Last week, Secretary Deb Haaland announced new guidance for three federal bureaus of the U.S. Department of Interior, outlining how each will facilitate and support agreements with Native tribes to collaborate in the stewardship of federal lands and waters. Here are the guidance memorandums for the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service created under joint order 3403, issued last November by secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments. The policy is designed to assist tribes in co-managing projects on 620 million acres of public lands.
For more than 50 years, tribal governments have sought a larger role in managing ancestral Native lands, most of them obtained by the federal government through duplicitous treaties or grabbed at gunpoint. Indigenous inhabitants were removed and corralled onto reservations or assigned to individual allotments that, all too often, wound up in non-Native hands. Some of that land was turned into national monuments, parks, and forests, but Natives were purposely excluded from having any part in how those were managed. Until relatively recently, officials educating visitors to these lands only gave the Boy Scout version of what life on these lands was like before they were snatched, and few Natives got to tell their own side of the story.
In a press release, Haaland said:
“From wildfire prevention to managing drought and famine, our ancestors have used nature-based approaches to coexist among our lands, waters, wildlife and their habitats for millennia. As communities continue to face the effects of climate change, Indigenous knowledge will benefit the Department’s efforts to bolster resilience and protect all communities. [...] By acknowledging and empowering Tribes as partners in co-stewardship of our country’s lands and waters, every American will benefit from strengthened management of our federal land and resources.
As Brett Marsh at Grist reported:
The principles of co-management tend to center on several key principles: the recognition of tribes as sovereign governments, their early and ongoing inclusion in any decision-making process, and the incorporation of Indigenous expertise in land management.
Increasingly, the principles of co-management and the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge in wide-ranging practices, from sustainable harvesting to fire management, have gained bi-partisan support. In a March 8 hearing by the House Committee on Natural Resources, Bruce Westerman, the ranking Republican from Arkansas, expressed his support for Tribal co-management policies. “We can learn a lot from tribes by the way they manage their land, in contrast to how the federal government does it,” he said.
Several co-management agreements have already been formalized. These include the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Bison Range Restoration in Montana, the Rappahannock Indian Tribe’s Homeland Restoration in Virginia, and the Dworshak National Fish Hatchery Transfer to the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho.
The most high-profile example is the agreement approved in June among five tribes to co-manage the 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, together with the BLM and U.S. Forest Service. Together with environmentalists, the tribes were key to getting the monument designated under the Obama administration. Eager to trash anything President Obama did, Donald Trump shrank the monument by 84% when he came into office, but President Biden restored the original boundaries last October.
Said Carleton Bowekaty, lieutenant governor of the Zuni Pueblo, one of the five participating tribes: “We are being asked to apply our traditional knowledge to both the natural and human-caused ecological challenges, drought, erosion, visitation, etc. What can be a better avenue of restorative justice than giving tribes the opportunity to participate in the management of lands their ancestors were removed from?”
¶ A new open-source database, the Global Registry of Fossil Fuels, now tracks fossil fuels, including their emissions as well as production and reserves, around the world. It’s meant to provide more information about fossil fuel projects and the remaining “carbon budget.” It was launched this week to align with U.N. General Assembly climate talks going on in New York City. Created by the nonprofit Carbon Tracker and the Global Energy Monitor, the registry tracks more than 50,000 oil, gas, and coal fields across 89 nations. That covers about 75% of the world’s fossil fuel emissions, production, and reserves.
¶ A new book —The Big Fix: 7 Practical Steps to Save Our Planet — sets forth climate steps where a minimum effort can generate maximum results. On his podcast at the Volts substack, David Roberts interviews the two authors, who he points out “have spent years in the climate trenches.” They are Hal Harvey, the founder of the Energy Foundation and other climate-focused nonprofits, who is currently CEO of research firm Energy Innovation, and Justin Gillis, a longtime journalist who has reported on climate change for The New York Times for several years and is now a fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
¶ How You Can Help Puerto Rico in the Wake of Hurricane Fiona. Here are a few Puerto Rico-based environmental and community-based organizations that provide relief services across the island.
At Civil Eats and Earth Island Journal, Lisa Held reports on school-based hydroponic gardens in Maryland, California, and New York. These projects have both academic and practical benefits. Among them is providing school cafeterias with food. And not just in small amounts.
