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Socialism is the only path out of the global ecological crisis.
This is Willard. He is an African Spurred Tortoise. You can't tell but he is hauling ass in this photo.
Willard belongs to a neighbor of a home I am rerouting some plumbing at. I got to feed him some squash. Willard is pretty ok.
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25901
“I just got a whiff,” said Peter Harrison, a marine scientist, as he leaned over the edge of the boat and pointed his flashlight into the dark water. “It’s really coming through now.”
It was shortly after 10 p.m. on a cloudy December night, and Harrison, a coral researcher at Australia’s Southern Cross University, was about 25 miles off the coast of northern Queensland. He was with a group of scientists, tourism operators, and Indigenous Australians who had spent the last few nights above the Great Barrier Reef — the largest living structure on the planet — looking for coral spawn.
And apparently, it has a smell.
Over a few nights in the Australian summer, shortly after the full moon, millions of corals across the Great Barrier Reef start bubbling out pearly bundles of sperm and eggs, known as spawn. It’s as if the reef is snowing upside down. Those bundles float to the surface and break apart. If all goes to plan, the eggs of one coral will encounter the sperm of another and grow into free-swimming coral larvae. Those larvae make their way to the reef, where they find a spot to “settle,” like a seed taking root, and then morph into what we know of as coral.
A team of researchers and tourism operators try to collect coral spawn above the Great Barrier Reef near Cairns one night in December. Harriet Spark for Vox
Spawning on the Great Barrier Reef has been called the largest reproductive event on Earth, and, in more colorful terms, “the world’s largest orgasm.” Coral spawn can be so abundant in some areas above the reef that it forms large, veiny slicks — as if there had been a chemical spill.
This was what the team was looking for out on the reef, and sniffing is one of the only ways to find it, said Harrison, who was among a small group of scientists who first documented the phenomenon of mass coral spawning in the 1980s. Some people say coral spawn smells like watermelon or fresh cow’s milk. To me it was just vaguely fishy.
“Here we go,” said Mark Gibbs, another scientist onboard and an engineer at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, or AIMS, a government agency. All of a sudden the water around us was full of little orbs, as if hundreds of Beanie Babies had been ripped open. “Nets in the water!” Gibbs said to the crew. A few people onboard began skimming the water’s surface with modified pool nets for spawn and then dumping the contents into a large plastic bin.
That night, the team collected hundreds of thousands of coral eggs as part of a Herculean effort to try to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive. Rising global temperatures, together with a raft of other challenges, threaten to destroy this iconic ecosystem — the gem of Australia, a World Heritage site, and one of the main engines of the country’s massive tourism industry. In response to these existential threats, the government launched a project called the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, or RRAP. The goal is nothing less than to help the world’s greatest coral reef survive climate change. And with nearly $300 million in funding and hundreds of people involved, RRAP is the largest collective effort on Earth ever mounted to protect a reef.
A pink skunk clownfish stares frightfully from its anemone home. Harriet Spark for Vox
The project involves robots, one of the world’s largest research aquariums, and droves of world-renowned scientists. The scale is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
But even then, will it be enough?
The first thing to know about the Great Barrier Reef is that it’s utterly enormous. It covers about 133,000 square miles, making it significantly larger than the entire country of Italy. And despite the name, it’s not really one reef but a collection of 3,000 or so individual ones that form a reef archipelago.
Another important detail is that the reef is still spectacular.
Over three days in December, I scuba dived offshore from Port Douglas and Cairns, coastal cities in Queensland that largely run on reef tourism, a whopping $5.3 billion annual industry. Descending onto the reef was like sinking into an alien city. Coral colonies twice my height rose from the seafloor, forming shapes mostly foreign to the terrestrial world. Life burst from every surface.
A pair of iconic clownfish in an anemone on a reef off the coast of Port Douglas. Harriet Spark for Vox
What really struck me was the color. Two decades of scuba diving had led me to believe that you can only find vivid blues, reds, oranges, and pinks in an artist’s imaginings of coral reefs, like in the scenes of Finding Nemo. But coral colonies on the reefs I saw here were just as vibrant. Some of the colonies of the antler-like staghorn coral were so blue it was as if they had been dipped in paint.
It’s easy to see how the reef — built from the bodies of some 450 species of hard coral — provides a foundation for life in the ocean. While cruising around large colonies of branching coral, I would see groups of young fish hiding out among their nubby calciferous fingers. The Great Barrier Reef is home to more than 1,600 fish species, many of which are a source of food for Indigenous Australians and part of a $200 million commercial fishing industry.
“The reef is part of our life,” said Cindel Keyes, an Indigenous Australian of the Gunggandji peoples, near Cairns, who was part of the crew collecting coral spawn with Harrison. RRAP partners with First Nations peoples, many of whom have relied on the reef for thousands of years and are eager to help sustain it. “It’s there to provide for us, too,” Keyes, who comes from a family of fishers, told me.
The Great Barrier Reef is not dead, as many visitors assume from headlines. But in a matter of decades — by the time the children of today grow old — it very well could be.
Cindel Keyes, on a boat near Cairns, before spawn collection begins. Harriet Spark for Vox
The world’s coral reefs face all kinds of problems, from big storms to runoff from commercial farmland, but only one is proving truly existential: marine heat. Each piece of coral is not one animal but a colony of animals, known as polyps, and polyps are sensitive to heat. They get most of their food from a specific type of algae that lives within their tiny bodies. But when ocean temperatures climb too high, polyps eject or otherwise lose those algae, turn bleach-white, and begin to starve. If a coral colony is “bleached” for too long, it will die.
The global prognosis is bleak. The world has already lost about half of its coverage of coral reefs since the 1950s, not including steep losses over the last two decades. And should wealthy countries continue burning fossil fuels — pushing global temperatures more than 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial baseline — it will likely lose the rest of it.
Projections for the Great Barrier Reef are just as grim. A recent study published in the prestigious journal Nature Communicationsprojected that coral cover across the reef would decline, on average, by more than 50 percent over the next 15 years, under all emissions scenarios — including the most optimistic. The reef would only later recover to anything close to what it looks like today, the authors wrote, if there are immediate, near-impossibly steep emissions cuts. (The study was funded by RRAP.)
A dead colony of branching coral in the Agincourt reefs. Harriet Spark for Vox
The reef has already had a taste of this future: In the last decade alone, there have been six mass bleaching events. One of the worst years was 2016, when coral cover across the entire reef declined by an estimated 30 percent. Yet recent years have also been alarming. Surveys by AIMS found that bleaching last year affected a greater portion of the reef than any other year on record, contributing to record annual declines of hard coral in the northern and southern stretches of the reef.
“I’ve been suffering,” said Harrison, who’s been diving on the Great Barrier Reef for more than 40 years. “I’ve got chronic ecological grief. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, like when you see another mass bleaching. It can be quite crushing.”
The problem isn’t just bleaching but that these events are becoming so frequent that coral doesn’t have time to recover, said Mia Hoogenboom, a coral reef ecologist at Australia’s James Cook University, who’s also involved in RRAP.
