B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

New accounts show the oil and gas industry trying to weaken methane reporting while saving the federal emissions system it relies on.

Everyone is now on board with the theory of multipolarity. But now that it’s mainstream that unipolarity is dead, it’s time to ask: is the world actually becoming multipolar?

In an old cottonwood tree in Arizona, a small group of Americans are doing what lawsuits and letters couldn't.

Double parking and loading zone violations are down in Center City Philadelphia after local officials implemented automated enforcement and payment cameras — offering inspiration to other cities struggling to enforce parking rules.

In the 15 months since the state-run Philadelphia Parking Authority introduced automated enforcement and payment for loading zones in Center City, traffic speeds increased from 7 to 10 miles per hour, the Inquirer reported earlier this month.

At the same time, the new enforcement has kept private vehicles out of commercial loading deliveries, and the number of freight vehicles using those dedicated spots increased 97 percent, parking authority officials said.

The parking authority now plans to expand the program to more locations in Center City.

“We are making substantial progress in our effort to reduce congestion on Center City streets, which in turn improves public safety and the quality of life in Philadelphia,” said Acting Philadelphia Parking Authority executive director Gabe Roberts in a press release.

Rather than deploying police to catch violators in the act, the camera-based program reduces illegal parking by making it easier to follow the law. Curb users complete a one-time enrollment that links their license plate to an online account, where they are automatically charged 10 cents per minute parked. In other words, the city isn’t asking drivers to follow the law — drivers follow it by design.

That ease of compliance, experts said, can exponentially improve the quality of cities’ streetscapes.

“Loading compliance typically goes from single digits to the 90s because the rules are easy to follow,” said Gabe Klein, the Head of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation under the Biden Administration.

City crash data isn’t up-to-date enough to show safety impacts, but locals say they’ve observed an increase in safety since the automated enforcement program started getting illegally parked cars out of the way of cyclists and crosswalks.

“These changes have probably shown a lot of safety improvements,” said Cody Cowper, who chairs the Complete Streets Committee for the Washington Square West Civic Association, which represents an area included in the program. “You don’t have somebody … swerving around a car and they can’t see the pedestrians in the intersection.”

Recommended Should Streets Be Designed for Easy Double-Parking or Safe Bicycling? Ben Fried March 20, 2014

Of course, dangerous illegal parking nuisances isn’t limited to Center City, or even to Philadelphia.

The quick rise of e-commerce has handily outpaced expansions of curb capacity across the nation. Cities aren’t able to handle the influx of Amazon and Doordash drivers and trucks, who also compete for space with traditional freight. The Philadelphia Parking Authority’s approach may be the closest yet to a practical solution.

“It’s really exciting,” said Giacomo Dalla Chiara, an urban freight management researcher at the University of Washington. “[Philadelphia is] really trying something new.”

Dalla Chiara worked on a recent study analyzing loading zone management systems across 13 different US cities. Few control commercial loading at all, or call it a day after painting a curb yellow. But the key is to integrate three strategies in tandem, Dalla Chiara said: infrastructure, including painted loading curbs; policy, such as time limits in loading zones; and regulation through pricing and enforcement.

That third element, Dalla Chiara said, is where Philadelphia stands out and others fall short.

“A lot of cities are scared of changing regulations,” he said.

Recommended Opinion: We Must Price and Manage The Curb Before Robo-Taxis and Other AVs Scale Up Jordan Justus May 7, 2026

Philadelphia’s program includes more than 50 cameras, and more on the way, which scan the license plates of vehicles in loading zones. The cameras do not track faces or any other identifying features, according to parking authority officials. Parking enforcement officers review each filmed violation before the authority issues a ticket.

Drivers do not have to operate a commercial vehicle to use the zones, but are required to register with the CurbPass app. The first three minutes of parking are free, and drivers pay 10 cents each minute thereafter. Drivers are fined $51 if they stay in the spot for over an hour or do not register on the app. Drivers who double park must pay a heftier $76 fine.

A loading zone violation ticket with identifying information redacted.

Automating enforcement helps to distribute penalties evenly and promote fairness, according to supporters.

“Our enforcement shouldn’t be selective,” Cowper said. “The things that people are being ticketed for were always illegal. We just didn’t have a good means of enforcing it.”

