How the Himalayan Blackberry Took Over the Pacific Northwest

The tangled history of an invasive plant and a scientist’s troubling quest to engineer a more efficient natural world.

There is no summer in the Pacific Northwest without the blackberry. Across Washington and Oregon, jagged walls of blackberry brambles choke out nearly every hiking trail, highway shoulder, and vacant lot in the region. Come August, dense thickets beckon berry-pickers to stain their fingers with the juice of the sweet purple fruits, promising the potential of a fresh-baked blackberry pie after a long day’s harvest. But despite the strong association between the region and the fruit, the species of blackberry that most locals have come to enjoy is anything but native.

The story of how the Himalayan blackberry came to swallow the West Coast is a monument to late nineteenth-century industrial ambition. In the late 1800s, transcontinental rail travel revolutionized the United States’ approach to agriculture. A rapidly growing, urbanizing populace demanded a constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. To meet this demand, the market required crops engineered for this new era, encouraging innovation that produced plants sturdy enough for cross-country travel and aggressive enough to thrive in any backyard soil.

At the core of this innovation was the enterprising horticulturist Luther Burbank. Operating out of his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank functioned more like a “plant wizard” than a traditional farmer. His mail-order catalogs allowed amateur gardeners across the country to purchase from a selection of hybrids suited for the shifting needs of the nation. Among these plants were the Shasta daisy, plumcot, spineless cactus, and Russet Burbank potato, known today as the most widely grown potato in the United States. As historian Phillip Thurtle states, Burbank’s explicit goal in crafting his hybrids was “to take the rough spots out of nature,” domesticating the wild to promote utility and commercial efficiency.

In 1885, Burbank received a packet of seeds that he had imported from India. Upon opening it, he discovered that the seeds bore a hardy blackberry plant that thrived in temperate areas and produced large, succulent fruits. Pleased by its capacity for growth, yet ill-informed of its true regional roots, Burbank named the plant the “Himalayan Giant” to signal its believed origins and great size. The name was a misnomer, as the species, known scientifically as Rubus armeniacus, is actually native to Armenia and northern Iran.

Impressed by the size and strength of the Himalayan Giant, Luther Burbank marketed the plant to growers in the damp, temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest in a targeted flyer in 1894, promising a plant of extreme utility. The marketing push was met with a large wave of orders from the region, and according to Burbank, “the plants could not be multiplied fast enough to meet the demand.” Over a century later, the Himalayan blackberry has spread far beyond the modest backyard bounds its importers envisioned, opting instead to take over indiscriminately and displace the native trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus) in the process.

Like all blackberries, the Himalayan blackberry is not a berry but rather an aggregate fruit of multiple drupelets, with each drupelet containing an individual seed. These sweet fruits attract birds and other animals in the summer, which encourages seed dispersal and the rapid spread of the plants through their feces. In addition to reproducing through seeds, Rubus armeniacus may also clone itself through vegetative propagation, which occurs when the stem tips root as they come in contact with the ground, contributing to its aggressive growth strategy.

The plant is impressively sprawling and hardy. An individual bush can grow up to 15 feet high and 40 feet long, with thick stems, also known as canes, marked by sharp, hooked thorns. The density and hardiness of Himalayan blackberry thickets allow the plant to “choke out other foliage and prevent the establishment of trees.” Furthermore, Himalayan blackberry bushes thrive in poor and disturbed soils, allowing them to flourish in abandoned lots and fields.

Combined, these traits have led the plant to be known as the unofficial state weed of Washington. Frustratingly, Rubus armeniacus is notoriously difficult to get rid of, as traditional approaches to invasive management such as fire, herbicide, and mowing are insufficient at eradicating the plant. Thus, this weed, whether northwesterners like it or not, is here to stay.

The industrial impulse that welcomed this hardy blackberry also manifested in Burbank’s vision for the future of American society. In 1907, he released The Training of the Human Plant, in which he directly applied his plant breeding techniques to the development of a “superior” race of people. Burbank argued that just as plants could be improved through careful crossbreeding to optimize their positive characteristics, the same opportunity existed for the improvement of mankind. Deeply informed by his American context, Burbank alleged that the “vast mingling of races” brought to the United States via immigration presented an opportunity for “developing the finest race the world has ever known,” as the ethnic variety allowed for a wide array of traits to select from. In light of this potential, Burbank called for a long-term overhaul of American childrearing in order to immerse generations of children in favorable environments that would lend themselves to the development of a “healthy [human] animal.”

While it is tempting to categorize Burbank’s ideas as typical of the rigid, genetically determinist eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century, his eugenic theories possessed a uniquely American appeal, emphasizing productivity, efficiency, and one’s ability to reshape their reality. Central to Burbank’s thesis was his belief that environment mattered as much, if not more, than heredity. For Burbank, heredity was “simply the sum of all the effects of all the environments of all past generations on the responsive, ever-moving life forces.” Under this view, human and plant species were entirely malleable, shaped profoundly by the pressures of the natural and artificial world around them. Thus, through enough hard work and careful attention to environment, one could bend the will of evolution to create more productive organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. [...]

Ironically, Burbank’s obsession with eliminating the weak and nurturing stronger organisms ultimately unleashed a botanical “master race” that defied his ideals of human control and smothered the Pacific Northwest. Once introduced to the region, the Himalayan blackberry found an environment perfectly suited to its needs and adapted so completely that it has become an inseparable fixture of local cultural identity. In regional lore and literature, the blackberry is depicted as a terrifyingly untamable force, with vines that “[push] up through solid concrete” and “[force] their way into polite society.” Yet each summer, the region suspends its hatred for the stubborn weed, celebrating the plant’s sweet abundance through blackberry festivals and preparing enough jars of blackberry jam to hold them over until the next year’s harvest.

Today, the Himalayan blackberry stands as a humorous rejection of Burbank’s attempt at complete human control. Amidst his efforts to “take the rough spots out of nature” and promote plants that worked toward a vision of human utility, he introduced a vegetal force that fundamentally refused to be disciplined. In doing so, the story of Burbank’s Himalayan blackberry reveals the limits of human intervention and demonstrates plants’ agency in shaping their own environments. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to highlight histories like this one, unearthing the mutual influences of humans and the plant world on one another.

by Kari Traylor, JSTOR |  Read more:

Images: Getty/Wikimedia Commons

[ed. When I went to school in Oregon, I couldn't believe the berry bushes everywhere, and being broke, I subsisted on many of them.]

Non-Technological Constraints to AI

Market manias have patterns. The most powerful ones are genuine technological revolutions pushed far beyond rational limits by crowd psychology.

By mid-1999 it was already clear to veteran investors and students of economic history that the dotcom bubble had reached parabolic insanity.

