The Revelator

The United States celebrated its 200th anniversary in 1976, and in a lot of ways it felt like a year-long celebration of everything that made our country great.

But there were dark sides to the American Bicentennial, including civil rights struggles, a gas crisis, and (of course) American capitalism.

The over-commercialization of the Bicentennial started long before 1976. As early as September 1974 people were already starting to call it the “Buy-centennial,” with many products designed to part fools from their money with maximum efficiency. Commemorative cars? Check. Special coins? Check. Red, white and blue lawn chairs? Check. Useless parchment certificates proclaiming your patriotism? Check.

Literally, write and mail a check (in those pre-Venmo days) and all of that could have been yours.

The “patriotic” commerce was everywhere. SeaWorld renamed one of its captive killer whales “Yankee Doodle.” Companies marketed toilet seats with eagles underneath the lids. George Washington and other Revolutionary icons were painted onto just about any piece of crap you could imagine.

There were even awards to celebrate the “most tasteless exploitation” of the Bicentennial, with “winners” such as “Paul Revere” ice cream and red-white-and-blue funeral caskets. (I’m sure that last one was some sort of violation of the Flag Code.)

And it wasn’t just these Bicentennial-themed products. Retailers also got into the act, with special “Spirit of 76” sales or “wrapped in the flag” marketing campaigns starting in January and running rampant as Independence Day approached.

What was funny — or, perhaps, completely predictable — is that a lot of the people who set out to exploit the Bicentennial ended up losing their shirts. Come July 5, 1976, whatever Bicentennial-branded products remained on the shelves became instantly worthless. One guy in Utah bought 7,200 Bicentennial chains and medallions; by the end of 1976 he had about 7,120 left that he couldn’t even give away. Our nation’s landfills must all have a layer of red, white and blue crap from around this time for any hardy archeologists with enough intestinal fortitude to dig deep and explore.

Of course, none of this is much different from the aisles of cheap, imported junk we still see in stores every year come July 4 — especially this year as our nation’s 250th anniversary looms. Right now you can go to any local grocery store, drug store, or big-box retailer to buy poorly made flag T-shirts, flag plastic plates, patriotic disposable forks, cups with bald eagles on the side, and maybe — if you look hard enough — an actual flag or two buried amidst the disposables and Monster energy drinks we use to “celebrate” Independence Day.

Photo: John R. Platt/The Revelator

And this year has the extra capitalist curse of the Trump presidency looming over it. Our Grifter in Chief and his family have emblazoned his name and ugly mug on a veritable infinite number of products designed to siphon the few remaining dollars from his acolytes’ wallets or bank accounts.

The one saving grace compared to 50 years ago is that a lot of this ephemeral Trump “merch” is print-on-demand, so there won’t be as much unsold excess to end up in a landfill — just hundreds of AI-generated images destined for a computer’s trash bin.

But even ephemera can last a long time, thanks to the wonders of the Internet. I spent a few years researching the Bicentennial (a project from which this essay is adapted), and I’ve uncovered a host of things that still speak to the lessons we haven’t learned over the past 50 years.

So as the Trump-infused Semiquincentennial bears down on us, let’s look back at the capitalist dystopia of the Buy-Centennial through the wonder of 1976 newspaper advertisements. Maybe they can offer a few reminders that unchecked capitalism and waste aren’t patriotic — or worth celebrating.

Sexism never went out of style.

Your constitutional right to banking.

A lot of stories ran prices like this during the Bicentennial.

Free flag with a bucket of chicken!

Existing mascots often found themselves wearing tri-corner hats and waving flags.

This clip art of sexy “Uncle” Sam showed up in newspapers all over the country.

Here’s that same model in an ad for “Buy-sale-tennial Specials.” Sheesh.

High inflation and labor exploitation … sounds like today.

The British are coming … to watch HBO!

Follow the troops to Beth’s Kitchen. Wow, this one’s offensive.

Metal detectors helped in the Revolutionary War?

I call this George Washington-washing.

Ouch. That’s some awful artwork. But soooo Seventies.

This one is actually kind of cute.

Not the greatest drawing, but…

…it sure got used a lot. For a lot of different things. All over the country.

Another mascot embraces the day.

A sexy minuteman — er, maid — sells cars. This photo was used by companies all over the nation. Because sex.

Our founding fathers’ best quotes turned into ads for various companies. This same spread shows up in regional papers all over the country selling different stuff for each town.

200th birthday, save $200. This clipart of a town crier showed up all over the place. I love the awful paste-up job on the text here.

So many companies did this. “America is 200, and we’re 50, so it’s exactly the same thing!”

Is pointing a gun at your customers ever a good idea?

Local businesses often ran photos or caricatures of their salespeople in their ads, but rarely like this.

I don’t even know what this mascot is supposed to be.

What are the most egregious Semiquincentennial products you’ve encountered? Let me know at jplatt@therevelator.org — and send photos!

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Let’s Rename the Day After Thanksgiving ‘Extinction Friday’

 

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PFAS are one of the biggest public health threats of our time. These “forever chemicals” have infested seemingly every facet of our lives, from water and soil to kitchen products, safety equipment, and even our babies’ toys. As a country we need real urgency to address this risk quickly and do it the right way.

Despite rollbacks and standstills of PFAS regulation federally, we’re seeing impressive bipartisan support to tackle forever chemicals at the state level. This is an important step in the right direction. But as states introduce legislation to regulate PFAS, it’s imperative that they move forward with responsible legislation that has been proven to be effective.

There are two policy paths moving through state legislatures, which I call the “Michigan model” and the “Maine model.”

Maine and Michigan both lead the charge for state-level PFAS regulation, but there are two key differences in their approaches that make the Maine Model the gold standard for states to follow.

First, Maine’s model takes a proactive approach, banning PFAS from consumer products before they’re manufactured.

Second, Maine was the first state in the nation to pass a comprehensive ban on the land application of sewage sludge, also known as biosolids, and the sale and distribution of sludge-derived compost. This stops PFAS before they have a chance to pollute our state’s drinking water, farmland, and local communities.

As a Maine policy leader who helped pass this legislation in my home state, I’ve seen the benefits of having a proactive strategy against PFAS. Currently, every state other than Maine and Connecticut is adding to its PFAS contamination through additional sludge spreading, which just deepens the crisis, increasing future remediation and health costs.

States Need a Proactive Legislative Strategy

Though Michigan was an early leader in setting drinking-water standards (Maximum Contaminant Level or MCLs) for specific PFAS chemicals, the Great Lakes state has now fallen behind. Michigan’s PFAS strategy depends on detecting PFAS and mitigating it through cleanup initiatives — a strategy that’s well intended but leaves room for harm to reach the public.

Adding to this, states are finding themselves needing more money to pay for PFAS cleanups, as settlements from polluters aren’t covering the costs.

Maine’s policies stand out because they anticipate the impact of sweeping PFAS prevention measures and create safety nets for the businesses and communities that are most at risk. This shows up in different ways, but a prime example is our partnership with farmers who have been harmed by toxic sludge threatening their land and livelihood.

About six years ago, we started to work with farmers who were no longer able to cultivate and sell their products safely due to PFAS contamination from fertilizer and sewage sludge on their land. We created a PFAS emergency relief fund, which gives farmers the resources they need to navigate safe transitions for their farms. The fund can help farmers pay for initial PFAS testing, access wellness and mental-health services, and sometimes receive short-term income replacement and invest in infrastructure adaptations — which are all essential when you lose your livelihood.

Since creating the infrastructure to transition farms safely away from threats of PFAS contamination, we have supported more than 100 farms. Only the earliest farms to discover contamination — prior to a safety net being in place — have faced closure.

This safety net for our agricultural leaders has been so successful because it prioritizes public health, financial stability, and long-term sustainability. Our food systems, public health, and economic vitality depend on our policies to both turn off the tap on PFAS chemicals being added to products that end up in the waste stream and create safety nets throughout the transition to cleaner infrastructure so small businesses are protected.

Combatting Lax Sludge Standards and Fighting for Accountability

In addition to being proactive, states need to set smart thresholds for sludge. Michigan has set incredibly high contamination thresholds for PFAS concentration in biosolids, which means that large amounts of contaminants will still be applied to the land. If thresholds aren’t meaningful, they aren’t protecting anybody.

Legislation with smart thresholds for sludge has quickly proven itself to be crucial, as attempts to water down anti-sludge policies are cropping up in states across the country. These attempts show up as high thresholds for PFAS contamination in sludge and liability shields for corporations engaged in sludge disposal. To prevent this policy trend from growing, it’s imperative that anti-sludge and anti-PFAS legislation addresses corporate loopholes like these.

Maine’s policies opt for a more comprehensive approach, regulating PFAS as an entire category rather than by individual chemical regulations. Furthermore, we were the first state to mandate a near-total ban on PFAS in products.

Our state has also passed legislation that pushes for accountability from manufacturers who are unable to rid their products of PFAS, giving them a Currently Unavoidable Use (CUU) determination. Our Department of Environmental Protection will only issue a CUU to businesses if the department has determined a product is essential for health, safety, or the functioning of society and for which alternatives are not reasonably available.

