This story was originally published by Stateline.

Midwife Sheila Simms Watson leaned to gently press on the pregnant woman’s belly. Me’Asia Taylor lay on a bed fitted with tie-dyed purple printed sheets in the corner of the RV.

Far from a typical camper, this RV houses a mobile midwifery clinic for prenatal, postpartum and women’s general health care.

“Roll when you’re getting up, and we can help you. You can sit there for a moment, all right, so you’re not lightheaded, not dizzy,” said Watson, whom patients and doulas call “Mama Sheila.”

Calm and slow, led by Watson’s soothing and attentive demeanor, the appointments are unrushed.

Run by the Southern Birth Justice Network, the mobile midwifery clinic brings care to majority-Black and Latino neighborhoods across Miami-Dade County several times a month. The clinic aims to offer a more relaxed setting, where women are comfortable and heard, their cultures are integrated, and they can connect with doulas from diverse backgrounds.

On the half-moon bench inside the RV, Watson, a doula and a midwife in training sit with patients. They take blood pressures and draw blood. They ask the women about their lives: How is their mental health and sleep? Do they have support at home? Do they want to give birth at a hospital or birth center with a midwife?

Taylor said pre-eclampsia, a dangerous pregnancy condition, runs in her family. She wanted to make sure she had space and time to express her concerns about her first pregnancy.

Taylor said she wants a midwife for her delivery. Many women of color have reported feeling marginalized or dismissed in medical settings. “I’ve just seen too many people have bad experiences,” Taylor told Watson.

The United States has markedly higher maternal mortality and infant mortality rates compared with other high-income countries, and women and babies of color fare the worst. Black women’s maternal death rates are three times higher than those of white women, and American Indian and Alaska Native women’s rates are twice that of white women. Researchers point to implicit bias, less regular access to prenatal care and higher rates of poverty.

OB-GYN shortages and labor and delivery units closing continue to make getting care harder. Last year, more than two dozen hospital labor and delivery units across the nation closed, including some in South Florida. And pregnant patients living miles away, or feeling uneasy about going to the doctor, may even forgo care.

Midwives can help fill gaps, maternal health equity advocates say, and mobile clinics can meet patients where they are.

“It really helps to disrupt this idea that patients must navigate these complex systems to receive care — and instead, [mobile midwifery] reimagines care as something that should be responsive to the needs of patients and should be community-centered,” said Tufts University professor and maternal health scholar Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha.

But mobile units are not as common for midwifery as they are for other areas of care, such as dentistry or family medicine, the American College of Nurse-Midwives told Stateline. Other prenatal mobile outreach efforts in the state include an OB-GYN-run mobile unit by the University of Florida that serves areas around north-central Alachua County and an operation called The Midwife Bus in Central Florida.

To increase access to care, maternal health advocates are also pushing states to change regulations that restrict midwifery. The American College of Nurse-Midwives recently filed a lawsuit against Mississippi for requiring nurse-midwives to have agreements with physicians in order to practice. This week, Jamarah Amani, a midwife and the executive director of the Southern Birth Justice Network, joined other plaintiffs in filing a lawsuit against Georgia over its restrictions. But supporters of the rules say they are meant to protect patients and foster communication between clinicians.

Offering culturally centered prenatal care that women are more inclined to use can help address inequities in maternal health, Amani said. The group trains doulas, offers telehealth, provides referrals such as to mental health therapists, and advocates for equitable policies across the South.

Most of the mobile clinic’s clients — about 70 percent — are on Medicaid or uninsured, and the clinic is funded through federal and university grants, as well as donations.

“[Midwifery] presents like a luxury concierge-type of service,” Amani said. “Our goal is to really change that and to bring it back to the community in a very grassroots way.”

Preserving tradition

The Southern Birth Justice Network keeps a small drum on a table at a nearby booth. It represents the heartbeat, and ancestral reverence, Amani said. Drums are a universal language, and the instrument is meant to symbolize culture.

For doulas and many midwives like Amani and Watson, bringing their profession to communities today is the continuation of a significant part of Black American heritage.

Throughout history, Black midwives were venerated in their communities. Many practices were rooted in West African traditions. These midwives were the keepers of Black ancestral records, and delivered many white women’s babies. Enslaved women who were midwives traveled for deliveries. Some routes, long and traversed by foot, were dangerous in the deep rural South. During the Jim Crow era, Black Americans were denied care at hospitals or given inferior care.

“They only had protection if someone would send a carriage for them if they were going to deliver a white woman’s baby. But to care for the Black families, they often had to go in the middle of the night, alone,” Amani said. “We talk about the legacy of Black midwives as health care providers, but also as social pillars, as community leaders, as resistors of oppression.”

In the 20th century, medical institutions began to oppose midwifery, sometimes using racist and sexist campaigns to target the practice. They argued it was unhygienic and lobbied across states to dismantle midwifery. At the same time, while developing the field of obstetrics, doctors conducted gynecological experiments on Black women. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has acknowledged this history and said it’s committed to fighting racism and inequities.

Dr. Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN and president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said that in order to address structural barriers and close gaps, policies have to prioritize access to care, such as allowing midwives to expand their practices. Throughout the South especially, states still restrict midwives from practicing independently, despite widespread maternal health care deserts. She also pointed to research showing midwifery is associated with fewer C-sections, less preterm labor and better patient satisfaction.

“Expanding access to midwifery care, and expanding collaborations between physicians and midwives, only improves outcomes,” Perritt said.

Cultivating trust

On a recent breezy and brisk Saturday morning, the Southern Birth Justice Network’s midwives and doulas were stationed in the parking lot of the Freedom Lab, a local community center that hosts food and clothing distribution and a free urgent care center.

At the booth by the mobile clinic, under the shade of a royal-purple awning, meditation music, low-key and mellow, reverberated from a small speaker. There was a cooler filled with oranges, water and other snacks for the clinic’s pregnant patients.

“I’m going to keep giving you food. You need to eat enough,” one doula told a patient, handing her an orange and a liter of spring water.

Staff had surveys to help assess a new patient’s needs, and Florida-specific pamphlets on pregnant patients’ rights. The group is working on other state-specific guides for Louisiana, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Texas.

The table also held a portrait of the late midwife Ada “Becky” Sprouse, who started the mobile midwife clinic around 2008. She’d drive it to the city of Homestead, an agricultural hub in Miami-Dade County. There, she offered free midwifery care to migrant farmworkers, many of whom couldn’t afford care throughout their pregnancies.

Sprouse passed the clinic on to Amani, who relaunched the mobile unit and broadened the scope of the Southern Birth Justice Network.

Patients told Stateline trust was one of the main reasons they sought out the clinic. One patient said she spent two and a half hours on public transit that day so that she could see the team.

For now, deliveries take place at hospitals or neighboring birth centers, where some of the group’s midwives also work. But the organization recently bought a building to open its own freestanding birth center, aiming for next year, along with a larger RV.

One patient, Isis Daaga, turned to Amani to deliver her other children after her first birth at a hospital. Despite the pressure she felt and her need to push during labor, Daaga recalled, hospital staff prevented her from delivering.

“They literally held my knees together,” Daaga said. “They were like, ‘the doctor’s not here yet,’ and the nurses were scared to deliver the baby.” In many hospitals, protocol is to wait for the doctor in case an emergency occurs.

By the time the doctor came, Daaga had a severe perineal tear, and she delivered the baby in one push. She had been in labor for 15 hours.

“I was in pain, I was upset,” said Daaga, a mental health therapist who is 35 weeks pregnant.

At the mobile clinic and with the midwives, Daaga said she feels supported.

“They make me feel the way I try to make my clients feel, like, it’s a safe space. You’re not judged here. I have a lot going on,” she said. “If I’m MIA or something, most of them will call and text me and [say], ‘Girl, you need to come in.’”

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

TriplePundit]]> Mary Mazzoni https://triplepundit.com/?p=70811 2026-05-06T20:57:10Z 2026-05-06T20:55:35Z

Within hours of the U.S. Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, Southern states showed the world why it was passed in the first place. But the fight isn't over yet.

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The 2026 redistricting wars took a turn for the worse last week when the six conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to restrict a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The decision in Louisiana v. Callais supports Republican efforts to suppress Democratic voters in Louisiana and elsewhere by creating gerrymandered congressional maps. But the fight is not over yet. Voting rights organizations are pushing back in court, concerned citizens have taken to the streets in protest, and the voters will still have the last word on Election Day.

The long history of the gerrymander

States redraw their electoral maps every 10 years when new U.S. Census data becomes available. Called redistricting, the process is meant to account for changes in population, but it also creates the opportunity for those in power to intentionally manipulate the maps to favor one political party over another, known as gerrymandering.

Gerrymanders have been a fixture in U.S. politics for generations. While some states have established non-partisan redistricting commissions, others put state legislators in charge of redrawing the maps — allowing the dominant party to suppress voters in the minority party by dispersing voters in one community among different districts, packing them into selected districts, or both. The practice has intensified in recent years with the aid of modern data collection technology, enabling the dominant party to select its most advantageous voters with laser-like precision.

Ahead of the most recent Census in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that gerrymandering challenges cannot be heard in federal court. “Since then, Americans have seen gerrymandering ramped up to unprecedented levels in many places — and the worst may be yet to come,” Michael Li, senior counsel with the voting rights organization Brennan Center, warned in 2021.

Last week’s decision made a bad situation even worse by motivating states to draw new maps between the 10-year U.S. Census cycle. The ruling effectively eliminates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which limits racial gerrymandering in states with a history of discriminating against Black voters and other voters of color.

Be careful what you wish for in the redistricting war

Though redistricting between Census cycles is historically uncommon, a number of states have moved to change their maps in an unprecedented standoff ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump began openly calling for mid-census redistricting in order to guarantee another Republican majority in the House of Representatives for the remainder of his term. The Republican-led Texas state legislature was the first body to respond, proactively adopting a new map in August that they said could give House Republicans as many as five extra seats.

Republican lawmakers in Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah soon followed suit, and Democratic-led states hastened to counterbalance with new maps of their own. Voters in California responded with a redistricting measure aimed at growing the Democratic majority by five seats. Virginia voters also approved a new map that would eliminate three of four Republican-leaning districts to establish a 10-1 Democratic advantage, although that move has been challenged in court. Lawmakers in New York and New Jersey have also declared their intention to draw new maps to create new Democratic districts.

After a series of court challenges, in April the Supreme Court ruled that Texas can use its new map for the midterms, but that may not turn out as planned. Some political observers anticipate that the new map’s reliance on the support of Latino voters could backfire, with Republican candidates losing some or all five seats.