The speculative momentum was still unstoppable – and would run a lot further – but grown-ups knew by then that few of the high-flying start-ups were ever going to generate a viable revenue stream. The authentic success stories would have to fight each other in a cannibalistic struggle for survival.

We are nearing the same point today with AI, although this time for a different and overwhelming reason. The $20tn (£15tn) valuation of hyperscalers, chipmakers and the larger AI complex, has wildly outpaced the electrical infrastructure needed to run data centres and sustain the technology on anything like the projected scale.

The physical constraint is rock hard. “Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade since the 1970s,” said Bobby Majumder from the industrial law firm FBT Gibbons.

The threat to AI stock mania is not so much lack of energy – though that is serious – but rather the global bottleneck of transformers, substations, switchgear, transmission lines and all the unsexy stuff we rarely think about, leaving aside the acute shortage of skilled workers in the US able to install and run such kit.

A single big campus in the data centre hub of Hays County, Texas – an area where I once played a lot of golf (misspent youth) and know well – can use 10 million gallons of water a day for evaporative cooling and power generation, draining the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies the Austin-San Antonio corridor.

“Nobody is talking about cooling; nobody is talking about water,” said Majumder, speaking at the recent Marshall & Stevens forum on energy infrastructure. “The farmers are not going to be happy at all about you pumping down their aquifer for cooling.”

There are other obvious catalysts that could puncture the bubble. Stubborn US inflation – input prices are rising at the fastest pace in four years – may force the Federal Reserve to stop its “stealth-QE” via bill purchases. The bond markets may hold Kevin Warsh’s feet to the fire as he takes over the institution.

Inflation may stop Scott Bessent, the poacher turned gamekeeper now running the US treasury like a hedge fund, from using the $8tn money market to help soak up massive fiscal deficits at the peak of the economic cycle.

Cheaper “commoditised” AI from the likes of DeepSeek in China may start to undercut American rivals, threatening the implicit pricing model behind today’s equity valuations. If it is true that DeepSeek v4 can achieve 80pc-90pc of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude at 10pc of the cost, you start to see the problem.

Liaquat Ahamed, author of the wonderful Lords of Finance covering the Great Depression and now releasing his new book 1873, likens the AI boom to the American railway mania after the Civil War. Routes were duplicated in the rush for dominance.

Costly lines passed through sparsely inhabited regions where there would never be enough human traffic in time to justify the scale of debt issuance. [...]

Hyperscalers can try to leapfrog the grid bottleneck by building their own power plants, but that will not solve the problem either, at least not in time to alleviate the burden of fast-mounting and opaque AI debt.

It took 17 years to plan, license and build the recent Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Costs ballooned from $12bn to $30bn. Small modular reactors may be cheaper per gigawatt – don’t hold your breath – but none yet exist in the West, and there will be no serious supply chain until circa 2040.

Shale gas frackers can drill until they drop, but that makes no difference if there are no gas turbines available on the world market. The waiting list for heavy-duty models used in combined-cycle plants has stretched to seven years, although hyperscalers with the deepest pockets are jumping the queue for a fat fee with 2030 delivery dates. [...]

The AI revolution is real. The language models are fabulous. The technology will make economic life almost unrecognisable by mid-century.

But the internet revolution was also real in 1999 before the Nasdaq index dropped 77pc, flushed out the commercial nonsense and overshot in the other direction.

Don’t track Nvidia chip orders if you want to know where the AI market is heading. Track the metaphorical picks and shovels that make it all possible. 

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Richard Newstead
[ed. See also: How bad is AI for the environment? (Yale Climate Connections).]

Cadillac Desert

CADILLAC DESERT: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. By Marc Reisner. Illustrated. 582 pp. New York: Viking.

It's unlikely that most taxpayers will read ''Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,'' but they should. It's a revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of their dollars have gone - and where a lot more are going.

The money has gone into Federal water projects in the Western states - some of the projects awesome, some scandalous but all with an uncertain future. More than a century ago John Wesley Powell, the nation's pioneer hydrographer and an explorer of the Grand Canyon, concluded that so much of the West was virtually desert that if all the flowing water in the region were applied to it, the water would spread too thin to make much difference.

But that didn't daunt several generations of pioneers, who believed the selective harnessing of available water could yield miracles. And it did. It virtually created modern California, making it the nation's most populous state and one of the world's prime agricultural areas. On a smaller scale, similar marvels were wrought in other states - Arizona, Utah, Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana and even Nevada.

It all came about less through engineering skill than through political prestidigitation. There's a thing known in Federal circles as the Iron Triangle. One side - depending on the week - is either the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, rival bureaucracies dependent for their existence on the building of dams and related water facilities. The second side of the triangle consists of members of Congress, shamelessly wooing votes via pork-barrel projects. On the third side are beneficiaries of water projects - farmers, contractors, merchants, local politicians and a host of secondary opportunists. Link these together, and you have a greed machine, fueled by taxpayers, that for generations has been unbeatable. President Carter tried to challenge it with his ''hit list'' of questionable water projects and came out of Congress's threshing machine too battered to swing a second term.

The taxpayers' problem is that the chronicle of this hocus-pocus normally emerges in inconclusive bits and pieces, in reports based on sanctimonious handouts from the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers that are heavy on how they are saving the world, light on what it's costing - and often opaque about the justification for the projects.

Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the respected newsletter of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has put the story together in trenchant form. He details the Machiavellian competition between the bureau and the engineers, recounts how huge sums have been spent to benefit small numbers of influential people and suggests painful days of reckoning lie ahead.

Parts of his account are oft-told stories, such as Los Angeles's snaffling of water from farmers 300 miles away. But much of his material is fresh and powerful, taken from such previously unplumbed sources as the bureau's ''blue envelope'' (secret correspondence) files and a marvelous, hair-down interview with Floyd Dominy, its free-swinging former commissioner. The 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam in Idaho - an instance of a structure that never should have been built - is detailed for the first time, with all its implications of carelessness and incompetence. Mr. Reisner also makes clear that much Western irrigation has been based on reckless ''mining'' of water in the great Ogallala Aquifer, which extends into seven states, from Texas to South Dakota. The severe depletion of this eons-old unrenewable resource, he says, has been matched in other areas by a reckless indifference to the accumulation of salts in soils. This has killed farmland and caused drainage crises like the current mess at California's Kesterson Reservoir, where pollution has poisoned the wildlife.

''None of this,'' Mr. Reisner writes, ''is to say that we shouldn't have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves.'' He maintains: ''What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere. . . . Its worst critics have to acknowledge its positive side. . . . The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. . . . Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? . . . Somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and . . . it will be a miracle if they can pay it.''

by Gladwin Hill, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. A classic, and the bill's about to come due.]