But Dalla Chiara warned that it’s too early to call the program an unmitigated success, since it only launched in May 2025 and continues to grow.

Curb management data is fairly limited in the US, making it hard to draw conclusions about a single city’s pilot program limited to a few blocks.

“We know very little about curb behaviors,” he said.

Recommended This Tech Could Stop Drivers from Double-Parking and Blocking Bike Lanes Kea Wilson September 21, 2020

Still, Philadelphia officials are nonetheless motivated by the results.

Several US cities already implement some form of automated street enforcement. Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC and Oakland all join Philadelphia in using bus and trolley-mounted, AI-assisted cameras to issue tickets to cars parked in bus lanes.

Several more use automated cameras to catch speeders and red light-runners with lifesaving outcomes.

Loading zone enforcement could revolutionize street safety on the nation’s busiest commercial corridors, but Philly officials advise other cities to take it slow.

“Any city looking to implement the program, should do a strong public outreach, it will take a while for the public to be aware,” a Philadelphia Parking Authority spokesperson advised other cities’ offficials in an email to Streetsblog. “Build in a warning period, so drivers have a chance to change behavior. You should also build in a grace period for those dropping off passengers, have an internal team review all images before a violation is created to make sure all violations being mailed out are accurate and clear.”

• Federal funding has a greater impact on transit systems in smaller communities than big cities, according to a new study. That doesn’t mean big cities don’t need federal funding, but each dollar spent on cities with populations under 200,000 generates three times the ridership growth. (Futurism)
• Technology is making cars even more expensive as they continue to turn into iPads on wheels. (The Atlantic; paywall)
• The U.S. DOT finally released Sean Duffy’s road trip reality show. (The Guardian)
• A Tennessee driver apparently didn’t even try to stop before plowing through a college cycling team, killing two people and hospitalizing seven others. (Jalopnik)
• A study found that Oakland drivers slowed down substantially after the city installed automated traffic enforcement cameras on dangerous roads. (San Francisco Chronicle; paywall)
• Nebraska is building more roundabouts because they’ve cut crashes by three-quarters. (Nebraska Public Media)
• About two-thirds of pedestrian deaths in Nevada happen in places where there are no crosswalks, according to a UNLV study. (Fox 5)
• Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson personally helped paint a new bus-only lane on Denny Way (The Urbanist). She also issued an executive order to speed up Vision Zero projects (Capitol Hill)
• Massive cuts to TriMet bus service took effect on Sunday. (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
• Phoenix’s Valley Metro is moving forward again with a stalled Westside light rail extension. (Axios)
• A prominent Atlanta developer wants to bring back the Peachtree Street streetcar. (Urbanize Atlanta)
• The family of Iryna Zarutska, who was killed aboard a Charlotte train, has sued the city. (Spectrum News)
• UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham plans to revive the HS2 passenger rail line between Birmingham and Manchester in Northern England. (Coventry Live)
• Dutch regulators fined Uber almost $1 billion for automatically deleting drivers’ accounts without informing them. (Reuters)
• Canada is building a lot of transit-oriented housing. (The Transit Brief)
• Children’s lungs grew faster after London established its Ultra Low Emissions Zone in 2019. (Yale e360)

On one block in Philadelphia’s Norris Square neighborhood, there were three active community gardens in 2019. Five years later, in the summer of 2024, only one remained. One former garden has been replaced by a pristine vinyl-sided rowhome, its backyard fenced in and partially paved to make way for an expansive patio. According to online […]

09-04 * 13:00 - GARDA Working Group meeting #8 (Bea)

If all food waste in the US found a second life as biogas and compost, this would almost completely offset its climate impact. But, it would also create a microplastic problem spread over a gigantic area.

This is the catch-22 described in a new study from Nature Food, which explores both the massive potential and the overlooked risks of tackling food waste. There is however a solution, say its authors, which is to design packaging and get much better at separating our waste.

The research, produced by the University of Vermont, was inspired by local recycling laws which require Vermont businesses and residents to keep food waste out of their bins, ensuring that landfills remain food-scrap-free. What would that look like, scaled up to the whole of the US? The researchers found out by gathering food waste recycling data from across the US, then running a detailed lifecycle analysis on anaerobic digestion to make biogas, and food waste composting measures. For each one they looked at the associated climate emissions, nitrogen and phosphorus loading on waterways, and plastic pollution. Then they compared these two recycling measures with the alternative and all its associated impacts: dumping food waste in a landfill. 