Pretty soon it won’t be a choice of whether or not states take action against PFAS, but how they do it. And Maine’s policy is the blueprint for how the rest of America should address this issue to prevent this poisonous public-health threat at the source.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

The Silent Threat Beneath Our Feet: How Deregulation Fuels the Spread of Forever Chemicals

The post Amid National PFAS Frenzy, the ‘Maine Model’ Shows States How to Stop ‘Forever Chemicals’ at the Source appeared first on The Revelator.

I’m lucky to live immediately adjacent to Point Reyes National Seashore in California and make frequent visits to indulge my photography hobby. In the summer I can work a full day and still search for bobcats through the evening golden hour. And I’m truly privileged to be able to advocate for its restoration and protection in my capacity as executive director of Turtle Island Restoration Network.

Photo: Ken Bouley. Used with permission.

Point Reyes is a coastal treasure protecting about 110 square miles of some of the most scenic and biodiverse landscapes on the planet. Surrounded by marine protected areas on its western coastline and buffered by open spaces of various jurisdiction on eastern inland boundaries, the West Coast’s only national seashore supports extraordinary species richness for both plants and wildlife. Meanwhile its proximity to San Francisco and Oakland provides an unusually accessible oasis for humans seeking recreation and outdoor experiences. Point Reyes receives more than 2 million visitors per year.

That number could soon increase — and it should. People deserve to see this amazing landscape. A recent legal settlement added new protection to Point Reyes that should make it even more magnificent. But getting to that point still requires effort, coordination, and vigilance against both new and returning threats.

How We Got Here

The Seashore has a rocky history. It was signed into existence by John F. Kennedy in 1962. Over the next decade or so, the federal government purchased private ranches in the area, adding acreage in a puzzle-piece fashion, and sparing the whole peninsula from seemingly inexorable sprawl development.

What followed were decades of controversy and conflict over the best ultimate uses of the park. Commercial ranches were initially allowed to stay in operation, leasing back the land they’d just sold to the public. But beef and dairy cattle operations increasingly conflicted with the park’s preservation and public-use principles. Damage from overgrazing and ranching lease violations came under public scrutiny. A battle raged over controlling tule elk in the only national park where they still occur. With growing concerns of extinction and climate crises, pressure from citizens and environmental groups boiled over and, following a recent settlement, the government enacted changes to move away from private businesses guiding park management.

Now 10 out of 12 commercial cattle operations have now vacated the park. With the departure of all dairy and most beef cattle ranches, around 17,000 acres of formerly overgrazed lands are shifting from “pastoral working zone” to “scenic landscape” — meaning they are slated, in theory at least, for ecological restoration.

Photo: Ken Bouley. Used with permission.

The January 2025 Point Reyes settlement took more than a decade of intensive pressure: several iterations of a park management plan, litigation, protests, public hearings and comments, investigative journalism, town halls, letters to the editor, petitions, intrepid photographers photo-documenting lease violations and environmental degradation, ranch infrastructure decay, extended drought, and collapse of dairy markets.

The heavy lifting was done via lawsuits by the Center for Biological Diversity (publisher of The Revelator), Resource Renewal Institute, and Western Watersheds projects, with pro bono support from Advocates for the West. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) provided a reported $40 million in voluntary lease buyouts to incentivize the ranch leaseholders to vacate. As part of the deal, the National Park Service has repurposed the former grazing leases into restoration leases, initially to be held and managed by TNC.

The transition marks a rare moment in conservation: A large, publicly owned coastal landscape has a chance to recover its ecological integrity. Stakeholders including federal agencies, conservation nonprofits, ranching interests, tribal representatives, scientists, and the broader public are asking a high-stakes question: Now what?

Here are five key areas of focus that can guide the restoration of Point Reyes as a model for ecological recovery, climate resilience, and inclusive stewardship.

1. Restore Native Coastal Prairie — A Scarce and Valuable Ecosystem

California’s native coastal prairie is among the most imperiled ecosystems in North America. Once widespread along the Pacific Coast, this unique habitat survives in less than 1% of its former glory today. Grasslands that remain are fragmented, degraded, and under constant pressure from invasive species, altered fire regimes, and adjacent land-use practices.

At Point Reyes the reduction of commercial cattle grazing is an unprecedented opportunity to restore thousands of acres of coastal prairie. This is not as simple as removing fences and letting nature take its course. Decades of intensive cattle grazing have compacted and altered soils, caused erosion, and spread invasive plants.

Photo: Ken Bouley. Used with permission.

Effective restoration will require planning and active management: controlling invasive plants, reseeding native bunchgrasses and wildflowers, reintroducing natural disturbance regimes such as prescribed fire and grazing by elk, monitoring ecosystem responses, and adaptive management.

Native prairie restoration is about more than just plants. These ecosystems support pollinators, ground-nesting birds, small mammals, and a host of invertebrates that form the foundation of coastal biodiversity. Rebuilding prairie habitats also enhances carbon sequestration in soils, contributing to climate mitigation.

At Point Reyes we have a chance to recover a nearly lost landscape, one that is both ecologically rich and culturally significant. This is also a rare opportunity to learn how formerly grazed grasslands react to different restoration regimes. Point Reyes offers a valuable laboratory for soil science, botany, and restoration ecology.

2. Wildlife Recovery and Reintroduction: Rebuilding A Functional Ecosystem

The management changes at Point Reyes will allow recovery of existing wildlife populations, as well as opportunities for reintroduction of wildlife species that have been extirpated but once played essential ecological roles.

The most visible beneficiaries will be tule elk, endemic to California. Once thought extinct, tule elk were reduced to a single remnant population in the San Joaquin Valley that was protected and became the source for elk reintroductions around the state. The National Park Service reintroduced two dozen elk to Point Reyes in 1978, and today the park’s population has grown to about 700 elk.

Photo: Ken Bouley. Used with permission.

The Park Service has removed a large fence across Tomales Point that formerly pinned elk on a peninsula, allowing them to roam freely. Under the settlement the agency also abandoned a proposed arbitrary population cap on elk that would have greenlighted annual shooting and hazing of tule elk to reduce competition with grazing cattle. With the removal of ranching infrastructure and cattle that competed for forage, elk will have significantly more room to roam in the park, potentially improving herd health and reducing human-wildlife conflicts.

Marin County is notably the only coastal county north of the Golden Gate Bridge without wild beavers. Beaver reintroduction represents a powerful, nature-based solution for watershed restoration. As ecosystem engineers, beavers create wetlands that improve water storage, reduce erosion, enhance biodiversity, benefit wildlife such as coho salmon and other endangered species, and build resilience to drought and wildfire.

Similarly, formerly abundant sea otters were extirpated during the fur trade era. Today southern sea otters are listed as endangered, and their recovery along the central and northern California coasts is an important conservation priority. Reestablishing sea otter presence at Point Reyes could contribute to broader population resilience and recovery. Sea otters are also keystone species, helping to maintain eelgrass and kelp forests, which in turn support fisheries, biodiversity, and carbon storage.

In the heart of Point Reyes, Drakes Estero is an excellent potential reintroduction location for sea otters, since the estuary is free from predatory sharks and dangerous boat traffic, rich in marine invertebrate foods for otters, and surrounded by designated wilderness. Sea otters could help control invasive Eurasian green crabs who have upset the local ecology.

And that’s not all: A recent report by Turtle Island Restoration Network explores the feasibility of reintroducing these three native mammals — and four more — to Point Reyes, and the ecological benefits and practical considerations for such efforts.

Reintroduction works best when it restores natural ecological processes, putting nature in the form of elk, beavers, and otters to work in restoring habitats. But such ecological changes must be approached carefully and require rigorous assessment, long-term monitoring, and collaboration amongst agencies and communities.

Point Reyes already serves as an ark against the Anthropocene flood of human impacts, harboring nearly 100 endangered, threatened, or rare plants and animals. If the Bay Area’s signature park can bring back animals extirpated upon European arrival, it will be an exemplary and inspiring example of the national parks as “America’s best idea.”

3. Tribal Co-Management and Cultural Renewal

Point Reyes is the ancestral home of the Coast Miwok, whose stewardship shaped the area over many thousands of years. Colonization removed and displaced these communities and disrupted their relationship with unceded land. The restoration of Point Reyes presents an opportunity to move beyond acknowledgment toward meaningful partnership. As a formal part of the settlement and the newly revised general management plan for the Seashore, the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, whose membership includes Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples, are official management partners with the National Park Service.

Tribal comanagement can bring Indigenous knowledge, cultural practices, and stewardship values back into land management, including the use of cultural burning to maintain grasslands, restoration of culturally significant plant species, protection of archeological and sacred sites, and the bolstering of programs that support cultural revitalization. Indigenous stewardship practices have sustained ecosystems for millennia and offer valuable insights for modern restoration challenges.

4. Expanding Public Access to Newly Opened Lands

For decades large portions of Point Reyes were effectively inaccessible to the public due to active ranching operations. While technically open, these lands were often surrounded by barbed wire, gated, or difficult to navigate safely. They were also covered with what cows do — high boots were not optional.