The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth

A Monument to Man’s Arrogance

Phoenix is in trouble. In 2024, the Arizona capital recorded 113 consecutive days of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater; the summers that were always hot but were still bearable are becoming more and more unbearable. As I write this in March of 2026, temperatures are already topping 100 degrees. While climate change explains some of the hotter temperatures, a bigger culprit is the endless concrete sprawl that traps heat in the daytime and doesn’t let it go at night. Phoenicians are long used to getting up at 5 in the morning to walk their dogs on concrete that doesn’t burn their paws; that time is getting earlier and earlier.

Then there’s the water. Phoenix sits on top of an aquifer and, like everywhere else in the west, they began draining that aquifer faster than they could refill it. So they supplemented. Phoenix sits at the confluence where the Agua Fria, Verde, and Salt Rivers all join with the Gila River; the Gila then runs west through the Sonoran Desert until it reaches the Colorado River some 200 miles downstream. Or, rather, it used to run west through the Sonoran. These rivers are completely used up by Phoenix, its suburbs, the Indian reservations in the metro area, and the farms in the exurbs. Waddell Dam, Horseshoe Dam, Bartlett Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Horse Mesa Dam, Mormon Flat Dam, Stewart Mountain Dam, and Granite Reef Dam create the lakes where Phoenicians go to escape the heat and ensure that one hundred percent of the rivers are available to Phoenix (less the millions of gallons that evaporate daily in the Arizona heat). West of Phoenix, the Gila runs dry until it reaches the Colorado.

But all that water is not nearly enough to sate the five million citizens of the Phoenician sprawl and the farms and the tribal communities. The rest comes from the Colorado River by way of the Central Arizona Project: a series of pumps, tunnels, and canals that every year move 456 billion gallons of Colorado River water 336 miles from the northwest. 5 billion of those gallons evaporate into the desert air before they ever reach Phoenix.

This water is, or rather was, guaranteed to Phoenix by the Colorado River Compact. The compact was signed in 1922 and assumed that the 1920-1921 flows of the river were representative of the river as a whole, but this turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way: those years had far more snowpack and therefore far more river water than average, decades before the effects of climate change began to be felt. The struggle to allocate the actual flow of the Colorado, not the paper flow, is a story of election fraud and bribery and lawsuits and gunfights and dynamite attacks involving states and militias and tribes and cities and feds and Mexicans, but that’s not the book I’m reviewing here. And to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, only three people have really understood the so-called Law of the River: the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who is dead; a Navajo lawyer, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it. So we won’t dwell on the Colorado. The upshot is that thanks to a lot of conservation efforts, Arizona has so far managed with the allocation it was given.

But Phoenix is getting more and more people and less and less snowpack. Arizona farmers are giving up more land and cities are instituting more stringent water restrictions, even as the population continues to increase and the thirsty data centers move in. In 2000, the seven western states in the Colorado River basin agreed to a set of guidelines to allocate the much-diminished river; those guidelines expire at the end of this year. The federal government gave a deadline of February 2026 for the seven states to come to a new agreement, and those states blew past that deadline without anything close to an agreement. The federal government is now in charge of determining how the river will be allocated.

This is a really bad time for the states to be arguing about river allocation; the winter of 2025-26 had the worst snowpack since the compact was signed and probably since much earlier, though records get shakier the farther back you go. This year we’ll avoid disaster by releasing years’ worth of water stored in a Wyoming reservoir. That won’t be an option next year. As the youngest state, Arizona has the weakest water rights; those rights would be the first to go in a crisis. Some of the options that the government has on the table involve cutting off the Central Arizona Project entirely, leaving Phoenix to drain the aquifer dry and collapse the whole metro area into a sinkhole.

This coming crisis has not passed unnoticed. Many people and publications have tried to explain these issues to a national audience, and a lot of them have hit on the same hook.

For example, the July 2024 cover story of The Atlantic tells the story of Phoenix. It opens with this:

No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

The Sierra Club’s cover story in 2022 described the coming Colorado River crisis. Their introduction ends with this:

No one knows exactly why, in the 14th century, the Hohokam abandoned Pueblo Grande and other settlements across the Salt River Valley. Two hypotheses (perhaps not mutually exclusive) are that the Hohokam were laid low by prolonged drought and that hundreds of years of relentless irrigation salinized the soil, which in turn led to a collapse in agriculture…The secret of the culture’s disappearance from the region may be encapsulated in its name. Hohokam derives from a word in the language of the Akimel O’odham, a contemporary Native nation. It means “all used up” or “exhausted.”

There are many more invocations of the Hohokam; I’ll quote just one more here to drive home the point. The ur-text of writing on the water crisis in the west, the book that all others cite as their inspiration, is the 1985 book Cadillac Desert. The chapter that discusses the Central Arizona Project begins this way:

The original 400,000 Arizonans were, for the most part, members of the Hohokam culture, a civilization that thrived uninterrupted near the confluence of the Gila, Salt, and Verde rivers for at least a thousand years, until about 1400, when it disappeared. The Hohokam, by A.D. 800, had already established a civilization that rivaled the Aztec, Inca, and Maya further south. They lived in small cities; the ruins of one of them, Pueblo Grande, occupied a large piece of land just about where downtown Phoenix is today. Superb flint and stone masons and excellent potters, they also worked beautifully with shells; they may have traded with people living on the Mexican coasts. For sport, they built enclosed ball courts very much like those of the Maya, who probably gave them the idea. When it came to irrigation, however, the Hohokam were in a league by themselves.

They were more populous than any culture around. Why then should they disappear? Drought remains a possibility — perhaps a twenty-year drought the likes of which they had never seen — but an equally plausible explanation is that they irrigated too much and waterlogged the land, leading to intractable problems with salt buildup in the soil, which would have poisoned the crops. In either case, the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water: they either had too little or used too much. And that is the exactly the problem that Arizona faces today.

It’s easy to see why the Hohokam story is used as a hook. It’s too good not to use. A people settle by the confluence of the Salt and Gila rivers and build a great civilization until the changing climate or their overuse of water forces them to leave. The writers of all these pieces start by saying the disappearance of the Hohokam is a mystery, but then make it clear that the answer to this mystery is the same as whatever they believe to be the biggest problem with modern-day Phoenix: climate change, irrigation overuse, poisoned crops, social conflict, etc.

But is it true that nobody knows why the Hohokam vanished? Archaeological investigations into Hohokam society have revealed several great houses, dozens of classic Meso-American ball courts, and a massive network of dams and irrigation canals. But archaeology tells us nothing about why the Hohokam left. Where else could we go to investigate this mystery? Where could we turn to see if Phoenix is heading down a well-trodden path towards destruction? How could we find out what happened to the Hohokam?

What if we asked them?