This revealed that food recycling brings some seriously big wins for climate and nutrient pollution. Firstly, it would reduce the climate burden of food waste by between 89 and 99% in the US. Converting food waste into biogas and compost cuts nitrogen pollution by between 49 and 54%, and phosphorus loading by 78 to 98%, compared to current landfill-focused measures. 

However there’s a huge polluting underbelly to this otherwise logical solution: that is the 20,000 extra tons of plastic pollution that would be tilled into the soil as compost and organic byproducts from anaerobic digestion each year. How does plastic even come into it? Because so much of our food is now coated and packaged in this material, and it is a challenge to completely remove it. 

 

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Much of our food goes bad while still encased in plastic, and people can’t always be relied upon to peel plastic off rotting food and put it into a different bin. Equipment designed to separate old food and plastic in commercial settings involves a degree of mechanical error, which could result in potentially industrial scales of plastic entering food waste streams. Ultimately, countrywide food waste recycling would increase plastic soil pollution “by an order of magnitude, even with highly effective (99% efficient) separation technologies in place,” the researchers write. 

So how to unpick this mess? A starting point would be to design better packaging, and the researchers find that encasing our food in biodegradable materials would decrease the 100-year accumulation rate of plastic in agricultural soils by up to 99%. But biodegradable materials aren’t the whole solution and they bring challenges of their own. 

Others may argue that the more effective approach lies in reducing how much single-use packaging we use, and questioning how much of it we need in the first place — a solution that requires global systems change, far beyond the US.

Porterfield et. al. “Food waste recycling in the USA can reduce climate and nutrient pollution impacts yet risks plastic accumulation in soils.” Nature Food. 2026.

Image: Based on Karolina Grabowska/Unsplash

For several years now, a few Republican lawmakers and their Big Ag allies have pushed federal legislation to effectively preempt, or block, state food safety and animal welfare laws.

More than just a record of the build, the film is a thoughtful exploration of the knowledge, values and community spirit behind Earthship construction.

• Omaha is a bit late to the streetcar trend, which started to die out when Obama-era funding did. Some, like Kansas City and Cincinnati’s, have been successful. Others, like those in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, lacked enough density or didn’t go far enough to be useful. A lot of times new streetcars are better at spurring development than actually moving people. (Nebraska Public Media)
• How did the public right-of-way become synonymous with cars? (Gary’s Substack)
• New Urbanism cofounder Andres Duany named his 25 favorite American cities or neighborhoods, and the thing almost all of them have in common is that they’re laid out on a grid. (CNU Public Square)
• Cities’ ambitious long-range plans are often disconnected from the sprawl-encouraging zoning that’s actually on the ground. (Smart Growth America)
• “Enshittification” doesn’t just apply to the internet. Cory Doctorow’s apt phrase for the worsening experience of going online can describe urban environments as well, David Levinson writes. Think about ugly bus wraps, blocked sidewalks and shared e-bikes scattered on the ground. (Transportist)
• New tire efficiency rules in California will save drivers gas and keep millions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. (Grist)
• Portland is banning right turns on red at 30 particularly dangerous intersections, and could add 200 more if it works. (Oregonian)
• An overhaul of Florida property taxes could result in eliminating more than half of Pinellas County bus routes. (St. Pete Today)
• A Nevada committee appointed by state legislators did not answer the question of how to fund regional mass transit. (Current)
• Montgomery County, Maryland is upgrading its red-light cameras to catch drivers who speed up to catch a green light. (WTOP)
• Without explanation, officials in Jackson County, Missouri decided not to call for a referendum on a tax to support transit, walking and biking in Kansas City. (Star)
• The University of Pennsylvania created a digital version of Roosevelt Boulevard to test solutions for the deadly conditions on the Philadelphia road. (Penn Today)
• Minneapolis released a new interactive bike map ahead of the possible return of bikeshare. (Mpls St. Paul)
• Ride Bellevue is a service that delivers bikes to the Washington city’s downtown hotels, enabling visitors to explore without a car. (Momentum)
• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a gallery of transit photos dating back to the 1960s.