Crew members Paco Mueller-Sheppard and Devante Cavalcante dump a bucket of spawn into one of the floating pools above a reef near Cairns. Harriet Spark for Vox
“The hopeful part is if we can take action now to help the system adapt to the changing environment, then we’ve got a good chance of keeping the resilience in the system,” Hoogenboom said. “But the longer we wait, the less chance we have to maintain the Great Barrier Reef as a functioning ecosystem.”
That night in December, after filling two large plastic bins onboard with coral spawn, the crew motored to a nearby spot on the reef where several inflatable pools were floating on the ocean’s surface. The boat slowly approached one of the pools — which looked a bit like a life raft — and two guys onboard dumped spawn into it.
The government established RRAP in 2018 with an ambitious goal: to identify tools that might help the reef cope with warming, refine them through research and testing, and then scale them up so they can help the reef at large. It is a massive undertaking. RRAP involves more than 300 scientists, engineers, and other experts across 20-plus institutions, including AIMS, which operates one of the world’s largest research aquariums called the National Sea Simulator. And it has a lot of money. The government committed roughly $135 million to the project, and it has another $154 million from private sources, including companies and foundations. It’s operating on the scale of decades, not years, said Cedric Robillot, RRAP’s executive director.
Scientists at RRAP have now honed in on several approaches that they think will work, and a key one is assisted reproduction — essentially, helping corals on the reef have babies. That’s what scientists were doing on the water after dark in December.
Research technician Elena Pfeffer points out pink bumps on the surface of branching coral in one of the autospawners, a sign it’s about to spawn. Harriet Spark for Vox
Normally, when corals spawn, only a fraction of their eggs get fertilized and grow into baby corals. They might get eaten by fish, for example, or swept out to sea, away from the reef, where the larvae can’t settle. That’s simply nature at work in normal conditions. But as the reef loses more and more of its coral, the eggs of one individual have a harder time meeting the sperm of another, leading to a fertility crisis.
RRAP is trying to improve those odds through what some have called coral IVF.
At sea, scientists skim spawn from the surface and then load them into those protected pools, which are anchored to the reef. Suspended inside the pools are thousands of palm-sized ceramic structures for the larval coral to settle on, like empty pots in a plant nursery. After a week or so, scientists will use those structures — which at that point should be growing baby corals — to reseed damaged parts of the reef.
Colonies of A. kenti spawning at SeaSim. Harriet Spark for Vox
With this approach, scientists can collect spawn from regions that appear more tolerant to warming and reseed areas where the corals have been killed off by heat. Heat tolerance is, to an extent, rooted in a coral’s DNA and passed down from parent to offspring. So those babies may be less likely to bleach and die. While baby corals are growing in those pools, scientists can also introduce specific kinds of algae — the ones that live symbiotically within polyps — that are more adapted to heat. That may make the coral itself more resistant to warming.
But what’s even more impressive is that scientists are also breeding corals on land, at the National Sea Simulator, to repopulate the reef. SeaSim, located a few hours south of Cairns on the outskirts of Townsville, is essentially a baby factory for coral.
I drove to SeaSim one evening in December with Robillot, a technophile with silver hair and a French accent. He first walked me through a warehouse-like room filled with several deep, rectangular tanks lit by blue light. The light caused bits of coral growing inside them to fluoresce. Other than the sound of running water, it was quiet.
Andrea Severati, a researcher at AIMS who designed many of the tanks at SeaSim, releases coral embyros into a large tank, where they’ll develop into larvae. Harriet Spark for Vox
The main event — one of the year’s biggest, for coral nerds anyway — was just outside.
SeaSim has several open-air tanks designed to breed corals with little human intervention. Those tanks, known as autospawners, mimic the conditions on the wild reef, including water temperature and light. So when scientists put adult corals inside them, the colonies will spawn naturally, as they would in the wild. The tanks collect their spawn automatically and mix it together in another container that creates the optimal density of coral sperm for fertilization.
Observing spawning isn’t easy. It typically happens just once a year for each species, and the timing can be unpredictable. But I got lucky: Colonies of a kind of branching coral known as Acropora kenti were set to spawn later that evening. Through glass panels on the side of the autospawners, I saw their orangish branches, bunched together like the base of a broom. They were covered in pink, acne-like bumps — the bundles of spawn they were getting ready to release — which was a clear sign it would happen soon.
A close-up view of coral embryos. Harriet Spark for Vox
As it grew dark, the dozen or so people around the tanks flipped on red headlamps to take a closer look. (White light can disrupt spawning.) Around 7:30 p.m., the show started. One colony after another popped out cream-colored balls. They hung for a moment just above the coral branches before floating to the surface and getting sucked into a pipe. It was a reminder that corals, which usually look as inert as rocks, really are alive. “It’s such a beautiful little phenomenon,” Robillot said, as we watched together. “It’s a sign that we still have vitality in the system.”
After spawning at SeaSim, scientists move the embryos into larger, indoor tanks, where they develop into larvae. Those larvae then get transferred to yet other tanks, settling on small tabs of concrete. Scientists then insert those tabs into slots on small ceramic structures — those same structures as the ones suspended in the floating pools at sea — which they’ll use to reseed the reef. One clear advantage of spawning corals in a lab is that scientists can breed individual corals that appear, through testing, to be more resistant to heat. Ideally, their babies will then be a bit more resistant, too.
During spawning late last year, SeaSim produced roughly 19 million coral embryos across three species.
“People often don’t understand the scale that we’re talking about,” said Carly Randall, a biologist at AIMS who works with RRAP. “We have massive numbers of autospawning systems lined up. We have automated image analysis to track survival and growth. It is like an industrial production facility.”
A dive boat from the company Quicksilver Group above a reef near Port Douglas. Harriet Spark for Vox
Including the spawn collection at sea, RRAP produced more than 35 million coral embryos last year that are now growing across tens of thousands of ceramic structures that will be dropped onto the reef. The goal RRAP is working toward, Robillot says, is to be able to stock the reef with 100 million corals every year that survive until they’re at least one year old. (Under the right conditions, each ceramic structure can produce one coral that lives until 1 year old in the ocean, Robillot told me. That means RRAP would need to release at least a million of those structures on the reef every year.)
On that scale, the project could help maintain at least some coral cover across the reef, even in the face of more than 2 degrees C of warming, Robillot said, citing unpublished research. One study, published in 2021 and partially funded by RRAP, suggests that a combination of interventions, including adding heat-tolerant corals, can delay the reef’s decline by several years.
“We are not replacing reefs,” Robillot said. “It’s just too big. We’re talking about starting to change the makeup of the population by adapting them to warmer temperatures and helping their recovery. If you systematically introduce corals that are more heat-tolerant over a period of 10 to 20 to 30 years, then over a hundred years, you significantly change the outlook for your population.”
