The Baffler no. 82

Bloom and Gloom

January 2026

Masthead

The Baffler

234 5th Ave
New York, NY 10001

Editor in Chief

Matthew Shen Goodman

Deputy Editor

Wes Enzinna

Managing Editor

Bidi Choudhury

Art Directors and Designers

No Ideas

Senior Editors

Jess Bergman

Dave Denison

Web Editor

Zachariah Webb

Editor at Large

Chris Lehmann

Literary Editor

J.W. McCormack

Staff Writer

Jess McAllen

Assistant Editor

Arielle Isack

Editorial Fellow

Grayson Scott

Photo Editor

Chris Maggio

Contributing Editors

Susan Faludi

Evgeny Morozov

Ann Neumann

Liz Pelly

Rick Perlstein

George Scialabba

Jacob Silverman

Astra Taylor

Catherine Tumber

Kate Wagner

Eugenia Williamson

Publisher

Noah McCormack

Executive Director

James White

Strategic Director

Bidi Choudhury

Marketing and Social Media Manager

Kelly Dickinson

Web Developer

Michael Gardiner

Administrative Coordinator

Leila Markosian

Past Publishers

The MIT Press, 2012–2014

Conor O’Neil, 2009–2011

Greg Lane, 1993–2007

Founding Editors

Thomas Frank

Keith White

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Naomi Barr, Alma Beauvais, Ben Gottlieb, Jasmine Liu, Federico Perelmuter, and Jonathan Truong for their help crafting Baffler no. 82.

A Million Parts per Million

Matthew Shen Goodman

Chris Maggio

Pour one out for the Chinese paddlefish, its habitat destroyed by dams on the Yangtze; the cryptic treehunter, the bird’s range in the Brazilian forest cleared for sugarcane plantations; or the gastric-brooding frog, one of over a hundred native species of plants and animals that have gone extinct in Australia since the continent’s European colonization. The death of a species is a tragedy, that of a genus an unfortunate statistic, what with vertebrate genera being lopped off the tree of life at thirty-five times the extinction rate of the past million years. All this at the behest of Homo sapiens, whose single-minded drive to render all of nature into commodities causes the pH of the oceans to plummet and the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to soar without pause.

“Bloom and Gloom” surveys the state of the environment and asks: Who will defend the Earth against our predations? Not the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, as Lindsay O’Connor Stern writes, their all-too-human obsession with virality too solipsistic to be truly efficacious. Direct action against polluting agribusiness is met by state violence in Christopher Ketcham’s missive from France, where new reservoirs destroy ancient riparian systems. In the United States, as Lauren Markham reports, organic milk producers partner with Trumpist Republicans to fight against conservationists championing the roving wild elk of Northern California against the land-hungry cow.

Elsewhere in domestication, ears of corn lament their toxic codependency with man in Anelise Chen’s short story, which provides a series of telepathic confessions from crops. We’re not so great at intraspecies cooperation, as history tells us: Scott W. Stern winds the clock back to the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment to show that international environmental law was dead on arrival, its utopic vision hamstrung by wealthy industrialists and the United States’ insistence on a unipolar world. A similar fate has befallen the Biden administration’s attempts at fighting climate change, with Trump rolling back fuel economy standards and decimating the Environmental Protection Agency. (Trump’s second term has seen many such attacks: Kristen Martin writes on the federal government’s current assault on Native sovereignty.) Biden’s technocratic efforts, however, excluded needed voices—e.g., the poor, the non-white—as Rhiana Gunn-Wright and Maria Lopez-Nuñez explain in their conversation with Dave Denison. In Ireland, as Caitlín Doherty writes, a preference for peat, that traditional (and cheap) source of fuel, is overridden by a Green Party more concerned with household emissions than poverty.

What’s one to do, then, as the wildfires rage and insurance companies pull out of markets, per Tyler Maroney’s interview with a public insurance adjuster? Antinatalists champion our own demise—“May we live long and die out,” goes the motto of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. That’s a narrative that’s a bit hard to swallow for those who have been born, and those who will give birth, though other mothers aren’t always so reassuring, as Madeleine Watts learns reading books about pregnancy while herself being pregnant. If we’ll never be able to undo the worst of our actions, perhaps we can appreciate nature’s adaptations, as Jennifer Kabat does with knotweed, an invasive plant species particularly fond of highways and parking lots, the latter’s flora chronicled in Andrew Conboy and Bobby Doherty’s field guide to what grows in the asphalt by the mini-mall.

Army of the Kind

Who gets to be human in PETA’s playbook?

Lindsay O’Connor Stern

© Chi Park

In October 2022, Francisco M. Lebron-Cruz was fired from his job as a turkey catcher. Then he was criminally charged. Footage had circulated online of Lebron-Cruz and eleven of his coworkers kicking, throwing, and otherwise abusing birds at Plainville Farms, a meat-processing plant in Pennsylvania whose packaging boasts that its fowl are “humanely raised.” Posing as a fellow worker, an informant for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world’s largest and best-known animal rights organization, had smuggled a camera onto the premises and circulated the resulting tape to major news outlets. As a result of PETA’s campaign, Plainville Farms launched what it called an “aggressive internal investigation,” firing Lebron-Cruz and the other men, who were subsequently charged with 141 counts of animal cruelty. While Lebron-Cruz was convicted and forced to serve one year’s probation, Plainville Farms survived. In 2024 alone, it slaughtered an estimated five and a half million birds, up more than 80 percent from the previous year.

Targeting corporations by scapegoating workers is hardly a PETA innovation, but the strategy has thrived under surveillance capitalism, and few gadflies have exploited the conditions of Big Tech more skillfully than PETA. Founded in 1980 by activists Alex Pacheco and Ingrid Newkirk, the organization quickly gained notoriety for its bullish ethos, drawn from its close ties to the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a militant group whose actions include bombing fur retailers, setting fire to laboratories at the University of Arizona, and “liberating” six thousand captive mink from a UK farm, two-thirds of whom were either recaptured or killed. In 1984, for example, Newkirk collaborated with the ALF to disseminate footage of animal abuse occurring at the University of Pennsylvania’s Head Injury Clinic, leading it to suspend all primate research. Yet it was not until the 1990s—by which point PETA was commanding an annual budget of nearly $10 million—that the organization started to recognize the power of the broadly circulated image. In 1990, PETA’s “I’d Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur” ads, depicting members of the Go-Go’s posing nude, proliferated on billboards and print media globally.

Undercover investigations, meanwhile, continued: the same year, PETA tricked Carolina Biological Supply Company, a leading distributor of science-teaching materials, into hiring two PETA informants. In the video clips PETA later distributed to cable news networks, cats PETA claimed had been alive are shown on an embalming table, immobilized. A judge ultimately dismissed the charges against Carolina Biological Supply, finding PETA’s evidence unreliable, but other companies were not spared. Long before targeting Plainville employees, PETA released surreptitiously obtained footage of farmers at Belcross Farms beating, skinning, and maiming animals in 1998, leading to felony convictions for three laborers. PETA’s subsequent exposé of a West Virginia slaughterhouse in 2004 put eleven more workers on the chopping block.

“The image is the most powerful tool we have,” Newkirk told director Matthew Galkin in his 2007 documentary I Am an Animal. Tracy Reiman, who joined PETA as a customer service representative and took over as president last year, concurs. “Social media is driven by images and video, and it has given people a window into the suffering that’s otherwise hidden behind closed doors,” Reiman told me. Between blasting images of violence against infant monkeys, sheep, and hens to its followers, taking animatronic cows and elephants to elementary schools, stationing vegan ice cream giveaways outside ice cream parlors, and loosing a robotic calf named Charli XC Cow into malls to ask leather wearers, “Are you wearing my mother?,” many of Reiman’s recent campaigns have sustained the combative approach that earned Newkirk her reputation as an “extremist.” But bad publicity is still publicity, and if PETA looked yesterday like a radical organization with a weakness for the burlesque, its techniques only reflect contemporary America, where corporations sustain themselves on a libidinal economy of likes, politicians cater to the social media tycoons who juice the algorithm in their favor, and large language models convert consciousness itself into a commodity.

A Boy Is a Dog Is a Pig

The idea for PETA came to Newkirk, an auto-racing and sumo-wrestling enthusiast working for the Humane Society in Washington, D.C., when she read Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation on a train ride up the East Coast. A manifesto inspired in part by Animal Machines, Ruth Harrison’s 1964 exposé of factory-farming practices, Singer’s book challenged a status quo best encapsulated by the work of early modern philosopher René Descartes. Descartes—who dissected carcasses from the butcher shop “as an aid to explaining what imagination, memory, etc. consist in”—notoriously defined nonhuman animals as unfeeling “machines.” Not so, Singer contended.

Marshaling the fervor of the sixties, when equality seemed a matter of rooting out racism and sexism, Singer added what he called “speciesism” to the mix. He grounded his case in the doctrine of utilitarianism hatched by English social reformer Jeremy Bentham. Inventor of the panopticon, an architectural design predicated on surveillance and psychological manipulation, Bentham argued that moral correctness consisted in “utility” for the greatest number. His famous dictum for defining consciousness—“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”—received an update in Singer’s hands: the “greatest number” would now include not just human beings but anything capable of sensation. Newkirk was persuaded. “When it comes to pain, love, joy, loneliness, and fear,” she wrote, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” A movement was born.

PETA launched from a converted warehouse in 1980. Newkirk and cofounder Alex Pacheco began by infiltrating the laboratory of the prominent neuroscientist Edward Taub, whose therapies have helped stroke survivors recover from paralysis. Taub, who was convicted of animal cruelty thanks to PETA’s efforts, eventually wiggled out of legal trouble, but disturbing images of his monkeys missing fingers, peering out from shadowy cages, and immobilized in restraints could not be unseen, and what became known as the “Silver Spring monkey case” drew national attention.

While the case spurred PETA’s most substantive achievement—the passage of a 1985 amendment to the Animal Welfare Act expanding protections for lab animals—it also emboldened vaccine skeptics. That animal studies had helped scientists abolish diseases like polio was, Newkirk told an interviewer in 1985, “a misconception.” She went further: “I believe that we’re now beginning to learn—and many people are stopping to vaccinate their children—that we have wreaked havoc on our immune system by such a dependency on animal-based vaccines in our youth. We have injected animal proteins into our bodies that have lain dormant for years and are now crossing the species barrier and doing all sorts of things.”

As PETA nurtured conspiracy theories about vaccines, it continued to expose sordid treatment of animals in farms, circuses, and labs. But a shift was taking place. By the 1990s, print media was ceding authority, byte by byte, to the digital realm. PETA responded in kind. Buying up numerous internet domains, the organization broadened its efforts to the staging of what Newkirk characterizes as “gimmicks,” a three-dimensional precursor to clickbait. Placing barely clad pregnant actors in a cage in London to protest the use of gestation crates, mounting billboards juxtaposing the words “Save the Whales . . . Go Vegetarian” with an image of an overweight woman in a bikini, and binding actors to Styrofoam trays with cling wrap to make them resemble meat, PETA packaged the abysmal situation of animals into content engineered to titillate and offend. After all, as Susan Sontag observed in 2003, “Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump-started, again and again. Content is no more than one of these stimulants.”

Dan Mathews, PETA’s former senior vice president, channeled this insight into many of the organization’s signature campaigns. Eschewing what he called the “dreary” route of more conventional activism, Mathews once distributed leaflets depicting dismembered animal figurines to children entering fast-food chains. He also persuaded Pamela Anderson, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford to go nearly nude for the aforementioned “I’d Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur” campaign and spray-painted kills animals onto a Calvin Klein logo. (Mathews later charmed Klein into a meeting, and the two became friendly.) “I’m from the generation that knows that a lot of people aren’t even watching the news anymore,” he told Alec Baldwin in a 2013 podcast. “There was cable, then there was the internet. There’s so much competition for people’s attention. . . . That’s what PETA is all about. We’re here to show you things you really don’t want to see.”

“Holocaust on Your Plate” read the organization’s most notorious ad, launched as a traveling exhibit in the United States and Europe, which juxtaposes a photograph of a Nazi-operated train with a cow-crammed cattle chute. In another widely condemned provocation, PETA erected billboards in 2000 in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania’s dairy country that featured a milk mustache photoshopped onto Rudy Giuliani, who was then suffering from prostate cancer, with the tagline “Got prostate cancer?” Another billboard, unveiled in New Jersey in 2008, baselessly announced that “studies have shown a link between cow’s milk and autism.” It was these sorts of histrionic gestures in the service of a minority view, combined with PETA’s hostility toward science, that led critics to call the organization “outrageous,” “hypocritical,” and “radical.”

But major brands bought in. Wary of alienating consumers, corporations targeted by PETA—including the Gap, Calvin Klein, and H&M—phased out fur. Facebook has reportedly shut down pages dedicated to rehoming animals, responding to claims from PETA that they were being sold for profit. Courts, meanwhile, have applied norms developed in physical space to regulate speech in cyberspace, buttressing PETA campaigns. After the National Institutes of Health (NIH) applied keyword filters to prevent PETA from overwhelming its posts with comments, for example, PETA sued the agency for “unconstitutional . . . restrictions on their participation in a public forum” and won.

Pigs in Cyberspace

Though PETA came to prominence by engineering memes and viral moments, it has nonetheless identified its latest villain in the self-styled meme lord who bought Twitter: Elon Musk. At Neuralink, the biotech branch of Musk’s fiefdom, scientists experiment on animals in order to eliminate what Musk calls the “bandwidth issue” preventing the human cortex from synching with artificial intelligence. One of Neuralink’s coin-sized devices has already enabled a quadriplegic patient to move a cursor with his thoughts, but this is unsatisfactory progress for its founder. Unlike competitors such as Synchron, which has pulled ahead with less funding and less invasive technologies, Musk, who has reportedly asked his employees to pick up the pace by imagining a bomb strapped to their heads, intends to develop the first commercially available chip—and fast. As in government, where Musk’s evisceration of the United States Agency for International Development has already resulted in the preventable deaths of over a quarter of a million children, this aggressive approach to innovation has likewise accrued a body count. More than one thousand sheep, pigs, monkeys, rats, and mice have died in the United States serving as test subjects for Musk’s chip.

But that’s just a drop in the bucket: well over 100 million animals die every year worldwide for initiatives in biotech and biomedical science, but such studies typically follow methodical protocols. At Neuralink, however, despite Musk’s claim that the monkeys selected for experimentation were already “close to death,” a Reuters investigation found otherwise and attributed multiple accidents to the breakneck pace of his mandates. In 2021, for example, twenty-five pigs at a Neuralink facility had devices of the wrong size implanted in their brains. Veterinary records obtained by Wired revealed that a young monkey yanked out another chip that had been faultily installed, causing an infection that led Neuralink to euthanize the animal. When another monkey tried but failed to remove her own chip, her remaining life was spent in a state of terror, huddled in a corner of her cage, gripping the hands of her cellmate, and shaking uncontrollably at the sight of lab workers.

Employees complained. At least two left the organization over its animal-testing practices. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission requesting an investigation of comments Musk had made that it claimed he knew to be false. PETA took a different approach. In a press release, then-president Newkirk announced that, pursuant to her final will and testament, a chunk of her heart would be mailed to Musk upon her death. “He doesn’t seem to have a heart, so I’m going to give him a part of mine,” she said.

The potential of agenda-driven media to provoke recognition drives PETA’s philosophy. It is also its blind spot. Images, as Sontag long ago pointed out, do not persuade. They “reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.” PETA claims 10 million members today, but an estimated 1.2 trillion animals still die each year for food alone, and the organization has had little impact on animal welfare law. Yet PETA still trusts its audience will change its behavior in response to what they see on their handheld devices displaying PETA’s images. If PETA’s notorious fat-shaming ads stoked misogyny, all the better, since outrage is just another form of attention, and anyone paying attention to the plight of other beings will inevitably become outraged.

The naivete of this as a strategy would be poignant if it hadn’t so effectively associated animal advocacy—already a tough sell to omnivores—with extremism for three decades. Yet in a moment of high desensitization, when the transformation of “news” into a seemingly continuous snuff film only foments violence, it is touching, almost kitsch, to encounter an organization that trusts a meme to change minds and widen hearts. “Every day, countless people are joining the army of the kind,” Reiman told me, invoking a phrase PETA members often use to describe the organization. “We are averaging 100 million impressions each month on our social media pages.” It does not seem to occur to PETA’s senior leadership that attention and recognition are not the same.

“The spectacle,” wrote Guy Debord, “is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity.” Substitute “spectacle” with “phone screen” and you will have some idea of the impact of those 100 million user impressions on the lives of animals today. Indeed, the actual sun still rises and sets on the facts: despite its digital dominance, PETA alone has changed little for nonhuman beings. The chief provisions for combating harm to animals in the United States—the 1973 Endangered Species Act and the 1966 Animal Welfare Act—were penned before PETA’s inception, and while the Silver Spring monkey case provoked an amendment to the latter, extending protections for the subjects of animal testing, it excludes birds, mice, and rats. That’s a considerable oversight since rodents comprise about 95 percent of the animal species used in U.S. research.

Scratch a little at PETA’s victories, meanwhile, and you’ll find varnish under your nail. While Reiman is credited with pressuring SeaWorld to end its orca-breeding program, for instance, NPR found that it was the Humane Society of the United States (now the Humane World for Animals) that actually negotiated an end to the program. (When PETA sued SeaWorld on the inflammatory grounds that “the orcas’ plight constituted slavery in violation of the 13th Amendment,” it lost.) And while Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus closed in 2017 and has since reopened without animals—a development similarly touted as a win by PETA—it was reportedly the award-winning 2013 documentary Blackfish that helped inspire the parent company of Ringling Bros. to phase out their use, not to mention the punishing economics of carting exotic animals across the country on mile-long trains. That beef sales have remained relatively stable over PETA’s tenure, despite a rising population, might suggest that PETA’s campaigns are working. But a 2023 Gallup poll found a slight decline in vegetarianism since 1999; the number of vegans in the United States has also shrunk.

As its partial explanation for Ringling Bros.’ closure demonstrates, the very technologies PETA strategically exploits may incidentally be improving animals’ lives, making some of PETA’s purported victories a case of the tail wagging the dog. For example, the soaring availability of avocado toast—reflecting a rise in vegetarian-friendly options at restaurants generally—may have more to do with social media–turbocharged wellness cults than concern for animals. In other words: MAHA and animal rescue influencers may be doing as much for animals as PETA.

So Like Us

But PETA has notched some accomplishments since Trump has returned to the White House. The NIH, for instance, has gutted research involving primates. It should come as no surprise, then, that having once targeted an NIH director personally, PETA recently sent a bouquet of flowers to Jay Bhattacharya, the agency’s new director. “Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s announcement that the NIH would shift from outdated experiments on animals and prioritize cutting-edge human-relevant research earned PETA’s thanks,” Reiman told me. (Less than three months after stating his commitment to reducing the use of animals in research, Bhattacharya approved $12 million in dog studies.)

As Emily Trunnell, PETA’s director of scientific advancement and outreach, told Fox News: “Curiosity-driven research . . . never results in anything meaningful for human health.” That claim is false, however. Our modern world is predicated on basic—as opposed to applied—research. For example, Ozempic, the drug primed to eliminate obesity, emerged from a curiosity about lizard venom. The work of PETA enemy Margaret Livingstone, whose biological research frequently relies on animal testing, has informed therapies for Alzheimer’s disease, tremor, and the lethal brain cancer glioblastoma. And the early findings of Edward Taub, PETA’s villain in the Silver Spring monkey case, underpins constraint-induced movement therapy, a treatment that has restored mobility to countless stroke survivors. But facts that fail to command user engagement have a way of dissolving in PETA’s world and, increasingly, ours. Earlier this year, Trump promised millions of his followers on Truth Social in a since-deleted post that every American would soon be granted access to “Medbeds,” a piece of furniture said to heal wounds, cure diseases, and regenerate limbs. This, of course, has yet to materialize.

PETA, meanwhile, has released an AI- authored revision of the Book of Genesis—billed as a “can’t be missed animal rights message filled with vegan teachings”—for $3.99. The book PETA has revised lionizes the individual human being, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or creed. Trust in the political power of the “human” broadly defined also underpins Peter Singer’s philosophy in Animal Liberation, PETA’s aforementioned credo, which proposes extending the rights of man to all animals. But as Hannah Arendt long ago observed, being human has never guaranteed protection. What matters is having papers. In an essay later published in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt noted: “The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see . . . that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger.” Arendt was writing in the aftermath of her displacement after the Second World War, the catastrophe that inspired the establishment of some of the international agencies now abandoned by the United States. But as Congress continues to enable freedom of reach to eclipse freedom of speech, the alleged interests of fetuses—sharpened by imaging technology—overwhelm those of pregnant individuals, and millions of Americans face a choice between their health and their financial solvency, her words have never seemed more relevant.

Consider the site of Musk’s new Neuralink offices, which executives reportedly boast will host a “Monkey Disneyland.” It’s a fitting term for humanity online. Personhood in so-called meatspace, by contrast, is growing more precarious, no matter your species. A few weeks ago, I was on a Zoom call with the owner of a ranch in my area, pursuing details about a writers residency. “There’s only one rule,” said the owner: when leaving the writer’s cottage, I would need to wear a bright orange vest. “We have lots of deer here,” she explained. “We aren’t contracting with any hunters right now, but periodically we do cull the population.” The vest would help the ranch’s foreman differentiate me from excess deer, but there was another reason I would have to wear it. Border patrol could see the ranch from their tower, the owner continued, and it was not a good idea, nowadays, to be anyone wandering these roads. “You look concerned,” she said. I sat up straighter in my Zoom tile. I did want this opportunity. “I’m just thinking about the moment we’re in,” I said. She nodded. “Well, it’s important that they understand you’re one of us.”

From Things I Have Made a Fiction

Alexis Almeida

I wrote a book where I tried to make sense of my life, or where I tried to distinguish my life from my dreams, because in the moments just after waking, my dream life and my waking life were starting to feel confused. In the past few years, while I tried to write my dreams down, I would often do this as an effort not to “lose” them, but when I turned to my waking life, it felt like certain things were still becoming lost, though maybe not in the same way. For example, when I turned toward my life, I felt the weight of something behind me in almost everything I did, not just because I was beginning to move away from my dreams, but because there was a quality in my days that made moving feel different, there was an edge I had not anticipated when I walked. When I pulled a piece of bright fabric over my head, or when I went to visit a friend walking across the park, I thought these small gestures would never feel the same, after the past three years. When I wrote down a dream in the morning, I was also writing down a question about the past, though the future was where it mostly landed, and when I thought of the future I did not know where to look so I sometimes closed my eyes. I thought that in the small period of time it took to render the dream into writing, there was a horizon I could feel that made my body more awake, and through this I could say things more freely, and that moved in many directions simultaneously, so when I said “past” or “future,” for example, they would in their trajectory often touch. I imagined other words here, too, and the word “firsts” seemed to stick because it was funny—how does the original originate, how could something have been the first time?—so in the book I tried to remember them, like the first time I saw slow motion in a movie, which happened yesterday when someone described the first scene of L’Eclisse, and in trying not to lose these moments I thought I could also direct a wish outward, and the pages came faster than they had in a while, and though I felt I should keep going until I had exhausted something, I also felt I was done.

Blame and Claim

A public adjuster on insuring a burning world

Tyler Maroney

© Karolis Strautniekas

Just off a hiking trail, not far from where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea, a fuel and an oxidant combine and combust. The underbrush is dry and dusty, and within an hour flames engulf your home. Smoke fills your kitchen and your garage. Flecks of wallpaper from your children’s bedroom float down onto a nearby parking lot. Your wedding photos melt, as does your car battery. The glass windows of your dining room shatter and temperatures reach a thousand degrees. The root cause might have been a mountaineer who burned his toilet paper at dawn, a spark at a faulty transmission line in the foothills, a discarded cigarette fanned by the Santa Anas, or, simply, arson.

But it is too early to assign blame. Your attention is elsewhere. You are not home and you cannot get there, as the fire department has evacuated your neighborhood, the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. Your mind races, and you reach for your phone to ensure your family is safe even if you have already heard from them. Maybe you call the police, even though you hear the sirens throughout your neighborhood and see the caravans of emergency vehicles filling the streets.

When you do manage to get home, you stand on the sidewalk watching your rafters collapse and, covering your mouth with a shirtsleeve, you make your next call, to your insurance company to file a claim. You don’t know what this process entails. You have never filed a homeowner’s or business insurance claim, you have never read your policy, and you do not know if your policy covers what has happened, since you do not know what has happened or what caused it.

You are unaware that the insurance industry has been, in recent years, denying more claims and more coverage, exiting major markets, and raising premiums. As governments and corporations continue to enable fossil fuels, throttle renewable-energy sources, and deny long-established climate science, the related catastrophes (fires, floods, droughts, storms) and social effects (mass migration, war over natural resources, economic and demographic stratification) are increasingly commonplace and metastasizing. This new world order transfers the risk and harm of the disaster business by way of the insurance industry onto you, the consumer. On an episode of the climate science podcast A Matter of Degrees, Dave Jones, a former California insurance commissioner who is now the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley, said, “For many Americans, the single biggest financial asset you have is your home. If you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford enough insurance and that home is destroyed, then you’re left with basically nothing. Insurance is the climate crisis canary in the coal mine, and the canary is just about dead.”

Days later, as embers still burn and you begin to accept that not one object will be recovered or salvaged from your home, your insurance company sends one of its employees or contractors, called an adjuster, to assess the damage, value what is or was, and (hopefully) make an offer of payment. While insurance companies defend their adjusters as necessary agents who help them evaluate claims, critics label them as conflicted loyalists who will undervalue losses, delay settlements, and pressure policy holders to settle quickly.

But as you stand there, a man in business-casual attire emerges from the smoke and approaches you apprehensively. He introduces himself as someone who can help. His title, too, is adjuster, but if you are able to focus enough on his pitch, he tells you he is not an employee of your insurance company or of a roofing company or a general contractor. If you would like help navigating the ashes of your new life, he will help you rebuild: independently value your losses, handle communications and negotiations with your insurer, draft paperwork, and take care of the settlement of the claims. He is part private detective, part lawyer, part psychologist. All of this sounds reasonable, so you take his card and tell him you’ll be in touch.

That evening, as you make plans for your family to sleep at a nearby friend’s house or in a hotel, some quick internet research teaches you this “public” adjuster is indeed part of a legitimate industry (although sometimes public adjusters, you discover, are known as “private” adjusters). Staff adjusters, you learn, are the ones that work for insurance companies, and independent adjusters are contracted for certain projects by insurance companies.

This ecosystem of adjusters is baffling, but you decide to retain the public adjuster. As you sign his contract, he informs you that he will take a significant cut of any claim settlement he negotiates. Your calculation is that outsourcing the administration of the recovery of your life is worth the cost—so long as the insurance company agrees to write a check.

I recently spoke with the president of a large public adjuster firm in California that represented victims of the Palisades and Eaton fires that broke out in early 2025 and destroyed about sixteen thousand buildings on nearly forty thousand acres, causing tens of billions of dollars in damages. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tyler Maroney: How many claims does the average public adjuster typically handle in a year?

Adjuster: It depends on the size of the claim, but some will do a hundred claims a year, mostly smaller—$10,000 claims or $50,000 claims. But if you’re talking about somebody who’s handling complicated claims, I’d say an average load for an adjuster is somewhere between twenty and fifty a year.

TM: And you handle more than just massive disasters, right?

Adjuster: We respond to disasters every day, 365 days a year. Some of them are disasters that affect a hundred people or a thousand people. Those are big events. But there are buildings that burn down every single day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Minnesota or if you’re in New York, there’s water damage, there’s flooding, there are fires, there are robberies. It doesn’t require a hurricane or a wildfire for there to be a need for our service.

TM: I’ve read that clients don’t really know that public adjusters exist until they are desperate. Is part of your job getting the word out that this is an industry?

Adjuster: We’re luckier now in today’s world of technology because people can search for things online. I’ve been doing this thirty-three or thirty-four years, when there was no internet to search. If you had an insurance claim, you only had the connections you had, but today people can type into Google, “Can I get any help with my insurance claim?”

TM: I presume you go out into the field to attract clients?

Adjuster: Yes, part of the job is to be out there when an event happens or shortly after an event is over, to let people know that we exist.

TM: When a large fire like in the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles breaks out, you go as quickly as possible to the scene?

Adjuster: Yes. When you show up at somebody’s house and the family is in the front yard crying and trying to save things that aren’t savable, it’s sad. Sometimes it’s total loss, and you find people sifting through the rubble, lining up bits of pottery.

TM: And when you approach these suffering people, how do they respond?

Adjuster: You get a wide range of emotional responses, from “Get the fuck off my property, you ambulance-chasing vulture” to “Oh my God, we’re so lost. We don’t know what to do. Thank you so much for being here. Can you help us?”

A burnt car in Eaton, California, 2025. Photo by Andrew Norman Wilson.

TM: That must be a difficult emotional minefield to wade into.

Adjuster: Yes, and when you’re walking up to meet these people, most of the time they’ve never heard of a public adjuster. They have no idea who we are or what we do or that it’s a licensed profession. It can look like we’re trying to prey on people when they’re at this vulnerable point. The reality is that’s when they need help the most, because often they do whatever the insurance company tells them to do. That puts them in the worst spot they could be in.

TM: Worst spot?

Adjuster: So, say someone calls us six months after a fire. They have been arguing with their insurance company about the value of a claim and then, out of nowhere, they get a $65,000 bill from the restoration company [a third-party, for-profit vendor] and they want us to deal with that too. We have to say: You already agreed in writing and signed for them to do that work. That money’s gone, you spent it. We can’t take that back because it was an agreement you made before we were involved.

Most people just know they have an insurance agent that sold them some insurance, and they do what they’re told. Often that results in mistakes.

TM: What kinds of mistakes?

Adjuster: I’ll give you the easiest one. There is a fire in your house, but it burns only part of your house down. There’s still stuff in it. It’s not like a wildfire where it burns all the way to the ground. So the insurance company comes out, and they bring a restoration contractor. He’s going to help you get your stuff out of the house, store it, and get it cleaned up. Seems like an incredibly important service. He says it’s going to get worse if we don’t get your stuff out of the environment. Just sign here.

TM: Okay.

Adjuster: If the owner asks, “Who pays for this?,” the automatic response is “Oh, don’t worry about it, the insurance company pays for it, it’s part of your policy.” It makes perfect sense at the time. What they don’t share is that it erodes your contents limit [which means it reduces how much money the insurance company is likely to pay out]. You have given them carte blanche, and they can bill the insurance company directly. They charge not only for clean-up but for storage. And there’s no language that protects the homeowner if they’re not happy with the service.

TM: The homeowner is vulnerable at this point.

Adjuster: What they don’t understand is that six months from now, their stuff has all been cleaned, and the restoration company charged maybe a thousand dollars to clean something that was worth four hundred dollars and they don’t even want anymore. They could have just said, “Oh, a thousand dollars to clean that item? I don’t care about that anymore. Give me the thousand dollars.”

TM: And what can you do as an adjuster to prevent this?

Adjuster: You can say to the insurance company that our client wants to select items that have intrinsic value or that we believe are valuable enough to save and restore. We can advise that often the cost to clean something is more than its value or that it’s too damaged to properly restore it. Otherwise, a homeowner will find out that the restoration company has charged $65,000 when they have $300,000 of coverage for their contents, and that $65,000 is coming right off the top, and the cleaning costs reduces the amount of insurance they have for the things that they’ve completely lost.

TM: Back to the field, is the pitch as simple as “Hi, this might be awkward, but my name is x and I’m a public adjuster, which means I help people like you”?

Adjuster: Yeah. Often it’s “Your insurance company’s going to come out here, they’re going to assign an adjuster. That adjuster works for the insurance company. They don’t work for you. You have the opportunity and you have the right to hire your own public adjusting team that counterbalances the insurance company’s team so that you have an advocate who’s a true advocate for you to level the playing field.” That’s the pitch.