With the departure of most ranches, thousands of acres of public land can now be reimagined for public use. This presents an opportunity to expand trail systems, improve connectivity between existing park areas, and create new spaces for hiking, wildlife viewing, and environmental education.

Photo: Ken Bouley. Used with permission.

However, increased visitation can bring unintended impacts: trail erosion, habitat disturbance, and pressure on sensitive species. Restoration and recreation must be balanced through careful planning, including designated trails, seasonal closures of sensitive areas, visitor education, and enforcement.

Done right, expanded access can deepen public appreciation for the landscape while fostering a constituency that supports its protection. It can also redistribute visitor use, reducing overcrowding in heavily trafficked areas of the Seashore.

This is not just about opening gates; it’s about evolving how people engage with public lands in a way that aligns with ecological recovery.

5. Environmental Justice and Equitable Access to Nature

For many residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly those from historically marginalized communities, access to national parks remains limited by economic, transportation, logistical, and cultural barriers.

Progressive environmental organizations have long emphasized the importance of linking conservation with community engagement. Ensuring that restoration benefits are shared broadly, not just ecologically but socially, is key to building lasting support.

With expanded access and renewed focus, the Seashore can become a gateway to nature for millions of people who may not have the opportunity to visit Yosemite or Yellowstone. This will require intentional programming: transportation initiatives, community partnerships, multilingual education efforts, and outreach that reflects the diversity of the region. Groups such as Outdoor Afro, Latino Outdoors, Rainbow Sierrans, and others can partake in, support, and enjoy increased access and restoration of the Seashore.

Equity in access is not an afterthought; it’s central to the mission of public lands. A restored Point Reyes can serve as a model for how national parks can better serve the public in all its diversity.

Notes of Skepticism

There is, of course, an orange elephant in the room. Until the next presidential election, any progress involving federal agencies or federal funding faces more of a vertical cliff than an uphill battle.

For example, reintroducing beavers would occur under the auspices of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and might actually make progress, whereas reintroducing sea otters would require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency suffering from DOGE budget cuts and firings and under Trump’s Interior Department that is hostile to conservation.

Worse than simply starving the relevant agencies of resources, there remains the specter of active interference in the Point Reyes settlement by the Trump administration. Local businessman and “regenerative ranching” pied piper Albert Straus has made overtures to Washington to roll back the decision and bring private commercial dairies back to the Seashore. Mr. Straus owns Straus Family Creamery and stands to gain financially if his implausible prayers are answered at the Department of the Interior.

The ranchers with the two remaining ranching leases in the Seashore have sued the Park Service to try to overturn the settlement. One of these beneficiaries of publicly subsidized generous lease conditions and reduced grazing fees and personal rent, Nicolette Hahn Niman, ran for Congress against incumbent Jared Huffman (D-CA-2) in an apparent attempt to penalize Huffman’s support for the Seashore settlement, but lost in June’s primary.

Another issue of concern is the question of how committed The Nature Conservancy will be to actual and full ecological restoration at Point Reyes given the political backlash by ranchers, agricultural interests and the Trump administration. TNC is proud of its longstanding relationships with ranchers and champions “restoration grazing” vociferously. The Point Reyes settlement includes managing the new leases for ecological, restoration, public use, and historical and cultural values. This will include continued cattle grazing, but at significantly reduced stocking rates and duration, with promises of rotating cattle off of grasslands before damage occurs. Will TNC implement rotational grazing minimally and as part of a practical restoration regime, or will it recreate the overgrazing and degraded conditions that characterized Point Reyes for decades?

Among the coalition of environmentalists and advocates who fought for Point Reyes restoration, there is skepticism or cautious optimism about the way and degree to which TNC will use cows on leased land in the Seashore. This concern was amplified when TNC awarded a short-term rotational grazing contract to a remaining private ranch leaseholder who forewent the settlement negotiations, sued to overturn the settlement, and is maneuvering to maintain or expand his commercial operations in the Seashore.

TNC is of course aware of these concerns and has committed to a transparent public process to develop a management and restoration plan for the lease lands and is sharing their vision and plan with the concerned public.

Conditions for Success

The opportunities for ecological restoration and public benefits at Point Reyes are significant, but they are not guaranteed. Realizing them depends on several critical conditions:

First, the settlement that enabled this transition must be upheld and allowed to proceed without interference. Legal certainty provides the foundation for long-term planning and investment.

Second, agencies with authority, particularly the Park Service and California Department of Fish and Wildlife, must actively engage, coordinate, and commit resources to the restoration.

Third, collaboration among stakeholders is essential. Conservation groups, Tribal representatives, scientists, and local communities must work together. Local environmental groups should be allowed to bring their expertise, volunteer power, and funding to the restoration effort. This, unfortunately, has not yet occurred, and there’s no committed timeline.

Fourth, restoration must be understood as an ongoing process, not a one-and-done. Ecosystems take time to recover, and adaptive management will be necessary as conditions change.

Finally, all stakeholders must understand and commit to the established purposes of the national park system, as stated in the Organic Act of 1916: “to conserve the scenery, natural/historic objects, and wildlife, while providing for public enjoyment in a manner that leaves them ‘unimpaired’ for future generations.”

Point Reyes stands at a rare inflection point. Few places have the chance to reclaim such a large and ecologically significant landscape in one coordinated effort. The question is no longer whether restoration is possible. It is whether we will rise to meet the opportunity.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

This Is What Community-Powered Restoration Looks Like

The post Rewilding Point Reyes National Seashore: Why and How appeared first on The Revelator.

By the time Mexican turtles and tortoises arrive in Chris Rodriguez’s rehabilitation center in Southern California, most of them are in desperate shape.

“As with most illegally smuggled animals, they arrive dehydrated and often malnourished,” says Rodriguez. He’s the cofounder of Carapace Conservation, a rescue and rehabilitation organization specializing in trafficked turtles. “This stems from them being collected over a period of time and held in poor conditions until the poachers have enough animals to send.”

Rodriguez says the most frequently confiscated species trafficked through the Port of Los Angeles are box turtles and mud turtles. They’re prized by wildlife traffickers precisely because their colorful shells make them attractive to the pet market and their habits make them easy to catch in the wild.

And they’re not alone.

A Smuggling Frenzy

Every day traffickers pack imperiled turtles and tortoises into coolers, load them into personal vehicles, and drive them north through Tijuana and into San Ysidro, California — the busiest land border crossing in the world.

Mexico harbors the second highest turtle diversity in the world, with 48 documented turtle species, according to a peer-reviewed analysis published in the Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad. This biological richness has made the Tijuana–San Diego corridor one of the most active entry points for illegally trafficked reptiles in the country, according to federal wildlife agents.

The Jalisco and Baja California regions sit at the center of this crisis, their extraordinary density of Chelonians (the taxonomic order that covers turtles) drawing organized trafficking networks that operate with the sophistication and impunity of criminal syndicates — because that is exactly what they are.

The scale of the problem came into sharp relief in late September 2025 when Mexican authorities executed coordinated raids across five locations in Jalisco and Baja California, confiscating more than 2,300 wild-caught turtles in a single sweep. What made the raid significant was the intelligence behind it: Multiple agencies worked in coordination across five locations simultaneously, which demonstrated a proactive, intelligence-driven approach that a 2025 study in Frontiers in Conservation Science found remains rare in Mexican wildlife enforcement. Responses to trafficking in Mexico are predominantly reactive, and law enforcement agencies frequently lack clarity on their specific responsibilities.

According to a December 2024 report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare titled Wildlife Crime in Hispanic America: An Analysis of Seizures and Poaching Incidents in 18 Countries (2017–2022), 1,945 seizures and poaching incidents were documented across the region during that period, involving a minimum of 102,577 wild animals. That only counts the animals who were confiscated and documented by authorities, not those who were successfully smuggled or died during transit.

The species disappearing into this pipeline are not generic “turtles.” They are some of the most ecologically irreplaceable reptiles in the Western Hemisphere.

The Mesoamerican slider (Trachemys venusta) is one of the most commonly trafficked species in Mexico and carries special government protection under Mexico’s Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection due to severe overexploitation of wild populations. The Central American river turtle (Dermatemys mawii) sits on the IUCN Red List as critically endangered, facing what researchers describe as widespread, dramatic, and ongoing population declines.

Rodriguez flags two additional species as his priorities right now.

“Our biggest concern out of Mexico is the Vallarta mud turtle,” he says, referring to Kinosternon vogti, a species found in only one waterway in small numbers, which is already appearing in illegal shipments.

At Carapace’s Madagascar program — a reminder that this problem is not exclusive to Mexico — the spider tortoise (Pyxis arachnoides) has emerged as a newer crisis.

“Adults are only around six inches, so they are the perfect size for smugglers,” Rodriguez explains. “Their small size means females only lay one egg at a time. This drastically increases the risk of extinction for this species if poaching trends continue.”

For animals who are seized and reach a facility like Carapace, recovery is possible, but far from guaranteed.

“It all starts with triage and quarantine,” Rodriguez says. “The animal needs to be evaluated immediately for injuries, external parasites, and disease until the vets are able to run tests. The animals stay in a quarantine area to prevent the spread of disease to healthy animals in our program.” Recovery timelines vary widely depending on each animal’s condition at arrival.

