quickly became recognized as something special. Enforcement of protected species legislation in Indonesia was and continues to be weak, and under Soeharto’s rule corruption and nepotism allowed for exceptions to be made.

Today numerous people and zoos keep Javan hawk-eagles, and young birds are frequently offered for sale. In the early years one could find them in the dark corners of one of the many bird markets that are present throughout Indonesia, but increasingly they are offered for sale on e-commerce platforms and social media sites.

But all is not negative.

At time of the declaration, very little was known about Javan hawk-eagles. Based on very limited surveys — including ones done by Bas van Balen — they were considered among the rarest birds in the world, with fewer than 60 pairs confined to five or six widely separated forest fragments and millions of people living in the areas in between. The first people who recorded the species and commented on their conservation were non-Indonesian birders, either living in Indonesia or visiting.

This has now changed. Today Javan hawk-eagles are arguably Indonesia’s most frequently studied birds, with university students’ conducting projects year after year on the eagles themselves, their habitat, and their distribution.

Meanwhile a solid group of dedicated raptor enthusiasts works to study, monitor, and protect the species. We now know more about Javan hawk-eagles than ever before, and the earlier population estimates were off by an order of magnitude.

And it turned out that the birds were not confined to the island of Java: They’ve been observed flying on neighboring Bali as well.

Trade and continuing habitat loss remain the main threats to the species, but guard nest protection programs have been very successful.

Zaini Rakhman, chairman of Raptor Indonesia, says that “between 2001 and 2021, 40 confiscated or surrendered Javan hawk-eagles were released and 27 of them survived in their new habitats.”

In 2023 two Javan hawk-eagles, captive born in an Indonesian zoo, were released into a national park in western Java — an area that might not have been protected if not for the birds.

“The presence of Javan hawk-eagles was one of the reasons why the forests on Mt. Murio in central Java were declared as a Grand Forest Park,” says Rakhman. “Increased protection of additional forest areas are currently under review.”

In the early 1990s Hans Bartels was of the opinion that the survival of the Javan hawk-eagle and its forest was fully dependent on Indonesia’s younger generation. They have taken this to heart. The eagle is now the pride of many Indonesians — and rightly so — and December 2025 saw the opening of the Bartels Javan Hawk-Eagle Conservation Museum, in a historic building that had originally been the private residence of the Bartels family.

Even President Soeharto could not have imagined this would be the cumulation of his single-handed declaration of Indonesia’s national bird.

References:

Nijman, V. 2020. Illegal trade in Indonesia’s National Rare Animal has moved online. Oryx 54(1), 12.

Nijman, V., Shepherd, C.R., Van Balen, S. 2009. Declaration of the Javan hawk eagle Spizaetus bartelsi as Indonesia’s National Rare Animal impedes conservation of the species. Oryx 43(1), 122-128.

Thiollay, J.M., Meyburg, B.U. 1988. Forest fragmentation and the conservation of raptors: a survey on the island of Java. Biological Conservation 44(4),229-250.

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The post Authoritarianism and Conservation: How a Dictator Shaped the Future of an Endangered Bird appeared first on The Revelator.

It’s the second-most used material on Earth, it’s an environmental disaster, and it’s falling apart all around us. Meet concrete, the subject of a new feature-length documentary by John Wilson, a filmmaker with a knack for finding laugh-out-loud absurdity in the mundane.

The History of Concrete stitches together quick cuts of handheld footage and deadpan narration in the same style as How To with John Wilson, the HBO show that made the filmmaker’s career. As in his episodes on “how to make small talk” and “how to put up scaffolding,” the titular subject of the film isn’t really the point. Instead, Wilson uses the theme of concrete as a kind of connective tissue, taking the viewer on a sprawling exploration of the overlooked corners of our world. Concrete’s pervasiveness allows this film to venture anywhere — a family-run mortuary that specializes in tattoo preservation, a patriotic brick-laying competition in Las Vegas, and a 3,100-mile spiritual race in which runners circle a single block in Queens for weeks on end.

It would be a stretch to call the documentary a climate film. (In fact, it’s explicitly styled like a Hallmark movie.) But with each turn of the lens, Wilson sheds light on an unfolding environmental disaster. After all, he points out, concrete is the third biggest contributor to global warming. And although concrete is an indispensable part of modern life, its short, crumbling lifespan makes it a hazard on an increasingly disaster-prone planet. (Reader beware, there are more grim facts about concrete — and spoilers —  ahead.)

Wilson’s fascination with concrete started when the basement of his apartment building in Queens began intermittently flooding. He tried to patch the repair himself with a store-bought concrete mix, but the leak kept coming back. His frustration is widely shared: As climate change intensifies storms and raises sea levels, New Yorkers are dealing with more extreme rainfall and coastal flooding than ever before. The abundance of concrete worsens flooding by preventing stormwater from seeping into the soil and, when it cracks, fails to block the water from filling subway stations and buildings for dozens of days a year.

More on concrete A new solution for flood-prone cities? Concrete made from shellfish waste. Ayurella Horn-Muller

Wilson goes on to discover our concrete-smothered world is full of hazards, owing to the material’s surprisingly short lifespan. Structures like the Brooklyn Promenade, which makes up the upper most deck of a four-layered expressway, aren’t supposed to last more than 40 years according to Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner who Wilson interviews. Today, the 1,800-foot-long artery is covered in patch jobs. Schwartz tells Wilson that a mass catastrophe could be just a few years away.

With these facts in mind, any city starts to look like a morass of potential disasters. It’s no wonder that Wilson spent at least a year filming the cracks around New York. Some places, such as a public swimming pool sanitation facility that is inundated with leaks, are given a few minutes of screentime. Others, including the architecturally famous Spring Street Salt Shed, which is patched with packing tape, and a 10-year-old skyscraper in midtown Manhattan that may already need to be demolished, are presented in a quick, jaw-dropping montage. As Wilson says, it feels as though “we’re all in danger somehow.”  

Perversely, climate change is making this problem even worse. Studies show that extreme weather hastens the deterioration of concrete structures around the world. And while Wilson doesn’t say this, it’s worth noting that even structurally sound concrete is a hazard as the planet warms. The material creates an “urban heat island” effect that can cause local air temperatures to rise as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit, turning the pavement into a scalding 140 degrees F griddle and killing hundreds of people in places like Arizona every year.

