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The Next Viral Pandemic Is Coming. Here’s How We Can Stop It

A new combo of climate and habitat crises, along with immune system stress, is driving more bat-borne viruses to afflict us

At 4:30 on a chilly morning in Australia, headlights burned through a dark forest in central Woodford, a small rural town 50 miles north of Brisbane, Queensland. Hundreds of flying foxes—magnificent fruit-eating bats with big eyes, fluffy coats, and a wingspan nearly that of an eagle—had just returned from foraging and dangled on tree branches like gigantic Christmas ornaments. Below them, rather incongruously, a large plastic sheet covered the ground. It had been placed there by a team of ecologists to collect urine and feces that the animals dropped.The scientists, from Griffith University in Brisbane, were probing bat droppings because of a grave human-health concern: plagues now come at us from the skies. Viruses carried by the world’s only flying mammals, bats, have infected people. In the past decades a series of viral attackers—many of them deadly—have been found in or linked to bats: Marburg, Ebola, Hendra, Nipah, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV and, most recently, SARS-CoV-2. COVID, the disease that last virus causes, has killed more than seven million people across the world. Bat-derived viruses seem to threaten our health with disturbing frequency.But why bats? And why now? After decades of searching for clues and putting together puzzle pieces involving evolution, ecology and climate, scientists have come up with a good answer. Bats have evolved a unique immune system that lets them coexist with a horde of otherwise harmful viruses, a development that seems tied, in surprising ways, to their ability to fly. But when people destroy their habitats and food and trigger disturbing changes in climate—all of which have coincided recently—bats’ immune systems can be strained to the breaking point. The animals can no longer keep viruses in check. Their burgeoning population of microbes rains down on other animals and eventually infects people.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The search for further evidence to bolster this hypothesis, as well as early warnings of bat-virus outbreaks, had brought the Griffith team to Woodford last year. The investigators were looking for signs of nutrition problems or biomarkers of impaired immunity in the bats, among other indicators. Alison Peel, one of the ecologists, carefully transferred puddles of bat urine from the plastic sheet into test tubes. Then she felt something hard land on her back. “Great, I just got hit by bat poop,” she said with a grimace. The first light of dawn began filtering through the dense forest canopy.The team will be spending several years in the field, trying to pick out causes of virus shedding that can be easily obscured in a wild environment. “Such long-term studies are extremely hard but absolutely critical,” says James Wood, an infectious disease ecologist at the University of Cambridge, who has been working on Hendra-like viruses in African bats in Ghana and Madagascar. The basic links between environmental stress on bats and increased spread of disease were documented in 2022, in a landmark paper in Nature. It connected climate variability, deforestation and food shortages over a quarter of a century to pulses of heightened virus infections in bats, other animals and people.In Queensland, Australia, large groups of black flying foxes hang from trees.One of the authors of that paper was Raina Plowright, an infectious disease ecologist at Cornell University who has been studying flying foxes and viruses for two decades. The interwoven nature of these causes, she says, means that any public-­health intervention to prevent future pandemics will need to tackle the whole environmental tapestry, not just pull on a single thread. “Halting deforestation and climate change will help address the root cause,” she says.On a March evening in 2006, Plowright was in the bushland in northern Australia’s Nitmiluk National Park when she felt that something was not quite right. She had set up a finely meshed net under the forest canopy to capture flying foxes, then sat back and stared at the sky. Plowright, a graduate student at the time, was waiting for what she called a flying river of animals—hundreds of thousands of them rushing from their roosts to feed as the sun went down—letting out a cacophony of high-pitched calls. “It’s absolutely spectacular,” she says. “They are the wildebeests of the Northern Territory.”But that twilight was eerily quiet. Plowright could barely find a trickle of flying foxes, let alone a gushing river. It was extremely unusual. “Where have the bats gone?” she recalls wondering.Plowright was part of a team trying to understand why flying foxes had been spreading the Hendra virus to horses and people. Hendra had killed two humans at that point, and it had killed and sickened many more equines, threatening an industry worth several billions of dollars to Australia. The scientists’ job was to periodically measure the extent of virus infection in wild bats and monitor their health.When the researchers finally managed to capture a few bats, they realized all was not well. The animals were skinny and in bad shape; it looked as if they had not been eating. “The bats were basically starving and in really poor health,” Plowright says. And even though it was just after the mating season, none of the captured females was pregnant. The team couldn’t detect any Hendra genetic material in the animals—which is notoriously tricky to do—but nearly 80 percent of the bats had immune system antibody proteins against the virus. That was nearly twice the level measured the year before, and it meant the bats had caught the pathogen. “It was the first clue that nutritional stress may have a role in an increased susceptibility to virus infection,” Plowright says.Hendra, the virus that Plowright and others were tracking, had made its fearsome debut on the outskirts of Brisbane, in the state of Queens­land, in September 1994. On a breezy spring afternoon a thoroughbred mare named Drama Series started to look sickly while grazing at a paddock near Hendra, a sleepy area known for its racehorses. Drama Series deteriorated precipitously, and she died two days later, says Peter Reid, the equine veterinarian who treated her.Within a few days a dozen more horses fell ill; most of them had shared a stable with Drama Series. Some soon died, and the rest were euthanized to prevent possible transmission to humans. But it was too late, Reid says. Within a week flulike symptoms descended on Drama Series’ trainer, who eventually succumbed to respiratory and kidney failure.Around the same time, another outbreak killed two horses in Mackay, 600 miles north of Brisbane. But the cause remained a mystery until their owner died 14 months later. Medical examinations showed that the cause of his death—and that of his horses—was the same viral pathogen that launched the deadly attacks in Hendra.Researchers spread a plastic sheet under a flying fox roost in Queensland to collect urine and feces samples.The same virus in two deadly outbreaks 600 miles apart: this context gave scientists an ominous clue to the pathogen’s source. “We started to consider the possibility that the virus was transmitted by a flying animal,” says Linfa Wang, an infectious disease expert who was then at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory (now known as the Australian Center for Disease Preparedness).But which animal? Scientists decided to focus their attention on insects, birds and bats. These creatures were the airborne members of a long list of wild animals, including rodents, snakes and marsupials, that field researchers had been trapping and another team of molecular biologists, including Wang, had been analyzing. Their goal was to pinpoint the source of the disease. Wang, now at Duke–­National University of Singapore Medical School, says the work soon paid off. Blood samples from all four of the flying fox species in Australia had antibodies to Hendra. In the ensuing years, the team managed to isolate the virus from a bat and obtained the full sequence of its genome.That discovery focused attention on bats as virus carriers, and scientists have since discovered dozens of bat-­borne pathogens. They learned, for instance, that bats are vectors for the Nipah virus, which killed around 100 people and led to the culling of one million pigs in Malaysia in 1998–1999. In the aftermath of SARS in 2005, Wang and his colleagues in China, Australia and the U.S. reported in Science that bats might also be the source of the new contagion.These discoveries posed a conundrum. Nipah, Hendra, and other viruses can make humans and other animals sick, often with devastating consequences, yet bats seem to tolerate them well. Wang wanted to understand why. He was shocked when he realized how little was known. “It was like stepping into a void,” Wang says. “Our understanding of bat immunity was almost zero.” It was a void that, beginning in the early 2000s, he and other scientists started to fill.In 2008 the Australian government gave Wang a coveted blue-­sky research grant, one awarded to scientists deemed on a path toward breakthrough discoveries. With around $2 million to spend over five years, he could do whatever he wanted. There was only one thing on his mind. “I wanted to be the first person in the world to sequence bat genomes,” he says. What he didn’t expect was that the effort would lead to a fascinating link between bats’ unusual immune system and their even more unusual evolution.Of the 6,400 or so living mammalian species, bats are the only ones that can fly. More than one in five mammalian species is a bat—it is one of the most diverse groups in the class, second only to rodents. Bats’ life­spans are extraordinary. Some bats weigh only a few grams but can live as long as 40 years, equivalent to humans living for almost 1,000 years. Despite such longevity, bats rarely develop cancer.How and when the only flying mammals evolved wings and became airborne is still unclear. The oldest fossils of bats that “have all the hallmarks of a flying creature” are dated to 52.5 million years ago, says Nancy Simmons, a mammalogist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who worked on these exquisitely preserved skeletons from present-day Wyoming. The signs of wings and other flight features on the fossils indicate the animals’ unique path to the skies began to evolve millions of years earlier, and the lineage probably split from other mammalian species before the massive asteroid impact that wiped out dinosaurs and around 70 percent of all species worldwide 66 million years ago.“The advantages of flight are tremendous be­­cause you can cover much larger areas than similarly sized animals that can’t fly,” Simmons says. “It opened up a whole new set of resources that were not available to those that couldn’t fly.” Bats, in essence, became “birds of the night,” occupying many of the same ecological niches as birds but avoiding competition with them by being nocturnal.A scientist prepares to analyze DNA from flying fox feces samples.This high-flying lifestyle requires a lot of energy. In flight, some species of bats increase their metabolic rate more than 15-­fold. Body temperature can rise from around 95 degrees Fahrenheit to 104 degrees F, and their heart rates can speed up from a resting pace of 200 to 400 beats per minute to 1,100 beats. From their roost sites, they often travel dozens of miles to feed in one night. Some migratory species can travel up to 1,240 miles from their summer locations to winter ones. The use of so much energy releases a large amount of metabolic by-products, such as damaged DNA and highly reactive chemicals. These substances trigger inflammatory responses similar to those caused by microbial infection. “Bats must have an efficient system to deal with the insults that come with flight,” Wang says. “It’s all about damage control.”With his blue-sky grant, Wang set out to systematically study how bats were physiologically different from other mammals—a question considered esoteric at the time. By collaborating with BGI, a Chinese genomics company that had already sequenced the genomes of organisms such as rice and the giant panda, Wang and his colleagues got the first chance to read the “genetic book” of two types of bats: a small, insect-eating species (Myotis davidii) from northern China and Russia, and a big, fruit-eating black flying fox (Pteropus alecto) from Australia. “It was like hitting a jackpot,” Wang says. Writing in Science in 2013, the team reported that bats have more genes responsible for repairing DNA damage than other mammals such as mice and humans do—possibly allowing the flying creatures to be more adept at fixing the molecular wear and tear caused by their high metabolism.There were also some helpful genetic absences. The genetic books of both of the