For instance, Michael Jochner is the nutrition director for the Morgan Hill Unified School District just south of San Jose, California, and is in charge of meals for the district’s 8,400 students. His goal is to keep nutrition levels high and the environmental effect of those meals low. And, he wasn’t happy with the wilted, sometimes rotting lettuce provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It took him a while, but he ultimately convinced the school board to allocate $150,000 to install a Freight Farm 30 feet away from his production kitchen. Provided by a Boston start-up, the hydroponic vertical farm housed in a shipping container now produces 1,000 heads of lettuce every week, 60% to 70% of what’s needed for the district’s salad bars. The board has approved a second Freight Farm, and Jochner has applied for a grant to build a 1,500-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers.
Around the nation, 16 K–12 schools are using Freight Farm’s technology. Several Freight Farm units also operate at colleges and food pantries.
“I’m really trying to develop a kind of battle plan for other districts,” Jochner told Held. It’s been a challenge to get teachers to use the farms as a teaching tool, but that’s not his main objective. “I’m going to find the most high-tech way to grow the most salad bar items, and if there are educational benefits, that’s icing on the cake.”
On the other hand, at Teens for Food Justice (TFFJ), education is key to all its projects. The New York City-based nonprofit installs hydroponic farms mostly in schools in low-income neighborhoods. Students tend crops under the guidance of a farm manager. TFFJ also provides curricula that cover STEM skills, health, and food justice.
A new study published in Nature Climate Change has found that 76% of tree and shrub species in urban environments will be “at risk” by 2050 from increasing temperatures, and 70% from decreasing rainfall. Said lead author Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez at Western Sydney University in Australia, “By ‘at risk’, we mean these species might be experiencing stressful climatic conditions. Those trees are likely to die.”
The researchers used the Global Urban Tree Inventory, a database of 3,100 tree and shrub species now grown in 164 cities worldwide, to understand the conditions necessary for them to thrive. They then evaluated how climate change would affect them under a medium-emissions scenario called RCP6.0. RCPs—Representative Concentration Pathways—are used to model and predict future climate by making assumptions about how economic, social, and physical changes to the environment will influence climate change.
Despite what GOP senate candidate Herschel Walker of Georgia says about there already being enough trees without planting more, trees not only make cities beautiful and enhance recreation, they also provide a refuge for wildlife, can reduce summer temperatures by up to 12°C (21.6°F), and remove tons of carbon dioxide emissions and other pollution. The team recommended cities planting new trees choose only more resilient species.
For instance, a 2018 study of Indiana’s urban greenery found that maples are among the most commonly planted street trees in the state. Many could be harmed by the warming climate. “By late-century, habitat suitability for black maple and sugar maple is projected to decline in Indiana. Silver and red maples, conversely, are likely to have no change or increased habitat suitability,” the report found.
Now that we finally have the text of Senator Manchin’s so-called permitting reform side deal, I’m not surprised to see that it has gotten even worse than the leaked oil industry summary we saw previously. Make no mistake, this is very bad policy.
Permitting Reform Is a Decoy for Ramping Up Gas. By Lee Harris and Julia Rock at The Lever. A just-released permitting reform deal crafted by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is being touted by lawmakers and the fossil fuel industry as a way to reform misguided environmental laws allegedly blocking the deployment of clean energy around the country. But a close reading of the legislative text suggests that the primary function of the bill is to empower the president to unilaterally speed up a handful of energy projects, while requiring that at least five of them boost fossil fuels. It would also fast-track the Mountain Valley Pipeline, helping the natural gas industry take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity to sell American gas to a hungry global market. Yet liberal pundits are helping launder the bill as necessary for building renewables, focusing on a grab-bag of additional measures that would tweak the environmental review process, even as huge factual disputes remain as to how those provisions would impact federal permitting for renewables.
Environmentalism is Being Mainstreamed at the Cost of Its Soul. By Max Wilbert at Deep Green Resistance News Service. We are in the midst of a battle for the soul of the environmental movement, and I, for one, will not forget the forests, the birds, the fish, the antelope, the bears, the spiders, the plankton — all those beings who hold the world together in their weaving, who share common ancestry with us. Nor will I forget the mountains whose minerals make up our bones, the rivers whose waters flow in our veins, the Earth itself who is our mother. These beings are family, and I will not turn away from them. The Bright Green worldview sees lithium as a necessary resource to transition away from fossil fuels and save civilization from global warming, and so Bright Greens promote lithium mining, vast solar arrays in desert tortoise habitat, and offshore wind energy development in the last breeding ground of the Atlantic Right Whale. And if some endangered wildlife has to be killed, some water poisoned, and some Native American sacred sites destroyed, well, that’s just an acceptable cost to save civilization. And so vast subsidies (see the inflation Reduction Act, for example) are being mobilized to convert yet more wild land into industrial energy and mining sacrifice zones. Around the world, nature retreats and civilization grows.