A hawksbill turtle on a reef offshore from Cairns. Harriet Spark for Vox
The obvious deficiency of RRAP, and many other reef conservation projects, is that it doesn’t tackle the root problem: rising greenhouse gas emissions. While restoration might help maintain some version of coral reefs in the near term, those gains will only be temporary if the world doesn’t immediately rein in carbon emissions. “It all relies on the premise that the world will get its act together on emissions reductions,” Robillot said. “If we don’t do that, then there’s no point, because it’s a runaway train.”
Many groups involved in reef conservation have failed to reckon with this reality, even though they’re often on the front lines of climate change. During my trip, I would be on dive boats listening to biologists talk about restoration, while we burned diesel fuel and were served red meat — one of the most emissions-intensive foods. A lot of tour operators, some of whom work with RRAP, don’t talk about climate change much at all. Two of the guides who took me out on the reef even downplayed the threat of climate change to me.
Yolanda Waters, founder and CEO of Divers for Climate, a nonprofit network of scuba divers who care about climate change, said this isn’t surprising. “At the industry level, climate change is still very hush-hush,” said Waters, who previously worked in the reef tourism industry. “In most of those boats, climate messaging is just nonexistent.”
Coral blanketed the seafloor at a reef offshore from Cairns. Harriet Spark for Vox
This makes some sense. Tourism companies don’t want people to think the reef is dying. “When international headlines describe the Reef as ‘dying’ or ‘lost,’ it can create the impression that the visitor experience is no longer worthwhile, even though large parts of the Reef remain vibrant, actively managed, and accessible,” Gareth Phillips, CEO of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a trade group, told me by email. (I asked around, but no one could point me to data that clearly linked negative media stories to a drop in visitors to the Great Barrier Reef.)
Yet by failing to talk about the urgent threat of climate change, the tourism industry — a powerful force in Australia, that influences people from all over the world — is squandering an opportunity to educate the public about what is ultimately the only way to save the reef, said Tanya Murphy, a campaigner at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, a nonprofit advocacy group. Tourists are ending their vacation with the memory of, say, a shark or manta ray, not a new urge to fight against climate change, Waters said. So the status quo persists: People don’t connect reducing emissions with saving the reef, even though that’s “the only reef conservation action that can really be taken from anywhere,” she added.
(Not everyone in the tourism industry is so quiet. Eric Fisher, who works for a large Australian tourism company called Experience Co Limited, says he tells tourists that climate change is the biggest threat to the Great Barrier Reef. “It’s what we tell people every day,” Fisher told me. “So as they fall in love with it, they’re more likely to leave with an understanding of that connection.”)
A school of purple queen fish. Harriet Spark for Vox
Keeping mum on climate change, while speaking loudly about restoration and other conservation efforts, including RRAP, can also take pressure off big polluters to address their carbon footprints, Waters and Murphy said. Polluters who fund reef conservation, including the government and energy companies, are given social license to operate without stricter emissions cuts, because the public thinks they’re doing enough, they said.
In reality, the Australian government continues to permit fossil fuel projects. Last year, for example, the Albanese administration, which is politically left of center, approved an extension of a gas project in Western Australia that Murphy and other advocates call “a big carbon bomb.” The extension of the project, known as the North West Shelf, will produce carbon emissions equivalent to about 20 percent of Australia’s current yearly carbon footprint, according to The Guardian.
A spokesperson for the Albanese government acknowledged in a statement to Vox that climate change is the biggest threat to coral reefs globally. “It underlines the need for Australia and the world to take urgent action, including reaching net zero emissions,” the statement, sent by Sarah Anderson, said. “The Albanese Government remains committed to action on climate change and our net zero targets.”
A school of small fish hides out in a colony of branching coral. Harriet Spark for Vox
Anderson highlighted a government policy called the Safeguard Mechanism, which sets emissions limits for the country’s largest polluters, including the North West Shelf Facility. Yet the policy only applies to Scope 1 emissions. That means it doesn’t limit emissions tied to gas that the North West Shelf project exports — the bulk of the project’s carbon footprint.
Although Australia has far fewer emissions compared to large economies like the US and China, the country is among the dirtiest on a per-capita basis. If any country can reduce its emissions, it should be Australia, Waters said. “We’re such a wealthy, privileged country,” Waters said. “We’ve got the biggest reef in the world. If we can do better, why wouldn’t we?”
On a stormy morning, near the end of my trip, we returned to the reef — this time, visiting another set of floating pools, offshore from Port Douglas. They had been filled with spawn several days earlier. Small corals were now growing on the ceramic structures, and they were ready to be deployed on the reef.
After a nauseating two-hour ride out to sea, a group of scientists and tourism operators jumped into small tenders and collected the structures from inside the pools. Then they motored around an area of the reef that had previously been damaged by a cyclone and started dropping coral babies off the side of the boat, one by one.
On a dive near Port Douglas we spotted broadclub cuttlefish — a cephalopod, like an octopuses — that decided to stick around. Harriet Spark for Vox
As it started to pour, and I noticed water flooding into the front of the tender, I couldn’t help but think about how absurd all of this was. Custom-made pools and ceramics. Hours and hours on the reef, floating in small boats in a vast ocean. Sniffing out spawn.
“You sort of think about the level of effort, that we’re going to try and rescue something that’s been on our planet for so many millions of years,” Harrison told me on the boat a few nights earlier. “It seems a bit ironic that humans now have to intervene to try and rescue corals.”
RRAP is making this process far more efficient, Robillot says — machines, not people, will eventually be dropping the ceramic structures off the boats, for example. But still, why not invest the money instead in climate advocacy or clean energy? Isn’t that an easier, perhaps better, way to help?
It can’t be either or, Robillot said. And it’s not, he contends. Many donors who fund the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a core RRAP partner and Robillot’s employer, are putting more of their money into climate action relative to reef conservation, he said. The government of Australia, meanwhile, says it’s spending billions on clean energy and green-lit a record number of renewable energy projects in 2025. Plus, while the scale of resources behind RRAP is certainly huge for coral reefs, it’s tiny compared to the cost of fixing the climate crisis. “We need trillions,” Robillot said.
Investing that roughly $300 million into fighting climate change could have a small impact on reefs decades from now. Putting it into projects like RRAP helps reefs today. It’s only a waste of money — worse than a waste of money — if that investment undermines climate action. And Robillot doesn’t think it does.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has been criticized for its ties to mining and energy companies, including Peabody Energy and BHP. The Reef Foundation currently receives money from mining giant Rio Tinto and BHP Foundation (which is funded by BHP) for projects unrelated to RRAP, the organization told Vox. “It is a bit concerning,” Murphy told me. “It’s really important that we get polluters to pay for the damage they’re causing. But that should be done as an obligatory tax and they should not be getting any marketing benefits from that.”
Robillot argues that these companies have not influenced RRAP’s work, or restricted what its staff can say about climate change. “If we can still scream that climate change is the main driver of loss of coral reefs, I don’t have an issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s realistic to only take money from people who do not have any impact on climate change. I don’t know anyone.”