A November survey of Hispanic voters in Texas by the organization Unidos U.S., for example, shows that many who voted for Republican candidates in 2024 were already beginning to change their minds just one year later, with an “overwhelming” 81 percent majority expressing concern that Congress is “giving up too much authority” to the president and the executive branch. More recent national polling by Florida International University indicates that the Latino vote has largely swung left, with 60 percent saying they’ll vote Democrat in the midterms.

States rush to redraw maps as the Supreme Court opens the floodgates

That was the state of play up until Wednesday, April 29, when the U.S. Supreme Court added a new element of chaos by invalidating the congressional map in Republican-led Louisiana. The ruling effectively means that states with a history of racial discrimination are no longer required to create majority districts for racial minorities (known as “majority-minority districts”) to temper bias that dilutes voting power among communities of color.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry promptly issued an emergency order halting the state’s primary elections, paving the way to draw a new map that is more favorable to Republicans. The ripple effect has also surfaced in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis successfully lobbied the state legislature to fast-track a new map.

Mississippi lawmakers will also hold a special redistricting session later this month. In Alabama, where Gov. Kay Ivey previously resisted calls to convene a special session, lawmakers met earlier this week to consider eliminating one, or both, of the state’s two majority-Black districts. The change would require annulling the results of the primary election, where voting is scheduled to begin on May 19.

Voting rights advocates fight back, from the statehouse to the street

As anticipated, the president leaped at the new opportunity to pressure more Republican states into redistricting. In a post on his personal social media site on Sunday, Trump exhorted his allies to “demand that State Legislatures do what the Supreme Court said must be done,” in order to gain a solid majority of at least 20 seats in the House of Representatives.

That remains to be seen. The new map in Florida, for example, is already facing a legal challenge, with plaintiffs alleging a clear violation of the Fair District amendment to the state constitution.

Voters and voting rights organizations in Louisiana also filed an emergency lawsuit aimed at stopping Secretary of State Nancy Landry (no relation to Gov. Jeff Landry) from implementing the governor’s executive order. One key matter of contention is another Supreme Court ruling in the form of an unsigned order issued on Monday, which enables Louisiana to redistrict prior to the Nov. 4 general election without waiting for the Supreme Court’s customary one-month rehearing period. Appellants argued the order was issued in error because a rehearing was clearly requested, but the Court rejected the argument earlier today and refused a rehearing.

Concerned voters are also taking to the streets in Louisiana and elsewhere. In Tennessee, for example, the state legislature convened a special redistricting session earlier this week, potentially eliminating the only majority-Black district in the state. Republican officials insisted the new map would reflect the “will of Tennessee voter.” Instead, hundreds of people marched on the state Capitol on Tuesday to demonstrate that voters do not approve.

Hundreds of protestors also demonstrated at the State House in Birmingham, Alabama, earlier this week. Democratic office holders have added their voices to the effort, too. In a signal that redistricting has emerged as both a state and national issue in the midterm elections, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker spoke at a separate press conference in Birmingham alongside former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, who is running for the governor’s office this year, and Birmingham’s House Representative, Terri Sewell.

The price of eggs vs. the price of gas: Falling approval ratings give way to election chaos

The extraordinary measures undertaken by Trump and his Republican allies to cement a House majority in the midterms has all the appearance of sheer panic, and there is good reason for that. While Republicans successfully leveraged the cost of a dozen eggs to send Trump back into the White House in 2024, grocery prices have only increased over the past year.

Moreover, the price of gas skyrocketed after Trump decided to launch a war against Iran in February, leading to a record-setting disapproval rating of 62 percent for the administration in the latest ABC News poll.

A new NPR/PBS/Marist survey released this week also indicates that Republicans will lose their House majority. “Six months from when votes will be counted this November, Democrats lead by 10 points on the congressional ballot test,” reads the top line of the survey, which asked voters who they would choose if Election Day was today.

Pollster Nate Silver noted a similar +10 result for Democrats from a recent Emerson College poll and observed smaller but significant upward trends in other polls. The Economist/YouGov survey, for example, moved to +5 at the end of April, up from +3 in March.

For all the good news, ABC advised that “Democrats are leading but not running away with the midterm elections at this point.” That is a point well worth taking, particularly so because the six Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court have demonstrated their determination to swing the elections in favor of Trump and the Republican party.

Within days of the Supreme Court ruling, Democratic office holders, voters and voting rights organizations mobilized to fight Trump’s latest redistricting push, but they will have to continue engaging voters and grow that movement into an unstoppable force in order to prevail in November.

Image credits: Victoria Pickering/Flickr, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum (public domain), House Democrats/Flickr, Adam Fagen/Flickr, Paul Becker/Flickr, Victoria Pickering/Flickr

TriplePundit]]> Taylor Haelterman https://triplepundit.com/?p=70786 2026-05-01T21:34:48Z 2026-05-01T21:27:50Z

Amid water shortages and policy negotiations, cities in the Colorado River Basin turned to demand management to reduce water use. Researchers say they need to think about bigger solutions.

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This article was originally published by The Conversation.

When a drought turns into an urban water crisis, a city’s first step is often to limit lawn watering and launch a campaign to encourage everyone to conserve. It might raise water-use rates or offer incentives for installing low-flow devices.

While demand management techniques like these have had a lot of success in reducing water use, our new research suggests that they may not be effective enough in the face of climate change.

We looked at three cities in the Colorado River Basin — Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver — to understand what each could do to increase demand management amid water shortages and how far those methods could go as temperatures rise and the Colorado River’s flow weakens.

The results suggest the region needs to be thinking about bigger solutions.

Colorado River states’ immediate challenge

The Colorado River provides drinking water to nearly 40 million people and irrigation for over 5.5 million acres of cropland. But it has experienced a significant drop in water availability in recent decades due in part to rising demand for water and a long-running megadrought in the Southwest.

To ensure that water is shared across boundaries, the seven states within the basin agreed to the Colorado River Compact in 1922, setting limits on water withdrawals from the river. Since then, the region has adopted additional rules, agreements and policies, collectively termed the “Law of the River.” But despite this compact, which the states are renegotiating in 2026, the basin’s water supply is shrinking.

Research shows that the region is likely to experience more intense, frequent droughts that last longer due to climate change, putting the water supplies for farms, people and energy systems at risk.

As researchers who study the impact of climate change on water systems, we wanted to see if demand management techniques could help under these intensifying conditions.

Getting people involved can change attitudes

Many demand management policies are reactive and only go into effect when sources run low.

These reactive policies can be successful during the scarcity period, but there is often a rebound effect: Water consumption can actually increase afterward.

We integrated survey data with a computer model of water availability and demonstrated that there can be long-term benefits to the local water supply if communities encourage positive attitudes toward conservation.

The survey focused on how people think about water conservation and climate change, drawing on a large body of research that shows people who care about the environment often take eco-friendly actions. Building off these ideas, we segmented the population into groups that shared similar views on water conservation and found that a large proportion of residents supported water conservation but weren’t actively participating in conservation programs within their communities.

We then used the computer model to explore how changing attitudes, and subsequent conservation behavior, could affect water supplies under climate change.

When participatory demand management works

Our research shows that individual actions, when implemented by a lot of people, can measurably improve water supplies’ reliability.

A great example of the benefits of long-term behavioral changes is Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is in many ways viewed as a city of excess; however, since 2002, the city has reduced its per-capita water use by nearly 60 percent, even as the population grew by more than 50 percent. It reached these savings through efforts to reduce seasonal irrigation, replace water-intensive landscaping and require new developments to be sustainable, along with the treatment and reuse of wastewater. Today, Las Vegas recycles nearly all of the water used indoors and returns it to Lake Mead.

Phoenix, another desert city, also runs successful conservation programs. These programs focus on converting grass lawns to desert-friendly landscaping and encouraging owners to fix leaks and install smart meters and low-flow devices. These programs led to a 20 percent reduction in water use over 20 years, while the population grew by about 40 percent.

Demand management is not always enough

These cities have shown that demand management can work, but there are limits on how much these techniques can do as water supplies dry up.

When we added projections of future climate change to our model, we found that conditions could lead to so little water being available that these demand management methods won’t be able to keep up.

In other words, climate change may create situations where water supplies are still severely limited, even after people reduced their consumption by up to 25 percent.

For example, under a plausible, moderately high emissions scenario, Phoenix’s available surface water supply was forecast to drop below the historical average by 2060. Even when we simulated higher participation in conservation programs, there was no noticeable change in the water availability, suggesting that any savings from reducing demand were counteracted by losses from upstream flow reductions. Encouraging people to use less water is a start, but there is a limit to how much people can conserve.

We found similar results in Denver under a moderate emissions scenario and in Las Vegas under a moderately high emissions scenario, indicating that even moderate climate change could lead to extreme scarcity conditions that are not manageable through demand-side changes alone.

What else cities can do

In these cases, it may be necessary to find other creative water sources, such as water reuse, desalination or limiting consumption in other sectors, such as agriculture or energy, to maintain the municipal supply.

These solutions, however, take time and money to implement. Desalination is incredibly expensive. A recently built desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, cost US$1 billion — four times the initial estimate.

Other solutions, such as reducing agricultural water use, require significant buy-in from local farmers and could result in producing less food.

Reducing the water consumed for electricity generation would require significant investment in renewable energy technologies that have lower water requirements than fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

While large-scale solutions like water reuse systems and desalination can be expensive, these costs might be necessary to maintain adequate water supply in the region, because simply encouraging people to use less won’t be enough.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Feature image credit: Gert Boers/Unsplash

TriplePundit]]> Taylor Haelterman https://triplepundit.com/?p=70758 2026-04-30T22:38:24Z 2026-04-30T22:18:11Z

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's new overhaul of the Forest Service would increase the lumber industry's access to public lands. Outdoor recreation businesses are allying with recreationists and conservationists to push back.

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Last month, without prior approval from Congress or input from the public at large, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a major overhaul of its Forest Service division. Although it’s promoted as “common sense” reform, the move is an effort to transfer control of federal lands to states, thereby creating new opportunities to favor industry priorities for land use — particularly the lumber industry. In response, business leaders in the outdoor recreation sector are allying with recreationists and conservationists to push back.

“Moving the Forest Service closer to the forests we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins said in a statement announcing the reorganization. “Proper forest management means a healthy and productive forest system that provides affordable, quality lumber to build homes right here in America.” 

The words make clear that this reorganization aims to increase access to public lands for the domestic lumber industry.