Reintroduction to the wild remains the end goal, Rodriguez notes, but comes with its own complex hurdles: international cooperation, safe monitored release sites, and protections to prevent trafficked animals from being collected again once returned.

Turtles in Crisis

The picture for turtles and tortoises is grim across the board.

“Populations across the globe are declining,” Rodriguez says, “with countries like Mexico and Madagascar being primary targets for smuggling due to a lack of funding for wildlife protection.”

When breeding adults — animals who may not reach reproductive maturity for 15 to 20 years — are stripped out of already-stressed wild populations, the damage doesn’t show up immediately. It shows up a decade later, when the next generation fails to appear and field surveys come back empty.

Scott Tregassar, executive director of The Biodiversity Group, a conservation nonprofit working across the American Southwest and Mexico, says the population-level consequences can be both immediate and catastrophic.

“In some cases it can be severe and apparent immediately, since someone, or a group of people, can collect enough mature individuals to disrupt the population dynamics overnight,” he says.

What makes tortoises particularly vulnerable, Tregassar explains, goes beyond simple numbers.

“Tortoises are fairly social creatures, and they suffer when their social group is disrupted. They know who their offspring are and they have a map of where all their neighbors, potential mates, and rivals live. In many cases, if even a single reproductive female is removed from a population, that could significantly reduce the population’s chances of long-term survival.”

Exploiting an Enforcement Gap

Traffickers don’t need drama; they need volume and consistency.

According to Kim Lovich, curator of herpetology at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, animals move north from collection points across Baja and central Mexico. They’re then consolidated by regional distributors before crossing through San Ysidro in coolers, hidden compartments, and personal vehicles. A single seizure can carry 50 or more tortoises with a street value approaching $55,000.

From San Diego the pipeline extends further still. The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance identifies LAX as the most-used port for shipping reptiles out of the U.S., bound primarily for China and Vietnam, where rare reptiles command premium prices as status pets.

In many ways turtles and other animals are just add-ons to make trafficking other illegal goods even more profitable. Mexico serves as the primary hub for a multinational criminal pipeline — sourcing wildlife from across the Caribbean, Central and South America — with transnational criminal organizations using logistics infrastructure built for drug, human, and arms smuggling to move exotic animals as a low-risk, high-margin side operation, according to a 2017 policy analysis by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. And as Brookings Institution researcher Vanda Felbab-Brown has documented, cartels have also leveraged wildlife operations by supplying Chinese traders with animal products in exchange for the chemical precursors. These are then used to manufacture fentanyl and methamphetamine, making the turtle trade not just an ecological crisis, but a threat in a much larger and more dangerous web.

As The Revelator has previously reported, ports of entry remain chronically understaffed for wildlife inspection, and traffickers are sophisticated enough to know exactly when and where enforcement bandwidth runs thin. That enforcement gap is the story within the story. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fields roughly 250 special agents to cover all wildlife crime across the entire country. Customs and Border Protection, meanwhile, directs every available resource toward fentanyl interdiction, firearms, and the Trump administration’s focus on migration that consumes the political oxygen in every border briefing. Wildlife trafficking doesn’t make the agenda.

The 2,300 turtles seized in Baja California last fall represent a moment of coordination that should be the rule, not the exception. For every animal confiscated, no one can say how many crossed undetected. The border stays open for business until wildlife crime earns the same urgency as every other form of organized crime moving through San Ysidro.

Right now, it doesn’t. And the tortoises are paying the price.

How to Help

Anyone considering buying a turtle or tortoise should ask for captive-bred documentation. Legitimate breeders can provide it. Animals sold without paperwork, at unusually low prices or in bulk, are red flags worth reporting to USFWS at 1-844-397-8477 or through the iWildlife app. Wildlife crime stays low-risk only because consumers don’t ask questions. That’s the one variable any of us can change today.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet, and How to Stop Them

The post Smuggled Alive: Turtles and Tortoises Trafficked Across the Mexico-U.S. Border appeared first on The Revelator.

Environmentalists, myself included, pay close attention to gloomy topics like species extinctions and Earth’s dwindling life-support systems. It’s not for the love of dark matters that we keep tabs on depressing metrics. Rather, it’s with the hope that they teach us something and guide us toward mitigating future losses.

On the biological front, about a million species could be taken by an extinction vortex by the end of the century. That’s also when linguists estimate about one-third of the world’s 7,000-plus Indigenous languages will go silent — and with them, most of their related cultures.

This is not uplifting news, to be sure. Nonetheless, people concerned with environmental protection can learn a lot from language extinctions. As it turns out, the survival of languages and species may well be linked. And when we wrap our minds around this, the panorama for conservation actually gets a little brighter.

A Confluence of Curious Similarities

Linguistic variation around the world caught the imagination and attention of naturalists going back at least to the Victorian era of exploration, when folks like Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin traveled across the wilds of South America and the Malay Archipelago.

Wallace marveled at the linguistic diversity shown by communities spread along the edges of the watery world in the Amazon basin and dotting the highlands of New Guinea. He even wrote out partial lexicons to aid in communicating with his guides. Darwin, in his ruminations on the descent of man, went so far as to remark that languages and species are “curiously the same.” He was thinking about human evolution and wondering if languages might evolve by natural selection. With his thoughts on the flowering of languages, he did not give time to their senescence.

It would take more than 100 years, after the concurrent publication of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection, for scientists to uncover the full extent of global linguistic variation, and also the languages’ risk of extinction. Today the patterns emerging from these discoveries hold lessons for environmentalists.

One of the pioneering explorations was conducted by Larry Gorenflo (Penn State University) and his team of conservation biologists and linguists. Their labors produced some profound findings.

First off, the places on Earth with outrageously high numbers of species also have outrageously high numbers of Indigenous languages. Furthermore, many of the species and languages of these hyper-rich spots are endemic. They don’t occur, much less co-occur, anywhere else.

Gorenflo and team went on to examine language diversity in regions that conservationists designate as “priority areas.” A second striking fact emerged: High-priority conservation regions are home to nearly 70% of the world’s languages.

These results demonstrate we can either win big or lose big, depending on the success of our efforts in these doubly diverse hotspots. It’s like playing a Daily Double, with “How to save life on Earth?” as the question to the answer.

Lullaby for Language

Extinction is forever. Except when it’s not. This isn’t a reference to de-extinction and the facsimiles brought into existence by technology. It’s about languages.

When the last speaker of a language falls into eternal slumber, so does their language. Linguists say that such languages are “dormant.” Dormancy is different from the extinction of biological species, at least in principle.

Sleeping languages can, hypothetically, experience reawakening. That is, they can be spoken again after a period of dormancy, but only under special circumstances. At a minimum there must be a written record of the lexicon and syntax.  For instance, Hebrew came back in the 19th century after a long slumber.

Sadly, however, the vast majority of Indigenous languages only exist in the oral form, making linguistic resurrections nearly impossible. This is why dormancy and extinction are, for all intents and purposes, synonymous. It’s also why we must work to document and teach Indigenous languages before they nod off.

High Tolls for Both Languages and Species

Just as the vastness of language varieties was unearthed, the global decline became apparent as well. Nowadays researchers race to figure out what drives language endangerment. Lindell Bromham and Xia Hua (Australian National University) are two such investigators, who lead a large interdisciplinary team analyzing the subject.

In a recent cutting-edge study of massive scope and scale, the team uncovered the principal determinants that drive the downturn. One of the top three is strangely simple: roads.

“Greater road density, which may encourage population movement, is associated with increased (language) endangerment,” Bromham and team conclude.

You might say that roads compromise the linguistic intactness of a landscape. Conservation biologists, well versed in the dangers that roads pose to natural ecosystems, should relate to that.

A South American tapir crosses a fresh road cut across fragmented habitat in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Photo by Leandro Maracahipes, with permission to use.

This is not to suggest that road effects are perfectly analogous in their impacts on languages and species. There are major differences. They have to do with the paradoxical capacity of roads to both create and destroy connections.

For remote ethnolinguistic groups, a frontier highway increases connectivity. Distances that once required weeks or more to cross may be traversed in hours or days. Lines of communication suddenly open — for material goods, of course, but also for the transmission of diverse ideologies and ways of life.

When this happens with high speed or without guardrails, a collision with cultural traditions and language preservation ensues. Often, such roads are the handiwork of large industries, looking to make money in the frontier, usually at the expense of local peoples whose lands they usurp.

One of the first casualties of enhanced contact is the local vernacular. This is a big blow to culture, potentially harming people’s health, wellbeing, and identity. The loss is accompanied by a shift to another language, usually the parlance of government, business, and education. A new sociocultural reality arises as the highway expansion continues.

By contrast, roads harm ecosystems by severing connections. Effectively, highways fracture natural populations and break the fundamental rules of ecology.

Renowned ecologist and conservation biologist Dr. William Laurance (James Cook University) tells me that bulldozing through forest expanses is like opening Pandora’s box.

“It’s because of the transformative effect that (roads) have,” he says. “They’re the single most important proximate driver of environmental change and degradation. A road goes in and six months later the forest is split open like a splayed fish.”

