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.”

The Desert Safety Net

Every winter, tens of thousands of Americans migrate to public lands in the Arizona desert. For a growing number, it's not a vacation—it’s the only housing they can afford.

Every autumn across North America, migration begins.

And across the continent’s highways and desert roads, another migration gathers – this one made not of birds or fish, but of humans.

They go by many names: nomads, drifters, snowbirds, boondockers, van dwellers. Some travel in search of warmth, others for freedom and community. And for a growing number, the migration is not simply seasonal but economic.

Among those is 55-year-old Derek Hansler, a chef by trade.

Known to friends as D Rock, he spends the summer in New Hampshire visiting his children and grandchildren, parking his 2003 Van Terra shuttle bus in driveways along the way. He picks up gigs when he needs cash or a place to park, but the season is less work than service, volunteering in the communities he revisits every year.

“New Hampshire tells me when it’s time to roll,” he jokes. He likes to stay until the leaves turn crimson, then leave before they fall. When that moment arrives, he says goodbye to his family and points his bus 3,300 miles (5,310km) to the south-west.

In Seattle, as the rainy maritime chill brings out jackets, Stephanie Scruggs and Gustavo Costo prepare to head south. After three years on the road, they recently decided to move in together – a milestone in their nomadic life that meant trading their two vans for a half-finished bus they named Magpie, a weathered 1999 International Thomas.

It’s been more than five years since Scruggs, then 35, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain cancer known as a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma. After surgery, six weeks of radiation, and a year of chemo, doctors told her she might have two to five years to live.

Retiree Theresa Webster makes a final pass through the Oregon campground where she volunteers each year as a summer host. Fire rings are doused. Bathrooms are scrubbed. Trash is gathered and hauled away.

In return for the work, she has been given what has become increasingly rare: a legal place to park.

With the season over, she packs up Old Yeller, the mustard yellow 1977 Dodge van she bought for $3,000. Her dog, Miles, rides shotgun as she takes the long way south, first turning east toward her son’s driveway in Iowa, folding briefly back into the family rhythms of grandkids and shared meals. When winter presses in, she points Old Yeller down the interstate.

In driveways, campgrounds, and borrowed corners of parking lots, autumn departures like these unfold across North America. Soon these migrants will spill on to back roads, highways and interstates, license plates tracing faint lines south from Alaska, Quebec, Maine and everywhere in between, navigating by a kind of winter constellation – an invisible beacon in the American southwest that most maps barely notice, a place they return to year after year.

A small desert outpost called Quartzsite, Arizona.

*****

For many road trippers speeding along Interstate 10, Quartzsite, or “Q-town” as it is affectionately known, appears little more than a gas station and fast-food stopover halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix. It sits in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert, 20 miles east of the Colorado River.

Summertime temperatures hover in the triple digits, sending the valley’s human residents indoors to air-conditioned rooms and its wild inhabitants – including desert tortoises, cottontails and kangaroo rats – into underground lairs.

According to the 2020 census, the population is 2,413.

But as winter approaches and temperatures fall to something more forgiving, the great migration of motorhomes, RVs, buses, trailers, vans, cars and trucks begins to pour into Quartzsite – and more precisely, into the vast stretches of open desert that surround it.

But not everyone keeps moving.

Tens of thousands instead gather inside BLM-designated long-term visitor areas, or LTVAs, seasonal enclaves established in 1983 to accommodate the growing number of people wintering in the desert. Seven LTVAs stretch across Arizona and California. But the largest of these and the center of gravity is La Posa – Spanish for “the resting place” – an 11,400-acre stretch of land on the outskirts of Quartzsite.

Each winter, a vibrant social world takes hold. Clubs form and dissolve – singles groups, quilters, metal-detecting hobbyists – while daily gatherings emerge at sunrise and continue late into the night. Around them, infrastructure hums into being: laundromats that double as showers, RVs converted into hair salons, swap meets, mail-forwarding counters for lives without fixed addresses, mechanics coaxing life from failing engines.