Not to be confused with the environmental protection mission of the National Parks Service (a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior), the USDA Forest Service is responsible for managing more than 150 national forests and 20 grasslands. It oversees 193 million acres as a multi-use endeavor that already includes a measure of private sector activities. Still, the agency’s current mission statement emphasizes sustainable practices, calling for “a conservation ethic in promoting the health, productivity, diversity, and beauty of forests and associated lands.”

It also emphasizes “developing and providing scientific and technical knowledge aimed at improving our capability to protect, manage, and use forests and rangelands.”

Despite Rollins’s calming words, the reshuffle is more accurately described as a ticking time bomb in terms of the Forest Service’s ability to balance its twin public conservation and private sector productivity missions. The agency’s workforce was already reduced by an estimated 16 percent — almost 5,900 employees — through U.S. President Donald Trump’s budget-cutting efforts last year, resulting in a significant shortfall in the agency’s routine fire mitigation and trail maintenance work.

Conservationists and recreation stakeholders charge that the new reorganization is nothing less than another mass purge. This time, under the guise of relocating thousands of experienced professionals — who don’t necessarily share the priorities of the Trump administration — with the goal of installing new recruits.

Critics say they foresee very few existing staff relocating based on similar relocation efforts in the past. During Trump’s first term in office in 2019, the Department of the Interior relocated the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado. Roughly 90 percent of the D.C. staff refused the offer to move across the country. 

The relocation was reversed just two years later when former U.S. President Joe Biden took office, but the damage was done. “When I led the Bureau of Land Management under President Biden, the hardest part of my job was reassembling the agency after the first Trump administration had scattered its headquarters from our nation’s capital,” recalled Tracy Stone-Manning, who headed BLM during the Biden administration, in a recent opinion piece for the Loveland Reporter-Herald. “The move crippled the agency — as intended.”

If the Forest Service follows a similar path, its staff will be decimated. Rollins expects 260 positions to be relocated from the current Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah, more than 2,000 miles away. 

The choice of Utah for the new headquarters raised additional red flags among critics. Utah is the epicenter of a Republican-led effort to transfer federal lands to state control. With support from the powerful right wing legislative organization American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the land transfer movement potentially exposes federal property to damaging exploitation and misuse. At times, armed local activists have raised the temperature and the profile of the land transfer movement in Utah and elsewhere.

Adding to the land transfer alarm, Rollins announcement plainly stated her intention to begin “transitioning to a state-based organizational model” that eliminates nine existing Forest Service regional offices and replaces them with 15 new positions, many located in Western states.

“State directors will serve as national leaders,” the announcement reads. Each office includes “a small leadership support team responsible for functions such as legislative affairs, communications and intergovernmental coordination.” 

This underscores concerns that new state leaders will follow Trump administration forestry policies, such as rescinding the Roadless Rule to allow road construction and timber harvesting on millions of acres of national forests and grasslands and eliminating public participation requirements for environmental reviews, in lockstep. 

Adding fuel to the land transfer fire is the installation of software billionaire and Idaho land owner Michael Boren as the USDA Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment earlier this year. Described as a “walking conflict of interest” by Idaho Democratic Party Chair Lauren Necochea, the Idaho native is known for building an unauthorized airstrip and cabin on public lands, among a series of clashes with Forest Service staff and other public officials.

Additional concerns were raised over the loss of staff and research programs at local Forest Service offices, which could cripple timber management, fire mitigation, pest control, and other research programs that support conservation and private sector use of public lands. The reorganization plan calls for closing 57 of the 77 local research offices. Thousands of positions at those offices will be cut or relocated to a single office in Fort Collins, Colorado. In testimony before Congress, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz admitted that up to 1,100 research positions will be eliminated.

Seen through that lens, the reorganization is part and parcel with the Trump administration’s far-flung war on science, most recently including the abrupt firing of the entire board of the nation’s premier scientific grant-making organization, the National Science Foundation. 

This time, however, the administration may be in for a fight. House representatives pointed out that Congressional approval is needed to make the proposed changes to the Forest Service program. While Rollins seems determined to forge ahead regardless of Congress or the law, opposition to the move has already formed among lawmakers, with some Republican members among those voicing skepticism.

The pressure from recreation and conservation stakeholders was also swift and furious. The public lands tracking organization More Than Just Parks, for example, weighed in immediately.

“What this actually is, stripped of the Orwellian window dressing, is the largest forced purge of a federal land management agency in American history,” Jim Pattiz More Than Just Parks co-founder, wrote in the statement. “This is a chainsaw in broad daylight.”

In his own statement, Chief of Staff for the Union of Concerned Scientists, Julian Reyes, called the USDA announcement an “irreversibly destructive” gutting of the Forest Service and its resources, including climate and pest control research and firefighting.

The outdoor recreation media also responded swiftly. The fly fishing publication Hatch Magazine published a widely circulated, point-by-point rebuttal of the USDA’s efforts to defend the move in the face of blowback from conservationists and other public lands stakeholders.

Private sector recreation stakeholders rallied, too, following calls from advocates to use their voices. “Trump just ordered the most devastating dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service in 121 years. The outdoor brands that built their entire business on public lands haven’t said a word. It’s time to change that,” SaveUSFS said in a statement on March 31, the day of the USDA announcement. (SaveUSFS is a project of the organization altNPS, which formed in 2017 to advocate for national parks during the first Trump administration.)

The call was answered. More than 70 outdoor businesses signed a letter by The Conservation Alliance calling to protect public engagement and Forest Service lands. Patagonia, Columbia Sportswear Company, REI Co-op, Black Diamond Equipment, Orvis, Cotopaxi and Nalgene are among the group outdoor companies that made their own public statements echoing that message. 

The nine-member coalition of outdoor enthusiast advocacy organizations Outdoor Alliance also weighed in with a statement, noting that the Forest Service has “shifted its focus away from conservation and recreation and toward extraction and development” under the Trump administration. 

Outdoor Alliance spent the last 10 years working to permanently protect 40 million acres of public land, converting outdoor enthusiasts into outdoor advocates along the way.  Efforts like these are needed now more than ever, lest their work, along with a century’s worth of efforts to conserve federal lands, all goes to waste. 

Feature image credit: Forest Service Photography/Wikimedia Commons

TriplePundit]]> Taylor Haelterman https://triplepundit.com/?p=70742 2026-04-28T01:51:16Z 2026-04-28T13:00:00Z

The global compliance carbon market is opening a big financial opportunity, and Paraguay is prepared to make the most of it. 

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Paraguay wants to make big money from the global carbon market. 

The South American country’s first ever carbon forum gathered government officials, project developers, financiers, and international experts over two days at the end of March. The message was clear: A big financial opportunity is developing, and Paraguay plans to make the most of it. 

Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, addressed the congregation at the beginning of the event, stating that the government’s aims include “mobilizing investment, strengthening competitiveness, and transforming our natural capital into concrete development opportunities for all of Paraguay.”

The country moved quickly to develop a legal framework for carbon credit projects aligned with Article 6 of the landmark climate treaty the Paris Agreement, which lays out standard operations countries can use to buy carbon credits from other countries to meet their emissions reduction obligations, opening the door to a potential source of climate adaptation funding for developing nations. Paraguay’s framework will allow the sale of carbon credits on a strictly regulated market to countries that need help reaching their emissions reduction obligations.

“Let’s be clear. This isn’t just idealism,” said Rolando De Barros Barreto Acha, Paraguay’s environment and sustainable development minister. “We are talking about a business opportunity that will benefit all sectors of our society.”

The state of the market

The voluntary carbon market faces a lot of criticism. Some carbon credit projects have fallen short on integrity and key considerations like permanence and additionality. Projects that reduce carbon emissions on the voluntary market, like reforestation or conservation efforts, calculate and independently verify emissions reductions before selling them as credits at roughly US$5 to $10 per tonne of avoided emissions, or emissions that would be released if the the project did not exist.

On the other hand, compliance carbon markets, like cap-and-invest or cap-and-trade programs, legally require countries or private entities to offset emissions they are unable to reduce. Given the added scrutiny — and therefore higher integrity — of carbon credits sold through compliance markets, these credits can demand much higher prices, up to around US$40 per tonne of avoided emissions.

Paraguay is developing its carbon credit network for these compliance markets.

“It’s not about which country can sell the most credits, it’s about who can sell better credits at higher prices,” said Victor Gonzalez, director of carbon markets at Paraguay’s Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development.

Paraguay’s plan

Paraguay is confident it has the tools to become a regional hub for carbon credit projects. One of the country’s glowing advantages is that its electricity supply is 100 percent renewable. Its electricity is primarily produced by hydroelectric dams, mainly the Itaipu Dam shared with Brazil on the eastern border. 

Clean energy opens the door for Paraguay to generate carbon credits from sectors beyond forestry and land use. Electrifying industrial processes and transportation can cut emissions, and other innovations like green hydrogen could further drive the country’s sustainable development ambitions, all of which are opportunities that the country is exploring.

Other carbon markets in Latin America are already much more advanced than Paraguay’s — namely Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, which together account for over 70 percent of the region’s voluntary carbon market. But Paraguay and international experts see that as an advantage, rather than a setback.

Director of Carbon Markets Gonzalez spoke about the benefits of starting from a clean slate and the freedom it provides when developing legal frameworks. In comparison, countries like Brazil or Mexico have different subnational carbon regulations, which can make building a national framework very complicated.

“Having a clean slate is an advantage for Paraguay,” Michael Berends, CEO of the global carbon market advisory firm ClearBlue Markets, told TriplePundit. “But it’s important to move fast now to be part of the few countries that have signed deals with buying nations under Article 6.”

Paraguay signed an agreement with Singapore to collaborate on carbon credit projects under Article 6 in May 2025 and has Article 6 memorandums of understanding signed with the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. New Zealand, Norway and Sweden are also exploring carbon credit agreements with Paraguay under Article 6.

One of the elements that allows Paraguay to move quickly is that much of the land in the country is privately owned, making it easier for project developers to make deals involving land use. Though, conflicts over inequality in land distribution are prevalent in Paraguay. 

“We are seeing that this benefits international investment and capital, but there is no public policy that favors, for example, Indigenous peoples or small and medium-sized producers who could benefit from the opportunities offered by carbon projects,” said Victor Vera, board member of Paraguayan conservation and sustainable development organization  OPADES.

Though Paraguayan NGOs have concerns about who will benefit from this emerging carbon market, members of the government and the private sector both spoke about including local communities in project development and providing all Paraguayans with the tools to access carbon markets.

“Let’s be honest — this is a market that is 100 percent reputational. It’s not about being sanctioned or punished, this is about reputation,” said Gonzalez of Paraguay’s Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development.