In distant lands, far from government regulation and oversight, a motorway quickly spawns ghost roads — unauthorized byways branching from the central transit spine. In short order, plantation monocultures flatten forests and open-pit mines erupt like infectious pocks. The cleavage of habitats puts native plant and animal populations at greater risk of declines, even extinctions. Curbside, roadkill piles up.

So while highways and their byways exert harm in different ways, they are nonetheless critical factors that must be reckoned with, for both conservationists and linguists.

We Don’t Need No Education?

The work by Bromham and team produced a result that may run counter-intuitive to every reader of this piece. Next to roads, say the investigators, the biggest threat to languages is formal education.

Educators may shake their heads, but there’s good evidence that Bromham and colleagues are right. They argue that monolingual education can lead to language shifts, with local Indigenous languages yielding to rising tongues. Young people, looking ahead to professional careers, may be strongly incentivized to adopt the language that advances their aspirations.

Various lines of evidence suggest this is, indeed, what happens. An example comes from Papua New Guinea, a tiny nation in Melanesia whose name graces the very top of the list of language-rich countries. That diversity is endangered, in large part, due to high school education, say Alfred Kik (University of Goroka) and Vojtěch Novotný (Czech Academy of Sciences). They’re long-term investigators in Papua New Guinea who have been documenting students’ Indigenous language skills and knowledge of local flora and fauna.

Their work demonstrates a “precipitous” decline in both. The result derives, they argue, from the push for children to learn English, which is used in schools and perceived to be the language of opportunity. The shift is also related to the spread of Tok Pisin, a type of pidgin English used extensively as the lingua franca in multilingual settings, including cafeterias and playgrounds.

The message is not that formal education should be eliminated for the sake of global linguistic diversity. The lesson, rather, is that the language of instruction, which is usually determined by education policy and funding availability, is highly consequential. Multilingual education is a possible antidote, especially in the context of environmental education.

Nature and Knowledge

K. David Harrison (Swarthmore and Vin University), an environmental linguist, emphasizes the “nature-centric” qualities of Indigenous tongues. They are distinguished, he writes, by the great diversity of words that describe plants and animals and the way that grammar encodes information about the world around them.

Harrison attributes nature-centrism to longstanding, intimate relationships between Indigenous speakers and their natural surroundings. It reflects a mindset in which people are part and parcel of nature, not separate entities.

For oral languages, words are key to the transmission of traditional ecological knowledge. This refers to a body of information and concepts held collectively by community members. As such, it is a living, evolving, and growing library that is honed and built incrementally over time and comes to life in use. When language goes extinct, so does the knowledge it holds.

The continued existence of ethnolinguistic groups in remote, harsh, and untrammeled areas is proof that knowledge and communication skills ensure sustainable ways of life. Gorenflo argues that, with a million species at risk of extinction, we should have regard for those who demonstrate a history of conservation success.

“Traditional ecological knowledge provides a glimpse into how people adapt to, and use, resources without destroying them,” Gorenflo tells me.

Along the same vein, Kik is racing against time to document the traditional ecological knowledge of the elders in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. He says it’s an effort to keep language and nature alive.

“Traditional ecological knowledge plays an important role in biodiversity conservation, sustainability, and natural resource management,” he tells me. “It plays a crucial role. If we lose language, we lose knowledge, and then there is a problem for environmental conservation. This will have impacts,” he warns.

Environmentalism, Language, and Culture

As we learn more from the results of interdisciplinary investigations, like those mentioned here, lessons for environmentalists emerge.

The first, of course, is to do more. Conservation biologists and linguists benefit greatly from cross-pollination, and the cause of language and species can profit, too.

In the meantime we know there are key action items that can be focal points for the short term. They include allocating the always-slender conservation monies toward diverse eco-linguistic landscapes, which are now well-documented by the mapping studies of Gorenflo and others.

Other priorities are to support the cataloguing of Indigenous languages and ethnobiological knowledge while speakers can tell their stories. In classroom settings, especially in locations where Indigenous tongues are still spoken, there should be real efforts to include multilingual programming, especially in relation to environmental education. Even better, where elders are able to share, their original voices should be heard.

Undoubtedly today’s environmentalists stand to derive great insights from supporting Indigenous groups in leading their own kinds of conservation. Most importantly, nature and knowledge will be the biggest beneficiaries. But first we must first embrace the idea that the extinction of languages and cultures is an environmental issue.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Decolonizing Species Names

The post The Extinction of Languages Is an Environmental Issue appeared first on The Revelator.

Summer is almost upon us, and with it comes opportunities to enjoy what our planet has to offer — or enhance your understanding of the environmental issues that affect us all.

We’ve collected several great new books about birds, reptiles and amphibians, green gardening, and climate change. They offer wonderful insights into the natural world and how to enjoy and protect it.

We’ve also paired some of these books with related reads for young people, so kids and adults can explore and discuss the beauty and important challenges facing our wildlife and environment together IRL.

We’ve adapted the books’ official descriptions below, and the link in each title goes to the publisher’s page. You can also find any of these titles through your local bookseller and library.

 

Eco Revolution: Climate Justice, Community, and the Fight for Our Planet

by Maya Penn

With 15 years of hands-on experience, award-winning environmental activist Maya Penn writes resoundingly about the ever-growing threat of the climate crisis, putting the world on notice that we’ve not only entered into a once-in-a-generation era of social and environmental justice advocacy but a deep-rooted overlap between environmental crises and inequities.

This book chronicles sustainability history and highlights unsung eco-warriors, offering solutions for a more sustainable and equitable world, exploring our collective connection to the natural world through inherited ecology and Traditional Ecological Knowledge passed down through Indigenous cultures, which used naturally occurring ecosystems to create thriving, functional societies and how this now translates to our modern understanding about sustainability.

Penn looks at the current green movements around the world and how they have discovered new approaches to sustainable living, and how we can use our creativity to bring about real change. Penn also looks at the future — and how we can remain optimistic in the midst of crisis.

 

Owls: Nocturnal Birds of Prey From Around the World

by David Alderton

Owls have been a source of fascination and awe throughout history. In Indian folklore owls represent wisdom and helpfulness, while in Ancient Greece they were seen as a good omen if sighted before a battle. Today owls are often kept as pets by bird lovers and can be found in woodland and forests from the Canadian Arctic to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. Full of fun facts and expert insights, Owls introduces these iconic birds in all their variety. Did you know that owls can rotate their necks 270 degrees, or that an owl’s ears are asymmetrical? Or that owls are considered apex predators? Or that the tiniest owl in the world is the elf owl, a mere five inches tall, while the largest North American owl is the great gray owl at 32 inches tall? Or that barn owls swallow their prey whole — skin, bones, and all — and they eat up to 1,000 mice each year?

With chapters divided into type of owl — barn and grass owls, typical owls, snowy, horned and eagle owls, wood owls, pygmy owls, and owlets and nesting — this book examines these superb aerial hunters in over 200 vivid photographs.

 

Cold-Blooded Murder: Reptiles and Amphibians on the Brink of Extinction

by Craig Stanford

Around the world reptile and amphibian species are facing grave threats to their survival: Habitat destruction due to logging, agriculture, development, commercial exploitation and wildlife trade, to say nothing of climate change. Examples include Galápagos giant tortoises slaughtered for meat, pets and decorative items, Caribbean rock iguanas driven to the brink of extinction by invasive species such as cats and dogs, commercial exploitation of the ploughshare tortoise, severely threatened by poaching for the illegal pet trade, and the critically endangered Cuban crocodile for its valuable skin.

In Cold-Blooded Murder, Craig Stanford tells the stories of dozens of endangered reptiles and amphibians, depicting the ecological roles and unique characteristics of each species. He takes readers on a globe-spanning journey, revealing the diversity and beauty of the creatures with whom we share our world. He also highlights conservation projects that are protecting critically endangered animals, sharing inspiring success stories while acknowledging the challenge of saving species. This gripping and poignant book shows why we should be fascinated by reptiles and amphibians — and strive to prevent their extinction.

 

The Gardener’s Mindset: A Gardening Book Connecting With Nature Through Plants

by Stephen Orr

A reflection on being a gardener, this absorbing collection of essays and photographs by the former editor-in-chief of Better Homes and Gardens examines the restorative power of gardening while recounting Orr’s own challenges in the garden, offering advice on growing green things.

This book helps readers understand not just how to garden but how to think about it. Orr brings his musings and practical advice to gardeners everywhere, no matter what skill level. Gorgeous photographs and easy projects range from cultivating a color scheme to building a wildlife habitat, and Orr gives practical advice on how to cultivate plants that stay resilient in the face of climate change.

On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites

by Alicia Kennedy

Author and journalist Alicia Kennedy’s captivating new book is a deeply personal work that asks: Can we eat and cook in a way that’s true to ourselves, roots us in the places we call home, and helps define our politics and ethics? Guided by curiosity and a hunger for flavor and experience, she posits that we don’t have to choose between what is delicious and what can sustain our planet and ourselves.