bat species Wang’s team sequenced, for instance, have lost several “pages”—genes found in more grounded mammals—that encode certain immune system proteins. These proteins help to detect invading organisms and launch inflammatory responses. This scenario might sound counterintuitive: Wouldn’t the lack of those genes make bats more vulnerable to infection? Scientists think not; it’s often the immunological overdrive in response to pathogens, rather than pathogens themselves, that kills the host. (A lethal aspect of COVID, early in the pandemic, was a “storm” of immunological overreaction that damaged organs beyond repair.) “This was the first tantalizing clue to how bats deal with infection,” Wang says.A hint about what happens when this delicate infection-control system goes awry came from earlier bat-­sur­veil­lance studies: when the animals shed more virus, other species started to get sick. In June 2011 a Hendra outbreak hit horses in Australia’s eastern states of Queensland and New South Wales. By October of that year about two dozen horses perished, traced to not one but 18 separate transmissions of the virus from flying foxes. “It was unprecedented,” says Hamish McCallum, an expert on ecological modeling at Griffith University’s Southport campus. There had been only 14 transmission events since the first Hendra outbreak in 1994.At about the same time, a team led by Peel (who would go on to collect samples in Woodford) uncovered another troubling phenomenon: bats were shedding a whole bunch of viruses other than Hendra. Since November 2010, her colleagues had been collecting urine samples from flying foxes—mostly the black flying fox and the grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus)—at their roost sites on a monthly basis. Their studies show that the bat populations usually have a variety of viruses at low levels. But the levels tended to rise in the cold and dry winter months, between June and August, when risks of virus transmission are heightened.In winter 2011 the levels of eight viruses—including Hendra, its cousin the Cedar virus and the Menangle virus (which can also infect humans)—peaked in urine samples collected from bats in Queensland. This bump did not happen in subsequent winters or in the state of Victoria, where there were no reported cases of Hendra infection in horses, Peel says. “That was when it became clear that flying foxes shed multiple viruses simultaneously in discrete pulses,” says Plowright, who collaborated with both Peel and McCallum for the study. The pulse seemed to coincide with the times when the horses got infected. A rise in virus shedding therefore seems to be a critical step—and a sentinel indicator—for cross-­species transmission.To bat immunologists such as Tony Schountz of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, the level of virus shedding is intricately related to the so-called immunological détente between pathogens and their bat hosts. “It’s a relationship in which the virus and the host effectively say to each other, ‘If you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you,’” he says.Two strategies are in place to maintain the détente. One typically entails the constant expression of immune system signals that are switched on in other mammals only when the animals are invaded by pathogens. In some bat species, this includes type I interferons (a group of signaling molecules regarded as the first line of defense against viral infection) and heat-shock proteins (which in other animals are induced in response to stress). “Bats are always in a state of ‘ready to fight,’” says Zhou Peng, an expert on bat virology at the Guangzhou National Laboratory in China. “This helps to keep the viruses in check.”The grey-headed flying fox also carries the Hendra virus, which threatens people and other animals.The other strategy is to have only minimal inflammation, avoiding the overreactions that can damage organs. Bats show only small signs of tissue inflammation even when infected by viruses, Schountz notes. Such dampened responses can leave bats vulnerable to viruses, but the “ready to fight” immune system components usually take care of the invaders with a more targeted, precise counterattack that goes after the viruses and not the organs they are in. “They never go overboard” in their defenses, Schountz says.This finely tuned interaction, developed over a long history as bats and viruses learned to coexist, can explain bats’ remarkable ability to harbor viruses without getting sick. “It’s all about yin and yang,” Wang says. “But the balance can be tipped.”Changes in the environment can do the tipping. That might be what happened to the bats the Griffith team sampled in 2011. Research over decades has shown that food availability predicts virus shedding. Several times a year since 2006, scientists have conducted detailed assessments of environmental conditions within the foraging radius of several flying fox roosts in Queens­land. They found that the eucalyptus forests at those sites provided the highest abundance of food resources in late summer—especially highly nutritious pollen and nectar. The amount of food dropped to the lowest point in winter months, when Hendra cases can rise.What was particularly striking was how well the levels of virus shedding and horse infection correlated with food availability. When food was hard to find, bats tended to shed more virus, and horse infections shot up. But when food was abundant, virus-­related problems dropped. The food ups and downs, it turned out, were affected by a pattern of climate variability known as the El Niño–­South­ern Oscillation (ENSO) in the preceding months or years. ENSO lurches between two states: El Niño, when surface waters in the tropical central and eastern Pacific are unusually warm, results in hot and dry years in Australia. La Niña, when waters are exceptionally cool, leads to wetter weather on land. Recent studies have shown that global warming might have made the switches more intense and more frequent.In 2011—the year scientists uncovered the big surge of virus shedding and horse infection—Australia was coming out of two strong El Niño years. The drought had created a prolonged food shortage for bats because eucalyptus trees didn’t flower. “There was little nectar around,” McCallum says. “The bats were probably starving.” Food availability during the winter of 2010 hit one of the lowest points during the entire period the scientists studied.The findings are also consistent with what Plowright saw in the spring of 2006 in Nitmiluk: starving and unhealthy bats, as well as a large number with signs of Hendra infection. That period followed a major cyclone that reduced food availability. Scientists suspect that food shortages and nutrition deficiencies, possibly exacerbated by an increasingly erratic ENSO, might have thrown off the balance of the animals’ immune systems, leading to increased levels of virus infection, replication and shedding.But ENSO is not the only culprit behind food shortages for flying foxes. The species have suffered from habitat loss for decades. Plowright’s team found that 70 percent of the forest that provided winter habitats for the animals was cut down and cleared, mostly for agriculture, mining and urban development, by 1996. Nearly a third of the remaining habitat was gone by 2018—often without proper regulatory approval, Plowright says. Millions more acres are set to be cleared in the coming decade, she adds, making Australia one of the worst deforesters in the world. The 2022 Nature paper she co-authored, which highlighted the correlations between environmental changes and fluctuations in virus activity, showed that Hendra shedding was curtailed when there were unexpected pulses of winter flowering in remnant forests. The blooms provided nutrition for the flying foxes, most likely improving their health and ability to keep viruses in check.Just after sunset, flying foxes take off to feed over the Australian town of Gympie, showing how close the bats live to people.The overall trend of development and loss of foraging habitat is forcing flying foxes to move into urban and agricultural landscapes. They scavenge foods such as weeds and leaves of shade and ornamental trees, which are less nutritious, hard to digest and possibly even harmful. “It’s a choice between you starve and die or you find new sources of food,” Plowright says. “They’re really just trying to survive.” At the same time that urbanization is depriving the animals of nutrition, it is also bringing them much closer to horses and humans. Both trends increase the likelihood of virus transmission. Plowright and her colleagues found that more than two thirds of all incidents of Hendra infection in horses, as of 2010, occurred within the foraging areas of bat colonies in urban settings.Australia is certainly not alone in driving bats out of their traditional habitats, says disease ecologist Richard Suu-­Ire of the University of Ghana in Accra. In Africa, Suu-Ire’s team has identified an increasing number of Hendra-like viruses in straw-­colored fruits bats (Eidolon helvum) and also found that pigs near deforested areas or bat colonies in urban settlements have been infected by those viruses. “It’s quite alarming,” he says. This aligns with other studies that suggest cross-­species virus transmission may happen far more frequently than previously recognized.It’s become increasingly clear that disease emergence from flying mammals is about the alignment of several elements. The virus reservoir, such as a bat colony, has to be infected, and bats have to shed significant amounts of virus. The environment—including factors such as temperature and precipitation level—has to support pathogen survival. And infection victims such as horses and people must come in contact with bats or the virus that they shed. “All of these things have to align to create the perfect storm,” Plowright says.El Niño, global warming and habitat loss have conspired to catalyze this alignment with an increasing frequency. Some researchers suspect the combination might also have contributed to the emergence of COVID, although investigations into the origins of that disease are ongoing. If the link to food shortages continues to hold up, scientists may be able to predict the risk of virus shedding by simulating ecological factors, climate conditions and bat physiology. The environmental connection could also be tested to see how it affects the spread of other bat-­borne viruses—especially Nipah, one of the World Health Organization’s top-10 priority diseases for research. Killing up to three quarters of the people it infects and, unlike Hendra, capable of hu­man-­to-­hu­man transmission, the virus has caused frequent outbreaks in South and Southeast Asia since its emergence in 1998.The new findings also point at ways to lower the risk of disease emergence. One is to plant tree species that flower in winter when food shortages tend to occur and to do so away from human settlements. This could provide flying foxes with badly needed foraging habitats. Scientists say this could keep the animals healthy and away from urban settings during vulnerable times of the year. “It’s about safeguarding public health through habitat conservation,” McCallum says. And Peel’s team is working to iden­­ti­­­­fy biomarkers of deteriorating bat nutrition and health that could serve as early warnings of virus shedding. Those markers will enable researchers to fine-tune com­­puter models that predict habitat changes that elevate the risk of virus spread.Ultimately disease risks, habitat loss and climate change are all interconnected elements of the same gigantic challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Yet international initiatives have typically tackled those challenges separately, says Alice Hughes, an ecologist at the University of Hong Kong. For instance, an agreement negotiated during the past three years by WHO member states and set to be finalized in May 2025 includes few provisions that factor biodiversity loss and global warming into its strategies to prevent pandemics. “It’s a missed opportunity,” Hughes says. One hopeful sign is a global action plan that came out of the 2024 U.N. Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The plan aims to address the connections among environmental degradation, wildlife exploitation and pathogen emergence.The flying foxes missing from that March evening in 2006 pointed Plowright toward many of the interlaced elements driving elevated disease risks. It’s since become abundantly clear that virus transmission is not only about the behavior of bats. It is also deeply tied to the actions of people and our increasingly tortured relationship with nature. Repairing that relationship will require coordinated global action. Such tasks are never easy, but the benefits of success are re­­duced pandemic risks and improved health for mammals that walk on the ground and fly through the air.This reporting was supported by a grant from the Al­­fred P. Sloan Foundation.