Two of the floating pools above Arlington Reef, near Cairns, during sunset. Harriet Spark for Vox
Yet if there’s one argument that I find most convincing for RRAP — for any project trying to help wildlife suffering from climate change — it’s that even if the world stops burning fossil fuels, these ecosystems will still decline. They will still need our support, our help to recover. The planet is currently crossing the 1.5-degree threshold, at which point the majority of coral reefs worldwide are expected to die off. “If you stop emissions today, they will still suffer,” Robillot said of reefs. “And we’re not going to stop emissions today.”
So much of reef conservation is absurd. We shouldn’t need to collect coral spunk from the open ocean in the middle of the night or breed these animals in tanks on land. Then again, these sorts of efforts are what scientists, Indigenous Australians, and the most thoughtful divers can do — what they are doing — to help the reef today.
“There’s so much work happening on the ground,” Waters, of Divers for Climate, told me. “All of those scientists, all of those [tourism] operators, are genuinely doing everything they can. It would be great for the Australian government to go, ‘Well, this is what we can do for reefs, too,’ pick up their game on climate, and show that we’re actually in it together.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the historic effort to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive on Feb 7, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26106
Michigan researchers have gone back in time to get a picture of how ice cover on the Great Lakes has evolved since the late 19th century.
Using historical temperature records from weather stations around the region, researchers improved their understanding of where ice might have formed and for how long it lasted — spanning the last 120 years.
Their findings were published in the journal Scientific Data last month. Researchers said this new data record would deepen understanding of how climate change has impacted the region over time and clarify what life under ice looks like for declining iconic species such as lake whitefish. The new data could also help improve ice cover forecasting in winter, making it safer for recreation and for people who go out on the ice.
“Lake ice is really part of the system, part of our life. It matters [for] our culture, regional weather, safety, everything,” said Ayumi Fujisaki-Manome, one of the study’s co-authors and associate director for the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan.
There’s a “pretty good satellite record” of Great Lakes ice cover from the last 45 years, she said. But research into the region’s historical climate requires a longer timescale, and there isn’t good data specific to ice.
According to researchers, there’s a general gap in scientific knowledge about winter on the Great Lakes — data buoys get pulled out because of harsh conditions. There are good historic weather observations, though. And air temperature is a good proxy for ice cover on the lakes because ice typically forms when there’s been several cold days in a row.
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To peer into the past, researchers looked at temperature records from weather stations all around the Great Lakes, limiting their study to stations with the most consistent data since 1897.
They calculated ice cover using this information, and the end result was a dataset that can be compared to present-day conditions. Researchers said it can inform future research on how animals behave during the winter, for example.
“A lot of the biological conditions under ice are really poorly understood,” said Katelyn King, a fisheries research biologist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the study’s lead author. King is using the dataset to study the historic decline of whitefish in the Great Lakes, a regional species that’s important culturally and economically.
King said this dataset is a helpful baseline as the region continues to shift under climate change. Research shows that average temperatures in the region have increased in the last two decades, frost seasons are shortening, and heavy snow and rainstorms are becoming more frequent.
Still, year-to-year variability is the new normal. Ice cover on the Great Lakes was relatively close to average last winter, but followed historic lows the season prior.
So far this winter, cold temperatures in recent weeks have contributed to some of the highest ice cover on the Great Lakes in years, according to data tracked by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“These really extreme years where we have really cold weather or really warm weather is just a sign that long-term climate is changing,” King said. “It really affects all of us in our day-to-day.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What over a century of ice data can tell us about the Great Lakes’ future on Feb 9, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25614
Kathleen Watts’ flowers bloom much brighter now that the wind no longer blows black. Pulling weeds in the garden outside her redbrick house, she recalled when coal dust would sometimes drift through her quiet corner of northern England, a rolling patchwork of farms and villages under the shadow of what was once the United Kingdom’s largest coal-burning power station.
“When the dust came our way, we’d have to come out and clean our windows,” said Watts, who has lived in the North Yorkshire village of Barlow for more than 30 years. “And when we’d get snow in winter, there’d be a lot of black over it.”
Thankfully, she said, the wind usually blew northeast, pushing the station’s smoke and dust toward Scandinavia. Locals liked to joke that the air pollution was mostly Norway’s problem. There, it caused bouts of acid rain that damaged forests and poisoned lakes.
The U.K. has quit coal — a lengthy process culminating in the closure of the country’s last deep-pit coal mine in 2015 and the shutdown of the U.K’s last coal plant in 2024.
The giant station near Barlow, however, is busier than ever, fueled now by American forests rather than English coalfields. Trees felled, shredded, dried, and pressed into pellets in Louisiana and Mississippi are shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, loaded onto trains, and then fed into the station’s immense boilers. Operated by Drax Group, the station gradually stopped burning coal until it made a full switch to wood in 2023. It now burns enough pellets to generate about 6 percent of the country’s electricity.
Purple flowers crowd a field near the Drax power station in Drax, England. The former coal plant now runs entirely on wood pellets, which the company markets as “sustainable biomass.” Tristan Baurick / Verite News
The U.K. government, in a bid to meet its ambitious climate goals, is giving Drax the equivalent of $2.7 million a day in subsidies to keep burning pellets, which the company touts as “environmentally and socially sustainable woody biomass.”
But a growing number of Brits aren’t buying it. After years of celebrating the shift away from coal, U.K. residents are realizing that wood pellets aren’t the cleaner, greener alternative they were supposed to be.
“I still have difficulties in my little brain figuring out how you can grow wood at the other end of the Earth, chip it, ship it to here … and then burn it, and say, ‘Isn’t that nice and green?’” said Steve Shaw-Wright, a former coal miner who serves on the North Yorkshire Council.
Burning wood for power instead of one of the dirtiest fossil fuels offers the illusion of sustainability and robust climate action, said William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University. But in reality, it’s doing more harm to the environment than burning fossil fuels, he said. “England is off coal — isn’t that wonderful?” Moomaw said. “But there’s no mention of the fact that it’s because they’re now burning wood from North America, which emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt of electricity than does coal.”
Sawdust piles up at Drax’s wood pellet mill near Urania, Louisiana. The mill presses sawdust into pellets that are burned in a former coal plant in Yorkshire, England. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today
The Drax station in North Yorkshire emitted more than 14 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2024, making it the largest single source of CO2 in the U.K., according to a report last year from the climate research group Ember. That amount is more than the combined emissions from the country’s six largest gas plants and more than four times the level of the U.K.’s last coal plant.
A Drax spokesperson called Ember’s research “deeply flawed” and accused the group of choosing to “ignore the widely accepted and internationally recognized approach to carbon accounting,” which is used by the United Nations and other governments.
But several scientists say burning wood can’t help but produce more emissions. Wood has a lower density than coal and other fossil fuels, so it must be burned in higher volumes to produce the same amount of energy. Between 2014 and 2019 — a period when coal was in steep decline — the country’s CO2 emissions from U.S.-sourced pellets nearly doubled, according to a report by the Chatham House research institute in London. “Almost all of this U.K. increase was associated with biomass burnt at Drax,” the report’s authors wrote.