More on urban heat Report: 41 million Americans are simmering on urban heat islands Katie Myers

But, as a contractor tells Wilson, “We’d be up a creek without concrete. It is used for everything.” Places like New York require vast amounts of the material to build new housing and maintain urban areas. Unfortunately, sand — the key ingredient in concrete — is vanishing as coastlines erode and humans use up some 50 billion tons of the stuff per year. While most people remain blissfully unaware, Wilson says, experts have been trying to warn us of an impending global sand shortage. 

Near the end of the film, Wilson takes a peak at a concrete recycling plant, one of the few existing solutions to these problems. These facilities exist to stop debris from demolitions going to landfills, and, ideally, to make newly usable material with fewer emissions. But the one that Wilson found near Brooklyn’s marine terminal was also filling nearby neighborhoods with dangerous amounts of airborne dust, prompting protests and the plant’s eventual closure in 2025.

For now, our dependency on concrete seems as intractable as its pitfalls. “Once you’re used to something, it becomes hard to change your lifestyle without external pressure,” Wilson says.

I was already aware of the environmental costs of concrete when I first moved to New York City as an early-career climate reporter, but I wasn’t prepared for what it would feel like to be surrounded by so much of it. I found myself questioning the commonly cited statistic that urban lifestyles have a smaller carbon footprint than suburban ones. After all, these studies generally account for the energy and materials residents consume directly, while leaving out the emissions embodied in the buildings, sewers, and other parts of the built-up environment that make city life possible.

Although my own back-of-the-envelope calculations support the idea that living here is probably the greener choice, I still rush through my commutes to spend less time amid the chaos. But walking out of the Manhattan theater where I saw The History of Concrete, my gray surroundings came into sharper focus — almost like the film had never stopped. There’s a kind of poetry in Wilson’s work: the banal becomes beautiful, the bizarre becomes delightful, and the heartbreaks become unguardedly funny. His curiosity, bordering at times on voyeurism, is an invitation to join him in the simple act of paying attention.

And so I noticed the toddler lying on her belly outside of the gum-plastered entrance to the subway station. A dumpling food truck, seemingly stuck in a pothole. Groups of women in ballgowns rushing past, their long skirts dragging into puddles — all of it part of a concrete world worth noticing.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world is crumbling in ‘The History of Concrete’ on Oct 19, 2026.

The extractivists of the Foreign Office Channel News brendan 19th October 2026 Teaser Media

When one of the nation’s biggest investor-owned utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric, wanted to replace Merrian Borgeson’s aging gas service line in Berkeley, California, she asked the company not to do it.

Borgeson, who is the California policy director for climate and energy at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, explained that the repair wasn’t necessary: She was in the process of fully electrifying her home and would be replacing her stove — the only gas appliance left in the house — with an induction version during an upcoming kitchen remodel. At that point, she planned to request that the gas line be shut off.

But PG&E told her it couldn’t wait. That week, the utility dug up her yard and swapped in a new pipe to send gas from the distribution main line to her home.

Borgeson wasn’t charged for the service — at least not directly. The upgrade, which in PG&E’s service area typically costs $20,000 to $30,000, plus interest and operation and maintenance costs, gets paid for by all gas customers over the life of the infrastructure.

A few years later, the new pipe sits unused in the ground.

Courtesy of RMI

“Now, I have no gas in my house,” Borgeson said. ​“But the customers all around me are paying for that pipeline for the next 50 years.”

Soon, Californians will have the choice that Borgeson did not.

A new law, the Home Energy Choice Act (Assembly Bill 2313), will require utilities to give households scheduled for a service line replacement the option of getting the new line or taking a financial incentive potentially worth several thousand dollars to get off gas instead. Crucially, the incentive to switch to all-electric equipment, such as a heat pump, induction range, and heat-pump water heater, will be less than the cost to replace the line, resulting in savings that will be shared among all gas customers.

The law ​“sends a very clear message that California is no longer going to invest millions of dollars in gas infrastructure without considering the future,” said Borgeson, who advocated for the bill. ​“It’s this huge signal of where the state is headed.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council has calculated that PG&E’s gas customers could save a total of $20 million if the utility gave 1,000 households a $17,500 incentive apiece rather than replacing their service lines. For context, PG&E replaces about 15,000 service lines annually.

Read Next The Northeast’s reliance on heating oil is turning into a crisis Tik Root

If similar programs were instituted across the country, the savings could rival Biden-era investments in home electrification. Utilities spend upward of $7 billion per year on service line replacements, according to clean energy nonprofit RMI. 

The policy will help push the state closer to its goal of a carbon-neutral economy by 2045; however, the version that passed was less ambitious than what was introduced, according to Brandon García, California director at industry association Advanced Energy United. Revisions included programs being capped at 1% of a utility’s customers and the law expiring Jan. 1, 2035, though it could be renewed before then.

“AB 2313 was a very difficult bill to get through the Legislature, so I’m very excited that it will soon give Californians the opportunity to decide what energy is powering their home and provide financial support if they choose to transition away from natural gas,” Assemblymember Marc Berman, who authored the bill, said by email. ​“When homeowners opt to electrify, the utility avoids additional investments in fossil fuel infrastructure that will eventually become a stranded asset, and this saves all ratepayers money long-term.”

Utilities San Diego Gas and Electric and SoCalGas opposed the bill, arguing that it would result in an unfair cost shift: As some customers stop using gas, those remaining could be left bearing outsized costs to maintain the system. While that is an issue writ large for the transition off of fossil fuels, and one the state needs to address, this law ​“is instead about trying to encourage people to leave at the exact time when they are saving money for everyone else by leaving,” said Kiki Velez, equitable gas transition lead at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

With the new legislation, California becomes the third jurisdiction to authorize the pipeline replacement alternative approach — and the first to do so statewide. In 2024, New York utility Con Edison launched its initiative, the Energy Exchange Program, which offers eligible households up to $20,000 to electrify. Other New York utilities are following suit, Velez said. And in July, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission authorized Xcel Energy to create a similar program, which she expects could launch within a few months.

Read Next A new report just busted another myth about heat pumps Matt Simon

In California, the next step is for the Public Utilities Commission to create a detailed framework for utilities to follow, including incentive levels, with larger amounts for customers in disadvantaged communities. Then utilities will have until January 1, 2028, for their individual proposed programs to be approved.

One yet-to-be-determined detail is how much notice utilities will give residents whose pipes they want to replace. ​“I think the worst case is you don’t hear about [the incentive] until the last minute,” Borgeson said. RMI recommends utilities alert residents one to five years ahead — at the point when it is scheduling the service line replacements.

Other states are looking to emulate California with bills of their own, Velez said, pointing to Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington. ​“Folks are already reaching out a lot about how they can bring it to their state,” she said.