Climate
Agriculture
Chemicals

Unified approach could improve nature, climate and health all at once

The biodiversity, climate, health, water and food crises need to be addressed together rather than regarded as separate issues, urges a major report

Tree planting projects designed to maximise carbon absorption can impact water suppliesCostfoto/NurPhoto The major environmental, social and economic crises facing the world today – involving biodiversity, climate change, health, food and water – are inextricably interlinked, and tackling them together has many benefits. Focusing on one issue alone, however, can make the other crises worse. That’s the conclusion of a major report put together by 165 experts from 57 countries over the past three years, and approved by the governments of 147 countries. The UN conventions on issues such as biodiversity and climate focus on these issues individually, says Paula Harrison at UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who co-chaired the assessment process for the report. “So what hasn’t been done before that we now do in this report is to join all of that together and show looking at these crises individually not only is inefficient but actually has a real danger,” she says. “Action is urgent but if we don’t do act in a way that takes account of these interdependences, it will try cause new problems or make existing problems worse.” Harrison says the scientific studies assessed for the report provide strong evidence that there are many actions that can be taken that have beneficial effects in all five areas simultaneously. These include conserving and restoring mangrove forests, boosting soil health and carbon content, creating early warning systems for all kinds of hazards, reducing the risk of diseases spreading from animals to humans, universal healthcare and international cooperation on related technologies. There are trade-offs, she says. The actions with wide-ranging benefits are not the same as the actions that are most optimal solution to any one problem, she says. “What you can’t do is get the highest possible value all at the same time,” Harrison says. “You can’t optimise food production and not have negative impacts on everything else, but you can have a balanced approach across them all that benefits them all.” Harrison gives the example of planting trees to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If the focus is solely on climate, the trees chosen may be fast-growing exotic species that do not support any wildlife and impact water supplies by taking up too much water. But if projects take a more holistic approach, they would choose native tree species that use less water and boost biodiversity. “They might not sequester quite as much carbon, but they will provide a lot of value for other aspects of the system,” says Harrison. There are also economic benefits to an integrated approach that helps preserve biodiversity as well as achieving other goals. The Nexus report, as it’s officially known, says that more than half of global gross domestic product – $50 trillion – is moderately to highly dependent on nature. “It is estimated that the unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to economic activity – reflecting impacts on biodiversity, water, health and climate change, including from food production –  are at least $10 to 25 trillion per year,” Pamela McElwee of Rutgers University in New Jersey, the other co-chair, said in a statement. “There’s a lot of evidence now if we carry on the way that we are, there are very strong and increasing biophysical risks to economic prosperity and financial stability,” says Harrison. The Nexus report was put together by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which is a non-UN body but works in a similar way to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report was officially approved on 16 December by representatives of the 147 member states of IPBES, meeting in Namibia. The report is very ambitious, says Anne Larigauderie, the executive secretary of IPBES. The aim is to provide the science and evidence needed to support achievement of other international treaties including the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement on climate change, she says.

Climate
Health
Nature

Drought Will Make Water Rationing Routine

So more places should practice going without.

Last winter, the mountains that shape Bogotá’s skyline more than any skyscraper were on fire. Which is strange in a place known for its abundant rainfall, but Colombia has been running low on precipitation since June 2023. In the spring of this year, the mayor began rationing water—the city and its 11 million inhabitants split into nine zones, each of which would have no water once every 10 days. My brother-in-law had told me about the plan, but by the time my family and I moved to Colombia this past summer, I’d forgotten.One afternoon, not two weeks after unpacking our bags, I tried to refill the half-empty water-purification tank in the kitchen, but when I opened the faucet, nothing happened. I went to the portero, to ask about the absence. He told me it was thanks to the mayor, though we both knew it wasn’t the mayor’s fault.In Colombia, climate change, coupled with deforestation in the Amazon and El Niño weather patterns that have become more intense, has caused a punishing and prolonged drought. The San Rafael reservoir rests above the city and is replenished by water collected in the country’s páramos––a high-alpine ecosystem known for its nearly constant moisture; as of April, when the rationing began, the reservoir was at less than 20 percent capacity. Natasha Avendaño, the general manager of El Acueducto de Bogotá, the organization responsible for the city’s water infrastructure, recently reported that this August was the driest month in the 55 years since the city started keeping track. Restrictions are unlikely to be lifted anytime soon.In our community WhatsApp chat, residents remind one another when our turn for rationing draws near. I fill up containers and deposit them throughout the house: a bucket in each of the bathrooms and a huge stockpot in the kitchen. I’m careful not to exceed what I think we will need to get by. El Acueducto sets monthly caps for households, and fines those who exceed their limits. Getting millions of people to use less water is a complicated dance, but the city tracks our collective effort by publishing the daily consumption rate and the fullness of the reservoirs from which we draw our water. “You’re nothing without water,” Angélica Villarraga, who lives in San Cristóbal and makes a living cleaning homes throughout the city, told me. Avendaño has said she hopes that rationing augments sentiments exactly like that one, and not just on days when the tap runs dry—that it helps residents recognize their dependence on water, and the need to conserve it during lean times.  El Acueducto was formed around the turn of the last century to guarantee affordable and clean drinking water in the growing metropolis, and now manages more than 30 percent of the forested mountain reserve that abuts the city. In recent years, the organization has opened nearly a dozen hiking trails in Los Cerros Orientales so that residents make the connection between these mountains and the water that fuels their lives. “The reality is there isn’t enough of this very basic resource,” Jhoan Sebastián Mora Pachón, who manages the Kilómetro 11 y 12 Quebradas trail on behalf of El Acueducto, told me. “The more people respect where the water comes from, the more likely they are to make little changes in their lives to conserve it.” Then he added, “When it is our turn for rationing, we cook more simple meals, and we only wash the dishes once, at night. It’s nice, in a way.”I have spent much of the past 15 years writing about frontline communities affected by climate change, in particular those where higher tides and stronger storms are forcing people to reimagine the way they live. I have learned that letting go of what you think you can’t live without is something a person is more willing to do if they feel that the injustice is shared equally among all. In New York City’s Staten Island, I watched neighbors band together to ask the state to purchase and demolish their flood-prone homes—on the condition that the land itself would go back to nature. Joseph Tirone, a leader of the buyout movement put it this way: “Everybody was pretty much at the same level of wealth, or lack of wealth. If their homes were going to … be knocked down so some developer could build a mansion or a luxury condo, they were not leaving. They’d stay there, they’d rot there, they’d drown there, but they were not leaving.” Eventually the state agreed with residents’ petitions, purchasing and razing hundreds of homes, the property itself becoming part of New York City’s network of parks.The rolling rationing that moves across Bogotá—and the frustration that comes with the disruption—is shared, too, and it generates, if not solidarity exactly, a feeling of mutual inconvenience. Sandra Milena Vargas, who works as a nanny in my neighborhood, told me, “We wake up early, get one last shower, just like you.” Whether one has hired help or works as a domestic laborer, every household revolves around water in much the same way.Doing environmental good is often framed in terms of personal sacrifice––less air travel, adopting a meat-free diet, turning off the heat. Water rationing in Bogotá is different in one key way: It’s a decision taken by a central institution to ensure the health and well-being of the entire city. The places that one might turn to in times of crisis––schools and hospitals, for instance––have water no matter what, to help keep the most vulnerable residents safe, but otherwise everyone is compelled to sacrifice together. “It is something we are used to, even anticipate,” Daniel Osorio, whose family has owned the Unión Libre café in the city’s Úsaquen district for more than nine years, told me. “We bring in five-gallon jugs to run the espresso machine. You adapt,” he said.These sacrifices do take a toll. “Over time you lose confidence in the city to function,” Osorio said. “That’s the real shame.” But what if periodic water rationing weren’t only implemented when the well runs dry? In the future the world is facing, preparation might mean anticipating inevitable shortages, rather than promising they’ll never occur. Imagine, for instance, that governments designated a day without water once every four months—a fire drill, but for drought. Embracing periodic utilities restrictions could be a precautionary measure, a way to prepare for and live on our climate disrupted planet.I’ve been thinking about this as, over the past few months, I have watched Valencia, Spain, be inundated by nearly a year’s worth of rain in a single day; the central high plains of the United States and much of southern Texas descend into drought; and residents across the Southeast reel after back-to-back hurricanes. No amount of preparation would have kept the French Broad River in North Carolina from rerouting straight through the center of Asheville. But those living in communities that were without power and cell service and potable water weeks afterwards might have had more backup systems in place—more buckets of water peppered throughout more homes, more generators, more solar-powered cellphone-service extenders—and muscle memory to maneuver through them, if a rationing drill had compelled them to practice.  Doing this kind of adaptive work also teaches one to cope with change. Resilience is a muscle that must be regularly exercised to keep from atrophying. And, perhaps most important, when neighbors ride out small and regular disruptions to daily life together, in many cases they develop information-sharing networks––such as our community WhatsApp chat––so that when a hurricane hits or a heat wave dismantles the grid, they already have in place the kinds of communication hubs and community organizations that make survival through upheaval easier.We can learn to be flexible in the face of change, and one task of our governing institutions is to teach us how. In July, California imposed permanent water restrictions on towns and cities, an attempt to locally respond to droughts that are expected to only get worse in the coming decades. In places where extreme heat regularly overwhelms the grid, municipalities might implement “fire drill” days without electricity. In the Northeast, where ice storms are on the rise, perhaps cutting the gas from time to time might make more sense. Periodic resource rationing would prepare us for a future that is sure to contain more days without––without water, or electricity, or heat––than today. The only thing that is certain is that the things we depend upon are no longer dependable. What better way to become more resilient to external shocks than to practice?

Water
Climate
Forests

‘Bad deal for taxpayers’: huge losses from NSW forest logging, reports reveal

Former MP astonished that taxpayers are ‘literally paying’ to cut down forests sustaining koalas and greater gliders and providing clean drinking waterGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastTwo reports revealing the extent of financial losses from native forest logging in New South Wales raise questions about the economic viability of the industry.The state government’s forestry corporation “consistently made a loss” by paying contractors more for harvesting and haulage than it earned from delivery of timber to sawmills, a NSW Independent Pricing and Review Tribunal (Ipart) report found.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading...