Featured image credit: 總統府/Wikimedia Commons

TriplePundit]]> Taylor Haelterman https://triplepundit.com/?p=70735 2026-04-24T20:04:28Z 2026-04-24T19:53:46Z

A growing body of evidence shows that cemeteries host much more life — including insects, birds, mammals and rare plants — than death.

TriplePundit]]>

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

A miner haunts the East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. It’s not the spirit of an interred workman, but Andrena regularis, also known as the regular miner bee. It’s black and tan and fuzzy, sometimes sporting patches of yellow as it collects pollen. The critter is at once peculiar to humans and highly regular in the natural world: We might expect it to form huge colonies like honey bees, but in fact it’s among the 90 percent of bee species that are solitary. Instead of building bustling nests in trees, it digs tunnels into the ground, hence the moniker. 

Scientists at nearby Cornell University have discovered that this seemingly sterilized habitat — lots of tombstones and cropped lawn — doesn’t just support this wonderful insect. It hosts one of the biggest and oldest known communities of ground-nesting bees anywhere in the world. 

Great for the miner bee, to be sure. But the findings also add to a growing body of evidence that cemeteries, of all places, provide essential habitats for all kinds of wildlife, from insects to mammals. Bees are already under significant threat due to habitat loss and insecticide use, so thoughtfully managing these final resting places can protect the pollinators we need to fertilize crops amid rising temperatures and increasingly chaotic weather. “It’s exciting to see that things like this are being discovered, where you find biodiversity in unexpected places,” said Christopher Grinter, collection manager of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It’s kind of this key, or this ‘aha,’ moment, where it’s like: ‘Wait, not only is this happening without us noticing, we should now encourage and foster this biodiversity.’”

It’s not your fault, but you might have the wrong idea about bees. We’re taught that bees live in colonies with a queen and lots of workers that produce honey. These are such essential flower-visiting pollinators that farmers rent hives to work their crops.

As honey bees swarm farms, though, their less visible colleagues are also hard at work. The vast majority of them are solitary, making their homes underground or in natural cavities like trees. The regular miner bee, for instance, digs cavities under the East Lawn Cemetery, where it lays eggs that hatch into larvae and emerge as adults the following spring. Those adults go on to become critical pollinators for local plants, including New York’s apple trees, a highly valuable crop. 

Weirdly enough, a cemetery might tick many of the boxes for a ground-dwelling buzzer in the market for a home. If this is a good spot for humans to bury their dead, it’s also a good spot for the regular miner bee: “places that don’t flood, and places that are easy to dig and don’t collapse when you dig them,” said Jordan Kueneman, a community ecologist at Cornell University and co-author of a new paper describing the findings. “So we think the bees in this area are drawn towards some of those same characteristics.”

But if a lawn mower grazed your house, wouldn’t you think about moving? Well, this might not be too big of a deal for the regular miner bee. In fact, by cutting the grass close, groundskeepers could be doing the insects a favor. “They do like to often have the ground exposed,” Kueneman said. “That helps the ground warm up quicker, allows them to become more active more quickly in the day. It allows them to get in and out of their nests easily.”

The researchers discovered that this population of miner bees is absolutely booming. By collecting individuals and scaling that count up across the grounds, they estimate that the East Lawn Cemetery hosts between 3 million and 8 million bees, including species other than the miner. “It was an extraordinary size, and a lot of that has to do with extraordinary density,” Kueneman said. “In some locations, we were measuring thousands of individuals emerging in a square meter.” (Still, Kueneman added, gardening crews could help the bees out even more by mowing earlier in the morning, before the insects emerge for the day.)

The researchers could also determine that this is a healthy population because of how many females were flying around. Male regular miner bees are smaller than they are, so when a mother lays eggs, she has to put fewer resources into making male offspring. If a population has a healthy proportion of females, then, it suggests that it’s thriving, and indeed that’s what the scientists found in the cemetery.

Enter the miner bee’s mortal enemy, Nomada imbricata, a variety of cuckoo bee. Just as cuckoo birds lay their eggs in other species’ nests, this opportunist invades the miner bee’s burrows and lays its eggs. This saves it the trouble of digging its own home, and its offspring hatch with plenty of food. “The parasitic bee develops and often has these large mandibles that they use to devour everything in their path, including the host bee,” Kueneman said. “They’ll sometimes decapitate them.” Not great for the miner bee, obviously, but the cuckoo’s presence at the cemetery provides more evidence that it has a healthy population to parasitize.

The bees are not alone in their success in this unlikely habitat. Other scientists are finding that many species across the tree of life — bats, migrating geese, owls, coyotes, rare types of plants — are using cemeteries as refuges in an increasingly urbanized world. “It has a lot of the things you want,” said Seth Magle, senior director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “It’s got trees, it’s got grass, it’s potentially got prey species for you, and resources. And then it largely lacks a couple of things you don’t like about parks, which are probably people and dogs.” Also absent from cemeteries are speeding cars, which in the United States hit hundreds of millions of birds and large animals, not to mention untold numbers of insects, each year.

While cemeteries already shelter hoards of regular miner bees and other species, groundskeepers can do even more to support wildlife. Reducing the use of rodenticides protects birds of prey, which die when they consume poisoned rats and mice. Adding native plants provides food and shelter for native pollinators, which go on to help humans adapt to a changing climate. These species fertilize greenery across a city, for instance, significantly reducing urban temperatures, and help farmers to propagate their crops. “In order to have flowers, in order to have a beautiful ecosystem, or any biodiversity, we have to have pollinators that are fueling the reproduction of those plants,” Grinter said.

While cities have been historically cast as destroyers of biodiversity, conservationists now take a more nuanced view, Magle said. Yes, clearing forests to build metropolises is terrible for nature. But there are also ways to foster the natural world deep within cities. As places for the dead, ironically enough, cemeteries can teem with the living. “What would it look like to create a world where we continue to urbanize,” Magle said, “but we do it in a way that leaves the space for some of these species?”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

Feature image credit: Madeleine Maguire/Unsplash

TriplePundit]]> Tina Casey https://triplepundit.com/?p=70711 2026-04-23T18:11:56Z 2026-04-22T22:04:15Z

Adding fuel to the fire is rising public awareness — and anger — over the wealth gap and the concentration of money and control in the tech sector. Ordinary households are grappling with high electricity rates and potential job loss while big tech companies make billions from AI growth.

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The race to build new data centers to fuel the boom in artificial intelligence is on. Even as tech giants and developers wield considerable political and financial firepower to get new data centers built as quickly as possible, U.S. communities aren’t so sure they want these massive facilities near them. Local organizers across the country are winning some significant victories despite the uneven matchup.

More data more problems, communities say

The first server rooms appeared in the 1940s at the dawn of the computer era, but we’ve come a long way since then. More than 4,000 data centers are now in operation or under active development in the United States. While some are relatively small facilities dedicated to particular businesses, artificial intelligence (AI) computing requires massive “hyperscale” data centers, and an equivalent amount of energy.

The energy consumption of U.S. data centers has more than doubled since OpenAI launched ChatCPT and is expected to more than triple from 2021 to 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. U.S. data centers used roughly 134 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2022, more than three times the annual usage of New York City. This figure is expected to reach a stunning 426 TWh by 2030.

As more data centers are built to meet the growing demand for computing power, people across the United States are raising the alarm about what this actually means in their communities.

Because the large new loads are often subsidized by local ratepayers, data centers are a driving cause of rising electricity rates. A recent analysis by Bloomberg found that wholesale electricity costs increased by up to 267 percent over the past five years in areas with data centers. Using on-site gas generators can lighten the impact on grid-connected ratepayers, but at the cost of local air quality.

Additionally, the heat projected from data centers has been identified as a significant contributor to the “heat island” effect in surrounding communities. A difference of just one or two degrees Fahrenheit can lead to increased air conditioning costs for nearby ratepayers.

Communities and advocacy organizations have also raised alarms over the use of increasingly stressed water resources for data center cooling. Beyond using an average 300,000 gallons of water a day, cooling systems contribute to data center noise, a matter of growing concern for locals. In addition to audible noise in the form of “a constant hum,” “a high-pitched whine” or even “a relentless roar,” professionals in the field have noted concerns over infrasound. Though inaudible to the human ear, exposure to high-intensity infrasound has been linked to measurable impacts on human health, including heart health.

While most of today’s data centers are located near cities, developers are increasingly eyeing rural areas, bringing the disquiet about the community-level impacts of the AI boom into new territory. Pew calculates that 67 percent of the 1,500 new data centers in the U.S. pipeline will be located in rural areas, where they’ll be competing against farmland for electricity and water as well as the land itself.

Organize, organize, organize: Communities push back on new data center construction, from city council meetings to the ballot box

With no specific federal regulations governing data centers and state regulations moving ahead slowly, local organizers are taking the lead in making people aware of proposed projects and encouraging them to ask questions and make their voices heard.

The city of Monterey Park, California, for example, held public meetings on a proposed data center earlier this year. The hearings were small and outreach was limited to adjacent residents. A positive determination was in sight until one attendee asked the local organization San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action to investigate.

The organization, which formed in 2020 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, mounted a multi-lingual awareness-raising effort about the data center and its potential impact on electricity rates and public health. The campaign included door-to-door contacts, fliers, phone calls and a petition. Organizers also purchased the domain “No Data Center MPK” to help boost turnout for public meetings and support letter-writing campaigns.

Hundreds of residents packed the next three city council meetings. They won a 45-day temporary ban on new data centers, and then a ballot measure for a permanent ban. The developer withdrew its application after the third meeting in March.

Communities are also wielding the power of the vote. In Festus City, Missouri, for example, all four incoming council members successfully campaigned on a platform opposing a new data center. They replaced four incumbents who voted to support the venture.

Lawmakers elsewhere are listening. In March, the economic development watchdog organization Good Jobs First counted at least 12 states and local legislatures considering temporary data center bans in this year’s legislative session. The mix of jurisdictions illustrates how the pressure on lawmakers is cutting across party lines, with Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Colorado recently joining the list alongside Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Other elected officials are considering taking executive action, and measures are under consideration in multiple cities and counties. “It’s a signal that the political system is starting to acknowledge the obvious: hyperscale data centers are huge, fast-moving, and highly subsidized, and states often lack basic economic and environmental guardrails to protect residents and ratepayers,” Good Jobs First summarized.

Public pushback isn’t the only thing slowing down data center development, as it turns out big tech is as susceptible to basic logistics as the rest of us. More than half of all data center projects in the U.S. pipeline have been delayed simply due to a shortage of electrical equipment, with some reporting up to five years’ wait time, according to an April analysis by Bloomberg.