TM: Do you have a sense for what percentage of people who’ve been victimized by a catastrophe are able to engage public adjusters? I assume that most people, when they’ve gone through something like that, call their insurance company, right?

Adjuster: That’s traditionally what happens, yes. They either call their agent, if their insurance agent is somebody who they’re close with, or they call the insurance company and give notice that they have a claim. And some agents will refer clients to us in a secretive way. Some brokers [who work for policy holders, not insurance companies] think that if the carriers see that they’re recommending a public adjuster, that will be bad for their reputation with the insurance carriers. Some brokers don’t care.

TM: So how does that work?

Adjuster: Some brokers say, “Hey, don’t tell anybody I told you this, but you should talk to x public adjuster.” Or sometimes it’s more open, like, “Hey, [this public adjuster company] helped a lot of my clients, so you might want to talk to them.”

TM: So how do the brokers respond to you?

Adjuster: There are insurance brokers who haven’t worked with us or don’t know us. Or they feel threatened because they were hired to do this job, and by bringing or inviting you in as a public adjuster, they’re admitting that they don’t know what they’re doing. If you’re a salesperson and you’re selling insurance policies and you’re a credible person, you want to believe that what you’re selling is the best product available. You want to hold your head up high and say, “I represent x insurance company and they’re great insurance.” So for some insurance brokers, saying “Maybe you need help getting money” is saying something negative about the insurance company. For some insurance agents, that doesn’t feel right.

TM: Do you feel you are adversarial to insurance companies?

Adjuster: We are advocating for the policy holder, not the insurance company. The insurance companies like to say, “Why do you need a public adjuster? We’re going to pay you all the money you’re owed anyway.” But if that was true, then why would they care? Why would they even have that discussion if they’re going to pay the same benefits regardless of whether somebody has somebody helping them put it together? The reality is that they’re going to pay as little as they can. So are we adversarial, or are we just taking the workload off the policy holder? It’s an arduous process. Imagine a family where everything is gone, disappeared into the smoke, and you have the burden of sharing with the insurance company everything that you lost. Where would you start?

TM: But there are fair critiques of the industry, right? Premiums are rising, carriers are pulling out of entire markets. What can you do?

Adjuster: I don’t know what I can do about it other than lobby. We go to Sacramento where we talk to [lawmakers] about the plight of people and their need for access to affordable insurance, pushing and encouraging them to pass legislation that helps people get insurance.

TM: And policy holders are struggling. As large, climate-related disasters causing property damage increase in number and scale, has the industry changed?

Adjuster: In some cases, the cost of insurance has tripled. And a few years ago, people were underinsured because they didn’t know what they needed. But now people are purposely choosing to buy less insurance and taking that risk because it’s so expensive.

With all the disasters we’ve had, insurance policies have been reduced, and diminished policy benefits have changed. Insurance companies have restricted coverage in Florida, for instance, with all the hurricanes. Some of the policies don’t cover roofs in a hurricane. How do you not cover a roof? We have had a lot of insurance companies pull out of California, at least for a while. You’ve got the California FAIR Plan that’s trying to fill the gap, and the coverage is not good. The FAIR Plan was established [in the late 1960s] for people who couldn’t find insurance from primary carriers. It was always meant to be a choice of last resort. It was never meant to do what they’re now doing.

TM: What is happening that is scaring you, that is worrying consumers about the insurance industry in connection with climate change and more frequent disasters?

Adjuster: The scary thing is people not having enough insurance to rebuild their lives.

TM: Are you able to help everyone who calls you?

Adjuster: I don’t have statistics, but I think half the people in the Palisades, for instance, were just woefully underinsured.

TM: Including wealthy people, since the Palisades was a wealthy neighborhood?

Adjuster: Including wealthy people. This is not just a poor man’s problem.

TM: It’s societal.

Adjuster: Modern society doesn’t exist without insurance.

TM: I’m sure the insurance companies would be happy to hear that.

Adjuster: The world doesn’t move without insurance. Title insurance, medical health insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, everything is tied around insurance. Anything you buy, anything you build, anything you do for work—there’s insurance that is tied around every single thing that you do.

TM: Can you give an example of how home insurance has changed?

Adjuster: You can’t close escrow in California on a property unless you’ve obtained insurance. If you talk to real estate agents, it used to be that, whether for a commercial business or apartment complex or just a house, they’d tell you that the last thing they ever thought of was insurance. Insurance used to be something that happened two days before the escrow would close, and it was just to check the box.

TM: And today?

Adjuster: If you talk to real estate agents, especially in California, they’ll say insurance has never been more important. One of the considerations as you’re going into escrow is what’s insurance going to look like? How obtainable is it and at what cost? The requirement to have insurance has killed real estate deals because brokers couldn’t get the right amount of insurance, or the coverage was so exorbitantly expensive that the person who was making the home purchase didn’t realize that was going to happen.

TM: And has that change become even more pronounced in the last five to ten years? And if so, how?

Adjuster: Oh, absolutely. If you go back again prior to 2017 in California, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. You wouldn’t be able to find a real estate agent who could tell you that a deal went sideways because of insurance.

TM: What happened?

Adjuster: A series of wildfires. You had the Glass Fire in 2020, you had the fires in Malibu. If you go back to Santa Rosa in 2017 [knowns as the Tubbs Fire in Northern California and often cited at the time as the most destructive wildfire in California history], those homeowner policies were significantly better than the policies that are out there today. They had much broader coverage, much bigger coverage. But if you go back even before that to the Oakland wildfires [in 1991], everybody had what was called guaranteed replacement costs.

TM: Can you explain that?

Adjuster: It didn’t matter how much your insurance coverage was for: if you could prove it, they owed it. Say your house had $100,000 worth of insurance on the building, it didn’t matter whether it cost a million dollars or $100,000 to replace it. That has basically gone away, because the insurance companies had to pay a lot more money than they wanted to pay. So now what we have is extended replacement costs. Different insurance companies have different percentages [past your stated limit]. It could be for 20, 25, 50, 100 percent depending on the insurance company and what they want to provide. So that gives you more coverage than the stated limit, but to a limit.

TM: So the insurance industry was dealing with a financial situation that they didn’t want to manage. Is it fair to say that their business model was not what they thought it was going to be because their margins were shrinking?

Adjuster: Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is, I think insurance companies always come out well from a disaster. They have an opportunity to raise rates and get rates changed, and between changing coverages to their benefit and getting rate changes, they generally do fine in these disasters. But, yeah, you’re right, they want to contain the risk and make sure that they know what their exposure is. And with guaranteed replacement costs, they had a harder time knowing what their real exposure was because you could be paying coverage for one-tenth of what your payout was. The math was not good for them.

TM: I imagine you’re in a difficult place, because even though you’re averse to insurance companies, you also depend on them. If the insurance industry goes away, then your industry disappears.

Adjuster: It’s too tied into every financial move. You can’t get a mortgage on a house without insurance, so if insurance goes away, the real estate market’s done or close to done.

TM: What does the future look like?

Adjuster: Well, State Farm recently got approved to raise rates [in California]. A couple of years ago, they stopped writing new policies and now they are coming back into markets. The truth is that after disasters, insurance companies have always done pretty well, even when they pay out billions of dollars. Somehow it all works out for them.

TM: Sounds like the insurance industry is resilient after all. Why is that?

Adjuster: Disasters give them opportunities to raise rates and then people keep buying insurance. I think we’ll keep negotiating with insurers and letting them take rate hikes when they need to. And I don’t see it going away.

Serious Reservations

What federal Indian boarding schools really taught

Kristen Martin

© Chi Park

Less than two weeks before the 2024 election, Joe Biden delivered a formal apology at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, south of Phoenix. Though Biden had traveled to dozens of countries throughout his presidential term, this trip to the reservation of the Pima and Maricopa peoples, whose ancestral roots here go back to approximately 300 BC, was his first diplomatic stop on tribal lands. In 1859, a few years after the United States acquired parts of southern Arizona from Mexico, an act of Congress relegated the Pima and Maricopa to the reservation, which comprised just 372,000 acres. At the same time, the United States took more than three million acres from the tribes. This land grab occurred in the context of Manifest Destiny in the 1800s, when the government used warfare, treaties, acts of Congress, and other seizures to expropriate around 1.5 billion acres of Native homelands. During this period, most of the tribes that made treaties with the United States—documents often signed under duress and frequently violated by the U.S. government—gained federal recognition, affirming their right to self-governance and stating U.S. responsibilities toward them. But the Gila River Indian Community never signed a treaty, and the tribe wasn’t federally recognized until 1939. There are now 574 federally recognized tribes within U.S. borders, but they can lay claim to only approximately fifty-six million acres of reservations and land trusts, roughly equivalent to the size of Utah.

Biden’s visit wasn’t explicitly about stolen land. Instead, he focused on the federal government’s 150-year-long history of using coercive and propagandistic education against Indigenous peoples. In 1819, Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act, apportioning $10,000 annually to boarding schools run by Christian missionaries that sought to assimilate Native children. Sixty years later, the federal government began operating its own assimilative boarding schools, after Army officer Richard Henry Pratt proposed repurposing military properties for an economically efficient answer to the “Indian Problem.” Indeed, the Secretary of the Interior at the time, Carl Schurz, estimated that it would cost just $1,500 to send an Indian child to boarding school for ten years, as opposed to about $1 million to kill an Indian at war. Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first federally run boarding school, was established in 1879 on the site of a former army barracks in Pennsylvania near the Susquehanna River. Superintendent Pratt provided the informal motto: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Children from 140 tribes, including the Pima and Maricopa, were shipped off to Carlisle during its nearly forty-year run.

The United States stopped operating Indian boarding schools only in 1969, after a Senate report titled “Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge” traced the government’s use of education to further its goals of stealing Native land back to the country’s founding. Assimilationist education, the report explained, “was considered ‘advisable’ as the cheapest and safest way of subduing the Indians [and] helping the whites acquire desirable land, and of changing the Indian’s economy so that he would be content with less land.” The report came amid a reckoning forced by Native activists: the same year had seen a group called Indians of All Tribes occupy Alcatraz Island during a larger fight for self-determination. Still, most non-Natives first learned about federal Indian boarding schools more than fifty years later.

In May 2021, the Temlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that ground-penetrating radar had found what appeared to be 215 unmarked graves at the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Within weeks, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American cabinet secretary, announced the creation of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. Over the course of three years, the initiative traced the government’s operation and support of Indian boarding schools, investigated Native children’s deaths at such schools, and invited survivors to share their experiences during a Road to Healing tour to a dozen Native communities. The resulting reports have publicized for the first time how federally funded education was used to assimilate Native children with “systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies” at 417 boarding schools across the country. The investigation identified by name 18,624 children who attended such schools and 973 children who died at them. These figures are undoubtedly undercounts. A 2024 Washington Post investigation puts the number of deaths at 3,104. And though comprehensive attendance estimates remain elusive, we know that in 1926, nearly 83 percent of Native children were enrolled at boarding schools. Haaland, whom Biden nominated for interior secretary following a campaign by Native activists, understands all too well that the abuses children faced in boarding schools decades ago continue to affect tribal communities today. Her maternal grandparents were taken away to the St. Catherine’s Industrial Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at age eight. “Federal Indian boarding school policies have touched every Indigenous person I know,” Haaland said at a Road to Healing stop in 2023.

Biden’s October 2024 apology on the grounds of the Gila Crossing Community School was prodded by the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative’s recommendations. As the president proffered this historic apology, the crowd, which included boarding school survivors and their ancestors, erupted in applause. But the federal government’s brief period of recognition ended just as it was getting started. Three months after Biden’s apology, Donald Trump was sworn in as president for a second time. Since his inauguration, it has become all too plausible that the American public will forget what we have learned about our country’s forced assimilation of Native children. Trump is taking the United States on a historical amnesia tour, suppressing and rewriting our past and overlooking tribal sovereignty. The administration’s erasures serve a larger project—yet another plunder of land, this time without even the pretense of honoring promises to tribes.

Save the Man

Among the first students to arrive at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in October 1879 was a Lakota boy named Ota Kte, or Plenty Kill, whose English name was Luther Standing Bear. Accompanied by Richard Henry Pratt himself, he made the train journey to Pennsylvania from the Dakota territory along with eighty-three other children from the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations. Standing Bear later recalled, “I could think of no reason why white people wanted Indian boys and girls except to kill them, and not having the remotest idea of what a school was, I thought we were going East to die.”

Ezra Hayt, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, had directed Pratt to recruit from the Sioux peoples, who were coerced into ceding to the United States the Black Hills—where gold had been discovered—following the Great Sioux War in 1876. Per Pratt, Hayt’s rationale was that “the children would be hostages for the good behavior of their people.” Tribal leaders like Standing Bear’s father scarcely had a choice but to enroll their children. Not all Native parents acquiesced, but that was no obstacle—Pratt was not above his agents’ use of “severe measures.” Notoriously, in 1886, President Grover Cleveland ordered that tribal leader Geronimo and his band of Apache be removed from their land in present-day Arizona and locked up as prisoners of war in Florida, though they had surrendered in the Apache Wars. Their surviving children were shipped by train to Carlisle.

In Pennsylvania, Native children underwent rapid identity alteration. Pratt employed a local photographer to capture before-and-afters of the transformations and sold the portraits to advertise the school. The first shot was taken upon arrival, when the youth were still wearing their traditional tribal garb; the second was taken after the school cut the boys’ long hair and clothed the children in military-style uniforms with brass buttons for boys and dresses with frilled collars and white pinafores for girls. The portraits were labeled with both the students’ Native names and their newly imposed Anglo names. “We’d lost our hair and we’d lost our clothes,” recalled Asa Daklugie, who was among the Apache who entered Carlisle in 1886. “With the two we’d lost our identities as Indians. Greater punishment could hardly have been devised.”

In addition to physical erasures, Carlisle students were forbidden from speaking their tribal languages in and out of the classroom. The school placed children in dorms with members of other tribes, such that their only shared language would be the English they were forced to learn. Children who spoke their native tongues were subject to abuse. In 1892, an elocution teacher attempted to blow the whistle on harsh disciplinary measures, writing to Theodore Roosevelt, then in the Civil Service Commission, about “punishments of keeping the children on a diet of bread and water for one or two weeks, and flinging them into cold cells from two weeks, to a month, and dungeons, until they are chilled to the heart, so that many cases of death have resulted from pneumonia, catarrh, and consumption.” The teacher was likely referring to the Guard House, a stone magazine said to have been built by Hessian prisoners of war on the Carlisle Barracks in 1777. Roosevelt forwarded the complaint to the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who tasked the superintendent of Indian schools, David Dorchester, with investigating; Dorchester alleged the teacher was “unbalanced.” Yet the school’s own records demonstrate that students were regularly confined in the Guard House and that at least one student died as a result of punishment. The first Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report confirmed that the disciplinary measures at Carlisle were not unique: “Indian boarding school rules were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment such as solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing.”

The curriculum at Carlisle was its own form of abuse, dedicated to preparing students to work in the white man’s world—and to abandon the ways of their tribes. Even English and math lessons revolved around industrial training, as evidenced by the samples of schoolwork by Carlisle students that I leafed through in the Cumberland County Historical Society’s archives while conducting research. Spelling tests for first graders used vocabulary from the industrial laundry; seventh-grade math word problems were based on tailoring; student artwork depicted blacksmithing tools. These lessons complemented the manual labor the children were subjected to for hours each day. Students were even put to work making wagons and harnesses to be used on reservations, supplying the needs of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Not only did boarding schools like Carlisle exploit Native children for labor, they allegedly made tribes fund the abuse: the BIA used tribal nations’ trust monies, raised by selling Native land, to bankroll federal Indian boarding schools. In May, the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma filed a class-action lawsuit in a district court in Pennsylvania against the Interior Department, among other defendants, demanding a full accounting of how trust monies “taken from the Nations themselves, and held in trust for the Nations’ collective benefit” were spent on boarding schools that systematically sought to destroy Native cultures.

Carlisle’s entire apparatus, from its location hundreds of miles from the nearest Indian reservation to its mixing of tribes and industrial curriculum, was designed to speed assimilation. Before Carlisle, most schools were located on reservations and primarily educated single tribes. As Secretary of the Interior Schurz complained in 1879, “It is the experience of the department that mere day-schools, however well conducted, do not withdraw the children sufficiently from the influences, habits, and traditions of their home-life, and produce for this reason but a comparatively limited effect.” Manifest Destiny demanded harsher measures. In the 1880s and 1890s, as the Dawes Act broke up Indian land into individual allotments, the government established military-style boarding schools, many of which were off reservation. As Ojibwe historian Brenda Child explains, “Indian people lost ninety million acres of land during the half century that assimilation policy dominated Indian education in the United States.”

Photo of Chiracahua Apache Indians at the Carlisle Indian School, 1886.
Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.

Manifest Density

Since retaking office, Trump has left no room for an honest appraisal of the government’s construction, and relentless expansion, on stolen land or of how its methods of expropriation continue to affect Indigenous peoples. His administration’s posture toward Native America is one of disrespect and ignorance. In July, presumably seeking to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, Trump demanded that the Washington Commanders football team change its name back to the Washington Redskins; that same month, the Department of Homeland Security’s X account posted the Manifest Destiny–era painting American Progress by John Gast, depicting Native Americans being driven off their land by settlers, which it captioned, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”

This isn’t just a case of rhetorical whiplash. On his first day back in office, Trump issued an executive order terminating federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, calling them “illegal and immoral.” The order’s antiwoke logic has fueled a project of Native erasure, most evident in the administration’s censorship of information, documents, and data on government websites. In March, a Washington Post investigation found that the Pentagon removed several web pages honoring Native American service members, including one about Ira Hayes, a member of the Gila River Indian Community who was one of the six Marines to raise the American flag at Iwo Jima. In June, thirteen members of Congress called on the Justice Department to restore to its website the Not Invisible Act Commission Report, which issued recommendations about how to respond to the missing and murdered Indigenous persons crisis. Trump himself had signed the Not Invisible Act into law in 2020 to develop recommendations on combating an epidemic of violent crime against Indigenous people, who go missing at disproportionate rates and for whom homicide is a leading cause of death. And in May, the Department of the Interior yanked down a page dedicated to the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, formerly hosted under a section about the department’s “priorities.”

While the administration has often focused its meddling in the digital world on clear-cutting anything that might be possibly construed as promoting DEI or “gender ideology,” it is also dedicated to an active reshaping of how the country remembers its past and tells stories about itself. Under the banner of complying with the DEI ban, the National Endowment for the Humanities canceled $1.6 million in awards for the digitization of archival records from federal Indian boarding schools and the collection of first-person accounts from survivors. Among the tribal nonprofits affected by NEH rescissions was the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) in Minnesota, a leading advocacy group for those subjected to the schools. The NABS lost nearly $283,000 in unspent funding on their National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive project; their grant supported the effort to find and digitize more than 120,000 pages of relevant documents from the National Archives. As NABS CEO Deborah Parker, citizen of the Tulalip Tribes, told Native News Online, “This loss not only hinders education, but also deepens the gap in our national understanding, allowing cycles of erasure, misunderstanding, and invisibility to persist.”

That gap in national understanding will soon be yawning if Trump gets his way. In a March executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” Trump directed the interior secretary, who also manages public lands and the National Park Service (NPS), “to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties . . . do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” As part of this review, NPS employees have flagged descriptions and displays per Trump’s instruction to review material presented to visitors at 433 sites nationwide, marking them for potential revision or removal by mid-September. A display at the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in St. Augustine, Florida, was flagged for how it described the imprisonment of Plains Indians in the late 1800s, referring to tribes having a choice between extinction or assimilation. This description is accurate. Castillo de San Marcos, once known as Fort Marion, was where Richard Henry Pratt developed his ideas for using education to assimilate and subdue Native peoples.

One wonders how the NPS under Trump will attempt to sanitize history at the newly created Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument. In early December 2024, Biden signed a proclamation establishing the monument. At the White House Tribal Nations Summit, where he announced the proclamation, Biden said, “I don’t want people forgetting [in] ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years and pretending it didn’t happen.” Under Trump, forgetting and pretending is an active project. In May, it was reported that the White House had scrubbed Biden’s apology from its website. Currently, visiting the site of the boarding school—now home to the U.S. Army War College—requires passing a federal background check. When I visited in November 2022 to conduct research, the few acknowledgments of the boarding school’s history might have passed muster with Trump. In downtown Carlisle, the only placard about the school focused on its athletic history (Jim Thorpe attended). In a small museum in the Guard House, where Carlisle students were confined for discipline, a different placard stated that “Richard Pratt’s vision was to provide training for Native American youth who could then sustain themselves in industry, trades and farming,” whitewashing the superintendent’s “civilizing” mission.

Beads and String

If the bigger-picture goal of the federal boarding school era’s reeducation campaign was making tribes be “content with less land” so that settlers and prospectors could stretch across the country and reap profits, the Trump administration’s censorship and suppression go as far as to enforce pride in oppression. When Americans do not have to confront the ways that our government attempted to exterminate Native peoples and their cultures, we are more liable to view westward expansion as our historic destiny. As journalist, author, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation Rebecca Nagle told me:

There’s research showing that people who aren’t exposed to information about Native people or examples of contemporary living Native people actually have less support for tribes and tribal sovereignty, and are more likely to support things like the idea that all reservations should be abolished, all treaty rights should be abolished, and then Indigenous nations should no longer exist.

Ignoring the existence of sovereign Native nations would make Trump’s goal of opening up public lands for oil, gas, and mineral extraction much more achievable; many of the public lands that Trump is eyeing for private drilling and mining are protected by national monuments that tribal nations lobbied for, seeking to protect their ancestral burial grounds and their use for ceremonies, hunting, fishing, and foraging.

Trump has meddled with national monuments before. In his first term, he ordered the largest national monument reduction in U.S. history, cutting down the Bears Ears National Monument by more than a million acres, to 15 percent of its original size, and slicing Grand Staircase-Escalante roughly in half, to about one million acres. Bears Ears is on land that is sacred and ancestral to the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni, among others; Grand Staircase-Escalante is also on land that is sacred and ancestral to many communities, including the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, Kaibab Paiute Tribe, and Pueblo of Acoma. Both monuments sit on land rich with minerals, oil, and gas that Trump sought to open up to private extraction. “Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington,” Trump said when proclaiming the monument reduction. “And guess what? They’re wrong.” He added, “We will usher in a bright new future of wonder and wealth.” That future would not include tribal nations trying to exercise their sovereignty.

Though Biden restored the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase- Escalante in October 2021 after pressure from Secretary Haaland and tribal leaders, under Trump 2.0, the monuments are once again in danger. Nor are these monuments the only federally held lands at risk of destruction. The Western Apache are currently fighting a legal battle to prevent the U.S. Forest Service from transferring land in the Tonto National Forest in Arizona containing Oak Flat, a site where they have gathered for thousands of years for ceremonies, to a copper-mining company. And in June, the Trump administration rescinded a regulation that protected nearly sixty million acres of national forests from logging, mining, and roadbuilding. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies got $18 billion in tax breaks in the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” that the president signed into law on July 4, while companies that drill on public lands will save about $6 billion in the royalties they pay the federal government. In addition to winding down tax credits for solar and wind projects, the law claws back unobligated funds in the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program, which supported federally recognized tribes’ investments in energy infrastructure. These programs were especially crucial as Native people living on tribal lands are extraordinarily cost burdened when it comes to energy, spending 28 percent above average, and face 6.5 times more electricity outages per year. Approximately seventeen thousand households on tribal lands have no access to electricity at all.

These and other cuts to federal programs for tribes are already putting treaty obligations in jeopardy, Nagle told me. “You know, these things weren’t free. They weren’t handouts,” she said. “In exchange for land, the United States made certain assurances to tribes.” Yet for most of U.S. history, our government has been content to renege on its word to Native nations. It promised to provide education but allegedly used tribes’ trust monies to abuse their children in the 1800s and 1900s and is now proposing a $161 million cut to the Bureau of Indian Education’s budget for tribal colleges. It has promised health care to a population that suffers disproportionate rates of chronic disease and mental health problems—especially among boarding school survivors and their children—yet the Indian Health Service has been chronically underfunded by Congress for decades. Though the shift to Trump 2.0 has been one of marked upheaval for Indian Country, the four years of Haaland’s tenure at Interior were in many ways a departure from centuries of federal policy and posture toward tribes. If Trump succeeds in his campaign of collective forgetting, those years will remain a blip.

Bog Trouble

The future of peat in Ireland

Caitlín Doherty

© Ricardo Tomás

From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland by Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie. Bristol University Press, 284 pages. 2025.

On the bogs of Gweedore in early July, there is a blanket of wildflowers: butter-yellow tormentil and prickly lousewort cloak the ground, alongside delicate sea campion and violet milkwort—an orchidlike flora whose buds, smaller than a fingernail, resemble the heads of birds. Chaffs and pipits hold court in the hedgerows; hares, startled by a breeze, freeze then dart below drystone walls; pairs of oystercatchers conduct their antiphonic calls across the battered rocks of Brinlack and between the sea caves of Glassagh. Walking the bog’s coastal edge, even at the height of summer, is a lonesome affair. A solitary hiker might appear on the horizon, a farmer’s quad bike worry the sheep, or a local surfer emerge from an Atlantic barrel, but signs of human activity are for the most part few and far between. Move deeper, though, into the mossy terrain—the word bog, in Irish, means “soft”—and traces will begin to emerge: vertical incisions, three to four feet deep, made into the peat’s surface; sods stacked in pyramid formations; digging machines abandoned in puddles of brown groundwater. All are clues to the bog’s role in life here, indications of a practice undertaken on blazing dog days in anticipation of cold winter nights: the cutting and drying of turf.

Turfis the Hiberno-English name for clods of combustible peat. The word is derived from the medieval Latin turbarium, which connotes both the bog and the right to its usage. A similar doubling occurs in Irish, where móin and the more commonly used plural móna mean both bog and the domestic fuel source it yields. Formed over millennia from the decomposing mulch of organic material, turf is also a signifier in Ireland for fading rural ways of life and the basis of a fractious dispute over the country’s cultural and economic identity. Traditionally cut by hand by pairs of workers—one operating the right-angled sleán spade, the other throwing sods from the trench—during the drier vernal months, then stored in piles outside the home, turf is simultaneously a practical energy supply, a link to premodern forms of Irish life, and an inanimate muse for countless poets, artists, and songwriters. To heat one’s home with the stuff today is as much a statement of belief in the value of old ways as an act of expedience—nowhere more so than in Gweedore, a Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking district, at the northwestern tip of Donegal, the island’s most northwesterly county. It is a region famed for its sandy beaches, musical heritage, and Republican identity. Each summer, buses of teenagers arrive from across the country to attend language schools only to struggle with the local accent. As they pass their long break flirting in Gaelic Athletic Association jerseys and recording covers of Ed Sheeran hits as Gaeilge, an aging cohort of residents moves across the bog in pairs, cutting and throwing bricks of earth onto banks to dry before ferrying them home by the tractorload.

The end of the turf has long been prophesied. It is decreasingly relied upon, burned mostly by elderly and poorer households in remote areas of the country. In 2011, ninety thousand homes—mostly in the rural west and agricultural midlands—used turf as their primary fuel source, down to sixty-eight thousand in 2022 and understood to have fallen further since (Ireland’s population during the same period grew from 4.6 to 5.1 million, with an average household size of 2.74). Be it by turf, kerosene, or a mixture of the two, heating your home off-grid in Donegal is an expression of a certain frontier mindset (shown also in the population’s disregard for planning laws and affinity for country music), a display of distrust in national structures that have repeatedly neglected the region’s interests, and a way of retaining control over costs in a county with one of the country’s lowest levels of disposable income.

Arriving in turf-burning areas like Gweedore used to mean stepping off the plane or out of the car and being hit with an unmistakable aroma. (Think of the scent of the peatiest whisky you’ve tried, then imagine walking into a cloud of it.) For the turf-minded today, the smell is notable through its absence—a cause for comment when a waft arrives through an open window. The reasons for this diminishment are, as with all socioeconomic changes, multifarious but fall generally into two camps: a waning appetite for the backbreaking work entailed in gathering the turf, particularly among the young, and a series of legislative changes aimed at decarbonizing the Irish economy.

Premature, Daft, Unworkable, Senseless

In October 2022, Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Irish Parliament, passed legislation banning turf’s commercial sale. In a confusing attempt at compromise, it would henceforth be legal to buy sods from one’s neighbor but not from one’s neighbor’s shop. The bill allowed for private sale of turf between individuals but not its retail or advertising; an informal market was thus formally recognized as an economic necessity to alleviate the tensions caused by the green transition. On the bill’s passage, Eamon Ryan, its author and then-leader of the country’s liberal-centrist Green Party, conducted a victory lap. His adversaries, mostly independent members of parliament or representatives of Sinn Féin, lined up in a series of tempestuous chamber and prime-time debates to denounce the move as “premature, daft, unworkable and senseless,” per Sinn Féin’s Darren O’Rourke. Nothing, he noted, “is worse for health than poverty.”

The bill, which also extended prohibitions on the retail of cheap but noxious bituminous coal, was constructed on public health grounds but interpreted by its critics as an out-of-touch ecological attack by the middle class on tradition, Ireland’s energy independence, and the balance sheets of those households that still use turf as fuel—often alongside, or in place of, kerosene, the price of which more than doubled in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At between €200 and €250 each, six to seven tractorloads of turf will power a family home that runs on a range system for the year. Since autumn 2022, however, acquiring the stuff means either cutting it yourself or knowing someone who will sell it to you.

It also means having a house equipped to burn it. While Dublin's astronomical property prices have been the focus of international reporting, Ireland is suffering from a nationwide housing crisis driven by an unregulated rental market and reckless private development projects undertaken in lieu of affordable public initiatives, especially during the years of the Celtic Tiger. When the bubble burst, cul-de-sacs of new builds were left unfinished and ghost estates haunted the edges of towns where residents lacked the income to support gargantuan mortgages; people, meanwhile, struggled to find homes. In Donegal, the problem has been worsened by the “mica scandal”: an estimated twenty thousand properties constructed, since the late 1990s, with concrete blocks that contained high levels of the mineral muscovite, or mica. Such blocks crack when exposed to damp conditions repeatedly, meaning houses across the coastal county are falling into the ground, unmortgageable and uninhabitable.

Turf, then, is cheap, but only if you can get it, and effective at heating your home, but only if you have one. Access to a hearth on which to burn it is yet another complicating factor: in 2014 the government introduced legislation that did not amount to an outright ban on chimneys in new houses but severely tightened conditions for their inclusion. The 2022 bill preserved the system of turbary rights, an amalgamation of custom and law by which families are permitted to cut turf for domestic use. Concentrated around the flat bogs of the country’s Midlands, the industrial-scale extraction of peat was already being wound down, however. Beyond limiting the volume of carbon inhaled in the home, the “turf ban” was also a means of complying with EU regulations on peatland conservation and an affirmation of Ireland’s pivot to a green economic model, prioritizing wind power in particular as an abundant national resource.

This was a period of technocratic green optimism in Irish political life, as it was across the European Union. Leo Varadkar, taoiseach (prime minister) at the time, had made investment in renewable energy a cornerstone of his political campaigning, and the formation of a historic three-way coalition between Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and the Green Party in 2020 seemed to confirm the development of green energy as the nation’s obvious direction of travel. At the same time, tech money was flooding into Ireland through the eruption of new data centers, structures well suited to the cooling winds of the nation’s climate and the permissive regulatory tax attitude of its government. Appeasing Brussels while courting Cupertino: Ireland was decarbonizing and digitalizing in one elegant maneuver. What could go wrong?