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Images: here and here 

[ed. Less about current water problems (and possible solutions) in the Phoenix area today and more about the history of Hohokam society that predated it. An interesting and detailed account of a unique and forward-thinking society quite advanced for its time. See also: Friday Book Club - Cadillac Desert (DS).]

Asteroid Day, June 30, 2026

Asteroid Day, June 30, 2026

Asteroid Day was cofounded in 2014 (the year after the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor air burst) by physicist Stephen Hawking, B612 Foundation president Danica Remy, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, filmmaker Grigorij Richters, and Brian May (Queen guitarist and astrophysicist). Remy, Schweickart, Richters, and May initiated Asteroid Day in October 2014, which they announced during a press conference. It was launched on December 3, 2014.

In 2016, the United Nations proclaimed Asteroid Day be observed globally on June 30 every year in its resolution. The event aims to raise awareness about asteroids and what can be done to protect the Earth, its families, communities, and future generations from a catastrophic event. - Wikipedia

See also: Asteroid Day 2026: What Is It and How to Celebrate It?

There are about a million asteroids in the Solar System with the potential to strike Earth and destroy a city. Astronomers have discovered only 1% of them. Asteroid Day is an effort to educate the public and encourage policy makers to fund this important effort.

King Tut may have celebrated an ancient Asteroid Day by asking his assistants to make a dagger out of a broken-off asteroid that landed on Earth. Astronomers discovered that the blade of the knife contained much more nickel than is found in terrestrial iron, an amount consistent with iron meteorites, especially with one found in the year 2000 in the Kharga region in northern Egypt. For more information about the dagger, go to http://goo.gl/BHBivd. (via: Bruce Palmquist, Daily Record)

[ed. Brian May was also an astrophysicist? Wow. A man of many talents. Another one would be Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, guitarist for Steely Dan and US missile defense contractor/consultant.]

Home Invasions

At four in the morning I heard a scratching that sounded like someone was trying to break into our new home. J. and I were not yet fluent in the house’s natural yawning and moaning—the way it sighed when stretching its pilings and beams, or grunted against a pummeling Florida gale, or shuddered when thunder clapped—and I often startled at sounds, trying to discern which ones required attention. And I’d recently been diagnosed with partial hearing loss in my right ear, which meant I couldn’t make out certain sounds but also imagined noises that weren’t there.

In the predawn dark it was hard to tell if my tenuous hearing was playing tricks on me. Then I felt a paw press my calf. Arrow was awake. The dog had heard it too.

I got up to ensure the windows were locked. Outside, a gentle wind stirred the mango tree’s canopy. A distant streetlight flickered on and off like a lighthouse beacon.

J. groaned and rolled over. “What is it?”

“I heard something.”

Arrow growled, jumped off the bed, and began sniffing along the baseboards, moving the length of the room. When he galloped down the stairs, J. and I dutifully followed.

Arrow stood by the back door, ears up, eyes on us. Everything was just as we’d left it. Everything was silent—until it wasn’t. A scraping so violent it made my fingernails ache issued from a corner of the dining room. Afraid of scaring whatever it was away, J. eased open the back door, and the two of us stepped outside.

Frogs chirruped. Something—a bird, a fish, a single, lonesome alligator—shattered the glassy black surface of the pond. J. ran a flashlight over the siding, the eaves, the roof. Nothing.

“It’s already inside,” he said.

“Squirrels?”

“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced.

“Not squirrels,” said the pest-control specialist who came later that morning, after J. had left for work. Squirrels are daytime animals, he explained. They sleep at night.

I hoped he would say opossum. I hoped he would say, even, raccoon. Either would have been inconvenient and unpleasant but more easily remedied—a Havahart trap, a relocation to a nearby nature preserve, a single hole to fill. Instead he said exactly what I didn’t want to hear.

In the Chinese zodiac, people born in the Year of the Rat are shrewd, fickle, creative, thrifty, and wise. They are a litter of cowardly, hot-tempered, picky musicians, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and writers. They may be plagued by a weak constitution and prone to head colds and other viruses. I was born in the Year of the Rat and, coincidentally or not, possess many of these characteristics. Though I’ve always considered myself hardy, my partial hearing loss—the cause of which doctors were yet unable to explain—suggested otherwise.

Each year of the Chinese zodiac has a corresponding element. Mine is water, which makes me a water rat. Water is an element of hiding and suggests an inability to choose something and stick to it. At times I’ve been true to my watery nature, having been accused of being unable to commit to a job, a person, a responsibility. My initial ambivalence about moving to Florida supported such accusations, and buying a house with J. was my attempt to act against type.

Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.” He wore a utility belt below a belly like unproofed bread dough. As he walked, his belt jangled with keys, flashlight, laser pointer, measuring tape, Swiss Army knife. He sweated beyond what was socially acceptable, even by Florida standards.

I hadn’t heard them before, but it turned out other people had. J. confessed to noting some rustling when he’d been up late a few weeks earlier. And my brother said he’d heard something when he and my sister-in-law had stayed overnight. Earlier in my life I might have been surprised, angry even, to learn they’d withheld the truth, but by then I’d come to believe it was human nature to look away, to plead ignorance. That was precisely what I’d done for months when my ear had begun to alert me, persistently, that there was a problem.

“I’ll close up the entry points,” said Rat Guy #1. “Set traps, fog the attic.” The fogging, he assured me, was safe for humans and canines—so safe, in fact, that it wouldn’t even kill the rats. Instead it left behind a perfume they found intolerable, driving them away.

This was my introduction to the pest-control business, and over the next several months I discovered that exterminators each have their own predilections, their preferred baits and traps, their brands of flashlights and trash bags in which to dispose of their prey. I also learned that, along with sound machines promising to transmit high-frequency pitches detected only by vermin, fogging is a scam.

Criminal or immoral tricksters are called “dirty rats” or “rat finks,” but Rat Guy #1 didn’t strike me as either of these. For one of what would be many visits, he arrived with his octogenarian mother who had been “bored outta my gourd” and “wanted a look-about.” Our generally discriminating dog loved him. When his truck appeared in the driveway, Arrow wailed at the front door, anxious to be let outside to spastically run circles around the man with an excitement he rarely demonstrated for anyone else, including J. or me. This was the most persuasive argument in favor of trusting Rat Guy #1.

by Lenore Myka, The Sun |  Read more:

Image: © Doug McMains
[ed. I had a rat problem in my last house. The constant rustling in the walls drove me crazy, day and night. After setting traps in the attic, I'd remove on average one, sometimes two dead ones every other day. They kept coming until I finally found their entry point - a small crack in the foundation the size of a quarter. I'd skipped it before because it just didn't look like something a rat could squeeze through. But that was it, and I eventually got them under control after barricading their front door. My friend Jerry in Texas had an even bigger problem. I forget if it was a warning light that kept turning on and off, or a hose leak or whatever, but the problems kept escalating until he finally took his car into the shop to have it checked out. That's when they discovered that a rat family had built a nest up inside the car frame, just behind the gas tank. Apparently they'd been there a long time, as evidenced by all the chewed wires, hoses, and other debris they found. The funny thing is that during the previous month or two after he'd started noticing these problems he'd driven over 700 miles between various states, many on bumpy, dusty backroads. Hard to imagine what that must have felt like for those guys, burrowed way up there in the undercarriage. Tough, scrappy little animals.]

