“If that plant explodes, we’re all dead,” Maffini’s mother used to intone, looking out at the defunct Caorso station, once the largest in Italy. As Maffini rode his bike six miles across the countryside to get a closer look at the plant from a nearby overpass, his mother’s doom-laden words rang in his ears. Her warning scared him. It also made him want to learn more. When he left home to go to university, Maffini decided to work in nuclear physics. “Radioactivity is a strange thing,” he says. “You can’t see it, you can't hear it, you can't smell it. It leaves a lot of room for imagination, for speculation, for fear.”

Four decades on from Chernobyl, and Italy has some of the highest energy bills in Europe. The country is scrambling to disentangle itself from its dependence on Russian gas in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and build out its energy sovereignty. War in Iran, and a growing European consensus that turning away from nuclear power was, in the words of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, a “strategic mistake,” has given more impetus to the Italian government’s argument that the country needs to move past its qualms.

Last year, the Italian cabinet approved a new draft law reintroducing the prospect of returning to nuclear power. “The government has approved another important measure to ensure clean, safe, low-cost energy that can guarantee energy security and strategic independence,” the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced. 

Italy is already surrounded on all sides by nuclear power plants: Slovenia’s Krsko plant is 90 miles away from the border, and there are four French nuclear power plants within 110 miles. Italy is the world’s second-largest importer of electricity, with nuclear power, largely imported from France, making up 5% of its energy basket. Italy also plays host to more U.S. nuclear warheads than any other European country. An estimated 35 thermonuclear gravity bombs are stored at two NATO airbases in northern Italy, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. 

Now, as data centers spring up in Italy’s industrial north, the country’s energy needs are expected to increase exponentially and the government is turning, albeit cautiously, to a long-held Italian taboo. Since the spring of 1986, when the most serious accident in nuclear history unfolded in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, the Italian population has lived in fear of nuclear energy. It voted to shutter its once-burgeoning nuclear industry in 1987, and in 2011, after the Fukushima nuclear accident, when 94% of voters rejected government plans to revive the industry. 

It is a fear that has transformed Italy’s energy fortunes, making it reliant on imports and vulnerable to volatility and price shocks. 

“The international crises of recent years have clearly demonstrated the risk of excessive dependence on imported fossil fuels or vulnerable supply chains,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “The government approaches this issue with great respect for the country's history and the democratic choices expressed by citizens. The 1987 and 2011 referendums profoundly impacted the national energy strategy at very different historical moments. Precisely for this reason, the point is not to ignore those choices, but to acknowledge that today's technological, climatic, industrial, and geopolitical context has radically changed.”

For Meloni’s government, the argument is not so much whether Italy needs to revive its nuclear industry, it’s whether the country is ready to shake its demons, to shake the cultural memory of what happened at Chernobyl forty years ago, a thousand miles away from Rome. 

In the early hours of April 28, 1986, in the control room of the Latina nuclear power plant south of Rome, a young technician called Ruggero Dell’Aquila was working the night shift. “Everything was perfectly quiet,” he recalled. As morning broke, teletype messages from Northern Europe began to rattle in. A clerk came down from the control room with reports from the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden. Their monitoring stations were registering radiation spikes far above background levels, and no one knew why. 

That evening, nuclear physicist Sergio Malossi, a director at the Latina plant responsible for monitoring radioactive risk, drove home. His mind was turning over what the clerks had been reporting. “He came in extremely agitated,” remembers his daughter, Roberta Malossi, who was 16 at the time. “We knew he was worried about something going wrong at the facility, but we didn’t understand.” Malossi says that her father’s first paranoid thought was that there had been a malfunction in his own plant, that radiation was leaching into the air, and that it was somehow his fault. 

At 9 p.m. Moscow time — aperitivo hour in Latina — the Soviet Union announced there had been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. In the ensuing days, Italian news was full of dire warnings. 

“Television was showing these clouds that would soon reach Italy. Everyone was terrified. The only information we got was from state TV, and the news was shocking,” said Monica Tommasi, President of Friends of the Earth Italy, who was a child at the time. Radiation, the news said, would rain down on the population. “The fear from the sky,” ran one La Repubblica headline. “The cloud above us, the doubt within us,” ran another.

On the night of April 30, 1986, Italy’s nuclear monitoring stations began recording increases in radioactivity. The cloud moved over the Valley of the Po, and while the government called for calm, the country began to descend into panic. In the minds of the Italian people, the worst had happened, explained Luca Romano, a writer and activist campaigning for the return of nuclear power in Italy. “Nuclear annihilation, death by radiation, the radioactive cloud and the nuclear holocaust, had arrived,” he said. Nuclear armageddon was a fear that had gripped the West for decades. This was not a nuclear war, but in the Italian collective consciousness, that didn’t make a difference. 

The reality was, says Barbara Curli, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Turin, that “Italy was only marginally affected by the cloud.”

The cloud in northern Italy meant radioactivity levels peaked briefly, but ten days later they had fallen dramatically back down. Because this spike was short-lived, the total radiation exposure remained low. A United Nations committee report recorded that northern Italy received an additional radiation dose of about 380 microsieverts in the year following Chernobyl — less than a fifth of the normal background radiation humans absorb in a year; equivalent to taking about six transatlantic flights. It was much smaller than the doses received by neighboring countries like Bulgaria, Austria and Greece, and in the south of Italy the dose was lower still. 

Down by the Latina power plant, though, the community was shaken by events in Chernobyl, and rumors and misinformation began to spread about the fallout. The friends and family of the technician, Ruggero Dell’Aquila, started asking him if a Chernobyl-style disaster could happen at Latina, too. “Everyone was afraid, asking — ‘can it explode, can it explode?’” he recalled. 

The reality was, a Chernobyl-style explosion was not possible at Latina, because its reactor lacked the unstable characteristics of the Soviet design. But this was not such an easy concept to explain. 

“The problem was that a slew of journalists took over, telling lies,” Malossi said, recalling paranoid rumours about radioactivity causing mutations in nature. People started telling stories, Malossi said, about “frogs with three heads, animals and fish with four tails. Strange things. When in fact absolutely nothing like that was happening.”

The government advised people to avoid fresh vegetables and dairy products, particularly for children. Farmers destroyed crops and poured away milk. Sergio Malossi ignored the warnings, having measured radiation levels in the air himself. “My father and others from the plant brought the vegetables home and we ate them,” his daughter recalled.

It was these warnings — delivered amid a lack of clear information — that shifted public attitudes toward nuclear energy, said Renzo Colombo, 65, who was just beginning a career in nuclear engineering when the explosion happened. Now a member of Nucleare e Ragione, a nonprofit that promotes a rational approach to nuclear energy in Italy, he recalls how quickly fear took hold. “A real phobia was born, a panic about radioactivity,” he said. “And this panic marked the next 25 years.”

The months after the accident were a shadowy, uncertain period for Italians working in the nuclear industry. “I have to be honest, I felt a little guilty,” said Colombo. “As a nuclear engineer, I thought ‘what have we done?’ My colleagues and I always thought we were designing something useful for humanity. And at that moment we felt betrayed by our own profession.”

Outside Italy’s nuclear plants, crowds began to gather. A coalition of environmental groups and political parties started pushing for people to vote against nuclear power in an upcoming referendum.

This movement was not new. “Many years before Chernobyl, an environmentalist culture was born — and it didn’t just concern nuclear power, but risky industry in general,” explained Curli, the Turin historian. The anti-nuclear environmental movement, which spread across Europe in the 1970s, was particularly potent in Italy — a country rocked by violent political turmoil, organized crime, and corruption scandals. Public fears, explained Curli, were sharpened by the Seveso disaster, an accident at an industrial plant in the north of Italy in 1976 that exposed tens of thousands of people to a toxic cloud of chemicals. Nuclear power, she said, “was not perceived by public opinion as a credible policy because there's this underlying distrust in institutions.” 

In 1977, almost a decade before Chernobyl, a 10,000-strong crowd of protesters showed up at Montalto di Castro, to protest against a large new nuclear plant that was planned. A Time magazine correspondent described the activists as “an improbable mix of elegant members of the Italian nobility, radical students in American Indian garb, middle-class citizens and Christian Democratic and Communist politicians.”

In the wake of Chernobyl, Renzo Colombo was working at that very same plant, helping to build the thermohydraulic cycle. By then, the station was nearly complete. “It was a beautiful plant,” Colombo said. “I loved working there.”

In November 1987, 18 months after the Chernobyl accident, the Italian government held a referendum on nuclear energy. Nearly 80% of Italians voted in favor of measures that would end the country’s use of atomic energy.

One morning, following the referendum, the Montalto di Castro plant’s director called the workers to a meeting. Colombo remembers him saying: “‘Ragazzi, gather round, I need to talk to you. I’ve just been to the ministry, and Italy has decided that we are closing all nuclear activity and will focus on coal and gas instead.’” The room went silent. “I was young,” said Colombo. “But there were people there who were older and had devoted years of their life to the nuclear field. There was just this urge to cry.” 

The effect of the referendum was all-encompassing: construction was halted, and over the next three years Italy’s nuclear plants were shut down for good; its nuclear engineers scattered — many going to work abroad, or, like Colombo, re-training to work in other industries. 

It was hailed as a victory for Italian environmentalism, says Curli. But the result was that there was a push to “gasify” Italy. That is, she says, “to choose the gas route — less expensive, and less demanding than nuclear power. But this made Italy almost completely dependent on Russian gas, Libyan gas, Algerian gas.” The Montalto di Castro site was converted into a fossil-fuel powered plant, running on gas and fuel oil.

Decades on from that post-Chernobyl referendum — and a second referendum in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 — Italy remains in the process of dismantling its nuclear power stations, even as it now contemplates a return to nuclear power.

Watching them work is Enrico Bastianini, director of operations at the Latina plant. As I walk with Bastianini through the plant, we come to the old control room. When it first opened in 1963, the Latina plant was the largest nuclear power station in Europe — a feat of Italian and British engineering (the reactor was of UK design) and a symbol of Italy’s post-war industrial growth. 

“We were emerging from the destruction of the war, and this was progress. And it was what allowed us to escape the economic hardships of war, and have low-cost energy,” Bastianini says.

Now, over 60 years on from when the plant opened, more than half of its existence has been spent being taken apart. Critics of nuclear power often focus on precisely this point: the long and complex process of dismantling nuclear plants, and the problem of managing radioactive waste, some of which takes millennia to decay. 

There are two phases to the process of taking apart the plant. “The first phase allows us to dismantle everything that’s nuclear except the reactor. That’s because the reactor contains a huge amount of graphite,” Bastianini explains. “When we have a national repository, it can be removed. But for now, it’s safest if it stays in the first phase.”

Bastianini leads me into a deposit room where radioactive material is being stored in steel containers, inside an earthquake-resistant facility. These containers are only for temporary storage.

There were attempts in the early 2000s to establish a national nuclear waste repository at a salt mine in Basilicata in southern Italy, but huge protests forced the government to abandon its plans. Today, SOGIN, the state-owned Italian company in charge of decommissioning nuclear sites, is still actively searching for a suitable location for a permanent repository and faces considerable opposition. 

Rumours and anxiety swirl around the Latina plant itself — just as they did in the 1980s, when Malossi heard stories of radioactive fish with four tails. Last April, an article by the Italian magazine L’Espresso published claims that the Latina plant could leach radioactive material into the soil. The plant vigorously denies these claims — a spokesperson for SOGIN said the company periodically checks the quality of vegetables, milk and fodder as well as air, soil and groundwater for radiation and that “as always, the results of the analyses confirm radiologically negligible environmental impacts.”

In the gloaming of a summer evening in Umbria, Monica Tommasi drives me through the twilight-darkened hills surrounding the medieval city of Orvieto. This land is rich in archeological and ecological heritage — filled with ancient tunnels, Etruscan caves, untapped archeological sites, wild places where wolves and boar roam. Tommasi is the President of Amici Della Terra — "Friends of the Earth" in Italian — an organization that was once the Italian chapter of the international Friends of the Earth network before breaking away in 2014. "We left, because we argued a lot," she said of the split, describing how the network "wanted to put turbines and panels everywhere, and we couldn't be in favour of that approach." 

The International Friends of the Earth association was born from the anti-nuclear movement in America, where the group successfully lobbied to shut down two reactors, and has since 1969 made anti-nuclear campaigning a core part of its identity.

But Tommasi remembers precisely when she first began to reconsider nuclear power. “I started thinking about it in 2011, when I began to see that the government was investing heavily in solar and wind power, which would invade and industrialize the natural landscape,” she recalled. Many of these green transition projects have been fraught with problems in Italy — wind farm companies accused of corruption and profiteering, of erecting wind farms in areas where there’s little wind, and laying waste to nature. 

For the first time, Tommasi began to think about ways to decarbonize “that don’t destroy the environment where people live and the landscape around them.”. She became intrigued by the nuclear option. “We needed to start reasoning and changing our minds,” she said. 

Tommasi now advocates for a national conversation about nuclear power. “This choice must be accompanied by a public debate,” she told me, “but it isn’t happening because everyone is still afraid.” 

“The future of Italy's energy sector must lie in nuclear,” she said, adding that if Italy was to continue pursuing solar and wind energy alone, “it means destroying all the natural areas that are still left.”

I asked the government to respond to allegations about how criminality, speculation and land-grabs in the renewable energy sector might be affecting Italians’ opinions on nuclear power. 

“We do not believe it is appropriate to frame the energy debate by ideologically pitting nuclear power against renewables, nor should we use any administrative or criminal issues in certain sectors to discredit a technology as a whole,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “Nuclear power is not an alternative to renewables, but their best ally,” she said. 

On a warm autumn day in Rome, several thousand people gathered for an annual “climate pride” march. They brandished homemade cardboard wind turbines that spun in the breeze. Vincenzo Migliucci, 83, was among them. He worked for more than three decades for ENEL, Italy’s energy corporation, and he’s been anti-nuclear for much of his life. After the Chernobyl accident, he protested outside the nuclear plant under construction in Montalto di Castro almost every day, picketing the workers as they went through the gates.

“The wrath of God happened,” he said, referring to Chernobyl. “And when a true estimate is made, we’ll one day see how many disasters Chernobyl caused.” 

Migliucci is against nuclear power plants of all types — arguing for solar panels instead — and is particularly concerned about what happens to the plants after they become obsolete and must, like the Latina plant, be slowly dismantled over decades. “The decommissioning costs a fortune; the nuclear waste repositories cost a fortune,” he said.

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He began telling me some of the stories that surround Italy’s shuttered nuclear plants. “Near the Garigliano power plant,” he told me, “a child was born with only one eye.” His own eyes widened as he pressed a finger into the middle of my forehead. “Sheep and cattle,” he said, “were born with six legs, or entirely red in colour. It’s not a myth, it’s real.” 

Younger generations of Italians don’t have the same collective impressions around nuclear power, nor around Chernobyl or its aftermath, explained Luca Romano, a young pro-nuclear influencer with a quarter of a million followers on Instagram. Romano makes videos with his partner, Luiza Munteanu, about the advantages of nuclear power. The main problem he runs up against, he says, is that “we have a very low scientific literacy, the level of debate is abysmal.” And culturally, he adds, “Italy has always been a country that looks backwards rather than forwards.”

In May, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Italy’s Lombardy region, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the governor to cooperate on applying nuclear science for development across the region. The choice of Lombardy was significant. It is home to Milan, and is at the heart of Italy’s digital infrastructure. Speckled with no fewer than 60 data centers, with more cropping up, Lombardy has opened itself up to Silicon Valley. Microsoft is investing billions in the area to boost its AI and cloud computing infrastructure. Amazon Web Services has committed to spending over $1 billion to expand its data center operations around Milan.

How northern Italy’s growing AI infrastructure will be powered, though, is still a problem to be solved — one that cuts to the heart of Italy’s energy dependence. Since Giorgia Meloni became prime minister in October 2022 — which coincided with the launch of ChatGPT a month later — the Italian government has been broaching the topic of nuclear power as essential to Italy's energy future. “World population and economic growth will significantly increase energy demand,” Meloni said at a sustainability summit in Abu Dhabi. “Not least due to the growing requirements arising from the development of generative artificial intelligence.” 

Artificial intelligence is a “highly relevant topic,” said Corrado, the communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “As more things run on electricity, the economy goes digital, and data centers and AI expand, demand for steady, low-emissions power will rise. Nuclear energy can help as a reliable, controllable source that works alongside renewables.” 

In August, it emerged that the government had set aside €7.5 million purely for pro-nuclear communication and information campaigns directed at regions where new plants may be built. One focus of the Meloni administration is on the prospect of building small modular reactors, sometimes called “mini nukes.” They are compact fission plants, a fraction of the size of the traditional, cathedral-like nuclear power stations. They have a smaller core, and proponents argue their safety features mean there’s minimal chance of an epic, Chernobyl-scale nuclear disaster, something the government is keen to get across to voters. 

Currently, only China and Russia have these small reactors up and running, but mini nuclear plants have attracted significant attention in Silicon Valley. OpenAI’s Sam Altman was chairman of Oklo, a nuclear startup focused on SMRs, while U.S. nuclear startup Kairos has signed an agreement with Google to develop these reactors to power its data centers. This month, the European Commission unveiled a strategy for rolling out small modular reactors and bringing them “online” by the 2030s.

Soon, Italy may take the first steps towards the reconstruction of a nuclear industry that has been abandoned for decades. “I believe it won't be easy to relaunch nuclear energy,” said Barbara Curli, the Turin historian. “Knowing a little about the history of nuclear power in Italy and its political dimension, I'd be quite skeptical about the possibility of relaunching nuclear power here in Italy — but let’s see.” 

A little under 1,500 miles away, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, among wild boar, birds, and deer, radiation levels in some areas have dipped below around 0.3 microsieverts per hour, lower than background radiation levels in many European cities. Not least the eternal city of Rome.

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The post How Italy’s Chernobyl ghosts might stop a new atomic age appeared first on Coda Story.

China has been the dominant force at COP30. It has made an effective case to be the global leader in the fight to avert the climate crisis in the absence of the United States, which not only did not attend the conference but is in the process of withdrawing altogether from the Paris Agreement of 2015, the international climate treaty. The U.S., which also withdrew from the agreement in Donald Trump’s first term, before rejoining when Joe Biden became president, now stands alongside Iran, Yemen and Libya as the only countries to not be party to the treaty. Country delegations and even climate activists have been loath to criticise China which dominates the climate agenda as the world’s largest emitter but also by far the largest producer of green energy, both in terms of generating it and building the technology to generate it.

The country’s enormous green energy industrial complex is largely located in Xinjiang (or East Turkestan, as advocates for Uyghur independence call it) and Tibet. Both are at the center of renewable energy expansion, lithium and mineral mining, and clean tech supply chains. In Xinjiang, the Chinese media celebrates the efficiency with which the government “transforms deserts into a renewable energy goldmine.” Renewable energies, particularly solar, are critical to Chinese, and presumably global, plans to produce the electricity demanded by AI computing and data centers. China controls over 80% of the solar panel industry supply chain, from raw materials through to finished products. But there is, say government departments in both the U.S. and U.K., credible evidence that modern slavery and forced labor play a large role in China’s dominant clean tech position. 

Tibet meanwhile is a major source for critical minerals, including the lithium that helps China dominate the production of batteries, electric vehicles and copper. China has also approved the construction of the world’s largest hydroelectric dam in Tibet, in a seismically active zone. The effect, claims the Stockholm-based Institute for Security & Development Policy, is that the Tibetan Plateau is “warming at more than twice the global average: glaciers are retreating, permafrost is thawing, grasslands are degrading, and the rhythms of water flow that support life across much of Asia are being disrupted.”    

When approached, I’ve found that major global climate and environmental civil society organizations, nearly all based in the global north, are hesitant or unwilling to speak critically about China and completely silent when it comes to Uyghur and Tibetan human rights. Some Tibetan refugees, based outside of Tibet, have told me they’ve been excluded when trying to engage with climate justice organizations and networks. Last year, when over 1000 Tibetans were arrested after demonstrating against a planned hydropower dam in Dege, there was little international comment. And earlier this year, when the jail sentence of Tibetan environmental activist, A-Nya Sengdran was extended, there was yet more silence. You’d be hard-pressed to find even soft criticism of China from nearly all the major global climate or environmental groups. Perhaps it’s because global organizations like Greenpeace, World Resources Institute, WWF, and Conservation International, have offices or staff in China and speaking out on human rights could lead to Chinese staff being investigated or detained. But even groups with no China presence are largely quiet on rights issues.

At COP30, China basked in a diplomatic victory. André Corrêa do Lago, the Brazilian diplomat in charge of organizing the summit, said “China is coming up with solutions that are for everyone, not just China.” As countries push to agree to a “roadmap” at COP30 to phase out fossil fuels, they will have to turn to China for the technology to switch to renewable sources. This means everyone, including countries that might otherwise see China as a geopolitical rival. For instance, Britain’s Ministry of Defence has warned employees not to discuss sensitive information while they were using Chinese-made electric vehicles. The “MoD needs electric vehicles,” the Global Times were quick to point out, to “hit net zero targets” and so needs China. Britain’s anxiety then, the paper argued, is less about security and more about “China’s technological leadership.”  

“China gets it,” said California governor Gavin Newsom, one of the few American political leaders to go to COP30. “America is toast competitively, if we don't wake up to what the hell they're doing in this space.” He wasn’t talking about the climate crisis. “It’s not about electric power,” Newsom said, “it’s about economic power.” As the U.S. turns its back on the climate crisis, it becomes inevitable that  the world will continue to ignore the human rights and ecological abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang on which a Chinese-fueled global green transition is built.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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The post China’s green energy miracle and a conspiracy of silence appeared first on Coda Story.

Case in point: In June last year, residents in western Azerbaijan began demonstrating against a proposed new reservoir to store toxic waste from a British-owned goldmine near the village of Söyüdlü. The Azeri regime  accused first the West, and then Russia, of organizing the protest. The mine, operated by a UK company called Anglo-Asian Mining, uses cyanide to separate gold from the bedrock, and then dumps the toxic sludge — which locals say is leaching into their soil and rivers. Residents in the area have been complaining of respiratory illnesses from the fumes and say lung cancer rates have increased, too. 