Theresa remembers arriving in Old Yeller for the first time in 2018. She had kept her apartment in Oregon just in case van life didn’t work out. But as the desert opened around her, the contingency plan dissolved.

“This is it,” she remembers thinking. “This is the life.” She had grown tired of paying rent and bills and having nothing left over – a treadmill she could never step off. Out here, there were no landlords to answer to. Eight years later, the desert around Quartzsite still carries that weight for her. “It has a magical feeling,” she said.

Community and infrastructure move in tandem here, creating a seasonal metropolis layered on to the existing town. But what allows it to function year after year is something more fundamental: affordability.

For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months.

Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out. [...]

Dr Graham Pruss, executive director of the National Vehicle Residency Coalition – a network that advocates for the rights of people living in vehicles – spends part of each winter moving between desert camps as he connects with vehicle residents across the country. He sees many of them as part of what he calls an “economic refugee class.” They are people displaced not by conflict or famine, he said, but by rents, wages and the shrinking availability of stable housing.

He describes what he calls “settlement bias” – our tendency to treat familiar forms of dwelling as legitimate and unfamiliar ones as suspect.

“If you park an RV on to a private space and you pay for rent, that’s called a mobile home park,” he said. “But if you move that RV 100 feet onto the street, we call that homelessness.

“These are people who are using their private property to solve a housing crisis that we all see around us,” he added. “That adaptive strategy is innovative. It creates solutions where they don’t exist.”

For many vehicle residents, public lands have become one of the few legal geographies where long-term habitation remains possible.

“Public lands are the lifeline for a lot of us,” said Mary Feuer, a longtime public land resident. “When the money runs out, they literally support us.”

by Joshua Jackson, Re:Public |  Read more:

Image: Joshua Jackson

The eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980.

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Monk Seals Under Attack

The response was swift.

A week after a bystander’s cellphone video appeared to show a tourist heaving a coconut-sized rock at a Hawaiian monk seal swimming in calm waters off Lahaina, barely missing its head, federal authorities charged the Seattle resident with harassing the endangered animal.

On Wednesday, they arrested the person believed to be in the video: Igor Mykhaylovych Lytvynchuk, 38. He’s expected to appear in court in Honolulu on May 27.

Those decisive moves followed near-universal outrage as images of the startled male monk seal and a defiant Lytvynchuk went viral in Hawaiʻi and beyond, prompting calls for action.

 

Outside of high-profile incidents such as that, authorities struggle to prosecute those who harass or even intentionally kill Hawaiʻi’s monk seals — one of the world’s most endangered species and a culturally important animal in the islands.

Protecting the mammals from human harm, advocates say, remains a complex and uphill battle.

Most incidents don’t get caught on camera. Federal enforcement is stretched awfully thin across the Pacific region. Misinformation about the seals competing with fishermen for food, seal advocates say, continues to spread through local communities and spur attacks. [...]

On Maui, Mayor Richard Bissen vowed to personally see that Lytvynchuk, who was vacationing there, would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If convicted, Lytvynchuk faces up to one year in prison for each charge plus fines of up to $50,000 under the Endangered Species Act and up to $20,000 under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Initially, authorities believed the seal nearly hit was a female named Lani but later determined it was a different, male seal, Bissen said in an Instagram post Thursday. [...]

Enforcement Challenges

Out of at least 16 incidents of confirmed, intentional monk seal killings by humans in the past 17 years that remain unsolved, federal officials have only managed to prosecute one case. That incident, on Kauaʻi, dates back to 2009.

NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement, which is charged with protecting the seals under endangered species rules, did not respond this week to requests for comment.

Maria Sagapolu, assistant director of the office’s Pacific Islands Division, said in 2024 that there were fewer than 12 people to cover enforcement of the entire U.S. Pacific region, including Hawai‘i, Guam and other U.S. territories.

The Pacific represents the smallest of the OLE’s five divisions but has to cover the largest area, according to Sagapolu, representing some 1.7 million square miles. [...]