On Eating is not only a provocative bildungsroman and a celebration of desire but a challenge to each of us to consider our own relationship with food and how our need to eat — to live — affects the world.

 

Insect Safari: Exploring the Wondrous World of Everyday Bugs

by Margie Patlak

Join veteran science writer Margie Patlak on a fascinating adventure as she explores the ever-more-astounding world of insects — all in her own backyard. It started when she took a close-up snapshot of a bee in her backyard; that was the start of a years-long passion for cataloging and understanding the tiny creatures that were all around her. This book showcases the superpowers, alien anatomies, and striking untold behaviors and thinking abilities of bugs hidden in plain sight in backyards, parks, gardens, and even in the flowerpots that dot city courtyards and balconies.

Even more intriguing is the book’s reporting on the plethora of recent scientific findings revealing there’s more to the inner lives and behaviors of insects than people ever thought possible. Who knew wasps use tools and recognize faces, bees play with balls and do math, ants invented farming way before we did, and even fruit flies mull over their mating choices? These findings reinforce the notion that we aren’t the only intelligent beings on Earth and tease people’s curiosity about the alien life right here on their own planet.

 

Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are: How Indigenous Cultural Resistance Can Restore the Earth, Recover Community, and Create Sustainable Futures

by Maceo Carrillo Martinet, Ph.D.

Rooted in Indigenous wisdom and a four-element framework, this book invites readers to rediscover and re-embody the truth that caring for ourselves and caring for the living Earth are one and the same. Find how climate solutions are still possible and already exist, practiced by communities around the world. Explicitly decolonial, this book offers a framework rooted in reciprocity, resistance, and kinship with the living Earth and is built around four elements:

1. 1. Water: How ancient Indigenous water-harvesting technologies are vital for sustaining water, land, and community.
   2. Earth: How successful community land stewardship continues to support ecological health and human life in spite of colonial desecration.
   3. Fire: How “Indigenous fire” — frequent, low-intensity burns rooted in deep cultural relationship — functions as a crucial medicine for restoring forest health, preventing wildfires, and sustaining cultural and environmental resilience.
   4. Air: The profound connection between linguistic diversity and biodiversity — and how language can be nurtured to heal and awaken humans.

Combining these four elements shows us how enduring human and ecological systems are built upon the interconnectedness of collective action, cultural appreciation, and diverse, restorative relationships with nature.

 

Noticing: Intimate Encounters With the Natural World

by Richard Louv

Long beloved for his insightful, inspiring nature writing, Richard Louv returns with his most personal book yet. Noticing is about discovering who you are by exploring the natural world. Louv shows how, by tapping into the 30 or more human senses, readers can develop skills — sensory, scientific, artistic, and spiritual —to see and experience the other worlds of nature.

Through personal essays, rich with descriptions of the California wilderness around his home in the most biodiverse county in the nation, Louv draws on wisdom from influences as far-reaching as neuroscience, nature photography, Indigenous traditions, and mindfulness to foster what he calls “bio enchantment.” He offers a new, deeper understanding of what it means to see a tree, know a fox, and to become fully human.

Books for young people to explore this summer, including titles that can be paired with the selections above.

Who’s Making That Big STINK?!

by Darrin Lunde, illustrated by Erica J. Chen

Ages 3-7

Ew! Who smells like rotten eggs and smelly feet? Yuck! Whose burps smell like cow poop? Find out which animals stink (and why) in this reeky, cheeky guessing game. Animals make all sorts of smells for all sorts of reasons. Can you guess the stinker from its stink? Simple clues and laugh-out-loud art make this guessing game perfect for rowdy read-aloud times. Fun facts from a world-class zoologist reveal the science behind the stink. Readers are introduced to the striped skunk, the stink bird, the musk ox, the corpse flower, the bombardier beetle, the sea hare, and the binturong.

 

Plastic Problem: 60 Small Ways to Reduce Waste and Help Save the Earth

By Aubre Andrus, illustrated by Dynamo Ltd Illustrator

Ages 6 to Grown-ups

Learn how to transform yourself from a plastic polluter to a plastic patroller with this practical, easy-to-understand book. Actions are big and small, so what can you do to address climate change? It’s time to step up and end our toxic relationship with plastic. It’s actually easy when you do it in small steps. Whether it’s buying in bulk, bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, or using zero-waste toothpaste, this guide offers advice on the practical ways to minimize your plastics footprint. This guide not only shows you how but why it’s worth investigating our relationship with plastics. A great book for adults and children to work together making changes instead of gaming or doomscrolling.

 

Owls (National Geographic Kids Readers, Level 1)

By Laura Marsh

Ages 4-6

National Geographic presents young readers with an exploration of the feathery world of adorable owls. Follow these curious-looking creatures through their wooded habitats, and learn how owls raise their young, hunt, and protect themselves. Beautiful photos and carefully leveled text make this book perfect for reading aloud or for independent reading.

Pairs well with Owls: Nocturnal Birds of Prey From Around the World

 

The Ultimate Book of Reptiles: Your Guide to the Secret Lives of These Scaly, Slithery, and Spectacular Creatures!

by Ruchira Somaweera and Stephanie Warren Drimmer

Age 8-12 years

Sink your fangs into the hidden worlds of these scaly and sensational creatures with leading reptile scientist and National Geographic Explorer Dr. Ruchira Somaweera as your guide.

Meet the coolest cold-blooded animals ever. From lizards to snakes, turtles to crocodiles, something called a tuatara, and even enormous prehistoric reptiles (think real-life sea monsters!), you’ll discover what makes a reptile a reptile; how these creatures live, hunt, hide, and raise their young, and the wild adaptations that make them so unique. Learn which snake is the most venomous on the planet and which are surprisingly gentle creatures, which reptile is born with a highly developed third eye in its forehead, and which one is so tiny it could balance on the tip of your finger — plus loads of super important conservation information and impactful ways to join the fight to save endangered reptile species right from home.

Pairs nicely with Cold-Blooded Murder: Reptiles and Amphibians on the Brink of Extinction

 

Amphibians and Reptiles: A Compare and Contrast Book

by Katharine Hall

Ages 4-9

What makes a frog an amphibian but a snake a reptile? Both classes may lay eggs, but they have different skin coverings and breathe in different ways. Pages of fun facts will help kids identify each animal in the class like a pro. Using stunning photographs and simple nonfiction text to get kids thinking about the similarities and differences between these two animal classes, this picture book includes a four-page For Creative Minds section in the back of the book and a 67-page cross-curricular Teaching Activity Guide online. Amphibians and Reptiles is vetted by experts and designed to encourage parental engagement. Its extensive back matter helps teachers with time-saving lesson ideas, provides extensions for science, math, and social studies units, and uses inquiry-based learning to help build critical thinking skills in young readers.

Pairs nicely with Cold-Blooded Murder: Reptiles and Amphibians on the Brink of Extinction

 

Force of Nature

by Melissa Clark

Ages 12-18

This fresh, smart, funny young adult book asks the question: What if Mother Nature was a teenage girl? Chloe Lovejoy is a straight-C student, a girl with a crush on the cutie from chorus, an all-powerful being responsible for taking care of the planet … or perhaps all three. Chloe finds out on her 16th birthday, when she unexpectedly inherits the role of Mother Nature from her grandmother. Overwhelmed, when the unthinkable happens and Grandma is gone, Chloe is left to oversee the natural laws of the world all by herself.

A unique coming-of-age story about a teen girl rising to the occasion, even when she feels completely in over her head.

Pairs nicely with The Gardener’s Mindset: A Gardening Book Connecting With Nature Through Plants

Make your sunny days (and rainy days) this spring and summer fun and engaging for yourself and those young people in your life. You can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives.

Let us know what you’re reading: Drop us a line at comments@therevelator.org

The post New Environmental Books: Spring-to-Summer Reads to Brighten and Enlighten appeared first on The Revelator.

There’s a particular weight to memory when you’ve lived through a time that others now only reference in shorthand. I don’t mean nostalgia. I mean the physical act of remembering who is missing.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, as AIDS moved through my community with a speed and indifference that still feels impossible to explain, I had address books that became, over time, records of absence. Names crossed out. Numbers that no longer rang. Whole clusters of friends and colleagues gone. Not abstractly, not statistically — specifically. People with voices, habits, jokes, plans. People who should have had the chance to grow older.

They didn’t.

At the same time, I was an undergraduate in marine biology, expected to keep pace — labs, exams, problem sets — as if the world were intact. Animal physiology, genetics, statistics, organic chemistry. Show up. Perform. Pass. All while a plague burned through my community with terrifying precision.

There was no accommodation for grief. No pause. No recognition that anything unusual was happening. The expectation was continuity — business as usual — no matter what was being lost.

And while that was happening, the federal government — under Ronald Reagan — withheld urgency in a way that still feels difficult to describe without anger. Years passed before the crisis was even named at the highest level. The silence was ambient, structural. It told us exactly how much our lives were worth in the hierarchy of concern.

So we filled the silence ourselves.

We marched. We organized. We protested in the streets and in front of federal buildings and in hospital wards. I remember the lines of police in riot gear, the pressure of bodies pushing forward, the stinging waft of tear gas, the sound of voices refusing to be contained. I remember the fear and the adrenaline and the clarity that comes when you understand that no one is coming to save you.