The station’s cross-continental supply chain is also heavy on emissions. For every ton of pellets Drax burns, about 500 pounds of CO2 are released just from making and transporting the product, according to Chatham House. About half of Drax’s supply chain emissions are tied to production, while transportation via trucks, trains, and ships accounts for 44 percent, according to the company’s estimates.
The switch from coal to pellets created a new pollution problem in Louisiana and Mississippi, where most of the station’s fuel is produced. Drax’s pellet mills have repeatedly violated air quality rules at its two Louisiana mills, located near Bastrop and Urania, and its mill in Gloster, Mississippi. The mills emit large quantities of formaldehyde, methanol, and other toxic chemicals linked to cancers and other serious illnesses, according to regulatory findings and public health studies. Residents of these poor, mostly Black communities say the mills’ dust and pollution are making them sick. In October, several Gloster residents sued the company, alleging that Drax has “unlawfully released massive amounts of toxic pollutants” in their community for nearly a decade.
The Drax spokesperson said the company is improving its mills’ pollution controls in line with a longstanding dedication to “high standards of safety and environmental compliance.” On its website, Drax says the company is “committed to being a good neighbor in the communities where we operate,” offering funding for environmental education programs, ensuring its wood is sourced from “well-managed forests,” and supporting land conservation efforts, including the establishment of a 350-acre nature reserve near Watts’ home in Barlow.
Much of the timber that Drax harvests comes from private lands in the Southern United States that function more as tree farms than natural forests. But in recent years, Drax has sourced an increasing share of its wood from western Canada, including from British Columbia’s treasured old-growth forests.
In 2024, Drax agreed to pay a nearly $32 million penalty after U.K. energy regulators determined the company had been misreporting data on where it sources its wood and how much of it comes from environmentally important woodlands. The practice of pelletizing Canada’s mature trees appears ongoing, according to a recent report by the environmental group Stand.earth. Citing logging data from 2024 and 2025, the group claims Drax has been accepting truckloads of trees from British Columbia that were hundreds of years old. Drax downplayed the report, emphasizing that the logs were legally harvested and of insufficient quality to go to sawmills.
Drax sees itself as one of the most environmentally conscious companies on the planet. “Sustainability is the cornerstone of long-term success and the transformation of our business,” said Miguel Veiga-Pestana, Drax’s chief sustainability officer, in a statement.
While most pellets Drax makes in the U.S. are derived from logged trees, the company also uses sawdust and other leftovers from lumber mills. The company supports forest thinning, a practice it says can ease crowding in densely planted timberlands, improve the health of the remaining trees, and diversify habitat for wildlife.
“By ensuring that we source sustainable biomass, and that we embed sustainable practices into every facet of our operations, we can build lasting value,” Veiga-Pestana said.
Water vapor escapes a cooling tower at the Drax power station in Drax, England. The station is the largest wood pellet-burning facility in the U.K. and was originally developed to burn coal. Gary Calton / The Guardian
The value of the entire utility-scale wood pellet industry depends on what many scientists call an “accounting loophole” entrenched in some of the earliest international policies aimed at combating climate change.
During the 1990s, the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol established land use and energy use as two separate categories for counting a country’s greenhouse gases. To avoid double counting wood burning across both land-use and energy-use categories, the U.N. assigned wood pellet emissions only to the land-use sector, believing that normal forest regrowth would keep pace with the modest harvests for pellet production. The wood pellet industry at the time was tiny, selling the bulk of its products to homeowners with small pellet-burning stoves. Any carbon released by burning would be balanced by new trees that work as natural CO2 absorbers, the thinking went.
The effect, though, was that regulators would count CO2 from burning oil and coal, but CO2 from burning timber could stay off the books.
“Drax and other bioenergy companies took that and said, ‘Look, we have no impact — we’re instantly carbon neutral,’” said Mary Booth, director of the environmental organization Partnership for Policy Integrity.
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This exemption was incorporated into the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty that set legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. Experts were soon warning of troubling consequences. In a study published in the journal Science in 2009, scientists said the exemption was an “accounting error” that could spur deforestation and hinder attempts by governments to curb emissions.
“The error is serious, but fixable,” said Tim Searchinger, a Princeton University energy policy expert, in a statement at the time. “The solution is to count all the pollution that comes out of tailpipes and smokestacks whether from coal and oil or bioenergy, and to credit bioenergy only to the extent it really does reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Other scientists challenged the industry’s claim that planting trees would neutralize power station emissions. According to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it can take 44 to 104 years for forest regrowth to pay back the carbon debt from pellet burning. While the planet waits decades for the trees to regrow, glaciers melt, seas rise, and weather from droughts to hurricanes grows more extreme.
Trucks haul lumber in and out of the Amite BioEnergy wood pellet production facility operated by the Drax group in Gloster, Mississippi, on September 24, 2025. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Despite these warnings, the European Union latched on to wood burning as a relatively quick and cheap way to meet tighter climate mandates. Rather than blanket the landscape with wind turbines and solar panels, countries could dust off old coal plants and put them on a diet of “carbon-neutral” pellets.
The shift toward bioenergy accelerated in 2009, when the European Union set a target of getting 20 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020. Pellet demand in Germany, Belgium, Italy, and other European countries immediately began to increase, but in the U.K., the growth was explosive. Between 2012 and 2018, the U.K.’s pellet consumption surged by 471 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The U.K. left the European Union in 2020, and it remains the world’s biggest buyer of wood pellets. In 2024, the country imported nearly 10.3 million tons, a record high spurred partly by a dip in pellet prices.
Wood burning has helped the U.K. come within striking distance of its goal to eliminate oil and gas from its electrical generation by 2030. Nearly 74 percent of the national grid is powered by what the government calls “low carbon” energy sources. Wood pellets and other forms of bioenergy supply about 14 percent of the low-carbon mix, with wind, solar, and hydropower accounting for the rest.
Every workday, Ian Cunniff climbs into his orange overalls, pounds his helmet tightly on his head, and steps into a cage that drops 459 feet into a maze of dark tunnels littered with old machinery.
The stout Yorkshireman is one of the last miners still working in the coal pits, but now his job is to lead tours along the rich seams he once risked his life to dig out. Cunniff is a guide for the National Coal Mining Museum at Caphouse Colliery, a former West Yorkshire mine dating back to the 1790s. His last “real” mining job was at Kellingley Colliery, the U.K.’s last deep coal pit and a major feeder of Drax’s power station before it switched to wood.
In the depths of the Caphouse mine, Cunniff grew wistful over the coal still embedded in the walls. The seams once provided nearly everything a man and his family needed, he said. “It was your future; it was your retirement. So much of it has never been touched.”
Miners, union members, and the local community take part in a protest march in 2015 in Knottingley, England, marking the end of deep-pit coal mining in Britain.
Christopher Furlong / Getty ImagesWood pellets didn’t kill the U.K.’s coal industry. It began to wither as the country shifted from cheaper, imported coal in the 1980s to natural gas in the 1990s. Coal’s decline left gaping holes in Yorkshire’s economy and social fabric. The wood pellet industry has contributed some jobs and tax dollars, but it can’t replace what the region once had, said Shaw-Wright, the county council member.