Journalists from one of Azerbaijan’s few independent news outlets, Abzas Media, came to investigate, and began publishing stories about the mine and the environmental damage it was inflicting on the local community. Then, in late 2023 — as COP28 in Dubai was getting underway — the Azeri authorities arrested the outlet’s founder Ulvi Hasanli, followed by four of its reporters. 

Context: Last week, Leyla Mustafayeva, the acting editor-in-chief of Abszas Media – who now lives in exile – spoke at a Climate Disinformation Summit in Copenhagen,’ run by the European Journalism Centre. I joined a disturbed, rapt audience as she described how her colleagues were languishing in pre-trial detention, while their relatives were threatened and their bank accounts frozen. The village itself has been cordoned off by police,with no outsiders,bar state-approved journalists, allowed to enter and talk to residents. 

Mustafayeva told the Copenhagen summit how “COP29 helps Azerbaijan’s government greenwash their fossil fuel exports” while protecting Western corporations. We’ll be watching closely to see how Azerbaijan continues to scrub its image in the run-up to COP. 

Connecting the Dots: If you think this story sounds far away from you, the gold mined in this place could well be in your iPhone, your laptop, or that Tesla you bought to help the planet.  

What to do about it all? Stay informed. That’s the least you can do. Mainstream media no longer have bureaux or correspondents in the South Caucasus, and local journalists are under enormous pressure from the authorities. Working with exiled Azeri journalists, the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories is trying to fill the gap, gathering  40 reporters  to continue investigating the impact of gold mining in Azerbaijan and keep the story alive. 

What to Watch For: nearly 200 countries are due to discuss a new plan to provide financial assistance to developing countries suffering the effects of climate change. But it’s not clear whether the United States, the world’s largest economy, will back the plan, with the summit taking place five days after the American presidential election..  As a result, many leading financial institutions are not bothering to send representatives, according to the FT, because, as one finance executive put it “You only go to the party if everyone is going.”

This piece was originally published as a newsletter. To get our latest stories directly in your mailbox please sign up here.

The post Azerbaijan throws climate journalists in jail ahead of Cop29 appeared first on Coda Story.

Stuart’s absurd round trip is an almost too perfect encapsulation of the U.K. government’s attitude toward the climate crisis. Once seen as a global leader on climate, the U.K. has lurched rightwards under its Conservative government, which has watered down climate targets, launched a “pro-motorist” campaign against cyclists, and passed draconian laws limiting the right to protest in response to direct action from climate activists.

What’s now known as climate populism is on the rise across Western democracies. In the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders, whose PVV party won the largest share of the vote in elections in November, made hostility to carbon emission targets a significant part of his platform. Populist parties in the Nordic countries have flirted with climate denialism. In the U.S., Republicans are lining up to attack President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, an enormous package of green stimuli that GOP presidential primary candidate Nikki Haley has called “a communist manifesto filled with tax hikes and green subsidies that benefit China and make America more dependent on Beijing.” On the more lunatic fringes, conspiracy theorists have tied climate measures to the racist “Great Replacement” theory. 

These populists are exploiting real tensions within the green transition away from fossil fuels. The shift to new models of production and consumption is reopening old conflicts around land, culture, identity and colonialism. Over the past year, Coda Story has worked to understand the compromises and complexities of addressing climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental health, looking at how power, wealth and geopolitics are restructuring the global economy and changing our daily reality on the ground, worldwide.

1. For more than a century, Kiruna, in northern Sweden, has been the capital city of the country’s “land of the future.” Its iron mines fueled the Industrial Revolution, its plains and waterways play host to windfarms and hydroelectric dams. The discovery of rare earths, vital for the electric vehicle industry, have once again placed it on the economic frontier, promising to power Europe’s transition to green energy. But environmentalists and Indigenous groups told Coda’s Isobel Cockerell that the industry behind the green transition is trying to fix the climate in precisely the same way it was destroyed.

2. China dominates the global green tech industry. It makes more batteries, wind turbines and solar panels than any other country in the world. Right now, any green transition will necessarily rely on China, where forced labor and human rights violations targeting ethnic Uyghurs figure prominently in the supply chain. Coda contributor Nithin Coca captured these tensions in a recent piece exploring how these abuses have given conservative politicians a near-perfect reason not to invest in solar energy.

3. Rewilding is an effective, if controversial, tool for rebuilding ecosystems. In the U.K. and Germany, many efforts are tied to ultra-wealthy or hereditary landowners. This past summer, Coda’s Isobel Cockerell got to know a community of unregulated “beaver bombers” who are trying to reintroduce the species at the grassroots level.

4. Populist opposition to climate action in the U.S. often focuses on the idea of lost jobs, bureaucratic red tape and the dismantling of old industries. But in Colorado, the need for silver for high tech industries, including clean energy, is prompting the reopening of long-dormant mines. Contributing writer Sarah Scoles brought us an in-depth look at the anticipated resurgence of the industry, straight from one of Colorado’s oldest silver mines.

5. Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine was poised to be a key player in the global transition to green technology. But as Russia has seized territory in Ukraine’s east and south, the future of the country’s critical raw materials has been thrown into question. Amanda Coakley brought us the story from the ground in Ukraine this past spring.

6. Pollution isn’t confined to the Earth. The number of satellites around the planet has increased sevenfold since 2009, as demand for communications and imaging explodes worldwide. In another immersive feature for Coda, Sarah Scoles showed us how these dynamics have turned Earth’s orbit into a crowded, complex place where accidents are increasingly common, creating a new pollution issue — space trash caused by collision debris.

The post Year in review: On the front lines and fault lines of the climate crisis appeared first on Coda Story.

Three-quarters of a mile below the ground, miners have just detonated a massive quantity of explosives. They’re blasting out iron ore from the bedrock: around six Eiffel Towers’ worth each night.

In this northern Swedish mining town of around 23,000, most people are used to the feeling of reverberating dynamite. But a newcomer will find themselves jolted awake, night after night.

Signs of the ground being hollowed out below are everywhere. Cracks run up the brickwork of houses and apartment buildings, and nearest to the mine, the land seems to undulate. Kiruna is breaking apart.

In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages

Kiruna sits high up in the Swedish Arctic, a starkly beautiful place, surrounded by primeval forests, powerful rivers and rugged mountains. More than a century ago, industrialists named it “the land of the future” because of the rich seams of iron ore that lay beneath the earth. But today, mining has carved out so much of the land that it’s causing deeper, tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust. Unlike the timed nightly rumblings from the mine, these are real seismic tremors that shake the town’s foundations without warning. It is as if Kiruna’s mountain, woken from its slumber, is trying to settle itself. 

Carina Sarri, 73, can barely recognize the landscape today — it has changed so much since her childhood. The Kiruna native now lives in the south of Sweden, but recently returned for a visit.

“Two, three new mountains they have built, from the remains of the mine,” she said, describing the enormous piles of waste rock the miners have dumped, forming artificial mountains that dominate the skyline to the south of the city. She told me about the lake, once a treasured summer spot for swimming and fishing brown trout. The Swedish state-owned mining company, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag or LKAB, began draining the southern end away about a decade ago to stop water seeping into the mine. Now people are afraid that what remains is too contaminated to swim in, and the brown trout have become scarce.

Sarri is of Sami origin, a group that is indigenous to the region. Now retired, she helped found Sweden’s first Sami-language nursery school in Kiruna in the 1980s. Sarri told me she couldn’t help but think about how her hometown might look a century from now when there is nothing left to extract. “How will they leave this land?” she wondered aloud.

It’s an old question in Kiruna, where an iron mine first laid waste to the land in the early 20th century. It forever changed the lives of the Sami people — indigenous reindeer herders, native to northern Scandinavia and northwest Russia, who have lived in these lands for millennia. But today, the question has taken on new meaning.

Across northern Sweden, companies have staked claims here for pioneering new carbon-free ways to mine iron and make steel. They also want to dig up a rich treasure trove of rare earth elements and precious metals to help power our mobile phones and electric cars. In 2021, the region even became the target site for a drastic intervention that could bring down global temperatures but could also cause cataclysmic disaster — a proposal to dim the sun.

Ebba Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and minister for business and energy, believes the region could help reduce the speed at which the world is heating up. “Sweden really has the answer to the million-dollar question of whether it’s possible to have very high set climate goals and then at the same time have a strong economic growth,” Busch told me. “The Swedish answer to that is yes.”

There’s an underlying sense here that swathes of this beautiful, resource-laden land should be turned over to industry, that it must be sacrificed at the altar of a green transition in order to phase out fossil fuels. But for local residents, the tradeoffs are more complex than simply embracing a more sustainable future. Environmentalists, Indigenous groups and academics say that what politicians and energy executives are really advocating for is a technofix for the climate crisis: simply trading out one extractive industry for another without challenging the systems that got us here in the first place. And it could bring untold collateral damage upon one of nature’s last refuges in Europe, alongside the Sami, the region’s last Indigenous culture.

In reporting this story, I met climate scientists, mining executives, Sami leaders and Swedish politicians. Among them, I found no absolute heroes or true villains. Everyone was searingly aware that the climate is in danger, but each person had drastically different ideas about how to fix it. Some politicians, like Busch, say the solutions to the climate crisis are in the ground, ready to be mined, while the Sami believe the answers have always existed in the quiet teachings of the natural world. This far-flung northern region is a crossroads of technologies, ideologies and ambitions for the planet. Kiruna is, as one scholar put it, “a microcosmos, like a magnifying glass under which you see all the problems of the world.”

This past October, I went to the mine myself. From a platform three-quarters of a mile below ground, I watched as an electrified train approached, moving autonomously along the tracks and letting out a shrill whistle. Carriages passed by filled with black rocks — some like gravel, some as big as watermelons. When they reached the loading shaft, the bottom of the carriage flew open and pieces of iron ore fell into the abyss with a screech and a roar. From there, my guide explained, they would be crushed, turned into pellets and eventually melted down into steel.

Anders Lindberg, a spokesman for LKAB, Sweden’s state-owned mining company, drove me down into the Kiruna mine in a company-owned four-wheel drive vehicle. Cheerful, bespectacled and passionate about mining, he kept up a constant stream of chatter as we rolled through the unfathomable warren of underground tunnels, caverns and railways. As we approached 4,000 feet below ground, the mine’s deepest level, my ears started to pop and it got hotter — we were getting closer to the Earth’s core.

“Whatever you do in your daily life, it has started in the mine,” he said as his headlights flashed across the roughly hewn rock of the tunnel wall. “The tools you use, the chair you’re sitting on, the bike you’re riding on your way to work. The pens you’re writing with, the computer, your mobile phone. It has all started in the mine.” 

From Kiruna, the iron is taken by train to ports in Norway and Sweden, where it is refined into steel or shipped to LKAB’s clients. At least 80% of iron ore in Europe comes from LKAB’s mines. The company says its products can be found in mobile phones, bikes, strollers, electric cars, roads and buildings all over the world.

When Lindberg took me to see some of the miners, I expected pickaxes and dusty faces, but instead I found men and women sitting in state-of-the-art underground offices — with computer screens, water coolers and even a canteen. It turns out that a lot of the mining now happens remotely. I watched as one woman, Ingela, picked up piles of rock and moved them using joysticks and an Xbox controller, before a huge curved screen.

Most iron mining and steelmaking today is otherwise not very modern: The pelleting, refining and smelting processes are typically powered by fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Globally, the steel industry is responsible for about 8% of carbon emissions. But LKAB says they can transform the whole process from mine to end-product by using electricity generated by water and wind instead.

Ahead of COP 28 — the global climate conference taking place this week in Dubai — the UN warned that we’re on track for global temperatures to rise 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. The UN estimates that an average of 21.5 million people have been displaced by climate disasters each year since 2008. Without drastic changes in the way we live, we'll see more and more hellish weather events, deadly heat waves, forest fires, drastic flooding and millions more forced to leave their homes — the world as we know it will be even further transformed.

We’re already living through these consequences, but stopping the worst effects will require overhauling nearly every industry. We must reduce our carbon emissions. But the question of how to do that hangs heavily in the Arctic air.

Until the last decade, Sweden’s northernmost county — Norrbotten, home to Kiruna — wasn’t such an exciting place. Unemployment levels were among the highest in the country, and people were moving down to Stockholm in search of work. But a new chapter began when Facebook came to town.

In 2011, Meta (then Facebook) began building an enormous data center in Lulea, a small city on the Baltic coast, about four hours south of Kiruna. Run on hydropower and cooled naturally by the frigid Arctic air, the data center called attention to northern Sweden’s potential as a place with an abundance of renewable energy. More server farms began setting up shop and wind farms were erected in the vast forestland. Within a few years, industry leaders and politicians spoke of the area’s potential to help revamp age-old, carbon-heavy steel production into new eco-friendly processes. Meanwhile, Kiruna’s space center — a rocket range and satellite station — was becoming an important European hub for monitoring climate change and space weather.

Signs of this new industry of sustainability — and its profits —  are everywhere now: LED screens on the university campus and at the airport invite people to “become the green transition.” Someone handed me a newspaper that proclaimed northern Sweden’s green transition will “save the world.”

The need for a change in the way we live and treat the Earth is also plain to see here. Every winter feels a little shorter than the last. The snow, once soft and easy for animals to dig through to reach food beneath, is now melting and refreezing as the temperature fluctuates unpredictably. The region’s reindeer are moving about ever more erratically, in constant search of food.

Alongside the “land of the future,” this place has another alias — “Europe’s last remaining wilderness.” There’s truth to the name: These vast boreal forests are home to the brown bear, golden eagle, Arctic fox, lynx, wolf and beaver. It’s one of the least inhabited places in Europe. But the Sami don’t like the term. For them, this isn’t a wilderness, and it isn’t empty. The land is replete with cultural heritage, with the traces of thousands of years of living alongside nature, herding reindeer, fishing, hunting and storytelling. 

“If you read a map now, you can see Sami names all over — every mountain, every lake, every river — all have Sami names. It’s our ancestors’ land,” said Anna Sarri, Carina Sarri’s cousin who runs a nature tourism business in a village outside Kiruna and comes from a long line of reindeer herders. “It’s a culture.”

In January of this year, the city of Kiruna laid out a lavish welcome for the European Commission to celebrate the start of Sweden’s six-month leadership of the Council of the European Union. Donning a blue LKAB hard hat and protective clothing, Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, gave a speech inside the belly of the mine to mark the occasion.

“I don’t know what comes to mind when you think of Sweden. Some of you might think of the Swedish musical miracle like ABBA, Roxette or Swedish House Mafia. Maybe you’re thinking of Astrid Lindgren or those red-painted wooden houses. Untamed wilderness,” Busch said with a smile. “But I’d like to add another entry to that list. LKAB, the Swedish mines.”

She went on to announce that in Kiruna, just north of where LKAB is currently mining, is a second enormous underground deposit of metals, containing not only iron, but also Europe's largest quantity of rare earth metals. This second deposit, she said, would be a treasure trove of much-needed materials for making magnets that power electric car engines and help convert motion into electricity in wind turbines.

Opening up a sister mine — to dig for these valuable minerals —  would be crucial, she said, for Europe’s greener, profitable future. It would wean Europe off dependence on China’s rare earth elements and help reduce dependence on fossil fuels worldwide. “Sweden is literally a goldmine,” Busch told reporters.

Anna Sarri was in her village when she first heard the news. Announcing the deposit without consulting the Sami first, and doing it on the grandest possible scale was a “dirty trick,” she said. In reality, the mining company has known about the deposit for over a century. They simply hadn’t categorized or publicly registered its geological makeup in detail until now. But the international media immediately bought the political calculus, hailing the deposit as a new “discovery.” The fanfare suddenly made it a very difficult thing for the Sami — or anyone else — to oppose the opening of a new mine. Doing so would mean being on the wrong side of the climate change debate.

“It’s a way of working which always puts the reindeer herding society in a situation where you are almost forced to say yes, and if you don't, you are an enemy to society,” said Nils Johan Labba, a Sami politician who I met in Anna Sarri’s village.

The mining company says that according to geological reporting standards, it had to make a large public announcement so all parties were notified at once.

Talk of untapped treasures lying beneath the earth in northern Sweden is nothing new, especially to Indigenous people like Sarri and Labba. In the early 20th century, a eugenicist named Herman Lundborg traveled to Kiruna to meet the Sami and classify them. He measured their skulls and photographed people naked, a project that was privately backed by the founder of Kiruna’s mine and the LKAB mining company. In 1919, Lundborg wrote that there were “dormant millions” in profits underground in northern Sweden and that because the Sami — who he believed to be racially inferior — did not extract those resources, they should “give way to clean Swedish [industrial] interests.” At the time, Lundborg’s influence served as the backdrop for the state’s displacement of Sami communities during the industrialization of the north in the early 20th century. Racial ideology — and assimilation policies forced on the Sami people — painted Sami traditions and philosophy around land use as incompatible with Sweden’s prosperity.

Sami politicians and community leaders told me that to them, the green transition feels like a continuation of what they have experienced for centuries: more extraction, more sacrifice of their land. The undeniable threats of climate change on one hand and the constant acquisition of land by mining companies on the other, feel like an existential Catch-22; they can lose their land to green development, lose it to climate change or, potentially, lose it to both.

But these rare earth metals are here. And they could help human beings keep using the tools and technologies we’ve come to depend on, without doing quite so much harm to the planet. Should the Sami have to give up their way of life to make way for these mines — when they had little to do with destroying the climate in the first place? I put the question to LKAB’s Lindberg.

“You cannot look at the Sami population and say, ‘They’re a small group that’s not part of the society,’” he said. “We have Samis working in the mine. Reindeer herders are using motorcycles, snowmobiles, helicopters, drones, mobile phones. They also need these metals. They are also using fossil fuels, being part of the climate change.”

The mineral-rich land here may contain real answers to the climate crisis. But there’s also money to be made from these rare earth metals — and a lot of it.

The state-owned mining company has not yet put a price on how much that second deposit in Kiruna’s potential sister mine — the one announced during the European Commission visit in January — might be worth. Along with 700 million tons of iron ore, LKAB believes the new deposit contains about 1.3 million tons of rare earth elements. One metric ton of neodymium, one of the elements found in the deposit used for powerful magnets and electronics, is currently priced at around $70,000. The total profits here — of iron for traditional industrial use alongside valuable mining byproducts in the form of rare earth metals that go into our phones and electric vehicles — could be astronomical.

Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, has called the newly announced Kiruna deposit as potentially fortune-changing for Sweden’s economic future as Norway’s discovery of offshore oil in the late 1960s, which led to it becoming a top global exporter of crude oil. 

But some locals are skeptical about what all this mining is really for and who really stands to gain from it. At a pub in Lulea, where locals were competing in a Swedish-style pub quiz over plates of meatballs and lingonberries, I met workers who had just flown in to lay fiber optic cable in the Baltic Sea. They chuckled when I mentioned the green transition. “Ask the companies how much electricity it will need!” one of them said.

It is a good question. LKAB, along with its partners — a steelmaking and hydropower company — is currently testing out a new way of making steel, which leaves behind the traditional blast furnace but requires a phenomenal amount of electricity. How much exactly? “We would need approximately 70 terawatt hours of electricity a year,” said LKAB’s Lindberg. He explained this would amount to roughly half the electricity that all of Sweden’s population of 10 million consumes in a year.

How could that much electricity be generated here in a planet-friendly way? Imagine 3,000 new wind turbines. That’s what must be built, according to Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson, Sweden’s former minister for business who now advises SSAB, the steelmaking company partnering with LKAB on their new fossil-free steel venture. Thorwaldsson is all for it, because the consequences of not doing it, he said, are too grave to think about. “It must, must work,” Thorwaldsson said. “There are no jobs on a dead planet.”

But wind farms come with issues of their own. “They talk about wind power,” said Johan Sandström, a mining expert at the Lulea Institute of Technology. “OK, some wind turbines might end up in the sea, but others must be on land. Whose land?"

For people in northern Sweden, this is the real million-dollar question. And it’s a hard one to raise in a place like Lulea — where almost everyone is somehow connected to the town’s industry and technology sectors. Sandström described an emerging “culture of silence” around challenging the new narrative of the green transition.

“As soon as you ask a question about it, you’re categorized as being against progress and sustainability,” said Sandström. “It’s like a silent consensus that we need to view this as a positive thing, period. And I think that's unfortunate.”

Henrik Blind, councilor of the nearby town of Jokkmokk, said he feels the green transition has been “hijacked by the industry” that has continued to take away and exploit Indigenous land, but this time with a climate-saving label slapped on top. When I met Tor Lennart Tuorda, a Sami photographer who works as an archivist at the Sami museum, he put it more bluntly.

“It’s only shit talk, this green transition,” he said. “It’s only a way to extract even more. You can call it green colonialism instead. That’s more true.”

Mining for the green transition will bring some harm to the land and the people who live on it. But its champions carry a healthy dose of realism about what drives the global economy and how our demands for everything from ballpoint pens to laptops affect the climate. They are pushing for more sustainable ways for us to keep living as we do.

Then, there’s a more radical crowd: scientists who argue that all options must be on the table, that we may need to look beyond the Earth itself to slow down climate change. They too found their way to Kiruna.

In 2021, a group of researchers at Harvard University wanted to study whether humans could one day bring down the Earth’s rising temperatures by dimming light from the sun. They predicted that if they could send a burst of mineral dust into the atmosphere, it would act like millions of tiny mirrors high in the sky, scattering sunlight back into space and potentially lowering temperatures worldwide.

The group set their sights on Esrange, the Swedish Space Corporation’s rocket launch site and space base, a 40-minute drive east of Kiruna. The sparsely populated Arctic landscape would make it an ideal testing ground.

The first step would be to come to Esrange, where they could test out flying a special mechanical balloon about 12 miles overhead. If successful, the balloon could one day be used to sprinkle the sky with those tiny mirrors.

One of the scientists on the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx for short, is David Keith, who is now a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. He told me that the first goal was simply to test the balloon, but the longer-term goal was “to do some stratospheric science, with a focus on solar geoengineering.”

Dubbed “sunscreen for the Earth,” solar geoengineering is one of the most controversial types of climate science out there today. If it works, it could potentially reduce global temperatures and save the planet from the worst ravages of climate change. But there are huge, potentially catastrophic, risks involved. Scientists say a mistake in the process could disrupt our climate system — even erode the ozone layer — and severely impact global drought and flooding patterns.

Nevertheless, the stage was set for the SCoPEx team to come to Sweden. They even announced their plans to the media. But then word reached Åsa Larsson Blind, who lives northeast of Kiruna and is vice president of the nonprofit Saami Council, a cross-border rights group that spans the Sami region.