Two reports revealing the extent of financial losses from native forest logging in New South Wales raise questions about the economic viability of the industry.The state government’s forestry corporation “consistently made a loss” by paying contractors more for harvesting and haulage than it earned from delivery of timber to sawmills, a NSW Independent Pricing and Review Tribunal (Ipart) report found.“[Forestry Corporation of NSW’s] delivery charge does not fully recover its native timber harvesting and haulage costs, including contract and administration costs, and has not done so for at least the last 10 years,” the report said.The tribunal recommended the state government review the long-term feasibility of native timber harvesting, noting the majority of wood supply agreements were due for renewal in 2028. It also suggested ways to improve cost recovery.Ipart’s findings followed the release of the state forestry corporation’s 2023-24 annual report, which disclosed a $29m loss for its native hardwood forest division in the past year, and losses totalling $72m since 2020-21.The corporation’s annual report said poor financial returns were linked to “operational challenges” and external factors such as extreme weather, regulatory changes such as protections for koalas and greater gliders, and legal injunctions by community groups.Graham Phelan, an economist with Frontier Economics who analysed NSW forestry’s financial status in 2023, said the Ipart report was a timely and valuable contribution in the context of nature policy and forestry reform in NSW which would encourage evidence-based decision-making.Phelan said public native forestry struggled financially, offering “poor returns to taxpayers at best”. “The government should look at the economic costs and benefits of the native forestry business in NSW and consider whether community welfare is served by continuing this practice.”Poor financial performance and environmental costs were among a “myriad of reasons” why governments in Victoria and Western Australia had decided to end native timber harvesting in their states, he said.There were also benefits associated with leaving native forests standing, such as carbon sequestration, erosion control, flood mitigation and tourism, Phelan added. For example, a Victorian government report valued those benefits at up to $12bn, compared with about $89m if harvested for timber and firewood.Public native forestry was a small segment of the NSW forestry sector, he said, alongside a much larger non-native softwood plantation business that served construction and cardboard markets.According to Ipart’s report, about 9% of timber harvested in Australia was native hardwood, and NSW was the second-largest producer of native timber logs after Tasmania.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Breaking News AustraliaGet the most important news as it breaksPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionA forestry corporation spokesperson said the organisation managed nearly 2m hectares of public native forests on behalf of the NSW government, harvesting about 1% annually. Timber revenue “subsidised” management activities such as firefighting, pests, weeds, conservation and road access, which were only partly government funded.The corporation would undertake Ipart’s recommendations that related to managing prices and costs, the spokesperson said.Ipart’s review of native timber harvesting and haulage costs from 2019 to 2022 was yet to be published but has been provided to the NSW treasurer, Daniel Mookhey, and was released to the ABC under freedom of information laws.Guardian Australia has asked the NSW government for a response to Ipart’s findings.Justin Field from Forest Alliance NSW, a coalition of environmental and conservation groups, said native forestry was a “bad deal for taxpayers”.Field, formerly a member of the NSW legislative council, said it was astonishing that taxpayers were “literally paying” to cut down forests that sustained koalas and greater gliders and provided clean water for drinking.“This is just another piece of evidence to show that native forest logging in New South Wales is economically unviable. We know that it’s ecologically unsustainable, and we know that the forestry corporation has been losing money on its hardwood division for the last decade.”The report provided an opportunity for the state government to end native forest logging and shift towards an industry based on 100% sustainable plantations, he said.

Forests
Government
Water

From Water Destruction to Deadly Heat, Associated Press Photographers Capture Climate Change in 2024

After heat records were smashed and a torrent of extreme weather events rocked countless countries in 2023, some climate scientists believed that the waning of the El Nino weather pattern could mean 2024 would be slightly cooler.

After heat records were smashed and a torrent of extreme weather events rocked countless countries in 2023, some climate scientists believed that the waning of the El Nino weather pattern could mean 2024 would be slightly cooler.It didn’t happen that way. This year is expected to break 2023’s global average temperature record and the effects of the warming — more powerful hurricanes, floods, wildfires and suffocating heat — have upended lives and livelihoods. All year, Associated Press photographers around the globe have captured moments, from the brutality unleashed during extreme weather events to human resilience in the face of hardship, that tell the story of a changing Earth. January: Experiencing a changing world As seas rise, salty ocean water of the Pacific encroaches on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, hurting agriculture and the farmers and sellers who rely on it. Life for those on the Mekong now – paddling across markets and working and sleeping from houseboats – is quickly being altered. In Tahiti, the arrival of the Paris Olympics this year meant giant structures were built on one of their most precious reefs. The reefs sustain the life of sea creatures and in turn, the people of the island. February: Farming against tougher odds In many parts of the world, there were impacts when agriculture intersected with climate change. In Spain and other European countries, farmers were upset over increasing energy and fertilizer costs, cheaper farm imports entering the European Union and pesticide regulations, arguing all these changes could force them out of business. In Kenya, access to water continued to be a struggle for many, while fishers off the Indian coast of Mumbai had to contend with a rapidly warming Arabian Sea. There were bright spots, however, such as the increasing use of natural farming techniques that are more resistant to climate shocks. March: Struggling to get water More than 2 billion people around the world don’t have access to safely managed drinking water, according to the United Nations, a grim reality experienced in so many places. In Brazil, some residents collected water as it came down a mountain, while in India others filled up jugs from a street drain. Drinking from such sources can lead to many waterborne illnesses. April: Fighting to thrive For the Ojibwe tribe in the United States, spearfishing is an important tradition, one they maintained this year in the face of climate change. At the same time, in other parts of the world the impact of climate change was so severe that simply surviving was the best hope. Such was the case in Kenya, where floods took lives and forced many to evacuate, and in an Indian village where flooding is so constant that residents are constantly displaced. May: Getting forced from home When heavy rains led to massive flooding in Uruguay and Brazil, residents were forced from their homes. In both of these places, most people likely returned and were able to rebuild their lives. In other places, there was no going back. Such was the case for Quinault Indian Nation in the U.S., in the process of being relocated inland as coastal erosion threaten their homes. The Gardi Sugdub island off the coast of Panama faced a similar fate — hundreds of families are relocating to the mainland as sea levels rise. June: Suffering from heat From Mexico to Pakistan and beyond, high temperatures hit people hard. Unable to find relief, some sweated profusely while others ended up hospitalized. Many would die, such as in Saudi Arabia, where heat related illnesses killed more than 1,300 during the annual hajj pilgrimage. The heat didn't just impact people, but also oceans and animals, putting at risk some of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, such as Ecuador's Galapagos Islands. Rising temperatures and prolonged droughts create conditions for more and longer burning wildfires. One of the places that is consistently hard hit is the U.S. state of California. This year was no exception. Wildfires burned more than 1 million acres, chewed through hundreds of homes and led thousands of people to evacuate. As happens in every fire, countless animals also perished or were forced from their habitats. August: Mother nature shining through For all the destruction that climate change caused in 2024, mother nature showed off its beauty. That was on display at Churchill, Manitoba, a northern Canadian town that revels in its unofficial title as polar bear capital of the world. Like every year, tourists enjoyed stunning views of the Hudson Bay, watched beluga whales swim and, of course, came into contact with polar bears. Water is central for humans and animals, but it can also take lives and leave a path of destruction. It did both in 2024. The scenes were shocking: students in India using rope to cross a flooded street, a little girl in Cuba floating in a container and Nigerians wading through floodwaters after a dam collapsed in the wake of heavy rains. October: Experiencing extremes Throughout the year, there was way too much water in some places and not enough in others, increasingly common as climate change alters natural weather patterns. In the Sahara Desert in Morocco, heavy rain left sand dunes with pools of water. By contrast, the Amazon region in South America, normally lush as a largely tropical area, experienced severe drought. November: Astonishing destruction Around the world, numerous storms unleashed powerful winds and dumped large amounts of water. The result: buildings and homes that looked like they had been hit with a wrecking ball, clothes and other household goods caked in mud and scattered on the ground, and residents walking through floodwaters. December: Looking to 2025 As the end of 2024 approached, the arrival of winter in the Northern Hemisphere meant relief from the heat in the form of cold temperatures and idyllic scenes like snow-frosted trees. But there were also reminders that global warming had already altered Earth so much that climate-driven disasters, such as raging wildfires even during winter months, are never far off. While impossible to predict when and where disaster may strike, one thing is all but certain in 2025: the storms, floods, heat waves, droughts and wildfires will continue. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Climate
Water
Animals

Opinion: Gov. Newsom, no more delays in shutting Aliso Canyon down

The California Public Utilities Commission proposed to keep the natural gas field open without a closure deadline. That would run afoul of our energy needs and health.

It was a cold, breezy October evening in 2015 when a foul odor swept through neighborhoods in the north San Fernando Valley. The smell — reminiscent of rotten eggs — invaded homes, forcing residents to seal windows and doors in vain. Soon many fell ill with headaches, rashes, nosebleeds and nausea. Those symptoms were only the beginning of a disaster that unfolded over the next 112 days.A massive gas leak at Aliso Canyon released 97,000 metric tonnes of methane, 7,300 tonnes of ethane, and other gases, forming carcinogens and smog. The blowout — one of the largest natural gas releases in U.S. history — upended lives and routines. More than 8,000 families had to be relocated, with both humans and pets experiencing health complications. The event highlighted the inherent risks of an aging fossil fuel infrastructure.Nine years later, scars of the disaster remain visible. Southern California Gas Co., which owns the facility, agreed to a $71 million settlement last year to address environmental concerns resulting from the disaster. Affected communities are still grappling with health issues and continue to push for the permanent closure of the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility. In 2017, Gov. Jerry Brown directed the California Energy Commission to develop a plan to close Aliso Canyon permanently, and the commission planned to do so within a decade. When Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, he pledged to accelerate that timeline, saying 2027 wasn’t fast enough and agreeing closure was a top priority. Yet not only has no progress been made — under the Newsom administration, Aliso Canyon gas storage levels have increased.Last month, the California Public Utilities Commission proposed to keep Aliso Canyon open and not set a closure deadline. This plan would defer exploration of a shutdown until SoCalGas’ projected peak natural gas demand drops below a specified threshold, which according to current estimates would happen after 2030. The commission’s upcoming vote on Dec. 19 could jeopardize California’s climate goals and expose nearby communities to ongoing health risks.California has made significant strides in reducing reliance on gas, cutting usage by 20.2% between October 2015 and October 2024, with electricity-related gas use dropping 25.9%. This progress has been driven by growth in energy efficiency as well as the use of batteries, electric heat pumps, and solar and wind sources. There have been setbacks such as a 50% decline in rooftop solar installations in 2024, following the public utilities commission’s 2022 decision to slash by 75% payments to new residential solar customers for excess solar output they send to the grid. Even so, by the end of July, the state set a record this year: 100 days of 100% renewable-powered electricity for up to 10 hours at a time.These clean energy advancements demonstrate that California can meet its grid reliability needs without gas. Southern California Edison has testified that Aliso Canyon can close by 2027 while maintaining reliability, provided that batteries ordered by the California Public Utilities Commission meet expectations — which they have so far exceeded. CPUC studies confirm 2027 as a feasible target year, emphasizing how investments in building electrification and energy efficiency improvements can cut winter peak demand and eliminate reliance on Aliso Canyon. But we need to seize the moment.With respect to gas for heating, the California Energy Commission has set an ambitious target of installing 6 million heat pumps statewide by 2030, sending a strong market signal to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels. Widespread deployment of heat pumps will be made possible by measures including the state’s Equitable Building Decarbonization program, with $525 million in funds, and the public utilities commission’s TECH initiative, supported by $40 million in state funding that prioritizes supporting Aliso Canyon communities. Expanding these efforts is crucial to reducing our use of gas.The benefits of clean, renewable energy solutions extend beyond ensuring comfortable homes and a reliable power grid. Electrifying and retrofitting buildings could create 100,000 construction jobs and 4,900 manufacturing jobs annually for 25 years in California, according to a UCLA study. Investments in electric heat pumps and building efficiency would benefit disadvantaged communities by reducing pollution and improving air quality, particularly in the low-income areas where fossil-fuel infrastructure has historically been built.Gov. Newsom faces a straightforward opportunity to facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels and permanently close Aliso Canyon. With declining gas consumption, growing clean energy capacity and available solutions, the case for closure has never been stronger. More than 100 scientists and scholars have joined me in sending a letter to Gov. Newsom urging him to close Aliso Canyon by 2027.The governor’s role in driving California’s global climate leadership has never been more important, especially in the face of a federal government aiming to increase fossil fuel use. He should continue standing up to fossil-fuel interests, keep his promise to protect the health and safety of Los Angeles and other California communities, and shut Aliso down.Mark Jacobson is a professor of civil and engineering at Stanford and the author of “No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air.”