Among the $7.5 million in green fee tourism outreach funding cut by the Legislature was a $700,000 proposal to work with the tourism industry on better visitor outreach and more “culturally grounded messaging that promotes safe wildlife interactions,” according to a statement from the Department of Land and Natural Resources on Thursday.

Those dollars also would have funded a pilot marine protected species reporting app, the agency said, for the community to help report a host of threats related to Hawaiʻi’s wildlife, including monk seals. The project was recommended by Gov. Josh Green’s volunteer Green Fee Advisory Council, but the Senate removed its funding last month.

by Marcel Honoré, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Hawaiʻi District Court document/2026; The Marine Mammal Center, NOAA Permit #24359/2023
[ed. The human capacity for stupidity and cruelty can never be underestimated (which appears to have infected Molokai as well). When a witness confronted the man, he said “he did not care and was ‘rich’ enough to pay any fines,”. Video here (Hawaii News Now).]

via: a/b

Stratos Data Center Gets Initial Approval

[ed. Can't be true, right? Well... from what I can tell, it's some kind of phased development (Stratos project) starting with a 40,000 acre 'data center campus" in Box Elder County, Utah. Local residents aren't happy. See: Massive Box Elder County data center could increase Utah’s carbon emissions by 50%; and, Hundreds cry out as Box Elder commissioners wave in massive data center (Utah News Dispatch). Excerpts below:]

The angry crowd’s jeers outweighed the voices of commissioners and guests, especially when they spoke about water rights and the county’s tax revenue prospects stemming from the project. Many in the audience asked to allow presenters to be heard, but shouts prevailed throughout the meeting.

No one was escorted out, but instead commissioners left the room and broadcast their quick vote on a screen available to the public.

“Cowards,” some in the audience yelled. Others repeatedly shouted “people over profit.”

The resolutions were required by state law to allow the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, to move forward with the Stratos project. MIDA, an entity created by the Utah Legislature to advance economic development with a military focus, needed local consent since the data center would be located on private land without zoning regulations. [...]

The data center campus sponsored by Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity investor featured in the reality TV hit “Shark Tank,” is set to house its own natural gas plant to supply 9 gigawatts of energy to self-sustain the center, more than double what the entire state consumes in a year. That power generation will be isolated from the grid Utahns share, so it wouldn’t have any effect on utility rates, developers say.

Developers are also planning on using a closed-loop system to cool their equipment, using privately-owned water rights that are unsuitable for drinking or irrigation. But, without a definitive environmental study, the public remains skeptical. [...]

‘We can’t build anything in this country anymore’

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said on Thursday, during his monthly news conference broadcast by PBS Utah, that at the rate in which machine learning and artificial intelligence is changing, building data centers has become a national security issue.

“We have an obligation, I think every state has an obligation, when it comes to this space, to allow for these types of data centers to be built in their states,” Cox said. “We have to do this. We can’t just say ‘no’ and shut the doors and go home and let China win this, this technology race, so that just can’t be an option.”

Data centers can’t be installed everywhere, and the government should be careful with its resources, but this site may be able to fulfill environmental standards and won’t be someone’s nextdoor neighbor, Cox said.

“If you can’t put this here, then we can’t put them anywhere,” Cox said.

He also fiercely disputed that the approval process has been rushed.

“I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done. It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer, it absolutely does not,” he said. “You get a chance to give your feedback, and then decisions get made. That’s how we have to do stuff in this country and in this state.”

The state denies many requests because of feedback, but it can’t say no to everything, Cox said.

“We’ve let the people against virtually everything, destroy our country, destroy our industrial base, destroy our mining base, destroy our housing base, because we can’t build anything in this country anymore,” he said. “And those days are over. We’re done with that.”

Wind Developers Paid to Quit (With a Catch)

As the Iran war pushes up energy prices, the Trump administration is paying offshore wind developers to walk away from projects and invest instead in fossil fuel infrastructure.

The US Department of the Interior (DoI) announced on Monday two "historic" agreements under which the firms behind the Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind projects will voluntarily terminate their offshore wind leases.

In return, the DoI will reimburse the companies with taxpayers' cash, to the tune of $765 million in the case of Bluepoint Wind, and $120 million for Golden State Wind.