Larsson Blind was startled by what she saw as the mindset of geoengineering — the idea that humans might one day be able to tweak the Earth’s climate to suit our own ends. 

“Solar geoengineering is kind of the ultimate colonization,” she told me. “Not only of nature and the Earth, but also the atmosphere. Treating the Earth as machinery and saying that we’re not just entitled to control the Earth itself, we will control the whole atmosphere is to take it a step further.”

The Saami Council launched a high-profile campaign opposing the project, releasing a video that challenged not only the proposed experiment, but called for a complete global ban on geoengineering research. The video featured Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaking alongside Larsson Blind, other Indigenous leaders, scientists and environmentalists who called geoengineering “pollution for a pollution problem” and a “false solution” to climate change.

In his work, Keith talks about a stark future where the effects of climate change get so bad that it could become urgent to research geoengineering as a potential solution. He argues that it is important to understand the risks while we still have time to consider them soberly, rather than in some future climate emergency. “The purpose of research,” he told me, “is to provide more information about how well these technologies might work and what their risks are.” But after the Saami Council campaign, the Swedish Space Corporation reneged on its commitment to the SCoPEx team — the balloon launch was called off. 

Keith recalled Space Corporation officials telling the group that “there were enough different disputes over mining and other topics in Sami land; that from the point of view of the Swedish government, they just didn't want one more irritation.”

“I think the Swedish government failed kind of abysmally on that score,” he said. “It is entirely legitimate for the Sami to oppose experiments or whole research in general,” Keith told me. “But their right to do so needs to be balanced against the rights of people in poor, hot countries.” He added that in his experience, people were more interested in geoengineering in the Global South.

Mattias Forsberg, a representative from the Esrange Space Center, said that it was not only opposition from the Sami that caused them to cancel the project. “Our core mission as a company, our reason for being in business, is to serve the sustainable development of humanity and our modern societies,” Forsberg said. “Since it quickly became clear that this whole topic around the SCoPEx project needed to be discussed more widely internationally before any related mission could be conducted, we took the decision to cancel our engagements with the project.”

I talked about the scuttled geoengineering project with Henrik Blind, the Sami politician in Jokkmokk. For him, the shutdown of SCoPEx’s balloon test in Kiruna — and the debate it sparked — seemed to capture the clash between nature-based solutions and techno-fixes to climate change.

“This is an example of how stupid it is, that we as one creature, among millions of creatures, think we can be larger than nature. It’s something that makes me laugh,” he said. “It isn’t the sun’s fault, and it isn’t the planet’s fault, that our climate is going where it’s going.”

We met by a frozen lake a few minutes’ drive from Blind’s office at city hall. He glided up to our meeting place in a pristine white Tesla, the tires squeaking on the snow. Dressed in a pink cashmere hat and bright red knitted mittens, he walked with a slight bounce, making quick progress around the lake.

Dusk was drawing in — it was October, and the nights were getting longer. Blind gestured at the twilight stillness around us, the sky turning the color of watery ink. “We call it the blue hour,” he said with a smile.

Jokkmokk lies just on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where the sun only just manages to peep over the horizon during winter. People in this part of the world have a singular relationship with the sun. It’s something that made the concept of solar geoengineering — the idea we can blunt the strength of the sun’s rays — feel particularly unsettling for Blind.

We talked about the strange reality of living mostly in the darkness for six months of the year, and with abundant light for the other six. “Of course it’s dark, but dark is also light in some way,” Blind said. “The light needs the darkness, to get the contrast.”

On the subject of contrasts, I asked Blind about the Tesla. Electric cars depend on metals and minerals often extracted in environmentally destructive conditions. “For me, it’s showing how hard it is to be a modern person. You want to do the right thing, but still, you are harming nature in one way or another,” he said. “It’s a conflict in the head. I know that an electric car has a lot of minerals in it, and it’s causing trouble in other places.”

There is trouble — plenty of trouble — in other places. In the fight for a more sustainable future, climate campaigners say those in power are trying to fix the climate in precisely the same way they destroyed it. Those least responsible for climate change are forced to relinquish their land — and in some places, even their lives — in the race to fix the damage. 

In Xinjiang, China, the Uyghur people are being forced to work in solar panel factories while millions more are surveilled, imprisoned and “re-educated” so China can consolidate control over the region’s vast resources of rare earth elements and precious metals. In Mexico, Indigenous communities say their lives and livelihoods are being threatened by wind farm company land grabs. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt mines providing 70% of the world’s supply for rechargeable batteries in cars and phones are expanding rapidly, mines run on trafficked child labor, with spartan conditions as people scrape out the metal by hand using pickaxes and shovels.

It’s a far cry from the Kiruna iron mine, which LKAB dubs the “most modern iron mine in the world.” Victoire Kabwika, a mining technician from the DRC, now works here in LKAB’s mine. I met Kabwika and his wife Angel as they came out of Sunday service at Kiruna’s church, blinking in the slanting Arctic sunlight. He too spoke of contrasts. To Kabwika, mining in Sweden is night and day compared to back home. 

“In Congo, people are working with soldiers around. And weapons. Children are working. It's not good,” he told me. Mining in the DRC to fuel the green transition is also ravaging the landscape, but there, people regularly pay for it with their lives. More than 7,000 miles south of Kiruna, the Kolwezi mine is also causing nearby houses to crack apart due to the excavation below them. But there, soldiers are forcing people to leave their homes, marking them with red Xs and burning them down. Amnesty International found they’d even torched some homes with families still inside.

All over town in Kiruna, signs proclaim that the company has “secured mineral assets that guarantee the future for ourselves and our region beyond 2060.” If the new sister mine for iron and rare earth elements — just north of the current mine — is allowed to open, “it will mean my life, because it's going to extend the time for exploration,” said Kabwika. It would mean more jobs in the region, and that he could likely stay in his job here indefinitely.

For the Sami collective that currently herds reindeer here, it would mean yet another loss of land. And for everyone in town, it could mean more earthquakes.

At 3:11 a.m. on May 18, 2020, a 4.9-magnitude earthquake shook Kiruna, triggered by ongoing mining activity. 

“I was in my bed,” said Zebastian Bohman, 51, who has lived in Kiruna for a decade. He remembers how his apartment shuddered: paintings fell off the walls and glasses tumbled from kitchen cupboards. His thoughts immediately turned to the mine: “Who’s down there? Who’s on the shift? You start to call.”

No one was killed. But the “minequake” was more evidence of how dangerously unstable the land had become — and would continue to grow if the mining company kept digging. The town is ever so slowly being pulled towards the mine, like a tablecloth dragged across a table set for breakfast. Even before “the big one,” as locals now call it, plans were made to move Kiruna for precisely this reason.

So the mining company drew a big, red line down the middle of the town. Everyone on one side, around 6,000 homes, would have to move around two miles to the east, and the mining company would pay the cost — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of the “old town’s” buildings are being bulldozed, replaced by new buildings in a “new town” center. But homes built in the traditional Swedish style — with painted clapboard and sloping, copper roofs — are being moved one by one, loaded onto trailers in their entirety and relocated. Residents often walk behind the houses, keeping a sort of slow-moving vigil.

In 2025 the city will move its immense Lutheran church. Made of wood, with soaring stained glass windows that bathe the congregation in Arctic sunlight, the architect constructed its pitched triangular shape to look like a Sami tent. The town will need to widen the road and demolish a railway viaduct to finish the job.

Since summer, the old town has largely emptied out. The land that’s closest to the mine has been turned into a kind of memory park, for the next few years at least, while the ground is still stable enough to be safe. It’s a place where people can go to process the loss of Kiruna as it was

“People are grieving, mourning the old city,” Bohman told me. “I would think it will take a generation. They love their old city and the new one is not in their heart yet.” Alongside his wife Cecilia, Bohman runs a food truck just outside the mine where they serve up reindeer kebabs to miners, businessmen, Kiruna’s teenagers and anyone else passing by. In between shifts, Zebastian Bohman took me to his old apartment building, where he showed me a series of cracks, big and small, running up through the block from the basement.

Bohman and his wife moved out of the apartment last year, into their newly allotted home. They were pleased with the trade and relieved to be out of their old place, away from the booming, the juddering and constant worry about seismic activity.

But a month after their move, around the holidays last year, the Bohmans were sitting on the sofa late one evening watching television, when they felt it. That familiar, sickening jolt: a mini-earthquake. The couple looked at each other as their new house shuddered around them. When the shaking stopped, they could do nothing but laugh. “We realized we were fucked,” Zebastian Bohman said with a chuckle and a shrug. “That's what we realized. This is not the end. This is not a home forever.”

The mining company says they don’t foresee the new town having to move again. But the Bohmans believed, in that moment, that this wouldn’t be the last time.

As we imagine our future on this planet, we can all expect epic upheaval in the places we call home. But the stakes of change will be much higher for some than for others. 

For people who are already seeing the worst of the climate crisis, the costs are extraordinary: their homes, their land, their lives. For those industrialists at the top of global supply chains, the fight to kick humanity’s fossil fuel habit will force a change in the source and size of their profits.

And for the people of Kiruna, the gains and the losses are as immense as the landscape itself. The fragility of this reality is felt every night, for now and for the foreseeable future, as the earth continues to shake.

The post In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages appeared first on Coda Story.

Together, the U.S. and China are responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and both countries need to take action to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, as Newsom argued on his trip. One technology that most scientists agree will make a meaningful difference for the climate is solar panels. U.S. appetite for photovoltaics is growing, and although it’s the world's biggest polluter, China happens to dominate the global supply chain for solar panels: Chinese companies manufacture panels more efficiently and at greater scale than suppliers in other countries, and they sell them at rock-bottom prices.

But there’s a big problem at the start of the supply chain. Part of what makes China’s solar industry so prolific is that it is rooted in China’s Xinjiang province, home to a vast system of forced labor in detention camps and prisons where an estimated 1-2 million ethnic Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups are held against their will. There is strong evidence that Uyghurs in Xinjiang live in conditions akin to slavery. Key components of solar energy, in other words, are being brought to much of the world by the victims of what U.S. authorities call an ongoing genocide.

None of this material officially lands in the U.S., owing to the 2022 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a federal regulation that restricts imports of any goods from Xinjiang — the only law of its kind among the world’s biggest economies. Still, the topic of solar panel production — a critical weapon in today's arsenal of climate action — is intrinsically tangled up with Uyghur forced labor. Yet Newsom made no mention of the Uyghurs on his recent China tour, a silence that has become all too common among left-wing and climate advocacy groups. At the same time, the Uyghur plight has captured a certain element of the right-wing political zeitgeist in the U.S. for reasons that are more complicated than one might expect: The Uyghur genocide is a near-perfect reason not to invest in solar energy, a prime talking point for right-wing media personalities and Republican lawmakers known for promoting climate skepticism and disinformation.

Uyghur forced labor is also unlikely to have come up when U.S. climate envoy John Kerry met with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua in California last week. Their talks, Kerry later told delegates at a conference in Singapore, led “to some very solid understandings and agreements” in preparation for the upcoming COP28, the United Nations climate summit that begins in Dubai on November 30. The timing of the talks suggests that the U.S. acknowledges that Chinese dominance of the solar industry is unlikely to be challenged anytime soon. In the first half of 2023, Chinese exports of solar panels grew by 34% worldwide, and China already controls 80% of the global market share. 

Climate scientists say that we have perhaps only a few years left to reduce emissions and avoid a runaway greenhouse gas scenario, which could lead to rapid sea-level rise, mass desertification and potentially billions of climate refugees. Extreme weather events fueled by the changing climate are becoming more frequent and their impacts more devastating. Canada saw 18 million hectares of forest burn this year, emitting a haze that had people from Maine to Virginia donning KN95s just to walk outside. Last year in Pakistan, historic floods covered one-third of the country.  

“The lack of progress on emissions reduction means that we can be ever more certain that the window for keeping warming to safe levels is rapidly closing,” said Robin Lamboll, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, in a recent press statement.

There is an urgent need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, and solar power is seen as an essential part of how to do this — it’s affordable and can be placed nearly anywhere. Without a rapid increase in the amount of solar installations around the world, limiting climate change might be impossible.

But right now, a huge proportion of solar installations are a product of Uyghur forced labor. A 2021 report from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. highlighted the solar industry’s dependency on materials from Xinjiang, estimating that 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon come from the region. The report detailed how Uyghurs and other minorities were made to live in camps that are “surrounded by razor-wire fences, iron gates, and security cameras, and are monitored by police or additional security.” Factories are located within the camps, and Uyghurs cannot leave voluntarily. And there is evidence that workers are unpaid. One former camp detainee, Gulzira Auelhan, told Canadian journalists that she was regularly shocked with a stun gun and subjected to injections of unknown substances. She felt she was treated “like a slave.”

For Uyghurs in exile, what is happening is clear — a genocide that aims to eliminate the Uyghur language, culture and identity and turn their homeland into another Chinese region. Mosques and old Uyghur neighborhoods are being replaced by hotels and high-rise apartments and populated by members of China’s dominant ethnic group: the Han Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is now the primary language taught in schools. “Putting it bluntly, the Uyghur genocide is more real and immediate than climate change,” says Arslan Hidayat, a Uyghur Australian program director at the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs. He believes that stories like Auelhan’s barely scratch the surface of what’s happening. 

“It’s still not widely known that Uyghur forced labor is used in the supply chain of solar panels,” said Hidayat.

Seaver Wang is a climate director at the California-based Breakthrough Institute, which published another report on the connections between Xinjiang and solar energy last year. Wang hoped the wave of research on the issue would be a wake-up call for the industry and for climate and energy nonprofits. But the reaction has been mixed at best. “Labor and some industry groups were very eager to talk about the issue,” he said. “But other constituencies, like solar developers and areas of the climate advocacy movement, who are really prioritizing deployment and affordability, didn’t want to rock the boat.”

Indeed, major environmentalists and climate groups have said little about the origins of so much of the world’s solar energy technology, possibly out of fear of inadvertently harming the expansion of clean energy. Recent reports on solar in China from international organizations including Ember, Global Energy Monitor and Climate Energy Finance make no mention of the solar industry’s links to Xinjiang. 

The same is true for major American nonprofits. Even as they strongly support the expansion of solar, Sierra Club, 350.org, NRDC, Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation make no mention of Uyghur forced labor on their websites or social media. None agreed to speak to me for this story. 

Only the Union of Concerned Scientists mentions issues related to Uyghur forced labor on their website and agreed to be interviewed for this story. “UCS strongly advocates for justice and fairness to be centered in all our climate solutions,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program, via email. “The clean energy economy we are striving to build should not replicate the human rights, environmental and social harms of the fossil fuel based economy.” Cleetus declined to comment on the decisions of its peer organizations not to acknowledge the issue.

Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at California’s San José State University, has a theory about why so many climate advocates and groups hesitate to speak on Uyghur forced labor. “It’s an area that people are uncomfortable talking about because they fear it undermines the objectives of getting more solar,” said Mulvaney. “It's almost as if people are concerned that any information about solar that could be interpreted as a negative could be amplified through the same networks that are doing climate disinformation.”

To wit, U.S. think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute, both heavily right-leaning, have released dozens of blog posts, op-eds and interviews focusing on Uyghur forced labor. These groups are also notorious hubs of climate disinformation.

One headline from a Heartland Institute blog post warned that “China’s Slave Labor, Coal-Fired, Mass-Subsidized Solar Panels Dominate the Planet.” An article on far-right news site Breitbart cautioned that the clean energy clauses in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act “may fund China’s Uyghur slavery.” Further amplifying the focus on Uyghur forced labor in solar are right-wing media outlets like Daily Signal and Newsmax and the pseudo-educational organization PraegerU.

Alongside mentions of Uyghur forced labor in the solar industry, one typically finds far less factual claims — that the emissions generated throughout the life cycle of solar panels are as bad as fossil fuels, that climate change is not responsible for recent extreme weather events, or that “net zero” and socially responsible investment trends are insider tactics meant to weaken the American economy. Some even push political disinformation. There are claims that President Joe Biden is pro-solar because he has received donations from China or because his son, Hunter Biden, has links to China — and that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is benefiting personally due to his investments in Chinese solar. 

Organizations like these are spreading climate skepticism, minimizing the threat of climate change, and casting doubt on its links to extreme weather events. This has also been the refrain from elected officials like Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, sponsor of the Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act, a bill that would further prohibit federal funds from being used to buy solar components from Xinjiang.

Another common argument holds that domestic fossil fuel production is better for the economy than importing solar from China. Support for fossil fuels does seem to be a common link across the groups and political figures focused on the issue. In fact, politicians speaking out about Uyghur forced labor in solar are among the top recipients of political donations from the fossil fuel industry. According to data from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan project that tracks political spending, Scott alongside two cosponsors of his Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act — Senators Marco Rubio and John Kennedy — accepted more contributions from the oil and gas industries than almost all other U.S. senators in 2022.

The U.S. is not the only country where this kind of narrative has found a home. Earlier this year, Taishi Sugiyama, who directs research at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, agitated on the issue after officials in Tokyo announced a plan to mandate solar panels on all newly constructed homes in the city. Like conservatives in the U.S., Sugiyama cited the plight of the Uyghurs as a primary reason to divest from solar. But Sugiyama’s think tank is a well known source of climate disinformation in Japan.

“Sugiyama is basically using absolutely any argument he can, real or false, in order to pursue what he’s aiming for in terms of his anti-climate objectives,” said James Lorenz, the executive director of Actions Speak Louder, a corporate accountability nonprofit focused on the climate. Some of Sugiyama’s allies have close links to Japanese companies importing coal, natural gas and petroleum from abroad. Two of the institute’s board members represent Sumitomo and JICDEC, both major importers of fossil fuels in Japan.

Early reports about China’s crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs, including the detention of thousands of people as part of a massive "political reeducation" program, emerged in 2017. Dustin Mulvaney, the environmental studies professor, thinks that would have been the optimal time to act. “Had the industry had that traceability in place back then, had they had this conversation back then, they might not find themselves in this situation today,” he said.

But now, six years later, both the climate and the Uyghur human rights crisis have worsened. Implicit in the silence from many climate and environmentalists is the idea that, in order to address climate change, the Uyghur cause may have to be sacrificed. Mulvaney feels that environmental advocates have hesitated to criticize solar or bring up forced labor issues for fear of playing into anti-solar messaging.

Mulvaney has personally experienced this, seeing his critiques being misquoted in right-wing media. “But I don't think it works that way. I think people are a little too guarded in protecting solar from criticism.”

To the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang, being forced to choose between reclaiming human rights in Xinjiang and ramping up clean energy quickly enough to address climate change presents a false dichotomy. 

“We’re willing to have open and frank conversations around responsible sourcing everywhere but China,” said Wang. “I recognize that there are climate versus human rights trade-offs, but let’s talk about those trade-offs rather than just prioritizing climate, because it all factors into equity at the end.”

For Uyghurs like Hidayat, who are used to being ignored by not only climate activists but also by progressive politicians, he’s open to any support and is glad to see people like Rick Scott proposing stronger regulations on solar imports from China, even if their motives are less than pure. At the same time, Hidayat is wary that they might be using the Uyghur crisis for their own political benefits, and would welcome more actions from environmentalists. 

“There is nothing clean about using solar panels linked to Uyghur forced labor,” said Hidayat. Instead, he says there needs to be a “change in the definition of what clean energy is. The whole supply chain, from A to Z, the raw materials all the way to its installation, has to be free of human rights abuses for it to actually be defined as green, clean tech.”

How do we get there? Wang wants to see a frank discussion, rather than the silence or politicization that has dominated the debate so far. 

“I do think that we could balance clean energy deployment, meet climate ambitions and address human rights in Xinjiang,” said Wang. “But I know it won't be easy,” he said. “It's not an unmitigated win-win.”

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It was February 2009, and a disaster was about to occur 500 miles above Siberia: A dead Russian satellite, Cosmos-2251, was on a direct collision course with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, an American company.

The orbits of the two wrapped around the globe, their paths forming a giant X. As they approached one another, it would have been clear to anyone watching that they were headed for exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. 

But no one was watching. The satellites crashed into each other, at a relative speed of more than 22,000 miles per hour.

They immediately broke into thousands of pieces.

Lisa Ruth Rand was watching the news of the dramatic breakup just as she was beginning graduate school. When the two spacecraft crashed, they formed two streams of debris that continued along the orbital paths they’d once traveled. It made Rand, who today works as an historian of technology at the California Institute of Technology, realize that Earthlings only have limited dominion over this part of the universe. 

“Human beings, yes, can design and control objects to a certain extent,” Rand told me. “Ultimately, nature plays a role as well.”

And there nature was, slinging brand new space trash around the planet.

Either Russia or the U.S. could have worked a little harder to prevent the collision: Both countries did some satellite tracking and collision warning, but the pending Cosmos-Iridium doom wasn’t on their radar.

The debris that the Cosmos-Iridium crash left in its wake has posed potential collision risks for other satellites ever since. And that garbage has plenty of company. For decades, countries and companies have launched satellites, let them live out their useful lives and then kept them in orbit long after they were “dead,” or inactive. They’ve also left behind spent rocket bodies and whirling debris from other crashes past. In low Earth orbit — the part of space where satellites are closest to the Earth itself — accumulating debris poses a crash risk but cannot, on its own, get out of the way. Alongside it are thousands of live satellites that must avoid both the debris and one another.

And the issue is only going to get worse. On August 23, an Indian spacecraft became the first to land on the moon’s south pole region. Just days before, a Russian craft attempting a similar feat crashed into the moon’s surface. The two events herald the start of a new space race, which brings with it the threat of adding even more space junk into the mix.

Just as car accidents are more likely to happen at rush hour, space collisions are bound to increase as active satellite and spacecraft traffic ramps up, littering the celestial road with trash. Crashes are more likely than ever today because there are more spacecraft in the near orbits. And even though most of us can’t see it, the picture up there isn’t pretty.

The number of active satellites in Earth’s orbit has jumped from around 1,000 in 2009, when the Cosmos-Iridium crash occurred, to nearly 7,000, thanks to satellite “constellations”: sets of dozens, hundreds or thousands of small spacecraft that work together to perform a single task. About 4,000 of the satellites currently in orbit are in constellations run by Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

When you’re on Earth’s surface, you reap the rewards of satellite infrastructure without thinking too much about what’s going on above you. But if that infrastructure, or parts of it, stopped functioning, you’d think about it a lot.