A new report from the city of Oakland shows that speed cameras are reducing speeding by 70 percent across locations where they are installed. This is consistent with results from other cities and countries.

More from Oakland DOT:

To test the efficacy of speed cameras, OakDOT conducted a before and after evaluation of vehicle speeds at camera locations in the summers of 2024, 2025 and 2026. Vehicle speeds were measured with pneumatic tube counts — an industry standard tool used to measure how fast vehicles are traveling.

Findings from that evaluation include:

• Compared to 2024 baseline data, 2026 tube counts show that drivers are slowing down at every speed camera location. The number of vehicles traveling 11 MPH or more over the speed limit dropped by an average of 70% across all 18 camera locations. That’s about 20,000 fewer speeding vehicles every day.
• The speed camera location with the greatest decline in speeding was 7th St. between Adeline St. and Linden St. In 2024, 1,700 vehicles passing the speed camera location were traveling 11 MPH or more over the speed limit. In 2026, that figure dropped to 150. This represents a 90% reduction.
• Traffic speeds are decreasing at all speed camera locations, as measured by the 85th percentile speed, a key traffic engineering metric. The 85th percentile speed is the speed at which 85% of vehicles are traveling at or below. Hegenberger Rd. saw the steepest decline. In 2024, 85% of vehicles were traveling at or below 57 MPH. In 2026, the 85th percentile speed dropped to 47 MPH.

A July 4, 2020 crash in West Oakland. It’s hoped speed cameras can help reduce such outcomes. Photo: Tim Courtney

The Oakland results echo similar results in San Francisco. Given the success, the East Bay Times is reporting that Oakland DOT director Josh Rowan wants to take another look at red light cameras, which were phased out in 2014.

“It is important to remember why Oakland is installing cameras, lowering speed limits, and adding speed bumps,” said Bryan Culbertson, representing the group Traffic Violence Rapid Response. “23 people were killed by drivers in Oakland last year, and 10 people have been killed so far this year.”

Despite the promising results from speed cameras in both San Francisco and Oakland, it’s clear more cameras and more safety infrastructure are still needed. An earlier report this month found that the number of serious and fatal crashes continues to climb in San Francisco and is even higher than it was in 2014, when that city first signed its pledge to reduce such crashes to zero in ten years.

Bike East Bay’s Justin Hu-Nguyen was pleased to learn of the speed reductions, but had concerns about an overreliance on cameras and funding. “We hope to see revenue and budget info included in future versions of Oakland’s speed camera program reports. For the program to be sustainable, it must be self-funded, and not detract from opportunities for proven infrastructure investments,” he said, adding that “…if the program generates a lot of revenue, this means it is writing many tickets, and therefore is not achieving its goals of adequately reducing speeding.”

The report states that “for the first six months of operation, Oakland issued 526,000 violations consisting of 194,000 citations and 332,000 warnings.” And that’s from just the 35 cameras that are part of the pilot. Readers who ride a bike should remember those numbers the next time someone says something akin to “cyclists are the real law breakers.” No, actually, it’s motorists—and with far more deadly consequences.

But advocates agreed that the most important part of cutting that down, and saving lives, isn’t speed cameras: it’s physical infrastructure. “Physical changes to streets like concrete corners on Telegraph, traffic circles on 8th, and plastic posts on International have saved lives by reducing deaths from multiple times a year down to nearly zero,” said Culbertson. “Physical changes to dangerous streets such as San Leandro, 73rd, San Pablo, etc will also be needed to stop people from being killed there too.”

“As always, speeding cars are deadly, and we need to be treating traffic violence as the public health crisis it is,’ said Hu-Nguyen. “The most effective and proven way to make our streets safer is through traffic calming, which physically prevents speeding from happening in the first place.”

Read the report here.

This week, we’re chatting with Dallas developer, DART board member, and urban designer Patrick Kennedy about his recent publication, “An Atlas of Intercity Highway Impacts.” We discuss the tax base that highways removed from cities, what we could have done for cities with federal transportation funding, and the long term value we lost.

You know the drill: we provide three ways of enjoying the podcast: The full, AI-generated transcript; an edited excerpt at the end of this post; and the embedded audio player below.

Jeff Wood: What was the process like for putting together all these maps, all these data points, and making sure that you were on the right track in terms of the story that you were trying to tell?