There is a catch, of course: the leaseholders must first invest a comparable amount in qualifying US conventional energy projects (i.e., oil, gas, or liquefied natural gas infrastructure) before they can recover the money tied to their offshore wind leases.

This isn't the first such development: last month, the DoI reached a similar deal with French ‌energy biz TotalEnergies to reimburse the company approximately $1 billion to give up its wind farm leases in Carolina Long Bay and the New York Bight area, suggesting that this may be an ongoing strategy.

It appears that paying developers to surrender offshore wind leases has become a fallback strategy after President Trump's executive order halting new federal approvals for wind projects ran into legal challenges from a coalition of state attorneys general and was later struck down in federal court.

In a remarkable coincidence, both sets of developers have decided not to pursue any new offshore wind developments in the US.

Washington's justification for these actions is that it is all part of President Trump's "Energy Dominance Agenda" to "leverage the nation's natural resources" to benefit American citizens and help lower everyday energy costs.

"President Trump is focused on providing affordable and reliable energy to American citizens," claimed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a prepared remark.

"The companies that bid for these offshore wind leases were basically sold a product in 2022 that was only viable when propped up by massive taxpayer subsidies. Now that hardworking Americans are no longer footing the bill for expensive, unreliable, intermittent energy projects, companies are once again investing in affordable, reliable, secure energy infrastructure," he added.

The President's well-known aversion to renewable energy is said to date back at least to his failed legal attempt to stop a wind farm project from being built within sight of his golf course in Scotland over a decade ago.

Looking at the figures, fossil fuel producers are estimated to receive about $34.8 billion a year in federal support through tax breaks, royalty policies, and other subsidies, even though oil and gas have enjoyed public backing for decades and hardly qualify as an emerging industry.

by Dan Robinson, The Register |  Read more:

Image: AI

[ed. Your taxpayer dollars at work. See also: Core Scientific accelerates crypto-to-AI pivot, converts Bitcoin mine to gigawatt-scale token farm (Register):]

***

Over the past year, all of the major hyperscalers have embraced some kind of non-traditional energy storage or generation tech, some more exotic than others. Google, Oracle, AWS, and others are all betting on small modular reactors (SMRs), tiny nuclear power plants, that can be deployed on site to fuel their AI ambitions.

Meanwhile Meta this week signed an agreement with Overview Energy to beam a gigawatt of solar power down from orbit, just as soon as they can lob the arrays into orbit. But, just like SMRs, that won't happen until at least 2030.

Power constraints have become such a limiting factor that major model builders like AWS, Google, and xAI are now talking about building orbital datacenters. However, the economics of such a deployment remain dubious to say the least.

Earthrise vs. Earthset

Apollo vs. Artemis: How the Earth changed in 58 years (BBC)

Images: NASA

Jiangxi Province, China
China stands to benefit most from the war-driven energy crisis (WaPo)

Image: AFP/Getty, and Lorenzo Martinez

Nopack Snowpack

'On a Whole Other Level’ - Rapid snow melt-off in American west stuns scientists.

Snow surveys taking place across the American west this week are offering a grim prognosis, after a historically warm winter and searing March temperatures left the critical snowpack at record-low levels across the region.

Experts warned that even as the heat begins to subside, the stunning pace of melt-off over the past month has left key basins in uncharted territory for the dry seasons ahead. Though there’s still potential for more snow in the forecast, experts said it will probably be too little too late.

“This year is on a whole other level,” said Dr Russ Schumacher, a Colorado State University climatologist, speaking about the intense heat that began rapidly melting the already sparse snowpack in March. “Seeing this year so far below any of the other years we have data for is very concerning.”

Acting as a water savings account of sorts, snowpacks are essential to water supply. Measurements taken across the west during the week of 1 April are viewed as important indicators of the peak amounts of water that might melt into reservoirs, rivers and streams and across thirsty landscapes through the summer.

During a critical survey in California’s Sierra Nevada on Wednesday, grass and mud could be seen through the thin white patchwork as state officials attempted to measure the meager snowpack.