Imagine if GPS went down. Though GPS satellites don’t sit in the most crowded orbits where the big constellations are, their part of space nevertheless has its own share of crash risk, and a cascading set of events could cause them to malfunction. Without a live navigation system, aircraft couldn’t get from place to place. Weapons systems couldn’t aim at targets. Drones wouldn’t know where they were or where to go. You couldn’t find your way to the grocery store in a different neighborhood or use Tinder in any neighborhood. GPS satellites also act as ultra-precise clocks, sending out timing signals that industries across the world rely on. Without those time stamps, the electrical grid could freeze up, financial transactions couldn’t go through, and data packets flowing through the internet and mobile networks wouldn’t work right. 

Communications satellites would cause even more issues on Earth if they stopped doing their jobs. Soldiers, ships and aircraft could lose access to secure communication channels. Civilian pilots couldn’t talk to air traffic control. Cargo ships couldn’t speak to those on land. People in conflict zones would have difficulty getting information from, or providing information to, the outside.

On top of the disruptions to services that rely on communications satellites, without orbital infrastructure, humans would lose access to key weather forecasting data, leaving us relatively blind to signs of oncoming natural disasters. Lots of intelligence is gathered from above too: Without satellites, nations would lose insights into what’s happening on the ground in times of war – satellites offer key information on things like troop buildup or movement. Earth observation companies help with acquiring some of that intelligence and also collect images and data that help with climate change monitoring, agriculture, mining, piracy, illegal fishing, deforestation and disaster aid. But they can only do that if their satellites work properly.

All told, a major collision in space could spell catastrophe on the ground. The only way to avoid serious crashes and the creation of more debris is to make sure that the orbit doesn’t get too crowded — and that the crowd already up there stays safe from itself.

After the Cosmos-Iridium crash, the U.S. amped up its collision-avoidance capabilities and began issuing collision warnings to satellite operators all over the world, including to foreign governments. The number of warnings that the U.S. government sends out has increased greatly since 2009, alongside the jump in orbiting spacecraft. 

Despite the growing orbital population, though, only a patchwork of regulation and governance exists for “space traffic management.” The International Telecommunication Union governs the use of the electromagnetic spectrum — regulating the frequencies on which satellites communicate and the use of the Earth’s orbit as a resource. But it has no enforcement powers. The U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space also weighs in on space traffic issues periodically and is attempting to ramp up this work, but it does not issue enforceable standards either. While the U.S. alert system exists, it is not equipped to be the space traffic manager for the whole world.

“It’s pretty minimal,” said Victoria Samson, the Washington office director for the Secure World Foundation, a think tank dedicated to safe, sustainable and peaceful uses of space. “There is no requirement for action when receiving those conjunction warnings,” she told me. “And there is no one coordinating any of it.”

No two active satellites have ever crashed into each other to date, except a spacecraft that collided with the Mir space station while trying to dock there. The Cosmos-Iridium crash involved one active satellite and one dead one. But without clear authority or protocols, mishaps inevitably occur, and as the amount of stuff floating in space increases, so does the likelihood of a major crash.

People like Samson and Lisa Ruth Rand worry that the existing regulatory system may not be comprehensive or international enough to make sure satellites stay safe in this new era. If another big crash, or a set of crashes, did happen, the results on the ground could be hugely disruptive. 

“That infrastructure is so invisible,” Rand told me. “It’s not the same thing as when the lights go out. But when the satellites go out, that’s going to be a pretty big deal.”

“There will eventually need to be a more formal coordinating mechanism,” said Samson, “rather than two-party discussions on an ad hoc basis.” 

A recent SpaceX fiasco offers a cautionary tale: In 2019, SpaceX had just 60 Starlink satellites in orbit. Predictions showed that one of those 60 had a relatively high likelihood of colliding with a European Space Agency satellite called Aeolus. The space agency saw this coming – having projected the spacecrafts’ predictable paths into the future – and reached out to SpaceX about a week in advance, asking if the company intended to move to a safer spot. SpaceX said it had no such plans: The likelihood of a crash was, at the time, about 1 in 50,000. 

But as the days went by, that probability rose, reaching around 1 in 1,000 — still not likely but not a number to play around with.

The European Space Agency repeatedly tried to reach SpaceX again as the situation evolved.

They heard nothing back. 

They sent 29 alerts to SpaceX. Still, there was no reply.

As the day of the potential collision grew closer, with no word from SpaceX, the European Space Agency decided to change its own object’s trajectory. 

SpaceX, it turns out, had a bug in its notification system, and the company was on a holiday weekend. No one was checking their email.

SpaceX doesn’t need any particular one of its Starlink satellites to continue to provide internet: It has thousands of satellites in part to make individual satellites expendable and redundant. But if it had impacted Aeolus, or any satellite that doesn’t have such redundancy, the crash could cut capabilities — and the debris from the collision could put many more spacecraft at risk.

SpaceX has so far avoided all crashes because it can propel its Starlink satellites away from danger. Nevertheless, it has been implicated in a lot of potential crashes. In 2021, with just 1,700 satellites in orbit — in contrast to today’s 4,000 — the company was already involved in half of all close-approach alerts, known as “conjunction alerts,” according to Hugh Lewis of the astronautics research group at the University of Southampton. 

And 4,000 is far from the final figure that SpaceX is aiming for. The company’s initial constellation will boast 12,000 satellites, and in its final form could involve 42,000. Today, the satellites provide internet and communication access for people in rural areas and in conflict zones like Ukraine — at least when Musk keeps the services turned on.

When the remainder of the initial set of Starlink satellites are in orbit, Musk’s enterprise could be implicated in 90% of all collision warnings, Lewis estimates.

Since 2020, Lewis has been analyzing Starlink satellites’ conjunction rates and measuring how often satellites have to maneuver around potential problems. In one recent dispatch, his data showed that the satellites have had to perform more than 50,000 moves since the end of 2020 to avoid potential crashes.

Lewis’ data indicates that as the number of Starlink satellites increases, the cumulative number of avoidance maneuvers increases at an approximately exponential rate. In other words, a few more satellites equals many more moves and a greater potential for disaster.

“On the basis of probability, something bad is going to happen,” he said.

There is a paradox here: Creating more satellite infrastructure to enable more connections and capabilities on Earth could be precisely what threatens those connections and capabilities. One way to dull that double-edged sword is to get satellite makers to coordinate — internationally and by law — to make sure their proposed constellations can play nice.

There are options for fixing the mistakes of the past. For instance, we could take the trash out now. Humans could clean up the space around our planet by removing our old debris — transporting dead satellites to “graveyard” orbits where they won’t bother anything, or “deorbiting” them by sending them to burn up in the atmosphere.

But such a proposition is tricky. The U.S. can only touch trash that the U.S. created. Russia can only touch its own trash. The same goes for China or anyone else. 

Touch someone else’s trash without permission, and you could create a full-on international incident. Sometimes, too, if you touch your own trash without telling others you plan to, you may stir global tensions. 

In 2021, China’s Shijian-21 spacecraft spent months hovering around an orbit, getting close to other satellites — with the country staying mum about its actions. Finally, Shijian-21 sidled up to a defunct Chinese navigation satellite, docked with it and towed it to a graveyard orbit. 

That’s an example of what scientists call “space debris mitigation,” and it’s technically good: That satellite was no longer a part of the traffic and no longer presented a risk to other spacecraft. But if a satellite can get that close to and physically move another spacecraft, it could do so to any spacecraft, regardless of who it belongs to. The same technology could also be weaponized to damage or deactivate a satellite. 

Brian Chow, a space policy analyst, says China shares information about its commercial activities but is “evasive about those that can enhance its military capability,” like the Shijian-21 incident. 

“China has been secretive in the development and tests of its rendezvous and proximity operations,” Chow said. And that secrecy — alongside the opacity surrounding China’s other space activities with military implications — is unlikely to change.

The lack of communication from China concerns officials from other countries because of China’s ability to potentially conduct an attack in space or cause space “situational awareness” problems. From a traffic perspective, without direct information from the country, managing potential crashes becomes more difficult: Space traffic trackers can make better predictions and give better warnings if they receive direct information from satellite operators about a spacecraft’s position or planned maneuvering. The Shijian-21 event and the silence around it, however, are typical of China’s lack of transparency. 

In another example, earlier this year, Lieutenant General DeAnna M. Burt of the U.S. Space Force said that when the U.S. sends warnings about conjunctions that could affect China’s space station, they get crickets in return.

“Many authoritarian countries that don’t share information with the populace don't share it internationally,” said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow for LeoLabs, a private company that performs its own space traffic tracking and management on behalf of satellite companies and space agencies. “And so I’d be concerned if China and Russia started putting up 10,000-, 13,000-satellite constellations that they would be as open about what they’re doing.”

Imagine a constellation that would add exponentially to the crash risk, like SpaceX does, but whose operators wouldn’t coordinate or share precise information that cannot be gathered from afar.

China does, actually, have a plan for such a constellation: a 13,000-spacecraft herd called Guowang that will, like Starlink, provide internet service. For Guowang to work well for the world, the country needs to become a part of space traffic dialogue and share information. 

Chow believes they will. “If China does not collaborate or share information, the U.S. would have to rely on its own warning system and ability to maneuver,” he said. “On the other hand, as this constellation will primarily be used for commercial purposes, China will likely share information to avoid these satellites from being hit so that they can perform their missions cheaper and better.”

That could lead to more formal crash-avoidance coordination that Samson, of the Secure World Foundation, sees coming. But whatever that system looks like, it can’t be the only protective mechanism in place. “There will also have to be rules of the road established,” Samson said. “If two satellites are heading toward each other, who moves?” The newer satellite? The larger one? “And continued sharing of space situational awareness data is key to have a common understanding of the orbital environment,” she said.

Making sure that space stays safe is key to protecting life on the ground too. The modern world would cease to turn without satellites, and catastrophic crashes could move us closer to that point. Regulation, cooperation and public awareness are ways to step back and keep space traffic running smoothly, without stifling the good parts of orbital infrastructure — like increased connectivity on Earth.

Cleaning up orbit and orbital behavior may seem daunting, but it’s possible: It happened, for instance, with the oceans. Until the middle of the 20th century, people thought these bodies of saltwater were so large that mere human pollution could never alter them. When it became clear that the seas could indeed get slimy, people rallied to curtail the dumping of waste into the oceans.

While those initiatives have been far from perfect (see: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), collective awareness of our ability to negatively impact the planet is much greater than it used to be.

The same could be more broadly true of space in the future. After all, environmental awareness of space is as old as environmental awareness on the planet. Earth’s environmental movement came about at the same time as the Space Age, around the 1960s, and the two shaped each other. “There’s been an almost explicitly environmental consciousness of outer space from the very beginning of the Space Age,” said Rand, the environmental historian.

That idea even shows up in what little international regulation exists in orbit. “There’s parts that are evident in the Outer Space Treaty,” Rand said, referring to the U.N. document signed by 113 nations about how to behave beyond Earth. For instance, the treaty has a provision stating that states “shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies,” things like creating debris, causing crashes and making things too crowded for comfort.

The Outer Space Treaty also treats orbit as an international place — a common resource that no one owns but for which everyone bears responsibility. A coordination system that recognizes that responsibility could keep orbit, and everything satellites help us do on Earth, safe for the future.

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In recent years, scientists desperate to stop global warming have looked back at this natural event and wondered: Could people recreate similar effects to help reverse rapidly rising global temperatures? 

Enter stratospheric aerosol injection, the process of releasing tiny reflective particles of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that reflect sunlight back into space in order to cool off the planet. The concept mimics the natural activity of volcanoes like Mount Pinatubo. But it is driven by humans.

Proponents of stratospheric aerosol injection, including start-ups and researchers investigating and experimenting with the process, call it “sunscreen for the earth” and argue that we can create a layer of protection to shield us from the hot rays of the sun. It is one of a growing variety of Earth-cooling techniques that fall under the conceptual umbrella of “solar geoengineering.” Other proposed solar geoengineering techniques range from creating light-reflecting clouds to deploying giant mirrors in space. In 2020, Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, unveiled a “whiter than white” specialized paint, designed for rooftops and roads, that can bounce 95% of the sun’s rays back into deep space, cooling the buildings beneath it.

But a growing group of scientists and academics are afraid that solar geoengineering is an all-too-welcome distraction from our obligations to reduce carbon emissions and a flawed scientific concept to boot. They say processes like these could throw Earth into deeper chaos by cooling the world unevenly and wreaking havoc on our climate systems. Plus, solar geoengineering could lock us into long-term reliance on such techniques, creating new dependencies and potential consequences.

“There’s a sense of really deep desperation and urgency among scientists who are reading climate science and see how dire the situation is,” said Lili Fuhr, the director of the Center for International Environmental Law’s Climate & Energy Program. She explained that despair can lead scientists to scramble around for an idea — any idea — that might stop global heating quickly.

“I don't think that desperation turns a bad idea into a good idea. The only good idea is that we need to get out of fossil fuels. Anything else doesn’t help us,” said Fuhr.

Despite the concerns that scientists like Fuhr share, solar geoengineering has some uniquely powerful advocates. Bill Gates has backed a Harvard University proposal to shoot light-reflecting aerosols into the sky above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, a project that was scrapped after local indigenous Saami people raised objections. In February, billionaire philanthropist George Soros gave a nod to the idea of creating more clouds above the ice caps to cool the poles by blocking sunlight. “Human interference has destroyed a previously stable system and human ingenuity, both local and international, will be needed to restore it,” he said in a speech at the 2023 Munich Security conference. And Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has provided $900,000 in funding for 15 solar geoengineering modeling projects.

These projects have the look of a quick, relatively cheap, technology-led solution to global heating that doesn’t involve restructuring society around sustainability and renewable energy. It would mean that society could, in theory, have its cake and eat it too: We could keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere while protecting the Earth from greenhouse gas effects.

But processes like this could require humans to continue shooting chemicals into the stratosphere for centuries. Fuhr explained that this could put us on a dangerous trajectory: We wouldn’t be able to stop or even slow down the deployment of these chemicals without facing a rapid, sudden — and potentially catastrophic — heating event. “There would be a shock effect that humans and ecosystems wouldn’t be able to adapt to,” she said. Scientists like Fuhr estimate that an event like this would cause the Earth to heat up so rapidly that we’d risk destroying life on the only planet we can safely live on.

If we want to avoid this, Fuhr said, we’d need “centuries of an international collaborative political regime, doing this in a benign way, for the benefit of all.” 

“I can’t think that anyone actually believes that is possible. We have regime changes all the time — look at the country I’m in right now,” she told me, speaking from Washington, D.C. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. government has shown increased interest in such initiatives. In June, the White House announced a federal plan to research the concept of solar geoengineering more deeply, with the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy leading an effort to set risk management standards and transparency guidelines for any publicly-funded solar geoengineering research in the U.S. The move could be the first step toward greater federal engagement with solar geoengineering research efforts.

The European Union has been more cautious: It has warned against using large-scale disruptive geoengineering technology without a proper assessment of the risks. In June, the bloc called for global talks on the subject and said that the risks of interfering with the climate were “unacceptable.” 

“Nobody should be conducting experiments alone with our shared planet,” said European Union climate policy chief, Frans Timmermans, at a news conference. But the EU is also looking at setting rules and boundaries for outdoor geoengineering experiments, an indication that at least some officials are warming to the idea.

In 2021, a collective of scientists and industry professionals signed a “solar geoengineering non-use agreement,” demanding no public funding, no outdoor experiments, no patents, and no support in international institutions for the practice. In other words, they called for a complete shutdown of any experimentation or exploration of solar geoengineering. The scientists and academics said the idea was simply too dangerous and that it would be impossible to test the effects of solar geoengineering on the Earth’s climate without actually releasing the chemicals on a global scale.

“You're literally talking about intervening with the atmosphere, which protects the only semblance of life that we know in an otherwise desolate universe. Like, I don't even know what to say to these people. It's extraordinary,” said Noah Herfort, the co-director of Climate Vanguard, a youth think tank that has been warning about the risks of geoengineering since 2022.

At some point, artificially spewing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to see its effects on the Earth stops being a test. We cannot fully predict the outcome without actually doing it, Fuhr explained. “And we just happen to have one planet,” she said.

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The havoc we have wreaked on our environment is why the Anthropocene epoch may be our last. Humanity has been talking about the apocalypse for thousands of years. But in 2023, as we grapple with the hottest temperatures ever recorded, the imminent threat of climate disaster and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, there is a greater urgency to the questions some are asking about what the world would really look like without us. Would it be better to leave the Earth to the animals, to the trees, even to the rocks? And would the world be a safer and more benevolent place if we let AI robots run everything? 

In “The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us,” the American poet and critic Adam Kirsch interrogates the prospect of a world that is no longer dominated by humans — either because we have driven ourselves to extinction or because we have been replaced by artificial intelligence. Sitting in a sweltering Rome on the hottest day ever recorded in the ancient capital, I spoke to Adam Kirsch on the phone in New York City, where the air quality index hovered near hazardous because of the wildfire smoke drifting over from Canada. It was difficult not to talk about the “end times.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you first start thinking about a future without humans?

I began to want to write the book during the pandemic when, very quickly, I felt like my physical world contracted to the space of an apartment. It struck me how little of a difference that made to my life. So much of what I do and what most of us do can be done virtually rather than physically — whether it's work, leisure or consumption. I began to think about the idea that human life has already changed. It has already gone virtual and disengaged from the physical in ways that our ancestors would not have understood. And the transhumanists’ idea is just another step on that path. 

Let’s clarify for our readers what “transhumanists” think. They basically imagine a world where the human condition can be improved or even replaced by technology like AI, right? 

Transhumanism is the school of thought which says that in the future, we will be able to use technology to overcome the limitations of our physical bodies. Transhumanists look to a future where humans will give way to another species or another form of life that isn't embodied in flesh and blood. It isn't necessarily mortal, and it might be able to live indefinitely, as a record of information, or as a simulation, or in the virtual world. 

Or, alternatively, transhumanism says that we will just be able to escape the limitations of our bodies with genetic engineering. One of the most vivid strains of transhumanism right now is the idea that in a future with artificial intelligence, there might be minds that are not human minds at all. Minds that are actually born on computers and that have a very different relationship to reality and the physical world than we do. And that those minds will become the leading form of life on our planet and take over from us in a violent or benevolent way. 

Another group you look at in your book also considers what the world would look like if humans no longer dominated it. They are called “anthropocene antihumanists” and seem to believe that humans are a kind of cancer on the earth, multiplying like a parasite. And that the world would be better off without us.

Antihumanists say that humans have taken over from nature as the most important factor on the planet. They say we no longer live alongside nature, but we control nature and dominate it. This, they believe, is eventually going to lead to the decline or disappearance of humanity itself. And they think that would be a good thing. So antihumanism can be anything from saying we should stop having children to predicting that an environmental calamity is going to reduce us to just a few leftover populations. Philosophically, it can take the form of saying, ‘How can we think about the world in ways that don’t put humanity at the center of it?’ They give equal respect and agency to nonhuman things and even nonliving things, like objects or the ocean. 

Or a rock. It’s funny, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what a world without humans looks like. Especially as I grapple with the realities of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. I sometimes find myself fantasizing about what the natural world looked like before human civilization. Reading your book was an intense experience in that way, because it forces you to think about the Earth without humanity. What kind of place did it take you to psychologically, while you were writing? 

It's very difficult to imagine the disappearance of humanity as a real prospect — in the same way that it's sort of hard to imagine what it's like to be dead. We could all theoretically agree that at some point there will no longer be a human species, that we will have become extinct. And that just as the dinosaurs did, someday we will disappear. But to think about that happening tomorrow or next year plays havoc with all of our assumptions about what matters and how we go about our days. Thinking about these things is on a different track from daily life. In daily life, we're dealing with the world as it is — raising children and going to work. We’re not thinking about the future in an abstract or philosophical way.

Yes, it’s a kind of bizarre cognitive dissonance to think about a world millions of years from now when humans don’t exist and then go back to thinking about what to have for lunch. 

When the book was published in January, almost right away, all of the things that I was writing about started to become much more mainstream. First, there was ChatGPT, which led to  people talking about artificial intelligence in a very immediate way and talking about how dangerous it might be. And then came this summer that we’re having with all these broken temperature records and parts of the world becoming dangerously hot and endangering human life. Even to me — someone who's been thinking about this and researching and writing about it for a long time — when it erupts into your actual life, it seems like kind of a shock. We have a tendency to think about dire things or radical changes in the abstract and not deal with the concrete until we absolutely have to. 

I think we rely so much on shards of hope that seem to get slimmer and slimmer every year. You talk about hope a lot in the book. How hopeful would you say you are? 

I think that all of us rely on hope. We rely on the assumption that the future is going to be like the present because that’s the only way we know how to navigate the world. But one of the things that drew me to the people I write about in the book is that they're not afraid to think about things that seem frightening or impossible, that most people dismiss as science fiction or extremism. They’re thinking through the idea of, ‘What if the world actually was like this in the future? What if we actually did have computers that could outthink us or what if billions of people could no longer survive because of climate change? What would that do to our sense of ourselves and the way we live?’ And I think that that’s useful to think about. Both for its own sake and because it maybe also makes us more willing to take action in the present. 

There was one Franz Kafka quote in your book that really stood out to me. “There is hope — an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.” What does that mean to you?

What transhumanists and antihumanists are trying to say is, ‘Well, maybe in the future, there won't be us, but there will be something else that we can be hopeful for.’ They say that the disappearance of humanity might not mean the end of everything that we care about. They’re trying to nudge us into a new way of thinking that if we're not here, it might not matter that much — as long as something else is. Both of them think of humanity as a stage. That the normal progression of the human species is to supersede ourselves or eliminate ourselves, not by accident, but by necessity. 

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It was 1998. Olivier Rubbers, then 29 years old, came up with the idea of returning beavers to his local rivers. “My level of knowledge about nature was extremely poor,” he now confesses. But he’d read a magazine article about how the beaver was indigenous to Belgium, though it had long been nearly extinct. Bringing beavers back, he thought, “would be a great project.”

“Beaver bombing” or “beaver black ops” — as it’s become known in conservation circles — is the practice of illegally releasing the humble beaver into a waterway and leaving it to do what it does best: fell trees, build dams and construct lodges. Beavers are known as “ecosystem engineers,” or a “keystone species,” because they create an ideal habitat for all kinds of other wildlife. 