Building the legal case against the most polluting data centers

Some organizations are also deploying environmental law to rein in bad actors. In Mississippi, for example, last week the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) announced a lawsuit against the Elon Musk AI venture xAI and its subsidiary, MZX Tech, charging “unlawful operation of dozens of unpermitted methane gas turbines” at the firm’s Colossus 2 data center in Southhaven.

“The company’s failure to get a permit for its power plant — which is located near homes, schools and churches — creates added health risks for families in North Mississippi and Memphis and is a clear violation of the Clean Air Act,” NAACP’s filing reads. The site already hosts 27 turbines, and an additional 41 turbines are planned for another facility at that location.

The Clean Air Act may be ineffective while U.S. President Donald Trump is in office, but another case in Oregon indicates AI firms are not immune to pollution lawsuits. In a first-of-its-kind filing submitted in March, Amazon agreed to pay $20.4 million in damages to remediate nitrate pollution linked to its Morrow County data center. Amazon denies wrongdoing, but if the settlement is approved, the company will cover the cost of new private wells and improvements to the public water system.

A rising tide of uneasiness and a tsunami of cash

The sudden intrusion of AI into everyday life is another factor contributing to the rising opposition against data centers. Polling indicates a general uneasiness about AI, including concerns over the replacement of human workers. In a 2025 survey from the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University, only 18 percent of respondents said they are “more excited than concerned about AI in daily life.”

Recent polls are more of the same. “A March NBC News survey found 57 percent of registered voters believe the risks of AI outweigh the benefits, and a Quinnipiac University poll reported that 55 percent expect AI would do more harm than good in their daily lives,” CNBC reported last week.

Adding fuel to the fire is rising public awareness — and anger — over the wealth gap and the concentration of money and control in the tech sector. Ordinary households are grappling with high electricity rates and potential job loss while big tech companies make billions from AI growth.

In response to public resistance, legacy tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google owner Alphabet, along with newcomers like Anthropic and OpenAI, have ramped up their lobbying efforts to remove regulatory obstacles from their path to AI dominance.

In one particularly concerning development, OpenAI lobbied on behalf of Illinois legislation that would limit the liability of AI labs for causing “serious societal harms,” including mass deaths and financial crises. In another, Elon Musk venture xAI sued the state of Colorado to block new legislation aimed at protecting consumers from discriminatory behavior by AI systems used in fields like education, employment and housing.

The reputational baggage carried by tech billionaires like Musk and Peter Thiel, co-founder of the data mining firm Palantir, do little to help the sector’s public popularity. Though Thiel is less in the public eye, both men are known as champions of far-right extremism, and both supported President Trump’s first and second campaigns for office, financially and otherwise. Both are also contributing to state-level campaigns in support of Republican candidates for the 2026 midterm elections, providing the public with additional insights into their tech-centered ideology.

Are we headed for a big tech reckoning?

“The AI boom is fueling a literal and metaphorical power grab by tech billionaires — and forcing a reckoning,” the progressive news organization Mother Jones summarized earlier this month.

The first rumbles of that reckoning have already come for data center proposals in some jurisdictions, where voters and organizers have been quick to make their voices heard. Now that AI and data centers are front and center in the midterm election cycle, voters will have another, more powerful opportunity to take the case for community control of proposed projects into their local legislatures and the halls of Congress.

Image credits: İsmail Enes Ayhan/Unsplash, Yngve Hellström/Wikimedia Commons, Robert Scoble/Wikimedia Commons, Chad Davis/Flickr, BeyondDC/Flickr

TriplePundit]]> Abdullahi Jimoh https://triplepundit.com/?p=70640 2026-04-20T20:02:07Z 2026-04-20T13:00:00Z

The Green Panthers visit schools across Nigeria to reveal the far-reaching impacts of human destruction. They hope to inspire the country's youth to do things differently.

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On a January afternoon at Yerwa Government Girls’ School in Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s Borno State, 26-year-old climate educator Aliyu Ibrahim steps into a room of high-school students.

The topic he came to speak about — how climate change and conflict are reshaping Nigerian life — is one Ibrahim knows personally. He grew up in Izge, a village in Borno State near the epicenter of northeast Nigeria’s bloody recent history of armed insurgency. The village was attacked by Boko Haram in 2014, leading to 105 deaths, but the immediate and tragic loss of life isn’t the only way conflict changed Ibrahim’s community. He also saw what the violence did to the environment and the ways local people have lived for generations.

“As a teenager, what stayed with me wasn’t just the sound of firearms, but the silence that followed: abandoned farmlands, dwindling means of livelihoods, drying Lake Chad for fishermen, mounting poverty, and consequently, young people left with shattered hope,” Ibrahim says.

Those experiences inspired Ibrahim and his friends to start the Green Panthers club in 2019. Hoping to reveal the far-reaching impacts of human destruction, the club mobilized volunteers across the region to teach young people about their environment and inform them on how human activities drive climate change and violence damages the resources upon which communities depend.

They teach in English and local languages, mostly Hausa and Kanuri, using visual aids like images and videos of dry farmland, flooded neighborhoods and receding rivers to make the evidence plainly clear. Research has shown that visual aids help strengthen memory retention by anchoring information to concrete, memorable images.

The Green Panthers use free periods in the region’s schools for trainings once a month. When conflict makes it too dangerous for volunteers to travel, they meet by Zoom. “I believe young people are the future,” Ibrahim says. “We need to start with them.”

Reaching young people on the front lines

Students in Borno State sit at the intersection of climate change and conflict. As insurgents carry out their violent campaigns, they damage and pollute natural resources and force farmers from their land — leaving behind hunger and livelihood crises in local communities already feeling the effects of the changing climate.

“The state is one of the major geopolitical zones in northern Nigeria, facing intense [impacts from] global warming like drought and abnormal heat, which is causing death, damaging farmland and displacing people,” says Mayokun Iyaomolere from the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Study at Obafemi Awolowo University.

Historically, Borno State produced more than 420,000 tons of wheat from its fertile farmland each year, enough to cover almost a third of the nation’s annual consumption. Today, more than 70 percent of the state’s roughly 6 million residents still depend on local agriculture, either directly or indirectly, according to a 2025 study led by Nigerian researchers and published in the International Journal of Agricultural Economics.

But the farming and fishing communities in the region are greatly affected by drought, flooding and other impacts tied to climate change, worsened by insurgency that claimed over 38,000 lives between 2011 and 2023 and displaced millions. Production of staple crops like wheat and millet fell by 80 percent in the years following the emergence of Boko Haram in 2009 and has yet to fully recover. Meanwhile, desertification driven by climate change means the Sahara desert is creeping into northeast Nigeria at a rate of nearly a half a mile every year, reshaping farming communities in Borno and Yobe States and making it harder for people to grow enough food and earn a living.

Against this backdrop, educating young people about what is happening in the region, what’s causing it, and what they can do about it is both a means of survival and an act of resistance.

Ibrahim acknowledges the Green Panthers can’t solve the climate crises in the region on their own. But he believes that imparting climate literacy in classrooms is a starting point to radicalize the situation in the future, arming young people with valuable information so they can take action in their communities and hold those in power accountable.

“Hopefully our initiative will produce more young climate advocates,” he says optimistically.

Students put climate literacy into practice in Nigeria’s Borno State

At the Yerwa Girls’ school, Mabel Natal Ahmad learned about climate change and how to take action through upcycling and tree-planting.

The 17-year-old now makes bowls and spoons from papier-mâché using paper scraps, a technique she learned from the lessons. “We were demonstrated how we can upcycle our discarded papers and sweet candy nylons,” Ahmad says. At home, she shared the lessons learned with her parents and siblings, and now her parents use their discarded beverage cans in their flower nursery.

The lessons helped another student, Fatima Muhammed, 15, conquer her fear of public speaking and feel more confident talking to friends and family about climate change and other issues she cares about. “I would like to be a climate advocate like Aliyu after my education,” she says with a smile.

Beyond Borno, the Green Panthers club has engaged over 200 communities in Adamawa and Yobe states. Together, they’ve planted over 4,000 trees and trained more than 500 teenagers as environmental advocates. Co-founder Ibrahim wants to do even more, but funding limitations and ongoing conflict in the region make it difficult.

“I wish I could reach the neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger, but insecurity is restricting this intention, and often short-term funding makes it hard to sustain afforestation beyond one-off activities,” he says. “Land ownership and usage disputes also complicate where and how trees can be planted and protected.”

Most of the club’s activities are supported by government agencies like Borno State’s Ministry of Environment along with individual donors, says Bashir Muhammed, a Green Panthers volunteer.

Even if limited, students educating their friends and relatives shows the compounding impact of the club, and Ibrahim plans to keep expanding as fast as he can. “We’re currently developing information education communication materials that can communicate climate vocabulary into local languages,” he says.

TriplePundit]]> Katie Surma, Inside Climate News https://triplepundit.com/?p=70652 2026-04-23T06:27:34Z 2026-04-16T17:55:04Z

In the copper-rich mountains of southeastern Ecuador, Shuar people are combining ancestral knowledge and modern science to protect their forest from a Canadian mining giant.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

By the time Olger Kitiar reached the ridge, his shirt was wet with sweat, clinging to his back. Built with the solid frame of a linebacker, he moved through the rainforest with a quick, even rhythm that defied the steep, slick climb. 

Then he froze.

“Stop,” he hissed in Spanish, his hand snapping up.

Jhostin Antún, a few steps behind, halted mid-stride. To an outsider, the trail ahead looked like any other patch of churned Amazonian mud — slick, brown and dense enough to swallow a boot. But Olger’s eyes, trained by a lifetime in the Shuar territory of Maikiuants, saw it instantly. He squatted down, pointing to a deep, four-toed indentation. The track was fresh. And massive.

“Jaguar,” he whispered, a grin spreading across his face.

The print belonged to a cat bigger than the female they’d recorded on a camera trap in October, one month earlier. The men photographed the imprint carefully, not as a memento, but for legal evidence. 

Maikiuants, perched high in Ecuador’s southeastern Amazon highlands near the Peruvian border, sits atop copper-rich ground now claimed by Solaris Resources, a Canadian mining company seeking to gash an open-pit mine into these mountains. If extraction moves forward, the forest Jhostin and Olger were walking through — home to endangered species, waterfalls, medicinal plants, generations of Indigenous knowledge and undiscovered beings — could be permanently altered. 

The jaguar’s presence here holds weight as a matter of law. In Ecuador, endangered species — and nature more broadly — have legal rights. The government must clear a far higher bar than under conventional laws before approving projects like large-scale mining. 