“With coal, you didn’t really need to get an education much because you were going to get a job at the pit,” he said. “And if you had a job at the pit, you would have it for life.”
At its height between the two world wars, the industry employed 1.2 million people in the U.K. In some northern England counties, 1 in 3 residents was employed in coal mining. The Selby Complex, a group of deep-pit mines near the Drax power station, employed about 3,500 workers before it shut down in 2004. The industry also supported cooperative groups that funded social halls, community brass bands, libraries, sports clubs, and welfare programs for injured miners and their families.
In contrast, the Drax-dominated bioenergy industry employs about 7,400 people across the U.K., including about 1,000 people at the Drax station. The increasingly automated industry has seen its job numbers fall by more than a third since 2014, according to data from the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics.
A similar trend is playing out in Louisiana and Mississippi, where the three Drax wood pellet mills employ far fewer people than the older pulp and paper mills that once played a dominant role in the Deep South. The paper mill in Bastrop, for instance, once employed 1,100 people. Drax’s pellet mill near the town has just 71 workers on its payroll.
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Shaw-Wright appreciates the economic activity the wood pellet industry brings to Yorkshire but said most of the region’s recent job growth actually comes from a surge in distribution centers for online retailers — a trend that has turned Yorkshire into the country’s “capital of warehousing.” Many of these massive facilities now sit on former coal fields, including the old Kellingley Colliery, yet the work of unloading and sorting parcels doesn’t provide the pay, stability, or sheer number of jobs that mining once did.
After giving another tour, Cunniff rested in the colliery’s old locker room. He knows coal isn’t coming back, but he doesn’t believe cutting and burning trees to power the grid is any better — for Yorkshire or the planet.
“So you’re taking away what’s cleaning the atmosphere, and you’re burning it?” he said. “That’s the big picture, isn’t it?”
The Drax power station is the dominant feature across several miles of North Yorkshire countryside. Its 12 cooling towers are each big enough to hold the Statue of Liberty. Every day, about 17 trains full of pellets arrive to top off four storage domes with a combined 360 million-ton capacity. The pellets are pulverized as fine as flour and blown into several boilers. Stored in hangar-like structures in the station’s center, the boilers consume some 8 million tons of pellets each year with fires that reach 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Just outside the station’s 3 miles of razor-wire fencing is a village, also called Drax, with one tiny pub. Inside, there was little love for the big neighbor.
“They’re taking wood from where they shouldn’t be taking it,” Tony Emmerson said as he sipped a beer at The Huntsman’s bar. “I think we should go back to coal, personally. We’ve got a hundred years of coal right here just waiting to be burned.”
Many of Drax’s post-coal era promises — lower energy bills, cleaner air, and a decarbonized grid — have proven hollow, Emmerson said.
“They get all this tax money but we don’t get cheaper power bills,” said Peter Rust, The Huntsman’s owner. “And they say they’re carbon neutral, but how’s that possible when you have to bring the pellets across an ocean?”
Trains unload wood pellets into giant storage domes each day at the Drax power station in Yorkshire, England. Gary Calton / The Guardian
The growing doubts about the wood pellet industry are seeping into public debate, leading the government to rethink its support for Drax. Last February, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government decided that the current subsidies for Drax would be cut in half in 2027. The subsidy renewal, which lasts until 2031, also requires Drax to increase the proportion of “sustainably sourced” biomass from 70 percent to 100 percent. Michael Shanks, the energy minister, told Parliament that the government made the move because Drax was making “unacceptably large profits” and “simply did not deliver a good enough deal for bill payers.”
Shanks, however, emphasized that wood pellets will still play a key role in powering the U.K.’s grid, and he welcomed Drax’s new efforts to bolster its green credentials. That includes a massive investment in carbon capture and storage technology. For years, Drax has been planning a pipeline that would divert about 8.8 million tons of the station’s CO2 emissions into storage under the North Sea. Reduced subsidies, though, are likely to slow these projects, the company has warned.
Many Yorkshire residents knew exactly — and proudly — where the Drax station’s coal came from. They’re much less sure about where the wood is sourced. Watts, the gardener in Barlow, assumed the trees were grown on English farms. Shaw-Wright was also far off the mark, thinking the pellets came from Australia. At The Huntsman, guesses were slightly closer, with people calling out South America and Eastern Europe — regions that together supply only 10 percent of the station’s fuel. The fact that the U.S. meets nearly 80 percent of the station’s demand was a surprise to many.
Environmental groups, meanwhile, have been campaigning for a broader understanding of the industry’s impacts. U.K.-based Reclaim the Power and Biofuel Watch have been highlighting the concerns about emissions as well as the pollution affecting mill towns in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Several groups had planned to stage a large protest outside the Drax station in August 2024. Drawing hundreds of activists from around the country, the “Drax Climate Camp” was to feature five days of “communal living and direct action.” But police preemptively arrested 25 protesters and halted a convoy of vehicles carrying tents, composting toilets, wheelchair-accessible matting, and other gear. Activists staged a much smaller protest outside the police station where their fellow campaigners were held, but the groups decided the camp couldn’t continue without the equipment.
Climate protesters hold signs outside a police station in York, England, in August 2024. Several of their fellow activists were arrested during preparations for a protest near the Drax power station in rural Yorkshire. Gary Calton / The Guardian
Police patrol outside the Drax power station in Yorkshire. Dozens of officers were called to the station in 2024 to prevent a planned protest encampment. Gary Calton / The Guardian
The aborted protest got Shaw-Wright thinking more about the connection between the pellet mills in the Deep South and the electricity that lights his home.
“Louisiana, that’s where they make the ‘gumba’ and they love cooking crocodiles, right?” Shaw-Wright said, half joking. “I think people will be surprised where the wood comes from and … know nothing of how it’s produced or what it entails. We need to be educated more about the communities that, in essence, benefit the Drax power station. And we all benefit from it. But if it’s at the expense of others, it gives you a different perspective.”
Rust, the pub owner, wasn’t so reflective, but he was deeply disappointed the camp was quashed. “I thought we were going to get loads more customers,” he said. “I bought loads more bottles when I heard about it. I thought finally Drax was going to do some good for me.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The UK quit coal. But is burning Louisiana’s trees any better? on Feb 6, 2026.
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/24911
The Western rattlesnake is the only venomous snake species found only in BC’s dry interior regions such as the Okanagan.
Photo submitted by Lindsay WhiteheadThis article was originally printed in Canada’s National Observer and appears here with minor style edits.
For a long time, killing rattlesnakes was just a part of life in the South Okanagan.
Jenna Bower, a member of the Osoyoos Indian Band (OIB), said that her great-grandfather, now 93 years old, remembers that one of his first jobs was being paid to kill rattlesnakes when the area was first being cleared to make way for vineyards.
As new orchards and farms took over native grasslands, the rattlesnakes had to vacate their habitats.