Rubbers borrowed his father’s car and drove to Germany to pick up the beavers, then crossed the border back into Belgium and dropped them in a river. Throughout 1999 and 2000, Rubbers repeated the feat with 97 more beavers, bringing them from Bavaria to Belgium in a van kitted out with homemade beaver crates. “We wanted them all,” he said.

Rubbers and his accomplices soon learned that the best time to beaver-bomb was not at night but in the middle of the afternoon, preferably on a Sunday, when everyone was having lunch.

He procured almost all the beavers from Gerhard Schwab, a wildlife manager based in Bavaria known as “the Pablo Escobar of beavers.” Over the years, Schwab has bred beavers and helped numerous communities across Europe with reintroductions — always in partnership with local wildlife management schemes. Rubbers showed Schwab some official-looking papers, all stamped and in French. Schwab had no idea that Rubbers was introducing the beavers into their new surroundings without local approval. 

“I had all the authorizations I needed,” Rubbers said. “Which, in my mind, meant no authorization.”

“He bombs quite a bit,” Schwab admitted about Rubbers. “He wanted to do something for nature.” 

Rubbers was eventually fined 500 euros for detaining and transporting a protected species, although he told me that the local administration forgot to claim the money. He has spent the following years watching with satisfaction as the beavers spread across Belgium, transforming its waterways. Frogs and fish came to lay their spawn in the slowed, dammed-up water, while bugs and beetles thrived in the rotting wood of the felled trees. Birds followed in their wake, feeding off the fish and insects. “Belgium should thank me for services rendered to the nation,” Rubbers said.

Rubbers is part of a secretive, underground network of wildlife enthusiasts who are returning species back into the landscape without asking permission first. It’s not just beavers: There are boar bombers, a “butterfly brigade” that breeds and releases rare species of butterfly and a clandestine group returning the pine marten — one of Britain’s rarest mammals — to British forests. 

Some, like Rubbers, have no background in conservation. Others have scientific credentials and feel an urgent need to restore nature’s ecosystems by taking matters into their own hands.

The movement is facing backlash from farmers who don’t want wild animals wrecking their crops and a number of scientists who believe that the reintroduction process should be regulated and controlled. They say rogue rewilding is a crime, however you dress it up. The mavericks argue that the bigger crime is not to reintroduce keystone species in a biodiversity emergency.

At the beginning of the 20th century, beavers were on the verge of extinction in Europe. They were hunted for their prized pelts and scent glands, and by 1900, there were just 1,200 left. Now, beavers are back from the brink, with the current European population estimated at about 1.5 million — and conservationists and rewilders agree that beaver bombers are partly to thank.

Floods, wildfires and droughts have become multi-trillion-dollar problems in the 21st century, ravaging the landscape from Bangladesh to Belgium. As the world burns and biodiversity hits a crisis point, rewilding — the process of letting nature restore itself — can feel like a hopeful refuge. Beavers, ecologists say, may be part of the solution.

The healthy wetland systems beavers create can sequester large amounts of carbon, according to climate scientists. Slowing down river flow helps the land act like a sponge, storing and holding more water, so it is more resilient to flooding and drought.

“Beavers work for free, they work weekends, they work round the clock increasing the groundwater and being a motor for biodiversity,” Schwab said. 

In the U.S., after Oregon’s devastating forest fires in 2021, beaver wetlands remained green and lush, acting as natural firebreaks in the land. On aerial images of the charred landscape, the beaver’s habitat stands out, a wide and verdant ribbon running through the blackened trees.

“I think beaver bombers are the heroes of our time,” said Ben Goldsmith, a British financier, writer and environmentalist who is a passionate supporter of rewilding. “A human lifetime is short — why should I not be the one that gets to see wildcats back on Dartmoor? Why should I not live in a country with beavers when they’re supposed to be there?”

I asked Goldsmith if he’d participated in rogue reintroductions. “Had I been involved in beaver bombing more widely,” he said, “I don’t think I’d tell you.” Until last year, Goldsmith served as a director for the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. His older brother, Zac, is a former member of parliament and the U.K.’s current international environment minister.

For ecologist and author Alex Morss, the fringe of the rewilding movement and its powerful backers are a problem. “Who cleans up the bill for illegal anonymous rogue rewilding if things go wrong?” she wrote to me in an email. Alongside a number of scientists working in ecology and conservation, Morss worries about the pitfalls ahead if people are encouraged to take matters into their own hands to address species loss. 

Maverick rewilding, she says, could increase the chances of conflicts between humans and wildlife, spread disease and actively harm biodiversity by introducing the wrong animals into the wrong environments. “There are also releasers who are skirting around the law or outright breaking it,” Morss added. “Or making decisions based on personal bias rather than ecological expertise, rather than lawful, professional and evidence-based conservation done carefully and less glamorously.” 

Beavers are capable of destroying valuable trees, eating crops and flooding farmland. In Tayside, Scotland, where beavers were illegally introduced around 2006, farmers shot the animals on sight. There was no law to stop the farmers from doing so because, although the beavers were endangered, they also weren’t officially there. It was, as one ecologist explained to me, a “wild west.”

Morss said she welcomes “true” rewilding but is concerned that the movement is being co-opted by a privileged few who want to turn nature’s last refuges into “eco Disneyland.”

As rewilding and the prospect of nature restoring itself has caught the public imagination in recent years, projects have sprung up all over Europe, often led by philanthropists and enthusiastically backed by politicians. But many of these projects have also become entangled in bureaucracy and an intense debate over the scientific practicality of rewilding.

Many in the rewilding movement say that political leaders are not doing enough to restore biodiversity — leaving the mavericks with little choice but to act unilaterally and reintroduce species themselves. 

“The British government and European governments are foot-dragging,” said Tim Kendall, who wrote a book about beaver bombing with his wife, Fiona Mathews, the chair of Mammals Conservation Europe and a professor of environmental biology at Sussex University. “You can’t go through the official channels and make it work.” 

Goldsmith is vocal about what he sees as a reactionary fifth column within the nature conservation movement. “There are these gray figures that lurk in the background of government agencies and other bodies, who kill off these projects before they have a chance to happen,” he said. “These are people who are governed by caution and say, ‘We’ve got to make sure every possible angle is researched to death.’ They don’t feel the urgency.”

The rewilding fringe believes that something more radical than scientific reintroduction and conservation programs that are implemented at a sloth-like pace is necessary. According to Mathews, there is a “grudging acknowledgment” among scientists that without the maverick rewilders, “we’d just get nowhere. We’ve been talking about reintroducing beavers in many countries for years and years, and basically, nothing happens.”

Derek Gow told me that he believes change will never come if the rules are always followed. Gow, 58, worked for a decade as a sheep farmer in Devon, in southern England, but is now one of the loudest voices in the maverick rewilding movement. He had his moment of reckoning when a pair of curlews — a European wading bird species — disappeared from his farm. They died, Gow says, because there was nowhere left for them to take cover, feed or breed. “How solemn and how sad that is,” he said. “They died because we had mowed everything to a bowling green with the sheep.” 

After the birds were gone, Gow began to see his farm work as a model for perfect destruction. He observed the men alongside him, who had worked in agriculture all their lives. “They can remember the last of the gray partridge or the glow worms. And even though they’ve done nothing for nature, they’ve done nothing other than continue their destruction; when their time finishes, that’s the thing they’ll remember.”

Gow now runs a 300-acre rewilding project in Devon with financial support from Goldsmith, among others. He spends his days among wildcats, Iron-Age pigs, wild horses, beavers and storks. He wakes up every morning to a cacophony of birds singing from the trees. He describes them to me as we talk on the phone: bluetits and stonechats flit above him, a water shrew runs past his feet.

Gow is resolute: He thinks the time has passed for doing things slowly and carefully. “I do wonder how the people who administer these things — who display the most incredible caution and naivety and a lack of willingness to do anything — really feel when they finish a long, long career and have achieved absolutely fuck all.”

I ask if he sees himself as a beaver-bomber, a maverick or a rogue rewilder. “I would describe myself as a human being concerned about the fate of the natural world,” he said, “at this time of colossal extinction, crisis and ecological collapse. I’m not interested in any other titles.”

Gow recently gifted former Prime Minister Boris Johnson a beaver pelt. Johnson has been vocal and enthusiastic about rewilding. “We’re going to rewild parts of the country and consecrate a total of 30% to nature,” he said in 2021 to rousing applause during his speech at the Conservative Party conference. “Beavers that have not been seen on some rivers since Tudor times, massacred for their pelts, are now back. And if that isn’t conservatism, my friends, I don’t know what is.”

“Build Back Beaver!” he added. Johnson tried to give his father Stanley a pair of beavers for his Somerset farm but was reportedly thwarted by his own government’s regulations. 

Rewilding has become a popular activity among Britain’s landed elite. The medieval 3,500-acre Knepp Castle estate in Sussex, owned by Baronet Sir Charles Burrell, is perhaps the country’s most famous rewilding project. King Charles III has a wildlife retreat in Transylvania, a rewilding mecca known as “Europe’s Yellowstone.”

Goldsmith jokingly described an emerging black market for wildlife trade unfolding in the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair. “You’ve literally got conversations happening over the lunch tables of White’s where one landowner is passing beavers to another,” he said. “You know: ‘I've got beavers on my farm in Perthshire, old buddy old pal. I could bring a few to you in Herefordshire.’”

This is a sticking point for Morss. “Is it healthy that a class of elite unelected people are using their wealth and privilege and influence to make changes to places, rather than with places and their communities of ‘plebs’ who live and work there and don't get a say?” she said. “It feels like a form of ecocolonialism.”

In Scotland, a cohort of millionaires, billionaires and corporations known as the “green lairds” have bought up huge swathes of the Highlands for rewilding and carbon-offsetting nature restoration programs. Among them is fast-fashion Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, Swedish Tetra Pak heiresses Sigrid and Lisbet Rausing and pension funds Aviva and Standard Life. The green laird movement has been criticized as “a greenwashed land-grab” that’s pushing up the price of land in the country and shutting out local communities. The Scottish Land Commission has reported to the Scottish government that the ownership of land by so few people in Scotland is tantamount to a monopoly.

“It is not democratic or always particularly wise when restoration ‘'rewilding’ is led by unqualified, rich hobbyists,” said Morss.

Across Holch Povlsen’s land, forests are beginning to regenerate. The project has been praised by Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as “Scotland’s most exciting and celebrated forest recovery project.” There have been increased reported sightings of ospreys, golden eagles, red squirrels and pine martens — all incredibly rare creatures in modern Britain. The manifesto for Holch Povlsen’s project, Wildland, says it aims to build “a culture of mutual respect with our communities” and “to support the viability of the local economy and improve quality of life.” But British online retail giant ASOS, the company that helped Holch Povlsen make his billions, has been criticized in the past for having an entirely different mission, with investigations revealing how the brand has used child sweatshops and contributed to the fast-fashion industry’s substantial carbon footprint.

Holch Povlsen and the Rausing sisters have contributed funding for a study exploring the implications of reintroducing the lynx to the Highlands, a predator that hasn’t been seen in Scotland since the Middle Ages. They’re still known in Holch Povlsen and the Rausings’ native Scandinavia as “the ghosts of the forest,” moving silently through the land while they hunt their prey. 

Reintroducing the lynx could well be in the plans of rogue rewilders too. “I wouldn't be surprised,” said Goldsmith, “if we started seeing lynx popping up in different parts of Europe where they've been absent.”

The hope in bringing back the lynx to the Highlands would be to see it help naturally control Scotland’s deer population and restore the overgrazed landscape, with minimal human interaction. 

Thomas Cameron, a senior lecturer in ecology at the University of Essex, is skeptical. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land, scientifically speaking,” he said. “It sounds nice. It's really pretty. It's a good story. It attracts lots of money, but it's not going to reduce deer numbers.” He added that it would take hundreds of years to have an effect — “and we need less deer tomorrow.”

Cameron works on an above-the-table beaver reintroduction project in Essex, which he said is already helping to reduce flooding in the local area. But he said he is wary of “false promises” made by advocates for species reintroduction. “Beavers aren't going to save biodiversity. They're not going to stop climate change by improving carbon sequestration,” he said.

Species reintroduction has limits — and it’s not going to fix the planet’s problems, he said. “The idea that that’s somehow some kind of utopia to get to is also quite dangerous.” The science, he insisted, “tells us that it's simply not true. And the science tells us we’re at a crisis point.” 

Cameron, who hails from northeastern Scotland, is also frustrated by how much Scotland, rather than England, features in the imagination of the people who want to reintroduce predators to the ecosystem. “It’s always about Scotland — ‘Oh it’s wild, let’s go to Scotland’ — despite the fact that people are poorer there than they are in the south. They lead shorter lives. Making a living from the rural environment is more challenging. We've got people with limited opportunities, and we want to put it on them.” 

In continental Europe, rifts are emerging between rewilding projects and local agricultural communities. In Asturias, in northwestern Spain, some farmers are furious about the presence of wolves among them. Spain’s wolf population, once close to being wiped out, has grown since the 1970s to become the largest in Europe at around 2,500 wolves. They kill around 11,000 livestock a year, for which farmers are compensated by the state. But when the government introduced a law banning people from shooting or hunting the wolves, it led to outrage. In May, a protest culminated with locals dumping two decapitated wolf heads on the steps of a town hall. 

“The human-wildlife conflict isn’t far away,” tweeted local wildlife photographer Luke Massey with a photo of the bloody heads. 

In Italy, the far-right government is busy dismantling hunting regulations and laws protecting wildlife. When a rewilded bear in Trentino mauled a jogger to death in April, the right-wing governor of the region took a reactionary stance: cull the bear. The governor has since embarked on a one-man mission to deport 70 more bears from the region. There were wider calls for rewilding projects to be scrapped. “We need to kill them all and close the discussion,” wrote one Twitter user when the jogger was attacked. “Fuck bears and animals,” said another. Viewers on Italian TV were invited to answer “yes” or “no” to the question, “Should the bear be put to death?” 

In May, news spread that beavers had turned up on the River Tiber, upstream from Rome. “They must be removed,” said Claudio Barbaro, the Italian undersecretary for the environment. He added that the beavers had “entered illegally,” using language that surreally echoed the government’s anti-migrant rhetoric.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, up by the Belarusian border, beavers and humans are working together. Ukrainian military commanders say beaver-made wetland systems, with their swampy terrain and waterlogged landscape, are helping to protect the country from Russian attacks, creating a natural barrier along the frontier that’s difficult for tanks and infantry to traverse.

With his bandana and grizzled white beard, Gerhard Schwab stands out among the dark-suited crowd of business travelers at the Munich airport arrivals gate. We drive straight out into the Bavarian countryside. Swinging on his keyring in the ignition is a fat little cuddly-toy beaver. 

“When I was a child, there were a lot more edges between the fields,” he says, as we drive past huge, featureless pastureland, the neat green crops rippling in the early summer sunshine. “Now it’s just fucking green. Back then you had everything. All kinds of wild plants. All the small ditches, all the small creeks — they’re all gone.” 

He takes me to a rare scrap of wilderness. The pocket of meadow, right next to a busy autobahn, has been transformed into a vibrant wetland. Bright blue dragonflies dip across the water, and the air seems to vibrate with birdsong. Schwab points to something in the distance, and I can see a pile of sticks: a beaver lodge.

We hear the two-note call of a cuckoo. I’ve never heard it before, though it was a familiar sound for my mother, who grew up in Surrey in the 1960s. Europe has lost 550 million birds since she was a child, and in Britain, cuckoo numbers have crashed by 70%. The cuckoo’s distinctive call is a traditional symbol of the start of summer. But most children in the U.K. will grow up never hearing it. 

The strange sorrow we feel when we confront this world without our fellow creatures has a name: “species loneliness.” Isolated from nature, we feel an existential loss for how the world once looked and sounded.

For Ben Goldsmith, his despair over the destruction of our wild places intersects with his own grief over the sudden loss of his teenage daughter, Iris. A lifelong lover of nature, she died, aged 15, in a farm vehicle accident in 2019. He has since given his farm over to rewilding. The spot where Iris died is marked with a stone circle. Not far off, along the stream threading through his land, a family of beavers has appeared.

“The family on my land happened to make their own way there, which is sort of a beautiful irony,” Goldsmith said. “They appeared by magic at a time in my life when I really needed and wanted that. It was one of the happiest events of my life.”

Beavers are resilient creatures. When the Khakova dam collapsed in Ukraine in May, it unleashed a torrent of chemicals and toxic oil into the surrounding landscape, with untold amounts of debris flowing into the Black Sea. But amid the waterlogged wreckage of Kherson, a lone beaver was seen wandering the streets. “OK, I’ve got work to do!” one British tabloid quipped in a caption of the video. Beavers are used to rebuilding, restoring and fixing what’s been broken.

Schwab feels sure beavers will long outlive us. After all, they have roamed the Earth far longer than humans — the oldest fossil is around 30 million years old. “When my bones and your bones are gone,” he says, “the beaver will still be here.”

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It’s chilly inside the Creede Underground Mining Museum. For one thing, it’s winter. For another, the museum is located underground. That was the innovative idea of three local workers who decided to blast out the 10,000-square-foot space when the last of the town’s famous silver mines closed down. They wanted to show outsiders and younger generations alike what their lives, and the lives of their predecessors, were really like.

Heather Brophy, the facility’s director, is used to the museum’s cold: She spends all day down here. Sporting sophisticated pigtails and a nose ring on this winter day, the Creede native is 29, younger than one might expect for someone in her position. She is the keeper of information about an industry that — for all intents and purposes — died decades ago in Creede, Colorado. But growing up here, Brophy became fascinated by how mining had shaped her town.

Today, more than 30 years after the Bulldog Mountain Mine — the last stalwart — closed up shop, Creede’s long-gone industry might soon come alive and chisel a new story from its past.

Last year, the largest silver mining company in the United States, Hecla Mining, confirmed that it plans to dive back into the Bulldog mine, through its subsidiary, Rio Grande Silver. The mountain still holds plenty of metal, and the company is poised to extract it. Brophy wagers that as soon as the price of silver can guarantee a return on investment, Hecla will seek out its permits and head into production mode. “They will bring in crews,” said Brophy. 

The American government just might be ready for that moment, too. Right now, the country is largely reliant on foreign silver sources. But soon, it’s going to need a lot more of the metal than it currently consumes: The shiny stuff is a key component in solar panels, electric cars, charging stations and 5G infrastructure, along with consumer electronics. The desire to increase mineral supplies in the country, while silver demand is increasing, means the U.S. could use more stateside silver than it currently mines.

The U.S. is keen on increasing the minerals the country sources domestically so that the availability of the metal won’t be determined by whether one country invades another, the general vagaries of international trade or supply chain delays. 

Where to get it, though? 

Sometimes, it turns out, the best places to start new mines are on the backs (or in the bellies) of old ones — in this case, that can mean in the heart of old silver boom towns, like Creede, that have gone bust. There, the ground is already excavated, data on what’s beneath already exists, and companies know for sure someone struck it rich in the past. 

And so, that new work might happen in the shadows of the falling-down infrastructure of the past. Here in southern Colorado, where miners once pounded chisels — the risks to themselves and the earth largely unmitigated — a batch of hopefuls is trying to extract raw materials for the green energy economy while keeping a historically dirty business a whole lot cleaner than in the past.

Silver outwardly appears in things like jewelry, utensils or the coins your conspiratorial uncle hoards. But its physical properties make it useful, not just pretty. Silver reflects light better than any other metal and also better conducts heat and electricity. Plus, it’s antibacterial. It’s part of medical equipment and is an important ingredient in all kinds of electronics. It’s integrated into cars, cell phones, TVs. It’s in “everything that has an on-and-off switch,” said Michael DiRienzo, the executive director of the Silver Institute, an international nonprofit with members from across the silver mining industry. 

And it’s going to become even more important as energy sources transition away from fossil fuels and toward more renewable energy: Silver is integral to solar panels’ workings, and it’s also a key to the zippy cars of the future. Last year, according to DiRienzo, the automotive industry used somewhere between 60 and 65 million ounces of the metal. “The number is just going to continue to grow as electric vehicles and, down the road, autonomous driving vehicles become more prevalent,” he said, going so far as to describe silver as a “decarbonization metal.” 

According to a report from the International Energy Agency, an electric vehicle’s greenhouse emissions over its lifetime, including manufacturing and minerals, are half of those of a gasoline-powered car. There are some risks that come along with acquiring the minerals,  like loss of habitat for animals and plants, significant water usage and potential for water contamination, air pollution and noise pollution. On balance, the risks of remaining dependent on fossil fuels, or not investing in the materials that clean energy requires, seem higher — for people and for the planet. 

DiRienzo is bullish about the prospects. “The demand side in the last year was a new high,” he said. It shot up 17% from 2021. “The market was firing on all cylinders.”

Hecla, ensconced at the Bulldog Mine in Creede, agrees with the hopeful forecasting and its connection to decarbonization — or, at least, its documents agree. The parent company did not respond to my multiple requests for an interview.

In recent years, Hecla’s silver output has accounted for 40% of all silver mined in the U.S. And so, predictably, it’s hopeful about the current prospects. “We’re at an inflection point unlike anything we’ve seen in more than a century,” says a 2021 Hecla document called “Silver: The Story of Our Past, the Foundation of Our Future.” That inflection comes courtesy, the company claims, of the transition to clean energy.

The document may be company propaganda, but data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration backs up some of its key assertions. To keep up with solar panel production alone, the world will need 500 million ounces of silver by 2050. Meanwhile, American domestic silver production has stagnated. Just four mines in the U.S. produced silver as their primary output last year. The rest of the approximately 32 million ounces came from mines that primarily dig for lead, zinc, copper or gold. To be part of the potential impending boom, those numbers will have to change.

But these aspirations can get complicated: If a company wants to open a mine on federal land, for instance, there’s a lot of paperwork and waiting involved. 

“Starting a new mine is much more difficult now than it was a hundred years ago,” says Hecla’s report. “You can’t just dig a hole in the ground and start producing.”

In fact, according to DiRienzo, if you started the clock at zero when you found silver in the ground, “it would take you nearly 10 to 12 years before you finally get the permitting to go ahead.” Those permits are there for a reason, of course. “The process is to make sure everything's good,” he said. “You can’t just go in there and start destroying.”