Jhostin and Olger are paraecologists, people who document life in their homelands using generations of ecological expertise and scientific methods. They work with Ecoforensic, a nonprofit that trains paraecologists — paramedics for ecosystems — to document how ecosystems function and how they are harmed. Ecoforensic works in places in Ecuador like Maikiuants: biodiverse regions where scientific data is thin or nonexistent.

The data paraecologists collect, such as species inventories and water samples, is then translated into evidence that carries weight in courts. Increasingly, it’s winning cases.

In 2023, in Ecuador’s Intag Valley, community paraecologists helped halt a proposed mega copper mine by documenting threats to endangered species that the company’s environmental studies had failed to account for. The ruling hinged on Ecuador’s “rights of nature” laws, enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2008.

Those laws rewrote the legal status of ecosystems, transforming them from property or objects — like a car or a microwave — into living subjects with rights to exist, regenerate and maintain their vital cycles. Since then, courts have repeatedly applied those rights, siding with forests, rivers, marine ecosystems and wild animals, and thwarting large-scale extractive activities that judges found would harm them irreversibly. 

But like any right, nature’s rights are not absolute. 

Ecuador, among the world’s most biologically diverse countries, also holds enormous reserves of oil, copper, gold and other minerals. Global markets want them. Multinational companies are itching to dig. And a cash-strapped government is eager to sell. The legal battles are intensifying. 

Ecoforensic is helping to prove that the rights of nature can go toe to toe with those forces. The work now underway in Maikiuants may be its most consequential effort yet. 

For Jhostin, Olger and the rest of Maikiuants’ 480 residents, the outcome is existential. Protecting their territory, Jhostin explained, is inseparable from protecting their own lives — they are nature protecting nature. If the forest is destroyed, so are the people who live within it.

Their people did not migrate to this region. They are from here. Every generation before them was born on this land, a continuity that Jhostin, 21, says his grandparents impressed upon him as a responsibility. His elders’ message was simple and unambiguous: This place must be defended. 

Now, that duty rests with him.

That’s why the two paraecologists step carefully around the jaguar’s tracks and continue climbing toward a camera trap tucked deep inside their forest. The device has been silently recording for weeks and they are eager to see what it captured. 

Thousands of mining concessions

Days earlier, a white pickup truck had wound down the Amazonian mountainside above Maikiuants, its wiper blades squeaking as they swept away the rain. 

Inside, British ecologist Mika Peck tapped the brakes, peering through the windshield as dense fog closed in. His wife, Inde Kaur Hundal, squeezed the bar above her seat, bracing against a pothole the size of a bathtub. The co-founders of Ecoforensic were on their way to deliver good news: The organization will establish a permanent research station in Maikiuants.

It had been two years since they first sat down with residents there to talk about Ecoforensic. They had met in a wooden community center featuring a mural of a Shuar warrior spearing a colonist. For over an hour, the community had grilled the couple. They wanted to know what Ecoforensic would do with the data paraecologists produced — and whether Peck and Hundal were just more outsiders there to extract knowledge, then disappear with it. 

Most of all, they wanted to know how Ecoforensic could help protect their territory. 

The Ecuadorian government had been carving up Shuar territory into mining concessions since the 1990s, but the threat had been confined to maps and paperwork until 2019. That was when Solaris Resources acquired the Warintza Project. Since then, the company’s mineral exploration subsidiary has been a constant presence, scouring the region for copper and gold while attempting to win over a handful of nearby Shuar communities that would be displaced or otherwise impacted, their ancestral mountains blown up.

Maikiuants was a wall of resistance. But communities facing extractive giants fight an almost impossible battle, with financial, political and legal power stacked against them. In Ecuador’s Amazon, that’s been the story of oil for decades. Now, mining is the new frontier. 

Ecuador’s rights of nature laws offer communities a fresh and powerful legal foothold, but winning court cases requires rigorous ecological proof. That was the gap Ecoforensic was built to fill, Peck told Maikiuants’ residents during that first meeting.

Peck and Hundal were inspired by a landmark 2021 rights of nature ruling by Ecuador’s highest court, a case that defined how nature’s rights in Ecuador could be enforced. The decision centered on Los Cedros, a protected cloud forest. 

The government granted a Canadian company a mining concession in 2016 covering more than half of the forest, despite its protected status. Local residents and scientists challenged the decision using decades of ecological research.

Some of that evidence came from Peck’s own work. Through a paraecologist project he launched in 2005, local researchers documented critically endangered brown-headed spider monkeys in the region. That effort formed part of a broader scientific record showing that more than 240 near-threatened, vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered species lived in Los Cedros — many absent from the company’s environmental impact studies used to justify its operations.

That body of evidence proved decisive. In siding with the forest, the court found that mining would threaten Los Cedros’ biological integrity and disrupt evolutionary processes unfolding over billions of years.

Peck, typically stoic, cried with joy when he learned that Los Cedros had prevailed in late 2021. Then he, Hundal and their Ecuadorian colleagues went to work. 

Los Cedros had benefited from a dedicated scientific research station. But vast swaths of Ecuador are, scientifically speaking, a black box — and they are also threatened by mining. 

Peck did the math: The Ecuadorian government had granted nearly 8,000 mining concessions as of 2021. Roughly 30 percent of those overlapped with protected areas, and 20 percent overlapped with Indigenous territories. The most impacted are the Shuar. 

The need to proactively document Maikiuants’ ecosystems, Peck told the community in their 2023 meeting, was “urgent.” 

“When the threats come”

On their first morning back in Maikiuants in late November, Peck and Hundal woke to the faint scent of woodsmoke in the cool air. Outside their tent, green peaks rose skyward, shrouded with forest and clouds, making the village feel held by the landscape itself. 

Today, Peck’s work centers on the web of relationships that bind this place together — water and soil, fish and forest, and the people who depend on them. But early in his career, he was trained to see the world in fragments. He studied aquatic systems in isolation, looking at “safe” levels of contaminants in water, an approach that mirrors how conventional environmental law regulates pollution. 

But the more time he spent measuring thresholds, the more uneasy he became with the premise itself. The idea that ecosystems could absorb endless damage as long as it stayed below a regulatory line struck him as a fundamental misunderstanding of how living systems work. Nature is all about relationships.

Peck, with close-cropped graying hair and a sinewy frame, tries to live that way too. Colleagues describe him as a rare mix of intellectual rigor and emotional intelligence — someone who listens as carefully as he measures. He instinctively looks to the communities embedded in the ecosystems he studies, a perspective that runs against conservation’s prevailing top-down approach. Real change, he believes, emerges from the grassroots. 

Ecuador’s rights of nature laws took shape in much the same way, emerging from Indigenous communities who brought their legal traditions to the state and demanded recognition.

Now, a barefoot Peck, one pant leg slightly rolled up, stepped again to the front of the community center, where about 45 Shuar sat in a semi-circle. This time, the mood was light. Peck was no longer an outsider, but a trusted scientific ally. 

The first order of business was brainstorming. What should the research station look like? Where should it be built? And what are residents concerned about?

They broke into small groups, scrawling ideas with magic markers across long sheets of paper. Ángel Nantip, 63, a muscular community elder with a direct and unflinching gaze, spoke first. Nantip remembers when mining engineers and the Ecuadorian military first arrived in the 1990s to prospect for metals. They told him nothing bad would happen to the territory or the spiritual beings that live within it, he said. Only later did he learn how destructive the planned open-pit mine would be — and that it would sever the relationships among communities. 

Before anything else, Nantip told the group, the community needed a way to protect its environmental defenders.

“We need an alert system when the threats come,” he said, his angular face tightening. 

Peck wasn’t surprised when others raised the same concern. Each week, an average of three environmental defenders — people who peacefully protect ecosystems — are killed around the world, a number widely believed to be an undercount given the remote and politically repressed places where many of them work. The sector most closely linked to that violence: mining. Maikiuants was not immune.

Since Solaris arrived, the largely tranquil region had grown tense, driven by what leaders describe as a “divide and conquer” tactic. Mining companies secure the backing of certain communities or leaders with financial incentives, often filling gaps left by the state — access to schools, health clinics or basic infrastructure. Maikiuants’ school, for instance, has one teacher for about 45 students spanning all grade levels. Two nearby Shuar communities and an umbrella Shuar organization entered into various cooperation agreements with Solaris, the contents of which are confidential. 

“As independent and legally recognized communities, we have the right to seek a better quality of life for the people of our community, where our children can study, our elderly can work, and we can have access to widespread healthcare that we have never had before,” the pro-mining communities said in a court filing about their relationship with Solaris. A spokesperson for those communities did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Though the project has advanced without the consent of all impacted Indigenous groups, Solaris has likewise framed it as community-driven. 

“At Solaris Resources, we believe that sustainable mining is not just an economic endeavour; it is a journey that must include the insights and values of every stakeholder involved, especially our indigenous populations,” said company president and CEO Matthew Rowlinson in a written statement on Solaris’ website. “Their lived experiences and deep connection to the land are vital to shaping responsible mining practices.”

Solaris did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, nor did it respond to a list of questions about the project, including its impact on local communities. 

On the ground, the divisions sown by the company’s presence are stark. It’s turned neighboring villages into adversaries, with pro- and anti-mining communities’ disputes with one another spilling into court battles, military deployments and threats. 

In 2022, members of the two pro-mining communities filed a criminal complaint against three Maikiuants residents, including Nancy Antún, a leader of the Maikiuants women, alleging they planned an attack on a mining camp in the region. All three fiercely denied the allegation. Antún said people from pro-mining communities have themselves made multiple threats against her, including that they will burn her house down while her children are inside. 

Another prominent Shuar leader said she received a death threat from a Solaris executive — an allegation the company denies. Amidst the turmoil, the government deployed military forces to protect the concession, including on Maikiuants’ territory, which Ecuador’s Constitution recognizes as self-governing. In response, community guards detained several soldiers and now face criminal charges. 

Similar disputes elsewhere in Ecuador have escalated into violence. In recent years, Indigenous leaders who opposed extractive projects — including A’i Cofán leader Eduardo Mendúa and Shuar leader José Isidro Tendetza Antún, a relative of multiple Maikiuants residents — have been killed, cases that rights groups say underscore the risks faced by environmental defenders in the region. 

Back in the community center, as the morning meeting ended, the path forward was clear — and fraught. In Maikiuants, building the evidence needed to defend the forest carries risks. There would be no separating the science from the struggle. 

The monkey’s axe

In many ways, Ecoforensic shouldered the work the Ecuadorian government was meant to do: protect its people, uphold the constitution and ensure companies followed the law. Instead, successive administrations deployed the military to suppress protests over pollution, shielded foreign firms from liability for massive toxic dumping and weakened civil society’s ability to resist. 