© Ricardo Tomás

Data Center Molochs

It’s a question taken up by Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie in From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland, a pathbreaking account of the development of Irish capitalism within the world system. Ireland is an outlier within that system: a former colony in Western Europe that jump-started its economy by offering itself up as a repository for foreign direct investment (FDI) without passing through a phase of postindependence industrialization. As such, some of the hallmark tensions of neighboring countries’ decarbonization programs are absent from the Irish situation. Unlike in the UK, where the culture war has shaped climate politics, or Germany, where energy costs and security do the same, in Ireland the primary determinant is the ownership and control of land. While this might have provided fertile terrain under different conditions for a national, publicly owned system of renewable energy, Ireland’s economic structure is not just open to, but entirely constructed around, attracting multinational capital investment. The result, as Bresnihan and Brodie show, is the creation of a shadow private renewable-energy sector in which American tech firms reap the rewards of public investment in green fuels while the population remains tethered to an inflation-sensitive fossil energy system. In the authors’ hands, Ireland’s outlier status proves a salutary lesson in the cunning paths global capitalism will take to ensure that both the green and digital transitions prioritize private profit over public good.

One story covered in the book is instructive. In 2020, a series of disastrous peat slides occurred at Meenbog, an area on the border between Donegal and Tyrone. Over eighty thousand cubic meters of peat cascaded from the bog, triggered by earthworks to install a set of wind turbines. The avalanche devastated wildlife in the local area, polluting an EU-protected salmon spawning ground in nearby rivers. Nature, as it is wont to do, ignored the political bifurcation between north and south, though the origins of the disaster are part of a story that is thus far unique to the republic’s recent political economy.

That is because the wind turbines intended for Meenbog were intended for one purpose: to provide renewable energy for Amazon Web Services (AWS) through a corporate power purchase agreement, a contract that provides a company with a private electricity supply—in this case, one generated by wind power—rather than buying energy from the national grid. (As Brodie and Bresnihan point out, this arrangement contravenes the 1927 Electricity [Supply] Act, which prohibits the development of private electricity infrastructure.) Since the peat slide, AWS has remained quiet about its involvement, but in the run-up to the construction work the company was in full green PR mode, advertising the agreement as a historic breakthrough for both its ambition to run a service powered completely by renewables by 2030 and for contributing to Irish green-energy infrastructure without costing the taxpayer a penny. “We will be the largest single corporate buyer of renewable energy in the country, and we won’t stop here,” read the 2020 press release. The appetite of Amazon and other large tech companies for Irish wind power has indeed proved voracious. In 2023, 21 percent of energy on the Irish grid (35 percent of which currently comes from wind power) went to data centers, which are pressing for yet further opportunities to circumvent regulation on energy use. This is the highest proportion of energy supply used for such purposes in any nation on Earth, and it is rising year to year. Other countries, such as the Netherlands, enforce regulations to manage supply and ensure a fair distribution to its population (7 percent of its supply went to data centers in 2024). Do this here, the tacit threat from the data center Molochs seems to be, and we’ll leave Ireland. The economic results of this for a nation whose budgetary surplus balance is generated entirely by Big Tech firms and the onshore registration of their intellectual property would be a disaster (though one that might revive the question of what form an Irish economy unmoored from American corporate clientelism could take).

By now it is a truth universally acknowledged that the effects of new green regulations are rarely as logical or linear as policymakers might have hoped. Much of this essay was researched and written in Gweedore, at the new digital coworking space built on the edge of Derrybeg. The Gteic, as the building is known, sits in the shadow of a rolling bog on which squats a troop of wind turbines. The office of Pearse Doherty, Sinn Féin’s deputy leader in the Dáil and one of the staunchest opponents of Ryan’s 2022 ban on the commercial sale of turf, lies a few minutes down the road, beyond the station of Raidió na Gaeltachta and the premises of a local waste disposal company. One lunchtime this summer while working at the Gteic I stepped outside to phone my aunt, with whom I share a home in Gweedore. In the car park was the van of a local turfman, who seemed—from the shoes left by the doors of his vehicle—to be taking a nap within. I called to tell her that our application to the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland for a grant to cover insulation works had been approved. Because we have an open hearth, however, the contractors would have to install trickle vents for the house to meet with public health regulations aimed at preventing us from choking on smoke. Happy to comply with this codified common sense, my aunt had just one question: If the green grant meant the fireplace was back in action, would I look into getting hold of some turf?

It’s clear, then, that turf has proved tricky to eliminate from Irish life, even as the national political culture has pivoted toward environmentalism. To understand why requires recalibrating a number of prevailing assumptions about the nature of a green transition, particularly one conducted under the regulatory auspices of Brussels and with corporate interests at its heart. It is to remind ourselves that, despite the fanfare made lately of its skyrocketing GDP, Ireland is deeply divided in wealth between the metropolitan Dublin area and the “under-developed” West, a country whose politics and economy continue to be shaped by British partition and a decades-long commitment to the strategy of attracting FDI. It is also to throw into doubt the binary division made between a fossil fuel and a renewable resource, by virtue of the bog’s own unique temporal character, and to raise the thorny issue of what it is that conservation projects should conserve.

A Long Day’s Cutting

For a period in the mid-twentieth century, turf was Ireland’s future. Under British imperial rule, the bogs had been dismissed as vast wastes of space, a geographical metaphor for native fecklessness in the eyes of the colonizers, who between 1809 and 1814 conducted a survey of Irish peatlands to identify areas that could be converted into arable plots for the supply of linen and food to the British Army. These surveys, which contributed to making Ireland one of the most mapped countries on the planet, were to have a second life following independence. In 1934, the government established the Turf Development Board—renamed Bord na Móna (BnM) in 1946—as part of a move to end Irish dependency on British coal, which, as the curtailment of exports during the Second World War demonstrated, was neither an economically wise nor politically palatable industrial strategy.

For those wondering how clods of hand-cut peat replaced industrial imports of coal in the Irish energy system, the answer is directly. When, during the 2022 energy price spikes, independent member of parliament Michael Fitzmaurice described possessing turbary rights as like having “an oil well in your backyard,” he was echoing the arguments of Seán Lemass, the mid-century minister and taoiseach credited with bringing technoscientific modernity to Ireland, who expressed his commitment to “any possible outlet for the utilisation of peat” in a speech to the Dáil in 1953. Coal remained in use, particularly in heavy-industry work such as shipbuilding, but, as the climate historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has recently shown, a transition from one fuel source to another is never a full switch. In the 1950s, BnM began constructing a network of turf-fueled power plants across rural Ireland. Peat extraction ramped up, and mechanical cutters were introduced. Digging down to the rock, these machines were much more damaging to the bog than the sleán spade, whose use replenishes topsoil in traditional practice.

In rural areas such as Gweedore, where one of the country’s first four turf plants opened in 1958, this was the first taste of a modern Poblacht na hÉireann, or Irish republic, in which traditional knowledge and methods would be harnessed to create a national energy supply and badly needed jobs, not dismissed as they had been by the British. In the first years of its operation, two hundred local cutters delivered around thirty thousand tons of turf to the station each year, which, combined with the nearby Clady hydroelectric plant, produced a total of nine megawatts annually for the Irish electricity grid. Taking place against a backdrop of rural electrification that transformed domestic life, these jobs helped to stymie working-age male emigration from the area and increase living standards in one of Ireland’s poorest regions.

The optimism of the early Irish state with regard to turf’s ability to power the nation was shortsighted, however, if not short-lived. The Gweedore power plant never made a profit over its thirty-eight years of operation, and in the mid-1970s, amid a nationwide recession and global oil crisis, tensions between turf cutters and Electricity Supply Board directors came to a head. Turf prices on the local market exceeded those offered by the ESB, which had not kept pace with inflation. In 1974, the Gweedore turf cutters’ spokesman, Seán MacAoidh, demanded a 100 percent increase in the price per ton for turf, work that the Donegal News described as “backbreaking, tiresome and arduous.” Fewer and fewer men could be drawn to work the bog, a decline that continued in the decades to come.

The Gweedore turf plant closed in 1996. Never truly economically viable, the project had begun to be seen as a remnant of a charitable impulse from Dublin to provide jobs during the harsh years of the mid-century rather than an effort at creating a national modernization scheme with its roots in rural cultures and resources. The view of the bog itself was also undergoing a shift, as environmental movements oriented toward peatland conservation began to apply pressure to the Irish government, and BnM in particular, to protect bogland flora and fauna and cease industrial peat extraction for export. Bogs cover nearly 20 percent of land in Ireland; around 80 percent of this peatland is degraded as a result of extraction, meaning it emits carbon dioxide at an estimated rate of 21.6 million tons a year. Restored, “rewet” bog is capable of acting as a carbon sink, in which a low-oxygen environment traps the gas as it is released from decaying plant material. Estimates on the volume of CO2 contained within healthy peatland vary depending on the bog type—Ireland’s are mostly “raised” bogs, though the country also has 8 percent of the global total of the rarer “oceanic blanket” type—but a general working figure is 172 kilograms per cubic meter of peat. BnM has committed to rewetting eighty thousand acres by 2030, having now closed all sixty-two of its working bogs.

The transition from exploiting bogs as a source of carbon to protecting bogs as sinks for carbon sequestration seemed like a rare example of progressive ecological policy that would come at little to no cost to livelihoods or existing patterns of behavior. Sleáns and stories of how the tae always tasted better after a long day’s cutting could be absorbed into the Irish heritage industry, oral histories taken down by the fire as ministers got on with attracting a new wave of IT companies to the country’s shores.

In 2020, BnM rebranded itself as a “climate solutions company” under the leadership of Tom Donellan, a self-described “poster child of foreign direct investment” who after a lengthy career in telecoms himself transitioned to assuring audiences at Ireland’s Development Authority that the former turf board was now “very much a commercial organisation,” one that believed “that the whole sustainability journey can be very commercially rewarding.” (This turns out to have been true for public-minded Donellan in particular, who—until press caught wind of his behavior this year—had formed a habit of claiming around €57,000 per annum of benefits in kind on top of his €225,000 salary.) The role of BnM as a semiprivate state body was now to mediate between EU-friendly conservation initiatives and U.S.-owned multinational renewable-energy clients. The bog would stay wet, and the wind farms built on top of it. A plan that’s hard to fault—unless those turbines damage the bog.

When hastily constructed sites like Meenbog collapse, destroying thousands of years of peat formation, releasing innumerable tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, and creating a hazard zone for locals that takes years to clear, the tech firm clients are nowhere to be found, hiding behind the third-party contractors who deal directly with the state. Accountability barely meets the bar for nominal: the fine issued to site developers in the Meenbog case was €1,500. As Brodie and Bresnihan write, “‘Modernity’ and ‘modernisation’ have always looked something like the split, differentiated landscapes and geographies of uneven development.” In the case of Meenbog, a wind farm designed to power an American tech firm put the bog out of action for any other use, be it domestic turf harvesting or conservation. These two ambitions are often presented as contradictory, a tussle between environmental activists who overlook the social and financial importance of the bog to locals, and locals who are reckless about the natural damage their practices incur. But this reading obfuscates the commonality between the groups, both of whom care deeply about the bog as a landscape and a way of life. Activists and locals alike want to find, as the great Irish geologist and botanist (and author of the magnificent The Bogs of Ireland) John Feehan has written, a way of “living on the land without heartbreak.”

The timeline suggested by a battle between cultural traditionalism and environmental modernity also obscures the way that the bog functions in areas such as Gweedore not as a resource but as a character with near-mythological qualities, whose existence defies the mortal frameworks of policy agendas. “Conservation,” Feehan writes, “was not part of the outlook of a community living with the bog in its blood. It didn’t need to be, because the bog was infinite: it went on forever and would last forever.” Conserving the bog means conserving some of this relation to time and the land as part of a cycle of renewal and seasonal patterns in the community. As the generations involved in turf cutting age beyond the point that the practice makes much meaningful difference to the preservation of the land, it’s clear that the ecological threat comes not from those who still depend on peat to heat their homes but rather from those who see the bog—as the British once did—as terra incognita, wasteland ripe for neocolonial development, whatever the cost to life, be it plant, animal, or human.

One Meter, One Millennium

How long should it take for a fuel to generate for it to be considered renewable? In Finland in recent years, peat has pivoted from fossil fuel to renewable and back in response to advances in peatland restoration as well as energy security concerns. Viewed in this light, peat starts to seem less like a soggy form of coal and more like a naturally occurring form of wood-chip biomass. The substance sits at the heart of ongoing regulatory battles over how and where emissions are quantified: At the point of production or combustion? But the production for wood-chip biomass, from planting suitable trees to selling burnable pellets, is around thirty years; for one meter of peat to grow on Irish bogs takes roughly a millennium. Those who continue to cut the bogs know, of course, that na móna are not infinite, that they will not last forever. They know also that each incision takes one deeper into the geological past, hundreds of generations of natural processes burned for the sake of a few evenings of warmth. Rather than being ignored, this awareness of the bog’s deep time, its vastness, and the scale of one human life within it is embedded within the culture of turf cutting, part of what makes it a fossil fuel unlike any other.

This summer, on a rainy afternoon in the run-up to Donegal’s Gaelic football semifinals appearance, as the gable ends of houses were being painted in county colors, I visited the Dunlewey Centre, a Gweedore heritage site and visitor attraction that lies at the foot of the Glenveagh Mountains. I was joined by Peter, Paul, and Bríd, all middle-aged employees of Dunlewey and locals of Gweedore, in the café, which on summer evenings doubles as a venue for traditional music events. Without discussing it, we gravitated toward the fireplace at the center of the room, on which clods of turf, naturally, were burning. Paul pointed out the fact of the flames’ magnetism—a radiator, he said, would never have the same appeal—as the trio agreed that a way of life would be lost when open fires ceased to be a standard feature within Irish homes (the Irish word for household, teaghlach, is a derivation of the word for hearth, teallach). The tradition of turf cutting would likely die with them, but they would continue to do it for as long as they were physically capable. “It’s in the blood,” as Bríd said, echoing Feehan.

All three were stoical in the face of this change, just as most Irish bog conservationists are sensitive to the pathos that talk of the end of turf inspires. Neither side claims total victory over the other. Conservationists will have to learn to live with the small damage incurred by those who continue, for however long, to cut turf; cutters, for their part, accept that they are likely the last generation to undertake the work. Pain is felt on both ends, but, unlike that caused by the reckless profiteering that underlies catastrophes such as Meenbog, it is a pain born of conflicting models of care for, not exploitation of, the bog. Heartbreak may then turn out to be a condition endemic to living on the land, the romantic price of the risk taken by loving it. But when it comes to the political-economic relationship governing how the land is used—and used up—the terms should be set by those who live on it.

Last Herd on Earth

After years of coexistence, elk and cattle go to war in Point Reyes

Lauren Markham

A dairy cow and a herd of tule elk graze in Point Reyes National Seashore in November 2025.
All photographs by Ian Bates.

It was the tule elk, of all things—those velvet-pelted, doe-eyed creatures once thought extinct—that ultimately drove the organic ranchers, an imperiled species themselves, out of the Point Reyes National Seashore. Point Reyes is a place whose beauty is heightened by contrast: a foggy peninsula where, just a thirty-mile drive north of San Francisco, coastal prairie meets virgin forest, rugged tide pools meet wetland esteros and sprawling lagoons, and, at least until very recently, domesticated livestock graze on oceanfront pastures within mooing distance of the fabled elk—the oafish cows and majestic tule the town’s unofficial odd-couple mascots.

In October, I took a drive through this landscape with David Evans, a rancher who grew up inside the Point Reyes National Seashore, the federally protected wilderness area that stretches along eighty miles of undeveloped coast. Evans’s family has been running cattle on the peninsula since before California was even a state, but despite his beef bona fides, he isn’t your stereotypical meat-and-potatoes cattleman: in addition to riding his ATV, he likes to forage for mushrooms and make jam. In 1999, he launched Marin Sun Farms, an organic, pasture-raised meat and egg company he now runs with his wife, Claire—a former vegetarian—that supplies some of the Bay Area’s highest-quality organic meat to its most upscale markets and restaurants.

Since the Point Reyes National Seashore was established in 1972, ranches like the Evanses’ have been a part of a Bay Area sustainable-food revolution that helped reconfigure our nation’s understanding of what we should eat, how we should eat it, and the ethics of its production. Bill Niman, of Niman Ranch fame—now the largest source of humanely raised, sustainably produced meat in the entire country, sold everywhere from Whole Foods to Michelin-starred restaurants—began ranching in what is now the Point Reyes National Seashore in the early seventies. Until last year, Albert Straus, of the beloved Straus Family Creamery, sourced nearly 15 percent of his organic milk from dairies inside the park. Evans’s Marin Sun Farms created a one-stop shop where the region’s organic ranches—some of them his neighbors on the Seashore—have their meat slaughtered, butchered, and sold at market, cutting out a number of middlemen and thus reducing costs and waste. Encouraged by their geography, the high quality of land, and the environmental regulations that govern the hundreds of people and some 1,500 species of plants and animals that live within the boundaries of the Seashore, many Point Reyes ranchers have joined influential Bay Area locavores like restaurateur Alice Waters and food writers Michael Pollan and Samin Nosrat in advocating for local food systems that support regional economies, reduce carbon and the use of toxic chemicals, improve human health, and restore soil quality. Ranches like Evans’s were presented as proof that these grand designs were possible.

So successful (and rare) is this regional model that, when then-Prince Charles visited the United States in 2005 on an official tour of promising organic agricultural practices, he made a point to visit the farmers market in the eponymous town of Point Reyes—situated just a few miles outside the park boundary, with a population of 485—where he chatted up vendors, celebrating the region as one of the most successful examples of a pastoral landscape that still actually fed people rather than just attracted tourists and looked quaint in social media posts.

At the same time, since 1978, the Seashore has provided crucial habitat to dozens of threatened, rare, or endangered species, including the tule elk, which had nearly gone extinct until finding sanctuary in Point Reyes. In fact, the Point Reyes National Seashore has proved to be one of the only places on Earth that this imperiled subspecies has been able to thrive, flourishing alongside the cattle. If elsewhere in the United States people with an investment in the country’s natural landscapes have too often fallen into a set of antagonistic binaries—tree huggers versus loggers, conservationists versus hunters, vegetarians versus ranchers—the beef and dairy farmers and the wilderness lovers of Point Reyes achieved a rare peace. Their conviviality proved that ecosystem conservation and sustainable food production could, in fact, coexist, even on a warming planet teeming with evermore hungry humans.

But that accord collapsed a few months before my ride-along with Evans, and now he suddenly pulled his truck over to the road’s shoulder so that he could point out to me a sign of the changing times. A tule elk buck, rack of horns and all, marched unimpeded through its new empire: a former cow pasture whose tenants had been moved out months ago. The animal was just a tawny speck trudging through a field of browning grass, overgrown because cows no longer grazed there, but even from the car I was impressed by the tule’s stature, its silhouette bringing to mind the dramatic and rare presence of a moose.

A barn at H Ranch.

“Look at that beautiful buck,” Evans said tenderly. So tenderly, in fact, that I wondered if he’d momentarily forgotten that the elk—or their champions, in any case—had been the cause of the doom that had befallen the ranchers of Point Reyes.

The story of how and why exactly the tule elk and their defenders led to the ranchers being kicked off their land has more twists and turns than the road on whose shoulder Evans and I were presently parked, but the most important part to understand is that, one day in the summer of 2012, the tule elk had suddenly and mysteriously started turning up dead, their emaciated bodies found rotting into the ground as if they were on an episode of CSI: Animal Victims Unit. That’s when the forty-year peace between the ranchers and conservationists started to go cold. Some two hundred elk died over the following two years, nearly halving the population of the imperiled species. Animal rights and environmental activists blamed the ranchers’ resource-intensive presence on the Seashore, which forced the elk to be fenced into a preserve when instead, they argued, they should be free to roam. (The activists also blamed the National Park Service for letting ranchers operate on the park’s land in the first place.)

The specifics of whether the ranchers’ presence really was to blame for the elks’ mass deaths and the details of the lawsuits and countersuits and counter-countersuits that followed are yet more zigzags on the switchbacked road that leads to the present, but the outcome of it all is straightforward enough. In January 2025, the Park Service announced the results of a mediation settlement that evicted all but two of the local ranch operators from the Point Reyes National Seashore, leaving the farms and creameries vacant and nearly a hundred (mostly Latino) tenants and ranch hands without jobs or homes, and halting the annual production of roughly a million gallons of organic milk and tens of thousands of pounds of sustainable and pasture-raised beef. At the behest of conservation-minded environmentalists, in other words, the local food system was being eviscerated, with some environmentalist organizations in the area now cheering the eviction of their neighbors who had produced some of the most sustainably and humanely produced meat and dairy in America. “This agreement will finally free the park’s magnificent Tule elk, forever,” wrote one organization, In Defense of Animals, celebrating the departure of ranchers like Evans, whom they mocked as “sewers of the land.”

Claire Herminjard and David Evans, the last remaining ranch operators in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

From afar—well, from my home in nearby Berkeley—I had watched the conflict unfold with a mix of skepticism and disbelief over some of the activists’ depictions of the ranchers as “greedy corporate monsters in overalls making a buck any way they can,” as one blogger put it. Environmentalists picking on small organic farms, for goodness’ sake? The whole affair seemed almost cartoonishly Californian, like an Onion gag skewering my home state’s love of litigating the absurd. The punch line to the joke came in the spring, when the kerfuffle attracted the attention of a group of Republican lawmakers on the House Committee for Natural Resources (led by Representative Ben Westerman of Arkansas, no less) who opened a congressional probe to challenge the legal decision. Along the way they made sure to milk the cow conflict for culture war clout by insinuating the ranchers’ removal was not only a Democrat conspiracy that had “muzzled” the cattlemen, per a letter penned by the lawmakers announcing their inquiry, but also evidence of what inevitably occurred if you let crazy environmentalists pass laws. When Chadwick Conover, a local surfer and wellness influencer better known as Ceadda, texted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for help fighting the supposed leftist plot, Kennedy declared he was working “full bore on a solution” and dispatched a member of the Department of Interior to visit Point Reyes. The absurdity had an air of slapstick to it, but the Republicans’ narrative about overzealous environmental legislation wasn’t funny, especially because it seemed to all too conveniently complement the unprecedented attacks that the second Trump administration has launched on wildlife and environmental protections—things like firing one thousand National Park Service employees, issuing five thousand new oil- and gas-drilling permits on public lands, and, of course, wiping out USDA funds that support organic farmers while dismantling federal regulations on the “certified organic” label. While clearly in bad faith, however, the Republican interlopers also sort of seemed to have a point. Was the war of Point Reyes yet another instance of liberals’ (decidedly non-vegetarian) lust for cannibalizing themselves? I hoped not. But even if it was, there still seemed to be something else afoot, some deeper conflict between differing visions of what “nature” even was, that had caused everything to unravel.

All of this clanged around in my head in time to the truck’s suspension as we continued our tour of the battlefields, Evans steering us through a swath of coastal prairie, the Pacific Ocean coming into view ahead. We passed his childhood ranch near Abbotts Lagoon, where his parents still lived and which his sister now operated; it would shut down and the family would all vacate before spring. We passed two closed ranches and one soon-to-close dairy. By April 2026, all of the ranchers and their workers would be gone.

Except Evans. He was one of the two ranchers staying, at least for now, the result of yet another one of those dizzying zigzags (in this case a legal one, his staying behind being the result more of an accident than defiance). But even though he’d been spared, he wasn’t sure for how long he’d be able to continue to make a living, or any kind of peaceful life, on his patch of land—what with the brutal costs of operating a small-scale ranch, the vicissitudes of his Park Service landlords, and the drone-wielding environmental activists who’d been surveilling the ranches, and his in particular, of late.

As if to underscore this newfound isolation, on the drive back to Evans’s ranch we came across a final sign of change: a large, southbound truck cresting a hill, followed by two more, bellowing toward us. It was the Nunes dairy ranchers hauling the last of their livestock out of the park. The cows were headed to Oregon, meaning the milk was leaving the local foodshed for elsewhere, where it may or may not stay in the hands of organic producers. Other evicted ranchers were setting up new operations in even farther-flung states. Others still had quit ranching altogether, taking more organic food out of circulation in not just the local economy but the United States at large.

Evans let out a long low. He still didn’t see why elk and cattle, organic ranchers and conservationists, couldn’t all just get along. The ranchers of Point Reyes had been stewarding this land for generations, but somewhere along the way, he felt, the Park Service—like many of his neighbors—had turned on him. “It feels like they’ve just left us out here to die.”

Prairie Shadows

If it wasn’t for the heroics of a cattle rancher named Henry Miller way back in 1878, there likely wouldn’t be a single tule elk left alive on Earth.

Prior to that—which is to say also prior to the Gold Rush and the arrival of scores of settlers to the West Coast—the tule elk had thrived in California for thousands of years. Along with bison and pronghorn, they had been a native keystone species, an animal that held the whole ecosystem together. The elk had been so plentiful that early European visitors noted that they covered the coastal prairie like a shadow. But the settlers who rushed west chasing gold or hitching rides on the new transcontinental railroad soon decimated the tule elk’s population, in part by turning so much habitat into farms filled with cows. So drastic and rapid was the tule elk’s decline that a California law banning all elk hunting was passed in 1873. The intervention came too late, however. By then, hunters, scientists, and government representatives all thought the elk had gone extinct.

So imagine Miller’s shock when, one day, at his vast ranch just west of Bakersfield, his workers discovered tule elk drinking from the tule marshes of Buena Vista Lake. (Tule, a staple of the elks’ diet, is a wispy, grass-like plant that thrives in shallow water.) It turned out they were part of a herd of thirty or so that had taken refuge on Miller’s land—the last thirty on Earth. Feeling responsible for the species’ survival and not wanting to attract the attention of trophy hunters, he fenced off a portion of his property, offered a $500 reward for reports of anyone coming after the elk, and—save for his workers and a local game warden—did his best to keep the herd’s existence a secret for decades, until it grew too large and began to trample his fences, causing him to reach out to state officials for help moving them elsewhere.

Fast-forward to 1971, a big year for the tule elk. The tule elk. With a population now numbered roughly five hundred alive on the entire planet, with a small herd still living at now-deceased Miller’s ranch and the rest scattered throughout different parts of California, the elk was added that year to the endangered species list, created under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 to provide the first federal protections for vulnerable species. That same year, the state passed legislation funding the relocation of the elk to suitable habitats with the goal of reaching two thousand tule elk statewide. One of the locations chosen was the newly created Point Reyes National Seashore, where, in 1978, the Park Service moved ten elk from the Miller ranch to a fenced-in 2,600-acre preserve on a former dairy in the northernmost tip of Point Reyes.

The elk arrived to a somewhat unorthodox landscape, especially for a national park. In addition to being home to hundreds of bird species, 18 percent of all of the plant species that grow in California, and aquatic life like octopuses, anemone, and gargantuan elephant seals, the Seashore was also home to more than a dozen family-run dairy and beef ranches that took up about half of the park’s total land. Among the eighty-five million acres of federally protected parkland in the country, Point Reyes was one of the few parks that hosted year-round commercial agriculture.

This peculiar arrangement was the result of the political compromise required to create the park. While Congress had recommended the creation of the Point Reyes National Seashore all the way back in 1935, the rising costs of land in the area, the machinations of local developers who saw big dollars in the landscape, and the ranchers’ longtime refusals to sell their pastures had successfully stymied that and every other attempt to seal the deal since. But in 1971, California politicians had come up with a unique financial and political proposal: buy the land from the ranchers below market value ($14 million back then, about $100 million in today’s dollars) and allow them to rent the land for years to come. It worked. Fourteen ranchers, among them David Evans’s great-grandfather, sold their land to the government in exchange for twenty-five-year leases (and, in one case, a life estate—essentially, a lifelong lease). They did so under the understanding—which was never explicitly enshrined into law—that they could ranch there in perpetuity as long as they kept their land dedicated to ranching activities that did not “upset the pastoral scenic effect of this particular area” and did not threaten the park’s fundamental purpose: to offer public recreation opportunities and preserve the cultural and natural landscape of the country’s wild spaces.

If the terms sound somewhat vague in practice, they were—almost ensuring, if inadvertently, dueling future interpretations. As one history of Point Reyes put it, “Legislators discussed and tried to resolve some of the land-use problems, which they knew would make life complicated for future administrators at the park. They ironed out some of the potential conflicts in their construction of the Point Reyes bill, but other problems were only temporarily avoided or swept under the rug in order to ensure the bill’s passage.” They kicked the can down the road, in other words, to ensure the park’s creation.

Because permanent ranching isn’t typically allowed in national parks, the architects of Point Reyes came up with another novel idea: the creation of a “pastoral zone” of some twenty-six-thousand acres to be privately managed by the ranchers with park oversight. Once the ranchers were officially operating on public land, the Park Service limited ranching activities in order to maintain the integrity of the ecosystem. Even within the pastoral zone, the service partially dictated which pastures could be grazed and when and which areas (erosion-prone hillsides, for instance) were off-limits. Only certain activities were allowed: a ranch couldn’t just start a pig operation without special permission and such permissions for expanded use were often denied. Park administrators conducted reviews, too, to ensure that no pasture was overgrazed, animals were being well maintained, and water contamination was being controlled. The Park Service strictures, while not formally prohibiting pesticides and other harmful chemicals, helped create an atmosphere that encouraged and incentivized ranchers to stay (or become) organic. Having the federal government as landlords meant a good deal of red tape for the ranchers—it could take days to get permission to build a new fence, for instance, let alone to build a new barn or dig a well—but the ranchers thrived.

The elk did, too, taking easily to the Point Reyes ecosystem that had generations earlier been the creatures’ home. They remained in a relatively small fenced-in area of the park, and tourists from all over the world came to behold the miracle creature in the semiwild. The purpose of the fence was to keep the elk out of the cattle pastures to the south, so as not to disturb the cattle or their forage and also to prevent the transmission of diseases from one species to the other. The ecological impact of grazing in Point Reyes is complex—ranching, after all, had contributed to the displacement of the native ruminant foragers in the first place—but grasslands do still need ruminant grazers. Cattle ranching now served an important function in the ecosystem of the park’s pastoral zone, playing the role the tule elk had once done back when they’d been numerous enough to shadow the state’s prairies. By munching grass, they help maintain the health of plants and soil, encourage a diversification of native species, prevent fires, and provide habitats and hunting grounds for the numerous animals that live there. Even though cattle aren’t a native species to California like the tule elk, they, too, can accomplish these tasks extremely well when managed correctly. The Point Reyes National Seashore administrators saw it as a success of their experiment that their ranching tenants successfully helped maintain critical habitats for raptors, who need low grasses to hunt for voles, and other creatures like the endangered California red-legged frog, who thrived in the ranches’ stock ponds.

Still, even though cattle was now king, the elk population did so well in Point Reyes that the herd began to outgrow its sizable enclosure. To address this, and to encourage further growth and genetic diversity among the inbred elk, the Park Service introduced twenty-eight tule in 1998 to a wilderness area near Limantour Beach, far from the pastoral zone, where the herd roamed free. Within a few years, this group had split into two, as healthy, growing herds do: a signal that this free-range experiment was working. But there wasn’t enough space on the peninsula to set all the tule elk free—certainly not without risking angering the ranchers, who had reasonable fears that too many tule elk would cause competition for grass—and so the main herd remained hemmed in between the Pacific Ocean, Tomales Bay, and the fence that kept them off the pastoral zone.

A herd of tule elk.

Then came the drought in 2012. The two free-roaming herds fared fine, but the enclosed elk died by the dozens. Those fenced in were living without adequate year-round water sources, and in some cases thirsty elk had been found drinking from mud pits. As tule elk biologist Julie Phillips explained to an activist at the time, the social patterns of the elk are such that the dominant bucks will guard limited water sources and keep the others away, especially during mating season. “They are a captive species,” Phillips lamented of the herd behind the fence. To her and other activists, it seemed clear that the elk could have gone elsewhere to find better water and forage sources had there not been a fence—and had there not been cattle in Point Reyes, there wouldn’t have been a fence.