But it can make things difficult for companies that won’t see any profit from their labor for many years. While what happens at any given site is different, and every state is different, the mining industry is in general subject to laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires a detailed analysis of how a project on federal land will impact an area and its occupants. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts deal with issues like dust and other particulate pollutants, along with stormwater runoff near mines and the disposal of water used in extractive operations.

Officially, the United States still operates on a legal framework for mining on federal lands that was written in 1872, but that could change. In 2022, the Biden administration released its principles for proposed mining reform, predicated on the idea that the U.S. needs to mine more of its own goods, create jobs and do so in a way that’s environmentally and socially responsible.

The “how” part of that plan includes making sure strict standards are in place, consulting with local tribes and communities, protecting places with sensitive ecosystems or Tribal Nations’ resources, recycling material that’s already been mined and processed and cleaning up the messes of extractions past.

Oh, and companies could have to pay royalties on their spoils, if they extract silver from land owned by the government, which is effectively taxpayers’ land. That money would go in part toward mitigating or preventing environmental and social impacts of mining, which today are still no small matter. 

Mines take up space that might otherwise be used by communities, flora and fauna. They also produce more waste material than they do metal. Water near silver mining sites regularly gets contaminated. According to the Government Accountability Office, abandoned hardrock mines have “contributed to the contamination of 40% of the country’s rivers and 50% of all lakes.” Historically, people have also used mercury, a pretty toxic substance, as part of the silver extraction process.

Reforms to the regulatory system and the long timelines, when coupled with the call for more domestic mining, irk Michael Feinstein, the founder of a geologic exploration company called MineOro. Produce things within the country, the government demands. “But the next breath they tie the hands of any potential domestic production,” Feinstein said.

As the largest silver producer in the country, Hecla can untie its hands better than most. And with the company’s purchase of the rights to 21 square miles of land in the Creede Mining District, Hecla has been working to make Bulldog’s old infrastructure accessible again. The company planned an exploration campaign for 2022 to figure out what metal was left in the mountain, where it was and how best to access it.

Brophy, the Creede museum director, details these efforts as she bustles about the caved, rocky interior of the museum, sending visitors — who’ve braved the incoming, days-long winter storm — out on the audio tour. Headphones on, they’ll wind their way through a U-shaped tunnel of exhibits featuring mannequins posing as miners throughout the decades. The first little group shows how Creede’s 19th century miners, seeking silver, used hammers and iron drills to hand-pound into the rock. Later, they transitioned to using hydraulic drills, affectionately known as “Widow Makers,” named for the silica dust they kicked up that got sucked right into the miners’ lungs. Then, farther into the tunnel, the inanimate miners show how life — and pulling material out of the planet — became easier and safer, as, for instance, mechanized equipment required less backbreaking labor. The industry also figured out that if you wet the material before drilling into it, you could reduce dust. From there, ventilation improved, and cave-ins became less frequent.

“There's a ton of history here,” said Brophy, a space heater blowing air toward her desk chair. “But that's pretty much all there is right now.”

Randy McClure, the current site and safety manager for Rio Grande Silver, is a third-generation Creede resident. His grandfather homesteaded near the town in the late 1800s, and McClure himself started working in the mines when he was 18. If the industry bounces back, it wouldn’t just change the state of the mine but also the state of the town. 

“A return of mining to Creede would bring back a solid year-around economy, families with kids to fill the school, and the characters that make a mining town great,” he said.

As mining declined and then ceased, Creede’s population shrank — today, there are just 700 residents. The town shifted to arts, theater and outdoor tourism to survive, meaning it is now home to a mix of people who’ve been around since the mining days and those who were attracted to its new offerings. The different groups are learning to coexist, Brophy says. If the Bulldog reopens, they may have to find a new equilibrium.

“Mining is our roots,” Brophy said. “It's what we came from. Without mining, this place never would have existed.” 

Anyone who likes Creede’s repertory theater and art, in other words, really has the town’s dirty, dangerous business of the past to thank. And they may have a modern version to thank for the town’s future.

Hecla’s re-exploration of this former boom site seems to mirror other efforts in the American West. Idaho’s aptly named Silver Valley is home to mines owned by Hecla and by a company called Sunshine Silver Mining and Refining that has gobbled up tens of thousands acres of mineral rights in the area. One patch includes the Sunshine Silver Mine that began in the 1800s and closed in 2001. In 1972, the mine was the site of one of the worst mining disasters in history, when a fire broke out underground. Sunshine Silver declined to comment for this story, stating that while it was exploring, it wasn’t actively mining.

In the small, adjacent towns of Silver Cliff and Westcliffe, Colorado, meanwhile, a Canadian company called Viscount Mining has been digging around old mining areas. These locales, along with nearby ghost towns, once hosted one of the biggest silver booms in the state. 

Silver Cliff was the third largest Colorado city in the late 1800s, as prospectors and miners flocked to the high-altitude valley, flanked by two mountain ranges. In the 2020 census, it had just around 600 residents. Westcliffe had 435.

The holes and mine-waste — loose piles of rocky leftovers (called tailings) that lay fan-shaped over mountainsides — that this silver boom left behind remain, easily visible on a drive through town. Both also appear in the deep woods on hikes. Today, the downtown area shared by the two towns is a bit bigger than Creede’s, and it also has live theater, art galleries and many burger joints for hungry climbers who probably failed to get to the top of the 14,000-foot peaks that point to the sky above town.

Like Creede, Silver Cliff hasn’t made much silver since those very early days. But that past is not so distant: When the dirt roads in town get graded, you can find miners’ abandoned tin cans or the occasional century-plus-old belt buckle. Decrepit wooden structures loom around the landscape, alongside badlanded tailings piles, all begging for photographs — and, apparently, begging at least one company to plumb their depths.

Viscount, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment, has invested in two silver exploration projects, both of which sit on 19th century boom spots. The company’s website has a gallery of images, showing two wooden structures left to decay and collapse, along with an old claim boundary, carved into rock, from the initial discoverer. It looks like a tombstone.

These modern explorers, currently drilling for samples, have at their fingertips tools that were unimaginable back during Silver Cliff’s previous boom, like surveying instruments that can provide a picture of what lies 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) or more underneath the shoes of the surveyor.

With this data in hand, the company suggests its Silver Cliff property could be home to one of the largest silver deposits in the entire U.S. 

If that’s the case, life in Silver Cliff, like life in Creede, could someday shift, looping back on itself like a time machine.

A new-old industry in towns like these could be an ultimate good: more jobs, more money, more renown. And getting silver from towns like these could, counterintuitively, be an ultimate good for the environment. If the silver has to come from somewhere, it might as well be a place with a number of environmental restrictions, controls and regulations — along with the current administration’s proposal to reform and improve policies that are already on the books.

For its part, Hecla claims to have the lowest carbon emissions in the industry per dollar of revenue. Most of the electricity it uses comes from hydropower, and it sucks out less water to produce an ounce of silver than the average person uses in a day. Mining in general is notorious for its water usage, accounting for 1% of all water usage in the United States. Hecla also generally backfills areas it mines — taking the waste that, in the past, might just have ended up stranded on a hillside, combining it with cement and filling up the empty, extracted places. That shore-up means that the land won’t collapse or be dotted by the abandoned pits that are so ubiquitous in the American West.

But Hecla has caused plenty of harm, too. In 2011, it paid $263 million to the federal government, the Coeur d’Alene tribe and the state of Idaho to settle a Superfund lawsuit about historical waste that its operations had discharged into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, causing harm to the water itself, fish and birds. In 2015, it paid $600,000 in fines after releasing heavy metals, in addition to other pollution, into the same river. Although no environmental fees have been levied against Hecla since then, the company has had more than a dozen workplace safety or health violations, for issues like using equipment beyond the capacity it was designed for or not correcting safety-relevant defects in machinery in a timely way.

Nevertheless, mining is safer and more friendly to the ground, water, animals and humans near its operations than it used to be.

Not everyone wants a mine in their backyard or as their employer. But as the final exhibit in the Creede Underground Mining Museum points out, it’s not so simple as yelling, “not in my backyard!”

If you like phones, and solar panels, and electric cars, the material that goes into them has to come from below someone’s backyard. “Since minerals exist randomly throughout the world, we do not always have the simple choice to mine or not to mine at home,” read the museum’s final panels.

But nor do people watching a potentially impending silver boom just have to sit back and let it happen, as it happens. Public information and engagement can make the industry better. It was agitation from the public, the museum’s signs point out, that helped usher in American environmental reforms that companies like Hecla and Viscount now have to abide by. Though companies in any industry can sometimes consider federal fines to be the cost of doing business, the Environmental Protection Agency can criminally prosecute, and jail, those who they can prove knowingly broke the rules.

For now, here in Creede, Hecla is waiting for the economics to tip in its favor, as they keep Bulldog’s underground infrastructure pumped free of the water that builds up underground and analyze how best to dig into the metal in the future. 

Brophy is ready for the next chapter of her town’s complicated industry — a potential resurrection of the town as it used to be, mixed with the way it has become. A condition that might be more accurately described as reincarnation.

“Mining is our past,” said Brophy. “And we hope that it's our future.”

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Even before the war, Ukraine was at least 10 years away from reaping the financial rewards for some of its in-demand raw materials, vital ingredients in many products from iPhones to fighter jets. Most rare earths are, in fact, not all that rare. But extracting and purifying the lightweight elements is expensive, dangerous and environmentally damaging. Almost all of Ukraine’s critical materials and rare earths can be easily found elsewhere. International investors might seek less risky alternatives.  

As the war grinds into its second year, the European Union, the United States and other Western powers are making strategic investments around the world to diversify away from their dependence on Chinese and Russia-sourced critical raw materials — investments that will translate into mines and infrastructure in places other than Ukraine and greatly undermine Ukraine’s ability in the future to compete in the critical raw materials market.

“Most of the foreign natural resource development is probably off the table,” said Chris Berry, an analyst on critical raw materials at House Mountain Partners in Washington, D.C. Even after the war, investor confidence is likely to be deeply shaken. The demining process alone will take approximately ten years according to Ukrainian officials. Russia has contaminated vast swathes of territory with landmines and other unexploded ordnance.

The total value of Ukraine’s deposits is believed to be astronomical, a prospective loss to add to the estimated $138 billion worth of damage caused so far by Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure.

Ukraine and the European Commission had signed a strategic partnership agreement on raw materials in 2021, heralded as a significant step forward for Ukraine in the renewables space. It was an accord that also boosted the confidence of foreign mining companies moving to secure Ukrainian exploration permits, the first step in the mining process.  

The Ukrainian government has not publicly announced how many lithium fields and promising areas are now under Russian occupation. Before the invasion, no lithium was being extracted from Ukraine. But several licenses were in various stages of development, including the Shevchenkivske field in the Donetsk region, the Kruta Balka block in the Zaporizhzhia region and the Dobra block and the Polokhivske field in the Kirovohrad region. Both the Shevchenkivske field and the Kruta Balka have danced along the war’s ever-moving frontlines.

Despite this, Ukrainian officials have presented an image of a stalwart critical materials partner to the EU, and last month Ukraine and the EU reaffirmed the strategic importance of their alliance. In December, Ukraine’s parliament passed mining reform legislation to increase the attraction of the country’s extraction industries.  

The invasion coincided with the EU’s quest to seek alternatives from China in order to meet its ambitious goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. The pandemic established the need to move away from single suppliers like China, while the Ukraine invasion underscored the geopolitical vulnerabilities for Europe that exist close to home.   

China supplies Brussels with 98% of the EU’s supply of rare earth elements. It’s a supply chain that Olivia Lazard, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said needs to be reviewed.

In fact, the issue of raw materials tops Brussels’ political agenda. Last September, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the European Critical Raw Materials Act. “Lithium and rare earths are already replacing gas and oil at the heart of our economy,” said von der Leyen in a speech, adding that Europe has to “avoid falling into the same dependency as with oil and gas.”

While Europe has been moving away from reliance on Russian oil and gas, Russia continues to hold many of the essential elements for the West’s green transition. Russia accounts for approximately 7% of the global supply of nickel, a vital ingredient in solar panels. It is also a leader in the global supply of aluminum, palladium, potash and vanadium. The EU imports approximately $7.4 billion a year in Russian raw materials.

Russian metals and minerals have escaped the same kind of scrutiny that oil and gas exports have encountered. Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel, owned by the Putin-supporting oligarch Vladimir Potanin, has not come under Western sanctions. Russian nickel exports to the U.S. and the EU actually saw a boost in 2022. “If you look into the sanctions, you will see that the EU has been more cautious on certain types,” said Vasileios Rizos, the head of sustainable resources and circular economy at CEPS, a think tank. “The whole raw materials agenda comes from a more strategic perspective at the EU level.”

In 2020, Russia pledged $1.5 billion for mining rare earth minerals with the goal of becoming the biggest producer after China. Capturing raw materials on Ukrainian land will redound to Russia’s benefits, allowing the Kremlin to keep the materials off world markets. 

Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group is believed to collect raw material deposits to shore up its finances. “This tells us something about the nature of the Russian approach now regarding security and defense,” said Lazard, the Carnegie fellow. “Geology is now an asset and geological exploration is a competency to wield in the global geopolitical competition.” 

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In many places, meteorologists on the local news are local celebrities, seen as trusted interpreters of the data provided by the National Weather Service, friendly personalities and loyal community boosters. Even in today’s sharply divided, partisan America, they are not usually seen as divisive figures.

No longer.

A vocal opposition has formed against TV weather forecasters and the science of meteorology.

Former political candidates have conjured claims that last October’s devastating Hurricane Ian was engineered by the "Deep State" to destroy Republican governor Ron DeSantis' reputation. Many in Florida’s Tampa region prepared for the landfall of Hurricane Ian, which, models had predicted, would hit their area. But storm path models rapidly evolved in the run-up to the hurricane, sparking spurious allegations from two Republican candidates: DeAnna Lorraine, who ran for election to the U.S. House in 2020, and Lauren Witzke, who campaigned for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware. They claimed that the hurricane was, in fact, a political instrument targeting opponents of vaccine mandates and anti-transgender legislation — baseless and absurd claims that gained currency on social media, especially among some Republican supporters.

Weather manipulation conspiracies have been around for decades. One of the most durable has been the chemtrails theory, which holds that the U.S. government manipulates the weather for nefarious reasons by releasing chemicals into the atmosphere from aircraft. Chemtrail conspiracists often mistake the trails of water vapor expelled by airplanes flying overhead for chemicals.

This conspiracy has been re-upped many times in recent years, especially during moments of uncertainty or social panic, such as during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Chemtrail conspiracists often share the same messaging as other conspiracy theorists, like adherents of the “Great Replacement Theory.” Researchers have estimated that between 30% and 40% of Americans believe in elements of the chemtrails conspiracy.  

Adverse weather events like the latest catastrophic hurricane, heatwave or winter storm energize conspiracists. Many cite local weather to bolster their claims of climate change denial. 

"Weather is your mood, the climate is your personality. It's easy to conflate the two, if you don't understand the difference," said Dennis Mersereau, a weather journalist in Reidsville, North Carolina. "It's hard for folks to separate daily weather from long-term climate patterns, especially now that we're feeling the effects of climate change's influence on extreme weather."

Weaponizing weather has made meteorologists a target, and not only in the United States. 

Meteorologists in Sweden had faced backlash ahead of the country’s general elections last year because of a "misleading image" that falsely claimed to show proof of "climate hysteria." Screengrabs of weather forecasts are being manipulated to show weather patterns and temperatures that allegedly prove that climate change is not real. 

In Hungary, two meteorologists were fired over forecasts, ultimately inaccurate, that put a damper on patriotic celebrations, part of the government’s general crackdown on media in the country. 

In response, meteorologists have felt the need to get political themselves. A German meteorologist has centered climate change in his weather reports to counter growing climate change denial. “TV meteorologists, unlike news reporters, can demonstrate this connection in a way that's far more immediate and accessible," he told Politico Europe.

As climate change transforms coastlines, consumes forests and upends hundreds of millions of lives, it follows that the local weather report has become a cultural and political warzone. Added to their predictions of precipitation and reporting on snowfall measurements, meteorologists have begun to develop a televised discourse on climate change in an effort to combat climate misinformation. 

"Meteorologists are the most visible scientists in our daily lives. They're on television every day, and their forecasts are omnipresent whenever you hop online. That visibility makes them an easy target for someone looking to vent their rage," said Mersereau, the weather journalist.

And because climate change denialism has been linked to other forms of online extremism, meteorologists have a unique role in being able to bring familiar credibility to combat misinformation for a local audience. 

"Once you believe that even nature itself is under the control of a shadowy cabal, it gets easier to see how someone falls into the really dangerous stuff," said Mersereau.

"We've done a lot of work with TV meteorologists on understanding their audience," said Bernadette Placky, the chief meteorologist at Climate Central. "People's views on climate change do tend to be more aligned with politics than they do with science and education."

Climate Central provides resources for meteorologists to help educate their local audiences on matters of climate change. They collaborate with meteorologists abroad since these issues can also be transnational. 

It wasn’t that long ago that the majority of meteorologists had trouble believing in the human causes of climate change. In a research paper published in 2017, surveys of TV weathercasters suggested that “weathercasters’ views of climate change may be rapidly evolving.” The paper found that “in contrast to prior surveys, which found many weathercasters who were unconvinced of climate change, newer results show that approximately 80% of weathercasters are convinced of human-caused climate change. A majority of weathercasters now indicate that climate change has altered the weather in their media markets over the past 50 years, and many feel there have also been harmful impacts to water resources, agriculture, transportation resources, and human health.”

American audiences have also continued to shift, according to reports from the Climate Change Communication program at the Yale School of the Environment. The number of people who are “alarmed” by climate change is increasing, while those grouped as “dismissive” have trended downward. 

The challenge for meteorologists is to tease out the distinctions between everyday weather and long-term climate patterns, while still preparing their audience for the next extreme weather event. The outlook looks cloudy, with a strong possibility of storms ahead.

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Part 1: Losing home

Madigan Traversi, 17, gives the property tour in Northern California’s wine country like a seasoned real estate agent. We’re standing on top of a hill in Santa Rosa, overlooking a sweep of golden ridges and green oaks. The two-story home is surrounded by redwoods, fruit trees and a carefully maintained vegetable garden. Traversi, in oversized sunglasses and brown leather boots, leads me to an outdoor pool with a panoramic view of the hills, and then to one of her favorite spots on the plot of land, a majestic old oak tree. As a little girl, she used to spend whole afternoons beneath its branches. They were so large she could duck under them and play make-believe for hours, lost in her own world. “I just turned it into this little haven,” she told me. “When I was there, it was my happy place.”

Traversi and I are standing in front of where the tree once stood, staring at the open air. Nothing we are looking at is actually there, not now anyway. The massive oak tree, the garden, the living room with the big glass windows — it was all lost in October 2017, when the Tubbs Fire devoured 36,807 acres of Sonoma and Napa counties, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and killing 22 people. It was the second-most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, and for many people living here, the marker of a new chapter in California’s story: an era bound by flames.

Traversi’s home was among those lost in the blaze, burning down in less than 30 minutes after she evacuated with her mom on the evening of Sunday, October 8. Traversi, who was 12 years old at the time, was still awake when the landline rang just before midnight. A recorded message explained that three homes were on fire eight miles away and urged them to leave. Traversi and her mom evacuated shortly after, taking their dog, Traversi’s school backpack and the bare necessities. They waited it out in a nearby hotel, assuming they would be able to go back home the next day. But the blaze grew bigger, Traversi’s school closed, and they relocated with some friends to a place just outside San Francisco. A few days later, they learned that their home burned down shortly after they fled. Gone was Traversi’s bedroom and the photos, art projects, journals and family heirlooms that anchored so many of her childhood memories.

Even the cherished oak tree did not survive. All of it was gone, engulfed in a roar of flames propelled by 50 miles per hour winds.

Five years later, Traversi walks around the property and can picture everything just as it was, straddling a split screen between the present and the past. Through her eyes, the open air in front of us flashes into a kitchen, a bedroom, a living room with a wall of glass windows. 

She can still see it all, vividly, in color and texture. A home that no longer exists.

The road leading up to the house was transformed, too. The street is now lined with rebuilt  homes. Traversi pointed out the changes as she drove me to the property on a scorching late summer afternoon. “The houses look so different than they did before,” she observed, as we passed an immaculate two-story home with gleaming windows. “You can see how new everything looks.”

Outside our windows, the sky is a bright blue and the vegetation is achingly dry — so parched that it’s hard not to think about when the next spark might ignite. This is what it’s like to live in California in 2022, a golden state blazing red. Fire is omnipresent, and the last seven years have accounted for 15 of the 20 most destructive wildfires in the state’s history. They have left their imprint on the land and our minds. 

A building that burns can be rebuilt. But if fire incinerates a state of mind, can that be put back together? After neighbors move, new homes rise from the ones that burned, and the landscape is marked by the fingerprints of flames – the time before can feel like a past life. It’s the kind of rupture that transcends space and time, shaping our memories, our goals for the future and even our understanding of where we belong. Part of living here now means grappling with apocalyptic scenes and with whether this version of California can still be called home. 

But this is not just a California story. These emotions will spread as the climate crisis intensifies, as biblical floods, hurricanes, heatwaves and drought displace communities from Puerto Rico to Pakistan. 

We are just beginning to contend with these phenomena and how they are shaping our collective well-being. “These losses are enormous,” said Robin Cooper, a San Francisco psychotherapist and the co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a group of psychotherapists focused on the mental health impacts of climate change. It’s “really important to know that climate distress is not a pathology.”

Cooper’s organization is part of a broader movement of people — activists, artists, psychologists, young people and residents — centering emotions in conversations about climate change. Experts are developing resources, therapeutic treatments and even new language to help people process the psychological impact of climate change. ​​Universities in California and Washington are offering courses for students about navigating the emotional landscape of climate change, including anxiety, hope and grief. The Climate Psychiatry Alliance offers resources and training about the psychological effects of climate change and curates a list of climate-aware therapists. There are also online forums where strangers from all over the world can gather and discuss the emotional toll of climate change and natural disasters, and dozens of virtual and in-person groups across the U.S. focus on processing the grief of the climate crisis.