In California, the bigger electrification incentives for disadvantaged communities will provide a much-needed boost to clean energy equity, García noted. ​“As someone who grew up in those kinds of neighborhoods as a low-income person, I want to make sure that everyone has access to [all-electric] technology.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new gas line or cash to electrify? California lets households choose. on Oct 18, 2026.

In January 1966, a South African ship caught fire at sea. In port in Bristol, England, after firefighters pried open the smoking container, the conflagration spread and burned for five days. A little over a month later, a Liberian steamship caught fire near Rotterdam, ignited a storage area with barrels of petrol and sank. The month after that, a Danish ship caught fire off Long Beach, California, injuring three firefighters, killing a longshoreman and causing over a million dollars in estimated damages.

The culprit in each fire was fishmeal, a dark yellow powder made by drying and pulverizing fish that, if left untreated, is known for spontaneously combusting as it decays and oxidizes. 

Tied to at least 90 ship and plant fires from the 1950s through the 1970s, fishmeal’s combustibility was a serious worry for seafarers, insurers and dock workers, according to a sweep of historical news coverage by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organization in Washington, D.C.

In 1967, American feed producer Cargill announced a solution: ethoxyquin. 

A crew abandons ship as the SS South America burns in Rotterdam in 1966.​ Sepia Times, NY Daily News, Evers, Joost / Anefo​

A fire retardant previously used to keep rubber tires from drying out and applied as a preservative on fruits and alfalfa, production of the antioxidant was soon ramped up. 

“Antioxidant treatment has made bulk handling an easy matter,” the director of the Canadian Department of Fisheries told an industry publication in 1966, arguing it should be required for fishmeal shipments. 

The chemical was highly effective. By the 1970s, press-reported fires dropped sharply—from a typical 16 ship fires a year, according to the Liverpool Underwriters Association, to five. 

By 1976, the U.S. Coast Guard imposed mandatory ethoxyquin treatment on fishmeal shipments, and three years later, the United Nations body that oversees maritime activity recommended fishmeal be treated with it “to prevent spontaneous combustion.” 

But there was a problem: Ethoxyquin is a carcinogen. 

“Toxic effects had been observed in laboratory animals fed high concentrations of ethoxyquin,” said a 1969 paper by U.N. food and agriculture authorities.

87 fires in fishmeal cargoes, plants, and warehouses, 1950–1978. The Outlaw Ocean Project

As its use in animal feeds and aquaculture grew, a 1987 study by British researchers found the chemical “caused severe damage” and had a potentially “carcinogenic effect” in rats. In 2015, the European Food Safety Authority said an impurity within ethoxyquin, known as p-phenetidine, was capable of causing mutations in genetic material. 

There is a lack of scientific consensus on whether it is safe to eat farmed seafood raised on feed treated with ethoxyquin, but some countries have considered the risk to be high enough to justify banning or limiting the use of the chemical. In 2017, the European Commission suspended authorization for its use in animal feed across the European Union.

Today, ethoxyquin has been banned in the U.K. and by members of the European Economic Area, including Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. But ethoxyquin, within limits, is still permitted in animal feed in Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S.

With more than half of the seafood eaten worldwide now coming from fish farms, and with the majority of such species fed fishmeal and fish oil, studying the chemicals added to feed is critical for understanding the possible contamination of our global food supply.

Although ethoxyquin is not banned in the U.S., it has been at the center of a half-dozen lawsuits, typically involving claims of false advertising. Some lawsuits targeted seafood companies for marketing their products as “sustainable” even though they contained ethoxyquin, while others highlighted the potential risks that the additive poses to the environment. 

Fishmeal production at an Exalmar plant in Peru spans from unloading fresh catch through processing and bagging the final powdered product. Growing health concerns over substances like ethoxyquin are fueling debate about the future of additive use in the global fishmeal industry. Credit: Pesquera Exalmar

In 2022, a New York resident brought a class-action lawsuit against Aldi Inc., a German supermarket chain with stores in the U.S., alleging its Atlantic salmon products were falsely labeled as “sustainable” due to “environmentally destructive” practices. The complaint cited the EU’s ban on the chemical and a study linking ethoxyquin to mortality and deformations in fish and crustaceans, noting the chemical “poses a risk for aquatic life.” The case was settled out of court. 

The same year, a New York and a California resident jointly sued Gorton’s Inc., a seafood company, for labeling its frozen tilapia as “sustainably sourced” despite containing ethoxyquin. This lawsuit also cited the “risk for aquatic life” and the European Union’s ban, and was settled out of court.

In Canada, the country’s Food Inspection Agency requires feeds containing ethoxyquin to carry a label declaring that it meets the legal limits, but the agency does not specify how it tests for the chemical in feeds. Inspectors also do not check whether ethoxyquin ends up in the seafood itself, according to the agency’s latest food inspection report from 2022. 

And a 2024 audit of the Canadian agency by the EU found it completed only about 40 percent of its planned inspections, citing “systematic and significant under-delivery” in terms of testing seafood products.

Read Next Marine protected areas aren’t as protected as you think Joseph Winters

Cargill said in a statement that it has assessed alternative antioxidants since 2005 and no longer uses ethoxyquin in its global salmon feed business or in any market where ethoxyquin is not authorized for use in aquafeed. The company also noted that it did not develop ethoxyquin. Globally, producers and feed makers have also increasingly shifted to alternatives, including natural additives such as rosemary extract and vitamin E compounds.

“More and more destinations are not accepting ethoxyquin, starting with our local Peruvian market,” said James Frank, managing director of the Peruvian fishmeal company MSICeres, during a 2022 webinar. He added that 100 percent of Peru’s fishmeal exports to Europe, Canada, the U.S. and Australia are now ethoxyquin-free, a shift also seen among companies in the U.K. and Norway. 

The most popular alternative to ethoxyquin is now butylated hydroxyanisole, or BHA, favored for its lower costs and strong antioxidant properties compared with fully natural additives. But like the chemical it aims to supplant, BHA has its own significant health risks, according to researchers. 

The U.S. National Toxicology Program identified BHA as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen” as early as 1991, and Japanese researchers found it caused malignant tumors in laboratory rats in 2008.

In February, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it was reassessing the safety of the substance as a food additive. 

To address the world’s insatiable hunger for seafood, the aquaculture industry will continue to expand. Perhaps there’ll be a shift away from carnivorous fish, or a replacement will be found for fishmeal. But for now, the aquaculture and fishmeal industries find themselves in a perilous loop: pivoting from deadly ship fires to a carcinogenic fire retardant, and then to yet another one.