Energy
Health
Government

Texas regulators report more than 250 new cases of groundwater contamination

An annual report documents 2,870 active cases of groundwater contamination around the state. Groundwater provides more than half of the state’s water supply.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. Texas agencies reported 252 new cases of groundwater contamination during 2023 in the Texas Groundwater Protection Committee annual report. The latest report compiles 2,870 open cases of groundwater contamination, some of which date back decades. Nearly every county in Texas is impacted by the problem. During 2023, Texas regulators notified 34 local authorities — from El Paso to Houston — that newly-identified contamination could impact their public drinking water. An additional 289 property owners were notified that groundwater contamination may impact their private wells. Groundwater contamination is costly to remediate and can linger for years or indefinitely. Public water utilities test their wells for regulated contaminants and shut off wells when necessary. But the contamination risk is more insidious at private water wells, which are not subject to water quality standards. Texas relies on groundwater from aquifers for about 55% of its water supply. As the population grows and the climate changes, groundwater will make up an even larger piece of the pie. Texas voters created a $1 billion fund in 2023 to develop more water resources for the state, including desalination of brackish groundwater. “Any groundwater contamination is a cause for concern,” said Adam Foster, the director of the Texas Alliance of Groundwater Districts. “It needs to be reported properly and addressed.” Annual report summarizes contamination The Texas Groundwater Protection Committee brings together nine state agencies and TAGD, the alliance of groundwater districts. The protection committee coordinates the activities of these agencies under Texas law, which requires that “groundwater be kept reasonably free of contaminants that interfere with present and potential uses of groundwater.” The committee releases an annual report on groundwater contamination confirmed in the previous year. This year’s report, released in October, covers groundwater contamination documented in 2023. The report, and a map with the location of existing groundwater contamination, is available on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality website. TCEQ, the state’s environmental regulator, and the Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas drilling and other extractive industries, both document cases of groundwater contamination in their jurisdiction for the report. The most important Texas news,sent weekday mornings. Eighty percent of the existing contamination cases, or 2,321 cases, fall under the TCEQ. The remaining cases are with the Railroad Commission. Currently there are 224 public water supply wells that are considered contaminated, according to the report. There are approximately 17,900 public water supply wells in the state. But the agency indicated that two public water supply wells were added to the list in 2023. The first is the Hart Municipal Water Supply in Castro County in the Panhandle, where benzene and total xylenes were found. TCEQ spokesperson Richard Richter said the source is unknown but the water utility remains in compliance with regulations. The second is the Grayson Business Park in South Houston, where chlorobenzene and vinyl chloride were found. The single most common groundwater pollution source in Texas is gas stations, which make up a third of all the cases. For that reason gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes are the most common contaminants of groundwater. In some cases the source of contamination is unknown. New groundwater contamination confirmed in 2023 included chlorinated solvents at a dry cleaner in Collin County, total petroleum hydrocarbons from a pipeline leak in Nueces County and per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, at the Austin Bergstrom International Airport. “If TCEQ-regulated activities do impact groundwater, TCEQ will investigate the possible source of contamination and notify well owners in the vicinity of any groundwater contamination,” Richter wrote in an email. Richter said that companies or individuals violating state water protection laws are issued a notice of violation or enforcement, depending on the severity of the violation. “In either case, the respondent would be required to undertake all corrective action necessary,” he said. Groundwater pollution can impact plans for future water supplies. The city of Midland bought a property in Winkler County decades ago to ensure a long-term water supply. What the city didn’t count on was groundwater contamination from legacy oil and gas operations. The city is in the midst of a multimillion -dollar remediation effort. The report says TCEQ uses a “risk-based” approach to groundwater contamination. The report notes that in some cases it is not “technically possible or cost effective” to remediate the groundwater. In addition to the 2,870 active cases of groundwater contamination, regulators have closed the files on thousands of others. In some cases, regulators remediate groundwater to meet safety standards. In other cases, regulators leave the contaminated groundwater in place and adopt restrictions, known as institutional controls, to limit use of the water. These controls can include covenants to prevent the groundwater from being used in the future. TCEQ’s Richter said the agency does not track what proportion of cases are remediated as opposed to adopting controls to restrict use of the groundwater. TCEQ encourages members of the public seeking more information on groundwater contamination cases to contact the agency or submit public record requests. Report raises questions for rural groundwater and private wells Groundwater management is essential as the Texas economy grows and surface water availability, such as rivers and reservoirs, stays flat or declines. “As the state continues to grow we’re relying more and more on our groundwater resources,” said TAGD’s Foster. “Pretty much all of our surface water is permitted so there’s really not any more access to surface water.” Agriculture is the biggest consumer of groundwater statewide, according to the Texas Water Development Board. Reliance on groundwater varies around the state, which is divided into water planning regions. In region F, which stretches from the Permian Basin east toward San Antonio, groundwater makes up more than 80% of the water supply. In Region K, which covers the Lower Colorado River including Travis County, groundwater provides only 28% of the water supply. Groundwater hydrologist Ronald Green, a contractor with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said groundwater testing in rural Texas is often limited. Green has advised groundwater districts in South Texas and the Permian Basin and found there has been little groundwater testing in rural areas with active oil and gas drilling. For that reason he thinks the actual number of groundwater contamination cases could be much higher than the report’s total. “There just are so few wells and so few samples of wells that have been collected and analyzed,” he said of those areas. “There’s no way you have an accurate reflection of how the groundwater has been impacted.” He said most testing is conducted around cities with municipal wells. “You find it where the light shines on it,” he said. That could be concerning for the more than 1 million Texans who rely on water from private wells, which are not subject to state and federal water safety standards. Well owners are responsible for the safety of their water. TCEQ mailed notices to 289 private well owners during 2023 about contamination potentially impacting their wells. Notices were sent to well owners in Northwest Houston near Ashburn Industries and in Bridge City near the Louisiana state line, among other locations. TAGD’s Foster recommends that private well owners test their water at least once a year. He said testing for indicator compounds can identify potential issues for more targeted testing. “A lot of groundwater districts have testing programs where you can come in and get your water tested for free or at a significantly reduced cost,” he said. The Texas Water Development Board also provides informational resources for private well owners. At least one state representative is eyeing additional resources for groundwater in Texas. Rep. Cody Harris, a Republican from East Texas, introduced House Bill 1400 for the upcoming 2025 legislative session. The bill would create a Groundwater Science Research and Innovation Fund that would fund activities to improve groundwater science, improve efficiency of groundwater use and protect groundwater quality.

Water
Agriculture
Climate

Why it’s so hard to create a truly recyclable Keurig coffee pod

A company is betting on aluminum to solve K-cups’ sustainability problem. But experts say it’s complicated.