The Finnish academic Panu Pihkala, whose research focuses on the emotions surrounding climate change, has created a detailed database of peoples’ responses to the climate crisis in what he calls a “taxonomy of climate emotions.” In Finnish, Pihkala has also developed a detailed vocabulary of climate emotions as specific as “winter grief,” mourning the loss of traditional winters, or “snow anxiety,” related to uncertainty about whether it will snow.

lumiahdistus: snow anxiety

talvisuru: winter grief

talvi-ilo: winter joy

lumihelpotus: snow relief

longing for snow: lumikaipaus / lumikaipuu

The Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht came up with a word in 2003 to describe a concept he believed language hadn’t yet captured: the psychological distress caused by environmental changes. Albrecht’s term, solastalgia, drew on the meanings of solace, desolation and nostalgia, but deviated from the latter in one crucial way. Rather than describing the melancholia experienced by people away from their home and yearning for it — nostalgia — it referred to the pain felt by those who stayed put.

Solastalgia, Albrecht wrote, “is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home.’ It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the present. In short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.”

Solastalgia: Solastalgia has its origins in the concepts of nostalgia, solace and desolation. Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos — return to home or native land — and the New Latin suffix algia - pain or sickness, and solace from the Latin verb solari with meanings connected to the alleviation or relief of distress or to the provision of comfort or consolation in the face of distressing events.

I relate to this, intimately.

When I read about solastalgia for the first time, I felt unburdened, that particular flavor of psychological relief that comes from having someone else articulate a previously felt, but unidentified, emotional state. Yes, that’s precisely how I felt about living here: solastalgia. Finally, I felt like I had found a single word that embodied my complicated and often sad relationship with California, a place I couldn’t imagine leaving but also cannot bear watching burn year after year.

My journey through solastalgia would probably start in the fall of 2018, when I moved back to California after spending the better part of the decade living unhappily on the East Coast, where everything felt muted, cold and bland. I never felt like I fit in there: I hated the frigid air and prep school energy. Before going to college in Maryland, I went to a big, raucous public high school in downtown Berkeley. The student body numbered in the thousands, and it was diverse and eclectic, including everyone from the children of ‘70s radicals who staged Iraq war protests at lunch to kids immersed in the Bay Area hip-hop scene of the mid-2000s. My most vivid memory of those years is laughing.

In the spring of 2018, I decided to move back to California permanently. For weeks after I moved back, I wandered around with my cell phone camera propped open like a tourist, giddily snapping photos of the Pacific, the deep green forests and the lavish gardens blooming with succulents and fruit. I had arrived.

But shortly after I moved back, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, the Camp Fire, tore through Northern California’s Butte County, killing 85 people, torching the town of Paradise and choking the air with smoke. A friend in D.C. texted me a link to an article with the headline: “Is California becoming uninhabitable?” “I think they’re trolling you,” she joked. It didn’t help when I later drove past a bar throbbing with music, and two men wearing hazmat masks to protect themselves from wildfire smoke were in line. It all felt like a slow-motion existential crisis. Staring out my window at the scene in front of me, I had a dawning feeling that my home was changing — quickly, in front of my face — and may never be the same.

The fires have not abated. As I sat down to write this article, there were multiple fires burning at both ends of the state, including one in the Sierra Nevada foothills that, as of publication, burned more than 76,000 acres. Fueled by climate change, the traditional fire season is stretching further beyond its traditional lifespan of spring to fall.

Those who choose to stay must learn to inhabit this unsettling liminal space between our imagined apocalypse and the reality of hazmat masks and smoke-filled skies. To recognize that home can vanish even as we never leave.

After the fire, Traversi’s family decided not to rebuild their home on the hill. 

They moved to a new place about 10 minutes away. Eventually, the chaos unleashed by the fire receded, and life resumed. Traversi went back to school, played piano, hung out with her friends. Traversi didn’t seem too outwardly sad about the aftermath of the fire, and her mother worried about how — or if — she was processing it at all. She went to a therapist. But Traversi was 12 and wasn’t ready to unpack all of that trauma. 

Over time, though, the weight of Tubbs began to sink in. As a teenager, Traversi dealt with anxiety and depression, and as she started peeling back the layers of those struggles, she began to recognize the ongoing toll the fire had taken on her mental health.

Traversi was not alone in struggling with the painful aftershocks of Tubbs: a recent survey conducted by the Sonoma County Office of Education found that nearly 3,000 students in the county, and 400 school employees, are still showing “increased anxiety, stress, depression, behavioral problems, or decreased academic performance as a result of the 2017 wildfire.” One of the educators surveyed pointed to an increase in suicidal threats or attempts in the wake of the fire. “Teachers reported kindergarten children crying and running inside after seeing the smoke while on the playground.” Years after the fire, the county superintendent of education concluded, schools are still dealing with students and staff who have been traumatized.

For Traversi, the grief became acute. Processing the loss felt “very similar to how I felt when I’ve lost family members or close friends,” she told me. The home, the property and everything inside the house had been anchors of stability throughout her childhood. As she began grappling with the toll these losses had taken on her, she got her driver’s license and found solace in going back to the old property. Up on the hill at the site of the blaze, taking in all that had been destroyed and all that was still standing, Traversi’s sadness finally had space to breathe. “I found it really healing to go back and sit there and just ignore everything around me,” she said. “It was the first time that I was really able to objectively think, ‘wow, I went through something huge and I lost a really big part of me.’”

Living through Tubbs also helped lay the groundwork for Traversi’s path to climate activism. In high school, she joined a local climate action campaign run by students and educators. Like returning to the property, becoming involved in the effort helped her process the trauma of losing her home. As part of the campaign, she and another local youth climate activist worked with their congressman to help co-author a resolution introduced in the House last spring, which calls on lawmakers to incorporate mental health into disaster preparation and provide funding to schools for youth mental health support after climate-related disasters.

While working on the resolution, Traversi came across a piece of research that blew her away: a survey of 10,000 people aged 16-25 across ten countries about the mental health impacts of climate change. Nearly half of the youth surveyed said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily lives and functioning, and 75% described the future as “frightening.” More than half of the 10,000 youth surveyed — 5,566 — agreed with the prompt “humanity is doomed.”

For Traversi, the findings were revelatory. “It was the discovery that kids aren't stressed because they have this irrational fear that they need to work through with a therapist. They're stressed because there's a genuine threat to their futures,” she said.

Part two

The grievers

Over the last several years, as wildfires throughout California have threatened some of the state’s most cherished places, from its splendid redwood forests to its picturesque coastlines, they have unleashed an outpouring of collective anxiety and sadness. It’s the grief of lives lost and iconic landscapes altered and the awareness that the state will become even more unrecognizable.

As this grief becomes ubiquitous, so too are the grievers. They are part of a nascent movement of climate mourners, people who see grief as a central — and overlooked — human response to the climate crisis. They are meeting up in person and online over the climate’s great unraveling, absorbing darkness so that they ultimately may come blinking into the light.

An assured mother of three living in Northern California, Kristan Klingelhofer joined the mourners nearly three years ago. It was the beginning of the pandemic and she was searching for resources that might help her manage her emotions over parenting and climate change. Her children began asking her about mass species extinctions and reading United Nations reports about global warming when they were in elementary school, nearly a decade ago. Klingelhofer was torn on how to appropriately respond. “Do you shelter them?” she asked. “Empower them?” One day, she opened her computer to see if she could find anything that might help and stumbled across The Good Grief Network, a 10-step, peer support program to help people process their climate grief. The program, which was inspired by Adult Children of Alcoholics’ 10-step approach, runs a weekly support group designed for people grappling with climate distress. The organization doesn’t heavily market or advertise its groups on social media, “so if you found this, it’s because you needed it,” executive director Sarah Jornsay-Silverberg told me.

Step 1: Accept the severity of the predicament

Step 2: Be with uncertainty

Step 3: Honor my mortality and the mortality of all

Step 4: Do inner work

Step 5: Develop awareness of biases and perception

Step 6: Practice gratitude, witness beauty and create connections

Step 7: Take breaks and rest

Step 8: Grieve the harm I have caused

Step 9: Show up

Step 10: Reinvest in meaningful efforts

The first class focused on the program’s first step: “Accept the severity of the predicament.” Klingelhofer and her husband emerged from the meeting in tears. “It was like we took our masks off,” she explained. Ten weeks later, they finished the course, and Klingelhofer signed up to be a Good Grief facilitator.

“People come in feeling so isolated, and with such a bottled-up bunch of emotions,” Klingelhofer said. “Whether it's outrage or panic or numbness or depression or fear,” she said. “There's always grief at the bottom of it. And it just comes out.”

In 2021, The Lancet, a medical journal, published an investigation into young peoples’ attitudes towards climate change. As part of the landmark study, researchers surveyed thousands of young people globally and uncovered a persistent future-facing dread. From Nigeria to France, respondents expressed sadness, anger and despair. Two-thirds of youth in the 10 countries surveyed reported feeling afraid. More than half said they believe the things they value most will be destroyed, and nearly 60% felt their governments had betrayed them because of how they were responding to climate change.

The study’s authors posited that governments’ failure to address climate change may be contributing to “moral injury,” which they describe as “the distressing psychological aftermath experienced when one perpetrates or witnesses actions that violate moral or core beliefs.” This often manifests in feelings of not just betrayal but abandonment.

The findings underscore what may be a generational gap in expressions of climate grief. For many young people, the heartache of climate change is slanted toward the years ahead. As they contemplate carving out a life amid a series of cascading environmental crises, they wonder: Where will I be able to live? Work? Find community? And in the absence of any certainty, how can I plan ahead? One Washington-based student I talked to, who just graduated college, told me the threat of wildfires in California had thwarted her plans to apply to graduate school there — a decision her parents couldn’t comprehend and found “ridiculous.” She described the process of climate mourning for her generation as “grieving the potential futures we could have had.”

That includes a future with kids. Nearly 40% of the youth surveyed worldwide in The Lancet’s study said that concerns about climate change have made them hesitant to have children. Traversi, whose home burned in the Tubbs Fire, said the subject comes up regularly in her peer group. “Everyone is looking at what they're going to do after high school. There's such a huge conversation about, like, ‘I really wanted to have kids, but now I think I don't want to because of climate change,’” she said.

This is a different flavor of mourning than the nostalgic sadness that has punctuated my relationship with California. Solastalgia is rooted in the past and present, the feeling that your home environment is moving away from you and your relationship with that place has changed because it’s no longer what it was. The younger people I talked to, however, are grieving something different: children they may never get to meet, glaciers melted, species lost, life plans derailed. This is grieving for a future that may never come to be, as opposed to a past that was.

“I think we see that future orientation much more with young people,” Jennifer Atkinson, an associate professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, said. “So many of them really are mourning the loss of the future, the children they will never have or the security from their parents’ generation that won't be available to them.”

Atkinson has been a professor at the University of Washington for more than a decade, but about five years ago, she told me, she began to notice a plunge in student morale. People were coming into class telling Atkinson they couldn’t sleep or focus because they were consumed with thoughts of climate breakdown. The future looked too dark. Atkinson observed that her students’ sense of despair was interfering with their ability to learn: they were feeling powerless and despondent, unable to process the material she was trying to teach. So Atkinson decided to create a seminar dedicated to helping students navigate the emotional landscape of climate change. The idea was partially inspired by Good Grief’s 10-step program.

In Atkinson’s class, students study the academic literature on climate emotions while also delving into their personal responses to ecological loss. Her seminar was the first time that 22-year-old Joe Lollo, who took the course last spring, began to explore and later articulate his climate-related feelings and anxieties. That included his sorrow and dread when he visited Mount Rainier, an active volcano looming above Washington’s Cascades, and saw that one of the glaciers draping the mountain was melting, part of a trend that has seen glaciers across the state shrink dramatically as the world warms. Lollo had learned about glacier loss in his high school environmental science class, but coming face-to-face with Mount Rainier’s receding ice mass was the first time he had seen anything like it firsthand. As Lollo absorbed the changes, he began to cry. “I remember this being overwhelming for me, but I kept it inside,” he told me. “I had a lot of emotions that I didn't know how to express.”

Much of Atkinson’s work in class is focused on making grief acceptable to students. She encourages them to think of grief not as a pathological feeling to run from or bury, but as an emotionally healthy response to climate change. “If we got rid of these feelings, we’d lose so much of the motivation to stay in this fight,” she explained. “The core of all of it is to emphasize that grief is an expression of love.”

Part three

The end of magical thinking

There is another character in this story, hovering over the page as I write. Frustratingly, I cannot interview her. Outside of my dreams, I cannot talk to her. She is gone. And mourning her death taught me how to recognize grief wherever it lurks, including the edges of flames.

When you lose someone prematurely, there is always a before and an after: a moment when life as you understood it disappears abruptly and you are tasked with creating a new one out of the absence that remains. Mine came in May 2018, just before midnight, with a call from my sister. “You need to sit down,” her voice taut on the other line. The next sentence came so quickly that I didn’t have time to process the instruction, or why her voice was cracking. A handful of words that changed it all. Your best friend, she told me, had ended her life.

I bolted up from my bed: What? Through the receiver I could hear my sister crying, my mom sobbing and my dad calmly telling me to buy a flight back to California because her funeral would be in a few days. I was in too much of a state of shock to cry, so I sat at the edge of my bed repeating the same question in disbelief: What? What? What? “But she just emailed me!” I wailed. Indeed, she had sent me a routine email the day before she died — “just saying hi” — and in my rush to meet a deadline I hadn’t responded. I fell forward, my palms smacked onto the ground, and I screamed. I don’t remember anything after that.

Four days later, I was in California, eulogizing my best friend at her funeral, in front of hundreds of people. Everybody was in black, weeping, in shock. I was inconsolable. My right hand wouldn’t stop trembling. Even though I was surrounded by friends, family and community, I had the sensation that the only person who could understand what I was feeling was the person we were all there mourning. I wanted to gossip with her about the people who unexpectedly showed up at her funeral and talk to her about how profoundly alone I felt without her. More than anyone else in my life, I knew she would see what I was feeling in its fullest, truest form. Nothing prepared me for the heartbreak of realizing that could never happen again and the anguishing mental exercise of training myself away from reflexively texting or calling her first when something happened to me.

I’ve never recovered from that call, and I know that I never will. If my phone rings after 11 p.m. my stomach drops and my palms sweat, bracing for the impending news that someone I love has died. She was my oldest friend, the closest person to me outside of my family and partner. We met when I was two years old. She was like an exaggerated version of myself. My hair was big, hers was enormous. I was a silly dog-obsessed kid, but she was way quirkier. She collected handmade tiny mouse figurines dressed up as British royalty from a specialty store 30 minutes away. I was extroverted, but she took it to a whole other level. She would talk to anyone, anywhere, and inevitably find a way to relate. She was also the funniest person I’ve ever known — so charismatic that friends I introduced to her once would ask me about her for years after they met. After she died, laughter was in short supply for a long time. I felt so out of sorts I wondered if my sense of humor had permanently vanished.

The year before she died, she visited me in North Carolina. One weekend, I took her to the local farmer’s market. She decided to wear a graphic t-shirt with a uterus above the expression “Don’t tread on me.” I wandered around the stands for a few minutes and found her deep in conversation with an elderly pig farmer in overalls working at a stand selling meat, talking about the complexities of adult female friendships. He gave her earnest advice about how to handle a conflict with a friend. I was amused, but not surprised. It was so completely her, charming her way into the hearts of the pig farmers of the world in a uterus shirt.

While this recollection makes me smile, it also makes me confused. Lots of my memories with her are that way. I think back to different moments of our friendship, like the afternoon at the farmer’s market, and I wonder if she was unhappy and I had missed it. I wonder how, or if, her missed unhappiness should change how I remember our past. This confusion makes many of my memories with her strangely inaccessible, like childhood photos engulfed in flames.

This is the part of the story I’ve been avoiding writing. Reliving the call is agonizing; the funeral, gutting; the death, nearly impossible to talk about. My ability to mourn was blocked by the way she died. I didn’t see it coming and couldn’t understand it, poring over the last text she sent me (a close-up of a pug’s face with no context), searching for clues about what I missed, what I could have caught and prevented if only I had seen it first. 

In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion’s classic book about grieving, she writes about her obsession with her husband’s shoes after he passed away. She was unable to get rid of them, because, Didion reasoned, he might need them in case he came home. Although she knew perfectly well that her husband was gone, she clung to the illusion that he might still stroll through the front door as a psychological salve for her grief. The behavior became an example of what she describes in the book as magical thinking: “thinking as small children think,” she writes, “as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.”

I am very familiar with this chaotic line of reasoning.

My best friend died a few months before my birthday, and a few months after her own. We were planning to celebrate both when I moved back to California permanently, in the fall of 2018. Two months before I was scheduled to drive across the country, she passed away. I couldn’t hit pause on my decision to move home: I had already quit my job and given up my lease, and my partner had enrolled in graduate school in California. I was moving home — back to the place I had grown up with my best friend, where she was living when she died — whether I was ready or not.

My return to our hometown plunged me into a grief deeper than what I had felt when I was living on the other side of the country. To make myself feel better, I came up with an illogical psychological salve. My friend had a habit of sending me eclectic handmade cards on my birthday, and so I convinced myself that a birthday letter would arrive from her posthumously, explaining everything with her characteristic humor and observations. Although this imagined letter would not bring her back, it would at least give me a semblance of closure about why she took her life and leave me with words to revisit when I missed her. I would finally have answers to the questions that kept me up at night.

Of course, a note like this would never arrive. But I felt confident that it would appear in my mailbox before my birthday, this letter-turned-death-Rosetta Stone, giving me a coherent narrative to understand her death. When my birthday came and went without a letter, it marked the end of my magical thinking and the beginning of my painful descent into reality. I recognized that I had to accept that she was gone, and that I would never get the answers I wanted. Sometimes things just don’t make sense. My future wouldn’t include her in the ways I had always imagined, and my childhood memories would now always be imprinted with her loss.

Death, like fire, had upended my past, present and future, as well as my relationship with home — a place that no longer included her. In order to exist in the world as it was, the one that I reluctantly saw in front of me, I finally needed to grieve.

In retrospect, when I moved back to California, I was actually mourning two things at once: the loss of my friend and the loss of my sense of home. It took me years to identify the latter because the former was so all-consuming.

But after I acknowledged my solastalgia and began working on this story, I started to recognize the familiar shape of my California fire heartache. The homesickness, the urge to stay rooted in the California of my past, the despair lurking beneath my nostalgia — that all began to feel like my entry point into mourning. I started to see solastalgia as the first stage of my climate grief.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in the book “On Death and Dying,” laid out the process of grieving the loss of a loved one in five separate stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This doesn’t necessarily describe a linear process, and plenty of people don’t relate to this framework, but I found acceptance to be a transformative stage of my grieving, a process that has left me much more attentive to the quiet pain of so many people moving through the world. While imagining a reality that included my best friend provided me with great nostalgic comfort, it also kept me locked in denial and magical thinking. It left me unable to process and exist in the present, like wearing a jacket of despair lined with silk sleeves. Eventually, I had to accept that she was permanently gone. The world I thought I knew had changed, the ground had hollowed out beneath me, and I needed to figure out a way to find my footing over the fragments that remained.

I’ve been wondering if a similar process is needed to confront the realities of climate change. Maybe our collective fear of descending into grief is sabotaging our ability to emotionally process the depths of the crisis. Grief is generally regarded in our society as a scary and unpleasant emotional state to avoid at all costs, or, if we must, to push through quickly and overcome, not voluntarily submit to. But my process of grieving my best friend was essential. It forced me to digest the depth and pain of my loss. It taught me that some losses are just too big to ignore.

“Every wisdom tradition and psychologist will tell you that sitting with grief is a necessary part of recognizing and internalizing a new reality in the face of a loss,” Jennifer Atkinson, the University of Washington professor who teaches the climate grief seminar, told me. “And one of the things that I've encountered in a lot of the research and work and interviews that I've done is how valuable and productive grief is in finally shaking us out of this collective denial or disavowal. You don't have to really be a climate denier, deny the science, to sort of deny the fact or disavow the fact that our lives are truly unraveling and will not be what we thought they were.” Grief, Atkinson argued, “is the opposite of indifference.”

What would it look like to let go of our denial and magical thinking, and instead open ourselves to climate mourning? For people who take part in the Good Grief Network’s course, it means beginning with what, for some, is an emotionally overwhelming task. The program’s first step is to “accept the severity of the predicament.” Acceptance is not the last step of the process, but the first.

Part four

Ritual

One summer night, I descended down the mountains for a concert in the city of Santa Cruz. I wound down the redwood-dotted hills, watched the surfers bobbing on the deep blue waves of the Pacific, and then made my way to the final stop of my day, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

The evening’s headliner was “The End of Rain,” a multimedia performance reflecting on Californians’ emotional responses to fire and drought. The composer, Scott Ordway, spent more than a year traveling across the state, collecting firsthand accounts of wildfire and drought from more than 200 Californians. He used their words to create a text and a musical score, which was performed by a chorus and accompanied by his own videos and photos taken from visits to different sites of wildfires.

Ordway, a Santa Cruz native who now lives on the East Coast, followed the 2020 Santa Cruz wildfire from his home in Philadelphia. He watched the fire, which was sparked by lightning, descend on his hometown, evacuating his parents’ town and bearing down on places he knew vividly from his childhood. “I knew immediately that I wanted to respond artistically,” he said. So he hit the road, asking people throughout the state about how the wildfires are reshaping their relationship to land, community and self.

That night was Ordway’s composition’s world premiere. The theater was packed, and he stepped onto the stage. “When the lightning struck, I never felt so far from home,” he told the crowd. The lights dimmed and the chorus began to sing the words culled from dozens of Californians, as photos of fire-scarred landscapes flashed on a projector behind the performers. For the next 45 minutes, the audience listened in rapt silence. It felt like a mourning ritual, a public space where a community razed by fire could hear the words of others who had gone through the same thing.

Ordway told me that when he began working on the composition, he thought he would end up writing “a funeral piece for my beloved landscape, for my home, for California.” But in the process of traveling across the state and collecting peoples’ stories, it went in a different direction. Ordway explained that the people he spoke to did not want him to write “a requiem — a sad, somber piece about what was going on” but wanted something that left open even a sliver of room for a salvageable future. He recalled an elderly woman who grabbed him by the shoulders during an interview. “Young man,” she ordered, “don’t you dare put a sad ending on this piece.”

Ordway tried to encapsulate those feelings in the composition’s last two lines of text:

We must change now.

Things will grow back.

Maybe this is where grieving leaves us, suspended between heartache and hope. Staring at an unrecognizable home, with so much left to save.