June 23, 1988: James Hansen Testified to Senate About Climate Change

Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. . . . the dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is that they are working for ‘clean coal.’ . . .The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. — James Hansen

On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the U.S. Senate stating the greenhouse effect had been detected, indicating that the climate was in fact changing.

Hansen was also arrested on this day in 2009 during a protest against mountaintop removal mining at Massey Energy Company.

Hansen has stated,

Several times in Earth’s long history rapid global warming of several degrees occurred. . . In each case more than half of plant and animal species went extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine. If we drive our fellow species to extinction we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world that we inherited from our elders.

by Zinn Education Project |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed.  "According to science historian Spencer R. Weart, Hansen's testimony increased public awareness of climate change. According to Richard Besel of California Polytechnic State University, Hansen's testimony "was an important turning point in the history of global climate change." According to Timothy M. O'Donnell of the University of Mary Washington, Hansen's testimony was "pivotal," "ignited public discussion of global warming and moved the controversy from a largely scientific discussion to a full blown science policy debate," and marked "the official beginning of the global warming policy debate." According to Roger A. Pielke of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Hansen's "call to action" "elevated the subject of global warming and the specter of associated impacts such as more hurricanes, floods, and heat waves, to unprecedented levels of attention from the public, media, and policy makers." - Wikipedia.]

[ed. Which was all it took for climate change skeptics to spring into action, and here we are...]

The Modern Efficiency of Squid Fishing

How Japanese Fishermen Use Robots To Catch Billions Of Squid (IE).

Video: YouTube

[ed. For calamari lovers. Squid fishing has gotten pretty efficient these days (and they land some big ones!). I remember catching them at night with my brothers in Kona, to use as bait for over-night tuna fishing (Ika Shibi). We'd go a ways offshore, put out a parachute anchor, then turn on the floodlights to attract them to the boat. Soon there'd be hundreds of them darting in and out of the light, coming from nowhere, out in the middle of the ocean. Using a multi-pronged snagging jig we'd catch our needed supply in no time. Fun! But wierd too - being surrounded by darkness except for the lights illuminating a small circle around the boat. It felt like fishing in a swimming pool.]

Slow Motion Disaster

Water in the Colorado River is dwindling to levels that haven’t been seen in decades, and the seven states whose residents and farmers depend on the river can’t agree on a fair way to divide up what’s left.

Negotiations are going nowhere despite more than six months of ongoing talks, plus cajoling by the Trump administration, which twice gathered governors in hopes of a breakthrough that never came. States are already sniping at aspects of a water-use plan the federal Bureau of Reclamation is set to unveil this summer and impose later this year, and they’re threatening to sue each other over water deliveries, raising the prospects of prolonged legal battles just as Western states face demands to sharply reduce water use.

The river’s system of reservoirs and canals was designed for the climate and population of a century ago. It has strained to adapt to a declining water supply and enormous growth in communities in the river basin, despite improvements in efficiency that mean even booming cities are using less water than in the past. Water rights that may date back to the arrival of European settlers also complicate matters. And a year of extreme drought is making it even harder to decide how much each state can draw from the Colorado.

It is not for lack of effort.

“We have invested time, effort and money in trying to facilitate a multistate agreement,” Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said in an interview this month, moments after signing a deal that could one day augment the basin’s supply using desalinated water from a plant in Carlsbad, Calif.

But a day later, Cameron told a conference of water experts in Boulder that states have repeatedly rejected proposals for compromise. He said he doesn’t expect any state to be pleased with the measures the federal government is expected to take to delay or prevent reservoirs from dropping to critical lows in the short term.

“I think we’ve succeeded in making everyone unhappy, and maybe making everyone mad,” he said.

About 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland depend on the Colorado for drinking water and irrigation, but its flow has gradually diminished over the past two decades as the climate becomes warmer and more arid across the West. Now the arcane system of water rights governing the river entitles each state and Mexico to far more water than is actually available. The rules prioritize the longest-established uses of water, in many cases dating to the 1850s and 1860s.

But the states have been unable to agree upon water cuts that would reflect the new reality.

In the river’s lower basin — which includes growing urban areas in California, Arizona and Nevada; vast agricultural operations; and the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead — communities have agreed to significant reductions in recent years. A new proposal that the states are asking the federal government to consider would curtail use even more, but the lower basin states and tribal nations have asked upstream communities in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming to cut back, too.

But anytime winter snowpack in the river’s headwaters is meager, the upper basin is forced to use less water, so those states have resisted committing to permanent annual water use cuts. While a 1922 compact divides the United States’ share of the river’s flow equally between the two basins, the less-populated upper basin consumes significantly less water each year than the lower basin.

The stalemate between the basins has deepened as the stakes rise. An existing water-use plan expired this winter, and the states missed key deadlines to agree on a new one, which must be in place by October to avoid chaos and confusion in water deliveries.

A mild winter and extreme spring heat left winter snowpack so depleted that Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, which straddles the upper and lower basins, risked falling below levels critical for hydropower until federal officials began emergency actions to shift water around and keep dams generating electricity. [...]

So far, Trump administration officials have resisted imposing any plan unilaterally, though Cameron said the bureau had “not been passive.” It has offered $454 million for water conservation projects across the basin, using money left over from the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed under President Joe Biden and included $4 billion for drought response in the West. Cameron said less than $100 million is left to help pay for more water savings.

“We have floated, three times, solutions that we thought represented something that the seven states could agree on,” Cameron said. “Turns out we were wrong.”

With the states unable to agree, the federal government is set to put new guidelines in place. Cameron said he expects Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose department includes the Reclamation Bureau, to release a plan in July to govern use of the river for the next decade. Before that plan becomes final, it would need approval from a White House that has so far not gotten very involved in Western water issues.

A draft plan released in January included a range of options, some of which would make significant cuts across the lower basin, where the federal government’s control of reservoirs gives it more power to cut off flows. The alternatives would force water shortages, mostly in the lower basin, based upon reservoir conditions. They include varying levels of cutbacks that would leave some risks of unplanned emergency water shortages in the lower basin.

Arizona is especially vulnerable because of its heavy reliance on the reservoirs and its relatively junior water rights.