Patrick Kennedy: It was an iterative process because I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I had a plan that I wanted to write a book on the history of the Interstate Highway System and how we got to this place, and a lot of it centered on Eisenhower and the person he appointed, General David Bragdon, to keep the interstate system on time and under budget.

Megan Kimble was working on her book, City Limits, and I talked to her about that. She ended up going to the Eisenhower Library and digging through the notes for that book. I was talking to a friend, Scott Polikov, about this, too. He was like, “Nobody cares about history. Focus on the actual data. What was the impact? And focus on the future.”

And that’s when I decided, you know what? I’m gonna focus on the data. I had been talking to some book publishers, and they were more interested in black and white text than images. So I was like, that’s not what this can be, right?

This has to be maps, and this has to be data. I’m just going to go my own way, just do it, and just do it for free and post it. I just focused on the real world impacts to every city. I started on every city in the Yellow Book, but I realized that was not enough. There were something like 90 cities. I expanded it to 142 because no cities in North Carolina were in the Yellow Book.

Phoenix might have been in the Yellow Book, but San Diego wasn’t. I just wanted to keep adding cities. And I just was assembling data and data and data. I was interested in what happened to population density since 1960 once we started building in earnest, what happened to population since 2000 to present.

I found an inflection point in demographics where millennials were entering the workforce and looking to come back to urban environments and walkable environments. I started keeping this huge database of these things. During the pandemic, I came across a report by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve — their study suggested that within three-mile radius of downtowns, highways become a disamenity and devalue property up to about a half mile away.

That was the key point where I started building these databases and said, “OK, real estate values in most cities is generally not as valuable in a three-mile radius.” So I built a one-mile radius and a three-mile radius, and I used that to collect population data points and my real estate data points regarding how much recent development is worth on the assessed tax rolls in all these cities.

I went through, found new development, looked it up on the tax rolls, and aggregated the total amount of highway right of way in each of these cities, in those geographies, the one-mile to three-mile radius, and said, “OK, if I developed these highway right of ways at 50 to 55 percent efficiency,” you’d have tax-exempt surface roads and schools and whatever else.

55 percent of private development, what would that be worth to the city? And I said, “OK, every city then has this value multiplied by the amount of land that highways take up in those one-mile and three-mile geographies.” And that’s what I used to determine the economic development potential of removals, and how much theoretical tax base was removed from each of these cities because of the development potential those cities lost by building highways.

Another book that was kind of the impetus to this was The Elephant in the Bedroom, which was a book about California highway building from the early 1990s. It was written by a couple of engineers. And when I was researching, thinking I was doing the book on the history of highways, came across a line where they said the 210 freeway through Pasadena wiped off 10 percent of the property tax rolls right off the map. I thought, “Oh, okay, there’s a number for every city,” and I wanted to know what it was.

Jeff Wood: I guess I have to disagree with Scott a little bit. I think the history is really important. I think it’s good to know.

Patrick Kennedy: No, me too. But the story was being told, you know? I was like, yeah … I’m just retelling the same story.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. We talked with Megan Kimble about Bragdon and what she found in the archives from Eisenhower’s library. But I think that’s really important to think about all the places where we could have gone in a different direction. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in the 1970s with the oil crisis — kind of what we’re in now with the Iran oil situation.

But there’s all these off-ramps that we could have taken over time, and we continue to go along the route that we’ve chosen. I feel like this is a negative way we’ve taken to building infrastructure in the country. But those inflection points are really fascinating.

I’m wondering how the Bragdon information spoke to you. You talked about the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. There’s a lot of little things that, in the past, kind of shaped how you’re thinking, but also kind of shape the politics of the way that things are going now.

Patrick Kennedy: To me, Bragdon was the most influential person. I’m drawn to those sort of Cassandras that fight the righteous battle, but then ultimately lose and are forgotten to history. But I also kind of wanted to tell that story because he was right and he fought the Bureau of Public Roads and all of the Robert Moses acolytes that worked there.

If people are this wonky and interested, his 1960 interim report is kind of fascinating because he argued that the interstate highway system was for interstate commerce. It was not to serve local traffic. If we were to build highways to serve the traffic projections in 1980, some of the highways through the bigger cities would have to be 40 lanes or more.