For their part, Park Service scientists dismissed concerns over the ongoing elk deaths as a cause for alarm. The drought was an adverse factor causing a “natural” population bust, just as it would in the wild: in favorable conditions, elk thrived, and in unfavorable conditions, they died. Water wasn’t the issue, the Park Service claimed, the deaths were instead the result of “overpopulation and poor nutritional quality of forage.”

It was true that the population had rebounded enough by now that the tule elk had been removed from the endangered species list. Indeed, the species’ reproductive success in Point Reyes had foreshadowed other success stories statewide, such that, by the time of the die-off, the nation’s total tule elk population had rebounded to about 3,200 animals. But this was still such a small number, and the population gains so recent and precarious, that, to the environmental groups and activists monitoring the situation, the dismissal of the mass deaths in Point Reyes as the acceptable result of overpopulation was an abdication of duty by the very agency entrusted with defending them. Even more enraging to some was the fact that the Park Service’s explanation didn’t seem to make much sense. The elk that were dying weren’t a free-ranging natural species but a captive herd unable to roam to find more favorable conditions, so deeming the deaths natural seemed odd.

As the elk body count kept rising, and the Park Service refused to reverse position and release the captive herd from their enclosure, local activists grew increasingly impassioned and numerous. Animal rights groups hitched themselves to the cause and began flying drones around ranchers’ properties looking for evidence of environmental harm. The elk’s advocates become almost as notorious as the animal they defended, and they began calling themselves “elktavists.” They demanded that the elk fence—which had now come to signal the emergent and growing divide between the ranchers and the Park Service on one hand and the wilderness conservationists on the other—be taken down and that the tule be liberated from the “elk prison.”

Prison Break

To Chance Cutrano, the elk enclosure was a violation both ecological and moral, and the fight to try to tear it down was a triumph of recent history.

“Can you believe how beautiful it is today?” he said cheerily despite the sagging gray sky overhead, as I met him near a hiking trailhead in the Seashore. He was going to give me a tour that would turn out to be almost identical to the one Dave Evans gave me but with very different points of emphasis. We ducked into his Tesla, remarkably clean for someone who spent so much time in the wild, where a “We Bought This Car Before We Knew” sticker was affixed beside the gearshift.

As we drove beneath rain clouds past abandoned ranchland in the direction of the elk fence, Cutrano was cheery. As one of three staffers for the Resource Renewal Institute—a scrappy local NGO that, along with two larger nonprofits, had filed all of the important lawsuits against the park and the ranchers, including the one that was ultimately successful—Cutrano had just won the fight of his life. To boot, the Park’s elk were doing well again after a period of ups and downs. When the drought eased in 2016, their population rebounded to upward of four hundred, only to see another die-off in 2020, with 152 new elk dead. Since then, the Point Reyes elk population had stabilized yet again, with a total park-wide population of roughly seven hundred elk—an almost record high. Life for them, Cutrano assured me, was about to get even better now that the ranchers were leaving.

His current optimism was a far cry from the way he felt in 2014, when he relocated to California from the Midwest at the age of twenty-one. The die-off was then ongoing; some of the first elk he ever saw were corpses. Huey Johnson, the head of the Resource Renewal Institute, hired Cutrano to collect evidence that would help the nonprofit challenge the Park Service’s narrative that so many elk had died suddenly of “natural” causes. If any species was suffering in a National Park, the organization felt, then they wanted to make sure that private interests weren’t being supported over public ones. He immediately got to work assembling the case, spending his days hiking around the park, documenting the perils the elk faced, filing FOIA requests, and poring over scientific studies and Park Service paperwork.

From his sleuthing, he learned that many of the tule elk suffered from Johne’s disease, a communicable bacterial infection that they likely contracted from the cattle (possibly from their manure). He obtained internal Park Service studies showing Point Reyes National Seashore administrators had known for years about the adverse impact the cattle had on the park’s water quality and terrain, including a comprehensive water-quality study from 2013 that showed high levels of fecal matter and other contaminants in areas of the park due to sewer discharges and agriculture.

Cutrano pulled the Tesla over at the old McClure’s Dairy with its now-vacant white clapboard barn. This dairy, he pointed out, was one of several positioned in a basin in the topography, meaning its runoff drained into key water sources like Kehoe Creek and Abbotts Lagoon and caused rampant fecal-contamination issues. Back on the road, he pointed out the Nunes ranch, where, in 2021, hikers found what was essentially a massive trash pit of oily car parts, rusted metal, and leaking engines—a clear violation of park rules about polluting.

Cutrano’s findings constituted the bulk of evidence in the first legal case against the Park Service and the ranchers, which began in 2016. Crucial to that case and the one that followed was his discovery that the park had been following an outdated set of guidelines for years. Every national park in the country has a “general management plan”: a master plan that establishes protocols for how the park manages the interests of the different species (including humans) under its authority. Cutrano’s crucial discovery was that the Point Reyes National Seashore still operated according to a general management plan from 1980—that is, a document that was then over thirty years old. As a result, its guidelines and rules neglected to account for any impacts of climate change, any change in wildlife population that had occurred since Jimmy Carter was president, or any new impacts of the ranches on the park’s ecology. The Park Service did have a more recent tule elk management plan, which provided more detailed rules relating specifically to the species. But even these protocols hadn’t been updated since 1998, when there were hundreds fewer elk to manage. Even the 1998 plan, though, clearly outlined the problematic fact that the enclosure would soon become too small, as there was no reliable year-round source of drinking water for the elk in the preserve—just eight “water impoundments” originally built for cattle and seasonal creeks and low-lying marshes that turned to mud pits during dry spells—demonstrating that the park’s administrators knew about the potential dangers years before the die-offs occurred and did nothing to prevent them. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs sought to show that, with its outdated management plan, the park had prioritized the ranches over the wild areas and creatures it was entrusted to protect, alleging that the Park Service had not done its due diligence in studying the impact of the ranches.

The Resource Renewal Institute filed the lawsuit with the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project, two other environmental organizations that were considerably bigger, more experienced, and better resourced. Like Cutrano’s Resource Renewal Institute, these organizations saw the fight in Point Reyes as part of a larger battle to protect the wild and keep it fully under the control of the public. In previous legal battles, these organizations had helped stall permits for the Keystone XL and other oil pipelines, blocked the opening of mineral mines throughout the West, and secured protective statuses and habitats for species ranging from gray wolves to spotted owls to the Florida bonneted bat. For them, the tule elk was yet another one of these fights.

As part of their efforts toward wilderness protection, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project had frequently targeted ranching on public lands. Roughly 80 percent of public lands in the West and 35 percent of public lands overall are used for grazing at some point during the year (most of this land is operated by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, not the National Park Service). Part of the organizations’ objections came down to the question of public versus private use. The Center for Biological Diversity believed that, by relying on public lands, where ranchers (including those in Point Reyes) were typically given lower-than-market lease rates, the cattle industry was getting a massive subsidy at great ecological expense. “The western livestock industry would evaporate as suddenly as fur trapping,” they claimed in one report, “if it had to pay market rates for services it gets from the federal government.” It was irrelevant, to these groups, that the subsidized ranchers in Point Reyes just happened to produce very sustainable food. (When asked on the tour whether driving organic ranches out of the area—and, in some cases, out of business entirely—was ultimately bad for the environment, Cutrano admitted that he wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to the concern. Feeding people, however, was simply not the job of public lands, and of a national park in particular.)

In yet another of this story’s zigzags, this initial lawsuit gave way, in 2021, to yet another lawsuit, which was settled in a three-year-long mediation that ultimately determined the fate of the ranchers last year. The mediation by all accounts was brutal. The ranchers by now had intervened in the legal proceedings, having convinced a judge they had a stake in the matter and should have a seat at the table. Like many to follow, the first mediation session was held at the Bear Valley Visitor’s Center, a building filled with taxidermized local wildlife just inside the park boundaries, where tourists come to secure camping permits, plan their routes, and pee. In June 2022, the relevant parties and their lawyers filed into the conference room and took their seats around the table: Cutrano and his compatriots, the Park Service administrators, and various members of the participating Point Reyes ranching families. (This included every ranching operation in the park except the Nimans’ and the Evanses’. The Nimans opted out of the negotiations because they held a lifelong lease to their property and thus were largely insulated from the outcome of any lawsuit. The Evanses had two small kids and simply didn’t want the bother. They assumed some deal would be worked out and the drama would just go away.) Items up for discussion included the problem of competing uses (as between the elk and cattle), the appropriate stock pond rations given the increasing water shortages, the length and terms of ranchers’ leases, and, most importantly, whether ranching was in fact intended to occur in the Seashore in perpetuity.

Chance Cutrano holds a cow bone.

Given the rancor that had preceded the mediation, the participants unsurprisingly struggled to make progress. Every participant was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement, barring them from even discussing the proceedings with one another outside the mediation room, which for some made finding consensus among their peers, much less their adversaries, challenging. About a year in, a powerful nonprofit called the Nature Conservancy, which had mediated numerous public-private land use matters in the past, offered to help the different groups navigate the conflict. But despite the Nature Conservancy’s guidance, the conflicts persisted. To help ease tensions, the Nature Conservancy held occasional group meetings in ranchers’ homes and met with individual ranching families to understand their perspectives and plight. One of the mediators told a local paper the disagreements were so intense that “I can remember times where I teared up on the drive back to Inverness after leaving a ranch.”

For his part, Cutrano had initially been disappointed and even surprised by how intractable the parties’ disagreements seemed to be. He had entered the mediation on the defensive—stung by the results of the first lawsuit, in which the Park Service seemed to side with the ranchers, not even considering the “no-ranching option.” But as the ranchers and environmentalists settled into increasingly deadlocked positions, he saw an opportunity: If the ranchers wouldn’t agree to any of the terms his team was suggesting, might they agree instead to sell their properties and vacate the Seashore entirely? The Nature Conservancy had a wealth of financial resources that might fund such a buyout, and Cutrano knew that a number of the ranchers were near retirement anyway.

Kevin Lunny, like many of the ranchers, had grown up on the Point Reyes National Seashore, and he’d always figured he’d die there. His family had been ranching its pastures since his great-grandfather’s generation. In the early 2000s, the Lunnys were the first ranch operators in Marin County to secure an organic-beef certification. But after suffering through years of lawsuits and attacks from the conservation groups (including a recent post entitled “Two Short Videos Expose Kevin Lunny’s Latest Lies” on a blog called The Shame of Point Reyes), the ever-increasing operating costs of ranching, the long odds of sustaining a small family farm, and arguing around a mediation table since 2022, Lunny was tired. He had entered the mediation hopeful for compromise, hoping above all to secure a reasonable lease length, preferably of twenty years, which would allow him to continue and even expand the activities that made his ranch profitable. He had also hoped that, by sitting face-to-face with the environmentalists, he might put an end to the idea that the rancher was an enemy to the ecological health of the land. But by now, Lunny had accepted that he’d been foolish to think that would happen.

Lunny wasn’t the only rancher who was tired. Of the twelve parties, some decided that they wanted out when presented with the possibility of a buyout—they were retiring anyway and were done fighting. But others didn’t want to go at all. Because the ranchers were coplaintiffs, however, and thus a unified team, the outcome would have to be an all-or-nothing deal: either every rancher took it or none would have the chance, trapping everyone around that mediation table for the foreseeable future.

Lunny was one of the last holdouts, he told me, until it became clear to him that, even if he somehow figured out a way to stay on his ranch, the rest of his life in the park would be mired in conflict, harassment, infuriating lease negotiations, and future lawsuits. “I didn’t have a gun to my head,” Lunny said, but in the end he, too, was forced to accept that there was really only one workable option: take the money and leave the ranch whose lease he’d inherited from his father, who inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his own, and whose lease Lunny had planned until now to pass along to his own children.

When the Nature Conservancy announced the results of the mediation in January 2025, people in Point Reyes were shocked. Clueless as to the proceedings because of the NDAs, the Nimans and the Evanses couldn’t believe that they were going to be the only ranchers left on the peninsula. Even Cutrano, who had been part of the proceedings every step of the way, was stunned by the outcome, a coup that he’d never imagined when the proceedings began. The plaintiffs had expected to win concessions from the Park Service, and maybe even a bid to eventually phase out ranching in the future, but given how entrenched historically and economically the ranches were in Point Reyes, they hadn’t expected a full-scale buyout. To Cutrano, the fact that the ranches were gone represented a historic victory for the ecology of the National Seashore—and a road map, perhaps, for the eviction of ranching off other public lands in years to come.

“We had no idea it would be this successful,” he told me now as he drove, struggling to suppress a grin as he gestured with one hand toward an abandoned dairy in the distance, the spoils of war.

In contrast to the moments of frustration and hopelessness he’d just told me about feeling in the years leading up to this point, his happiness now suddenly struck me as yet another sign of change in the park—though, perhaps, not as dramatic of a change as the one he was about to show me. Parking the Tesla and rolling the car’s windows down, he instructed me to look outside, pointing into the thick mist. I could make out a two-tone field. On one side, the grass was uniform, short and brown; on the other, the earth was wild and varied, a swirl of tall grasses and thickets of coyote brush. Down the middle was an eight-foot-tall wall of mesh tethered by hefty wooden posts: the elk fence. Cutrano beamed as he pointed toward a portion of the fence that had been removed, leaving the entire park open for the elk to roam. The rest, he said, would soon be dismantled.

We turned around and headed south again past the shuttered dairies. Just as with Evans, I spotted elk in the distance, an antlered trio also tramping through what had once been pasture for cows. It was mating season, Cutrano explained, and the elk that don’t win mates are sent away by the herd. “This is the farthest south I’ve ever seen bull elk,” he said. “We’re seeing in real time the change. Wildlife coming back to these areas.”

The elk fence, known among some activists as the “ungulate Berlin Wall,” will soon be torn down.

Future Primitive

Today, all the Point Reyes ranches that participated in the mediation are either on their way out or already gone. The Lunnys held their final cattle run in May. After that, they began to pack up their barn and their home. Even with the settlement money—which remains confidential but has been reported to be around $3 million per lessee—the Lunnys couldn’t afford to buy a place anywhere nearby that was big enough to hold their ninety cattle. In the end, they moved a few hours away to the foothills of the Sierra, bringing just three cows with them.

Of the other eleven departing or departed ranching families, one—the Nuneses—has moved to Oregon. Another ranch sold its cattle and got out of the business entirely. One dairy trucked all its cattle to Texas. Other families didn’t know where they were headed, or didn’t respond to my calls, or were unreachable—on the move and hard to locate or loath to talk about the whole affair.

“That’s not milk that’s going to be available in California anymore,” Albert Straus, founder of Straus Family Creamery, told me. Before the ranches shut down, the company sourced 15 percent of its milk from Point Reyes, about three thousand gallons of milk per day that had previously ended up in local grocery stores with the Straus name. When small ranches and dairies close in California, land prices being what they are, they often move out of state. When this milk goes out of local circulation, its market share goes to the larger organic conglomerates who use far less stringent environmental practices—or to large factory farms that aren’t organic at all. Straus Family Creamery is committed to sourcing all of its milk from local producers to reduce its footprint. Until Straus manages to find new sources, consumers will have to find milk elsewhere—maybe from nonorganic dairies, with far more deleterious environmental practices, or from dairies farther away, increasing the carbon footprint of each pint sold.

The ersatz eviction of the ranchers so upset Straus that he had been the one to reach out to Conover, the wellness influencer, in April 2025—in turn leading to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s entrance into the affair. “Albert just kept getting more desperate,” Conover told Politico earlier this year. “I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I gotta just text [Kennedy].” Kennedy was—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the “food is medicine” pillar of his Make America Healthy Again agenda—sympathetic. “Everyone is involved,” Kennedy replied to Conover, according to reporting by the local North Bay paper the Press Democrat, “including [interior Secretary] Doug Burgam (sic) and [Agriculture Secretary] Brooke Rollins and the White House.” Burgum reportedly asked the acting deputy secretary of the Interior to help broker a solution that would have allowed ranching to continue in the park. But, as of now, like with the Republican probe led by Congressman Westerman, nothing concrete has come of the political theater—and the deal remains in place.

Others, too, are waging a fight—if not to reverse the deal itself, then at least to change its outcomes and implications. Local attorney Andrew Giacomini, himself a descendent of a prominent Point Reyes ranching family, filed a lawsuit on behalf of displaced ranch workers, alleging a conspiracy between the Park Service and the Nature Conservancy “that compelled the Departing Ranchers to accept the pay offs and terminate their leases with the National Park Service.” Financial restitution, the suit argues, must be given to the workers kicked out of their homes. David and Claire Evans also joined with Bill Niman and his wife, Nicolette, to file their own lawsuit, arguing that the pastoral zone is a congressionally designated space for ranching and that the Park Service has a responsibility to protect it as part of the region’s cultural heritage; thus, even if the former leaseholders are gone, those areas must remain available for active ranching. These cases are also still pending.

Meanwhile, though the Nimans are protected by their life estate, the Evans family is currently operating without a lease. After he got wind of the deal, David Evans sent a letter to the House Committee on Natural Resources, beseeching lawmakers’ help in negotiating a new lease. “We know that as the last (multigenerational) ranching family on the peninsula, we will be the next target for these green groups,” he wrote. “We will be harassed and pushed out, and family ranching on this peninsula will be gone forever.” Evans also went to the Park Service to negotiate a new lease. He wrote down twenty requests, many of them, he told me, in line with previous lease arrangements. The Park Service did not agree to a single point. “It wasn’t a negotiation,” Evans said, suspecting the agency wanted to make things as difficult as they could in hopes he’d eventually just roll over and close.

To add insult to injury to the ranchers, the Nature Conservancy—which is in charge of the transition implementation for Point Reyes—plans to seasonally truck in some 1,200 cattle each year for temporary grazing, acknowledging the importance of livestock grazing on public lands to maintain the health of the Point Reyes ecosystem.

Twelve hundred seasonal cattle, of course, aren’t enough to do the work of the more than six thousand that are being evicted. Theoretically, the tule elk could at some point take over the grazing work of the cattle—and without the environmental impact, like manure contaminating the waterways. At present, however, their population is nowhere near large enough to replace the departed cattle, either. Herds big enough to take over all grazing duties would cause yet another problem, however, as the tule elk no longer have real predators in Point Reyes. The Park Service would have to introduce predators as population control or bring back the wildly unpopular practice of culling the elk.

And anyway, as Grey Hayes, a biologist and coastal prairie expert, impressed upon me, even if the elk were the ultimate answer to this land’s future management, which he has his doubts about, the transition should have happened more slowly, replacing cattle with elk one by one. But now that the cattle are gone, he told me, whatever plan to replace them needs to happen “immediately.” Even six months without large ruminant grazers can cause enough environmental damage to a pasture to require years of remediation and restoration. “Every month counts,” he said.

“We are entering a critical first step in establishing a land stewardship program to support grazing and restoration efforts on the Seashore,” a representative for the Nature Conservancy wrote to me (they declined an interview). In collaboration with the Park Service and the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, whose ancestors managed what is now Point Reyes for millennia, the Nature Conservancy wrote that they will “develop a research and monitoring plan that will, when implemented, be the foundational science needed for the National Park Service and partners to adaptively manage the grazing and other restorative actions over time to get the best results.” It’s unclear when the temporary grazing is to begin; where these cattle will come from (in December, the organization released a request for proposals for ranchers seeking to run cattle in Point Reyes); where the 1,200 number came from (there were 6,000 cattle in the park); or how these cattle will be managed differently than those that were already here.

The future of the approximately ninety farmworkers and their families is also uncertain. On my last visit to Point Reyes, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, I met up with a former Point Reyes dairy worker and his wife, whom I’ll call Diego and Maria, in the town of Point Reyes, about a ten-minute drive from the Seashore.

At their suggestion, we met at Toby’s Feed Barn, a West Marin institution that hints at the region’s shifting demographics: a farming heritage store trying to survive in a context of increasingly extreme wealth. Toby’s sells feed in a towering old barn where birds nest in the rafters; the barn also houses an overpriced coffee shop (chai: $6.50), a yoga studio and art gallery, and a store selling fancy candles, food sundries, and nature-themed tchotchkes. As we spoke, a Latino employee stacked hay bales and pallets with a beeping pump truck while locals and tourists enjoyed their coffee in the sun.

Originally from Mexico, Diego and Maria had moved to Point Reyes with their three children in 2018 from Tulare County in California’s Central Valley. There Diego worked in a massive industrial dairy and Maria picked grapes. Their middle son, whom I’ll call Fredy, suffered from a rare genetic disorder that required frequent medical appointments and testing. When Diego missed two days of work to take his son to see a specialist hours away in Sacramento, his employer fired him. Maria’s cousin worked not too far from Point Reyes and managed to land Diego a gig at McClure’s Dairy in the park, which Cutrano and I had visited a few months prior. The whole family moved north. When McClure’s shuttered in 2021, Diego got a job working at another dairy in the Seashore. The pay was $16.50 an hour, and the family didn’t have to pay rent because, with average rents of $6,500 for a home in the area, ranch workers and their families were typically provided free housing.

Diego told me he found out about the ranch closures from his employer (he asked me to use a pseudonym, and not name his employer, for fear of retribution—especially because he is still living on the rancher’s land). One afternoon, when his shift began, his boss rounded up his three employees—Diego, another father with a young family, and a single guy, all of whom lived on the property in separate houses—and told them the news. Worse than the closures, perhaps, was the severance pay. While the Nature Conservancy awarded the ranchers $3 million settlements, the ranch workers each received a single month’s pay, around $1,000, which wouldn’t get Diego and his family a long weekend in a local Airbnb. “He was out there rain or shine, sick and healthy!” Maria told me. “A single month! He kept that place going. It’s ugly, what these ranchers have done.”

The family has been in something of a tailspin since then. The ranch shuttered last spring, but they are still living on the property—the only ones there, by permission of the former owner. The kids don’t want to leave. Their youngest, now in seventh grade, wakes up crying in the night. Maria was angry at the ranchers but also at the people who’d run the ranchers out of town. As we spoke, I detected an articulation of the view of ecology that had lost out in Point Reyes—the belief, shared by many of the biologists and ranchers I spoke to while reporting, that it’s a myth that a healthy environment is one that is untouched. Humans have always managed landscapes, something that California’s leaders have begun recognizing in transitioning to controlled burns of the kind that Indigenous communities once carried out, back when the prairies were still shadowed by grazers, to thin forests and underbrush. Restoration is, by definition, a human imposition on the land. Preservation is, too, as is, of course, the pesky human need for food.

“I don’t understand what environment they are trying to protect,” Maria said. From her perspective, the land was healthy, the cows part of the environment—mooing, shitting ruminants, grazing along the same zigzagging roads upon which the tule elk now run free.

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization.

Interviews with Certain Vegetables

Am I nourished or tortured by the memory of what was?

Anelise Chen

© Parsa Mostaghim

NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR

One day when I was taking refuge in the produce cooler at Costco, I heard a bright voice issue forth from a package of fresh corn. Startled, I looked down and noticed how the gleaming rows of starchy nutrition looked to me like rows of perfect teeth. The corn even appeared to be smiling. Still in the grip of what we call long Covid, under which I occasionally suffered from bouts of dissociation, I consoled myself that this voice was merely a projection of my own mind and would soon subside. But as I wheeled my cart around the store, a chorus of other voices chimed in, emanating from peppers, carrots, even a sack of onions. I continued with my shopping, pretending that I had earbuds in and was listening to an amusing audiobook.

I retained the ability to hear vegetables for over a year. This period coincided with a total loss of taste and smell. It was as though, by losing two sensory receptors, another organ uniquely tuned to the frequency of vegetable chatter developed. What happened to me may not be as far-fetched as you would imagine. Saint Francis was said to talk to animals, and while I don’t presume to compare myself to a saint, we must not discount the neurological explanations for his ability. He went blind toward the end of his life; when one sense atrophies, it is natural for other senses to step in to compensate. For example, I read an article about a newly blind woman who developed synesthesia and reported that colors were “talking” to her. After losing a primary sense, the brain rewires itself and finds new pathways for sensory inputs.

I entertained countless such hypotheses. Stress? I was disillusioned with where the country was going, and I hadn’t been sleeping very well. Trauma? I hit my head after falling from an ottoman I had foolishly tried to stand on to reach a book. It was one of those rickety mid-century things that look very elegant but aren’t very stable. Or perhaps it was the psilocybin mushrooms I was microdosing. Certainly, I was devastated when my betta fish died. I admit I lost interest in the outside world. I took a medical leave from the tech startup where I was working. During my time off, the only thing that interested me was what the vegetables had to say.

The following interviews are the result of an intense period of transcription and translation. When I say I heard voices, I am speaking figuratively. What entered my brain was pure understanding, which I then rendered into language. After I received each transmission, I would quickly write down as much as possible, without judgment. Sometimes the vegetables said things I did not agree with, but it was not my job to censor them. Mostly, they shared what they thought about the natural way of things. They seemed resigned about being harvested and did not seem to fear death. After I mastered the skill of listening to them, they seemed to hear my thoughts too. When it sounds as though the vegetables are responding to an interlocutor, you can assume that I was there prompting, clarifying, proposing, challenging. I have edited myself out to spare the reader too much back-and-forth and to shorten the length.

I never forced any vegetable to speak to me; I was receptive when they wanted to talk. Sometimes I listened to tomatoes in porch planters, other times to peas on my plate. It is perhaps unsurprising that I stopped eating vegetables for a year. It is not easy to eat something that talks to you.

My sense of smell has since returned, and I can no longer hear the vegetables. In a way, I am relieved to rejoin the human realm. I can go to restaurants again and shop without eavesdropping on the whispers of the cauliflower. I have also returned to the office, where I was surprised to learn that my superiors had not sacked me. Still, I am left with a sense of irreparable loss. I know I will forever mourn this bittersweet era for the rest of my life, when I could talk to my vegetables.

POTATO

Cultivated potatoes are reproduced clonally, through planted seed tubers that give rise to a new plant. As clones, these potatoes all share the same genetic makeup and can arguably be considered one individual. —TR

What can I say? That first division was thrilling. All I’d ever known was that unruly potato patch, badly tended to by the undergraduates of a mid-tier agricultural school; that rocky field where we potatoes were encouraged to mingle, exchange DNA, and produce offspring. That day, harvesting time, I was readying for my first winter underground when I heard the rumble of a tractor overhead. Suddenly I was routed from the soil. The light was dazzling and—my god. I blinked. Look at that sky. A man hovered over me, clipboard against his chest. He bent down, and I perceived a single bead of sweat forming on his chin. The reflection in that bead was a curved, green globe.

What drama! What beauty! In the ground, all I had for entertainment was the turgid droning of dueling bacterial colonies and the petty gossip of the earthworms and worker ants. I felt the man’s hands yanking my roots, rubbing my skin, saying, “This one’s a keeper.” Immediately a part of me was tossed into a pickup truck. Off we went, and I perceived for the first time the rhyming colors of that late September day, the red truck intersecting with a red stop sign, the ripe apples hanging from an orchard’s gnarled trees, and the swooping bird I now recognize as a cardinal. Texture! Variety! That was how I came online. Meanwhile, residual parts of me remained back in the field, lying warm and exposed in the sun, watching the twitchy-tailed squirrels bury winter nuts in the leaf litter. It never occurred to me to want to be in two places at once, but the moment it happened, I was hooked.

After that, I was divided and planted in fields all over the country. Each time a new plant grew, a new channel of perception awakened. To be many, multiple: what a concept! My singular existence of before seemed so impoverished. I was simultaneously slurping up the rain in Michigan while luxuriating in the mineral soils of California. I learned that, in the city, humans routinely walk their dogs and smoke and listen to podcasts, all at once, while responding to work emails. Maximization is a nifty hack. Of course, this level of toggling took some getting used to for a potato, but I was determined to perceive and enjoy every last detail this world had to offer. I began to archive the countless beautiful things I had once loved as a small potato: the first snow, the first frost, the first sound of peepers in spring. But soon I realized that seasonality no longer mattered; nor did the cycles of day and night, as I now spanned many time zones. Previously, I had to wait a whole day to enjoy one sunrise; now I had many magnificent sunrises to choose from, and if I didn’t like the look of one, I could always switch channels to find a better one.

The next big expansion of my consciousness happened when the tuber parts of me ripened and I was sacked up and distributed in supermarkets. That’s when I entered your homes, into the most intimate recesses of your life. Most of you are worried that your phones are spying on you, but actually it’s us, the humble potatoes in your pantry. With everything I perceived in homes, I began to appreciate the nuances and complexities of people, who provided me with unending content for perusal. Here I was, clutched in the hand of a sniffling woman, informing her friend over speakerphone that she was hired for a job when she hadn’t been; and there I was, watching a pencil roll away from an old man slumped over a crossword puzzle. Simultaneously I was also dashed upon the floor by a child, his beatific face smeared with carrot puree while his mother wept in the corner. And I could perceive all this while listening to Brahms’s Symphony No. 4.

I know the fantasy of immortality and godlike omnipresence is everywhere in your culture. What is it like to never die and to see everything? Well, I confess, during the pandemic, everyone watched a lot of TV and had very good sex—you would be amazed at the things people were willing to do on the kitchen counter. And with your open floorplans, I often watched television over the sleepy forms of myriad pajama-clad humans and studied the cultural creations of your kind. I watched all the popular shows—first enduring the laborious, scrolling search for something suitable—and the entirety of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. In the movie, a legion of invisible angels flies over East Berlin, cataloging in stylish little notebooks all they had seen. The angels lean over the shoulders of children in wheelchairs, acrobats and cab drivers, fathers and sons, overhearing, witnessing. Within ten minutes I was weeping because those angels were the closest thing to what I experience and captured what I love so much about life and everything I don’t want to miss.

However, the movie’s ending suggests that a life bound by death is a privilege. One angel chooses to become a mortal man. Why? The pieces of me puzzled over this angel’s decision. Why put a limit, an end, on your perception? I mentioned to my other parts how once, in a dark auditorium, netted in a produce bag on the lap of a plaid-skirted woman, I had attended a lecture by an eminent writer who said how inefficient, and what a waste, that humans spend decades on the cultivation of a single brain, with its unique network of electrical pulses, only for it to disappear at the moment of death. What a waste for this particular woman to die, this writer said, she who once possessed such vibrant memories of their small town and who earned her perfect witticisms after a lifetime of practice. This writer said that she had always tried to improve her German, but now she doubted whether it was of any use. Why carve out these neural paths if they were all bound to disappear? Death inhibited progress or undercut the idea of it by forcing new generations to learn its old lessons afresh, in perpetuity.

In death, I wondered, what would happen to my precious catalogs? Granted, my debates with myself have worn thin; increasingly I fail to come to any conclusions because I am pulled in another direction that temporarily distracts. At this moment, I am riding in the backseat of a minivan while a woman accosts her husband for buying rotten fish. He hastily grabbed a sack of me that had been attacked by a fungus, liquefying my tissues, which caused me to emit that foul smell. He promises to write a vengeful review of the potato company, but she has already leapt to another topic, saying, “But in the winter, because you don’t sweat, does that mean you can’t shed the salts you’ve consumed that day?” She lowers the car window, gripped with the fear that her husband might die, that his high blood pressure has not been controlled properly, and that is when this channel winks out and fades.

Time only goes forward, and as much as I want to dwell on death, I can’t stop the onslaught of images that sparkle forth and fade. It is relentless, like a dream that won’t end. I, potato, am a web of feeling, pulsing outward, contracting. This is my best approximation of my interior life, impossible to translate into your language. And the more I do, the less I remember. Perceptions back then were imprinted with such startling clarity. I had the ability to concentrate. I was simply in one field, the field where I was born, and day after day, I perceived the same maples and oaks in the margins and saw the goldenrod dipping their heads in the wind. Each morning was brand new, the beauty like a struck bell. The first time I heard the peenting woodcock, with its watery, garbling song as it circled the field at dusk, I shivered, astonished. No less magical was the beeping of a trailer truck backing up in the gravel drive, that exhilarating sound of waves over shingle, or the first time I heard a little girl whispering, “He loves me, he loves me not . . .”