“Everyone saw them as a big problem,” Bower said.
By 2004, the western rattlesnake was listed as a threatened species.
Since then, a syilx-led research program has been working to change the relationship between snakes and humans. The Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre, run by OIB, has been studying rattlesnakes just north of the “Canada–U.S.” border since 2002.
Thompson Rivers University has been a key partner in the project. When Lindsay Whitehead joined the program as a graduate student, she said she was also afraid of snakes.
“There’s a photo of me holding my first rattlesnake with tears in my eyes, thinking, ‘What am I doing?’” she recalled. “But it’s amazing how being out there, hands-on, changes your perspective.”
The western rattlesnake is currently federally listed as a species of special concern and provincially listed as vulnerable in “B.C.”
In December, the federal government announced it was providing a total of $19.6 million for 82 different Indigenous-led stewardship initiatives nationally, including $109,000 for the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre’s work to study rattlesnakes.
The project is funded through Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Indigenous Partnerships for Species at Risk program.
The new funding will allow continued monitoring and expand research on how wildfire, climate change and habitat loss affect rattlesnakes as well as other rare species like the western yellow-bellied racer.
A major focus for which the funding will be used is understanding the impact of the 2021 wildfire that burned through the South Okanagan. Whitehead, a biologist and now the program’s manager, said the fire burned more than 19,000 hectares — and “burned through a large portion of the 450-hectare study area.”
“That actually burnt all known den locations, as well as all known birthing locations,” she added.
Rattlesnakes rely on specific dens — known as hibernacula — to survive the winter, and usually return to the same one each year. While their population seems stable so far, Whitehead said their behaviour has changed. Researchers have seen a sixfold increase in “den switching,” a rare behaviour where snakes stop returning to their usual winter dens.
The snakes are also moving less directly and covering smaller areas than before, which might show the habitat has changed since the wildfire, she added.
Climate change is adding more stress. Sudden cold snaps in the fall or spring can trap snakes away from their dens or shorten their hunting and mating seasons.
A view of the setting sun from the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre in sw̓iw̓s (Osoyoos) in syilx homelands. Photo by Aaron Hemens
Bower, the cultural centre’s executive director, said long-term federal funding has been key to keeping the program running. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to even have biologists here and be able to do the research that we do,” she said.
The new funding is also being used to expand the research to include other species, including the western yellow-bellied racer. While research on rattlesnakes has been conducted for many years, little is known about the other snakes that live at the northern edge of their range in “Canada.”
Whitehead said such research is key to the future of conservation in one of the county’s most biologically diverse regions.
As part of the new funding, local Youth will be hired as interpreters and field assistants to help with monitoring and outreach.
“We’re always on the lookout for band Youth passionate about biology,” Whitehead said.
Bower said involving Youth helps pass on knowledge and supports their long-term stewardship. In syilx culture, rattlesnakes (xaʔxʔulaʔxʷ) are sacred — Elders share their stories to teach lessons about respect, responsibility and living in harmony with the land and each other.
The snake program began as a response to safety concerns about bringing visitors onto the land.
“If we’re going to be taking people through the centre, walking through the trails, how are we going to do that with a rattlesnake problem,” Bower said.
With the help of public education, guided walks and live presentations, staff have taught visitors how to identify local snake species, move safely through snake habitat and respond appropriately if bitten by a snake.
They also correct myths about treatments that stem from old Western movies.
“Snake kits — they don’t work. They’re more of a novelty item,” Bower said.
The post With habitat affected by wildfires, syilx-led program monitors rattlesnakes appeared first on Indiginews.
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Here we have a brutal feedback loop with small predators and herbivores. Suburbanites poison their lawns, that poisons the fox prey, and the foxes become so weakened that I've never seen an adult this size with all of its fur. A lack of predation explodes the herbivore population, so many of our surviving rabbits are plagued by disease and our roads are full of squirrel corpses.
It's nice to see the alternative in greenspace like this. A couple minutes down the path a blue heron was fishing. Above the fox there are healthy bats/woodpeckers/hawks/owls in the biodiverse native forest, all of it municipally owned and free to access. The bike path is well-maintained and meets any need within 15 minutes. It links a few dozen parks where the developmental focus is more of this.
Communism begins with the garden city. I will kill and eat hair to achieve the garden city.
Figured this post would fit best here. I've been so happy that it is finally winter proper here and all the coniferous trees and nature finally gets at least some of the winter they need to survive.
There's been an incredible frost for some days now. Been on my daily hikes in the nearby trail and it's so incredibly silent there, everything but some birds hunkering down against the cold. Walking there alone always makes me think of how easy it is to think of nature as sacred.
Tension just melts from my shoulders when I walk into a forest, it feels like an embrace.
Sun kissed tree tops
Frost covered spruce trees on a hillside
A view from a raised peat bog towards a frozen lake close to sunset
Sunset from a trail on a hill
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/23554
It’s a commonly repeated statistic that the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter, but what exactly does that mean?
The quest to find a real answer to that question led journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin and her husband and co-director Mike Prysner on a five-year journey from defense contractor conferences and international climate gatherings to the Rim of the Pacific military training exercises and the fight against the construction of a military base in Okinawa that would fill in its iconic Oura Bay.
The result is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, released this year independently through Martin and Prysner’s own Empire Files, with editing by Taylor Gill and an original score by Anahedron. The film uses personal narrative, research, investigative reporting, interviews, and live footage to detail all the ways in which the Pentagon poisons the planet, including greenhouse gas emissions, the ecocide of war, and the toxins left behind long after the fighting has stopped.
"When you combine all of this, it is completely undeniable that this force that is upheld by extreme violence is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth,” Martin told Common Dreams.
World’s Largest Polluter?
Toward the beginning of the film, Martin sets out to explain how the Pentagon can count as the world’s largest institutional polluter, and why the numbers behind that fact actually undersell its impact.
It turns out, Martin told Common Dreams, that this statement is only based on the amount of oil the US military purchases on paper, which comes to 270,000 barrels per day. This puts its emissions at 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than 150 countries.
This itself is a staggering amount of carbon pollution.
As Martin explains in the film: “It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers.”
"You have to look at the military as actually the institution that's actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”
But it’s also only the tip of the melting iceberg. Through an interview with scientist Stuart Parkinson, Martin reveals how that 55 million keeps ballooning when considering life cycle emissions from military equipment and from the equipment purchased by NATO allies, projected to reach 295 million metric tons by 2028, or more than half of all countries. And that figure excludes the use of military equipment in war, or the emissions from reconstructing cities leveled by US-made bombs.
In one particularly candid interview, a major general tells Martin that it’s great to develop alternative energy sources, “but let’s not walk away from what fuels today’s national security, which is oil. You have to have it.”
And until something is developed that can completely replace oil, “I think you need to keep the alternatives in check," he says.
Statements like these give the lie to the idea that the US can have a “green military empire,” Martin said.
They also show how difficult it is to separate the US military’s carbon footprint from that of the fossil fuel industry itself.