“Normally we’d be standing right here,” Andy Reising, manager of California department of water resource’s snow surveys and water supply forecasting unit said, gesturing at chin height. The 5ft-tall tool typically thrust deep into the high berms on 1 April poked into the brown earth next to him. “There is actually no measurable snow.”

With zero depth and zero water content, this year’s annual April snow survey conducted at Phillips Station, was the second worst on record, beaten only by 2015 when officials “walked across a dry field”, Reising said.

It’s not just the amount of snow left on mountaintops that’s concerning experts, but the amount of moisture still frozen within them. “Snow water equivalent” (SWE), a measurement of what could melt off to supply natural and manmade systems, is exceptionally low.

California’s Sierra Nevada had just 4.9in of SWE, or 18% of average on Wednesday, according to the state’s department of water resources.

In the Colorado River headwaters, an important basin that supplies more than 40 million people across several states, along with 5.5m acres of agriculture, 30 tribal nations, and parts of Mexico, had just over 4in of SWE on Monday, or 24% of average. That’s less than half what was previously considered the record low.

Schumacher said the incoming storm could slow the early melting but won’t be enough to pull the basins back from the brink. Snow water equivalent measurements going into April were at levels typically seen in May or June, after months of melt-off, according to Schumacher.

The issue is extremely widespread. Data from a branch of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which logs averages based on levels between 1991 and 2020, shows states across the south-west and intermountain west with eye-popping lows. The Great Basin had only 16% of average on Monday and the lower Colorado region, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Nevada, was at 10%. The Rio Grande, which covers parts of New Mexico, Texas and Colorado, was at 8%.

“This year has the potential of being way worse than any of the years we have analogues for in the past,” Schumacher said.

‘Nothing short of shocking’

Even with near-normal precipitation across most of the west, every major river basin across the region was grappling with snow drought when March began, according to federal analysts. Roughly 91% of stations reported below-median snow water equivalent, according to the last federal snow drought update compiled on 8 March. Water managers and climate experts had been hopeful for a March miracle – a strong cold storm that could set the region on the right track. Instead, a blistering heatwave unlike any recorded for this time of year baked the region and spurred a rapid melt-off.

“March is often a big month for snowstorms,” Schumacher said. “Instead of getting snow we would normally expect we got this unprecedented, way-off-the-scale warmth.”

More than 1,500 monthly high temperature records were broken in March and hundreds more tied. The event was “likely among the most statistically anomalous extreme heat events ever observed in the American south-west”, climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an analysis posted this week.

“Beyond the conspicuous ‘weirdness’ of it all,” Swain added, “the most consequential impact of our record-shattering March heat will likely be the decimation of the water year 2025-26 snowpack across nearly all of the American west.” [...]

In the Colorado River Basin, the situation could be even more dire. The two largest reservoirs on the Colorado River are Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which together account for about 90% of storage, are 25% and 33% full accordingly, as of 29 March, and there is little to fill them.

Already officials are in the process of relocating a floating marina on Lake Powell in anticipation of the quickly receding water levels, as experts warn the vital reservoir could drop to the lowest levels recorded since it was filled in the 1960s. If they fall far enough, the system would cease to function altogether. So-called “deadpool” – when water isn’t high enough to pass through the dams, generate hydroelectric power, and be distributed downriver – would be catastrophic.

The Colorado River has been overdrawn for more than a century but rising temperatures and lower precipitation are putting more pressure on the system that depended on by cities, farms, industries and wildlife across the west. The extreme conditions have added more urgency and greater tensions to fraught negotiations over who will bear the brunt of badly needed cuts. Seven states that have blown past two key deadlines are still locked in a stalemate over how the river’s essential resources will be managed through a hotter and drier future.

by Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Guardian Design/Nasa Worldview

[ed. See also: Western US states fail to negotiate crucial Colorado River deal: ‘Mother nature isn’t going to bail us out’ (Guardian).]

'Fragment Creation Event' - Starlink Satellite Breaks Apart

SpaceX’s Starlink division confirmed yesterday that it lost contact with a satellite on Sunday and is trying to locate space debris that might have been produced by… whatever happened there.