By a genetic fluke, your kind saw something useful in me, and I know I won’t die anytime soon. Yet I’ve heard the students at the agricultural school say that I am what is called a biological dead end. I will simply exist and be useful until the next, better version of me comes along. And then I will be retired. I wonder when that day will come, but then I recall how my forebear, the Irish Lumper, several centuries old at this point, still lives on in niche restaurants serving heritage potatoes. I may live longer than that. For now, I can simply wonder what death will feel like, when the various parts of me wink out, all the different strands of experience snipped until I’m back to being one. I’ll hear the sparrow singing in the field, and I’ll no longer hear it alongside the smack and scurry of rats behind a dumpster, where I lay decaying; or feel the halogen buzz of strung lights in some eatery, the proprietors smoking their cigarettes after a long night, massaging their feet. Suddenly, all of that will disappear, and maybe then, in the last moment, I’ll finally see the sunlight filtered through leaves, casting those ripples of shadow.

ASPARAGUS

Considered a seasonal delicacy, white asparagus is cultivated in the dark—covered with canopies or mounded with dirt—to prevent it from photosynthesizing. The resulting asparagus will be exceedingly pale, tender, and fat. White asparagus is still harvested manually, and the supply of cheap labor remains the most critical factor in its production. —TR

Here we are at the cafeteria of this prestigious university. The students eat very well, don’t you agree? They have everything they could possibly want—food, housing, intellectual enrichment—even white asparagus. And yet something seems amiss. I can sense their unhappiness, their fear. Why does everything feel wrong? I know they are worried about jobs, about being replaced by technology. Here they are training themselves to do things that a machine could do in mere seconds. They don’t see the point. Soon AI will render them moot. If I could, I would tell them what it’s like to be harvested by a higher intelligence, as you humans do to us. It’s not so bad, I would tell them. But acceptance requires a spiritual readjustment and letting go of a certain etiological understanding of things. And that’s not what they want.

“Expose yourself to sunlight first thing upon waking!” their school counselors advise. “Turn on that light-therapy lamp—they’re rentable from the student-life center—for light must hit your eyes, penetrate them, spear through the backs of your corneas, as soon as you can manage it. Brain fog and lethargy are natural consequences when your circadian rhythm is out of whack!” I imagine these poor students, jagged with sleep, emerging from warm beds to blind themselves first with their lamps, then with their phones. Dutifully, they ingest various supplements, pills, powders, and then it’s back to the screens. Headphones on, wrist supports, goggles to cancel out the spectrum of blue light. They either sit on bouncy balls with no backs to them or walk listlessly on treadmills tucked underneath their desks. Endomorph or ectomorph? I propose adding etiolated to your list of modern physical types.

It’s the best we’ve ever been and the worst we’ve ever been. That’s our modern condition. As for me, I’ve never even seen the light of day. I know previous generations had access to plenty of light. The beautiful stories of my forebears are a lovely dream. Before, asparagus emerged at the first sign of spring, when the meltwater trickled and the familiar birds returned, and we burst out of the soil, unfurling feathered fronds to the sky. We lived in densely packed communities, a patch at a time, and we would tickle one another in the wind.

Sunlight! There was no end to it. We absorbed it hungrily and transformed the light into sugars through chlorophyll. We were green. We had purplish tips. Of course, there were certainly dangers, the way you humans might remember wolves or scarlet fevers. We all knew someone whose spear had been nibbled by an asparagus beetle or whose stalks had been wilted with fusarium rot. We learned how to secrete toxins to repel our predators. But nowadays, we are sprayed regularly with fungicides, insecticides, and no longer have the opportunity to practice our survival skills. Access to water used to be touch and go, a constant source of anxiety. But now it comes in drip lines. There are pluses and minuses, I suppose. Spaced far apart for easy harvesting, I hardly touch feathers with my kind.

Am I nourished or tortured by the memory of what was? I love to hear stories of our glory days, when we were prized by emperors, from Julius Caesar to Louis XIV, so revered we were kept on ice in the Alps. I suppose these stories are like the reserves in my roots that keep me going. What does it mean to know that I’ll be plucked and harvested before I reach the sun? Mounded up, the soil is heavy against my sides. But what choice do I have but to keep sprouting? That is what I do; that is my namesake. The Greeks took my name from the Persian word asparag, meaning to sprout. My determination to keep growing is encoded within me. How can life persist under these conditions? I sometimes wonder. Am I happy or am I miserable? I hear that when asphalt and concrete are poured over old asparagus fields, packed down into parking lots, we find our way through the cracks. We push through, somehow. We don’t know what else to do.

CORN

The domestication of corn likely began in central Mexico around nine thousand years ago, from a wild ancestor called teosinte that resembled a tall grass. Modern corn is purely a product of human invention. Without the work of humans to continually seed and harvest and modify the plant, modern corn would likely disappear within a few years. —TR

“That’s a monument to petroleum,” a woman says, pointing to the sprawling black-and-white edifice beyond the acres of enhanced green lawn. “You can only make a concrete-and-glass building like that if you know you’ll have a cheap source of energy for cooling and heating.” The woman’s companion is nodding solemnly, running a hand over our broad leaves. They have been walking among us in the crop garden, gently prying the husk from our ears. It is a normal morning. Jet planes take off from the Westchester County airport. Ultrafine particles drift down from the sky. Goldfinches dip and dive between stalks of overburdened sunflowers. Here we grow in rigid, regimental lines. Next to us is a perfect stripe of buckwheat and next to that a perfect stripe of sativa. The potatoes were harvested earlier in the season, and soon the winter wheat will arrive.

From what we’ve gathered from the daily supplicants who walk these grounds, devotional pamphlets in hand, we have been planted in what they charmingly refer to as an ornamental “crop garden” to demonstrate the power and reach of a benign multibillion-dollar corporation that produces innumerable foodstuffs for everyday consumption. Humans visit this out-of-the-way place because, as we’ve gleaned, humans are a pious bunch. For decades now, this campus has been meticulously maintained by a squadron of groundskeepers who faithfully, exactingly blow leaves and dust away from the paths and keep the vast stretches of fertilized lawn well trimmed. We’ve heard of Zen monks who comb plots of gravel for hours for no higher purpose than to pray. We likewise interpret this zooming and grooming of the lawn mowers as a practice of faith. Certainly these rituals serve no other functional purpose.

Five days a week, members of this tidy team will don their high-visibility green and set about raking. They command a battalion of edgers, blowers, sprayers, and wheelbarrows. They keep the soil at our roots clean and bare. During breaks, bottles of soda are twisted open, bags of chips crinkle and pop. These men might well be meditating. To us, they are seers administrating rites of spiritual sustenance. The garden’s visitors rarely speak to them or appear to see them at all. Perhaps these high priests have ascended the visible spectrum. We don’t have eyes. We don’t know how it works.

Sometimes I wonder: What is the meaning behind ancient crop circles, those catascopic patterns that can be seen only from an avian perspective, the perspective of the gods? Why did your ancestors do it? You have also planted us in a perfect circle in the center of this enormous green lawn. It must mean something. The visitors here rely heavily on the placards erected among us, printed with symbols that compel them to chant the contents aloud. We are so starved for the human voice these days; we love its wavelengths and tenor. Your kind used to sing to help us grow. We listen avidly for your voices, chanting: “Here you will find three of our hero crops, potatoes, corn, and oats! They form the key ingredients we depend on to create many of our beloved products.” While other placards are written in first person, curiously, from the perspective of us: “I’m corn! Whether I’m popped, milled, mixed or shaped, I’m a chameleon and a hero ingredient in so many nutritious products.” And: “I’m corn! All it takes is a little salt and oil to turn me into a perfect crunchy corn chip.”

When the woman mentioned a monument to petroleum, at first, I thought she was talking about us. A fair enough conclusion because, well, look around! (I’ve mentioned already how we don’t have eyes, but we can sense in other ways; I’m simply using this terminology for your sake.) The fertilizer used to feed us is chemical nitrogen, harvested from the air, a process enabled by natural gas. Additionally, we have been genetically modified in a sterile laboratory to produce a toxin that kills our enemies, and then this seed was carefully grown out, saved, dried, bagged, shipped, and reseeded in fields that were prepped with diesel-powered machines. Think about monster tractors, seed drills, fertilizer drones. Climate-controlled warehouses, trucks, railcars. Conveyer belts pouring seed into receptacles and speeding them around the world. Every step of this process requires huge amounts of petroleum. And then, after we reach the end of our growing cycle every year, we are harvested, ground up, milled, shot through funnels, channeled into barges, propelled across the seas, fed to animals, or processed into corn syrup or oil. One of the somewhat ungrammatical garden placards says: “7,000 railcars is the equivalent of corn produced by our products annually.” We’re made into corn syrup and oil for toothpaste and adhesives, for chewing gum, shampoo, the cornmeal on your pizza crust. Paper, explosives, plastics, poisons. What I’m saying is that we are all part of the monument to petroleum these days. I hear you are also increasingly made of microplastics.

Once upon a time, we would have considered ourselves, Zea mays, to be a monument to reciprocity, not petroleum. What changed? I’d like to puzzle over this question this morning. Maybe you find this activity frivolous—thinking—but I don’t have much else to do these days. I have plenty to eat and drink, and of course there are no pests to speak of. These days I have plenty of downtime. I can afford to think a lot.

I am thinking now of the domestication of corn. If you humans had to do it all over again, you would not have the wherewithal. Imagine the years of work that went into the development of the cob—the sheer determination, the ingenuity! We’re talking thousands upon thousands of years. A targeted effort that spanned generations. Back then in the Balsas Valley of south-central Mexico, before our teosinte cousins branched off, we all just looked like tall grass. You would’ve walked right by. As teosinte, our kernels were enclosed in a protective case called a glume, hard as rocks. Sheathed in a delicate, papery skin, these triangular kernels fell to the ground upon maturing. The seeds on the ground would have been picked up by birds and animals, and maybe humans, too, which would have passed through their digestive systems unharmed. That’s how we traveled and disseminated in the old days.

Over millennia, a slow dance takes place. One day, a woman comes along. She picks up a few kernels, masticates with great difficulty, hurting her teeth in the effort, and frowns. Some years later, another woman comes by and does the same with a toddler in tow, who playfully collects sticky palmfuls of seeds and drops them into a satchel. Later, around the cooking fire, this toddler dumps out the items he had collected and . . . surprise! A few kernels of teosinte explode in the fire and pop! Popcorn! Years later, a fire rages through the campsite. In the aftermath, humans find little white puffs of food scattered about.

For then on, humans hover over the ground, scouring it for teosinte, picking each kernel and wishing for an easier way. They pop the kernels in the fire. Until one day, another woman discovers a teosinte plant with larger seeds that somehow stay attached to the stem. She doesn’t know how it’s happened, but she saves these seeds and plants them again next year. Her children do the same, and their children, until that plant can reliably hold on to its kernels. Over thousands upon thousands of years, we bring one another into being. You feed upon our body and guarantee our continuation.

We have grown side by side. You cultivate us, and your prize is the cob. In the beginning, these cobs were only two centimeters long, with a measly two rows of kernels. Now, we grow up to twenty-two. Our teosinte grass cousins do gossip. They say our proportions are all wrong, our anatomy disfiguring. They say our engorged ears seem to jut out tumorously from the stalk. Imagine a human creature with clusters of eyes growing on their knees or a dangle of babies erupting from an external appendage like grapes. Corn is not beautiful, they say. Not the way we are beautiful to you humans. To our teosinte cousins, who can still bend and wave with the wind, whose sexual organs are positioned at the top of their heads for easy pollination, their form is beautiful. That is nature to them.

But to you, we look beautiful. We saw the slow dance. The soft caresses and the singing of songs of the Hopi and the Navajo. The words gold, mother, deity came to mind. Humans held our leaves as one would in matrimony. I said earlier that we love the timbre of the human voice. To the Hopi, singing to us was as integral to the process as photosynthesis. Not singing to us would be depriving us of an essential nutrient, like sun or soil.

Perhaps what I’m saying is this: so much work goes into planting, harvesting, selecting, and breeding. These are gestures of love. Reciprocity still exists. Your word, cultivation, shows that you agree. The root of cultivation is the Latin cultus, to care for. The word culture contains the same root. Cicero used the agricultural metaphor to talk about the development of the soul. We have coevolved, you and us. Now, for better or worse, we can’t imagine life apart. More than ninety-five million acres of corn are planted in this place you call America. The scale of this production is beyond our comprehension. Your bodies and your lives are made of corn, but you’ve forgotten. Toxic codependency is a term that gets thrown around more frequently in your world and defines more and more of your relationships. Is that our new dance? Are we toxic? You say that we are slowly killing you, that our sugars are too sweet, that the animals who feed on us are destroying the planet. But there’s nothing yet that can replace us. Your future depends on our future. Our future depends on your future. Without you to plant us, we would only be chaff.

Parking Lot Paradiso

A Field Guide to Parking Lot Flora in the Northeastern United States

Andrew Conboy with Bobby Doherty

fig. 1 Your average parking lot boxwood (Buxus sempervirens) shrub, pointlessly pruned into a tiny green ball.

Parking lots and fast-food drive-thrus are not typically desirable destinations for plant nerds or nature lovers like myself. As an urban forester and content creator (@Andrew_The_Arborist) focused on trees, native plants, and ecological restoration, I don't often get excited about parking lot plants. The flora of these commercialized seas of asphalt is usually ignored, viewed as nothing more than blobs of greenery used to divide up the parking spaces.

Most of the time, that’s a pretty accurate description. The plants that are installed in parking lots and corporate landscapes are often some of the most horticulturally boring, ecologically useless vegetation available at wholesale plant nurseries: boxwoods pruned into tiny spheres, rows of yew bushes butchered within an inch of death, and hundreds of daylilies sprinkled in between. Ecologically damaging invasive plants like Callery pears, burning bushes, and barberries are popular despite their propensity to escape the parking lot and degrade adjacent natural areas.

It takes a tough plant to survive in these unusual, man made settings. The concrete and asphalt absorb warmth during the day and release it at night; when combined with a lack of greenery, these elevated temperatures create an urban heat island effect that stresses plants. The trees also usually have a limited soil volume, which makes obtaining water and nutrients more difficult. Soil quality and microbial life are generally poor, and soil compaction from foot traffic and frequent mowing are high.

While planting native oaks or milkweeds in a Walmart parking lot is not a replacement for natural woodlands or healthy meadows, it is a step in a better direction. And amid the excessive trimming, weeding, and pruning, there’s almost always a forgotten edge of the parking lot where wild plants persist, sprouting in pavement cracks by abandoned shopping carts and windblown litter. The cliché rings true: life finds a way.

fig. 2 The red, glossy display of a Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) in autumn. Because of its invasiveness, the tree is now classified as a noxious weed in Pennsylvania and is illegal to sell here.

fig. 3 One of the most ecologically beneficial herbaceous plants, a native goldenrod (Solidago altissima) sprouts in a forgotten corner of the parking lot.

fig. 4 A fence tries to hold back Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) at the wild edge of the parking lot.

fig. 5 Endangered in Pennsylvania, a resilient Shumard oak (Quercus shumardii) grows on a median.

fig. 6 While most plants are going dormant for the winter, a cultivated rose variety (Rosa sp.) puts on a showy pink display.

fig. 7 Heavy cones weigh down the branches of a Norway spruce (Picea abies) meant to provide an evergreen privacy screen.

fig. 8 Ten-foot-tall invasive Miscanthus (Miscanthus sinensis) dwarfs all other vegetation in the meadow next to an indoor pickleball center.

fig. 9 The fresh stump of an Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus), cut down to make way for construction that will convert abandoned office buildings into housing.

fig. 10 Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) leans out into the sunlight, with boxelder maple (Acer negundo) samaras dangling overhead. These native species are some of the first to grow on land cleared by human development.

The Knotweed Factor

Reconsidering an invasive species

Jennifer Kabat

© Alëna Skarina

I followed my friend Tom Lewis through a field of weeds. It was mostly mugwort, with stalks that reached our shoulders and foliage that smelled like sage. We were at the Mawignack Preserve in New York’s Hudson River Valley. The 144-acre park sits just north of where Catskill Creek meets Kaaterskill Creek to form a river that flows through the nearby town of Catskill before emptying into the Hudson.

Tom is the founder of Trillium Invasive Species Management, Inc. He was there with his colleague Pat Salaway on behalf of the nonprofit Scenic Hudson, an organization founded in 1963 that, according to its website, “is credited with launching the modern grassroots environmental movement.” Scenic Hudson works to preserve and improve the landscape in the region. To that end, Tom and Pat were on a weed-eradication mission. It wasn’t the mugwort that concerned them. They were looking for one of the most dreaded of pervasive plants: Japanese knotweed.

At their pickup, Pat pulled out jugs of the herbicide glyphosate, branded Roundup Custom. While Tom consulted site maps, Pat blended the Roundup with a luminous blue dye and poured the mixture into backpack tanks. The two donned overalls and rubber gloves. Tom explained that they needed the dye so they could see what they had sprayed—or if they got any on themselves.

Tom’s pack sloshed with its cerulean poisons as I followed him into the weeds. He says that three years ago the site was covered in knotweed—about twelve acres of it. This time, we found only puny specimens. Pat squatted, searching for them in a nearby field. He had a red beard and a gold nose ring and was wearing an orange trucker cap. Genial and self-effacing, with a stubbled round face, Tom lit a cigarette on the side of the path.

Tom comes here twice a year for knotweed eradication—stem injections in the late spring with a giant hypodermic needle to pierce the stalks and foliar spray in the fall. In a wetland, he headed for a knotweed arcing gracefully toward the light. He sprayed. The dye turned the knotweed’s heart-shaped leaves an otherworldly jade.

We reached a stream. Tom lit another cigarette. Across the water, a thick stand of knotweed rose, and I asked if there was less on our side because it doesn’t like shade.

“It doesn’t care where it is,” he said. “It just loves living.”

Nightmare Fodder

Knotweed especially loves living near human industry. The plant tracks our unnatural terrain: highways and roadsides, railways and power lines, old mines and coal tips, abandoned factories, new subdivisions, and parking lots. It travels through the places humans have transformed or degraded and thrives where soil is moved and disturbed, where highway departments mow and plow. It flourishes with fewer frosts, warmer temperatures, humidity, and floods. High waters wash the rhizomes—the endlessly prolific underground stems and nodes—downstream, where they establish new colonies and start again and again.

And the plant terrifies people. Friends tell me their fears about it. One suspected it was growing in her garden and started having dreams of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Another emailed: “A patch creeping towards my driveway is giving me nightmares. Let me know if you land on a way to kill it.” There’s a stand of it on my road, and I worry about the snowplow pushing it up toward my house. I fret about the town crews mowing it each year, leaving tiny fragments in their wake. People have so many feelings and direct such charged language toward the plant that an anthropologist at CUNY, Alyshia Gálvez, is studying how it maps onto our fears. A weed scientist tells me about the knotweed growing at the terminus of his dead-end street in Philadelphia. A group of people he knows decided to get rid of it. “Now it’s ‘We’re going to sneak out,’ and someone says, ‘I’ve got a whole tank of glyphosate,’ and they’re going to spray it in the middle of the night.”

Knotweed is nearly impossible to kill. It can grow up to eight inches a day. It’s also allelopathic, meaning it exudes a chemical that repels other plants, a bit like having its own herbicide. In many regions, the plant is clonal; it regrows from the smallest pieces of stem or rhizome, a fragment the size of a fingernail, as if each piece contained a miniature version of the whole. There is so much contradictory information about it—how to kill or stunt it; how it spreads, whether by seed or vegetally or both; even whether it is truly a problem—that it seems to be one more example of how hard it is in this political moment to find agreement on basic scientific facts.

In dozens of places, like New York or the Netherlands, knotweed is criminalized, illegal to plant or grow or even to move. In the UK, it’s been governed by multiple regulations since 1981 and now is covered in part by the country’s antisocial behavior laws that started when New Labour wanted to crack down on teens in hoodies. Given that so much middle-class wealth is held in real estate, the plant is seen as a mortal threat to the workings of capitalism. Finding knotweed on a property, or even near a property, can make it impossible to sell a home in Britain. Banks might refuse to offer a mortgage. And if you don’t reveal there’s knotweed, the new owner can sue you.

By the stream in the Mawignack Preserve, while Tom and I waited for an area he sprayed to dry, he asked why I was there. I told him I was trying to understand the plant and my feelings about it. I love weeds and have been reading and writing about them: I can’t even bear to weed my own garden, and I wonder how specific plants came to be called weeds when they’re often edible and nutritious and have medicinal uses. I resist using the loaded term invasive. I worry, too, about the lengths we go to eradicate these vilified plants and what that says about us. But knotweed puts my tenderhearted sentiments to the test. “Maybe if I know where it comes from and its history . . .” My voice trailed off. We stared at the mass of green across the water. “I used to want to understand it,” he said. When he started this work, he was curious about each weed he was targeting, wondering where it came from. “Now I just want to get rid of it.”

Some Mammoth Asparagus

Knotweed, though, is beautiful. It’s graced by delicate sprigs of dainty white flowers that drape from its boughs, angling in elegant fountains. Bees love the blooms, which have been called a crucial fall food for the pollinators. In the fall, the dead branches turn a brilliant copper red, transforming an otherwise dormant, dulled world.

The thing that thrills me about the plant: wherever it grows in Europe, in whatever country, all Japanese knotweed is part of the same original plant, carried from Japan in 1829. That first plant was female. Because most Japanese knotweed in Europe is clonal, it is genetically a single plant, so taken together it adds up to what could easily be the largest single female organism in the world. Much of it in the United States, too, is derived from that very first specimen that traveled thousands of miles from Japan, where it often grew on the sides of volcanoes. That plant, Reynoutria japonica, has also been able to hybridize with giant knotweed, Reynoutria sachalinensis, and those hybrids can backcross with their parents.

In Japan it is called itadori, which means “pain puller.” It was known to be not only edible but medicinal. Today, its roots and rhizomes are being used to treat Lyme disease. Knotweed is a rich source of resveratrol. Long before it was known as a nuisance weed, botanists and plant collectors were attuned to its benefits.

One of the first was Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold, a German doctor who worked for a Dutch trading mission. In 1823, Siebold traveled to Japan as a twenty-seven-year-old, landing on a tiny island near Nagasaki surrounded by walls and guards. Siebold served as the trading post’s doctor, but his job was also to amass information on the country, which might be called espionage at a time when Japan controlled all access to its resources. It was an era when information on plants could be national secrets and people like Robert Fortune would steal tea and roses from China.

In 1829, he packed his collections, including hundreds of plants, onto ships headed to the Netherlands. Not far from Nagasaki, one of the ships ran aground and its contents were discovered. Siebold was arrested for spying and ordered by the shogun to kill himself. Eventually, he got a reprieve: banishment.

In Europe, he moved to Leiden, in the Netherlands, and was often broke and bitter. He spent years writing the multivolume Flora Japonica with Joseph Zuccarini, though it was only finished and published after Siebold’s death. In 1863, he described knotweed’s “shining foliage” but also noted that it was “inextirpable.” It was, he said, being tested for stabilizing “railroad tracks and sandbanks,” which seems darkly prophetic.

He sent a box of plant samples, including knotweed, to London’s famous Kew Gardens in 1850. The staff was unimpressed with most, but knotweed arrived just in time for the “wild garden” movement of the late Victorian era. Knotweed was championed by Gertrude Jekyll, still a legendary horticulturalist in the UK today, and I’ve read that at the time it was recommended “for association with vigorous things on the turf in the pleasure ground” and called “handsome in rough places.” That last line makes me think of the Ramble in Central Park, where it lately proliferates. Knotweed came to be called, too, “a sad rambler.”

Its path to America also tracks to geopolitics. The United States forced Japan to open its economy to foreign trade with the threat of invasion in 1854, and sometime later the plant made its way to New York. Knotweed specimens arrived that were from Siebold’s original plant. Others were shipped back by a New York horticulturalist, Thomas Hogg, whom Abraham Lincoln had sent to Japan. Hogg’s brother ran a botanical garden on the Upper East Side and advertised knotweed as “some mammoth Asparagus.” He talked about French experiments with the shoots as a substitute for the vegetable. Even in the 1980s, New York magazine praised a wild Japanese knotweed dish as “unsurpassed.” By this time, knotweed was almost everywhere: there were only a few states where it had not yet proliferated, including North Dakota, Texas, and Nevada. But as a substitute for asparagus, it has not caught on. Some foragers sing its praises, likening it to rhubarb, but even I, who eat most weeds—mugwort and docks, dandelions and garlic mustard—can’t quite acquire the taste. When cooked it turns a sickening slick green.

Don’t Use Loppers

I made another foray in upstate New York, this time with another friend, Timothy Furstnau. A few years ago, he got a grant from Greene County’s soil and water agency for a study of the different ways of eradicating knotweed: glyphosate or cutting it back regularly in the growing season. This year, he lost his funding, but he’s still there working, consumed by the knotweed problem. Outside, I watched him cut into a wall of knotweed. He was bent double, holding a small Japanese scythe and slicing at the stems. With a flick of the wrist, a branch fell. He showed me just where to cut at the base, an inch above the ground. “Avoid the node,” he explained, “to keep the plant from regrowing from the downed limb, and don’t use loppers—they’re too much work.” He tossed the limb behind him, and it floated away like a paper airplane.

We were standing in a postapocalyptic landscape. A mound of old tarmac was stacked like a cairn guarding the site. The road ran to dust and weeds, ending in a river, and Timothy joked darkly that the three sisters here are knotweed, mugwort, and black locust. It’s a place of floods and eco-fatalism in Prattsville, not far from where I live in the western Catskills.

Before us, the branches grew ten, twelve feet high, so packed they were impossible to push through. Timothy tossed back another stalk. We gathered them, and behind us, the dead, dry ones dangled upside down, bound together like heads on pikes hung in warning. Rusty red against an aching blue sky, they were also starkly beautiful. He guided me around the branches, and they looked like something out of a Millet painting. We came to a scrappy pavilion built of Tyvek tarps, and I told him people joke that tarp is just another word for roof in the Catskills. He pulled out something like an apple corer, designed to split bamboo. He sliced a knotweed stalk into staves and wove them into a fence. He also carried a bag full of dried plant pieces for making paper. He spoke of the possibilities, everything we could create with this weed: mulch, steam-molded furniture, building materials, biofuels. He has what might be the state’s only license to transport knotweed in order to experiment with such projects.

Sitting on the tailgate of his Ford F-150, I admitted my confused feelings about the plant. Which was better: cutting the plant or poisoning it with Roundup? And how bad is knotweed, really? He said he did consider getting licensed to spray but prefers the scythe. He said there are studies of wastewater treatment plants using knotweed to soak up toxins. So many possible uses. “But I don’t have a start-up mentality. I’m interested in shared knowledge and a culture of management, but this amount of biomass could be transformative for this region.” His hair was spangled with tiny knotweed flowers. And then a preacher’s ardor rose in his voice. “Stewardship needs to spread faster than the plant, so the idea of proprietary values is antithetical to that.”

He waved at the sea of knotweed. Its flowers frothed like foam in the breeze. Zadock Pratt, he noted, built an industry in the nineteenth century here on tanning, which required the peeled bark of hemlocks. “Prattsville’s history, like that hemlock economy, could be a knotweed economy—and I am joking,” he said, but also he was not. “This place has this history of being denuded with extractive capitalism, and here is a dream of biocultural restoration.”

Noxious or Nice

I met Tom on a September morning. I crossed a mountain pass as the fog burned off. One knotweed glistened in the light, and I nearly had to pull over because of the flowers’ sheer splendor. I wondered about the limits of human perception, and my own perception. What are the ideas of value or beauty held in certain plants? A grass lawn is unnatural and deadly to many other creatures. As I drove, the maple leaves burned red, and the sky was so clear it felt like you could see to the outer atmosphere. It was a big migration day for birds. The route I took tracked to where Earth’s first forests emerged 380 million years ago, before the trees were even trees (they were essentially giant ferns). Those plants depleted oxygen in the ocean, which is said to have led to a mass extinction.

It seemed a good moment to check in with naturalist Erik Kiviat. Through Hudsonia, and his work with Bard College, he has studied knotweed in this region for more than twenty years and written several papers on the plant. He has also written studies of birds nesting in knotweed and how it interacts with mosses. Species do benefit from it, just not so much ours. He explained that knotweed grows so densely that it keeps us out. “The larger animals, predators and humans, may not be able to get in there,” which might be why the plants seem so forbidding. But as for smaller creatures, “they adapt,” he said. “It can be behavioral and sometimes genetic. That happens when a weed like this has been here for 100, 150 years.” He’s not convinced of some of the worst things knotweed is accused of, like stream-bank erosion, which can cause flooding, or even allelopathy. “That someone has shown in the lab that knotweed’s root extracts kill mosses or radish seedlings may or may not happen in the field, and if it does, it may happen selectively, depending on the environment. We don’t know much about how allelopathy works in nature.” Kiviat distinguishes between knotweed in different locations—Oregon or Wales—because they have different ecosystems. But few researchers register this, as if what the plant does or how it interacts is the same everywhere.

I asked him about Roundup, and he sent me a literature review on glyphosate, which is still employed in many Roundup products in the United States. I read about the dangers it poses to bees and monarchs and other species, dire warnings about coformulations of the pesticide with other surfactants. Even nonlethal doses inhibit bees’ thermoregulation, so it can lead to death. Glyphosate, though, is likely the most common pesticide in the world. The United States deploys 300 million pounds of it each year, according to the Center for Food Safety. Originally discovered in 1950 by a Swiss chemist, Monsanto separately developed it in the early 1970s. The chemical attaches to an enzyme in plant cells crucial to creating amino acids for growth and then basically kills the foliage. It also works as a desiccant and has been applied to dry grain crops like wheat and oats.

The U.S., Canadian, and EU governments all say, used correctly, glyphosate is fine. But in 2015, a World Health Organization study declared it was “probably carcinogenic.” Bayer bought Monsanto a few years later. Since then, the company has been losing court cases in the United States that tie Roundup to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, including one this year in Georgia for $2.1 billion. Bayer controls about 40 percent of the global production for glyphosate, but in the wake of all the legal costs, the company keeps threatening to stop making it.

Dan Jones is a Welsh scientist who has published studies advocating for glyphosate to kill knotweed. His company is called Advanced Invasives, and he’s billed as an “expert witness” in the language of fear knotweed engenders. He does not address fears of Roundup, but even with his support of chemicals to control the plant, he wonders why we are so scared of it. Unlike foxgloves, common garden flowers that can kill us, or giant hogweed, whose sap causes long-lasting burns and scars, “knotweed is not a ‘deadly plant’ . . . nor, is it inherently hazardous,” he wrote. “Japanese Knotweed is a plant, not a disease.”

One might ask which is scarier: living with knotweed or losing the bees? Tom says waiting to see what happens will be too late. Alyshia Gálvez, the anthropologist, says, “The problem isn’t the plant. We’re the problem. . . . We create the vacuums through which it takes hold.” And Timothy has a shining hope for a different world that sounds like a romantic postindustrial future, postcollapse.

I keep thinking of those primordial forests I drove past. There is a display of fossils that sits by the road just outside a small museum in Gilboa, New York. I think of how they mapped to a geological age, a different moment of climate collapse, and of how urban soils are now so similar, often sharing the same DNA across continents. Knotweed grows in those places with contaminated soils, phytoremediating what we’ve done to the world. Most people on Earth have glyphosate in their bodies—and this substance is another thing we have lived with for only fifty years. What do we know about its long-term impacts? I don’t have answers but more questions, questions that in this Make America Healthy Again era won’t get answered—or whose answers I won’t necessarily trust. Some of the questions, too, are about what it means to try to live with a plant that makes us so uncomfortable. I think of Timothy’s vision of knotweed as a usable crop—the paper, the materials, and the fuel, all of which could be a boon to our world. I still haven’t emailed back the friend who asked for advice about killing it.