You either act or you disappear.

My generation built something out of that refusal. Not just activism but systems — care networks, research pipelines, legal strategies, cultural shifts. It was blood and sweat and grief. It was also ingenuity and persistence. It forced recognition where there had been none. It changed policy, medicine, and public understanding.

We didn’t win everything. But we won enough to believe that progress, once secured, might hold.

Now I’m in my 60s. There are more years behind me than ahead. This is supposed to be the part where you take a breath. Where you look around and see what endured. Where you enjoy, at least in part, the world you helped fight into being.

Instead I’m watching something else.

A kind of thinning. A quiet unraveling. A great forgetting. I’m watching it in civil rights language. I’m watching it in public institutions. And I’m watching it just as clearly in the environmental work I’ve spent my life in — where the stories we tell about land, water, and who belongs in them are being quietly rewritten.

The language shifts first. What was once widely understood becomes contested again. Terms that carried hard-won meaning — equity, inclusion, justice — are recast as excess, as ideology, as something to be rolled back in the name of neutrality. The current administration under Donald Trump has leaned into that reframing, encouraging a broader cultural move to strip away the very frameworks that made broader participation possible.

It’s familiar, in the way bad patterns often are.

You don’t erase history outright. You erode it. You question its premises. You remove it from curricula. You flatten it into something unthreatening or dismiss it as irrelevant. Over time the edges blur, the urgency fades, and the lessons become optional.

What makes this process so effective is its efficiency. Recast hard-fought struggles under a single dismissive label — “DEI” — and you don’t have to argue against their substance. You simply make them suspect. From there the cascade is predictable. Funding becomes conditional. Curricula are scrutinized. Research agendas narrow. Writing, teaching, and public engagement that reflect lived realities begin to carry professional or financial risk. Not always through explicit bans, but through signals — what is rewarded, what is questioned, what quietly disappears.

Fear does the rest. Institutions grow cautious. Individuals self-edit. The story contracts. And over time a generation comes of age not just without the full history, but with a lingering sense that perhaps those earlier gains were excessive, that something went too far. That equality and justice themselves were the overreach.

And alongside that, something even more unsettling: the return of silence from people who know better.

Allies who once spoke up now hesitate. Institutions hedge. The language becomes cautious, then vague, then absent. Even much of the media — consolidated, risk-averse, and increasingly billionaire-owned — pulls its punches, shaping silence as much as it breaks it. The same dynamic that defined the early years of the AIDS crisis, the gap between what was happening and what was publicly acknowledged, begins to widen anew.

There is, however, a distinction worth naming. The silence of the Reagan years was neglect — devastating in its indifference but defined by what was not done. What we’re seeing now is more deliberate. Federal agencies are being directed to reshape the narrative itself — to remove language, narrow scope, and determine whose experiences are permitted to remain visible. The effect may echo the past, but the mechanism has changed. This is not just silence. It is its construction.

That silence carries a memory for those of us who have seen it before.

As Pride Month arrives, we’re asked — publicly, collectively — to celebrate how far things have come. And there’s been real progress worth marking. But memory doesn’t move on a calendar. For some of us, it remains immediate, shaped by what it took to get here — the years when a “normal” life was never really on offer, when the choice was to fight or risk erasure. Sacrifice isn’t always something you commemorate cleanly. It lingers. It returns. In certain moments, it opens wounds again, often accompanied by a quieter, more persistent weight: the survivor’s question of why I am still here when so many are not.

We learned, very early on, what it meant. “Silence = Death” wasn’t rhetorical flourish. It was observation.

The throughline doesn’t belong only to the LGBTQ+ community. It runs through the broader arc of civil rights in this country.

Black communities fought to be seen in a nation structured to abuse and ignore them. Asian American communities refused to disappear into exclusion and incarceration. Indigenous nations resisted erasure from land and history. Women refused the legal and cultural frameworks that reduced them to property.

None of these struggles were granted recognition voluntarily. Each required pressure against systems that preferred quiet. These histories are not separate from environmental protection. They shaped it. And now, as those same voices are pushed to the margins again, the consequences are showing up in the places we claim to protect.

And here’s where the environmental story enters more fully — because public lands and waters have never just been about scenery. They’re where this country tells itself who it is.

Walk through a national park, a monument, a protected shoreline, and you’re walking through a narrative. These places carry the imprint of who was displaced, who resisted, who built, who endured. They are supposed to hold the full story — messy, uncomfortable, unfinished.

That’s precisely why they are now being rewritten.

What’s less clear to me is what is ultimately gained by narrowing that story. I understand the intent — the impulse to recast this country as the product of a singular lineage, to smooth complexity into something more orderly, more reassuring. There is a kind of counterfeit comfort in that version of history: simpler, less contested, easier to claim. But it comes at a cost. Because the fuller story of American lands and waters — of Indigenous stewardship, of displacement and resistance, of communities shaping and being shaped by these places — is not a burden. It is the substance of what “out of many, one” has always meant. To strip that away is not to clarify who we are. It is to trade a living, contested inheritance for something thinner, quieter, and far less true.

Recent directives have pushed federal agencies to scrub or soften references to slavery, Indigenous dispossession, civil rights struggles, LGBTQ+ history, and even climate science from the very places meant to preserve them. Exhibits have been altered, language removed, context narrowed. In some cases the stories of entire communities are being reduced or erased in the name of removing “divisive” narratives.

This isn’t just cultural housekeeping. It’s structural.

Because those same communities — the ones whose stories are now being minimized — were often central to the modern conservation movement itself. Indigenous stewardship shaped landscapes long before they were designated as parks. Black, Latino, and Asian communities have borne disproportionate environmental burdens while also driving environmental justice movements that expanded what conservation even means. LGBTQ+ advocates helped build coalitions, institutions, and public will at moments when environmental protection needed it most.

To erase those voices from the story of public lands is to do more than distort history. It is to narrow the present.

If conservation is recast as something neutral, apolitical, and disconnected from lived experience, then it becomes easier to exclude. Easier to decide who belongs in decision-making spaces and who does not. Easier to ignore whose communities are most affected by pollution, climate change, and ecological decline.

The land doesn’t just lose its history. It loses its witnesses. And once that happens, the decisions that follow begin to reflect that absence.

We see it in policy rollbacks framed as efficiency. In weakened protections justified as balance. In the sidelining of environmental justice as unnecessary complication. The same logic that dismisses DEI as “woke” is being applied to conservation — stripping away the very perspectives that made the field more honest, more effective, and more accountable.

Remove those perspectives and the system doesn’t become clearer: It becomes more brittle. Because ecosystems don’t exist in isolation from people. And conservation that refuses to see people clearly will fail to protect either.

This is the same pattern I watched unfold decades ago. Information existed. Communities spoke. The impacts were visible to those closest to them. But the systems in power chose not to see, not to listen, not to act.

That gap — between reality and recognition — is where harm multiplies.

There came a point when I threw my old address books away. The accumulation of loss had become unbearable — page after page of names, each one a life interrupted, a story cut short.

I think about it now as a warning. What we’re seeing this time around is a different kind of erasure. It starts quietly: histories softened, contexts removed, voices pushed to the margins. By the time the loss is visible, the record has already been rewritten.

What I carry from that time isn’t just grief. It’s a kind of pattern recognition — the moment systems begin to look away, the subtle softening of language to avoid discomfort, the speed with which urgency dissolves into ambiguity and then into silence.

And I know what it takes to interrupt that erasure. It takes people willing to challenge the rewriting of the story, to hold onto memory even as it’s being erased, and allies who understand that silence is not neutrality — it is participation in the outcome.

Because silence is still available as an option. It always is.

You can choose to look away. You can tell yourself that things aren’t that bad, or that they’ll correct themselves, or that it’s someone else’s fight. You can let the language erode, let the policies shift, let the history blur.

Or you can recognize the pattern and decide, again, not to accept it.

For those of us who have lived through earlier versions of this, that decision feels less like a choice and more like a reflex. We’ve seen where silence leads. We know what it costs.

And we know, just as clearly, what it takes to break it.

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Environmental Groups: Earn Your Place at Pride

The post The Great Forgetting appeared first on The Revelator.

This may be true: That we live in a time of cosmic tragedy, when heedless human expansion has pushed many of the planet’s lives beyond bearing. Marvels such as the universe has never seen before — angels’ trumpets and vaquita porpoises — may be past saving. As ecosystems unravel, so do the cultures that depend on them, and the dreadful, dangerous human genius has not yet found the imagination or will to rescue them. I fear that this is so.

But this also is true: That a flock of butterflies is dancing around purple lupine in our field. They are tiny, the size of a buttercup, but blue. So blue they look like slips of summer sky, taken flight. Fender’s blue butterflies, Icaricia icarioides fenderii. They once seemed to have vanished from the world in the 1930s, when farmers plowed up most of the prairie flowers. Scientists got ready to pronounce them extinct. But then, in 1989, a young U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist named Jarod Jebousek found a few butterflies on feral land next to our field.