Under President Daniel Noboa, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, those pressures intensified. In recent months, his administration froze the bank accounts of prominent Indigenous leaders and environmentalists — including one belonging to a lawyer for Maikiuants — while dismantling the environment ministry and imposing sweeping restrictions on nongovernmental organizations.

The crackdown has made coalitions essential. Communities, lawyers and scientists are banding together as they push back against Noboa’s drive to accelerate mining and oil extraction.

Now, as the afternoon meeting got underway, Peck invited an aquatic ecologist to the front of the room: Edwin Zárate, a lanky, soft-spoken biology professor at the University of Azuay in Cuenca. In Maikiuants, Zárate was quietly helping to build the scientific record of how the territory works as a living system — supporting paraecologists, establishing an agro-ecology program and setting up a meteorological station to track the climate in real time.

Peck moved through the room, handing out spiral-bound packets thick with color photographs — frogs no larger than a thumb, fish flecked with purple and green, each image paired with a short description.

“These are the species paraecologists have documented so far,” Peck said, as pages rustled open. “And they’re discovering more.”

“Every time we do new studies, we find new species,” Zárate added. Some, he said, were unknown to science — like the one paraecologists had recently found, a frog with skin as dark as night, speckled with iridescent blue dots, like a tiny galaxy.

Maikiuants, Zárate explained, sits in the rugged transition zone where the high Andes meets the tropical lowlands. It is a landscape defined by ancient upheaval: millions of years ago, colliding tectonic plates forced the Pacific seabed upwards. Each ridge and fold created its own microclimate, isolating species in narrow ecological niches. Here, extinction can come suddenly. Destroy a single slope, he said, and an entire evolutionary lineage can disappear with it.

That fragility has legal implications. Ecuador’s Constitution gives special protection to species with unique evolutionary paths — those that exist nowhere else on Earth, representing a “one-of-a-kind” branch on the tree of life.

“Some species are more important for rights of nature cases than others,” Peck said. “Those at risk of extinction are very important — and species that exist only here.” 

He turned next to keystone species, animals whose influence ripples through entire ecosystems. Jaguars, for instance, regulate prey populations, shape plant growth and feed scavengers through their kills. When keystone species disappear, food webs unravel. “The future of other species depends on them,” Peck said.

“The condor is another,” Zárate added. With wingspans stretching up to 12 feet, Andean condors are among the largest flying birds in the world. They are critically endangered in Ecuador, with fewer than 150 remaining, largely due to poaching and agricultural expansion. As scavengers, they play a vital role in disease control. A rapidly emerging threat: habitat loss from mining.

The information in the packets, Peck and Zárate explained, could give the landscape a voice, grounding nature’s constitutional rights in ecological data. 

Using a small projector powered by a cable threaded through a gap in the wall, Peck cast a diagram of Ecuador’s rights-of-nature framework onto a poster affixed backward to the wall as a makeshift screen. The government’s duty to prevent species extinction appeared on an infographic, circled in red, adjacent to other constitutional guarantees.

Peck pointed to the protections for biocultural heritage — the inseparable ties between communities and the plants and animals they live with. That was something science alone couldn’t document.

“We need your stories,” he told the room. “Which species matter most to you? Why?”

The room erupted into conversation. Lead paraecologist Claudio Ankuash Nantip, who goes by Pinchu, pointed to a photograph of a capuchin monkey.

“When people die, they don’t disappear,” he said. “They return as animals.”

Those who lived badly might come back as creatures of fear. Others return as protectors.

“Like the monkey,” he said.

Nearly a century ago, Pinchu said, a demon terrorized the community with an axe, killing people. It was the monkey who defeated it, burying the axe deep inside a mountain. 

Elders once saw the species often. Now it is almost gone. Paraecologists have so far been unable to document it.

“Now,” Pinchu said, “the company wants to dig the axe up.” 

Dreams of a father

The next morning, Peck, Hundal and Zárate pulled on knee-high rubber boots and tried to keep pace with a group of Shuar heading into the forest to scout sites for the research station. The group was led by Jorge Antún, 60, a lifelong resident of Maikiuants and the father of paraecologist Jhostin Antún. 

Compact and powerfully built from decades in the forest, Jorge moved easily along the trail. His long-sleeved beige shirt, visibly stained with mud and sweat in the warm, humid air, clung to his torso as he climbed.

Minutes in, he stepped off the path. Reaching into the vines, he plucked a leaf and held it up. 

“This is good medicine for insects that burrow into your skin,” he said, explaining how the leaves are cooked into a paste and applied to the body.

Every few steps, the forest offered another lesson. Berries used as dish soap. Plants that calm sunburn. Ants whose bites burn like fire.

“The forest,” Jorge said, his eyes bright, “is our own storage unit for food and medicine.”

That is not how mining firms see it. 

Companies’ environmental impact studies — required before permits are granted — are meant to assess a project’s social, cultural and ecological risks. In practice, lawyers say, Indigenous ecological knowledge is hardly ever included. Also absent are mentions of communities’ spiritual relationships to the land, like Maikiuants’ waterfalls, which residents view as sacred temples of spiritual renewal where their futures are revealed.

Companies’ science can also fall short. Ecoforensic’s review of Solaris Resources’ environmental impact assessment identified what it called “critical deficiencies,” including the omission of 91 at-risk or endangered species and scant attention to fish — an especially glaring oversight in an industry notorious for contaminating waterways. Mining has left a global legacy of heavy-metal pollution, acidic runoff and depleted aquifers.

The assessment also had mistakes, such as its failure to include the vulnerable-to-extinction giant anteater and bush dog. Paraecologists had already documented both species on Maikiuants’ lands.

More broadly, the document never analyzed whether the project could violate Ecuador’s rights-of-nature laws. That requires evaluating impacts on ecosystem functions (the work ecosystems do to keep themselves alive, like a tree converting sunlight into oxygen and wetlands filtering dirty water); on life cycles (think of a frog’s journey from egg to tadpole to adult); and on evolutionary processes (the long-term change of life over millions of years as it adapts for survival).

Now, as Peck followed Jorge down the trail toward his home, it was hard for the ecologist to imagine company contractors producing the kind of patient, place-based knowledge needed to truly understand an ecosystem. The thought lingered as he ducked through the low doorway of the Antún family’s traditional hut.

Inside, the oval structure was meticulously kept: a swept dirt floor, a long wooden table with benches, a smoldering fire at its center. Pots, pans and a rifle hung from the walls. On a bench, two relatives, one in a dark T-shirt with her hair pulled into a loose bun and the other in a sage-green blouse, shelled peanuts into a large container while another lifted a squirming child from a colorful activity seat and brought the baby to her breast.

Jorge’s wife, Ilda Chias Nakaim Antún, handed out glasses of fresh pineapple juice and steaming plates of yucca and plantains, alongside hard-boiled eggs served with chili-flecked salt. But for the salt, everything came from the land around them.

Over the meal, Jorge spoke quietly about ideas for sustainable businesses: fish farming, fruit cultivation, even a local variety of vanilla. 

“We want alternatives to mining,” he said. “We can be an example for others.”

His family is firmly opposed to the mine. His daughter Marcia Antún, the young mother, worried about air and water contamination. 

“The company could force us to leave,” she said. 

As the conversation turned back to economic possibilities, they discussed precedents. A cocoa project tied to paraecologists’ work on the brown-headed spider monkey helped farmers triple their incomes by pairing market access with forest protection. Other communities turned to ecotourism. In West Papua, Indonesia, where Peck helped develop paraecology initiatives, one of the first paraecologists went on to earn a Ph.D. and now leads the Binatang Research Center, Papua New Guinea’s leading conservation research institute.

In each case, the model produced something durable: livelihoods tied to ongoing scientific work, not extraction.

Reliable internet, now possible through satellite services, could open paths to e-commerce. The University of Azuay’s business school might help with planning. Jorge also imagined sharing the Shuar’s medicinal knowledge with the world, on their own terms.

“I have dreams for my family,” he said. “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to fulfill them because of the company.”

Time was not on their side. Solaris Resources’ final operational approval was expected within months.

Sustaining life 

Later that day, lead paraecologist Pinchu, who told the story of the monkey’s axe, set out on a narrow trail climbing out of Maikiuants, his 10-year-old son Kirup and Zárate following close behind. The forest tightened around them, the canopy draping over the path like a botanical cloak that choked out the midday sun, the air warm and faintly sweet with the scent of ripening fruit. They walked in silence until Pinchu signaled for everyone to stop.

A five-foot-long snake, no thicker than a golf ball, lay stretched across the path, its dark body blending into leaves like a shard of obsidian.

“It’s sleeping,” Pinchu whispered. 

He picked up a fallen branch and shook it above the snake. Unhurried, the animal stirred, slid off the trail and vanished into the undergrowth.

Farther on, the forest began to open. Sunlight pierced the canopy in narrow shafts, and then, suddenly, the trail opened into a hidden alcove. A waterfall spilled over a jagged ledge of dark rock, unraveling in thin silver strands into a lagoon below. Thick vines draped overhead like green tresses.

Kirup grasped one of the vines and slid smoothly down to the lagoon, diving in. Zárate and Pinchu followed, wading toward a small island carpeted in soft green moss. There, Pinchu pulled out a container of tobacco leaves steeped in water. Among the Shuar, the mixture isn’t smoked but inhaled as a tea — a practice Pinchu said brings calm and sharpens his connection to the forest, helping him listen and feel more deeply.

Waterfalls hold deep spiritual significance for the Shuar. When life’s challenges arise, they follow protocols refined over generations, preparing carefully before visiting, communing with and leaving these places. 

Only recently has Western science begun to affirm what many Indigenous communities have long understood. Time spent in nature has been shown to lower stress hormones, reduce inflammation, strengthen immune response and sharpen focus.

Yet the places where such scientific findings carry the greatest authority are often those most disconnected from the natural world — and whose consumption is driving the destruction of ecosystems like this one. 

The copper beneath these mountains would likely be shipped to the United States and other wealthy countries, feeding the expansion of military hardware, energy transitions and infrastructure behind the artificial-intelligence boom, such as data centers. 

A conventional data center can require up to 15,000 tons of copper. Facilities built to power AI systems can demand more than three times that amount, driving prices to record highs.

Those artificial worlds feel impossibly distant here, where now, a dripping wet Zárate emerged from the lagoon. This marked the 12th trip he’d made to Maikiuants, each one reinforcing for him the importance of scientists stepping out of walled offices and learning from other knowledge systems.

“We have to be more holistic,” he said. 

The industrialized world, Pinchu added, has “a different way of viewing nature — only thinking about money.”

He dreams of a future in which his people can evolve and develop without losing the essence of who they are.