There’s a Keurig machine in some 40 million households in the U.S. Single-serve coffee brewing systems — which allow consumers to make just one cup of coffee at a time by feeding a pod into a slot and pressing a button — have soared in popularity since the early 2000s.  Inevitably, this leads to a lot of trash.  Every cup of java brewed creates a conundrum: what to do with the coffee pod that produced it. To start, can it be recycled? The answer, in Keurig’s case, is not really. The company’s single-use coffee pods — also known as K-cups — are made of polypropylene plastic, a material that experts warn is not as recyclable as consumers have been led to think. Two of the country’s largest recycling companies have said they do not accept K-cup pods, and one environmental group calculated that if you lined up all the K-cup pods in the world’s landfills side by side, they would comfortably circle the globe 10 times.  A new coffee pod company claims to have developed a solution to Keurig’s plastic waste problem. Cambio Roasters, which launched in September, offers a Keurig-compatible coffee pod that’s made out of aluminum — which, unlike plastic, is infinitely recyclable. Cambio is led by a team of former Keurig employees, including founder and CEO Kevin Hartley, who was previously a chief innovation officer at Keurig Green Mountain, as the company was formerly known. “This is, in our view, the most exciting innovation in coffee since the K-cup,” said Hartley during a launch-day press call for Cambio.   Experts, however, aren’t sure that Cambio understands just how big of a problem K-cups pose to curbside recycling systems.  “Really, plastic is just not a good option,” said Jeremy Pare, a visiting professor of business and environment at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. But even aluminum, with all its benefits, is “still going to have issues.” Part of the difficulty of creating a truly recyclable packaging option — for just about any consumer good — is the severely fragmented nature of the American recycling landscape. “There are over 10,000 recycling systems in the U.S.,” said Pare, who is also a member of the Plastic Pollution Working Group at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. “And yet, at the same time, only a quarter of the population has access to recycling in the U.S.” (Pare lives in one such community with no formal recycling program, just outside of Augusta, Maine.) In the U.S., the question of whether something is recyclable can only accurately be answered on a local level. Read Next The best coffee for the planet might not be coffee at all L.V. Anderson Another problem is the plastic composition of most K-cup pods. Sustainability concerns have followed the Keurig brand closely as it has scaled. (Once a small startup, Keurig was acquired by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in 2006; in 2018, Keurig Green Mountain merged with Dr Pepper Snapple to become Keurig Dr Pepper.) Keurig started selling K-cups pods made of polypropylene in 2016, with the goal of making 100 percent of K-cup pods “recyclable” by 2020. But the company has run into trouble for touting recyclability. In 2018, a California resident sued Keurig for claiming that K-cup pods could be recycled after the foil lid was removed and the coffee grounds were rinsed or dumped out — which resulted in Keurig agreeing to pay $10 million in a class-action settlement. And in September of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Keurig for falsely claiming the pods “can be effectively recycled.” (Keurig settled the claim by agreeing to pay a $1.5 million penalty fee.)  Hartley, who left Keurig in 2017, knew consumers wanted a plastic-free K-cup option — and after years of prototypes and testing, he and his team settled on aluminum as an easier-to-recycle alternative. Aluminum is also impervious to oxygen, which causes coffee to lose its flavor over time. “Whenever we brew a cup of coffee, it tastes exactly as the roastmaster intended,” said Hartley.  Cambio Roasters launched earlier this year as a plastic-free alternative for Keurig coffee pods. Cambio Roasters / Chrisman Studios Cambio isn’t the first single-serve coffee company to opt to ditch plastic or invest in circularity. Nespresso, a popular single-serve coffee company that’s owned by the Nestlé Group, has made its capsules out of aluminum for over 30 years. In 2020, Nespresso announced that its pods would be made of 80 percent recycled aluminum, and it claims its global recycling rate is 32 percent.  But Nespresso pods only work in Nespresso machines. Because Cambio coffee pods are designed to work with Keurig models, Hartley hopes to give consumers what they want “without having to buy a new brewer.” Cambio also allows users to peel back the lid and dump out the grounds before recycling. Nespresso pod lids are difficult to remove, and the company instructs users to recycle their pods as is, grounds and all — but they’re only approved for curbside recycling in New York City and Jersey City, where a designated recycling contractor cleans them out before reprocessing them. (Nespresso consumers can also mail used pods back to the manufacturer for recycling, or drop them off at Nespresso stores.) Unfortunately, swapping plastic for aluminum doesn’t automatically solve K-cup pods’ recyclability crisis, experts say. What really prevents coffee pods, regardless of what they’re made of, from having a second life is their size.  After collection, recyclables are sorted at a facility known as a materials recovery facility, or MRF. MRFs aren’t equipped to collect small items — a common rule of thumb is that they can’t handle anything smaller than a credit card — and so small objects placed in recycling bins often wind up getting sent to landfills. “The K-cups are so small that they fall through” the machinery in many recycling facilities, said Pare. “So other than separating” coffee pods from the waste stream “individually, there’s no good way to recycle them.”  Cambio’s approach to working around this is two-pronged. First, the company says it wants consumers to stack used K-cup pods together — and then pinch them closed — to overcome many recycling facilities’ size requirements. Three or more used K-cup pods should create a piece of aluminum large enough to fit through the machinery at recycling facilities, says Hartley. (These instructions don’t currently appear on Cambio’s packaging or website.) Nespresso instructs consumers to recycle their used coffee pods as is, grounds and all. Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images Cambio says it is also developing a device that will make this stacking and pinching of used K-cups easier. “Think of this device as an easy way for consumers to bundle cups together and then toss into their recycling bin,” said Hartley. He added that the company has filed for patents for second-generation Cambio pods that can be “snapped” together after use. Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and an environmental nonprofit founder, said, “I don’t think aluminum pods are a meaningful improvement,” citing their small size as a barrier to being accepted and sorted via curbside recycling systems. “Think of the pods like confetti: impossible to collect back up.” Cambio disagreed with Dell’s characterization of the switch to aluminum, pointing out that currently, essentially no single-use plastic pods are recycled, whereas aluminum can be endlessly recycled. “To Cambio and consumers, these two facts are meaningful.” Hartley also shared that the work of ensuring Cambio’s compatibility with recycling programs across the country is “ongoing.” The company is planning to run tests with MRFs in specific markets “as soon as feasible.” In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson from Keurig Dr Pepper said, “We know our consumers want simplicity and less waste.” They shared that the company has “been lightweighting our pods to reduce the amount of plastic used,” as well as “increasing options for recycling them,” including a soon-to-be-launched program in which customers will be able to mail their used pods to Keurig for recycling. The spokesperson also said the company is “continually exploring” more “sustainable packaging” options.  Dell leads the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup, which is focused on fighting plastic pollution. The ultimate solution to Keurig’s plastic footprint, she said, is a product that eliminates “the need to collect anything back from customers,” like a fiber-based pod that can be composted along with the grounds. Keurig is currently testing a plant-based pod format that won’t have any plastic or aluminum, and the company expects it to be certified compostable, according to the Keurig Dr Pepper spokesperson. Hartley said he worked on that product for many years, calling it “an amazing innovation.”  But these coffee pucks, which are not yet available for sale, will require an entirely new machine to run. “It’s going to take a long time before America is going to throw away 40 or 50 million brewers and buy 40 or 50 million new brewers,” said Hartley. He added, referring to his time with Keurig, “I won’t tell publicly how much money we spent to start from zero and have 50 million American households loving their Keurigs. But it’s a big lift, and it takes decades.”  In an interview with the Atlantic in 2015, the inventor of the K-cup said, “I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it.” As the market for single-serve coffee brewers grows, so will its impact on the environment, unless its products are somehow wildly reimagined and redesigned. Keurigs and Nespresso machines are marketed as both convenient and luxurious, a combination that is likely to keep drawing in new market segments.  But eco-conscious coffee brewers can rest easy in the knowledge that you don’t need a Keurig or Nespresso machine to brew one cup of coffee at a time; any coffee maker can be single-serve if you use only the water and coffee grounds you actually need. No pods required — maybe just a filter.   This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why it’s so hard to create a truly recyclable Keurig coffee pod on Dec 17, 2024.

Business
Chemicals
Crisis

Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation

“Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.” Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps […] The post Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation appeared first on Civil Eats.