Starlink said there appeared to be “no new risk” to other space operations and did not use the word “explosion.” But it seems that something caused a Starlink broadband satellite to break apart into at least tens of pieces. LeoLabs, which operates a radar network that can track objects in low Earth orbit, said in an X post that it “detected a fragment creation event involving SpaceX Starlink 34343,” one of the 10,000 or so Starlink satellites in orbit.

“LeoLabs Global Radar Network immediately detected tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite after the event, with a first pass over our radar site in the Azores, Portugal,” LeoLabs said. “Additional fragments may have been produced—analysis is ongoing.”

LeoLabs said the breakup was “likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris or another object.” Because of “the low altitude of the event, fragments from this anomaly will likely de-orbit within a few weeks,” it said. [...]

LeoLabs said yesterday that the new event is similar to one from December 17, 2025, which also produced “tens of objects in the vicinity of the satellite” and appeared to be “caused by an internal energetic source” rather than a crash with another object. LeoLabs said it wants more information on the anomalies.

“These events illustrate the need for rapid characterization of anomalous events to enable clarity of the operating environment,” it said.

Starlink provided a few details shortly after the December 2025 incident, saying on December 18 that an “anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km, and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects.” Starlink added that the satellite was “largely intact” but “tumbling,” and would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and “fully demise” within weeks.

In December, Starlink seemed confident that it could prevent future anomalies. “Our engineers are rapidly working to [identify the] root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event,” Starlink said in the December 18 post.

We asked SpaceX today whether it has determined the cause of the December anomaly or the one on Sunday, and will update this article if we get a response.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Lost In Space

No one is happy with NASA’s new idea for private space stations (Ars Technica):

"Most elements of a major NASA event this week that laid out spaceflight plans for the coming decade were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space.

However, one aspect of this event, named Ignition, has begun to run into serious turbulence. It involves NASA’s attempt to navigate a difficult issue with no clear solution: finding a commercial replacement for the aging International Space Station.

During the Ignition event on Tuesday, NASA leaders had blunt words for the future of commercial activity in low-Earth orbit. Essentially, they are not confident in the viability of a commercial marketplace for humans there, and the agency’s plan to work with private companies to develop independent space stations does not appear to be headed toward success. Plenty of people in the industry share these concerns, but NASA officials have not expressed them out loud before.

“We’re on a path that’s not leading us where we thought it would,” said Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station program for NASA.

NASA proposed a new solution that would bind the private companies more closely to NASA, requiring them not to build free-flying space stations but rather to work directly with the space agency on modules that would, at least initially, dock with the International Space Station. This change was not well-received."

***

[ed. See also: SpaceX offers details on orbital data center satellites (Space News):]

"At a March 21 event in Austin, Texas, Musk outlined an initiative by SpaceX, along with automaker Tesla and artificial intelligence company xAI — also run by Musk — to massively increase production of high-end computer chips needed for both terrestrial and space applications.

The Terafab project seeks to produce one terawatt of processors annually, which Musk said is 50 times the combined production rate of all manufacturers of chips used today in advanced applications such as AI.

Those processors, he said, are the “missing ingredient” in his plans to deploy a large constellation of satellites to serve as an orbital data center.

“We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we’re going to build the Terafab,” he said.

"SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission in late January for a constellation of up to one million satellites that would be used as an orbital data center for AI applications. The company provided few technical details about the constellation, including the size of the satellites, in that application."

Hawaii’s Small Farmers Begin Recovery After Catastrophic Flooding

Eddie Oroyan’s farm was thriving when the storms hit. He and his wife had started LewaTerra Farm last year on a gorgeous stretch of land on the north shore of Oahu. They were delivering vegetables to customers in the community, selling at farmer’s markets and to local restaurants.

Then, on the week of 10 March, a first kona low storm hit the island, bringing copious amounts of water, flooding their land and wiping out crops. Nearly all their papayas were gone. And the tomatoes didn’t survive. But the couple quickly began cleaning, replanting and tying down crops, confident that they would get back on their feet shortly.