As the talks stall, the threat of litigation is looming larger, even though negotiators have said they are hoping to avoid court battles that would undoubtedly be lengthy, expensive and unpredictable. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, warned Wednesday on Capitol Hill that he would seek to block federal drought relief funds from any states that sue over Colorado River water.

In Arizona and Colorado, state officials have been readying lawyers and setting aside public funds for a legal fight over water. Earlier this year, television ads paid for by a coalition of Arizona water users warned that the state is “being targeted” with crippling cuts. Officials in both states said litigation was a real possibility.

In public comments submitted in response to the federal proposal, the states have hinted at contradictory legal interpretations of the 1922 compact, offering dueling arguments that both suggest that the Trump administration was at risk of violating that document. In dispute is whether the compact requires upper basin states to deliver a set amount of water downstream, regardless of conditions, or if the compact simply bars those upstream states from using more than they are officially allotted. [...]

Because the 1922 agreement is only about 1,700 words long, Entsminger suggested that the states might never agree on what exactly each of them is entitled to — and that was all the more reason for them to find common ground without resorting to litigation.

by Scott Dance, Seattle Times/NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Chet Strange /The New York Times
[ed. For a fictional and nightmarish vision of what a full blown water fight between states might devolve into, see: The Water Knife. For a detailed historical account (along with all the back-stabbing and dirty dealing) that produced water allocations and the sprawling cities we see now in the West, see: Cadillac Desert.]

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Telescope Ranching

[ed. Awesome. An example of the intrinsic economic value of undisturbed natural environments. A few more: eco-tourism, hunting and fishing lodges/preserves, photo-safari's; air taxi operations, outfitters, etc. etc. Many people just assume that if land isn't somehow 'developed' it's just sitting there, worthless. Then there are even worse ideas: like putting up a border wall/fence with miles of security and search lights to be installed at Big Bend National Park.]

Big Bend National Park is known as one of the outstanding places in North America for stargazing. In fact, it has the least light pollution of any other national park unit in the lower 48 states.

The Last Great Wilderness

Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea.

If you want to follow in the footsteps of the great explorers, forget the moon and Mars: the ocean floor is where the real action is. The deep ocean, the part that’s deeper than 200 metres, covers about 66% of the Earth’s surface. Most of it has never been surveyed in detail. Even less has been seen up close. If the current rate of observation continues, a complete visual survey of the ocean floor will take about 5m years. [...]

The deep ocean is the largest ecosystem on Earth. It is also in many ways the most extreme, home to crushing pressures, extremes of heat and cold, and a near total absence of sunlight. Animals inhabiting this midnight world tend to be equally extreme. It is a menagerie that abounds in superlatives: the largest, the oldest, the blackest, the most luminous. But those are only the ones we know about. Most of the animals dwelling in the benthos, the true deep, remain unknown to science. Virtually every scientific expedition to reach this zone of darkness returns with new species in tow. In the past year, scientists have discovered more than 1,100 new marine species. Among them are a ghost shark (not really a shark), a ping-pong ball sponge (which does look like a cluster of ping-pong balls), a number of luridly coloured worms and a floating something that resembles a tiny jet plane made out of pale pink jelly, and which scientists have not yet been able fit into any of the primary categories of animal life. [...]

For over 50 years, would-be industrialists and entrepreneurs have floated the idea of mining the ocean floor, but without much happening in practice. But in our search for new sources of metals needed for batteries and microchips, we may now be on the cusp of destroying the world’s largest – and strangest – ecosystem before we get a chance to understand it.

by Jacob Mikanowski, The Guardian | Read more:

Images: Jim Maragos/AP; Nekton Ocean Census/Schmidt Ocean Institute

How Amsterdam is Reviving the Fine-Grained Courtyard Block

At Centrumeiland, a new district in Amsterdam’s IJburg expansion, the city is avoiding one of the great failures of contemporary urban development, the large-parcel megaproject. Rather than handing the 37 acres over to a few large developers to build massive, hotel-like buildings, Centrumeiland is subdividing the site into perimeter-block parcels, assigning each parcel a buildable role through a plot “passport,” and enabling many smaller actors to build within one coherent urban framework.

Begun in 2013 as part of Amsterdam’s IJburg land-reclamation project, Centrumeiland modernizes the old perimeter-block model for contemporary goals. It will be dense, but green; urban, but family-oriented; highly planned, but open to many builders. Amsterdam plans roughly 1,500 to 1,700 homes on the 37-acre island, or about 40 to 46 homes per acre. By American standards, that is serious density. But it is not being delivered as a monoculture of towers or double-loaded apartment blocks. Centrumeiland includes a mix of housing types and tenures: large family-sized homes, smaller rentals, social housing, mid-market housing, market-rate condos, individual self-build houses, collective self-build projects, housing-association buildings, and developer-led apartments.

The ambition is a dense urban neighborhood that can serve households across the lifecycle: singles, couples, families with children, older residents, renters, owners, and collective building groups. It also adapts the perimeter-block tradition to contemporary priorities: low-car living, accessibility, climate resilience, mixed tenure, family housing, and broader participation in development and ownership.

All of this depends on the subdivision and passport system. Amsterdam breaks the large site into many buildable pieces, assigns each parcel a role through a plot passport, and holds the pieces together through streets, blocks, party-wall conditions, courtyards, public-space rules, and environmental obligations. In this way, they have brilliantly resurrected the old urban formula that allows many builders to participate in the development of a large site, making a real neighborhood.

For American cities, the moral of the story is clear. On large brownfield and greenfield sites, cities should stop treating whole districts as single development packages to be handed to master developers. They should do the more civic work first of laying streets, subdividing land into buildable parcels, and issuing clear “parcel passports” that specify what each site can become. In existing neighborhoods, the same logic should operate at a smaller scale. Cities should create transit-oriented overlays that give ordinary private lots clear building rights that make great multifamily housing easier to finance, permit, and build.

Centrumeiland goes far beyond “build more housing.” It is more radical and more urbane. Divide the land, write good code, and let many hands build the city.

The Megadevelopment Trap

For the last half-century, large urban sites have met a sadly familiar fate. A railroad, port authority, public agency, hospital, university, or industrial landowner controls a vast tract of developable land. The master-planning process then carves it into a few enormous parcels and awards them to one or several major developers. After years of negotiation, public fights, redesigns, entitlement battles, and financing risk, the developer may finally build the megaproject, which is widely reviled by the public.

Megaprojects may be economically productive. They can deliver housing, offices, parks, retail, transit, and tax revenue. But the development model itself is thin. Too few actors control too much land. The parcels are too large, the buildings are too big, and the building code and underwriting norms push toward deep floorplates and double-loaded corridors. The buildings are dominated by small, expensive, hotel-like units that are poorly suited to middle-income families who need light, storage, bedrooms, outdoor access, and a sense of domestic permanence. These districts may be a success on paper (for now), but they make failed neighborhoods, lacking the social depths and street life that is the reward of fine-grained courtyard urbanism. [...]