In the heart of Louisiana, about 100 miles north of Baton Rouge, lies the rain-soaked farm that lured Konda Mason away from California in 2020. Reflecting on her journey to the South, the entrepreneur and spiritual teacher has no regrets about relocating from Oakland to the small city of Alexandria to start growing rice. She chuckles while explaining how she got there: in an RV with two loved ones and two dogs. But a hint of frustration creeps into her voice when she talks about the weather. Planting the Seeds of JusticeThis article is part of our ongoing series, Planting the Seeds of Justice, in which we focus on the connections between climate, health, soil health, and equity for farmers of color. Read all the stories in this series: A Black-Led Agricultural Community Takes Shape in Maryland An urban farm trailblazer begins building a Black agrarian corridor in rural Maryland, fostering community and climate resilience. Land access was the first step. Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation Jubilee Justice grows rice regeneratively while reclaiming the past. “Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.” Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps small-holder Black farmers in the South grow specialty rice with the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a “dry-land” method developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of growing rice in flooded paddies to prevent weeds from overtaking the crop, SRI farmers treat rice like a vegetable, irrigating it as needed and using other weed control methods. “What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.” Created on Madagascar and practiced in about 60 countries today, SRI has been shown to increase grain yields, sometimes twofold. The method also tackles the significant climate impact of conventional rice production. Methane emissions created by flooded rice paddies account for about 10 percent of global agricultural emissions. That’s because so much rice is grown around the world: Roughly 11 percent of all arable land is devoted to this crop, a daily staple for half the people on Earth. Per calorie, though, rice produces fewer emissions than most staple foods, including meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and even other grains like wheat and corn. And growing rice with SRI can cut those emissions nearly in half. (Rice has other issues, namely that it can contain high amounts of arsenic, depending on the variety and where it’s grown; however, rice grown under drier conditions, like SRI, likely has less arsenic.) Despite all the advantages of SRI, it’s scarcely practiced in the U.S. because it requires specialized equipment, involves a lot more labor, and is extremely difficult to pull off. “That’s why people think we’re crazy,” Mason said. But she has powerful reasons to focus on rice despite the challenges. For Mason, rice represents a way to transform lives and reclaim the past, offering a path toward racial, economic, and climate justice. A Flow of Knowledge Jubilee Justice’s rice program, called the Black Farmers Cohort, currently consists of 10 farmers from Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Collectively, they cultivate seven different varieties, including the organization’s signatures: “Black Joy,” “Creole Country Red,” “Black Belt Sticky,” and “Jubilee Justice Jasmine.” The team in Alexandria is testing 20 more varieties at their 17-acre farm, located on a former cotton plantation that serves as the central research hub for crop and equipment trials. Mason notes that knowledge flows out as much as it flows in, because everyone is learning. At the Jubilee Justice farm in Alexandria, Louisiana, rice is farmed with a “dry-land” method called System of Rice Intensification (SRI). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice) “We are basically figuring it out year by year,” explained Erika Styger, director of the Climate-Resilient Farming Systems Program at Cornell University. A leading provider of SRI technical assistance to small-holder farmers worldwide, Styger has been a Jubilee Justice advisor since the Black Farmers Cohort began in 2019. Jublilee Justice is the only organization in the U.S. “actively implementing and systematically researching the [SRI] method organically, regeneratively, and in collaboration with multiple farmers,” she said. Essentially, these farmers are the vanguards of a grand Southern experiment—part of what makes their work so challenging. SRI can take years to adjust to a single farming operation and microclimate, Styger said, and having farmers around who have already done it successfully and can share their wisdom minimizes a “difficult” and “fragile” learning period. Being the first ones to pursue SRI on U.S. soil, Jubilee Justice doesn’t have this option. “It takes a lot of knowledge and fine-tuning, and you need to be ready to adapt to different situations,” she added. Styger thinks the growing pains are worth it, though: “In the long run, of course, you’re building a much-improved system that will be able to withstand climate change much better.” With SRI, farmers can cut by half the typical 800 to 5,000 liters of water used to grow one kilogram of rice, resulting in a 43 percent reduction in methane emissions, according to a brief by Styger and her Cornell colleague Norman Uphoff. While SRI may slightly increase nitrous oxide emissions, Styger and Uphoff found its advantages outweigh the potential downsides: SRI has been shown to lower the global warming potential of rice production by 25 percent on average. Caryl Levine, co-founder of Lotus Foods, a California-based company specializing in SRI with farmers in Asia and Southeast Asia, says dryland rice farming is gaining popularity because “it’s much more regenerative” than conventional flooding. Still, it’s taken decades for the practice to spread. Lotus Foods primarily works with farmers overseas, but teamed up with Mason to work on bringing Jubilee Justice rice to market. “It was a long-term goal of Lotus Foods to work with domestic farmers who are willing to use SRI practices,” Levine has said. With as many challenges as successes these past four years, the Black Farmers Cohort has yet to meet the volume threshold for Lotus to put their rice on grocery store shelves. Mason remains optimistic, though, saying, “We’re getting there.” In November, her farm in Alexandria achieved a milestone by harvesting its first full acre of rice after three years of smaller trials, marking their best harvest yet. Jubilee Justice supplies farmers who are a part of the Black Farmers Cohort with everything they need to get started with SRI, including seeds, equipment, minerals, fertilizers, labor support, and technical assistance. In addition to funding from small family foundations, the organization received a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2021. MacArthur described the organization as “transformative,” providing support to “Black farming communities through new models of regenerative farming, cooperative ownership, and access to new markets by restoring and accelerating Black land ownership to create generational wealth.” Honoring Their Ancestors Mason started forming the Black Farmers Cohort and bringing in a network of experts to ensure their success about eight months before she left California. She’d already had multiple careers, managing a Grammy-nominated musician, producing an Academy Award-nominated film, and founding a co-working space in downtown Oakland, Impact Hub, an incubator for entrepreneurs, creatives, and environmentally conscious organizations. Jubilee Justice Specialty Foods co-op members. Top row, left to right: James Coleman, Roy Mosley, Hilery Gobert, Collie Graddick, and CJ Fields. Bottom row, left to right: Jose Gonzalez, Konda Mason, Bernard Singleton, and visiting farmer Rodney Mason (not a member of the co-op). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice) Mason’s choice to focus on rice was an intentional nod to America’s intertwined racial, economic, and environmental histories: Around the end of the 17th century, before “king cotton” blanketed Southern fields, American colonists in the South Carolina Lowcountry recognized the potential to profit from cultivating rice along coastal waterways. “But the American colonists had no experience with the cultivation of rice, and they needed African slaves who knew how to plant, harvest, and process this difficult crop,” writes anthropologist Joseph A. Opala. The colonists set their sights on the peoples of Africa’s “Rice Coast,” from present-day Senegal down to Liberia, who had developed sophisticated rice cultivation systems. Opala says plantation owners were willing to pay higher prices for dragging these expert farmers across the Atlantic into North American slavery. Over two centuries, hundreds of thousands of acres were cleared to establish rice plantations, shaping the Southern economy and landscape. “After emancipation, Black folks left and walked away from our birthright to be rice farmers,” said Mason. “What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.” Even the name Jubilee Justice suggests reclamation and restoration. Mason was inspired by the “Jubilee Year,” referenced in the Bible, signifying a cycle that occurred every 50 years when “land that was taken goes back to its original owner, debts are forgiven, and people who have been enslaved are set free,” said Mason. “It’s a year of reboot and equity and justice.” Challenges of a Changing Climate Louisiana is known for being a wet state, but this year’s unusually long and rainy spring prevented Mason’s team from planting rice until summer, putting their young crops at risk of wilting in the field. Across the Black Farmers Cohort, many attribute their climate challenges to relentless rains and intense heat. In 2023, Louisiana got so hot that its governor declared a state of emergency. “It’s like the spigot turned off, which was the rain, and the heat turned up,” said Donna Isaacs, who runs Campti Field of Dreams, a nonprofit with a 43-acre organic farm in Campti, Louisiana. “You would walk on what was supposed to be grass and you heard crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. That’s how bad it was last year.” Most of Campti’s land is dedicated to livestock, including sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, while 2.5 acres are reserved for vegetables. (The farm is working toward organic certification.) Only a fraction of the land, around a quarter acre, is devoted to rice. Isaacs had never grown rice before meeting Mason and thought the crop was a money suck. “My understanding of rice at the time was, you were only getting a few cents per pound, so growing it was not cost-effective,” Isaacs explained in her Jamaican accent. When Mason told Isaacs there was no financial outlay to join the Black Farmers Cohort, it was easier for her to take a chance on rice. Isaacs’ face lit up as she reminisced about their “amazing” first harvest of four varieties. Last year was different, though: Campti lost most of its rice crops to drought and heat. Half their livestock died, too. This spring, they encountered the opposite problem, facing the same cold and wet conditions as Mason’s team, which left them unable to plant rice at all. In Richmond, Kentucky, near the foothills of Appalachia, cohort member Brian Chadwell had no trouble planting rice this year. But he’s been battling heat and weeds ever since. Chadwell lost about half of his rice crops to weeds last year, which was Kentucky’s fourth warmest on record. State climatologist Jerry Brotzge told Civil Eats that Kentucky is on track to surpass that record this year. Chadwell dreams of establishing a wholly organic SRI operation. For now, he’s reluctantly laying plastic mulch and spraying Roundup to suppress weeds. He’s learned how to make gradual shifts in his operation with guidance from Jubilee Justice and his idol, Nazirahk Amen of Purple Mountain Organics, a Louisiana-born farmer and naturopathic doctor living in Takoma Park, Maryland. Amen isn’t part of the Black Farmers Cohort because he’d been growing rice regeneratively for years by the time Jubilee Justice got started. Still, he faces some of the same challenges. He anticipates that of the 1.5 acres he devoted to growing rice this year, approximately 80 percent of his red rice and 20 percent of another variety will be lost to blast, a fungal disease he says is worsened by the drought conditions his region experienced this summer. “Like, why do I farm?” Amen said, laughing. “At some point, I was telling people that I feel like [the biblical character] Job. Like, I don’t know what else could go wrong.” Driven by the healing power of nutritious food for his family and patients, Amen continues doing what farmers do best: adapting. “We’re not doing true SRI,” Amen said about Purple Mountain Organics. “We’re doing practical SRI.” He’s adjusted some of the principles to make the system work for him. At one point, he imported two combines from Japan specifically designed for rice. “They have a system of production that we don’t have [in the U.S.],” he noted, pointing out that their combines are well-suited to SRI because their plant spacing is similar to the 25-x-25-centimeter spacing that SRI recommends, giving plants more space to grow. When Mason visited Amen in 2021 to learn about his operation, he sold her one of his combines and delivered it personally. “I’m so grateful,” Mason said. “He saved my life.” Experience has taught Amen that it’s advantageous to diversify his crops so that if one fails, another might thrive. (He was pleased to hear that the Black Farmers Cohort is doing the same; they’re currently experimenting with red wheat, black corn, indigo, and more.) But given the overall risks involved in specialty rice farming, he believes the only way to survive is to account for losses by raising consumer pricing. “I don’t think it’s possible for farmers to do this below $6 or $8 or $10 a pound—even in the South,” he said. Drying rice at the Jubilee Justice mill, November 2024. (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice) Despite the losses Isaacs experienced, she estimates that her farm in Campti could save $10,000 a month by growing SRI rice and other grains they can use in livestock feed. Building up soil health and improving its water-holding capacity to better withstand climate events will be an added benefit. “What started out as a quarter of an acre of rice may end up becoming 10 acres twice a year,” Isaacs said. To avoid potential barriers to planting next year, the Campti team is planting cover crops early and building new infrastructure—investments that she estimates will cost over $20,000 and incalculable sweat equity. Rice, Racism, and Repair Many Black farmers face challenges in securing the credit essential for operating their farms, let alone preparing for climate-related disasters. Barriers to owning, operating, and modernizing farmland date back over a century. In 1910, Black farmers were 14 percent of the U.S. farming population but account for only 1.4 percent today. Black farmers lost 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997, due to a combination of racial terrorism, forced property sales, and discriminatory USDA policies that the agency has said were “designed to benefit those with access, education, assets, [and] privilege rather than for those without.” All that acreage, most of which was in the South, is worth roughly $326 billion today, according to a 2022 study. Recent federal efforts to repair this history of anti-Black harm have faced backlash, with claims of discrimination against white farmers. In response, Congress opened discrimination payments to farmers of all racial backgrounds. In July, the USDA announced it had distributed about $2 billion to more than 40,000 farmers who endured past discrimination. To date, the agency has not shared what percentage of these payments went to Black farmers, although more than half of the recipients were in Mississippi and Alabama, states that boast the largest populations of Black agricultural producers. In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations. Recognizing that Black farmers are often under-resourced and need forms of capital beyond what Jubilee Justice provides, Mason and Mark Watson, former managing director of the Fair Food Fund, co-founded a sister organization called Potlikker Capital in 2020. Potlikker Capital provides grants and loans meant to “nourish farmers, not to be extractive,” as Mason put it. (A potlikker recipe in a cookbook by her friend, the renowned chef Bryant Terry, inspired the name.) According to Watson, Potlikker invests in rural Black, Indigenous, and farmers of color through a mix of grants, loans, and equity. Instead of making decisions based on credit scores or tax returns, Potlikker takes a “relational” and “holistic” approach to funding by visiting farmers regularly and building relationships with them, reviewing their business plans, and making introductions to distributors and lawyers “to create more supportive ecosystems for BIPOC farmers to thrive,” Watson said. In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations. During an earlier Jubilee Justice program called “Our Ancestral Journey,” Mason crossed paths with Elisabeth Keller, whose family owns the former plantation in Alexandria that now serves as the Jubilee Justice headquarters. Their relationship deepened over the course of the two-year program, which brought together people from different backgrounds to delve into their genealogical roots and reimagine capitalism, “healing backwards in order to heal forward,” as noted in an annual report. Mason and Keller found an affinity in the work they wanted to do: Keller had transformed part of the plantation into an organic farm but hadn’t figured out how to “heal the land” from the trauma inflicted on the enslaved peoples and sharecroppers who’d labored there. When Mason came up with the idea for the Black Farmers Cohort and was still looking for a place to begin, she remembers Keller saying, “Konda, bring Jubilee Justice here to this land.” Farmer Donna Isaacs, part of Jubilee Justice’s Black Farmers Cohort, with harvested rice at her farm in Campti, Louisiana, August 2021. (Photo courtesy of Donna Isaacs) Jubilee Justice recently expanded its initial lease from 5 acres to 17, which now includes Elisabeth Keller’s organic farm. In 2022, the Keller family gave the organization the deed to a piece of land with a building that now houses the first cooperatively Black-owned rice mill in the U.S., enabling Black farmers to cut out middlemen and own their means of production. Mason’s journey bears a striking resemblance to that of Charley Bordelone West, the mill founder in the television series Queen Sugar, though the show predates Jubilee Justice. (It’s worth noting that Natalie Baszile, who wrote Queen Sugar, is now on Mason’s board of directors.) Like Bordelone, Mason is out to build a durable model of Black self-determination. Taking a break at the mill during the busy November harvest, Mason voiced her fatigue after an equipment failure left her team to manually process 3,000 pounds of rice by spreading it out on tarps and using fans and rakes to dry it. It was the fourth day of grueling shifts, and her weary eyes reflected both exhaustion and pride in the farmers’ accomplishments. The cohort was scheduled to arrive the following week to decide on their path forward. Despite the rollercoaster nature of their startup journey, Mason felt invigorated by their progress. “There’s so many people waiting for the rice—and nobody more so than me,” said Mason. “I’m hoping that we’ll get all the channels that are available to us.” Mason stressed that Jubilee Justice is not a project but a legacy, meant to live beyond her. “This is not about me. It’s not about condemnation . . . This is justice work and healing work.” For Mason, producing rice organically and regeneratively, with Black farmers in the South, goes beyond climate action. Rice is a conduit for honoring ancestral practices and the long-existing bond Black people have with “the land and earth and interconnectedness of all life,” she said. “Nobody can take that away.” The post Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Spending Christmas with ‘Dr. Doom’

How my climate-obsessed dad brought our family closer together.