Patagonia’s radical business move is great – but governments, not billionaires, should be saving the planet. By Carl Rhodes at The Guardian. That Yvon Chouinard and others contribute to addressing the climate crisis is undoubtedly a good thing; after all, governments worldwide have failed for decades. The rub, however, is that this is all part of a well-developed global system where responsibility for dealing with public and social problems is increasingly taken on by private interests. And, as we see with Chouinard, it is an empowered elite who are able to call the shots. Rather than addressing the underlying political and economic system that creates inequality, billionaire philanthropy provides it with a moral justification. They may decide to give away their money, but it is still them making the decisions. The rest of us just have to passively rely on their benevolence. What exactly the Holdfast Collective will spend its $100m a year on is as yet undisclosed. One key question, though, is whether it will be open to public scrutiny and accountability.
Corporate Involvement in Jackson’s Infrastructure Set Stage for Its Water Crisis. An interview with Judd Legum at Democracy Now. Amy Goodman: Tell us about Siemens, and tell us about this brown water that is coming out of people’s faucets now. Judd Legum : Well, I think the brown water is a reflection of the, really, system that’s been deteriorating now for decades. The story that I reported tracked how, starting in 2010, Siemens came to the city of Jackson, who was already suffering under a very faulty water system at that time, and said, “We have a solution. You can pay us $90 million”—it’s the largest contract signed at that time in city history—“We will install these new automated water meters. This will not only pay for itself, but generate extra revenue, which you can invest back into the water system.” They came to the city offering a solution, but this contract ended up being a disaster.
Why Are Wild Horses Brutally Uprooted From Public Lands While Private Livestock Can Stay? By Ginger Fedak at the Independent Media Institute. Every year, thousands of wild horses and burros are chased by helicopters and ripped from their native land in terrifyingly brutal, and often deadly, roundups. After capture, they are corralled in crowded dry lot holding pens, where many contract diseases or injuries and some then die or are killed. Some of the captured wild horses and burros are adopted out or sold to questionable buyers. Many of these horses are, in turn, sold to slaughterhouses. These horrendous actions are perpetrated by the U.S. government while using taxpayer dollars to protect the vested interests of cattle and sheep ranchers. The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the government agency responsible for “managing” public lands and the wild equids who live on them. It practices cruel and egregious methods of removing wild free-roaming horses and burros from public lands, even though these lands have been set aside by law for their “principal use.”
The Skinny on California’s Big New Climate Legislation. By RL Miller at Sierra magazine. The California legislature has passed, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed an ambitious package of 40 climate-change bills that, to borrow from President Obama’s description of the recent federal climate legislation, is a BFD. Just how big a deal? Pretty big. The new legislation includes oil well setbacks, carbon neutrality by 2045, a clean energy ramp-up, carbon sequestration through tree planting, and carbon capture through regulation—all of which, together, is cementing California’s position as a leader on climate action.
“The climate crisis is the defining issue of our time. It must be the first priority of every government and multilateral organization. And yet climate action is being put on the back burner. ”—UN Secretary-General António Guterres
How to Hunt Like an Octopus. By Veronique Greenwood at The New York Times. In its small glass aquarium, an octopus is coiled placidly in its den. Then, a crab falls into the tank. The octopus scrambles to fling itself over the crab, looking less like a finely honed killing machine than a toddler who’s spotted a cookie, engulfing its clawed prey in a cloud of suckered arms and legs. However, there’s order to this chaos of limbs, according to a paper published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology. Scientists who observed how the octopus hunts found that the creature almost always uses its second arm from the center to make a grab for prey, and when it needs backup, it’s the arms closest to that second appendage that they bring into play. The researchers also found that different prey are hunted with different tactics: Crabs get a move the scientists call “parachuting,” while shrimp, which are more skittish and sensitive to big movements, are snared with a stealthy limb.
Why the Rush to Mine Lithium Could Dry Up the High Andes. By Fred Pearce at Yale Environment 360. What environmental price should the world be willing to pay for the metals needed to switch to electric vehicles? The question is being asked urgently in South America, where there are growing fears that what is good for the global climate may be a disaster for some of the world’s rarest and most precious ecosystems — salt flats, wetlands, grazing pastures for Indigenous livestock, and flamingo lakes high in the Andean mountains. This remote region straddling the borders between Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile has become known as the Lithium Triangle, because it is the sudden focus of a global rush for the metal vital in making lithium-ion batteries to decarbonize the world’s automobiles. Demand for lithium is predicted to quadruple by 2030 to 2.4 million metric tons annually, and in anticipation, prices on world markets have risen close to tenfold in the past year.