So now, here they are. We see them lapping up nectar from the furry throats of wild iris. We find their eggs on the undersides of Kincaid lupine leaves. Butterflies gather to lick the mud. There are thousands, and it’s all because young acronym-agency scientists teamed up with landowners to save them. I know that this is so.

How is a person supposed to think about that? How do you hold both truths at the same time — the horror and the hope? How can you accept the truth that destroys hope and at the same time hold the hope that may be the only route toward recovery?

Essayist E.B. White made a joke of it: I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But it isn’t funny. It tears me apart. How can you love Earthly lives and know that forces are advancing to destroy them?

This is the question at the center of my life.

I once asked a group of students to pull out their pens and start writing a list of what they loved too much to lose. They started strong. My daughter. Smell of wet oak leaves. Bees in foxgloves. But the students couldn’t keep it up. Salmon coming home. Nettle soup. Sticky cottonwood buds. A student put his head in his hands. Do we have to do this, he asked. Dragonflies.

Yes, we have to do this, I whispered. We have to keep a list. We have to keep them in mind, all the small glories. We can’t let any of them escape our attention. Every day, every moment, we have to name what we love and stand to lose.

Here is what we will have to do: We will love the world with a tender and ferocious love, and we will do what we can to protect and renew it. Both of these. Even if it breaks our hearts. Even if we fail in the end. That’s what love means. That is why we are here.

That conviction may explain why my husband and I were standing in the center of the field with Kathleen Westly, in that nasty cold fog that afflicts Oregon’s Willamette Valley in December. Up until her retirement this year, Kathleen was the restoration program director of the Marys River Watershed Council, so she was the one coordinating the restoration of habitat for the Fender’s blue butterfly across agencies and landowners.

We were excited because we’d just learned that the Fender’s blue had been promoted from endangered to threatened. A small, even pitiable, victory, maybe, but a significant one, and who wouldn’t be glad for that? Kathleen held a field notebook and pointed with a pencil, as she sketched out how we might change the landscape to make it more welcoming for the butterflies.

Lupines in the field. Photo: KDMoore

Fender’s blue butterflies are rarely found more than 50 yards from Kincaid’s lupines. They may sip nectar from other plants, especially white or yellow composites, and they may lick roadkill, mud, or animal droppings for their mineral nutrients, but it’s Kincaid’s lupines that provide home and sustenance. Fender’s blues need Kincaid’s lupines, and the lupines need open prairie and sunshine. Only 1% of the Willamette Valley’s prairies are left, and these are small islands in a sea of subdivisions and grass seed farms.

So our first goal for us was to keep our prairie intact and connect it with other prairie land along the Marys River.

Kathleen pointed to a Douglas fir that shaded the oaks at the western boundary of our land. Shall we take this out? And this one? Before long, most of the tall evergreens on that border were goners. Frank and I gulped, but we understood that she wanted to give the butterflies an open, unshaded passage, so they could fly from one lupine patch to another.

We had planted the Doug firs that were in the way of the butterfly movements, and if that was a mistake, then we decided we should make it up.

Frank Moore looks for butterflies in the meadow. Photo: KDMoore

The wonderful surprise of this restoration work was to see so many people of skill and good will come together to create a connected corridor of lupine prairie. Along with the Marys River Watershed Council, credit many agencies and nonprofits, including Benton County, Starker Forests, the Greenbelt Land Trust, the Institute for Applied Ecology, and landowners all along the river. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Recovery Program is a big player, providing most of the funds.

The process has been complicated; I do not pretend to understand the acronyms or responsibilities of all the agencies that were involved, but they somehow came together to get the grants written and the work accomplished, from young Indigenous fire crews to those solid-shouldered, old timey ecologists who know everybody and everything. Along with the new butterfly/flower communities, the growing communities of caring people lifted my spirits, at a time when they could use a bit of lifting.

Long tongues that retract and roll up like measuring tapes. Bulgy eyes that see ultraviolet pathways to the heart of a flower. Intestines that collect the remains of the caterpillar that a butterfly used to be. Clear blood. Hairy feet that can taste sweetness. Two eyes that coordinate images from 6,000 lenses. Transparent wings with scales in some of the loveliest patterns and colors on the planet.

These are grand and glorious beings, complicated and clever beyond imagining. I want to ask, who thinks up these extraordinary creatures? But it’s not like that, I know. Butterflies evolved in the Cretaceous period, 100 million years ago. They danced around the feathered crests of dinosaurs, dipped their tongues in the blood of wounded pterosaurs, and drank from newly evolved flowers. Were butterflies beautiful then? Of course they would have been, because there’s survival value in bright beauty that mimics glaring eyes or warns of poison hairs.

The improbable, beautiful complexity of a butterfly seems like a miracle. But that’s the great miracle of biodiversity, isn’t it? That it’s no miracle at all — just nature doing what it does, according to the only rule it knows, which is to live long enough to produce more life.

The storms of the Cretaceous period could not kill the butterflies. The asteroid that set the world on fire did not kill the butterflies. They survived ice age after ice age, flood after flood, drifting continents and fire-breathing volcanoes. Even with their axes and plows, the homesteaders did not kill the butterflies. Tiny things, delicate as paper lanterns, each allotted only one year to live before they blink out, the butterflies on this land survived everything that 100 million years could throw at them.

I don’t know where or when their journey will end. But it will not be here, and it will not be now.

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Insects Are Disappearing — Here’s How to Help

The post When the Butterflies Come Home Again appeared first on The Revelator.

Songbirds generally make their migratory flights at night, and during spring migration tens of millions of birds may be streaming north above us as we sleep. But when the sun rises, where do these tired birds choose to stop, rest, and refuel?

You may picture a nature preserve or grassy field, but a study published earlier this year in the journal Nature Cities shows that a large percentage of these birds are making their “stopovers” in cities, illustrating the importance of urban conservation efforts.

Ornithologist Miguel Jimenez was a Ph.D. candidate at Colorado State University when he led the study as part of his dissertation. The project was inspired by his desire “to do work that was useful to people who are actively working to conserve birds,” he says. “So I had a bunch of conversations with different folks doing that work, and one thing I consistently heard was that it’s often really hard to convince people that bird conservation in cities matters.”

Jimenez’s dissertation focused on studying bird migration using weather radar. Large masses of migrating birds show up clearly on the nationwide radar system used by meteorologists, and this data isn’t subject to the same biases as bird counts carried out by people. If you capture a radar image just as migrating birds are starting out in the morning, Jimenez explains, you can pinpoint the stopover locations from which they’re leaving.

“You see this kind of mushroom cloud of birds taking off, and then they start to dissipate over the landscape.”

Jimenez and his colleagues used data from 143 radar sites to identify stopover hotspots across the continental United States for both spring and fall migration, then calculated how many of those sites fell within urban areas.

“To be totally honest, I ran this analysis originally expecting, like, I’ll probably figure out that most of it doesn’t happen in cities,” says Jimenez.

Instead, nearly half of the stopover sites he found were within what the U.S. Census Bureau has defined as Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Other ways of statistically defining cities showed a similarly disproportionate number of migrating birds using urban stopover sites.

So why would migrating birds choose city habitats?

“Probably a good chunk of my career is [going to be spent] on that question,” says Jimenez.

But there are already some indications. Cities often develop along coastlines and rivers, places that already have high biodiversity, he points out. And birds are attracted to artificial light at night (though scientists aren’t sure exactly why), so perhaps they’re being drawn in by city lights.

Taking things a step further, Jimenez and his colleagues searched for signs of the so-called “luxury effect,” the tendency of urban wildlife to congregate in high-income neighborhoods due to the greater amounts of green space. Analyzing bird stopover use of more than 2,000 parks across 88 urban areas, they found that stopover density was indeed higher, on average, in areas with higher-income residents.

These nationwide averages, however, don’t tell the full story. Both the overall density of urban stopovers and the strength of the luxury effect varied considerably from one U.S. region to another, and the reason may have something to do with water.

Cities where the luxury effect was most pronounced, such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, were in regions where surface water can be scarce. Dryer regions also had a higher overall proportion of urban stopover sites. It seems in dry places, the way that humans concentrate the available water (and the resulting vegetation) in the places where we live — and especially in the highest-income neighborhoods — may also attract high concentrations of migrating birds.

“This area, where ecology meets the social forces that shape biodiversity, is really important and interesting,” says Emily Cohen, a bird migration expert and faculty member University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who was not involved in the project. “Not only are cities important for birds, but the connection between people and birds [that can happen in cities] is just a really powerful tool for conservation.”

Cohen says she’d love to see follow-up research on the regional variations uncovered by Jimenez’s work, as well as on how the birds using these urban habitats are actually faring.

“I would describe this paper as more opening up questions than giving answers,” agrees Jimenez. Having completed his Ph.D., he has moved on to a postdoctoral research position at the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute in Chicago, where he hopes to continue pursuing answers.

But what we definitely know, he says, is that “the actions that we take where we live, which for most people today is in cities — those matter a lot for migratory birds.”

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What City Birds Around the World Have in Common

The post City Birds: New Study Shows Urban Habitat Matters for Migrating Species appeared first on The Revelator.