Moments strung together like lights

How it's looking on this end.

Dear friends, 

Finding the right words for this platform has proved elusive over the last several weeks, but I’m still here trying to make sense of things. 

Here’s a collection of recent moments, in no particular order. 

1. The morning after EPA administrator Lee Zeldin claims to be “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” and promises to do away with a wide range of environmental regulations, I wake up with unexpected chest pain. For a few days I feel like maybe it’s my heart that has a dagger in it.  

2. I write to my overworked editor to inquire about a piece I turned in two weeks ago and he promises to get to it before we’re all “rounded up and sent to Gitmo.” It is part joke and part unvarnished fear and I wonder how the percentages break down for him, how they break down for me.   

3. My therapist tells me that her plan, if she has one, is to get very heavy, to make herself unmovable. We talk about Nelson Mandela, Leonard Peltier and what they must have had to keep alive in themselves to survive as they spent years waiting through tyranny. Later I go to see I’m Still Here in the theater and it lays it out precisely. 

4. I find myself thinking “I didn’t sign up for any of this” and it feels like a childish thing to say, even if no one else can hear it. 

5. What did I sign up for, I wonder. Almost two years ago, I signed up to write a newsletter about the climate crisis in a world where certain things seemed like givens: The science around climate was settled. Most of us understood that taking action to prevent the worst-case scenario was urgent. The first amendment would hold. 

6. I call people for articles I’m writing, and most don’t want to go on record saying anything, especially not about climate or equity. I reach out to the people at the center of the longer stories I’ve been reporting since last year—about complex, hard-earned climate action—and they are all waiting to see how little, if anything, will remain of their efforts. 

7. I go to bed early most nights, and wake in the dark post-daylight-savings darkness. I cook meals. Stock up on drygoods pre-tariff, feel increasingly like I’m not even being a prepper. I’m just being logical.  

8. I talk to a young journalist who says he can imagine it would be exciting to be reporting on DOGE, speaking truth to power. I tell them that most journalists are fried and demoralized. Then I regret my frankness.  

9. We get a decent quantity of rain for March—something I know by now not to take for granted in California—and I go back to the forest. It is much greener, springier than it was just a few weeks ago. There are forget-me-nots, nettles, and trillium everywhere and even the tender red leaves on the poison oak help me feel like a person who can keep waking up, can keep trying.10.   I keep waking up, working on articles.

11. I read that they are building a 4-lane highway that will cut straight through the Amazon rainforest in hopes of making it easier for the expected 50,000 people from all around the world to travel to the Brazilian city of Belém for COP30. I read that the last remaining Native birds in Maui’s rainforests may not survive. I grieve for both places.

13. I interview five current and former park rangers for a story about climate change in the national parks. They are angry, devastated, and emboldened by the ongoing effort to erase the work being done to protect the nation’s most pristine landscapes. And I feel the same, if also unexpectedly lucky to get to hear their brilliant, intimate descriptions of the places they care for. Most of it doesn’t make it into the story, but the conversations themselves are nourishing. 

14. Like everyone else, I await the high costs of food and other goods with some dread. I take stock of the quantity of kale and collards I have growing in my community garden plot. I also wonder: Will higher costs of everything mean that fewer cheap, unnecessary objects will be produced in the world’s factories. Will it require us to trade, borrow, and fix more things? Will we inch just a little closer to living within our means, as a nation and as a species? I hold this small thought close to my chest like a flame.  

Photo by stayhereforu.

Climate news you might have missed

It’s not just about Greenpeace 

Last week, when a North Dakota jury ordered Greenpeace USA to pay more than $660 million to the Texas-based pipeline company Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, it stopped many in the climate movement in their tracks. Although Energy Transfer wasn’t ultimately stopped from building the pipeline, they claimed that Greenpeace organized the 2016 Standing Rock protests and defamed the company. Not only does their argument threaten to erase the leadership of the Standing Rock Sioux and dozens of other tribal communities who spent months protesting the pipeline, but it sets a dangerous free speech precedent.

The case is the latest in a series of strategic lawsuits against public participation or SLAPP suits brought by fossil fuel companies against climate activists and journalists. And while Greenpeace leaders claim the group was merely at Standing Rock in 2016 to support an Indigenous-led movement, James Wheaton, the founder and senior counsel for the First Amendment Project, told CNN that a decision in favor of Energy Transfer could “establish that anybody who assists in putting on a protest is going to be held responsible for what everybody else does at that protest.”  

Thirty three states have anti-SLAPP laws in place, but North Dakota does not. Furthermore, the county where the trial took place is known for its Trump-supporting majority. Greenpeace USA says it will appeal the decision. Meanwhile, Greenpeace International is counter-suing Energy Transfer in the Netherlands for waging too many SLAPP suits in an effort to suppress dissent. 