The problem is the development system. A megaproject cannot make a great neighborhood. Neighborhoods require many actors, many front doors, many ownership structures, many building types, many ground-floor conditions, and many small adaptations over time. They need private yards. They need a public framework strong enough to coordinate many actors.

That is the old art of division and perimeter block planning Centrumeiland begins to recover.

Making Land Into City

Centrumeiland is part of Amsterdam’s IJburg expansion, a chain of artificial islands built in the IJmeer on the city’s eastern edge. IJburg extends Amsterdam outward into the water between the historic city and the open landscape of the Markermeer, turning what was once lakebed into new urban land. Centrumeiland sits within this larger archipelago, connected back to Amsterdam by bridges, cycling routes, bus service, and the IJtram to Amsterdam Centraal. It is therefore both peripheral and deeply urban, a new island neighborhood made from water, but tied into the metropolitan fabric of Amsterdam.

While the land reclamation is impressive, even more remarkable is the public framework that governs the development. The city divided the land into kavels, and created parcel-specific rules through kavelpaspoorten, or plot passports.

A passport can define the parcel boundary, buildable envelope, maximum height, frontage condition, access requirements, open-space obligations, water-management rules, parking expectations, program, tenure, sustainability requirements, and sometimes ground-floor use. It tells a builder not merely that “residential” or “commercial” is allowed, but what kind of urban contribution this specific piece of land is supposed to make: a row of townhouses, a small apartment building, a collective self-build project, a social-housing block, a mid-market rental building, a mixed-use corner building, or a larger perimeter-block parcel with shared courtyard space.

The subdivision and passport framework enables much broader participation in the development. Of the planned 1,500 to 1,700 homes, roughly 60 to 70 percent are intended to be self-build. But “self-build” here does not only mean one household designing one eccentric house. It includes individual self-builders, small groups, collective private commissioning, building groups, housing cooperatives, and other resident-led or small-group development structures...

Its lesson moral here is that parcelization broadens participation and creates more development pathways than the master-developer model. [...]

The American Application

For American cities, the lesson is to create a modern urban passport system.

There are two obvious applications: large-site development and existing-neighborhood overlays.

On brownfield and greenfield sites — former industrial land, rail yards, malls, hospital campuses, public land, waterfronts, and other large redevelopment areas — cities should stop defaulting to the megaproject model. They should lay out streets first, shape interesting blocks, design public spaces, subdivide land into buildable parcels, and assign parcel passports. Those parcels could then be allocated to many actors: small developers, cooperatives, housing associations, community development corporations, nonprofit builders, resident-led groups, and larger developers where appropriate.

Large developers may still participate. But they should not control the whole district. The city should not ask one actor to simulate the complexity of a neighborhood.

by Alicia Pederson, Courtyard Urbanist |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

‘Clean, Beautiful’ Coal Industry Gets $700m Bailout

Trump uses wartime powers to dole out $700m to ‘clean, beautiful’ coal (The Guardian)

Donald Trump is using wartime presidential authority to hand $700m to coal-fired power plants in the US, the latest move by the president to bolster what he called “clean, beautiful coal”, despite it being the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

“Today, we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” he said at a press conference on Thursday. [...]

In the past year, the Trump administration has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to the coal industry, signed orders forcing ratepayers to pay extra for ageing plants to stay open, and dismantled environmental rules that limit toxins from coal leaching into Americans’ shared air and water.

The administration’s attempts to provide a cuddly rebranding to coal have even extended to creating a new mascot with giant eyes, called Coalie, and gushing social media posts that include an image of a lump of coal wearing sunglasses as if it were on the TV show Love Island.

“You’re not allowed to say ‘coal’ within the Trump administration unless it’s preceded by the words ‘clean, beautiful’,” Trump said on Thursday. “Complicates our life, but it’s good.” [...]

Trump’s attempts to revive the coal industry, while at the same time seeking to stymie the rapid growth of clean energy such as solar and wind, have so far floundered. The number of people working in coal has declined by more than 90% in the past century, with more people now working in Waffle Houses across the US than in coal.

US coal production is currently less than half of what it was in 2008, with coal recently declining as both a fuel for electricity and as an input for manufacturing materials such as iron and steel. Cheap, abundant gas has helped displace coal from power grids with even cheaper renewable energy also now taking off in the US despite the administration’s efforts to kill it off.

“What’s next, a taxpayer bailout to build new phone booths?” said Kit Kennedy, a senior climate campaigner at the Natural Resources Defense Council, of the new round of support for coal. “This is going to mean higher bills and dirtier air. What a waste.”

by Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
[ed. One picture = thousand words. The stupidity never ends. In other news of the stupid, henchman Hegseth gets bad reviews for his speech commemorating D-Day:]

***

"Speaking in north-west France on Saturday to mark the 82nd anniversary of the D-day landings, Hegseth seized on the moment marking the wartime liberation of Europe to reiterate the US administration’s longstanding attack on European immigration policies.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies,” Hegseth told those gathered at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.

“Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said."

The remarks were swiftly condemned on social media. The English historian, author and television presenter Simon Schama described them as a “special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance”.

Schama added: “As if the little people’s rage against immigration somehow is superior to the war against the 3rd Reich and entitles this comic book nobody to lecture the actual heroes.”

Ocean Observatory Will Go Dark Under Trump Funding Cuts

A portion of one of the most ambitious ocean monitoring networks ever built will go dark this month when scientists board a research vessel and motor off the Oregon coast to pull a research buoy from deep out of the Pacific.

The buoy 80 meters (260 feet) below the water’s surface will be removed June 16 from the Ocean Observatories Initiative — a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386 million that has continuously collected real-time data for more than a decade. But last month, the National Science Foundation announced it would dismantle most of the system, pulling instruments from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland by 2027.

Funded by the foundation, the observatories have tracked everything from ocean circulation and marine ecosystems to climate change and extreme weather. Its data has been freely available and has informed more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run for another 15 to 20 years.

In an emailed statement, the foundation said the decision is not a cancellation, but a “descoping” aligned with a “wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.” The foundation added that its decision drew in part on a 2025 National Academies report on the future of ocean science. [ed. There has to be some kind of annual award for worst word salad example. This would certainly qualify.]

But for the scientists who built and operated the system — and the researchers, educators and students who rely on its data — the timing feels particularly punishing.

An El Nino event, which disrupts weather patterns and supercharges marine heat waves, is predicted to arrive along the Pacific coast this summer. One marine heat wave is already pushing unusually warm water off California.

Without the Oregon and Washington moorings and the network of underwater gliders the Ocean Observatories Initiative operated in the region, researchers say they’ll lose much of their ability to measure what’s happening below the surface, which is precisely where the most significant oceanographic signals are.