He said that it’s far better to use our dollars for actual high-capacity transit. And part of his job was to keep the entire interstate system under budget. It ended up going about five or six times over the original budget. I calculated that in today’s dollars: the interstate system ended up costing something like $750 billion.

He said the inner city highways, which were one-tenth of the lane mileage of the system, cost ten times per mile to build. And so it was the most expensive part. Roughly half the cost of the entire interstate system was just the property acquisition and construction of the inner city highways.

Montreal was building the first legs of its subway in the 1960s. We could have built the equivalent of 36 Paris Metros for that $375 billion at the cost that Montreal was building its subway. And so part of this is just creating like an Earth 2 in my mind. What if we had gotten it right?

We could have a Paris Metro system in Cincinnati and in Kansas City serving local traffic and not devaluing the downtowns and basically wrecking a lot of the local economies around the country.

Dictionary (WG) * Coordinators: Carlos Tornel and Franco Augusto * Members: Franco Augusto, Matthew Burke, Ashish Kothari, Vera Kozak, Lizah Makombore, Vasna Ramasar, Carlos Tornel, Matías Vaccarezza. Description * Our short project aim: To create a collection of concepts in an online platform where we foster intercultural knowledge of radical alternativesalternatives

Solar power is in its heyday, with installations growing rapidly around the world as costs drop. Recent studies have suggested that photovoltaics could be the dominant power source by 2050.

Those shiny sun-harnessing panels have a dark side right now though. They are slated to become a major waste problem at the end of their lives. Anywhere from 297 to 402 million tonnes of solar panels will be discarded by 2060.

But all that PV waste could deliver almost $1 trillion in economic benefits if recycled properly, according to a new study published in Nature. And with international cooperation and foresight, these benefits could be distributed globally, writes the international team from China and Sweden.

“Effectively recycling [end-of-life] PV modules is therefore not only an environmental imperative but also a strategic necessity to secure material supply chains for future PV deployment and sustain global decarbonization goals,” they write.

Right now when solar panels become ineffective or break, they typically end up in landfills. There, they can leach toxic heavy metals such as lead and cadmium into soils and groundwater systems.

 

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Solar modules also contain valuable materials such as silicon, silver, copper, and tellurium, which could be reused to make new panels. Silicon and silver are the most valuable metals in PV panels. But today’s commercial recycling technologies typically cannot recover either at sufficient purity to justify the cost of recycling. And there simply aren’t enough industrial-scale recycling operations in place today.

Veolia runs PV recycling facilities in France and Michigan. China, which is the world’s biggest PV producer, has a directive for manufacturers to take responsibility for collecting and treating end-of-life panels. Many Chinese solar PV manufacturers now have pilot recycling projects.

“The global landscape is far from uniform, characterized by an uneven distribution of recycling capabilities,” the authors write. High- and middle-income regions such as the EU, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea have the capacity to recycle most of the world’s solar panels. Meanwhile, low-income regions lack the expertise and capacity for recycling so they rely on outsourced recycling.

So the researchers created a computer model that examined 1,708 recycling scenarios across 32 global regions. They took into account recycling technologies, material prices, international trade and subsidy policies. They found that combining region-specific recycling technologies with outsourced recycling strategies gives the highest benefits. It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 3.32 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent. And it would generate a net benefit of around US $530 to over 935 billion by 2060.

But these benefits would concentrate in upper-middle-income regions with advanced technologies. One strategy that would help make recycling more equitable is a declining subsidy model, the researchers found. This approach gradually reduces financial support as recycling becomes commercially viable.

International cooperation mechanisms, such as the Paris Agreement, should also prioritize technology transfer and targeted funding to develop recycling capacity in low-income regions, they write.

“We suggest that regionally adapted recycling strategies and international cooperation, with a focus on technology transfer and funding for recycling capacity in low-income regions, provide effective ways to achieve equitable and scalable PV waste circularity,” the team writes.

Source: Chen Wang et al. Towards an equitable future of global photovoltaic waste recycling. Nature, 2026.

Image: AI-generated / by Magnific

 

For a farming community that depends on seasonal consistency, climate change creates uncertainty at every stage of production.

Rewetting and restoring wetlands, building small dams, and restoring streams create landscape-level discontinuities that interrupt how fire propagates by putting water back into the land rather than letting it run off. EcoAtivo is one organisation putting this directly into practice.