“We have ways of living that are also valuable,” he said. “Our ancestral knowledge is valuable, and it’s not about money — it’s about sustaining life.” 

Love and hope

With the fresh jaguar tracks documented, Jhostin Antún and Olger Kitiar quickened their pace toward the camera trap, anticipation building with every step. They were high in the mountains now, far above the waterfall where Pinchu had taken Zárate.

The camera was fastened to a tree washed in sunlight — a deliberate choice, since it ran on solar power. When Olger reached for it, pure delight sparked in his eyes.

“I love this,” he said. “I love seeing all the animals — sometimes there are things we haven’t seen in real life.”

He began transferring the data to his phone using Bluetooth, a 10-minute process that felt far longer. To pass the time, they scrolled through older recordings: pig-like peccaries rooting through the undergrowth, a spectacled bear lumbering past, turkeys, a species they call wild dogs, perdiz birds — and a jaguar, caught once, briefly, slipping through the frame. 

This camera was one of two they maintained on their territory. The other required an eight-hour hike each way and an overnight stay in the forest.

“It’s still as exciting as it was in the beginning,” Olger said. “We’re learning more and more and discovering new species.” 

Jhostin had been part of the team that discovered an unknown frog, soon to be named the Maikiuants frog.

His work, he said, was both fun and deeply serious. Gesturing with his hands, he described the rhythms of daily life — planting, harvesting, eating what the forest provides. Agriculture, for his community, is not a commercial activity but a way of sustaining the body and spirit. 

“Ecoforensic gives me hope that this way of life can still be protected,” Jhostin said. 

He wants children someday, and he wants them to live in the forest without fear, free of contamination. Without territory, he said, you cannot teach children who they are. You cannot teach them the forest.

He wants a future of buen vivir — living well, living in balance. His father, Jorge, taught him the forest by walking through it, by explaining what each plant and river meant. His grandfather did the same, offering guidance not through lectures but through nature itself. That, Jhostin said, is where wisdom comes from.

And that is what he is trying to protect.

Olger signaled that the data had finished loading. The footage showed a lone tinamou, a chicken-like bird. 

Their task finished, the two paraecologists walked back to the village — crossing a gushing, pristine river on the way, its banks alive with hundreds of iridescent blue butterflies rising and falling in slow waves. 

On a narrow bank of stones and sediment in the middle of the river, where the water divided and came together again farther down, Jorge Antún sat quietly, taking in the sweep of forest and sky. Jhostin spotted his father and smiled. He and Olger crouched at the river’s edge, splashing the cool water over their faces before cupping their hands to drink, the current threading around them as it always had.

TriplePundit]]> Andrew Kaminsky https://triplepundit.com/?p=70625 2026-04-14T15:57:04Z 2026-04-13T13:00:00Z

A Canadian mining giant is using a $20 billion lawsuit to pressure Panama into reopening a controversial copper mine. The case exposes how international investment agreements can undermine democracy, and why experts are calling for fairer investment frameworks worldwide.

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This article is part of our series on responsible mining solutions. The push for clean energy is fueled by a growing demand for minerals, but conventional mining has a track record of harmful social and environmental impacts. Rethinking international investment agreements is another potential solution to that problem.

Public outrage and mass protests shut down Central America’s largest copper mine two years ago. In 2025, the Panamanian government was coerced back to the negotiating table by a $20 billion lawsuit from the mining company, First Quantum Minerals, despite the fact that the project’s contract was ruled unconstitutional in 2017, and again in 2023.

This type of lawsuit from a foreign company against a government is called an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), and it plays out in international arbitration court. First Quantum Minerals’ case against Panama is a prime example of how ISDS provisions in international trade agreements can limit a country’s sovereignty and leave them vulnerable to exploitation.

The risk of international lawsuits has countries backing out of trade agreements with ISDS provisions, while international law experts suggest alternative methods to ensure that foreign investment works for all parties. Some worry this could turn mining companies, and the economic benefits they bring, away. But most studies find that the presence of ISDS provisions has little impact on foreign direct investment, anyway.

What’s happening in Panama?

To oversimplify a very complex topic, ISDS is a type of protection for foreign investors. If they feel the government of a country they are investing in does something that may reduce their returns, they can sue that government in international arbitration court. (We have an in-depth explanation of ISDS, how it’s used, and why countries are backing out in our previous coverage here.)

Even if the foreign investment project breaks domestic laws, harms communities or destroys the environment, governments that try to remedy or prevent those issues with changes in legislation can face lawsuits in the billions. That’s how Panama wound up staring down the barrel of a $20 billion lawsuit.

“The [Panama] mine was allowed to start with an unconstitutional contract. If that doesn’t tell you this is a risky project as an investor, I don’t know what does,” said Jamie Kneen, national program co-lead at MiningWatch Canada. “But ISDS helps investors override that kind of concern. It essentially de-risks otherwise extremely risky investments.”

The Cobre Panama mine, run by Canadian-based First Quantum Minerals, is the largest copper mine in Central America. Operating from 2019 to 2023, it accounted for about 5 percent of Panama’s GDP.

Despite being declared unconstitutional in 2017, it wasn’t until mass protests five years later that the Supreme Court ruled the mine must be shut down. A few months later, First Quantum launched an ISDS case against Panama. Now that Panama is entertaining contract renegotiation in light of the case, First Quantum paused the lawsuit. The mine seems set to resume some operations, but Panama will make a decision on whether to fully reopen the mine this summer.

“The company and a number of its investors and suppliers are threatening to sue the pants off of Panama to make up for lost profits or to pressure the government into ignoring its people and restarting the mine,” said Jen Moore, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

This raises questions about the benefits of ISDS for governments. Critics of ISDS argue that disputes can be resolved in other ways and host countries don’t need ISDS to attract investment.

Does ISDS actually attract investment?

Proponents of ISDS claim that having these provisions in trade agreements entices foreign investment by providing a safety net for investors against government maltreatment.

“ISDS provisions boost investor confidence by offering legal protection against expropriation or discriminatory acts,” said Attorney Davy Karkason, founder of Transnational Matters International Law Firm. “My foreign direct investment clientele rely on these provisions for risk mitigation.”

But the data on the influence of ISDS provisions on foreign direct investment does not paint a clear picture.

A 2022 study by the United States International Trade Commission found that binding ISDS provisions result in an increase of foreign investment by 22 percent, but it concedes that evidence in the literature continues to be mixed with little consensus.

Meanwhile, a 2020 meta-study on investor protections in international investment agreements found that the effect on foreign investment was, “so small as to be considered zero.”

“Even if there is a marginal correlation in some cases, the costs of ISDS — financially, legally and politically — are significant and woefully underappreciated,” said Lisa Sachs, director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.

Politically, ISDS can cause “regulatory chill,” where governments avoid enacting environmental, social or tax laws for fear of costly ISDS lawsuits.

“Most of the time, mining executives’ decisions are made based on the nature of the resource, the legal and regulatory frameworks, and the certainties around development,” explained Kneen of Mining Watch Canada. “ISDS coverage comes out as kind of a bonus point, but not a crucial decision making factor.”

Based on the Panama situation, I ran a rudimentary analysis to see what changed in foreign direct investments when other countries removed ISDS clauses from trade agreements. Here are three of those cases.

Ecuador

In 2017, Ecuador terminated 16 trade agreements after their government determined ISDS provisions were not attracting investment.

In the following five years, Ecuador received $1 billion per year in foreign direct investment, compared to $830 million annually in the five years prior, according to data from Macrotrends. While many factors affect foreign investment, the termination of ISDS-laden agreements did not appear to deter it.

ISDS clauses may have helped attract investment initially when they were first introduced in 1993, but once investment was established in Ecuador, the removal of ISDS clauses did not deter additional investment.

South Africa

South Africa let several ISDS treaties expire in the early 2010s and replaced them with its own national program called the Protection of Investment Act in 2018. The act still provides some investor protection, but now cases are heard within South Africa’s own legal system, not international arbitration in Washington.

In the five years preceding 2012, when South Africa started to distance itself from ISDS, its average annual foreign direct investment inflows were $6.4 billion, according to data from Macrotrends. From 2012 to 2016, foreign direct investment averaged $4.5 billion per year.

Since South Africa enacted its national investor protection act in 2018, foreign direct investment averaged $5.1 billion annually. (This omits $41 billion of foreign investment in 2021, which was largely the result of corporate restructuring.)

Again, many factors affect these investments. After cancelling ISDS treaties, South Africa’s foreign direct investments dropped at first, then climbed back up after enacting the national protection program.

India

After facing multiple billion-dollar ISDS cases in the 2000s, India terminated over 50 trade agreements in 2016 and 2017. In the five years preceding the 2016 changes, India saw $33.5 billion in annual foreign direct investment inflows, according to data from Macrotrends. In the five years following, that increased to $48.3 billion.

In two of these three cases, removing ISDS clauses was not followed by reduced investment. In one country, it was. This inconclusivity is in line with what larger academic studies find. Whether ISDS attracts investment or not is up for debate, but the financial and political costs that countries face from the ISDS system likely outweigh any boost to foreign investment.

How to make foreign investment work for all parties

“Instead of relying on ISDS, we need more balanced and mutually beneficial investment frameworks — ones that support sustainable development and fair dispute resolution,” said Sachs of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.

The International Institute of Sustainable Development recently released a report that provides recommendations on how to improve foreign investment agreements. It includes rewriting or ending old agreements that prioritize investor protections and refinding and processing minerals domestically.

Processing and refining minerals domestically adds more suppliers to the market and derisks concentrated global supply chains from external shocks and geopolitical market manipulation, said Isabelle Ramdoo, director of the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development.

“Keep in mind that if you remove ISDS, investors still have recourse. They have national courts and regional courts that can play that role,” said Suzy Nikièma, an author of the report and director of sustainable development at the International Institute of Sustainable Development.

In fact, many international law experts say that domestic courts should be the place to settle investor-state disputes, while others worry that domestic legal systems may not be equipped to handle them.

“Domestic courts, particularly in developing countries, have the reputation of being inefficient, weak or problematic,” Nikièma said. “But ISDS is not better. If you decide to prioritize domestic courts, you could put in the effort to improve them and make sure they can handle this type of dispute properly.”

It should be a requirement to at least start a case in domestic courts before elevating a dispute to other regional or international courts, she added.

“A final element is to bring more inclusivity in the system for local communities,” Nikièma said. “A sort of compliance mechanism is needed for communities to raise concerns about project impacts and to have a collaborative approach with the investor or state to adjust and comply with investment obligations.”

Feature image credit: AnyGang/Wikimedia Commons

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