“It’s a crippling loss of information,” Ed Dever, a professor at Oregon State University who helped lead the initiative’s Pacific Northwest operations, told The Associated Press Tuesday. Scientists can get some data from the surface, such as temperature and the distribution of chlorophyll, which drives photosynthesis in plants, but information below cannot be gathered from satellites alone, including low oxygen zones. [...]

The initiative operated on roughly $48 million a year, not including the cost of research vessels, which adds substantially to the overall price. Prior to budget cuts, which began in 2025, around 60 to 70 people worked directly on the project across its partner institutions, Dever said.

“What’s happening with the Ocean Observatories Initiative is not unique,” he said. “This is just one of a number of science facilities that is being dismantled at the present time. It seems to really mark the end of a federal commitment to basic scientific research — a commitment that has served this nation very well for the last 70 years.”

by Annika Hammerschlag, AP |  Read more:
Image: Darlene Trew Crist/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution via AP

[ed. See also: How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics (Smithsonian):]

***

Like Fight Club, there were rules about joining the secret society known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB). An initiation rite called “Seeing Sam.” The memorization of passwords and hand signs. A solemn pledge never to betray the order. A pureblooded pedigree of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock and the rejection of all Catholics. And above all, members of the secret society weren’t allowed to talk about the secret society. If asked anything by outsiders, they would respond with, “I know nothing.”

So went the rules of this secret fraternity that rose to prominence in 1853 and transformed into the powerful political party known as the Know Nothings. At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation's highest values.

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The Public Lands Rule Is Gone

What the BLM's Public Lands Rule was, why the Trump administration killed it, and what it means for the 245 million acres we all own.

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management officially rescinded the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule—better known as the Public Lands Rule. The change takes effect June 11. The administration had been signaling this move since last spring, but this week made it final, and it landed alongside a separate proposed rule weakening grazing oversight on 155 million acres of Western land.

I haven’t previously written about the Public Lands Rule, in large part because, frankly, it’s very much an in-the-weeds policy story and tough to make interesting. But that doesn’t mean the rule was not important or that this week’s decision won’t have downstream impacts. The PLR was a sincere attempt to put conservation on equal footing with drilling, mining, and grazing in how the BLM makes decisions about the 245 million acres it manages—roughly one in ten acres in the United States. That the administration moved so aggressively to kill even that modest reset tells you something about where its priorities lie.

Here’s what you need to know.

What was the Public Lands Rule, exactly?

For most of the BLM’s modern history, “multiple use” in practice meant that drilling, grazing, and mining got to sit with the adults when decisions were made, while conservation was relegated to the kids’ table, typically alongside recreation. The Public Lands Rule, finalized in May 2024, was meant to fix that. It directed the BLM to protect the most intact landscapes, restore degraded habitat, and use science and Indigenous knowledge as the foundation for management decisions. Most consequentially, it made conservation an official use of public lands—meaning a tribe, a rancher, or a conservation organization could hold a restoration lease on a piece of ground the same way an oil company leases it for drilling. That’s what was really at stake. Not a land grab, but a seat at the table.

Who made the rule?

The Biden-era BLM, led by director Tracy Stone-Manning, finalized it in May 2024 after a lengthy public process. The comment period generated 215,000 remarks, and the overwhelming majority were in favor. The rule wasn’t a new policy invention so much as a course correction. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 already requires the BLM to manage lands for “multiple use and sustained yield” to benefit current and future generations. After decades of drift toward extraction as the default, the Public Lands Rule was the agency trying to follow the law Congress wrote nearly 50 years ago.

What was the case for rescinding it according to the current administration?

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued the rule was “unnecessary” and could block access to hundreds of thousands of acres, hurting energy producers, miners, and ranchers. The administration began the rescission process last spring. A 60-day public comment period followed—and the results were striking. Roughly 98% of more than 61,000 commenters opposed rescission, including members of Congress, former BLM officials, Tribal representatives, ranchers, hunters, and local elected leaders. The administration proceeded anyway.

What does the rescission mean in practice?

Picture the Owyhee Canyonlands in southwestern Idaho—one of the most intact desert ecosystems left in North America, home to bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and some of the wildest river country in the lower 48. Under the Public Lands Rule, a conservation organization or Tribal nation could have held a restoration lease there, giving those values a formal foothold in BLM planning. That mechanism is now gone.

More broadly: 81% of BLM lands are open to oil and gas drilling. About 60% are grazed by livestock. Just 14% are designated for lasting conservation. The rule was meant to start bending those numbers toward balance. Instead, the thumb goes back on the extraction side of the scale.

OK, so how big a deal is this?

The Public Lands Rule was only 16 months old when the administration moved to kill it. Its most important provisions—like conservation leasing—hadn’t yet been fully tested. So the rescission prevents future progress more than it reverses present gains. That’s actually a useful way to understand the administration’s broader strategy: move fast enough that the seeds for a different future, one guided by long-term stewardship principles, never get a chance to take root.

The rescission is significant—but it’s also one item in a very long list, and that context matters. Since January 2025, the administration has fired or pushed out thousands of Interior Department and Forest Service employees. It has proposed cutting public lands agency budgets by more than a third. It issued an executive order making mining the "primary land use" across all public lands where legally allowable—ahead of recreation, wildlife, watersheds, cultural sites, everything. It opened sensitive Arctic habitat to drilling, moved to strip mineral protections from the Boundary Waters watershed in Minnesota, and declared a state of “emergency” on nearly 60% of national forest lands to fast-track commercial logging.

The Public Lands Rule rescission is the headline this week. But the pattern is the real story.

by Christopher Keyes, Re:Public | Read more:
Image: Daniel Halseth/Unsplash
[ed. Public lands (and the public's access to them) are under assault in this administration. See also: The Sellout of the Crazies (Re:Public):]

***

"At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property.

For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.

“The fate of our public lands and our rights are in jeopardy right now,” Wilson told Floodlight.

Wilson is a former sheriff’s deputy and lifelong hunter. For most of his life, he has lived in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains—their snow-capped peaks and twisting valleys watched him grow from a boy herding sheep on his grandfather’s ranch to a grey-haired hunter tracking elk herds across their remote slopes.

“The loss of this access means a lot to me and everybody else,” he said beside the gate, looking down and hiding the wet corners of his eyes.

The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club—an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me to give this up,” said Wilson.

For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America’s public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration. [...]

Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands—and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings—more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.

“This is a really simple issue,” said Andrew Posewitz, a Montana public lands advocate and the son of a renowned conservationist. “The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains. Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot … And now the public doesn’t have that access.”

Every American—not just Montanans—should care, he warned.

“Because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come.”