I was 11 years old the year my older stepsister brought her high school boyfriend home for the first time. It was Thanksgiving in 2006, and his Southern manners fit right in as we bantered between mouthfuls of cornbread stuffing, fried okra, and marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole. Then, in the overstuffed lull before the desserts were served, my dad plunked his laptop in the center of the table. He opened it up and began clicking through a PowerPoint presentation chock full of data on ice sheet melt and global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.  My stepsister’s eyes grew wide with embarrassment. In an effort to welcome her sweetheart to the family, my dad had rolled out his version of a red carpet: one of his many family lectures on the horrors of climate change.  This wasn’t the first — or last — time my dad’s climate obsession took center stage at our family gatherings. On that particular occasion, he was doling out factoids about Arctic amplification — the prevalence of which was then a debate among climate scientists. It was just a warm-up to a typical holiday season spent quibbling over the ethics of farmed Christmas trees and openly scoffing at scientific inaccuracies during a movie theater showing of Happy Feet, the year’s seasonal offering about a dancing penguin named Mumble. A month later, on Christmas Eve, he forwarded me an email about how Santa Claus’ body would disintegrate if he were to travel through the atmosphere at the speeds necessary to meet his seasonal duties, adding a personal note: “Not to mention the emissions!” Over the years, these tendencies earned him the family nickname “Dr. Doom” — a nod to his university professor title and compulsive need to share terrifying facts about our warming world. My dad hammed it up, interrupting his own lamentations by hooting out, “We’re all gonna die!” in a cartoonish falsetto. More than anything, it was a term of endearment. After all, we knew other households that spent their holidays arguing over whether climate change was even real. Many of us know a Dr. Doom in our lives, or at the very least, a pessimist with a particular fixation. We each have our own ways of responding to it, such as my brother’s pragmatism, my stepmom’s knee-jerk optimism, my stepsister’s exasperation. Or, perhaps you are the doomer yourself.  I’m usually tempted to respond with, “I see hope in the next generation.” But doomerism — a label often used to describe climate defeatists — doesn’t typically leave room to talk about a better future. It’s a contagious kind of despair, often too credible to dismiss. Nowadays, my brother and I both work in climate-related fields, undeniably thanks to Dr. Doom’s influence. But growing up, it only took a few days of dad’s soapboxing before I’d tune out of anything climate-related until the New Year. This Christmas, as we once again prepare to pass around the cranberry sauce and discuss the end of the world, I can’t help but wonder how my dad became Dr. Doom. And in a world of rising doomerism, what influence do such tidings have on others? Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist My dad’s journey to becoming “Dr. Doom” started with his formal training as a tropical ecologist. Until the early 2000s, his work meant trudging through rainforests, studying photosynthesis while battling mosquitoes. Then, the wear of human activity on his surroundings became too much to bear. He switched gears and has since spent his career leap-frogging between climate education jobs — from director of an environmental science program at the University of Idaho to president of a small school in Maine, which, in 2012, he led to become the first college to divest fully from fossil fuels. Those entrenched in science, like my dad, seem to be especially susceptible to climate despair. That’s according to experts like Rebecca Weston, the co-executive director of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, a community of mental health professionals trained to address the emotional and psychological challenges emerging in our warming world. Many in scientific fields, Weston says, are first to document and review the data behind irreversible loss. The facts of the crisis are so dire that despair seems to be a hazard for many — scientists or not. After all, a study by researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that some 7 percent of U.S. adults report potentially serious levels of psychological distress about climate change. Gale Sinatra, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education who studies how people learn about climate change, put it more simply: “Your dad’s problem is that he knows too much.” The issue only gets worse when the climate-informed try to share what they know. In a short-lived position in 2007 as science advisor to the Florida state government (back when then-Governor Charlie Crist would actually acknowledge “climate change”) my dad was silenced during a presentation to the Legislature. A report later said that the “awkward” situation arose when a Republican senator took issue with a discussion topic that “had not yet been accepted as fact.” According to my dad, the controversy stemmed from his decision to share the famous “hockey stick” graph, a data visual that shows that global average temperatures began spiking after human societies industrialized.   “We’re starting to understand it as moral injury,” said Kristan Childs, co-chair of a committee to support climate scientists with the Climate Psychology Alliance, referring to a psychological phenomenon that happens when people witness actions that violate their beliefs or damage their conscience. “They’ve been informing people for so long, and there’s just such a betrayal because people are not believing them, or are not doing enough to act on it.” Like many, my dad’s response to this was to get louder — and darker. There’s conflicting research on how different kinds of messaging can affect peoples’ behavior. Some studies show that those experiencing distress are also more active, while others say that emphasizing worst-case scenarios, like so-called climate “tipping points,” is an ineffective strategy that can overwhelm and demotivate audiences instead. It can also backfire on a personal level: Listeners of the podcast “This American Life” may be familiar with a story about a climate activist dad whose zeal led to his children cutting him out of their lives.  Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist As a journalist on the climate beat, I’ve interviewed dozens of self-described “doomers,” and yet I’ve found the term is a bit of a misnomer. While many fixate on the worst possible climate scenarios, they’re generally not quitters. As Childs put it, “I don’t know anyone who’s just given up on it all.” Instead, nearly all have dedicated their lives to addressing climate change. And they can’t help but evangelize, warning everybody within earshot of the ways the coming century could change their lives.  Throughout these interviews, I’m tacitly looking for any insight that might help my own Dr. Doom. (Recently, I accompanied my dad to a physical therapy appointment where, upon seeing a disposable blood pressure cuff, he attempted to regale his doctor with facts about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the U.S. healthcare system.) Childs might just have one. She offers a 10-step program for professionals who work in science-oriented fields, affiliated with a larger collection of support groups offered by the Good Grief Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to processing emotions on climate change.  “The group work is powerful because it really, really helps dissolve the sense of isolation,” Childs said. As she spoke, I shifted uncomfortably, wondering how many times my teenage tendency to tune out or respond flippantly made my dad feel I was invalidating his concerns. The best place to start is often the hardest: acknowledging how bad the problem is. “It’s actually helpful to give people a place to share their biggest fears,” she said, adding that the typical workplace culture in scientific fields discourages expressing emotions. “Somehow some acceptance of how bad it is, and the fact that we can then still stay engaged, shifts the question to who we can be in these times.”   Weston agrees that entirely erasing climate anxiety isn’t realistic, especially as the effects of Earth’s changing atmosphere become more apparent and frightening. Instead, her group suggests reframing ideas of what having a meaningful impact looks like. “It depends on breaking through a kind of individualist understanding of achievement. It’s about facing something that will be resolved past our own lifetimes,” she said. My dad has spent his career chasing that elusive sense of fulfilment — never quite satisfied with the work he’s doing. But lately, he’s found a reason to stay put. In 2019, he returned to my hometown to teach climate change to undergraduates at the University of Florida. Now and again, I’ve wondered how these 18- to 22-year-olds, many of whom grew up in the increasingly red state, respond to his doomsaying. This year, while home around Thanksgiving, I sat in on his last lecture of the semester — a doozy on how economic systems can destroy natural resources. His students seemed completely at ease — chatting with him at the beginning of class, easily participating when he asked questions. I was already surprised. “He’s just sharing the facts,” one of his students told me, when I asked a group of them about his teaching style after the class.  Another quickly interjected: “He’s too dogmatic. It’s super depressing, it’s super doom.” Others nodded.  A third chimed in: “It helps me feel motivated.”  Later that week, while I was reporting a different story at a local climate event, both his former students and local activists flagged me down to say how much they appreciated my dad’s courses and op-eds in local newspapers.  “We need all sorts of climate communication. People are responsive to different messages,” said Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the markedly anti-doomer author of What If We Get It Right?, a recent book that puts possibility at the center of climate action. In 2019, a Yale study on how people respond to different messaging tactics underscored this point — finding that “hope is not always good, and doubt is not always bad.” For Johnson, getting through the climate crisis starts with who you surround yourself with. “This is not solitary work. Individual changemakers are not really a thing,” she said. “We never know the ripples that we’re going to have.” Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist The Christmas stockings on the mantle at my dad’s house haven’t changed in years, but the dinner conversations have. Now, Instead of trying to brush aside Dr. Doom’s digressions, we lean in. Our evenings are spent butting heads over the recent climate optimism book, Not the End of the World, by data scientist Hannah Ritchie; swapping notes on heat pumps; and debating how to make the most of used-EV tax credits. My baby nephew, Auggie, the latest generation to be saddled with our hopes and fears, brightens the room with his cooing at all manner of round fruits and toy trucks.  Between sips from warm mugs, my dad leans back in his chair and frowns at some news on his phone’s screen. “The wheels are really coming off the wagon, kids. Humanity faces an existential threat,” he says, to no one in particular. From the next room, my step mom calls, “The sky’s been falling since I met you, Stephen.” It’s hard not to smile. Who knows how many people my dad has influenced, or if he will ever feel satisfied with his mission. But as his doomy, gloomy self, he’s built a community and family that shares his values. At that moment, I find myself thinking of something Childs told me: “You cannot protect your kids from climate change. But you can protect them from being alone with climate change.”  In our changing world, these conversations feel like something to be thankful for.  This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Spending Christmas with ‘Dr. Doom’ on Dec 17, 2024.

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