“It was looking really positive. We were like, OK, we’re going to make it out of this,” Oroyan said.

But days later the Hawaiian Islands were hit with yet another storm – this one even more perilous. It inundated neighborhoods, leading to more than 200 rescues, washing houses off their foundations and leaving wide swaths of the land underwater.

Oroyan and his wife evacuated in chest-deep water. They returned to find an almost complete loss.

“The crops were completely covered and had already been underwater earlier that week. The disease was already setting in,” he said.

One week on, Hawaii is only just beginning to grapple with the aftermath of both storms, which saw as much as 50in of rain and caused some of the state’s worst flooding since 2004. The damage is immense – with officials estimating costs at $1bn, and farmers have been hit hard, particularly on Oahu. More than 300 farms have reported about $17.5m in damage as of this week, said Brian Miyamoto, the executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau.

“This is so widespread that the need is astronomical,” he said.

And with significant debris, damaged roads, and thick mud indoors and outside, cleanup will take time. [...]

Blake Briddell and Brit Yim, who for the last eight years have run an eight-acre farm on land that used to serve as a sugarcane plantation on the north shore, went through their nursery and storage sheds, elevating everything off the ground to protect their breadfruit, mango and citrus trees.

The storm came sooner than expected. The first front brought incessant rain, dropping about 20in in McKinnon’s area, which typically sees an average of 30in for the year. The water levels on Briddell’s farm were steadily rising, and the couple soon had to evacuate.

The heavy rains didn’t stay for long, but caused significant damage, including flooding fields and saturating the ground, and harvested crops were lost to power outages and damaged equipment.

Much of the land that Oroyan and his wife, Jessica Eirado Enes, tend had been left coated in a thick layer of mud thanks to the dense clay soil. Millions of years of erosion from the mountains produced that mineral-rich clay soil, which is good for planting, but that doesn’t soak up water well, Oroyan said, and swallows shoes and tractors.

The couple spent days cleaning up their land, trying to get things back in order and leaving soaked equipment out to dry. They got to work replanting crops that had tipped over, including eggplant and okra.

So did McKinnon and Briddell. Another kona storm was forecast, but was expected to be less severe than the previous ones. “It’s silly looking back, but we were talking about how it might be nice to get a little bit of rain to wash the mud off of everything. Like a little bit of rain would be welcome,” Briddell said.

Briddell woke up at 1.30am on the morning of 20 March to the see water surrounded his farm’s small living space, an alarming development given that it is located on the most elevated area of the property. The water was already shin-deep, meaning the road was too flooded for the couple to drive out, he said.

“We knew we were stuck at that point and it was just a matter of ‘OK, everything that we can get back up elevated, let’s do it’” Briddell said. “The water at that stage was raising about a foot every 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could literally see the water line climbing.”

Meanwhile, as the storm made landfall, Oroyan had been harvesting beets and lettuce in the rain, trying to get them out of the ground before it became too muddy to do so. As he prepared to go to bed, he saw that water was already overwhelming a nearby culvert and coming to the edge of a drainage ditch on the property.

He and his wife began to prepare once more. They gathered their things and moved valuable heavy equipment, a solar generator and a washing machine.

“Within 20 minutes of me saying we should start prepping it was at the foot of the living space,” Oroyan said. Twenty minutes later it was up to their knees, and they drove their vehicles to higher ground with water submerging the hoods of their cars. They made it to a neighbors after walking through chest-deep water.

Briddell and Yim put on wetsuits, and placed their dry clothes in a cooler. The couple knew their cats would not leave, and that they couldn’t swim out with them, so they left wet food on the rafters of their home where they knew they’d be safe. They swam a quarter of a mile to their kayak and met with a friend who offered them a vehicle to drive out in.