This story is part of an investigation conducted by an international team of journalists based at The Outlaw Ocean Project. Read the other stories here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The fire retardant in the seafood chain on Oct 17, 2026.

The clean energy industry has learned the hard way that having the law on your side doesn’t always mean you win. 

Since taking office for his second term, President Donald Trump has attempted to delay or cancel dozens of wind and solar projects. These projects all underwent extensive reviews to secure federal approval, but the Department of the Interior and other agencies have frozen their permits for vague “national security” reasons, or with no explanation at all. These attacks have all but tanked the offshore wind industry and have led many developers to take payouts from the administration rather than fight for permits.

This attack is one big reason why solar and wind companies have been supportive of efforts in Congress to negotiate a bipartisan “permitting reform” bill. A group of senators reached a compromise earlier this month on a bill they call the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act. Lawmakers won’t vote on it until after the midterm elections, but the renewable energy sector has hailed it as a win. The bill would speed up environmental reviews for all kinds of energy projects, from transmission wires to oil pipelines, and it also contains a number of provisions that are designed to deter current and future presidents from blocking clean energy. Trump reportedly told aides just before the compromise became public that he would ease up on wind projects in order to reach a deal. 

Cracks are already emerging in the deal. While the renewable energy industry has remained steadfast in its support of the bill, a number of experts and key climate advocates are arguing that the “project certainty” provisions would do little to prevent Trump or another president from blocking solar farms and offshore wind turbines. The Trump administration itself threatened the compromise bill this week when it announced that it would review three permits for wind farms off the Atlantic Coast, including one that is already up and running.

“The administration’s action against [the wind projects] just further demonstrates the lengths they will go to to obstruct clean energy progress, especially offshore wind,” said Elizabeth Klein, who led the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore wind permits, under former president Joe Biden.

The project certainty portion of the Senate bill has two key parts. First, it declares that the federal government “shall not take any new action that would revoke, rescind, withdraw, terminate, suspend, amend, or alter” a project that has already received a permit. This is just a forceful restatement of the status quo, since permits that are issued aren’t supposed to be canceled for no reason. But the bill goes further by offering companies two main remedies if the government does take such prohibited actions. 

One is the reinstatement of the permit — which is somewhat redundant. Judges have already shot down the Trump administration’s past attempts to stop wind projects, but the administration is still seeking to revoke those permits. If the bill passes, all the courts would be able to do is order it in stronger terms to restore them. 

The other remedy is a cash payout. The courts would be able to order the government to refund a project developer between 25 and 50 percent of the costs of their project, which for a big offshore wind farm could reach well into the billions. The money would come from the Judgment Fund, a bank account the federal government uses to pay out legal settlements. This fund typically disburses around $2 billion in settlements per year, and successful claims under the permitting bill could lead to a big spike in payouts.

The other key part of project certainty in the bill is an anti-discrimination clause that would ban “disparate treatment” of any particular energy source, whether it’s solar panels or coal plants. If a wind developer found evidence that the government denied them permits as part of an anti-wind pattern, they could present that evidence to a judge. If persuaded, the judge would then order the government to restore the permit and pay the developer the entire construction cost of the wind farm — albeit only if the developer finished building it. 

Supporters of the bill argue that the promise of financial relief would help lure investors back to the renewable energy industry, which has been in turmoil under Trump. This is most important for offshore wind. Big companies like Ørsted and Equinor spent billions of dollars to build wind farms in the Atlantic under the Biden administration, but their costs ballooned after the pandemic snarled their supply chains and Trump tried to destroy their existing projects. These companies now view the United States as uninvestable, but Northeastern states still need a lot more offshore wind in order to meet their climate goals. 

The cash payout provision is supposed to help make the U.S. seem like a less risky place to invest. The American Clean Power Association, a trade group representing wind and solar developers, said in its analysis of the bill that “greater certainty lowers financing risk before construction and reduces the chance that years of development and investment will be stranded by a later policy reversal.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, gives a press conference about the Trump administration’s connection to fossil fuels. Whitehouse is one of the lead negotiators behind a bipartisan energy permitting bill. Photo by Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images

While the promise of reimbursement from the federal government would be good news for investors, it’s not clear that it would actually lead to more clean energy getting built. Opponents of the permitting reform bill point out that Trump has already been paying to stop renewable power plants from being built, albeit on a smaller scale. The president has worked out several deals to buy back offshore wind leases from energy developers in exchange for those developers committing to build a fossil fuel project elsewhere. These arrangements are being challenged in court, but in the meantime they function as repayments for leases that Trump intended to block.

The project certainty “provisions are unlikely to deter the Trump Administration from continuing to mess with clean energy permits, since this administration has shown an eagerness to use the public’s money to advance its own policy goals,” said Matthew Littleton, a former attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice who worked on environmental law issues. 

Littleton also points out that the anti-discrimination provision may not work as intended. The baseline for calculating “disparate treatment” is the average pace of project approvals over the most recent five years. By the time Trump leaves office, he will have spent four years permitting oil and gas projects while delaying almost all major solar and wind efforts. This baseline would prevent wind developers from making a discrimination claim — while also preventing a future president from walking back support for new oil and gas.

As if to highlight these risks, the White House has said in court filings over the past week that it is seeking to rescind permits for three offshore wind projects on the Atlantic Coast. One of these projects, the 700-megawatt Revolution Wind, is already complete and delivering power to Rhode Island, while the other two are still in the early stages. In each filing, the government has said only that it seeks to “reevaluate … compliance” with federal law.

Over the past year, Democratic negotiators in the Senate have said that this sort of behavior would jeopardize any bipartisan deal. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, one of the authors of the bill, said in the spring that he would not endorse a compromise bill unless the administration stopped blocking wind farms. This week he appeared to change tack, and described the move against Revolution Wind as another reason to pass the bill. “Frankly, we need to get permitting certainty in law, and this proves it,” he said in a statement.

The bill would in fact offer financial protection to a company like Ørsted, ensuring that a president could not wreck billions of dollars worth of investment with no justification at all. The question is whether it could end the government’s prejudicial assault against offshore wind. The answer could determine how millions of people in the Northeast keep their lights on and heat their homes, and right now, it’s up in the air.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Congress has a plan to stop Trump’s attack on offshore wind. It may not be enough. on Oct 16, 2026.

Marcia Ciro
Pause
Charles River, Dover, Massachusetts
Infrared photography
© copyright Marcia Ciro

“I’m not sure of the species, just got ‘ray-finned fishes’ on apps. I’ve been exploring local underwater environments in nearby rivers and lakes. I am fascinated by the complexity that lurks just below the surface.” Image taken with a digital camera modified to shoot infrared images.