Mama Tried

Motherhood books answer the questions we’re afraid to ask

Madeleine Watts

© Chi Park

When I found out I was pregnant last May, I commenced a program of reading. I needed to know what was coming. During the six months that I had been trying, I had avoided stories about pregnancy and small children at all costs. If a TV show introduced a pregnancy plotline, I switched it off. If somebody recommended a book tangentially connected to motherhood, I made a point to quickly forget the title. When I saw acquaintances on Instagram post birth announcements, I muted their activity. The more other people were becoming pregnant and having babies, the more pregnancy began to seem like a finite resource, one that may well not extend its rewards to me. (I’d left it until thirty-five, my thyroid didn’t work, I drank too much in my twenties, hadn’t earned it, etc.) I constructed for myself a provisional world where I could keep trying without losing hope that one day, on the other side of a luteal cycle, I, too, would get what I wanted. By the time the positive test result materialized, I had been living in a narrative dead zone.

I hadn’t always hidden from motherhood stories. During my twenties I had read Rachel Cusk’s memoir A Life’s Work, a book so divisive when it was published in 2001 that Cusk later recalled being “accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual.” I’d read and liked pregnancy memoirs (Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts), novels about motherhood (Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love), as well as novels about not mothering (Sheila Heti’s Motherhood). I read histories (Sarah Knott’s Mother Is a Verb) and critical inquiries (Mothers by Jacqueline Rose). I felt reasonably confident back then that I knew what I was getting into.

I found out I was pregnant when a doctor emailed me at the end of the day on a Friday. I had visited several days earlier to complain about a lingering chest infection and persistent, but suddenly overwhelming, fatigue. I had burst into tears on the examination table; the weeping alone should have been a clue. Once the first wave of giddy happiness had eased, I realized that, for all my casual reading in my twenties, I’d had no skin in the game. I knew that early motherhood had the ability to fundamentally alter one’s personality, and I knew the cultural baggage that came with it. But what I wanted was to come away unscathed; I was afraid of losing who I was, but I also wanted a baby. I wanted to know about peers getting pregnant while still living with roommates, kids sleeping in their parents’ rooms until their teen years for lack of space in tiny rentals, friends taking out extra credit cards to afford their health insurance copays and working three or four insecure jobs at once on endless short-term contracts—how women right now were experiencing new motherhood. I wanted to know what it was like to give birth in the increasingly precarious social and economic conditions that the postpandemic years have turbocharged, amid epidemics of atomization and loneliness with no seeming solution, in which the reliability of facts has been trashed. I went to the bookstore.

Tales from the -Hood

In those early weeks, when I noticed myself avoiding the word mother, even in my own thoughts, I turned to Egyptian Canadian poet Iman Mersal, who writes that narratives about motherhood generally involve “the melding of two distinct selves, a love unlimited and unconditional.” In her book How to Mend (translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger), Mersal sets out to dismantle the dominant narratives of motherhood. You do not enter new motherhood with a clean slate; you enter a territory in which mothers are instrumentalized to illustrate sociopolitical narratives, and becoming a mother thrusts you into the narrative space crowded out by Virgin Mothers, Angels in the House, Crack Moms, and Mommies Dearest, forcing you to measure yourself against them.

Mersal takes particular issue with contemporary feminism’s neglect of motherhood. According to Mersal, feminist activists, in the course of battling for women’s rights in the workplace and in the law, for paid time off after birth and for affordable childcare, have generalized women as a group and neglected more private, subjective experiences of motherhood. This has produced “one of the crises of Western feminism,” in which speaking about motherhood as a “special” experience that might imply a meaningful difference in male and female experience is interpreted as “detract[ing] from the coherence of calls for gender equality.” Mersal concludes that, “until feminist theories take account of the violence, rage, and frustration inherent in motherhood, you will have to narrate your own experience or learn to take refuge in a narrative that will help you see that you are not alone.”

Reading Mersal, I began to think about this problem in relation to the specific form of twenty-first-century feminism that had been dominant over the course of my own adult life. Most women having children right now—millennials and Gen Z—have been brought up in a culture of #GirlBossing, “The Future Is Female” T-shirts, and relentlessly pink-coded hypercapitalist rhetoric that’s part business-school dictum and part self-help drivel. Motherhood had been reclaimed by an ideological tradition I wanted nothing to do with—one that made me nervous about the kinds of dresses I liked wearing because they had been co-opted by tradwives, the modern conservative movement’s vision of acceptable motherhood.

An indexical figure of post-Covid online life, the tradwife insists on a return to a prelapsarian past. Most of these women who have made their families the subject of their Instagram and TikTok streams are, of course, monetizing their lives, slipping ads into their content, and speaking of “exciting new business opportunities.” As journalist Amanda Hess points out in her book Second Life, which contextualizes pregnancy and new motherhood as it’s lived online, in these videos, “no figures from outside [the tradwife’s] heterosexual nuclear family appeared. Presumably she had neighbors, surely she had some help, but the content elbowed them out of the frame to zoom in on her virtuosic solo performance.” In the tradwife, the contemporary practice of motherhood adheres to the same achievement-oriented model of success as any other job under late capitalism; the difference with mothering is that the work is meant to remain invisible. Any dissatisfaction is a moral failure.

While I was reading Second Life, I discovered that the online world Hess spoke about was becoming the grand master of my anxieties: a story in the Guardian about a woman whose pelvic floor prolapsed after childbirth, who now finds sex agonizing and can’t even go for a run; an interview in which Jennifer Lawrence spoke about her own dark and lonely postpartum months; a report about a man who had bombed an IVF clinic in Palm Springs leaving behind a manifesto arguing it was cruel to bring more human beings into a harsh and meaningless world. Eight, ten weeks in, I read these things in bed at night, my face illuminated by the blue glow of my phone as my husband slept soundly beside me. Were sex and running over for me? Would I be lonely? Was creating new life in the face of rising authoritarianism, a casually accepted genocide, and climate collapse inherently cruel? But in most online (and offline) spaces, whether medical, therapeutic, or woo-woo, I was warned that negative thinking would “harm the baby.” Online strangers insisted this was going to be “the best time of my life.” My body held “ancient wisdom.” Prenatal yoga classes had me put a hand to my not-yet-showing stomach and dedicate “my practice” to the fetus while reciting mantras like “I am the best mother my baby could wish for.” Doctors refused me painkillers, telling me that the best medicine was “the joy you will experience in becoming a mother in a few months.” The relentless positivity was terribly alienating.

In Second Life, Hess details what are now digital commonplaces: the period-tracking apps that turn into pregnancy companions, the algorithmic ads suddenly addressing you as “Mama,” the smart baby technologies that essentially gamify infants for their parents, and the way the internet gives voice to—and sometimes legitimates—previously fringe ideas like freebirthing. Even in the first weeks of pregnancy, I could see my experiences documented in Hess’s book. “I asked the internet how you push a baby out. I asked the internet how much it hurts,” Hess writes. I’ve asked it the same things. Hess expresses the profoundly weird loneliness of contemporary pregnancy, in which the internet knew I was pregnant before my family or my friends: I was getting ads for maternity wear and prenatal supplements before I’d even seen the ob-gyn.

Second Life reflects the disjuncture between the internet and the unbearably cloistered reality of offline life. Regarding the labor of childcare in the early years of her son’s life, Hess writes, “It was the isolation of the work that made it so inefficient, depressing, and dull.” But on her phone, Hess “found my isolation transformed. My social feeds were stacked with videos that eroticized the secluded mother. Robed in a prairie dress, she stood in a kitchen as white as a near-death experience, whispering ASMR incantations into my ears.” The isolation Hess writes about alarmed me, but it was also consoling; during the first twelve weeks, the books I was reading were the only community I had. I wasn’t telling people I was pregnant (aside from doctors, several waiters, and a security guard at London City Airport) because there is a much higher risk of miscarriage in the first trimester of pregnancy (80 percent of miscarriages occur in those weeks), and I didn’t want to have to face everyone I knew and explain that I’d miscarried if I did. I had not known the decision to stay silent would make the first trimester so lonely. I spent insomniac nights in the darkness with a small purple reading light attached to a book, trying to lull myself to sleep.

The problem was that the only books I wanted to read were about pregnancy or mothering, and in novels like Olga Ravn’s My Work (translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) I could make out dark presentiments of my possible future. Like its contemporaries, My Work attests to an experience of devastating change: “When the child left my body, the whole world transformed, not a single living thing could be understood the same way again . . . I was no longer the same.” Anna, Ravn’s protagonist, is overcome with anxiety the moment her baby is born. She can’t sleep, either, she feels like she’s drowning, she has to remind herself to breathe. She loves the child desperately, but she also holds a “drawer of knives in her mind” and slowly becomes intimate with “the thought that she can kill herself.” Anna enters therapy, with long sections of the book given over to the outpatient treatment she receives. Echoing Mersal, she gradually comes to regard “the story of the happy mother” as a fiction that strips away the role of mother from the woman because she can never inhabit it comfortably. Nobody can live a fiction.

I felt like Ravn’s Anna expressed an essential truth otherwise unspoken in the dominant narratives, but it frightened me to read it. “This is why no one wants to read the books of mothers,” Ravn writes. “No one wants to know her. To see her become real. But if we don’t look, we live stunted half lives, each isolated in loneliness.” Toward the novel’s end, I underlined the quote “This book will be a container, a vessel for what a mother is not allowed to be: torn, in doubt, distraught, unhappy.” I wrote in the margin “motherhood as a Lars von Trier film?” It was not, arguably, a good time for me to be reading the book. I was overcome with a paralyzing fatigue, making it difficult for me to work, exercise, or maintain even the most meager of conversations. I spent days riddled with nausea, brought to vomiting by the semen smell of the flowering linden trees growing along our street. I canceled social occasions because it was too hard to lie to friends. I still wasn’t sleeping.

© Chi Park

Work, Achieve, Consume

Toward the end of June, I managed to walk with my husband to the Saturday farmers market. We bought apricots and rainbow chard, and my husband took them home while I sat on a bench in the park, too exhausted to walk back. I had a book in my bag, and because I couldn’t do anything other than sit, I began reading Ayşegül Savaş’s The Wilderness, finishing the slim book on that bench over the course of the afternoon. The wilderness that Savaş refers to is the first forty days after childbirth. Savaş, a Turkish anglophone writer living in France, is drawn to traditional Turkish stories about this interval, “considered one of extreme fragility for mother and baby alike.” The new mother is susceptible to air currents that occasionally herald the arrival of a demon called the Scarlet Woman, who becomes the prism through which Savaş contemplates her first days of motherhood. She details sweating through towels and shedding the hairs on her forearms, bleeding nipples, bloodstained breast milk, and the panic she experiences when family and friends text to congratulate her and insist that she “must be so happy.” In fact, Savaş’s days are lonely: “For us, there are no extra hands to help and to hold . . . no lighthearted cousins with whom to chatter. No other human scents our baby can trust.”

Around this time, I was in a prenatal yoga class where we were told to lie down while the instructor told us we knew just what to do. “Your body knows when to go into labor at exactly the right time,” the instructor purred over a New Agey Spotify playlist. My head started to whirr: What about women who go into labor at twenty-four weeks and lose their babies? I could see other women around me on the floor calmed by the instructor’s reassurances. I wished like hell I was one of them, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what we weren’t being told. If part of me felt like I was being unnecessarily alarmed by some of the books I was reading, at least writers like Savaş weren’t bullshitting me. “I frantically try to remember all the phrases I’ve heard about new motherhood,” Savaş writes. “But it seems I have never really listened to mothers, that I have never penetrated the meaning of what they were saying.” She draws on the theorist Jack Halberstam to frame new motherhood as a type of wildness, specifically “unbeing.” This I marked with an exclamation point. Why, I wondered, was the common through line in all these books the radical alteration in a woman’s sense of self? Why was every story one of isolation? It was after reading The Wilderness that my nightmares began. I woke up in the middle of the night on the first of July, shouting “Panther!” into the darkness. There was, I explained to my husband, a panther in our bedroom, stalking me.

During the time of the panther, I began Louisa Hall’s Reproduction, about a woman trying to get pregnant while writing a book about Mary Shelley. Reproduction takes on several resonances in the book: becoming and staying pregnant, art making, and the limits of scientific knowledge. Hall’s protagonist, too, frames the journey to motherhood as one of lonely discovery, “the last man, setting off in his ship to find a new country.” It was while reading Reproduction that we told our family and friends I was pregnant. I was, at eleven weeks, not quite out of the first trimester, but it was my father’s birthday, and I wanted to give him the news as a gift. I was, upon telling my family about the pregnancy, phenomenally happy. But a few nights later, I read about Hall’s protagonist’s miscarriage, an event that happens at twelve weeks. I lay awake, paralyzed with the fear that I had jinxed it.

At the end of August, after months of programmatic (but by no means exhaustive) reading, I came to Matrescence by Lucy Jones, the book that consoled, exasperated, and frightened me the most. Matrescence (by which Jones means “mother becoming”) is frank about everything I suspected we, as pregnant people, weren’t being told: the way your sense of smell changes, the way pregnancy physically alters the brain, the prevalence of traumatic childbirth. “From the moment I was pregnant,” Jones writes, “I didn’t just feel different. I was different. I am different. On a cellular level. I would never be singular again.” I wrote in the margin the word terrifying.

Jones uses her own experience to illuminate the neurological and biological findings we’re only recently beginning to understand. But in many ways, I found Matrescence an odd book: its first page, for instance, is an illustration of a human egg meeting with a sperm composed entirely in letters of the alphabet. The second page is a prologue on the subject of slime molds. Sometimes Jones pauses to offer an aside on the mysteries of eel reproduction, fungal networks, or the collection of individual organisms that make up the Portuguese man-of-war. On one page the words “this is how big it needs to be” frame a tight circular vacancy that takes up nearly the entire paperback page in width. It is the only representation of how dilated you need to be to push a baby out of your body that I had seen. I carried the book around for a week and showed the dilation word illustration to every friend I encountered. Those of us who hadn’t had kids yet were horrified. But a friend with an eleven-year-old shrugged and said, “Yeah. Obviously.” It felt like one more crucial thing I could uncover only from my reading—nobody else was going to tell me.

Jones articulates the books’ common cry—“As time passed, this new isolation and alienation chipped away at my sense of self”—but goes further in tying these feelings to issues larger than the individual and her singular aloneness. In most developed countries, it has become harder to have children. Rent and housing costs have risen higher than wages, and jobs have become increasingly insecure and unreliable. I was intimately familiar with this instability: the reason I had left New York, my home for over a decade, was because I couldn’t afford to have a baby if I stayed. I am, according to Guardian Australia, a “mid-career” writer still being asked to work for free because it will “look good,” cobbling together abysmally paid teaching work to keep my head just above water. As Jones writes, “The intense competition fostered by predatory capitalism has resulted in a culture of increasing busyness, presenteeism and overwork, which corrodes social relations.” When women have children, they are met with intensely gender-normative narratives, in which being a good mother means putting the child above all else. The cultural expectations of motherhood clash with the hypercapitalist culture that has raised us and told us to work, achieve, and consume. “Mothers have been stripped,” Jones writes, “of collective care structures and public services.” No wonder we’re all so lonely.

The Personal Is Political

At the beginning of autumn, I wound up my reading. My pregnancy itself had become louder and more operatically eventful (the eerie reawakening of old injuries, the debilitating dizziness of persistent anemia, being thrown into the curb by a moving cab and landing, catlike, in the only position that could preserve both my and the baby’s life). I felt, if not prepared, then aware of the territory ahead of me: what to look out for, what not to be surprised by. What these books had revealed was a commonality of experience in which childbirth often leaves women traumatized. Women are then sent home to look after newborns, per Jones, “while burdened with loneliness, lack of sleep, and a shedload of impossible cultural expectations, including the imperative to enjoy every minute of it.” Jones, like Mersal, points to motherhood as a blind spot of contemporary feminism. Second-wave feminists worked to emancipate women from the role of housewife, but in doing so, Jones writes, birthing and caring for young children was thrown into the same category as housework, “neglecting the fact that it can be more emotionally and ecologically complex, embodied and demanding than laundry, cooking or even the relationship with a husband or partner.” As a consequence, contemporary feminism ends up “neglecting the maternal experience as an important site of meaning for many women.” Into this vacuum slides right-wing populism and the tradwife in her prairie dress.

The longer I’ve been pregnant, the closer I draw to actual motherhood, the more I’ve thought about something I heard the Australian writer Helen Garner express at a conference I attended in July, reflecting on her involvement in second-wave feminism: “We were naive back then,” said Garner. “We thought if we just explained it to the blokes, then everything would be fixed. We thought we were going to change the world,” she qualified somewhat sadly. This was the era when the slogan “The personal is political” was coined, and consciousness-raising groups met to share private experiences that would transform into political action. Perhaps my own program of reading was a kind of personal consciousness-raising: here were women talking their way out of isolation and, in aggregate, telling a story that might make more women than me feel less alone.

But the truth is I don’t yet know. I can’t assess whether what Jones calls “the anxiety, the lie-exploding romance, the guilt, the transcendence, the terror, the psychedelia, the loss of control, the rupture of self” reflects or diverges from my own experience because I’ve still not yet encountered new motherhood. As I write to you from November, baby knocking firmly at my ribs, I still have a couple of months left before I find out for myself.

Pt. Reyes

D. S. Waldman

Drove to where the trees turn to ocean air and vista,

golden hills and old crag, water churning

in the far, low distances. M brought enough to microdose

and we chewed dried persimmon to help

with the aftertaste: sort of chemical but earthy.

And the elk we’d come to see watched us

in a herd, interested then not, pulling grass and chewing.

We knew to be nonthreatening. There were three of us

then four, but J passed on the mushrooms. Our keeper,

he walked between us and the rocky ledges.

This ocean, wrote Spicer, humiliating in its disguises.

We took turns talking horizon-like about love,

making up a future we could remember

or want to, careful always when we saw a calf nearby

with its mother: they’ll charge you.

As far North and South as we could see, at a pace

we could not, cliffs spilled into the Pacific

whose shimmer belonged to none of us

and each of us, in turns. Tougher than anything.

And the long moments opened around us

and the bag of persimmon rounds grew light.

Cold-air breath a familiar hurt. A stirring white from blue,

the patterned sounding. We’d all return, eventually

and alone, to our expensive rooms in the city, the ebbing

traffic of late evening on MacArthur. We’d never make it

to the far point at trail’s end, the point for which the park

is named, and where no elk were grazing.

Earth, Bound

The tragedy of international environmental law

Scott W. Stern

© E S Kibele Yarman

Picture a world in which we actually managed to arrest the climate crisis—a world in which a robust and binding regime of international law worked to rein in corporate polluters, rehabilitate the environment, and preclude the worst effects of global warming. When Maurice Strong took to the stage at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment on a gorgeous summer day in 1972, that world seemed not only possible but maybe even within reach.

More than a thousand delegates, representing most of the world’s countries, had gathered in the cavernous Folkets Hus, or House of the People, in Stockholm for the first global environmental summit in history. The conference offered an opportunity to establish an actionable plan and a legal framework for addressing a mounting ecological emergency: acid rain falling across Europe, industrial mercury poisoning in Japan, catastrophic drought in the Sahel, metastasizing deforestation from Brazil to Nigeria, smog killing thousands in London and Pennsylvania. Strong, a jovial Canadian oil magnate with luxuriant mutton chops, exhorted his audience to get down to business. He spoke of “target dates” for halting environmental deterioration, of new “institutional arrangements” for intergovernmental cooperation, of “all nations accept[ing] responsibility for the consequences of their own actions on environments outside their borders.” He acknowledged that the conference might not produce the “comprehensive code of international conduct” for which many had hoped, but he posited that “it does represent an important, indeed an indispensable, beginning.”

Strong was an unlikely messenger. Born on the eve of the Depression in a tiny speck of a Manitoba prairie town and raised in a series of rented houses without heat or indoor plumbing, he dove headfirst into the petroleum industry at just twenty-one, capitalizing on the Alberta oil boom to become a fabulously wealthy man. Soon enough, he was recruited to run one of Canada’s biggest holding companies and then the country’s External Aid Office. There, Strong built relationships with leaders at the World Bank and the UN; everyone liked him. Then, in 1970, the UN came calling—the planners of the conference wanted the well-connected Strong as its secretary-general. Over the next two years, Strong reportedly traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, visiting dozens of countries, to build support. He promoted the idea that the environment was an issue essentially above politics, something upon which all nations could surely agree.

Strong’s dream of unity was mostly realized: though the Soviet Union and a number of its allies were boycotting (because of the invitation of West Germany and the snubbing of East Germany, a UN decision with which Strong disagreed), delegates from every inhabited continent had converged on Sweden’s capital, arriving at the Folkets Hus in convoys of Volvos and Saabs (having mostly spurned the offer of free bikes). Yet such harmony meant little to the many groups and individuals excluded from the opening ceremonies. Indeed, just out of view, hundreds of cops, including mounted officers, were clashing with protesters holding signs like capitalism is the cause of environmental ravages; the police had dogs, and they halted the demonstrators before the procession reached the conference site.

The more significant exclusion, however, was less conspicuous. (It has, for instance, escaped the attention of most of the conference’s chroniclers.) The global working class had no true representation in Stockholm. Though labor unions had fought for years to shape the conference and play a direct, consequential role, no invitations had come their way. All of civil society, in fact, was relegated to the margins of the official proceedings, mostly dismissed as a sideshow or a distraction (or beaten by the police).

The costs of this consignment were high. The legal regime that emerged from Stockholm—the treaties, the frameworks, the follow-up summits, the UN environmental body—was able only to delay, not to reverse, the twentieth century’s great planetary crisis. The fires, the floods, the droughts, the storms, the carbon in the atmosphere, the microplastics in our genitals—by most every metric, the environment is worse off than it was fifty years ago. Far worse is yet to come. Pacts supposedly binding almost every country on Earth, asserting “rights” to a clean, healthy, and just environment, have amounted to little in an economy structured by multinational corporations and a political order dominated by a handful of rent-seeking nuclear powers.

At first glance, this hardly distinguishes the law of the global environment from the broader international legal firmament. Generations of postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist critics have shown how the juridical order that emerged after World War II was colored by colonialism, shaped by and for global hegemons, and lovingly crafted to facilitate the relentless accumulation of capital. But unlike, say, the law of the sea, with its rich precedents dating back to ancient times, or the prohibition against war crimes, painstakingly constructed by jurists in Geneva, the Hague, Nuremberg, and Tokyo, international environmental law has a single birthdate (June 1972), a single birthplace (Stockholm), and a single midwife (Maurice Strong). It thus offers a singularly straightforward parable for the tragic limitations of the law.

Plunder, Famine, Poisoning

Few could have guessed that when a group of ardent Swedish diplomats first proposed an international conference on the global environment it would become a media firestorm or that it would birth a whole new field of law. But the Swedes were determined to combat what they saw as global apathy in the face of impending catastrophe. Theirs was a strong social democracy where the people expected much from the state, and ecological consciousness had been rising in the country since the 1950s. In the summer of 1967, Sweden established the world’s first environmental protection agency. That fall, a book titled Plunder, Famine, Poisoning—some consider it the Swedish equivalent of Silent Spring—further unsettled the populace.

Swedish delegates began stalking the halls of the UN headquarters in New York that winter, according to one account, angrily urging the General Assembly to convene a worldwide conference to address the growing crisis. At first the grandees in the U.S. State Department were skeptical, considering the idea a waste of money, but polluted waterways were catching fire across the heartland, fears of a “population bomb” were rising in U.S. cities, and by the time Swedish chatter crystallized into a formal resolution at the end of 1968, Washington had come around.

Hardly any observers anticipated that the conference would serve as a historic turning point—save, perhaps, for Walter Reuther. An erstwhile socialist, New Deal Democrat, and seasoned leader of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Reuther was still famous as the man who had led the 1936 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, a weeks-long wintertime battle between autoworkers and armed police that ended up transforming labor relations across the United States. As president of the UAW, Reuther immediately saw the potential of the conference. As his brother Victor, another UAW leader, later recalled, scarcely a month after the UN voted to schedule the conference Walter “directed our interest and our support for this UN action.”

By this time, the UAW was one of the most pro-environmental unions in the country. It had recently established a conservation department to combat what the union’s international executive board called “the constant threat imposed by those individuals and corporations which exploit our natural resources for quick profit with little regard for the health and welfare of the community.” Members of this department swiftly recruited union members to serve as civilian “watchdogs” to report pollution and aggressively lobbied for stronger environmental laws. Indeed, the UAW’s conservation department may have recognized the significance of the UN conference even before Reuther; by January 3, 1969, they had drafted a message of support.

Four thousand miles away in Stockholm, plans for the conference were off to a rough start. A year passed without much progress. Yet the UAW was eager to help. The Reuther brothers traveled to New York to meet with UN Secretary-General U Thant and express their interest in leading the planning for the conference. They told Thant of the UAW’s recent experience bringing together Americans and Canadians to jointly address pollution in the Great Lakes. “Walter wanted to make certain that not only governments but the people themselves, through their lay organizations, could contribute to improving man’s environment,” Victor recalled. By November 1969, the union had extended a formal invitation to the UN to host a small symposium in advance of the main conference, convening world experts to discuss the “impact of urbanization” on the human environment. “This has never been done before,” Walter told a union meeting that winter. It was to be the first time “in which the U.N. and a labor union have joined in sponsorship,” the Washington Post agreed.

Walter Reuther and the UAW’s conservation department imagined a symposium international in scope, meaning it would have to include experts from behind the Iron Curtain. (“Air pollution and water pollution do not recognize ideological differences,” Reuther told the union. “It pollutes their air the same as it pollutes ours.”) They collaborated with allies in the Swedish labor movement, who soon offered to cohost the event at the UAW’s new recreation facility situated along Black Lake in Michigan. Invitations went out in April 1970, just as the first Earth Day raised environmental awareness to new heights. Ultimately, more than a hundred participants—labor leaders, academics, ambassadors, activists—hailing from two dozen countries agreed to attend.

Then, suddenly, less than a month before the symposium was set to open, Walter Reuther died. His small plane crashed en route to Black Lake. It was a debilitating loss for the UAW, and rumors swirled that Reuther had been assassinated. Victor stoically took over leadership of the upcoming symposium—and quickly became mired in a bitter fight with the U.S. government after the State Department refused to grant a visa to a significant Soviet trade unionist whom Victor had personally invited. It soon emerged that George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO—who had repeatedly clashed with the Reuthers on the grounds that the brothers were inadequately anticommunist—had appealed to the Nixon administration to block the visa.

The UAW could escape neither the strictures of the Cold War state nor the narrowing horizons of the postwar labor movement, but the symposium nonetheless opened as planned on June 15. UN Under-Secretary-General Philippe de Seynes would recall arriving at the UAW’s sylvan, lakeside enclave and feeling “quite moved to see the UN flag flying at the entrance and to learn that it was there permanently.” Leonard Woodcock, Reuther’s successor as UAW president, told the assembled delegates that “much of what still passes for environmental concern in the United States is limited to a cosmetic approach: sweeping streets, picking up litter,” that kind of thing. “These are wholesome pursuits, but they do not go to the heart of the matter,” which is that “poverty and deprivation are among the most dangerous forms of pollution” and therefore belong “high on the agenda of the environmental campaign.” Ultimately, attendees agreed on a set of conclusions that they conveyed to the UN Conference’s planners—and that read, at least today, as breathtaking in their ambition.

Fundamentally, the symposium recognized that “most” environmental measures being advocated at the time could “at best only eliminate a percentage of pollutants by chemical or mechanical means,” yet the crisis demanded “measures which seek to remove the causes of degradation, rather than concentrating on the effects.” To this end, the symposium sought to address the structural sources of ecological injustice by proposing that the UN assert jurisdiction over certain stateless territories, facilitate public control of national land, and form an international inspectorate to enforce global pollution standards. Further, the attendees agreed that, because of the

increase in the influence of international conglomerate corporations and other powerful investors on the utilization of resources and environmental factors in many countries of the world, a concern of international trade unions . . . it has become necessary to create a system of international law, as well as appropriate international judiciary processes particularly relevant to environmental cases.

This echoed the calls of other U.S. activists at this time, many inspired by the civil rights movement, who were coalescing around a lofty if legalistic vision: the UN should pronounce the existence of environmental rights, just as it had declared universal human rights in 1948. In Detroit, for instance, an official in the World Peace Through Law Center proposed that freedom from environmental damage was “a fundamental human right” and that any person deprived of said right—directly or indirectly—should be able to bring suit in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which would have the power to grant immediate injunctions and award damages or other restitution.

Finally, the symposium’s attendees “forcefully” suggested that “it is only through the participation of people”—including working people—that the many problems on the agenda at Stockholm could be resolved. They noted that unions were beginning to raise environmental concerns “at the bargaining table in discussions with employer groups” and urged the UN to involve “workers, students and . . . all citizens.” Such suggestions reflected the demand of American environmental activist Barbara Reid, who declared at the symposium: “It is vital that the United Nations, in preparing for the 1972 conference in Stockholm, open lines of communication with diverse groups of citizens and individuals,” from the “international and national trade union movement” to “poor people” the world over. “There are too many people who cannot or will not wait.”

More than half a century later, this symposium has been largely forgotten. Virtually no history of international environmental law, or even of the UN Conference, so much as mentions it. Such disregard, such erasure, would swiftly become a theme. No one from the UAW would participate in Stockholm.

Instead, even as Detroit unionists and their international counterparts were preparing with such ardor, the original Swedish champions of the conference decided that the preparations, the real preparations, had hopelessly stalled. A savior would be needed. They turned to Maurice Strong. He, in turn, launched an international charm offensive, beseeching nations to send delegations. And national governments began strategizing.

In the United States, the country’s new ambassador to the UN, George H. W. Bush—a wealthy Northerner who had moved south to make his name in the Texas oil industry—spoke vaguely at a preparatory meeting about the international community’s “shared and transcendental interest” in the environment but was conspicuously silent about new funds or obligations of the sort envisioned by the UAW and its allies. As the conference approached, the Nixon administration ordered U.S. delegates to vote against any increase in aid to poorer countries—or, indeed, any increase in funds for UN-led environmental cleanups. Such an approach echoed the demands of industrial lobbyists, who dominated the U.S. secretary of state’s advisory committee for the conference, as well as the National Industrial Pollution Control Council, a consultative body that gave the CEOs of the nation’s largest polluters a direct line to the White House. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials partnered with counterparts from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom to form the Brussels Group, which secretly strategized to minimize the impact of Stockholm. A “new and expensive international organisation must be avoided,” reads one surviving document in a British archive (uncovered decades later by New Scientist), as should “universal guidelines.”

By 1971, the grandest ambitions for the UN Conference had already begun to fade. In February, the UN’s official Preparatory Committee reported that the “prevailing view” among surveyed countries was that a Declaration on the Human Environment, the conference’s keystone document, “could outline broad goals and objectives,” but it should not set out “a detailed action programme,” much less “legally binding provisions.” A year later, the Intergovernmental Working Group charged with crafting the declaration reported such difficulty settling on consistent international environmental standards that its final text omitted “entirely any mention of standards.”

Bombs, Bulldozers, and Bureaucrats

It took more than two years for thousands of diplomats to arduously negotiate the UN Conference’s agenda. It took mere days for much of it to be cast aside. The trouble started on June 6, 1972, just the second day, when Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme denounced the defoliation of Vietnam—the bombs, the bulldozers, the flesh-stripping herbicides—and demanded that “ecological warfare cease immediately.” Although Palme did not name the United States, Russell Train, chairman of the U.S. delegation, took offense and issued a statement lamenting the “injection of a highly emotional issue,” which threatened to destroy the “spirit of positive cooperation.”

