More than 1,500 idle ships may soon carry marine species from the Persian Gulf to ports around the world. By land and sea, humans have become the planet’s great dispersal mechanism—spinning ecological roulette wherever we go. insideclimatenews.or...

While conservation waits for the perfect lawsuit, destruction proceeds without delay. New essay: Waiting for the Perfect Environmental Lawsuit — Sunday

The American West isn’t just managed by ecology and politics. It’s also managed by mythology. New essay: Myth and Mirrors — Sunday.

Some people take “reconnecting with nature” a little too literally.

Shifting environmental baseline on steroids. Here is the difference between the “recovered” forest and the original forest.

This administration has reduced the role of the US Fish and Wildlife Service to Pictionary status.

This badger wasn’t photographed in a zoo or a wildlife refuge. It was photographed earlier this month in the Trout Creek Mountains of Oregon. This is also the landscape being considered for a new lithium mine. Every mine begins as someone else’s habitat.

Imagine an animal the size of a black bear living in wetlands from Alaska to the Gulf Coast for tens of thousands of years. Now imagine that animal disappears. What happens next? New essay Sunday.

Heavy trucks are tire-wear machines. Studies in some countries find trucks and buses generate more than half of all road-transport tire wear despite being a minority of vehicles. One of the largest sources of microplastics isn’t packaging. It’s transportation.

It’s hard to argue with this kind of logic.

This is not dust. It is centuries of accumulated fertility leaving a field in a single afternoon.

This is what fire-proofing looks like in many places now. Remove the forest. Leave the trees. And pretend the system is still intact.

We talk about a water crisis while ignoring livestock overgrazing—the process that strips soil cover and turns infiltration into runoff. It’s like worrying about your health while smoking and living on fast food. The problem isn’t just water. It’s how we’re managing land.

Typical large wind turbine foundation: • 1,000–2,500 tons of concrete • 30–60 ft diameter • 10–30 ft deep Concrete accounts for ~8% of global CO₂ emissions. It persists for centuries. It may be the most environmentally consequential material humans have ever invented.

:) You just can’t make this up. I almost didn’t need to do anything but quote and voila……satire.

This essay was inspired by Katherine Hayhoe and her podcast guest last Fall.

😊

Yesterday, I posted satire about the “God Squad.” Today, it isn’t satire. A federal panel has voted to exempt oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico—home to the last ~50 Rice’s whales. This committee exists to decide when extinction is acceptable.

For the past several days I’ve introduced species that have spent years “getting in the way.” Today the God Squad meets. The Endangered Species Act protects species from extinction. The God Squad exists for the moments when we decide not to.

Rice’s Whale — another potential candidate for the God Squad. It lives only in the Gulf of Mexico. Fewer than 100 may remain. The God Squad meets tomorrow to consider exemptions for offshore drilling in the same waters.

Red-cockaded Woodpecker — another potential candidate for the God Squad. It depends on old longleaf pine forests in the Southeast. Those forests once covered tens of millions of acres. Most are gone.

Florida Panther — another potential candidate for the God Squad. It survives in a shrinking corner of south Florida. The problem isn’t the panther. The problem is that millions of people also want to live there.

Desert Tortoise — another potential candidate for the God Squad. It lives in the Mojave Desert, where solar projects, transmission lines, and development are expanding rapidly. The future is green. The tortoise is not so sure.

Delta Smelt — another potential candidate for the God Squad. This small fish lives in California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. For years it’s been blamed for water shortages. The real problem is that we promised more water than the rivers can provide.

Northern Spotted Owl — another potential candidate for the God Squad. It became the symbol of the old-growth logging wars in the Pacific Northwest. But the owl didn’t stop logging. It revealed how little old forest remained.

The Greater Sage Grouse—another God Squad nominee. In the 1990s states formed working groups to keep it from declining to the point it needed listing. I hired a Nevada biologist in 2000 who had been on one. That was 25 years ago.

The Lesser Prairie Chicken—another potential God Squad nominee. When I worked at U.S. Fish & Wildlife it was a candidate species. Conservation agreements were supposed to protect it so listing wouldn’t be necessary. That was decades ago.

The Dunes Sagebrush Lizard—a potential God Squad nominee. It lives in the Permian Basin sand dunes — one of the most productive oil regions on Earth. I worked on this species years ago at U.S. Fish & Wildlife. Conservation agreements were supposed to protect it. A few decades later, here we are.

One of the largest industrial systems on Earth operates almost entirely outside environmental accounting: the global military. War is not only a humanitarian catastrophe. It is an ecological one.

War is usually measured in lives lost and cities destroyed. Rarely in forests burned, soils contaminated, rivers poisoned, and wildlife displaced. But the biosphere pays a price for every conflict.