 

 

 

 

Marcia Ciro
Untitled
Ipswich River, Ipswich, Massachusetts
Infrared photography
© copyright Marcia Ciro Both photos were taken with a digital camera modified to shoot infrared images. Marcia Ciro’s website is papertracestudio.com if you want to see more of her work, including more landscapes in color and infrared.

 

 

 

 

Barri Hitchin
Alien Visitor
Somerset Levels, United Kingdom
Inspiration: Surreal Wetland
Photograph
© copyright Barri Hitchin

 

 

 

 

Karl J. Findling
Hell’s Canyon, Oregon
Oregon Pack Works
Bend, Oregon
© copyright Karl J. Findling

 

 

 

 

 

María Isabel Dabrowski
SSSSlithering Through the Jungle
Bocaracá
Eyelash palm pitviper/Bothriechis schlegelii
La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica
© María Isabel Dabrowski

“While at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica for a training, I met a lovely wildlife biologist who is studying this species at La Selva to learn more about what, if anything, impacts the color variation of the Bocaracá. While we were admiring this bright yellow danger noodle from a respectful distance, the snake began moving along the tree branch; as this species mostly moves at night, the wildlife biologist we were with was super excited to watch the Bocaracá’s tongue-flicking and branch-wending in daylight.”

 

 

 

 

 

Lizann Michaud
Black-Tailed Rattlesnake (Crotalu molossus)
Mule Mountains of southeastern Arizona
© 2026 Lizann Michaud

“We knew this small black-tailed rattlesnake was there only when it began to move (and we of course hopped back a safe distance in reply). It didn’t rattle, and appeared remarkably relaxed, so I took a golden sunset-lit photo of this curious beauty.”

 

 

 

 

 

Stephen Reed
Colorado Columbine and Greenback Trout
Rocky Mountain National Park
© copyright Stephen Reed

“Here’s an unintentional double exposure from Rocky Mountain National Park. It shows the state flower (blue columbine) and the state fish (greenback trout) in a tribute to the 150th anniversary of the state of Colorado.”

 

 

 

 

Stephen Reed
Bison Profile
©copyright Stephen Reed

“Here’s a bison profile taken with a 300mm telephoto lens near Soda Butte Creek in Yellowstone. What caught MY eye was the knot of fur near the nose (shaped like a false eye) that makes that nose look like a monkey face within the image. I cannot un-see it…”

 

 

 

 

Kate Chabarek
European Black Bee on Teasle
Basque Country, Spain
Photography, edited with Adobe Lightroom Classic (manual tools only)
© copyright Kate Chabarek

“My three-year-old son and I saw the European Black Bee by the Urumea River, near the town of Hernani, where we live. He warned me quite strenuously about the “erlea” (bee) and how it would “mina eman” (give pain), in the Basque language. I want to encourage him to be interested in nature, and I enjoy talking with him about plants and animals in English, so he can talk to his grandmother in the United States about them.”

 

 

 

 

Puffball
The Adirondacks in Northern NY
© copyright Kate Chabarek

 

 

 

 

 

Red Eft or eastern newt (Notophthalmus viridescens)
© copyright Kate Chabarek

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Ross
Wildlife Observing the Wildlife Photographer
Red foxes
Dean Hill Road, Wellsboro, Pennsylvania
Canon Powershot SX70 HS
© copyright Robert Ross Robert Ross
Wildlife Observing the Wildlife Photographer
Red foxes
Dean Hill Road, Wellsboro, Pennsylvania
Canon Powershot SX70 HS
© copyright Robert Ross

“While trying to get good photographic evidence (for the 3rd Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas) of a mother Bobolink feeding its young in a hayfield, I noticed a family of red foxes watching me the whole time from their upscale home nearby. These moments are what makes the project well worth the time spent.”

 

 

 

 

Candace Galen
Complementary Colors
Little blue butterfly (Icarica) on a purple aster
Hoosier Ridge — part of the Continental Divide just north of Hoosier Pass in central Colorado.
Photography, using a Sony Alpha II camera with telephoto lens and a continuous shoot setting so as not to disturb the butterfly.
© copyright Candace Galen

“Though tiny, these are truly the smallest of butterflies, their luminescent blue color is a showstopper. This one, flitting from flower to flower in an alpine meadow was irresistible.

An interesting fact: this species was given its scientific name by the Russian writer, Vladimir Nabokov, better known for his literary contributions (for example, Lolita). Exiled from Russia in the 1940s, he hired on as Curator of Lepidoptera at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.”

 

 

 

 

Linda Carroll
Moth Feasts on Sunflower
© copyright Linda Carroll

“I confess I don’t know the moth species. The photo was taken in Spokane, Washington. I went out to water the plants one summer morning and was taken by the beauty of the moth and the grouping of bright colors. I took a number of photos, moving closer each time but trying to do so without the moth noticing me. It wasn’t easy because the sun was behind me and I didn’t want to create a shadow, which would have disturbed the moth and spoiled the photo. This was the closest I got and the best shot. Shortly thereafter, the moth became annoyed with me and flew away.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guidelines to get your masterpiece into the Revelator Gallery:

• • Original photos and art from you
  • No AI-generated or enhanced images
  • Images can be horizontal, square, or vertical
  • We accept only .jpgs and .png files
  • No limit on submissions
  • No people in the images, just wildlife and landscapes (animals, plants and trees, insects, sea life…)

Send your submissions to ccrary@biologicaldiversity.org with the following information:

• • Your name
  • Title of image (if applicable)
  • Species of wildlife
  • The location (where it was created)
  • A brief description of what inspired you to capture or create this image
  • Medium: Photography (many types, be specific), painting, drawing, pottery, sculpture, textiles/fabric art, mixed media, glass, etc.
  • Let us know if you want us to include a specific copyright notice “©”

All submissions are considered intended for publication; submission does not guarantee publication. Monthly galleries will be distributed to our partner publications under a Creative Commons license, but you retain the copyright on your individual images. There’s no prize or payment, just  bragging rights.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy.

 

The post The Revelator Gallery: October 2026 Exhibit appeared first on The Revelator.

In August of 2023, a series of wildfires broke out across Maui, killing more than 100 people, destroying thousands of homes, and causing billions in damage. Noelani Ahia, who is Kanaka Maoli and co-founder of Maui Medic Healers Hui, helped mobilize nearly 600 volunteers in Lāhainā, including doctors, nurses, and therapists. 