“The drive was scarier than the swim. The water ripping down the roads. You’re driving with the tailpipe pipes submerged for miles where you can’t let off the gas,” Briddell said.

by Dani Anguiano, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: Eddie Oroyan of LewaTerra Farm

[ed. Climate change. We lost the fight before ever getting started. Because it was a hoax. Because we needed to protect our corporations and our economy, 401Ks, consumptive standards of living. Because it was too complex and too far in the future. Because it was just too hard. See also: They’re Rich but Not Famous—and They’re Suddenly Everywhere.]

Fuzz: Wildlife Conflict in the Modern Era

Recently, I read Fuzz: When Natures Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. Like all of her books, it is a meandering journey that touches on a common theme. Although the subtitle makes it seem that the theme is nature crime, the theme is more about conflicts between bureaucracy, modernity and nature rather than crime itself. A more accurate but worse title would be Fuzz: The Weird Ways Humans Deal with Nature while Navigating Bureaucracy and the Impossibility of People Wanting to be around Wildlife without Ever Being Inconvenienced. Some examples Roach explores include the Indian government’s attempt to sterilize monkeys, how the city of Aspen deals with bears raiding trash cans, and the many failed attempts at getting rid of birds including the infamous Australian emu war.

Reading Fuzz was often frustrating because most of the problems share the same basic structure regardless of time or place. Humans disturb a local ecosystem through moving there or extracting resources. Animals then wander into human settlements in response to ecosystem change that has worsened their food supply, altered the predator-prey ratio, or made it easier to get caloric rich food. Humans react by engaging in one of two strategies. Strategy one is to kill everything, which is usually ineffective because it does not affect the population levels or results in extinction (at least in the region) which results in further ecosystem change. Strategy two is to feed the wild animals because that seems like the nice thing to do except that feeding them encourages the animals to keep going into the human settlements which makes the animals bolder which leads to more conflict and potentially leads to attacks. Once this has started, the animals become so used to relying on people for food that they cannot be integrated back into the wild. Sometimes people become so frustrated and angry that they go back to the first strategy of kill everything.

These problems can seem intractable. People have a hard time being convinced that killing everything doesn’t work and the people who don’t want to kill the animals have a hard time accepting that their help may makes things worse. They continue to feed the wild animals, resist methods that would discourage the animals (such as locking trashcans), and mainly advocate translocation (moving the animal to a different area) even though translocation rarely works. Whether because of blinding love or hate, people have a hard time handling wild animals wandering into their homes and cities.

Even though reading about these issues was frustrating, Fuzz left me feeling more inspired than dejected. There are examples of humans humanely and successfully addressing human-wildlife conflict and limiting the presence of introduced flora and fauna. They do so through careful study of local ecosystems, which includes the humans who live there and how they feel about wildlife. What was the most inspiring thing in the book was seeing how much the animal rights and environmental movements have changed how the public handles these wildlife issues. Before the 1970s, the kill everything approach was the norm. Now it is not.

Throughout these stories, Roach makes the case that the best way to deal with wildlife conflict is to find better ways to live with animals that isn’t killing them or making them reliant on humans. Sometimes the solution is simple and easy. After multiple chapters of ridiculous attempts to stop birds from eating crops, Roach argues that it’s better to do nothing or to hire a human to scare the birds off. Other times the solution is complicated. In New Zealand, there’s research being done on using genetic engineering to induce infertility among mice and other destructive, introduced species as a way to reduce the population without mass poisoning. The researchers are trying to limit unintended consequences but there will always be risk. The important question is whether the unknown risk of doing something is worth the known risk of doing nothing. I appreciate that there are people out there doing the often thankless work of trying to make humans and wildlife happy. Roach did an excellent job of showing the myriad of ways this plays out and, unlike other books I’ve read, Roach discusses these issues without claiming that now is the first time humans have tried caring about nature and ecological balance.

by Mia Milne, Solar Thoughts |  Read more:

Image: Fuzz

[ed. This issue has played out forever in my old hometown of Anchorage, Alaska (as you can imagine), and will probably never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. It's a form of politics. What's the science say, and what are the options? How feasible are mitigative policies, and how much will they cost? Finally arriving at the most relevant question: what kind of city do you want to live in (that would perpetually kill its animal populations and modify its natural environment)?]