Not long after Palme’s objection, Tang Ke, chairman of the Chinese delegation, introduced a resolution calling for a wholesale reconsideration of the final draft of the declaration. The proposal, China’s first, landed like a bomb, and the major powers frantically sought to contain its blast; within a day, however, China’s pitch had won support from most African and Asian nations. Reluctantly, organizers created a special working group that would meet behind closed doors and reopen the draft declaration. By the next day, the Chinese delegation seized on its advantage and unveiled a ten-point agenda that the declaration should reflect, including calls for the world’s wealthiest nations to fund the development and environmental efforts of the poorest—a principle known as “additionality”—and condemnations of capitalism and imperialism, especially the war in Vietnam. The U.S. delegation was flabbergasted. Torn between a desire to respond and a fear of imperiling the goodwill generated by President Richard Nixon’s recent visit to China, the Americans regrouped. Unity, it seemed, was dead.

As the conference’s careful choreography deteriorated, Maurice Strong strove desperately to keep the major players on the floor. He met every morning with the Chinese delegation, which he later reflected “maintained a very tough line.” He assured developed and developing nations alike that environmental protection could be paired with continued industrialization, a position shared with what the Wall Street Journal labeled his “wide contacts in the American oil industry.”

In fact, representatives of the oil industry, not wanting to take any chances, were present in Stockholm, holding unpublicized meetings with delegates and passing out reams of stylish literature boasting of their environmental bona fides. Industry lobbyists present in Stockholm nonetheless whined of their marginalization to the New York Times, which quoted World Bank president (and Vietnam War architect) Robert McNamara reassuring the business community that “in every instance” environmental goals have been accomplished “either at no cost to the project or at a cost so moderate that the borrower has been fully agreeable.”

Across town, thousands of activists, students, and other groups genuinely marginalized from the official proceedings countered with their own conferences. In a colorful array of gatherings that attracted bemused press attention, hippies, pacifists, communists, and liberal academics sought to raise verboten topics (“ecocide,” land redistribution) and lamented the sidelining of civil society. The Pit River Tribe of California, for instance, schlepped to Stockholm without an official invitation in a longshot bid for allies: “The big corporations in North America have taken our land by force, but we are trying to get it back,” their spokesman declared.

The closest thing to “official” counterprogramming was the Environment Forum, held at the National School of Art, which was so poorly managed that its staff reportedly threatened to mutiny unless its executive director, a Swedish sex educator, learned more about the environment. At one panel, Anthony Mazzocchi, the legislative director for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, charged that the UN Conference did not want to talk about workers. Noting the impunity of multinational corporations, Mazzochi called for “an alliance between workers and environmentalists against their common enemy,” as one observer recounted.

Months earlier, a representative of the Seafarers’ International Union of Canada had sent a similar message straight to Strong, mailing him the union’s policy statement on pollution, which declared that “we cannot rely upon profit-oriented private enterprise to institute strong action,” nor can pollution control “be left to government alone. It is imperative that we, as the national voice of organized labour, develop a concerted demand for governments to enact without further delay effective and enforceable legislation that will prevent, under severe penalties, the continuance of destructive practices which endanger our environment.” Despite such pleas, organized labor—that is, the workers powering the polluting factories and enduring the ecological consequences—played virtually no role in the conference.

Though Strong privately believed in the necessity of “some radical changes in the whole basis on which our society sets its priorities and uses its resources,” as he wrote in a letter to an acquaintance, he had little time for the demands of labor. He had instead focused his efforts on recruiting national delegations and shoring up an essentially symbolic declaration quite unlike the one envisioned by the unions—and one that was increasingly described by the press as “in shambles” or simply “dead.” And Strong’s efforts notwithstanding, just one active head of state (other than Sweden’s prime minister) ended up attending.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, in what has become the conference’s most enduring moment, spoke to the delegates on June 14. Implicitly countering Western conservationists who directed so much ire and revulsion at India’s fast-growing cities, she insisted that it was the wealthiest countries—those that consumed and burned the great bulk of the world’s resources despite containing a relative sliver of the world’s population—that bore most of the blame for the ecological crisis. “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?” she asked. Without knowing it, Gandhi used almost the same words that the UAW’s Leonard Woodcock had two years before.

Gandhi’s speech was a powerful one, and it won plaudits across the globe. Yet despite condemning colonial exploitation and calling for additionality in development aid, Gandhi did not suggest enforceable pollution-control mechanisms, much less any challenge to the power of polluting corporations or their place in the global economy. In the end, the delegates did much the same.

Following a wrenching, all-night meeting just hours before the conference’s conclusion—at one point, Strong unplugged the electricity supply enabling simultaneous translation in order to “jolt” the delegates into action—they agreed to a declaration that contained soaring rhetoric and no binding obligations. The declaration’s very first principle asserted a “fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being” and denounced apartheid, segregation, and colonial oppression, a significant symbolic victory for the developing countries, as was a call for additionality and a recognition of the “sovereign right” of states to “exploit their own resources.” But the wealthy nations, led by the United States, succeeded in blocking language demanding a ban on nuclear weapons and any mention of Vietnam. On the final day, the declaration was adopted by consensus. “The Stockholm Conference had moved into the history books as a major landmark,” Strong would reflect years later, “launching a new era of international environmental diplomacy.”

Yet from the moment the final gavel came down in Stockholm, the conference’s fundamental limitations were apparent. “All features of the program are voluntary,” one journalist wrote on the front page of the New York Times. “Any suggestion that the wealthier states mean to carry out all the recommendations made here,” added the Washington Post, in a bizarrely racist aside, “would strain the credulity of even a delegate from the Central African Republic or Fiji.” For their part, the delegates from wealthy nations weren’t hiding anything. One UK delegate bluntly told the press that his country would not follow the conference’s vote on additionality, explaining, “I don’t think the UN would last very long if every majority vote in the UN were taken to be binding on every nation.” Indeed, a French delegate announced that his country did not consider itself bound by any resolution it had voted against. Chairman Train of the U.S. delegation pronounced himself “exceedingly pleased,” adding that the United States got “everything it wanted.”

© E S Kibele Yarman

Omission Impossible

Looking back fifty years later, the legal scholar Rebecca Bratspies lamented that the Declaration on the Human Environment “did not even hint at duties and responsibilities held by commercial actors, by corporate entities, or by businesses.” This omission became a hallmark feature of the emergent environmental legal regime.

The political scientist Steven Bernstein noted that, when thirty-three delegates from developing nations gathered in Mexico in 1974 for a follow-up meeting, they produced a declaration calling for redistribution and insisting that, in their words, environmental policy “not be left to the automatic operation of market mechanisms.” By 1990, though, many of these same countries had “moved toward a stronger support of market mechanisms and away from international aid and domestic regulatory approaches.” This fit with a broader rise in the power of corporate actors and a global turn away from state intervention in the economy. Bernstein observed that, while the original Clean Air Act, passed by the United States in 1970, featured “command-and-control regulation,” in 1990 Congress reconfigured the law to promote “market-based incentives.” Domestic legal regimes the world over were undergoing similar makeovers. Even the UAW lost its ambitious environmentalism in an age of austerity, union busting, and offshoring.

Today, the language of “environmental rights” pervades—since 1972, eighty-eight countries have enshrined such a right in their constitutions, and the UN Human Rights Council recently voted unanimously to endorse the right ahead of the Stockholm Conference’s fiftieth anniversary—but concrete commitments remain vanishingly rare. The 1992 Earth Summit, scheduled to celebrate Stockholm’s twentieth anniversary, affirmed the “right to development” and the “sovereign right” of states to exploit their resources but produced only nonbinding, nonspecific frameworks to address the crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an emissions reduction agreement, relied on a system of “cap and trade” that effectively allowed rich countries to pay to pollute as usual, and, in any event, the United States refused to ratify it. The 2016 Paris Agreement, its stronger and more widely adopted progeny, has been called “legally binding” but again lacks an enforcement mechanism; almost a decade on, all of the major polluters have failed to meet their agreed-upon benchmarks, the much-touted “loss and damage” fund (a manifestation of the long-deferred dream of additionality) remains embryonic, and the United States has now withdrawn. Twice.

No true international environmental inspectorate exists; no tribunal adjudicates the greatest suffocations, desiccations, and inundations that mark our age; no global obligations fetter the wealthy industrialists, feckless bureaucrats, or deranged autocrats who are doing their best to incinerate the planet. While some post-Stockholm international agreements oblige states (at least in theory) to rein in corporate pollution, the agreements themselves fail to do so—nor do they ensure that their second-order obligations are fulfilled. Indeed, a 2019 UN review found that many domestic environmental laws “exist mostly on paper because government implementation and enforcement is irregular, incomplete, and ineffective.” Further, as the legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi recently argued, “the most important part of international law” today is the body of over three thousand treaties in which countries have agreed to resolve disputes with foreign companies in secretive international tribunals. When a state fails to maintain the legal conditions that existed at the time a company invested there—say, by passing an environmental law—the company can bring that state before a tribunal and collect lost profits. “More than 1,400 cases have been initiated,” Koskenniemi wrote, and, citing a Guardian investigation, he added that “more than $120 billion of public money has been awarded to firms through investor-state dispute settlement courts, including at least $84 billion to fossil fuel companies. The latter are even using the 1991 Energy Charter Treaty to sue states if they take action to decarbonize.”

Workers, such as those of the UAW, were sidelined at Stockholm and remain so to this day. Last July, for instance, the ICJ issued a unanimous advisory opinion on climate change, affirming that the Paris Agreement (among other international agreements) created “legally binding” emissions obligations and, further, that states have only “limited” discretion in coming up with ways to fulfill those obligations. The decision is a massive moral victory for the nations most vulnerable to climate change, albeit one determined by one of its own authors, Judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, to be lacking in “practical significance.” And it fails to address the concepts of just transition or decent work as explicit components of state climate obligations. This failure came despite extensive comments from the International Trade Union Confederation, representing nearly two hundred million workers, and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), the world’s first global union, on those very topics.

It’s hard not to see some quantum of original sin in Maurice Strong’s leadership. Within weeks of the conference, he was writing fawning letters to fellow oilmen and attending a dinner in his honor hosted by the investment bank Salomon Brothers. Months later, he was nominated to lead the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), a new international body tasked with coordinating global environmental efforts. Developed nations refused to adequately support UNEP, so Strong placidly turned to “private sources,” in the words of a Sierra Club bulletin. He resigned from UNEP in 1975 to run Petro-Canada, calling himself “a bridge” between industry and the environmental movement. At the same time, he became involved in a plot to transport groundwater from beneath the environmentally delicate San Luis Valley to fast-growing urban centers—though he hastily exited the venture after a groundswell of public opposition. In his memoirs, he would gratuitously praise billionaires for their environmental philanthropy, including the Rockefellers, a family of literal oil barons.

It would be indefensible to claim that international environmental law has not accomplished anything—international pacts did, for instance, succeed in greatly reducing acid rain and saving the ozone layer—but it has undeniably failed to effect systemic change or, for that matter, stymie the increasing accumulation of global pollutants. Despite the ICJ’s powerful recent articulation of “legal consequences arising from wrongful acts,” it’s hard to see such consequences actually arising short of some sort of supranational police authority with either nuclear or supernatural coercive powers.

The struggles that dominated debates in Stockholm—between the right to development and the necessity of environmental protection—were impossible to overcome absent a robust attempt to rein in private enterprise and allow for the flourishing of genuine social democracy. Because the delegates at Stockholm, having excluded so much of civil society from the substantive negotiations, did not in fact provide for the latter, they failed to resolve the former tension and instead called for both development and protection. They created neither the strong international pollution authority nor the public control of natural resources demanded by the UAW’s symposium. The agreements that emerged in Stockholm’s wake—the treaties and accords that make up this thing called international environmental law—likewise exhorted more growth and more care without addressing the conditions necessary to reconcile these goals.

Today, international law is in tatters. Clear violations are there for all to see—the Russian shelling of Ukrainian civilians, the systematic sexual violence perpetrated by the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, the continuing abuse that the military of Myanmar is inflicting on the Rohingya, the U.S. murders of fishermen and other civilians in the Caribbean, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza—with little sign that any authority can or will do anything about it. “We have to speak of this regime of rights and laws in the past tense—it existed for eighty years, but no longer,” the journalist James Robins told Jacobin last year. In other words, the risk of impunity is not uniquely environmental. But it is acutely environmental. While there once was adherence, however uneven, to postwar international commitments, the system that arose from Stockholm never imposed true obligations on the principal polluters.

Still, the UAW may have been onto something half a century ago: in the absence of meaningful state action, solidarity can be an impediment, and perhaps a counterweight, to environmental degradation. In the years before the oil shock neutered the UAW’s environmental activism, its members and staff allied with environmentalists to picket polluters and even used the threat of work stoppages to directly negotiate for stronger pollution control. Starting in the 1970s, the ITF, after years of unsuccessfully demanding that states police substandard ships, created its own extralegal regulatory regime to inspect vessels, enforce wage and standard minimums, and use the threat of boycotts to ensure compliance—a regime that remains in force to this day. The solidarity of dockworkers, who routinely join seafarers in strategic ship boycotts, has been integral to the ITF’s success in winning better wages, conditions, and security.

It is the hope that solidarity could lead to real change that recently led some two million Italians to take to the streets in protest of the Israeli assault on a flotilla of boats carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. Dockworkers were vital to the initiation of this action, too, with one presciently telling a crowd of forty thousand, “If we lose contact with the boats, even for twenty minutes, we’ll shut down all of Europe.” It is this same hope that compelled a newly energized UAW to urge other unions to align their contracts to expire on the same day in 2028, with the goal of sparking a general strike ahead of the next presidential election.

Such hope is, frankly, a far more attractive prospect than continued faith in a system that was compromised from the start and remains debilitated to the end. Still, hope can be hard to muster these days. “The old order had to die,” the human rights attorney Jake Romm recently wrote in The Nation of the international legal order more broadly, “but the timing is inauspicious—the forces opposing the burgeoning fascist-international are relatively weak and disorganized; our task now is to build them where they don’t exist and to support them where they have already taken up the fight.”

More than fifty years ago, one environmental activist, en route to Stockholm, found himself beaten by the Paris police at a protest against nuclear testing. Amid their punches, the gendarmes kept asking if he was a “red.” “No,” the activist insisted, “I’m a green.” It is the height of irony that the cops, failing to distinguish between the two, apparently possessed a far broader conception of solidarity than did the environmentalist. It is high time that changed. The punches keep coming; we need as many allies as we can get.

A Few Things Worth Noting

Shira Dentz

Ribbing is a

I’ve written

some reason I

deep valley a

to the hill, which

pick. Or the

painting, flat and

time. Groove

The netting

make its light

Netting is what

brings us back to

warp and woof,

too much

start looking. To

greatest. I play

pleasing designs

the rest,   what      I

hand at. No

Muted and

mono mono.

money. But now

emerges,

Ancient peoples

plucked chicken,

bulbs where

now bared.

texture or pattern

about before. For

come back. The

crook, in contrast

like meat, you can

curve of trees in a

plush at the same

instead of crook.

around a bulb to

more ambient.

spiders do. Which

fabric, its weave,

ribbing. There’s

visuality once you

be a designer is the

being the maker of

and try to remove

don’t try to have a

hand, abdicate.

muddy, mono

Money, money,

a darker theme

merging shadows.

in unison, skin like

an awful texture—

feathers rooted

Green Raw Deals

A conversation about environmental justice after Biden

Dave Denison, Rhiana Gunn-Wright & Maria Lopez-Nuñez

© Diego Mallo

It’s an odd fact that when environmentalists in the United States talk about the ups and downs of their movement in recent years, much of the discussion turns on something called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Efforts to push the potentially transformational Green New Deal—both the original resolution introduced in Congress in 2019 and subsequent legislation introduced by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—were consistently rebuffed by lawmakers, with opponents claiming it was too ambitious and expensive. Instead, after Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, environmental policy issued from key spending bills on infrastructure and inflation reduction as well as a series of executive orders. The IRA, the Biden administration’s signature law, was primarily marketed as a way to tame inflation by cutting the federal budget deficit. Yet the bill devoted billions of new spending to clean energy, while Biden announced parallel government-wide environmental justice policies: Justice40, billed as a way to direct investment “to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution,” and the Community Change Grants Program, which Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency announced in late 2024 would award nearly $1.6 billion “to advance local, on-the-ground projects that reduce pollution, increase community climate resilience, and build community capacity.”

Though some mainstream environmental groups hailed the Biden policies as sweeping and historic, a single four-year term was not enough time to reverse decades’ worth of inadequate and counterproductive policies on climate. The Biden years ended with the U.S. environmental movement in a fractured and demoralized state, partly because of a sense that the administration didn’t do enough to break the grip of the fossil fuel industry. A critique emerged that the Democratic policies were not able to meld clean-energy initiatives with the kind of racial and class equity envisioned by Justice40. As Politico reported in the year after the passage of the IRA, “The most aggressively climate-minded president in history is getting flak from his green base.”

Both Rhiana Gunn-Wright and Maria Lopez-Nuñez are leading critics of the top-down technocratic environmental policymaking that many in the Democratic Party see as the only serious way to address climate change. Gunn-Wright joined the New Consensus economic and social-policy think tank in 2018 to work on the development of the Green New Deal; she later worked for almost five years on environmental and climate policy for the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive research center. Lopez-Nuñez, as a community organizer in Newark, New Jersey, helped pass a state law that is described as one of the toughest in the nation in restricting the cumulative effects of pollution. Lopez-Nuñez was also one of thirty-six members of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which Biden created by executive order almost immediately after his inauguration in January 2021. From there, Lopez-Nuñez watched as the Biden administration looked for technocratic solutions in the energy sector while failing, in her view, to connect with working-class communities. Gunn-Wright also faulted the Biden policies on equity grounds, writing for Hammer & Hope in 2023, “Black people [are] at risk of being left behind and locked out of the clean energy economies spurred by the IRA.”

Then came the election of Donald Trump. With its Project 2025 blueprint drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, the Trump administration started to move aggressively to reverse as much of the Biden agenda as possible. Trump issued an executive order on the day of his inauguration freezing all IRA funds. Although courts ruled he did not have the authority to cancel spending that was already appropriated, his agencies found ways to eliminate billions in funding. Passed this summer, the administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” rescinded some of the IRA spending and tax credits while directing new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Meanwhile, the EPA made huge cuts in staff and ended funding for environmental justice measures, while the Department of Energy issued a report in July asserting that the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are “less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial.” The moves through 2025 were directed at clean energy and environmental justice: in August, Trump’s EPA announced the termination of $7 billion in grants that were meant to help low-income households install solar panels on their homes and expand community solar power initiatives.

In speaking over Zoom and following up by email with Gunn-Wright and Lopez-Nuñez this fall, I wanted to understand the critique that recent Democratic policies were skewed against minority groups, as well as their views on how the environmental movement might move forward with new strategies in these years of all-out federal assault. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Dave Denison

Dave Denison: Let’s zero in on what took place in the Biden years. You’ll hear from the Biden partisans about all the billions of spending on environmental policy that happened. There also was a lot of talk in the administration about how to benefit diverse communities, right? But was it mostly talk?

Maria Lopez-Nuñez: Let’s start with the good. For the first time, community organizations could get access to up to $20 million at a time. The Community Change Grants were the start of something beautiful—the start. And they should have got it out much faster. Most of those Community Change Grants did not go out until the last six months. It’s funny because the Trump people complain that they were throwing money out the window. I wish they were! They were being slow as molasses to get money out the door. Now, at the same time, there were a lot of bad things in the IRA that were pushed, quite frankly, by environmentalists. Like carbon sequestration: what we saw on the ground is these science-fiction projects that were going to absorb the carbon. Instead of ending fossil fuels, we’re going to suck carbon up, put it back in the ground, and push carbon dioxide along pipelines—sometimes to extend the life of fossil fuel production. Things like that were problematic, to say the least. Another example: the hydrogen fuel projects that are probably going to be financially stranded assets—because who uses hydrogen? The whole making-fuel-out-of-water thing costs too much money without federal investment and would require the whole system be built anew—it is extremely challenging to reuse pipelines we already have. Hydrogen gas molecules are so small there would be leakage. So once the federal money is gone the whole thing falls apart. A bunch of these projects were being pushed on communities of color with no ability to refuse. And then there were all the “community benefits plans,” which were, again, to communities on the ground, often seen as extortion. Like, “Oh, we’ll give you a few jobs, but you’re going to trade in generational health, and you’re going to have a lesser quality of life because of these power plants that get dumped in your neighborhood.” It was a mixed bag with the Biden administration. I thought they were terrible messengers. They kept relying on influencers and the lily-white environmental people to go spread the message. They were not talking to the average person.

DD: Rhiana, you’ve written that after the IRA you saw the United States “relying on white supremacy to decide how to allocate the power and resources that come from going green.” I think that you’re talking about a whiteness problem in the environmental movement.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Whiteness is a problem for policymaking in general, right? I don’t think it’s unique to the environmental movement. It’s pronounced in the environmental movement because the movement has been segregated for a really long time. It’s understandable, however, because we have a political system that privileges white people and white voters. So when they’re at the center of that system, and you have electeds who want to get elected through that system, putting forward policies that center those folks and help them the most makes sense electorally. For you to think that a policy that primarily benefits white people is a net good requires a studied ignorance about how we are connected as people in the country. It just makes terrible sense in terms of sustainability.

DD: Give a quick example, though, of how some of these policies were geared toward more affluent white people.

RGW: The IRA’s tax credits, for instance. Individuals were going to get money for, say, putting solar panels on your house or switching to an induction stove. Tax credits are not distributed equitably. They privilege people who have tax burdens—if you don’t have a tax burden, you’re not going to see that money. And you need to have the money to do the initial investment and have a home to begin with. There was very little for renters, who are disproportionately people of color. They’re younger and have less money. Homeownership is like 75 percent white in the United States. So if most of the money that’s moving through the IRA for individual electrification of residences is moving through tax credits for homeowners, that’s going to be disproportionately white and affluent. The vast majority of people who took those credits made over $100,000 a year.

But it was also the whole debacle around permitting reform with former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. This was a fight to curtail the environmental review process in order, ideally, to make it easier and faster to build clean energy infrastructure. The problem was that Manchin, and later much of the climate movement—especially the clean-energy wing—wanted to accomplish that by gutting the National Environmental Policy Act, the law that requires agencies to conduct environmental review for all energy projects, including fossil fuel projects. Weakening NEPA also makes it much easier to build these projects, largely by making it harder for communities to bring suits against them—even in places like the Gulf South, where residents are already saddled with tons of pollution. The climate movement advocated for permitting reform over the objections of the environmental justice movement, only for Trump to turn around and gut NEPA once in office, using the movement’s arguments to justify it, and cancel clean-energy projects and federal clean-energy funding. So now the only energy projects really benefitting from so-called permitting reform are fossil fuel projects.

What happens if you gut NEPA? How do people push back on fossil fuel permitting? These concerns were shrugged off by groups like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, and the American Clean Power Association, and “abundance” advocates like Ezra Klein, the Institute for Progress, and the Breakthrough Institute as environmentalists being too picky, caring too much about birds and trees and not understanding what the stakes were. Many of the people who would be affected, particularly if fossil fuel projects became easier to build, were low-income folks—black, white, brown, Native, you name it—already living amid the kind of pollution that these dudes don’t even drive through. But it didn’t matter. Permitting-reform advocates put them in the same bucket as rich homeowners going to town council meetings to shout down a new wind farm. You’ll hear this language often when it comes to environmental justice: “They don’t understand the stakes of climate change. They don’t understand how our system works. They don’t understand the trade-offs that need to be made.”

DD: What you’re saying reminds me of a story I heard Yale professor Dorceta Taylor tell: when she got to her first environmental science class in college in the early 1980s, she was the only non-white person in the class. She asked the professor about it, and the professor came right out and said, “Well, black people aren’t interested in the environment.” So there is a stereotype—but that was a long time ago!

RGW: You see dog whistles in that direction still. If black people are involved in climate, they’re assumed to be environmental justice activists. Even if they don’t work on environmental justice, they’re called activists—even if they’re policy experts. Very prominent voices in the climate movement came out post-IRA and said they don’t know if environmental justice advocates care about climate change because they had reservations about the act.

MLN: I want to be clear: when I say white, I mean white upper-class rich people. Because I really feel a lot of solidarity with working-class white folks. They’re also being dumped on with a bunch of power plants and chemicals in their neighborhoods. Working-class people are busy enough as it is without having out-of-touch environmentalists tell them they need to take personal responsibility for stopping climate change. You get a solar panel on your roof and change your car, and that’s going to solve climate change? They don’t have the money to pay for those things upfront and then wait for a tax credit. And even if everyone did those things, they wouldn’t stop anything unless we go to the source, which is fossil fuels. Those are societal shifts, not individual ones like recycling or buying the right car. It should be about corporations ending their fossil fuel dependency.

RGW: You see this huge emphasis on expanding clean energy, but there’s so little attention paid to actually reducing the supply of fossil fuels. The Republicans have been very good about making clean energy an enemy of Americanness. You’re going to see very, very few politicians sign up to reduce the amount of fossil fuels or to deal with those very hard problems that come with fossil fuels.

DD: We don’t expect the Republican Party to stand up against fossil fuels. The Democratic Party, you know, there is a certain rhetoric that you’ll hear about climate change—but when it comes to a national movement against ExxonMobil and the banks that are behind ExxonMobil, the Democratic Party is petrified. And look back, not just to the Biden years but the Obama years. He’s the one who ramped up oil and gas and said, “That was me, people.”

RGW: You still get a lot of kudos on both sides for expanding fossil fuel production. In the Biden administration, there was this push and pull. You saw a stated commitment to environmental justice and steps toward that. But when you look into the programs, you see them watered down in a way to create the least amount of friction. For instance, Justice40 said that 40 percent of the benefits of environmental investment should go to disadvantaged communities. Sounds great. But then you start to get into the nuts and bolts of it. You’re not saying 40 percent of the money, you’re saying 40 percent of the benefits. Which means the Biden administration ends up counting funding of carbon capture and sequestration projects as part of Justice40—even though the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council asked them not to. There were community benefits plans where project developers agreed to invest some of the federal funding they would receive for the project in “employment and equity benefits” for the host communities. You also end up seeing a lot of preexisting programs, like the Weatherization Assistance Program, the Rural Energy for America Program, or HUD’s Healthy Home Grants, where money that was already going to disadvantaged communities is also being counted as Justice40 funding. So what you’re seeing is not an infusion of new investments or benefits in these communities so much as existing funding being recategorized in a way that suggests, perhaps, more progress than was actually happening. Similarly, a lot of the clean-energy money going out in the IRA was not included in Justice40. The tax credits to corporations, that wasn’t included in Justice40. That means that some of the biggest investments that the federal government is making environmentally are actually not subject to Justice40, because that would have been a commitment to environmental justice that could have upset really powerful donors.

MLN: There were plenty of opportunities for state and municipal Democrats to get in line as well and look at their own budgets. A huge percentage of federal funding goes through the states. If there was a true Democratic commitment to Justice40, then states with Democratic governors should have stepped up and implemented Justice40 allocations within their budgets. Communities needed to see that money faster, and the path to that was through state governors, who should have taken up the Justice40 mantle. That would have gotten them the approval that they were so desperately looking for. Instead, they were like, “Okay, let’s direct a lot of the money and programs toward red states, and then Trump will protect it.” Sixty percent of the announced projects, making up 85 percent of the investments, were in Republican congressional districts. The hope was that Trump and the Republicans would not attack the IRA after their constituencies saw the benefits, but they went after all the funds anyway. We’ve seen he respects no line. He’ll run over anybody, even his supporters.

DD: I feel like that brings us back to where we are right now, with the near-total triumph of fossil fuel power in this Trump administration. You know he’s perversely opposed to wind power and solar power. There will be no talk in this administration of environmental justice or diversity—that’s all been squelched. And I wonder if you both think that the environmental movement is in any shape to take this challenge on. Is it too fractured, or too slumbering, to respond now?

RGW: What Maria was talking about, about civic engagement, is so true. Especially at a time when people don’t trust government and see the government not responding to the desires and the needs of everyday people, particularly if you are working class, broke, poor. This is an example of white supremacy really hampering policymaking, because it hampers your ability to think broadly and widely. Because if every policy has to ultimately help maintain white privilege or help white people—at least white upper-class folks—have a greater share of material resources, there’s only so many ways you can solve a problem. And again, we have to be very real about the history of the United States. For all that we talk about democracy, true democracy—as in public participation, everyone mattering—is coded as black and brown and dangerous to white people. And you see it in the Republicans. There’s this call, “We don’t want a democracy, we’re going back to the republic. We need an ordered republic.” Some people get a say. Other people don’t get a say. Only some people are fit to make these large-scale decisions. So when you ask if we are too fractured, I think, in raw materials, in people power, no. Even big climate groups that people think of as Big Green, they’ve had budget reductions, but they are not broke. There’s still a lot of money in the environmental space. Clean-energy investments in the United States are really taking a hit; new investments in renewable energy, for instance, fell 36 percent in the first half of 2025—about $20.5 billion—compared to 2024. But they’re not gone. Those were historic levels of investment in 2024, so even with the decline, there is still money going into clean energy, especially globally, where investments in clean energy have actually increased. And the environmental justice movement, I think, has in fact not lost energy, the way that the climate movement has post-IRA. There has been, for example, a lot of attention around environmental injustice related to data centers, particularly with Elon Musk’s xAI facility in Memphis. I’ve seen far more coverage and energy around those kinds of stories than I have with, say, the increase of greenhouse gas emissions over the last two years. The question is whether we’re willing to work together toward a vision of climate activism that likely does not look the way that white, affluent folks want it to look or are comfortable with it looking. Because there are lots of ways to tie in climate to the things people care about: health care, affordability, even antiauthoritarianism. There’s so much that the climate connects to that we can build coalitions around. It requires not making climate secondary but knitting it into an overall idea of what a good life is. People of color are some of the most persuadable people on climate change, if you talk to them and make the connections. Environmental justice groups vary in size and strength, but they often do know how to do this sort of organizing.

DD: Maria is in the middle of some of that. As you know, there is no White House Environmental Justice Council—that was done away with very quickly under Trump. But I saw that you’re part of an effort now called the People’s Advisory Council on Environmental Justice. It sounds like you’ve got an idea to take some of this discussion out of Washington and ignite it at the grassroots, right?

MLN: Environmental justice got on the radar during the Biden administration. He said it a few times on the campaign trail and created a council after being elected. It was short-lived, but for people on the ground the essence remained the same: How do you have a functional government that works for you, that doesn’t work for corporations? To that end, me and some of my colleagues decided that the best part of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council was the public hearings. At this moment in time, we need more of them. I don’t think that it’s possible to come up with good policies without the people that that policy is meant to serve. And that’s why we’re on tour to listen to communities. We are going to places that are unexpected, often neglected, less visible. We’re making sure we then reach out to every corner of the state where folks are working toward a better quality of life. In Greensboro, North Carolina, five hundred people came out without any promotion. There’s a need out there. Many communities feel neglected by both parties and disillusioned with processes and their governments at all levels. They spoke to enduring issues and dysfunctions in government, about how the silos within agencies and between different departments meant that people lived with contamination and health issues without hope for resolutions. There were communities living with the impacts of failed federal policy, with no access to programs that might make a difference. They don’t know that there is a national movement and have never heard of most mainstream environmental organizations. It just shows how much of a field there is out there. There are so many people in all the corners of this country who have not been engaged yet. No movement has ever knocked on their door and asked them for their vote or their opinion on what policies should be. So that’s what we’re trying to do.

RGW: For the climate movement to help, there needs to be real, frank conversations and reckonings around race and class, right? We did a little bit after the Green New Deal. We did some of that coalition building. Part of the reason I was so heartbroken by the IRA was that it felt like we had tried so hard to build these coalitions and were starting to work together in a way that was more productive. But when the rubber hit the road, it was more of the same. Climate activists and environmental justice activists are going to be most powerful when we are knit together in a larger coalition. So that means supporting immigrant rights. That means supporting voting rights. Supporting as in leveraging our money, our connections, our bodies to further these fights. The Biden administration, for all of its successes, really showed us the limits of that model and the need to move away from it. It didn’t really get us to where we needed to go. We had the biggest climate investment that the United States has ever made, and people didn’t know about it.