Three years later, the housing and health crises remain acute. Maui Medic Healers Hui runs a free clinic, but Ahia wishes it had 10 more to address the community’s needs. “The fire may be out, but the catastrophe is not over by any stretch of the imagination,” she said. 

The devastation extended well beyond the lives lost and buildings destroyed. Research published last year by researchers with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Maui Wildfire Exposure Study, or MauiWES, found that more than 1 in 5 residents had reduced lung function.

Now, new research from the same project has found elevated levels of toxic metals in the island’s residents months after the fires, with higher exposure associated with impaired lung function. The findings offer further evidence that the health consequences of catastrophic wildfires can persist long after the flames are extinguished and the smoke clears.

“What we consider and sometimes look at as a one-time event isn’t really one-time anymore,” Alika Maunakea, who is Kanaka Maoli and co-director of MauiWES, told Grist. 

Researchers don’t yet know how much of the contamination came from the fires and how much was already present in the environment. That distinction matters as wildfires increasingly race through towns like Lāhainā and cities like Los Angeles, where burning homes, cars and infrastructure can leave contaminants that people encounter for months or years afterward.

Community members hold hands in a prayer circle at a “Lāhainā Strong” gathering in October 2023. Mario Tama / Getty Images

“We have traditionally thought about wildfire exposure primarily through the lens of smoke,” Maunakea said in a press release. “But when an entire community burns, we are dealing with a much more complicated exposure environment.” Researchers must also understand what contaminants were already present, what the fire may have released, and what entered residents’ bodies, he said.

The research, which studied 1,400 adults across Maui six to 18 months after the fires, measured 24 metals in urine samples. It found that participants had higher concentrations of several metals than people in a nationwide health survey conducted before the fires. That included 2.2 times as much arsenic, 2.3 times as much barium, and 3.8 times as much manganese. Antimony, which is used in flame retardant materials and has been previously linked to lung irritation, stomach pain, and other symptoms, was found at levels nearly 40 times higher.

Because the researchers lack comparable data from before the fires, they could not determine how much of the metal exposure resulted from the disaster. Maunakea told Grist answering that question is the next step for the project, which has received a $3.6 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. That work will include investigating whether and to what degree past agricultural and industrial activity contributed to the contamination.

“It’s important to realize that these are all part of settler colonialism,” Ahia said. “So what we’re looking at is confounding factors that are to the detriment of the health of our local people.”

Read Next Two years after a wildfire took everything, Maui homeowners are facing a new threat: Foreclosure Anita Hofschneider

Decades of plantation agriculture altered water systems, introduced herbicides, and displaced native plants, leaving a legacy on the islands that is still felt today. Disasters like fires and storms can compound those ongoing environmental problems. 

“If we begin the story when the fire starts, we miss the decisions that shaped the landscape and the community’s ability to respond,” said Katie Kamelamela, who is Kanaka Maoli and an assistant professor at Arizona State University based in Hawaiʻi. “Micro climate change acts on places already shaped by histories of land ownership, water diversion, development, and unequal access to resources.”

Kamelamela said true recovery must look beyond the fire. “I want recovery to be measured by whether people can remain in their communities, care for ʻāina, and pass on their knowledge and practices in place,” she said, using the Hawaiian word for land, which carries deeper meaning and relationship than property or mere place. “Rebuilding should not recreate the same conditions that left people at risk. Caring for ʻāina and caring for people need to be funded and planned together.”

Maunakea said the multitude of intersecting pressures is one reason why he wanted to pursue this research. As climate change continues to accelerate, longstanding issues facing Native Hawaiians like housing, the harms of tourism, and the legacy of plantations can amplify problems. “We worry that disasters like this that we experience on Maui, as well as the floods and other storms that we’re experiencing now, is just going to continue widening the gaps in health disparities that already exist in those populations,” he said.

Moving forward, the project will not just identify health risks but also help residents respond to them. Study participants receive their results, discuss them, and meet with health professionals. “People now know that there’s these types of potential hazards, and what to do about them is a big concern,” Maunakea said. “We still don’t have all the answers for sure, but we are taking the next steps to get a better picture and inform our community around it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Long after the Maui fires, toxic metals linger in residents’ bodies on Oct 16, 2026.

In my years as a psychotherapist, I’ve worked with many people facing similar struggles. One such pattern is embodied by a client I’ll call Emma (whose real name and identifying details I’ve changed for privacy purposes). She came to see me because, despite pursuing a climate career aligned with her values, practicing good self-care, and having a close community of friends, she couldn’t shake a persistent feeling of being “low.” She didn’t know what was missing.

Emma was invited to an event at a scenic destination — let’s say, for your mind’s eye, that it was a wedding in Alta Lakes, high in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Imagine a scene something like this: The cool scent of spruce and fir drifted through the open windows, along with the thin, mineral clarity of mountain air. Now and then two owls traded low hoots through the dark, and something slapped in the water out on the lake. 

Emma lay listening for a long time. For reasons she couldn’t name, tears began to slide down her face, and soon she was sobbing.

She wasn’t sad or upset. She described a welling up of joy, a sort of homecoming moment — a deep remembering that felt familiar yet beyond the reach of words. It was, she said, like “drinking clear, cool water when you didn’t know you were thirsty.”

Ask a Climate Therapist tackles your questions about how to navigate the emotional side of climate change, with leading climate-aware therapist Leslie Davenport. Have a question? Ask it here!

Emma spent most of her workday in an office building. She loved to run, but usually on city streets with a podcast playing in her ears, or on a gym treadmill. Like most of us, she lived by a daily routine whose steady stream of input kept her separate from the natural world. She cared for nature, but it was cognitive, not visceral. 

Our work focused on integrating what had lifted her mood during that experience in Colorado and keeping that connection alive in her everyday life.

We don’t need to go to the mountains to touch the living world within and around us. For Emma, it started small. She left her earbuds at home on some runs and let the wind and birdsong keep her company. She began each morning with a moment at the window watching the sky before opening her laptop. At lunch she found a beautiful tree in a nearby park and made it her regular spot to pause and sit, watching it change through the seasons.

I was reminded of Emma, and the other clients I’ve seen who were similarly feeling the sorrow of this detachment, when I read a question that came through the Ask a Climate Therapist form: “Why is it that working with animals and tending to plants helps process the grief, anxiety, and depression?” 

This question-asker found the answer that Emma and others were seeking, but wanted to understand the “why” behind it. I can point to some of the science that backs this up: Compounds released by trees can boost the activity of our immune cells. Stroking an animal lowers stress hormones and can raise oxytocin. But I would also say that we don’t need academic journals to know these things. We feel better working with plants and animals because we can sense directly how life flourishes as a complex, interwoven system that we’re part of. When you water a garden or care for an animal, you’re practicing a form of reciprocity that’s also a way of caring for the future. 