Fish are often treated as reflex-bound creatures, bodies without minds. Yet, study by study, from anatomy labs to behavioural experiments, mounting evidence to the contrary has emerged.

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The North American plains bison stands as a symbol of both rampant devastation wrought by colonizing powers and of the potential to bring a species back from the brink of extinction.

The legacy of that destruction, and the promise and perils of the recovery, are indelibly etched in the DNA of the survivors and their ancestors, according to research just published in Science.

“Ancient DNA is rewriting the story of one of America’s most iconic conservation successes,” said Beth Shapiro, a University of California Santa Cruz researcher and the paper’s senior author. The new results show “both what the 19th-century collapse actually did to bison genomes and what a smarter, genomically informed path forward could look like.”

For millennia, an ocean of bison numbering in the millions swept across the center of North America, shaping ecosystems and the Indigenous peoples who lived there. But by the early 20th century, there were just a few hundred left, their numbers depleted by overhunting, habitat loss and systematic slaughter sanctioned by the U.S government to help subjugate bison-dependent tribes.

Since then, conservation work by some of these same tribes, and others, has led to a modest recovery. Today, more than 20,000 bison live in the wild, largely in protected land such as Yellowstone National Park. More than 400,000 are raised for commercial uses such as meat.

But the recovery has been dogged by questions. Since current bison are descended from such a small population, have they lost genetic diversity or become inbred? Did a quixotic attempt to breed bison with domesticated cattle irreversibly tamper with their genetics? Similarly, did a decision to move thousands of plains bison into the territory of wood bison break down the genetic wall between the closely-related species?

To answer these questions, Shapiro and colleagues turned to the latest scientific tools for deciphering a species’ history in its DNA. They collected samples from 115 ancient bison, dating back as much as 20,000 years and as recently as 100 years ago, when the last survivors of the slaughter remained. They also gathered tissue from 45 modern-day bison.

When they sequenced the genomes, the results offered both good news and cautionary lessons about the current state of bison conservation.

 

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Among the ancient samples, the genetics of plains bison were remarkably similar regardless of their location. That suggests a genetic flow across the landscape relatively uninhibited by geography. By contrast, today’s wild plains bison are confined to small pockets of land. There are at least four groups with distinct, shared genetic fingerprint that differs from the other groups.

The findings point to the need for managing the remaining bison more as a single herd, the authors write. Given the geographic barriers, that could mean using modern reproductive techniques to help blend the DNA of these different herds, much as modern cattle are carefully bred using tools such as artificial insemination.

While this points to the potential risks of continuing with traditional management methods, the findings also show reasons to be hopeful. Although the modern herds are distinct from each other, collectively they contain levels of genetic diversity similar to their ancestors.

Fears of contamination from cattle also appear to be overblown. The analysis turned up traces of livestock DNA in roughly a third of the modern-day bison genomes. That means the majority of bison hadn’t been tainted. And in those that did contain evidence of cattle, it represented less than 2% of their genomes.

The news is slightly more complicated for wood bison, the larger relative of the plains bison that lives in Canada’s boreal forest. In the 1920s, the Canadian government moved around 7,000 plains bison into Wood Buffalo National Park, which at the time was home to the last surviving 1,500 wood bison.

The legacy of that transplant remains today. The study showed that wood bison are genetically distinct – having diverged from plain bison approximately 3,000 years ago. But it also revealed that today’s wood bison carry significant plains bison DNA. The individual wood bison genomes were between 7% and 64% from plains bison.

Despite this, the results show “that wood and plains bison are substantially distinct and should continue to be managed separately,” said Parks Canada bison ecologist Greg Wilson, a coauthor of the study.

Now, thanks to DNA, bison managers have a clearer roadmap for moving forward, and the tools to know if they are veering further off course.

“Until now, managers didn’t have a genetic baseline for what ‘healthy’ bison diversity looked like before the 20th-century collapse and management,” said Shapiro. The new study “is a great example of using ancient DNA to facilitate management decisions in the present.”

Oppenheimer, et. al. “Paleogenomic insight into the collapse, recovery, and management of American bison.” Science. Aug. 6, 2026.

Photo: Getty Images for Unsplash