MLN: The only thing I’ll add is, with the IRA, I was there at the signing. It didn’t look like America. I hope that when we have another historic bill that regular people in everyday communities are actually excited. They know what’s in it. They know how it’s going to work for them. And it wasn’t because someone just pushed messaging on them but because they were a part of creating it. It could be the day for the average American—we’ve got to give our country back to the everyday person.

[His ordinary bedtime questions . . .]

Laura Kolbe

His ordinary bedtime questions—why she never pierced her nose,

whether she might ever like a tattoo, to color or shave her hair—

fill her with a rage she knows is dread in drag. Whoever she is being

compared to is sending tendrils up the bricks and to their room.

Stepsister nightshade in a cartoon gloom. She knows she knows better

than crude jealous spew. It’s something Betty Boop might do,

pre-Code—envision the fawltless wival and, supersonically,

squawk into a paper bag until the panic unloads.

She has to get a grip. It’s the Anthropocene! She’s in charge of this account.

Her pillow is a book she hopes she’ll master just by upward pressure,

cotton case to scalp. The osmotic eating of crow: it’s the down alternative.

To be everything to someone is a one-horse town. It’s lonesome as a dove

and there’s no one around except her playing stick-and-hoop

or self-sheriffing her dreams. She’ll have to let this backlot Deadwood go.

Reservoir Hogs

Battling the water monopolizers of western France

Christopher Ketcham

© Daniel Benneworth-Gray

On the morning of March 25, 2023, an estimated thirty thousand protesters set out across the countryside near the village of Sainte-Soline in western France. They marched for miles in muddy fields and on country roads before coming in sight of the object of the protest: the unfinished 190-million-gallon Sainte-Soline reservoir, a taxpayer-funded boondoggle intended to create a surplus of water for irrigated agriculture. At that time, it was nothing more than a hole in the ground, fifty feet deep and as wide as several football fields. When filled with groundwater via pumps driven below the water table, however, it was to become part of a system of more than two dozen reservoirs in the Vendee, Deux-Sèvres, and Charente-Maritime departments of western France. Proposed in the late 2010s, the reservoirs’ broad purpose was to help large agricultural operators meet their already enormous water needs in the production of corn, a singularly thirsty cash crop, as heat waves and drought worsened across the country.

Put another way, the reservoir complex was a form of climate adaptation, but one that attempted to monopolize a public good—water, that basic necessity of life on Earth—for the benefit of private interests. The protesters considered this both unwise and unjust. At Sainte-Soline, the largest of the planned reservoirs, they wanted construction stopped, the site demolished. By occupying the reservoir for a day, the intention was to make their displeasure known by their numbers, defying local authorities’ ban on such demonstrations.

As the first group of marchers crossed the field toward the site, they saw that on the towering berm around the reservoir hundreds of cops had massed, and thousands more were posted in the cover of a forest that edged the field. Then, according to reports, the police attacked without warning. Tear gas sent the crowd running, a toxic haze obscured the landscape, and helicopters whipped overhead while armored vehicles were deployed in the distance. A hail of sting-ball grenades exploded in the air and at people’s feet, sending rubber shrapnel in all directions. A man’s skull was blown open, a woman’s foot shattered, and several people lay blinded by tear gas. As the injured screamed in agony, a few of the marchers fought back. A group of young men, masked and wearing only black and carrying wooden shields, threw Molotov cocktails and rocks dug out of the dirt; others shot fireworks at the forces de l’ordre. Per news accounts, the protesters set at least three police cars on fire and injured sixteen officers.

The battle of Sainte-Soline, as it became known, did not issue out of a political vacuum. It was the culmination of years of conflict over the expanding reservoir system in western France. A coalition of French citizens—antireservoir activists, smallhold farmers, environmentalists, students, eco-saboteurs, and black-clad anarchists—demonstrated against several reservoirs in the Deux-Sèvres and Charente-Maritime departments in 2022, with some of the marchers tearing out pumps and pipes and ripping up and setting aflame the huge plastic tarpaulin linings that kept the water from percolating into the ground. Others had sabotaged reservoirs across the region under cover of night and escaped undetected. The police expected similar property destruction at Sainte-Soline.

After two hours, the battle was over, the protesters forced to flee. The government claimed that nearly fifty police were injured but only seven demonstrators required medical aid. Protest organizers, however, counted two hundred injured in the fighting, including one who fell into a coma from a sting-ball grenade that exploded by his head. The authorities had launched as many as five thousand grenades and tear-gas canisters. Around 3,200 cops had marshalled for the attack, deployed along with nine helicopters, four armored vehicles, and four water cannons, directed from a command center overlooking the field of battle. The attack had been effectively greenlit by Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister in the Macron government, who in the days and weeks following the bloodshed denounced the marchers as “ecoterrorists.” Human rights investigators with the UN had a different view. They called the violence at Sainte-Soline “alarming” and “anti-democratic” and noted that France is the only country in the EU known to deploy tear gas and stun grenades against a peaceful assembly. The repression arose, in part, because the antireservoir movement, radicalized and well organized, had succeeded in monkey-wrenching agribusiness in France—direct action against entrenched interests that could not be tolerated.

Machines in the Garden

I visited western France in 2024 to write about the antireservoir movement, and my first stop was at the home of one of its most outspoken leaders, an elfin environmentalist in his seventies named Jean-Jacques Guillet, in the village of Amuré in the Deux-Sèvres. By trade a carpentry teacher, Guillet had spent decades in some form of elected officialdom, typically as a rabble-rouser. As mayor of Amuré for nineteen years, he clashed with local farmers about their use of GMOs. For six years he was president of the local waste management authority and made a name for himself stopping the construction of a garbage incinerator in the city of Niort and, before that, a nuclear-waste burial site in the town of Neuvy-Bouin.

What most interested him were the consequences of the transformation of farming in France after World War II. It was to him a history of the destruction of a venerable peasant culture and the erasure of the landscape of his youth. “We say, ‘It is not water that flows through our veins, it is the river of our childhood,’” Guillet told me. “I was a child of agriculture, I grew up on a farm, and if today I am a seventy-three-year-old activist, it’s because, without being really conscious of it, I was traumatized in my childhood after the war,” when these terrible changes took place.

If you were to look at aerial photos of France in 1950, it was a country of millions of small parcels, irregularly shaped, diverse in what they produced, a “nation of three hundred cheeses,” as Charles de Gaulle reportedly once quipped. This patchwork of distinct food cultures had evolved over centuries of experimentation and adaptation based in local knowledge of the interactions of weather and soil, crops and livestock. “We were smart enough,” said Guillet, “to understand that one did not just do anything one wanted anywhere.”

In the wake of the privations of wartime, France turned to the American model of productivist monoculture. Traditional wisdom was jettisoned and local diversity pushed aside for the cultivation of crops best tended by machines for maximum output and efficiency. Large parts of rural France fell to a regimen that required expensive tractors; heady volumes of fossil fuels, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides; the capture of water for irrigation; and, not least, vast open fields where machines could run unimpeded over miles of uniform terrain. “Nowhere was the transformation of the agricultural sector effected so quickly and so thoroughly as in France,” University of Oxford historian Venus Bivar writes in her account of postwar farming upheaval in the country. “At the close of the Second World War, the agricultural sector was for the most part a backward holdover of the nineteenth century, and yet by the mid-1970s, France had become the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural goods—second only to the United States.”

Taming the land to make way for petroleum-powered tractors would prove devastating for western France’s bocage country, a tangled matrix of woodland, heath, fields, hedgerows, and orchards laced between brooks, rivers, and ancient canals. It was in the bocage country that Guillet romped as a child in the 1950s. Within a decade, large parts of the bocage came under assault. A teenage Guillet watched as bulldozers tore out the hedges and woods and straightened and redirected rivers and streams, transforming waterways into what was effectively “a large collector drain, the goal [being] to move water as quickly as possible for the sowing of cereals.”

By the 1970s, cereals in France had become cash crops for profitable sales to countries overseas. In order to expand into global markets, the areas of domestic cultivation would have to broaden into the most biodiverse and important storage areas for water, les zones humides—marshes, wetlands, river deltas. The new ideal, as Guillet described it, was that “all France would be made into a garden. There must be no uncultivated areas.” It was a move toward total domestication of the countryside, the logical extension of an American model that squeezed every last bit of profit from the land. Between 1960 and 1990, the French agro-industrial complex drained an estimated 50 percent of the country’s “uncultivated” wetlands.

The destruction of the old ways also meant the evisceration of an entire social class: the smallhold farmer or paysan (that is, peasant), an appellation considered a term of endearment by many rural French. Thirty-six percent of the adult population farmed in 1945. Today it’s less than 3 percent—which is to say that modernization eliminated roughly nine out of ten smallholders. (A similar process also unfolded in the United States: less than 2 percent of the U.S. population in 2025 remain in farming, a drop from 17 percent in 1945.) Consolidation and enlargement of French farms followed, with increasing control in the hands of fewer and wealthier players, the monopolies aided by government subsidies and tax breaks. Surviving smallhold farmers sank into the industrial maw: dependent on more machines, more chemical treatments, more fossil fuels, they were driven into increased indebtedness to banks. The types of crops changed with the decline of the smallholder, and one in particular emerged triumphant. With the introduction of hybrid strains from the United States after the war, corn production went from roughly 540,000 metric tons in 1948–50 to nearly 13 million tons in 2024, making corn the country’s second-largest cereal crop. It is now the third-most-exported grain in France.

The dominant voice of French agriculture, and the chief proponent of the corn regime, is the National Federation of Agricultural Workers’ Union (FNSEA), established in 1946. Though its membership includes lots of individuals who own farms, FNSEA defends the interests not of the workers but of the agro-chemical industry, the banks that finance Big Ag, and the largest and most powerful agribusiness companies and allied cooperatives. According to Corporate Europe Observatory, a Belgian watchdog, FNSEA is “France’s agribusiness war machine.” It is “much more than just a farmer’s trade union: it has been the co-manager, together with large sections of the French State, of France’s agricultural system for the past 50 years.” FNSEA promotes the distribution and use of toxic pesticides and herbicides in Europe, and it is also a proponent of pesticide-dependent grain as a cash crop for export. The union has been the loudest booster of reservoir construction in the face of the drought that has afflicted western France. And, unsurprisingly, it has gone to extreme lengths to make sure its interests are protected against dissenters.

In 2019, FNSEA partnered with the National Gendarmerie, the branch of France’s armed forces that focuses on civilian law enforcement, to establish a special intelligence unit, code-named Demeter after the Greek goddess of the harvest, that would single out for surveillance and harassment anyone who engaged in “agribashing.” Agribashing was defined to include criminal activity—trespassing on agricultural facilities, acts of sabotage, and so on—along with “actions of an ideological nature,” including “simple symbolic actions denigrating the agricultural sector.” In cities, towns, prefectures, and rural police stations, and with local members of FNSEA lending a hand, Demeter intel operatives created a network of informants across France.

French courts ruled the program illegal and shut it down in 2022. The Demeter network, however, may still be in place, according to antireservoir activists. When one approaches a reservoir site in the fields of western France today, the response from watchful vigilantes can amount to a menacing display. A few months before I met with him, Jean-Jacques Guillet led a group of fifty students from a Belgian engineering school on a tour of a reservoir not far from his home in Amuré. Angry farmers on tractors—he assumed they were FNSEA—surrounded them at the site, Guillet says; not long after, gendarmes showed up, asking them what they were doing there.

Before the cops arrived, Guillet was able to tell the students about the threat the reservoirs represented:

They were surprised to hear that in France, a democratic country, where we consider water a public good, it can be grabbed by a few, stored in the sun, on black tarps at the mercy of evaporation, at the mercy of cyanobacteria. To be more stupid is impossible. And the cherry on top is that to fill the reservoirs we take water from aquifers. If we were taking the flow from a river or marsh, it wouldn’t be much smarter, but at least it would be less stupid. But to take high-quality water beneath us, protected from light and to place it in the sun? And best of all, to do it using public funds, with the support of elected officials?

Rivers Run Through It

The rivers that flow out of the gentle uplands of western France—the Mignon, the Sèvre Niortaise, the Vendée, and others—come together at roughly a single point west of the city of Niort, by the Atlantic Ocean, in the 386-square-mile coastal wetland-cum-canal system called the Marais Poitevin. No longer a true marsh, the Poitevin is an artifact of human intervention that began in the seventh century, when local monks embarked on construction of a complex of earthen canals and small barrier dams to drain stretches of land in the delta where the many rivers debouched to the sea. The man-made Marais Poitevin acted as a natural reservoir, storing excess water from the uplands. It became a marvel of bocage country—“It is one of the most important wetlands on the European continent,” said one account of the Poitevin, “a favorite stopover for migratory birds” and habitat for European otters—maintained for most of the last 1,400 years first by the monks, then by generations of peasants.

Among those who tended to the wounded at the battle of Sainte-Soline was a hulking, bearded forty-eight-year-old activist named Julien LeGuet, who had spent much of his life as a boat guide and self-taught naturalist in the Marais Poitevin. When the first group of reservoirs was proposed in 2017, LeGuet helped organize the opposition under the banner of a grassroots group called Bassines Non Merci, or Reservoirs No Thank You, which he cofounded that year with a collective of like-minded activists, environmentalists, and smallhold farmers. It was Reservoirs No Thank You that helped spearhead the march at Sainte-Soline.

I spent a day with LeGuet poling on his punt on the Sèvre Niortaise and in the canals that connected to it in the Marais Poitevin. With the spread of industrial-scale farming and the rise of the corn regime, the water had been poisoned with agricultural runoff, so toxified that locals advised not to swim in it. Thirty years ago, when he was a teenager, he and his friends bathed all summer long. Old-timers attested that at one time, as recently as seventy years ago, one could drink the water. Julien’s seventy-year-old father, Christian, a retired schoolteacher who hosted me for a week at his drafty old stone house, told me about the wetland as it once was. “When Julien was a boy, he used to collect frogs, scores of them every day. They’re gone, mostly. And the dragonflies, the variety we once had, the noise they made, the water buzzing with them, the frogs croaking, the number of insects. You don’t see the same plants in the water either.” The water lentils that typically float on the surface of healthy wetlands, richly green, a protein source for waterfowl and cover for the fry and tadpoles of fishes and amphibians, used to be so abundant that the canals of the marsh were dubbed the Green Venice. But the water lentils, according to Christian, were dying out, slowly disappearing.

LeGuet poled our boat in the cold November afternoon under gray skies, wearing a sweatshirt that said eco-terroriste. Not long ago, he had discovered a high-end surveillance camera camouflaged on the ground in front of his father’s neighbor’s house but pointing directly at his father’s home. He assumed it was placed there by the gendarmerie or Demeter agents to keep track of the comings and goings chez la famille LeGuet. He knew he was a target and leaned into it: hence the blaring words on the sweatshirt, which he wore every day I saw him. When I remarked on the sparkling clearness of the water, he insisted that it was full of poisons, that at least two hundred types of chemicals, including a variety of neurotoxins, have been detected there. He related this with a heaving sigh and a shake of his head.

There’s only so much of this type of grief one can bear without descending into rage. In an essay he wrote that was published in 2023, LeGuet addressed the “ecocidal business executives of the sprawling tentacular FNSEA”:

You who idolize to the extreme a capitalistic system and all forms of techno-solutionism, you who are ready to blow up nurturing lands to dig megacraters surrounded with megadams made waterproof by an ocean of black tarps. . . . For 15 years, in the Marais Poitevin, some of you thought well to come here and disturb the water and soil cycles. . . . you thought we’d let this happen? You thought we wouldn’t resist?

What shape, though, should resistance take? In the summer of 2021, LeGuet and other representatives of Reservoirs No Thank You met with members of a grassroots environmental action group called Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or Earth Uprisings, to answer that question. The group was an outgrowth of a successful land-defense movement that had formed in northwestern France, in the rural community of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where farmers had been fighting for decades to protect four thousand acres of small-hold bocage farmland from destruction for a planned airport. Starting in 2008, activists and anarchists joined the farmers’ movement, and despite attempts by successive administrations to evict the land defenders, who fought repeated battles with police that involved tear gas and beatings and lots of injuries, the airport was never built and the bocage was left intact. The occupation at Notre-Dame-des-Landes—nicknamed zone à defendre (ZAD) as a middle finger at the developer’s common lingo “zone à déveloper”—provided the model for resistance that Earth Uprisings would now uphold. After the founding of Uprisings in January of 2021, chapters sprung up from one side of the country to the other, though the exact numbers of its membership were unknown.

The group’s 2024 manifesto, First Tremors, a three-hundred-page, anonymously authored book published by radical Paris imprint La Fabrique Éditions, made clear their vision of ecological revolt in the context of global capitalism that had become “intoxicated by Herculean power” and left the natural world a shambles. “We are young rebels who have grown up with the ecological disaster in the background and precariousness as our only horizon,” said the manifesto. It inveighed “against the urbanization that tends to cover [the planet] with concrete, to infinitely extend the tentacles of roads, lines, and flows,” the landscape suffocated with infrastructure. It denounced the extractivist economy “that pollutes irremediably in the service of fossil capitalism.”

Earth Uprisings proposed three prongs for land defense: occupation (of places, by people en masse who refuse to budge); blockade (of industrial activities and byways—roads, for example—that threaten those places); and sabotage (of industrial machines and property), which they called “disarmament.” They echoed the long history of working-class machine-breaking in Europe and hailed especially the antecedent of the Luddites of England, artisanal weavers who in the 1810s found themselves out of work with the advent of mechanical looms and took action by donning masks in the night to smash the machines with hammers and clubs. Starting in 2021, cells of direct actionists who issued communiqués via Earth Uprisings sabotaged cement and concrete factories, sand quarries, road construction sites, and road-building equipment across France. Following the meeting that summer with Reservoirs No Thank You, the list of targets expanded to include the reservoirs of the Vendee, Deux-Sèvres, and Charente-Maritime departments.

The movement thereafter grew by leaps and bounds. Autonomous collectives of French anarchists joined and would become instrumental in tactical and defensive strategy to fight back against violent policing and give other protesters, most of them terrified of battle, a better chance to exercise the right of assembly. Anarchists were willing to engage in physical combat with police and use incendiaries such as Molotov cocktails. As a general policy, the representatives from Earth Uprisings neither encouraged nor discouraged these acts of revolt. All rebels were welcome, all methods were in the running, as long as a line was drawn at the taking of life. (“We’re not terrorists!” LeGuet told me.) The movement was hardly fringe. By the end of 2021, FNSEA’s old enemy, the Peasant Confederation, a formidable union of smallhold farmers established in the 1980s to oppose agribusiness, had also joined the rebellion against the reservoirs.

Arrayed against the water defenders, farmers, anarchists, and environmentalists were the FNSEA patrollers—a mix of “virile fraternity, binoculars, beers, sodas, and shotguns in the trunks of utility vehicles,” as described in First Tremors—who took up posts around reservoirs deemed most threatened. The rebels evaded them again and again, raiding the sites under cover of night. Saboteurs posted communiqués using names that evoked satire and enigma: here struck the “Regional Directorate for Water Protection,” there the “Fremens of the Marais Poitevin.” By the time of the Sainte-Soline march, so much damage to reservoirs had accrued across western France that the resources of FNSEA, the Macron government, and local municipalities and police prefectures had been exhausted by a campaign of sabotage that operated across hundreds of miles of rural terrain. The campaign was fluid, organized, anonymous, and relentless. “Considering the multitude of potential targets and the extent of the territory to be protected,” stated a prefectural decree from 2022, “the available law enforcement agencies will not be able to contain these disturbances.”

© Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Dead Reservoirs

Some in the anti-reservoir movement saw the violence of March 25, 2023, as an explosion that issued from this administrative impotence. The odd thing about the Sainte-Soline site is there was nothing for the rebels to sabotage, no pipes or pumps or plastic tarps yet installed. The government defended with ferocity an empty crater because it was symbolic to hold the ground against unruly citizens. The seriousness of the police violence fell into vivid context when a government official noted in a hearing on Sainte-Soline that five thousand tear gas and sting-ball grenades fired in one day in that rural enclave was more than had been fired in 2018 across all of France (and this during the widespread unrest that year from the Gilets Jaunes protests). Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin attempted to legitimize the bloodshed at the battle of Sainte-Soline with a declaration that Earth Uprisings should be banned under French law, its principals and adherents to be charged and imprisoned as terrorists.

By dissolving Uprisings, rendering it an illegal entity and smearing by association all who worked with the group—including Reservoirs No Thank You, Julien LeGuet, Jean-Jacques Guillet, and so on—one could open the flood gates of mass arrests of ecological rebels. Darmanin issued his order for the dissolution of Earth Uprisings in June 2023, but within months France’s high court shut him down, stating it was Darmanin who was acting outside the law. “Inciting violence against property,” stated the court, “does not justify dissolution.” (In November, journalists with the newspaper Libération and the nonprofit investigative news site Mediapart revealed bodycam footage from gendarmes at the battle of Sainte-Soline that showed officers not only violating laws themselves in their use of weapons against protesters but also rejoicing in the thrill of injuring their targets.)

A few days after my visit with LeGuet in the Marais Poitevin, I went for a drive with Guillet in his little electric car to take a tour of reservoir-construction sites across the Deux-Sèvres. Some of the sites had been sabotaged in the last year, others more recently, others not at all. Piloting dirt roads, we came upon a reservoir in the afternoon light. The barbed-wire fencing of the berm rose from a sea of dead corn stalks, and when we approached the perimeter a surveillance camera flashed from a fence pole. “Uhp,” said Guillet, winking at me. “They’ve got us.”

“No, my friends,” he said, addressing the camera, “we are not here today to smash things or make trouble. That’s for another day.” He speculated on the ease of blowing the camera to bits with a carbine, then we got back in his car to continue the tour. We passed a pump that supplied a reservoir that repeatedly had been put out of commission. Someone, he said, kept hitting that pump again and again, tearing out its guts. It was just terrible, said Guillet, grinning like an imp.

A few days earlier, Guillet and I had attended a march of around a thousand people who gathered in the morning fog in the village of Saint-Sauvant, in the uplands thirty miles east of the Marais Poitevin, not far from the battlefield at Sainte-Soline. The goal was to walk from the village in a procession that would cross the countryside on backroads to the site of the planned Saint-Sauvant reservoir, which had yet to be built. A sizable number of police—scores of officers, allegedly—were said to be hunkered in the forests along the route of the march. No one I talked to knew what to expect. An attack was possible, for whatever reason the state deemed fit. Perhaps the marchers would be allowed to proceed without trouble.

The alliance of peasant farmers with Reservoirs No Thank You and Earth Uprisings’ direct actionists had produced a good run. Reservoirs in Deux-Sèvres were on hold, and in 2025 the authorities in the department of Vienne would announce the cancellation of the planned construction of forty-one other reservoirs, according to LeGuet. Some projects had “died in the cradle,” he told me, “abandoned without anyone knowing because elected officials are terrified of seeing a ‘Sainte-Soline’ in their backyard.” Prompted by lawsuits from nature conservation, fishing, and other environmental groups, French courts had weighed in and killed or delayed projects, finding them in violation of various laws, including those protecting water quality and wildlife. The list of questionable reservoirs included Sainte-Soline; a December 2024 court decision ruled that its construction threatened the habitat of an endangered bird species. At the same time, reservoirs as a publicly funded support for agribusiness have become a growing object of revulsion across France, largely because of the negative publicity the rebellion against them brought. After the violence at Sainte-Soline scared people from fighting in the fields, they opened their pocketbooks; one fundraiser for Reservoirs No Thank You in 2024 netted a sizable sum of donations, according to Jean-Jacques Guillet, though he declined to say how much, and close to two hundred new chapters of Earth Uprisings formed across France, Belgium, and Switzerland.

In some instances, however, the Macron government had defied the court orders and continued building reservoirs. “We are in a kind of Mafia state then. The law has spoken, the government doesn’t listen,” Guillet told me. He had marched at Sainte-Soline and come under attack and now was one of the marchers at Saint-Sauvant. The bitterness and pain of events a year and half earlier had not been forgotten, and many of the people mustered had been in the battle and seen the wounded and heard their cries. Julien LeGuet was also here for the march. That morning, at his father’s house, LeGuet had been chain-smoking and guzzling coffee. He looked weary, like he’d slept in a ditch, and he was worried about how the day would unfold. He expected the worst.

We set out past noon, the procession stretching a mile in length along muddy dirt roads through enormous fields of corn that had been cut for harvest. People sang and shouted slogans, and loudspeakers boomed music, and the marchers wanted to tell their story. I met a woman in her thirties named Laury Gingreau, a co-owner of a cooperative farm, where she and her partners in recent years had planted three thousand trees, including sixty different species, their goal the rewilding of the landscape. She had been tear-gassed at Sainte-Soline. “It was like war,” she told me. Gingreau joined Reservoirs No Thank You at its inception in 2017 and had no intention of backing off. I met a twenty-one-year-old philosophy student named Kate Saoirse, who told me the struggle against reservoirs was about “the nation-state versus the people who live in the land. It’s about ways of life lost to progress—which means colonialism, empire, corporate power.” She said she marched because she was “on the side of people living in the land.”

We reached the site of the future Saint Sauvant reservoir. For miles around, except a few remaining vestigial forests, all one saw was machine-scythed corn that crunched underfoot. Little children carrying buckets of seeds—types of peas and wheat and other grains—sowed the fields with their parents in an act of protest against monoculture. Two peasant farmers spoke about water woes; LeGuet exhorted the crowd with a chant of “No bassaran!” (a joking homage to ¡No pasarán!,” the rallying cry of Republican and anarchist forces in the Spanish Civil War); and a deput é from the National Assembly, adorned with the tricolor sash that elected officials in France often wear at public events, inveighed against agribusiness. A dozen men and women with hammers and nails then proceeded to build a bird-viewing station out of rough-hewn logs. This was in honor of the ground-nesting little bustard, which is headed for extinction in western France because of the overdevelopment of its habitat.

The march unfolded without incident, though at one point a young woman went to urinate in the forest along the route and flushed out a group of armored gendarmes hidden in the brush. The gendarmes ordered her to “piss somewhere else.” A drone followed the crowd, low in the fog. Cops in the distance, armed with long-lens cameras, took photographs. It was reasonable to assume the images would be held in data banks for use under whatever laws the government passes in the future to imprison so-called ecoterrorists—which is to say all those who defend land from the progress of the capitalist machine.

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization.

From Instruments for a New Navigation

Andrew Mossin

  ‘The most tremendous

and compelling emotion

we possesses is the one that

forces us to look, to know, if

we can, to see.’

    Switch on the

lights  late days  you are right

to underscore the reasonableness

of our approach  as any of us

is standing outside the self  proximal

to those who preceded

this passing through.

  ‘Back toward town we glided past

straight and threadlike pines...’

not left to the imagination

but parallel to what can be

gathered as any day now the light

gives back its charge

unequal

    precincts of color.

I am sure you saw

the same light

when you

stood

    at the foot of the

stairs and mounted them

one step at a time.

16 November 2025

Bafflomathy

(no. 82)

© Rosalie Ryan

Alexis Almeida (“From Things I Have Made a Fiction”) is the author of Caetano, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse, and the translator of Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems (The Song Cave). She lives in New York and edits 18 Owls Press.

Anelise Chen (“Interviews with Certain Vegetables”) is the author of the hybrid memoir Clam Down: A Metamorphosis. She has written for venues including The Atlantic, The Believer, Arnoldia, and the New York Times. She is an associate professor of fiction at Columbia University.

Andrew Conboy (“Parking Lot Paradiso”) is an urban forester and ISA-certified arborist in the Philadelphia area. He founded an ecological restoration nonprofit, Community Canopy Project, that empowers his community to participate in land stewardship.

Shira Dentz (“A Few Things Worth Noting”) is the author of five books, including SISYPHUSINA (Astrophil Press), and two chapbooks, including FLOUNDERS (Essay Press).

Bobby Doherty (“Parking Lot Paradiso”) is a photographer living in Brooklyn, New York.

Caitlín Doherty (“Bog Trouble”) is currently writing a history of the Swiss town of Davos.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright (“Green Raw Deals”) is a former climate policy director at the Roosevelt Institute. Now based in Chicago, she is working on a book about white supremacy and climate change.

Jennifer Kabat (“The Knotweed Factor”) is the author of The Eighth Moon and Nightshining. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and BOMB, among other magazines. She lives in rural New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.

Christopher Ketcham (“Reservoir Hogs”) is the author of This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West. He is currently working on a book about ecological defense and eco-sabotage.

Laura Kolbe (“[His ordinary bedtime questions . . .]”) is a writer and physician and the author of the poetry collection Little Pharma.

Maria Lopez-Nuñez (“Green Raw Deals”) is a cofounder of Agency, an environmental consulting firm. She previously worked as a director of organizing and advocacy at the Ironbound Community Corporation in Newark, New Jersey.

Chris Maggio (covers) is a photographer living in New York City with 8.4 million of his closest friends.

Lauren Markham (“Last Herd on Earth”) is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, and Immemorial. She writes for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books.

Tyler Maroney (“Blame and Claim”) is a private investigator, the cofounder of QRI, and the author of The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence Is Reshaping the World.

Kristen Martin (“Serious Reservations”) is the author of The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood.

Andrew Mossin (“From Instruments for a New Navigation”) is the author of ten books of poetry, including most recently A Common World (Bodily Press) and Whitman at the Bardo (Spuyten Duyvil). He teaches in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Lindsay O’Connor Stern (“Army of the Kind”)’s most recent novel is The Study of Animal Languages.

Scott W. Stern (“Earth, Bound”) is an environmental attorney, historian, and author. His next book, Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen, cowritten with Charles O’Malley, is forthcoming in June. He lives in Oakland, California.

D. S. Waldman (“Pt. Reyes”) was excerpted from his collection ATRIA: Poems. Copyright 2026 by D.S. Waldman. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and ZYZZYVA. Waldman lives and teaches creative writing in New York City.

Madeleine Watts (“Mama Tried”) is the author of the novels Elegy, Southwest and The Inland Sea, the latter of which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Raised in Sydney, Australia, she currently lives in Berlin.

Art Contributors

Alëna Skarina

Deanne Cheuk

Chi Park

Hokyoung Kim

Rosalie Ryan

Diego Mallo

E S Kibele Yarman

Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Ricardo Tomás

The front and back covers of this issue of The Baffler are by Chris Maggio.

Submissions

The Baffler welcomes submissions. We encourage authors to read our most recent issues and online coverage before submitting to familiarize themselves with the magazine. Nonfiction should be submitted in pitch form (no complete manuscripts, please), consisting of two paragraphs that describe your project. Poetry and fiction are welcome; our preferred length for prose is between 2,200 and 5,000 words. All contributions to The Baffler are paid. Submit at https://thebaffler.com/about/submissions.

The Baffler (ISSN 1059-9789 E-ISSN 2164-9266) is independently published five times a year. Subscription orders and address changes should be sent to: The Baffler, 234 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001. Telephone: 212-390-1569 or email: subscriptions@thebaffler.com. An electronic, full-text version of The Baffler is available online at http://thebaffler.com.

Subscription rates are: Individuals: Print and Electronic ~ $50, Canadians ~ $60, Outside the U.S. and Canada ~ $80. Electronic only ~ $30. Institutions: Print and Electronic ~ $88.

Single Issues: Print ~ $14, Outside the U.S. ~ $24. Claims for missing issues will be honored free of charge if made within three months after the publication date of the issue. Claims may be submitted to subscriptions@thebaffler.com.

Postmaster, send address changes to: The Baffler, 234 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001.

Permissions: To request permission to photocopy, republish, or otherwise reproduce content from The Baffler, please visit our Rights & Permissions page at https://thebaffler.com/about/permissions, or contact the permissions manager directly at The Baffler Foundation, 234 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001. Email: permissions@thebaffler.com.

Phone: 212-390-1569.

thebaffler.com.