It’s not too late to notice butterflies

By now you may have heard about the recent study that found that one in five butterflies have disappeared in the US in the last two decades. And while pollinators everywhere are struggling due to over-reliance on insecticides and loss of habitat, Chasing Nature’s Bryan Pfeiffer made an excellent point recently about the crisis at the root of the problem: Most Americans need a study to tell them something they would likely notice themselves if they stopped to pay attention to the natural world more often. He wrote:

It seems that the prosperity of modernity has come with a cost: more stuff to do away from nature, even away from something as simple as watching a few butterflies in the backyard. If only more people took notice of what’s flying around back there. No, the problem is not that the U.S. will become a country without butterflies. The problem is that for far too many Americans it already is.

Where did all the weather balloon launchers go?

Does it get better than weather balloons? The fact that twice a day 100 or so people all over the country launch actual balloons (attached to small orange parachutes!) into the air and let them float up to 100,000 feet up, where the sensors they carry with them collect data about the temperature, air pressure, wind, and humidity is just down right charming. But it’s also a vital part of the way we’re able to forecast the weather; they predict snow storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other potentially life threatening events. 

And yet recent DOGE cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) resulted in an estimated 1,000 firings and it turns out that at least a handful of those people were in charge of launching weather balloons. So far, that has resulted in fewer launches in Alaska, New York, and Maine. In a public information statement earlier this month, the National Weather Service announced the cuts and explained that “data is also collected from instruments aboard commercial aircraft, surface observing stations, satellites, radars, and buoys.” But as several experts told Associated Press, those more modern tools haven’t actually replaced the balloons. Instead, they explained, “weather balloons provide the key middle part of the forecasting puzzle—the atmosphere—where so much weather brews.” 

As if our relationships weren’t under enough stress 

Climate crises can bring people together, but they can also drive a wedge into our closest relationships. New research finds that the long-term impacts trend toward disconnection and divorce for people experiencing climate-fueled disasters like floods and hurricanes.

“After the initial intensity of the crisis has happened and now you’re waiting to get your roof fixed or trying to piece your life together or your kids aren’t in school yet, the disillusionment phase that happens even before the real recovery begins … can become a big dip,” Debbie C. Sturm, an assistant professor of counseling at James Madison University told Greater Good Magazine. Coping with natural disasters can chip away at our mental health and recovery is often an isolating process. And even being exposed to disasters through the media can take a kind of secondary toll that adds up for many of us. 

For that reason, social scientists are pointing to the value of broader communities and mutual support networks. 

“What we learn from disaster survivors over and over is that community is the most important element that they experience. Their neighbors. For me, that means we need to do a lot of work in our communities and create these pockets of connection,” added Sturm.

The pushback

A recent essay by Extinction Rebellion’s Nuala Lam in the UK-based publication Absurd Intelligence asks: How does one rehabilitate climate activism when the oil and gas industry has worked for years to vilify and criminalize the people taking part. She writes:

The laws introduced since the unprecedented mobilizations in 2019 have been very successful in removing the conditions for a diverse civil disobedience movement. It’s much harder to organize families … when they could be arrested for holding a sign or organizing a zoom call, or face a prison sentence for sitting in a road. The result, again, is to turn a movement of citizens into a group of “activists”, making them much easier to alienate from the onlooking public. 

A well-funded campaign has worked to separate the people who participate in climate activities from “ordinary” people, adds Lam, when that story couldn’t be further from the truth. “Don’t buy it,” she implores her readers. “Our task is to demonstrate and embody the fact that it is precisely ordinary people who step up.” 

On the brighter side 

1. As you may recall, Paris took advantage of the investment required to host the Olympics last summer to create a new network of bike and pedestrian-only streets. Now, two-thirds of Parisians voted in favor of a measure to remove cars from 500 more streets (bringing the total to 700, or one tenth of the city’s total).

2. Dams are coming down the Northeast. A record 80 of them were taken down in 2023 in an effort restoring natural flows, improving habitat for aquatic life, and reopening rivers to migratory fish.

3. Research out of the University of Vienna found that interacting with nature reduces acute physical pain. And while that fact might not seem too surprising, what surprised me about the study was that even people who watched nature videos rated their acute pain as less intense and unpleasant afterwards.

4. I am intrigued by the Wooly Devil, a tiny, fuzzy, flowering plant that was discovered recently in Big Bend National Park in Texas. Perhaps you will be too.

5. Delhi, India is now home to seven biodiversity parks, which were restored from degraded lands to serve as urban forests, providing ecological benefits.

6. Knowable Magazine published a fascinating interview with environmental linguist David Harrison about the time he spent with the Tuvan people in Siberia and the way Indigenous languages are nature-centric and associated with environmental knowledge. 

7. A “marine rewilding”effort in the UK that has put a stop to trawling in a 117-square- mile area is just beginning to see promising results. The underwater kelp forest there has come back to life and it is already attracting a diverse array of marine life.

8. Wisdom, a 74-year old albatross, who resides on the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, on a tiny Island northwest of Hawaii, is the oldest known bird to lay an egg. Scientists estimate she has produced around 30 chicks in her long life.

1. The Wooly Devil 2. Bikes in Paris (photo by Rostislav Kralik)

Take care out there,
Twilight