Coal plant sites could host 265 GW of advanced nuclear, costing 35% less than greenfield projects: DOE. By Ethan Howland at Utility Dive. About 80% of operating and recently retired coal-fired power plant sites could host an advanced nuclear power reactor, with nearly 265 gigawatts megawatts in total potential nuclear capacity, according to a Department of Energy report released last week. The U.S. currently has about 100 gigawatts of existing nuclear capacity, generating 8.2% of the nation’s electricity. Using transmission and other infrastructure at the coal plant sites could reduce the overnight cost of capital of a nuclear facility by 15% to 35% compared with a standalone greenfield project, the researchers say. The analysis was based on a hypothetical 1.2 GW coal-fired power plant in the Midwest that is replaced with a 924-megawatt nuclear plant.
Melting Himalayan Glaciers Alter Water Supplies Near and Far. By Zakir Hossain Chowdhury. The Hindu Kush Himalayas have the world’s third largest concentration of glaciers, after the Arctic and the Antarctic. For this reason, they are sometimes referred to as the “Third Pole.” The region, though, has been warming faster than the global average. The glaciers are retreating, an erasure that has accelerated in the last few decades—and they may affect the water supply for communities both near and far. According to a 2017 study published in Nature, by 2100, only 37 to 49% of glacier mass in the Himalayas will remain (compared with 2005 figures) if global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Climate experts say that the changes will continue to alter the hydrological cycle in the region. [...] Anu Sherpa started climbing Everest in 1970 when he was 24 years old. He retired in 1994, and now runs a shop at Namche Bazaar. Over the years, he has noticed changes in the area’s climate. The seasons are less predictable, he said. The rain doesn’t come when expected, he added, and “this time, it should have been warm, but it’s not.” Throughout the region, the changes in water levels in local rivers will likely affect farming, sanitation, and fresh drinking water.
A Plastic Bag’s 2,000-Mile Journey Shows the Truth About Recycling. By Kit Chellel and Wojciech Moskwa at Bloomberg Green. Recycling of soft plastic begins when someone tosses a bag or food wrapper in the trash. After that, it’s shipped to … who knows where. The only way to know for sure would be to follow the garbage. And that’s exactly what the reporters set out to do with some items in the U.K. They placed tiny digital trackers inside three used plastic items—film that covered some bok choy, a lentil-puff snack pouch, and a Tesco-branded shopping bag—and deposited them in Tesco storefront collection bins around London. The idea was to find out, definitively, what happens to the plastic waste generated by the U.K.’s biggest supermarket chain. It was the start of a journey that would cross seas and continents, revealing a netherworld of contractors, brokers, and exporters, and a messy reality that looks less like a virtuous circle and more like passing the buck.
Solar PV employed around 3.4 million people in 2021. By Beatriz Santos at PV Magazine. Almost half the workers were employed in China, around 280,000 in North America, more than 260,000 in Europe, and some 50,000 in Africa, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency. The vast majority of workers were employed in manufacturing and installation of new capacity, with solar jobs paying lower wages than the nuclear, oil, and gas industries. The solar industry also has less trade union representation than fossil fuel industries, where labor representation has led to higher wages. According to the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, 14 million new clean energy jobs will be created by 2030, with another 16 million workers shifting to new roles related to clean energy. In this scenario, around 60% of new employees will require at least two years of post-secondary education, making worker training essential to the sustainable development of the industry.
• Nine European nations propose to install 260 gigawatts of wind power in the North Sea by 2050 • Iowa man fined for harassing TV weatherman and calling him a “Biden puppet” over climate change • Inherit The Dust. The Colorado River is running out of water. No place will be more affected than the arid metropolis of Phoenix • Why electricity prices should not be left to bogus “free markets” • The East Coast Will Not Escape Fire • South Australia set to become first big grid to run on 100% renewables • Yes, Windfall Taxes on Big Oil Are Warranted—But That's Not All • Report: More than 600 million Africans at risk of severe droughts due to climate change • Vulnerable countries demand global tax to pay for climate-led loss and damage • Mississippi's Water Crisis Is a “Textbook Case” of Environmental Racism