“Everything has really been wrapped up into securing the fossil fuel, building the infrastructure for fossil fuel, and maintaining that infrastructure empire in order to maintain a fossil fuel economy,” she told Common Dreams. “So you have to look at the military as actually the institution that's actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”
'Human Detritus'
The film also makes clear that carbon pollution isn’t the only kind of pollution the military generates.
“Once you get into the research, you realize every stone unturned is an entire other documentary because it's not just emissions, it's the totality of pollution that the military is emitting on a daily basis, the dumping of toxic waste, the legacy contamination, that alone is still killing people every day,” Martin said.
The film spends much of its run time digging into the landfill of military waste, from melted down pucks of plastic dumped off Navy boats and unused munitions exploded in the desert to decades of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the 26 million marine mammals the US Navy is permitted to harm or kill over five years of training, and the more than 250,000 bullets left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan for every person killed.
Martin said that almost every fact or anecdote she unearthed surprised her.
"We're fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”
“No matter what you think you know, it's worse. It's actually worse because of how big it is and how every face is a story, every victim is a story,” she said.
One of the most devastating stories comes at the film’s beginning, as viewers spend time with Lavon Johnson, an Iraq War veteran who once starred in a US Army commercial and is now living on Veterans Row, a stretch of tents bearing American flags lined up outside the Veterans Affairs hospital in Brentwood, Los Angeles. “My life is so fucked!” he declares as he lifts his hands from the piano he furiously plays despite the nerve damage caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid while in the Army.
In the next scene, viewers see the camp being demolished by police, juxtaposed with images of war, pollution, and environmental destruction, such as soldiers breaking down doors or dumping trash off of boats, oil pump jacks working, and beachside homes collapsing into a rising tide.
Martin said she was inspired to open the film with Johnson because of a letter that late Iraq War veteran Tomas Young wrote to former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney before he died, referring to himself and other victims of the invasion as “human detritus your war has left behind.”
“That always stuck with me, that line, ‘the human detritus,’” Martin told Common Dreams. “And that is exactly what they do to veterans. That is exactly what they do to veterans… they're churned up and spit out. They're the cannon fodder of the system. And for what?”
Prysner is an Iraq veteran who spoke out against the war, and Martin is very clear that veterans are not the target of the pairs’ critique.
“This isn't about service members,” she said. “This isn't about hating the military. This is about accountability and justice for them. We're fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”
The demolition of Johnson’s camp cut through with clips of war and weather disaster illustrates this point, and could serve as a sort of thesis for the film, showing that the US military ultimately turns everything it touches into detritus, including, if it’s not stopped, the planet itself.
“Everything on Earth is in Lavon’s tent,” Martin said.
A Movie and a Movement
This sense of connection is ultimately why Martin decided to keep Earth’s Greatest Enemy as a two-hour feature documentary rather than pivoting to a documentary series, despite the fact that, the more she dug, the more she realized “it could be 10 documentaries.”
She also ran into roadblocks when seeking Hollywood distribution. While environmentalist distributors would praise the film and compare it to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, they also said frankly, “You’re never going to be able to get anyone to buy this stuff.”
But, Martin said, “I was so committed to making a movie because movies were what radicalized me,” citing inspiration from films like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, War Made Easy, and Michael Moore's filmography.
Ultimately, her stubbornness paid off.
“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire."
“It shows that everything from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to Gaza to the climate, that everything is connected,” she said. “Veterans, soldiers, the Indigenous people on the receiving end of this. If you care about cold water and good air, you can't walk away from this not being impacted. And that was the goal. The goal is to lock people in and explain the totality and to bring you down to the depths of hell.”
She added: “We have to understand those depths, and you can't get that with a 20-minute segment. You just can't. You have to go through the pain of all the victims in this community and come out the other side empowered with the truth and the resolve that we have to change this.”
Change is a large part of Martin’s motivation for making the film, by educating people about the scope of the military’s destructive force and connecting them into a broader coalition.
Martin speaks in the film about coming to political consciousness and beginning her career as a journalist during the Iraq War, meeting Prysner through their shared opposition to war and empire, and developing "profound climate anxiety" following the birth of the pairs' first child. She lamented that the climate and anti-imperialist movements have been largely siloed over the past two decades, though that is beginning to change.
Through local screenings, she said she wanted to “try to build the environmental movement with the anti-war movement together because… even though the consciousness is expanding, it's not happening fast enough. And we are simply out of the luxury of time.”
The sense of urgency has only increased with President Donald Trump’s second term. While the film does not cover this period, it points to many developments that have shaped the past 12 months, including Trump’s claim that he attacked Venezuela for oil, his imperialist push to control Greenland, and his deployment of ICE to terrorize US cities.
Toward the end of the movie, Martin includes a segment on the militarization of US policing and warns that “this is our system’s big plan for the climate crisis.” She also films a panel on “Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic” in which the generals speaking tell US companies they have an “open invitation” to experiment in Alaska.
“We know what they want the Arctic for, and it's to pillage every last drop,” Martin said. “So if environmental organizations are not thinking this together, we have to do it for them. We have to do it for them quickly.”
So far, she has seen encouraging signs, with several Sierra Club chapters stepping up to host screenings and enthusiasm from the mainstream environmental groups, parks departments, and other city officials she has invited to attend.
But education is not her only goal.
“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire,” Martin said.
For Martin, that doesn’t mean not having a military for self-defense, but rather decommissioning the 800 or so bases the US military maintains around the world and transforming the infrastructure into something that could help local communities in a climate-friendly way. It also means accountability for harm caused and redirecting military spending toward basic needs like housing and healthcare, and certainly not giving the Pentagon another $600 billion as Trump desires.
While that may seem like an impossible task given the current political climate, Martin maintains a sense of revolutionary optimism, encouraged by the global mobilization against the genocide in Gaza and the way that people are increasingly seeing the links between the multiple crises and struggles around the globe.
“There's so many of us,” Martin told Common Dreams. “We care about the planet. We have a vested stake in life. And that's our vision.”
“It's like they have a vision of death and destruction for profit,” she continued. “Our vision is life, and we have to fight for it with every fiber of our being. And let this movie assist you however you can do that.”
To attend a screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy**, see the schedule** here. To host a screening of your own, email theempirefiles@gmail.com.
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All the cool weevils are doing it
spoiler
It's actually just a male and female side by side, the males have long necks for sexiness
Some kind of Ichneumon parasitoid species I think, but I haven't ID'd them yet. I try to keep my household IPM limited to biocontrols and the most harmless chemicals. My houseplants are full of soil macrofauna, assassin bugs, parasitoid wasps, non-venomous spiders, and other beneficial insects that control the species I don't want.
These wasps are totally harmless to humans and animals, the size of a small carpenter ant. The "stinger" is an ovipositor that they use to lay eggs in pest insects, and spiders as well which keeps their population in check. I've noticed maybe 30-50 overwintering inside, just sitting around beggin' for an eggin'.
Turn your home into an ecosystem. Fill it with wasps.