And so for you, reader of this column — wherever you may be at in your journey of connecting with, caring for, and feeling a sense of belonging in the natural world — remember that engaging with nature brings more than just joy; that restoration of connection actually supports and sustains your ability to do the larger work. 

Below, I offer just a few practices to begin to cultivate that more mindful relationship. I would love to know about your regular practices, too. How do you create moments of connection and kinship with nature in your daily life? Reply to this email or reach out to lookingforward@grist.org to share them with the Grist team, and with me.

Practice tips:

There are many ways to cultivate an awareness of our place in the living world. 

1. Listen to the mp3 “We are Nature” — a free resource I created to accompany my book, Transforming Climate Anxiety — for a guided experience of connection.
2. Take a daily sensory pause. Once a day, stop for one minute and notice what’s alive around you: Take the temperature of the air on your skin, notice a bird call or the smell after a rain. As you breathe, remember that the Earth’s trees and plants created the oxygen you’re taking in, and that your exhale feeds them in return.
3. Tend something — and say thank you. Water a plant, fill a birdfeeder, or care for a patch of garden. Reciprocity is how we take our place in the web of life: We receive and we give back.
4. Leave the earbuds at home from time to time. Try a walk or run with the wind, neighborhood sounds, and your own breathing as the soundtrack.

In this with you, 
Leslie

I’m Leslie Davenport, a licensed therapist, educator, speaker, consultant, and internationally recognized voice on the emotional and psychological dimensions of climate change. If you’ve got a question about climate and mental health, please consider submitting it for a future column. Submit a question for a future Ask a Climate Therapist column More from Ask a Climate Therapist

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Advice from a climate therapist: Touch grass. (No, really.) on Oct 16, 2026.

Earlier this month, after a series of stops and starts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced changes to a long-running program that is supposed to help farmers and rural small businesses stand up renewable energy projects. 

The new rules, set to go into effect today, October 16, effectively make any solar power development ineligible for funding through the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP. It’s the latest of multiple rollbacks by the second Trump administration that advocates say are essentially making the program unusable.

Installing solar systems on farmland can cost tens of thousands of dollars upfront, which many agricultural producers may not have or may be reluctant to spend, given their low profit margins. REAP has long provided financial support to farmers to build out renewable energy systems on their land. 

These projects often provide multiple benefits to participants. First, they can help lower utility bills for agricultural producers and rural businesses by providing their operations with additional power. But farmers and business owners are also able to sell excess energy back to the grid. By cutting costs or padding revenue, these systems can be a lifeline at a time when farmers are facing escalating costs for things like fertilizer, fuel, labor, and seeds, making it difficult to make ends meet. 

Research shows investing in renewable energy can also be an economic driver in rural parts of the country. “All of these things lined up,” said Matt Russell, the executive director of the Iowa Farmers Union, an independent organization representing family farmers. So for the Trump administration to “shift away from those kinds of win-win-win investments is very disappointing,” he added.

The Iowa Farmers Union is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last month against the USDA, alleging that previous changes to REAP were already harming rural communities by severely restricting solar development under the program. (The lawsuit was filed on September 28, just days before the agriculture department published its new rules.) 

The lawsuit takes aim at changes made to REAP in August 2025, following an executive order by President Donald Trump the previous month stating that taxpayers would no longer “subsidize expensive and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar.” Although the executive order did not instruct the USDA to do anything in particular, the office within the agriculture department that administers REAP changed the criteria for applicants such that most solar projects would become ineligible for grants or loan guarantees. 

Part of the plaintiffs’ argument is that such a move violates the REAP statute. Lawmakers created REAP in 2008 as part of that year’s farm bill by combining two existing programs that sought to develop renewable energy and increase energy efficiency. “Rather than complying” with this mandate, “the agency has decided to completely ignore what Congress told them to do,” said Michael Youhana, an attorney at Earthjustice, the nonprofit environmental law group representing the plaintiffs. “In fact,” he added, the USDA is doing “the opposite of what Congress told them to do” by promoting the use of fossil fuels over renewables. 

The lawsuit also alleges that these anti-solar moves from the USDA violate the Administrative Procedure Act, which essentially requires agencies to show that regulatory decisions were made through careful consideration. The USDA says “that they’re taking this action to protect farmland from being gobbled up by solar systems,” said Youhana. “But farmers are voluntarily applying for REAP, and they’re doing it because solar gives them all kinds of really great financial benefits that the agency has completely ignored.”

The USDA told Grist it “will not comment on pending litigation.” In an email to energy news site Utility Dive, a representative for the USDA said that under the Biden administration, “fertile farmland that should be feeding America” was used instead to produce solar power. “Those days are over. USDA will not actively participate in repurposing farmland historically used to sustain this country’s abundant food supply.”

Grist has previously reported on how the USDA’s abrupt freeze of REAP grants in the early days of Trump’s second term created confusion and chaos for small farmers who had already spent tens of thousands of dollars on energy upgrades. In March 2025, the agency released that grant money but asked participants to voluntarily revise and resubmit their applications without any mention of climate change. That summer, the USDA announced the anti-solar policy over which Earthjustice, along with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, are suing.

But the switch-ups didn’t stop there. A year later, in March 2026, the USDA effectively paused REAP as a whole, announcing it would suspend further grant awards until the program rules were rewritten to comply with Trump’s executive order from the year before. 

This month, on October 1, the department published its final rule changes. They state that solar or wind projects on cropland involving “any component made in a country named as a foreign adversary” are no longer eligible for funding through REAP. Because so many parts of solar power systems are manufactured in China, this effectively means an end to any new solar development on farms through the once-popular USDA program. 

Another change drags out the timeline for receiving funding; applicants must now have energy systems up and running for one year in order to be considered eligible for reimbursement. 

These changes “more deeply entrench the anti-solar policy we’ve challenged in our lawsuit,” said Youhana. While “federal investments in renewable energy projects could help to offset rising energy costs, making life more affordable for farmers and the broader American public alike,” he added, the USDA seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

Russell argued that further restricting funding sources like REAP will only lead to the further consolidation of the agricultural industry, where only the biggest, wealthiest operations can survive, and the little guys suffer without adequate public support. 

“It’s like stacking the deck against family farms, and entrepreneurial businesses in small towns that are trying to bootstrap themselves,” he said. “It’s picking winners and losers, and the losers are the very kinds of farms and businesses and communities that I think the vast majority of American taxpayers think that they’re investing in.”

This story has been updated with the USDA’s response to Grist’s request for comment.

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump just effectively killed a popular solar energy program for rural America on Oct 16, 2026.

Coal was on the way out. That’s how it looked last year, anyway, when the International Energy Agency forecast that global demand for the dirtiest fossil fuel had plateaued and was poised to start declining. But this year hasn’t gone as expected. The agency recently projected that coal consumption will climb to a record high of 8.94 billion metric tons in 2026. Headlines have declared that coal is “back in fashion” and making a “comeback.”

So what changed? Blame it on the war in Iran, which choked off a chunk of the world’s oil and gas supply in the Strait of Hormuz and thrust the world into an energy crisis. Many countries turned to coal as a replacement. “The main thing is that coal is going up because gas is going down,” said Daan Walter, who leads strategy research on the future of energy for the think tank Ember. 

As for the idea that there’s a revival of coal, energy experts aren’t convinced. “I think it’s important to distinguish between a small short-term bump in coal use and a genuine resurgence of the coal industry,” said Christine Shearer, a coal analyst at Global Energy Monitor, which tracks coal plants and other energy projects. According to some experts, there’s a more convincing case that the crisis will accelerate the adoption of renewables and clean technology.

Nearly every country around the world agreed to “phase down” coal at an international climate conference in Glasgow five years ago. Coal is the dirtiest source of electricity, releasing more carbon and more air pollutants, for every unit of energy generated, than oil or natural gas. 

Mining companies and right-leaning politicians are using the energy crisis to argue for more coal. In June, the International Energy Agency said that investment in coal reached its highest level in 14 years. David Crisafulli, the premier of the Australian state of Queensland, recently said he’d welcome proposals for new coal-fired power stations to power Anthropic’s AI data centers. The mining company Northback is now working to reopen a former mine in Alberta, Canada, that closed almost 60 years ago, based on recent projections that the world will be in need of coal in the next decade as well as the prospect of profits. 

“There’s a big sugar rush right now,” Walter said. But soon enough, the sugar crash may set in, perhaps in the years before these projects are completed. “They’re all rushing in, and they are all making, I think, reckless business plans,” he said. 

The other half of the story is that the oil and gas crunch has also pushed countries toward renewables and clean technology, perhaps permanently destroying demand for oil. President Donald Trump and Israel’s attack on Iran in February sent oil and gas prices skyrocketing so high that some journalists compared it to putting a tax on carbon. It was the second oil shock in recent years, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and as a result of this unpredictability, countries are viewing wind and solar as a more secure option than fossil fuel imports. 

Read Next It’s official: Data centers are slowing America’s shift away from coal Jake Bittle

The world is also seeing increased demand for electricity, for powering AI data centers as well as more AC units as temperatures rise. But much of this additional demand is being met by wind and solar. This growth in clean power has been one of many factors cushioning the economic effects of the oil shock so far, the International Monetary Fund said in a report on Monday, though it warned that the world was nearing the “limits of resilience” to withstand future shocks.

It almost creates a sense of whiplash to see headlines that the world is entering an “age of electricity” alongside others saying that coal is on the upswing. Yet both can be true. “The immediate response to an energy crisis can be more fossil fuel use, even as the longer-term response is to reduce dependence on those fuels altogether,” Shearer said. 

Take India. This week, the head of its power sector said the country might be forced to add much more coal-fired power capacity than planned, driven by growing demand and lower hydroelectric output thanks to weaker monsoon rains. At the same time, India is aggressively building clean energy. The country has quadrupled its renewable capacity to about 300 gigawatts over the past decade, meaning that it’s well ahead of schedule for meeting its climate targets under the Paris Agreement. 

Coal boosters might celebrate their industry’s growth over the next handful of years. But coal is simply taking up a larger share of the energy generated from fossil fuels, a slice that’s on track to shrink compared to other energy sources, Walter said. He likened it to being the most powerful man on the Titanic. “It’s a great party to have for a couple of hours, but then you’re going down with the ship.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is coal really making a comeback? on Oct 16, 2026.

Burnham's life and death decision Channel Comment brendan 16th October 2026 Teaser Media

Equinox Gold’s Western Mesquite Mine in the desert of Southern California is the state’s largest producing gold mine. The company wants to expand their open pit, cyanide heap leach operation. Their first step is to test the quality of the nearby gold deposit at the Rainbow East exploration project.

SUBMIT A COMMENT The project would impact sensitive environments and Tribal cultural resources

The project would build and widen access roads, drill 23 holes, and disturb 2.34 acres on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management in Imperial County. These lands are part of Desert Tortoise Critical Habitat and the Picacho Area of Critical Concern. 

The project is also located within a cultural landscape that the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe seeks permanent protection for. Mineral exploration here needs careful study, public input, tribal consultation, and strong safeguards in order to protect these sensitive desert resources.

This biodiverse desert should not be sacrificed for more gold

In February, I visited the site together with local resident Gail Overton. Gail lives in the desert and cares deeply for the plants and animals who call it home. Together we walked along the proposed access roads and drill sites. Here the desert was full of life. Desert washes braid through the area, providing water to plants and wildlife. The brittlebush and ocotillo were in bloom; we saw burrows that could be used by tortoises or burrowing owls, and several lizards. 

Future mining operations in this area would block this critical source of water runoff from the Chocolate Mountains to the desert floor below. An entire ecosystem of deer, coyote, tortoise, lizards, birds, and native plants should not be sacrificed to chase low-grade gold ore that only serves the profit margin of this Canadian mining outfit.

Gail Overton Trump’s tools could allow Equinox to skip environmental review

Last year, almost 5,000 Earthworks supporters asked the BLM not to skip environmental review. Now they are doing just that, considering approving the project under a Categorical Exclusion, one of the many tools Trump is using at breakneck pace to permit irresponsible mining on public lands. 

The public has a chance to weigh in

Luckily, we still have a chance to weigh in. The project and its reclamation plan are being reviewed by Imperial County under the California Environmental Quality Act. However, Imperial County is considering approving the project using outdated documents from more than 20 years ago. These documents studied and approved a 2002 mine expansion within the project boundaries, but never looked at the impacts of exploration drilling in Rainbow East, which would disturb an entirely new area outside of the mine plan boundaries. 

Submit a comment

Make sure Imperial County doesn’t cut corners on its environmental review. Comment by October 19 to urge the planning commission for a new study.

The post Equinox Gold’s Outdated Environmental Studies Won’t Protect the California Desert appeared first on Earthworks.