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The post Grieving California appeared first on Coda Story.

“Today, Mozambique enters the annals of world history as one of the countries that export liquefied natural gas, which, in addition to representing an alternative source of supply, contributes greatly to the energy security of the countries with the highest consumption,” declared Mozambican president Filipe Nyusi. This moment, he insisted, “must bring pride to all Mozambicans.”

Yet life in Cabo Delgado has increasingly brought pain and fear, with thousands displaced to refugee camps to the south following vicious ongoing battles between government troops and militants linked to the Islamic State, with both sides accused of war crimes. Four thousand people have been killed and more than a million people have fled their homes in the five years of fighting. The abandoned buildings bear the scars of an insurgency that the Mozambique government — even when bolstered by forces from neighboring states and mercenaries from the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group — cannot control.

TotalEnergies, one of a nexus of American and European energy companies present in gas-rich Cabo Delgado, declared force majeure at their site last year, following a nearby attack, and ceased operations. Rights groups accuse the government and its supporting forces of focusing on security for global gas exporters over the local population, amid a new worldwide urgency to find gas supplies following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. “There is a prioritization of optics for the world to see that these areas are fine and therefore investment should come, rather than a prioritization of basic conditions for people to go back,” Zenaida Machado of Human Rights Watch told CNN.

That urgency was on full display at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort town where dozens of heads of state and tens of thousands of delegates gathered to ostensibly tackle the climate crisis. European Council president Charles Michel began his address to the conference with the warning that the “Kremlin has chosen to make energy a weapon of mass destabilization.” And, he added gravely, “it is pointing this weapon directly at Europe and at Europe’s global energy markets.”

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, whose trip to Sharm el-Sheikh was punctuated by numerous energy deals, addressed the climate talks with what she presented as a solution to Europe's energy crisis. “For Europe,” she said, “the answer is RePowerEU,” the bloc’s plan to phase out its dependence on Russian fossil fuels in part by scaling up the use of renewable energy. “Let us not take the highway to hell,” Von der Leyen said somberly, seemingly quoting ancient Australian rockers AC/DC. “Let us earn the clean ticket to heaven.”

But even amidst talk of energy independence through ratcheting up renewable energy supplies within Europe, the bloc is on a renewed hunt for natural gas reserves across Africa.

Von der Leyen’s clean ticket to heaven seems to stop at Europe’s borders. It includes plans to increase cooperation to build a gas pipeline from Azerbaijan, potential new supply deals with Algeria and Qatar, as well as accelerating orders of LNG from Egypt and Israel. RePowerEU also notes the need to “explore the export potential of sub-Saharan African countries like Nigeria, Senegal and Angola.” This divide between encouraging growth in renewables as part of a green transition within Europe and what some have labeled a “dash for gas” outside the EU’s borders has provoked anger and alarm among climate advocates.

The British Court of Appeal is due to hear a legal challenge from Friends of the Earth, who argue that the British government's decision to approve $1.15 billion in financing for TotalEnergies’ LNG project in Cabo Delgado is incompatible with the commitments made in the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Exploration or broadening extraction in gas-rich countries like Mauritania, Senegal, Mozambique or Egypt put the world on a path to accelerate even faster past acceptable limits of global warming and into dangerous levels where the African continent will bear the brunt of the initial consequences. African nations are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of global warming despite accounting for, at most, 3.8% of global carbon dioxide emissions annually.

Evidence of climate change is already visible in many places across the continent, including flooding that displaced over 1.4 million people in Nigeria, in the same months as severe drought across the Horn of Africa that has led to a growing famine that risks affecting 82 million people in eastern Africa according to the U.N. “Unfortunately, we have not yet seen the worst of this crisis. If you think 2022 is bad, beware of what is coming in 2023,” said leading World Food Programme official Michael Dunford. He added that the Horn of Africa “is experiencing the worst drought in over 40 years.”

Fears about the consequences for Africa as the world remains on track to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming have done little to stop business interests discussing the continent's gas reserves, estimated to be around 13% of the world's total. "Wind and solar are not going to help Africa industrialize,” said Joseph McMonigle, the secretary general of the International Energy Forum, at an industry gas conference in Dubai in early November. “They need to have access to hydrocarbons.” The African Union expressed a similar sentiment before COP27, pointing to natural gas as a short-term measure to solve the problem of 600 million Africans currently living without electricity.

Many of those looking to Africa as a business opportunity have prioritized gas for export over improving living conditions for those on the continent. “The energy crisis that emerged during the pandemic and that was exacerbated by the war in Ukraine has given East African gas greater appeal,” wrote Carole Nakhle, an energy economist and CEO of the London-based analysis firm Crystol Energy. She noted that countries such as Tanzania or Mozambique “may benefit over the medium term from Europe’s efforts to diversify its energy sources and thus see stronger export demand from the region, especially given the European Union’s recent decision to classify gas as sustainable.”

Gas producing nations such as the COP27 host Egypt have been part of this effort to rebrand natural gas as sustainable, claiming it will form an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels — despite being a fossil fuel. Cairo hosted a meeting of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) in late October, shortly before COP27, welcoming officials from Russia, Iran, Qatar and nearby Algeria, a key natural gas supplier to Europe. The conference also welcomed officials from Angola and Mozambique, which sits atop an estimated one percent of the entire world's gas reserves.

Egyptian officials were keen to present gas as the solution, rather than part of the problem. “We are convening at a critical time when global efforts are dedicated towards achieving the energy trilemma for security, sustainability and affordability. As the cleanest hydrocarbon [fossil] fuel, natural gas is seen as the perfect solution that strikes the right balance, and will continue to play a key role in the future energy mix,” Egypt’s Minister for Petroleum and Mineral Resources Tarek El Molla, told the conference.

Yet even as Molla spoke to the conference, his own country provided a warning to other African nations about the consequences of prizing gas exports above domestic need. Following an August cabinet directive, the lights were switched off in public buildings in central Cairo and shoppers in the capital’s malls fanned themselves in the crushing heat as the air conditioning was cut to conserve energy so that more gas could be exported.

The Egyptian government has pledged to increase its development of solar energy projects and has publicly sought investment in renewables, all in a bid to export the maximum possible amount of gas in order to bring in desperately needed foreign currency. This has not automatically resulted in a smooth shift to burning cleaner fuels.

Instead, as the multicolored neon lights adorning the streets around Cairo Tahrir square dim, the Egyptian state has been forced to rapidly increase the burning of a heavy fuel oil named mazut in power stations nationwide in order to plug the energy gap, according to a government leak published by Climate Change News. Mazut, a blend of heavy hydrocarbons that can contain sulfites and heavy metals, is now consumed in over 20% of power stations compared to just under 4% at the same time last year.

Ministers who met at the Gas Exporting Countries Forum cautioned against “misguided calls to stop investing in natural gas projects,” in their statement following the meeting, warning that this could cause “supply-demand imbalance, which has been exacerbated by geopolitical tensions.” They applauded Egypt for hosting COP27, as well as praising the United Arab Emirates, a gas exporter, for hosting next year's COP28 and presenting “a great opportunity to make a case for gas in the energy transition as well as to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular in Africa’s development.”

While talk of development and Africa’s wealth of untapped gas reserves proliferates in boardrooms and conference rooms around the world, Mozambique’s bid to become a major gas exporter shows how such economic ambition plays out for communities on the ground. Since an American company found gas off the coast of Cabo Delgado region in 2010, the northern province has become the scene of some of  Africa's largest private gas investments, including TotalEnergies' 20-billion Mozambique LNG. According to the French energy giant, the Mozambique LNG project represents a coalition of some of Africa's largest export loans, financed through $14.9 billion in loans from eight different export credit agencies, 19 commercial banks and a loan from the African Development Bank, saddling an already heavily indebted state with further debt repayments.

There is little evidence that the population of Cabo Delgado has felt any benefits from the multi-billion-dollar gas projects that now dominate the shoreline. Instead, according to environmental groups, an estimated 2,000 people who lived and fished in the area were evicted to make way for gas extraction infrastructure. In the past five years, Cabo Delgado became the center of an armed insurrection in which, the International Crisis Group said, “most of the Mozambican rank and file militants are motivated by their perceived socio-economic exclusion amid major mineral and hydrocarbon discoveries in the region.”

Outside Cabo Delgado, the wider population of Mozambique also appears unlikely to receive any of the alleged development benefits that could come from sitting atop this wealth of natural gas. “Despite the incredibly limited access to electricity in the country, the liquid natural gas projects will not benefit Mozambican citizens lacking access to electricity, since most of the gas will be transformed into LNG and immediately sent to other countries, in particular markets in Asia and Europe,” observed the environmental groups Justiça Ambiental and Friends of the Earth in a 2020 report. “Furthermore, in order to build and maintain needed infrastructure for this project, the government will need to divert funds that could instead be spent on other more sustainable investments such as renewable energy development, education and social programs.”

Mozambique will also have to deal with the heavy environmental impacts of gas extraction, notably increased levels of harmful methane gas, even as Europe enjoys the benefits of greater access to supplies of LNG. Justiça Ambiental and Friends of the Earth warned that the projects risk increasing Mozambique’s greenhouse gas emissions by 14%.

Charity Migwi, a regional campaigner for 350Africa.org, said that African nations buying into the idea that exporting their gas reserves will bring development are being sold a lie. “Before even a drop of gas was exported from Mozambique,” she said, “the project caused massive issues, it brought about conflict among people, and violence as well as internal displacement. Everyone wants a share [of the gas] and that need for control creates conflict."

Migwi told me that Europe's focus on hunting for fossil fuels in Africa hampers efforts at genuine energy independence, rather than spurring development. “The dash for gas in Africa threatens the potential investment and development of renewable energy in the continent. Africa has an abundance of renewable energy alternatives like solar. This is the real solution that spurs Africa's economic growth, especially when decentralized, without causing adverse climatic impacts.” Short-term thinking in Europe and knee-jerk responses to the war in Ukraine, she argued, have debilitating long-term impacts in Africa. 

“I don't even think the dash for gas in Africa can meet the European Union's energy needs in the near future,” Migwi said. “That's part of what makes it so destructive.”

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Known in the British cycling community as a “punishment pass,” this type of threat is an occupational hazard for anyone pedaling on two wheels in the U.K. 

A video of this particular punishment pass ignited a fiery controversy online in early November. Some people were enraged the child had been threatened. But many others were just as angry at the 5-year-old and his father. 

The video garnered millions of views and soon became the top story on the Daily Mail website — one of the most-visited news sites in the world. It unleashed a wave of hatred, with thousands blaming the boy’s father for “horrific parenting” and risking his son’s life by letting him out on the road. 

“I faced insane levels of abuse,” the boy’s father Ashley Zhang-Borges, 36, told me. “Some of it was very direct threats of violence: ‘I’d run you over if I saw you’ or ‘hope they get you next time,’” he said. Others said they hoped his son would be killed.

Former Home Secretary Sajid Javid even weighed in on Twitter, also casting blame on the father. Although he later deleted the tweet, it was a signpost to how Britain’s cyclists are facing an onslaught of criticism amid the debate over who owns the roads in the U.K.

On one side, cyclists say they don’t feel safe on the roads, and there is not enough space for them when there should be. On the other, motorists see cyclists as a nuisance, people who hold up their travel time and don’t obey Britain’s Highway Code.

But the anti-cycling narrative is also frequently rooted in disdain for environmental policy. Cycling advocates are campaigning for safer streets for bikes amid a broader global movement to rethink the way cities are run as the world heats up. It’s causing fury among those who believe that the road should be for cars.

“A frenzy of high-minded moral purpose — allied to a lockdown culture of big government deciding how we should live our lives — has been the perfect excuse for town and city councils to impose a range of drastic 'cycle-friendly' measures with appalling consequences,” wrote politician-turned-broadcaster Nigel Farage in a 2020 Daily Mail op-ed during the lockdown. “Cyclists are the new kings of the highway, accountable to no one. Of course, the rest of us are told to shut up because cycling is the green alternative, better for the environment and healthy living.”

Right-wing media voices frequently paint cyclists as fanatical environmentalists. In another Daily Mail op-ed, Brendan O’Neill declared: “I’d rather take my chances with the carbon emissions from cars than with the moral emissions that emanate from these puffed-up, two-wheeled eco-warriors.”

On a 2017 BBC talk show debate about cycle lanes in Northern Ireland, Irish broadcaster George Hook even accused cyclists of being Nazis, saying they “used to wear brown shirts and sing the Hurst Wessel song.” 

The anti-cycling lobby in the U.K. also has some powerful backers. Two Facebook groups called "Unblock the Embankment" and "Londoners for Transport" were formed to advocate for the rerouting of London’s flagship cycle lanes running along the river Thames. Although often presented as a grassroots movement, the groups were really overseen by Crosby Textor, a lobbying firm owned by Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby. Alongside efforts to tear up London’s cycling lanes, the group has orchestrated a number of social media disinformation campaigns, doing everything from influencing Zimbabwe election debates to burnishing the reputation of Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

It is easy to imagine how these narratives trickle down and contribute to rising levels of online vitriol towards cyclists. People who post about cycling on social media say they regularly receive death threats. Anne Ramsey, a 55-year-old cyclist from Northern Ireland who posts under the handle “Cyclegranny,” told me she’d recently gotten a string of knife emojis in a private message. She used to post on Facebook about life on two wheels but was so inundated with abuse she had to leave the platform. “The level of aggression was extreme,” she said.

But cyclists too have popular online allies. Just outside leafy Regent’s Park, a notorious corner for collisions in London, drivers stuck in traffic are known to lurch out into the oncoming lane to overtake the line of cars. Cyclists coming out of the park can easily be hit — so one man has taken the matter into his own hands. Mike van Erp, 50, hides behind a hedge with his camera, waiting to pounce.

“Here we go,” he tells his YouTube audience of millions as he sees a car pull out of the traffic. Reciting the license plate number to his viewers, like a vigilante traffic cop, van Erp stands in front of the car trying to pass and tells them, “Go back!” Van Erp nicknamed the junction Gandalf’s Corner after the YouTuber was compared to the Lord of the Rings character shouting “you shall not pass.”

The videos are artistic in their own way — they somehow form a vignette of London in 2022. Doctors on their way to clinics, frustrated by the traffic, pull out illegally and immediately enter into a shouting match with van Erp. Drivers on the other side of the road yell words of encouragement or derision, and cyclists and motorbike riders whizzing past chime in.

“I do think there's some kind of U.K. position that cyclists are like eco-warriors. Yeah, actually, I'm a terrible environmentalist,” van Erp laughed.

“I still don’t really understand why people enjoy watching it,” van Erp told me. But enjoy it they do. Van Erp’s YouTube channel has racked up almost 50 million views, and his supporters are fiercely protective. When I reached out publicly to van Erp to ask him for an interview about “Britain’s cycling wars,” his followers immediately fell on me, assuming I was preparing to write another anti-cycling hit piece. “You are part of the car cancer,” one follower wrote (full disclosure: I cycle in London myself, but am also learning to drive), and my phone pinged with notifications for days. It was a litmus test for how fraught the debate has become.

It is minor in comparison to the abuse van Erp receives from the other side. “I can’t wait for you to get your head kicked in you little t***,” read one recent message. “Ten years and you still haven’t been curb stomped, I’m astonished. What a loser you are. I’m telling you now one day you’re gonna get hurt.”

According to a 2021 study by Oxford researchers, on average, those who swapped their car for a bike for just one journey a day could decrease their carbon emissions by 67%.

“People don’t want to make any sacrifices, but no one’s going to think about those sacrifices when we have a global catastrophe that’s been caused by heating up the planet,” said Frances Cherry, 38. Cherry campaigns for “play streets” and set one up on her local road. Once every month, the road is closed to cars, and kids can play freely on the street, riding their bikes around. It harkens back to 1950s London, when passing cars in residential neighborhoods were a rarity.

When the pandemic hit, it offered a glimpse of what the world’s cities could look like without cars. Metropolises that previously were hostile to cyclists, where only the most foolhardy would take to the road on two wheels, suddenly became cycling havens. 

During the lockdown in London, Cherry took her children on long bike rides through the suddenly quiet city, riding for miles across the capital as a way to get fresh air and exercise and pass the time. With her 5-year-old son, she cycled from Haggerston, in London’s East End, to St. James Park, a distance of almost five miles. “It felt almost unlimited. Like if it was safe he could go all that way. So I started questioning why people need a huge heavy machine to get any distance.” But soon enough, the cars returned.

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The Darvaza crater is believed to have been the consequence of a natural gas drilling operation accident, where the ground collapsed into a void under the Karakum desert. 

Despite having an isolated dictatorship hostile to outsiders ruling the country, Turkmenistan has a history of marketing the country’s bizarre spectacle to tourists, like a 246 foot tower in the capital Ashgabat dedicated to geopolitical neutrality. Or a gigantic, rotating golden statue of the country’s former dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov. And a newer, 16-foot statue of the current president’s favorite dog breed (The Alabay, a Turkmen variety of the Central Asian shepherd dog).

Putting tourism aside, last week President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov ordered the Gates of Hell to be extinguished. He had abruptly given the same command in 2010, without stating any clear reasons, but it was never completed.

Berdymukhamedov is known for puzzling initiatives like fumigating public spaces with smoke from an indigenous grass to protect against Covid. He has said that he wanted the pit extinguished because it’s a waste of profitable resources and it adversely affects the health of people living nearby and damages the environment.

But closing the Darvaza crater would have negligible mitigation for Turkmenistan's emissions problem. Rich in oil and gas resources, the country is one of the top emitters of methane, the largest component of natural gas and is significantly more detrimental to the environment than carbon dioxide. Methane leaks can be reduced with the help of regulations and infrastructure, and over a hundred countries made cut-down pledges at COP26, the climate conference last year in Glasgow. Turkmenistan’s had only made vague promises at COP26. 

In the past couple years, Turkmenistan has been on the radar of energy data analytics organizations like Kayrros or International Energy Agency, as methane footprint awareness evolved to become a top climate concern. But the contribution of the Gates of Hell to the problem does not rank among the chief causes of the country’s methane crisis.

“It's actually a tourist attraction. I don't think it can be considered the main cause of Turkmenistan's emissions. If you want to reduce methane emissions in Turkmenistan, it's probably not the place you want to start,” said Antoine Halff, chief analyst at Kayrros. “I think there's a lot of scrutiny over emissions from Turkmenistan and this looks like an attempt by the government to be proactive about emissions.”

Darvaza crater, in fact, draws many adventurers' interest.

“If you'd never seen this place before and were asked to draw a picture of a hole in the ground as a doorway to hell, this is exactly what it would look like,” said George Kourounis, a professional explorer and the only man known to ever go down in the pit. “I've described it as being in a coliseum of fire.”

If the reasons why the president of Turkmenistan wants to extinguish the fiery pit right now is open to speculation, so is how it became a burning hole in the ground in the first place. The most widely circulated theory is that in 1971 geologists ignited the hole, hoping to burn off seeping dangerous methane over a few days. 

But Kourounis says the Turkmen geologists that accompanied his expedition had a slightly different memory. 

“They tell me that the crater bubbled with mud and gas for years and that the mud actually overflowed the top of the crater and spilled into the surrounding desert and didn't catch fire until the 1980s.” 

Kourounis says nobody in the country knows what happened either. “I tried to get any kind of official reports, something on paper, but you know, it was the Soviet era, it was either classified or destroyed, or maybe no good records were taken. So I don't have any proof other than what we witnessed ourselves and the testimony from two geologists on the scene.”

Extinguishing the burning hole won’t be a straightforward task, according to Giuseppe Etiope, a geologist and researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy and the author of book called Natural Gas Seepage: The Earth’s Hydrocarbon Degassing.

Etiope said the accident seems to have exposed an accumulation of gas, or a gas pocket, below the surface, opening a Pandora’s Box. Closing it would require a comprehensive geological and geophysical study of not only the crater but the whole area.

“The Pandora’s Box is not only the shallower gas pocket, but is all the sequence of the pockets below that are probably connected,” he told me.

Long-term burning craters are not a new phenomenon tied to the petroleum industry. These “eternal fires” relegated as tourist attractions have had a special role in ancient cultures, driving mythological legends, religious traditions, and contributing to human civilization. Like the burning Baba Gurgur in Iraq, or eternal fires in Iran and Azerbaijan, like the Yanardag, worshiped by Zoroastrians.

Besides attempting to turn the Gates to Hell into a tourist attraction, Berdymukhamedov also gained attention for the site when, after months of rumors that he was dead, he appeared on a state-owned TV channel in a video, driving around the fire pit doing doughnuts.

Since November, the government has banned Turkmen from visiting the pit without special permission. And although the ban has not applied to foreign tourists, it appears Berdymukhamedov hasn’t welcomed them to visit the pit either.

It’s doubtful that the plan to close the Gates of Hell will succeed, according to Stefan Green, a microbiologist that accompanied Kourounis on his Darvaza expedition and gathered soil samples from the crater. 

The president “is certainly right that the crater is pretty bad for the environment. But it is better off burning than as an uncontrolled methane release. Methane is a terrible greenhouse gas, much worse than CO2. Better to burn it than to let it go into the atmosphere as methane,” he said. 

According to Green, the right solution would not be inexpensive: “You could put out the fire easily but that would create an explosion hazard. It needs careful engineering. My guess is that they decide it isn't worth the effort.”

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Eco-anxiety is the term being used to describe a deep-seated fear of environmental meltdown now being experienced by a growing number of people. According to psychologists, it can have profound effects on mental health and is particularly prevalent among young people. 

In response, a growing number of mental health professionals are taking a “climate-aware” approach to the treatment of a range of conditions. Young people are also creating online communities to share their experiences and tips on how to deal with feelings of stress related to ecological issues.

As psychotherapist Caroline Hickman explained, the phenomenon “doesn't just stop with anxiety, it extends into depression, despair, frustration, guilt, grief, shame. It's a real combination of emotional responses.”

“It's not just what's happening to the planet,” added Hickman, who is a member of Climate Psychology Alliance and a lecturer at the University of Bath in the U.K. “What we also feel is frustration and abandonment and betrayal, because people in power are failing to act on science.”

Hickman has co-authored a global survey, led by the University of Bath, which will soon be published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet. Questioning 10,000 people aged between 16 and 25 in 10 countries, it found that more than half of respondents said that stress over climate change was affecting their daily lives. But some go even further than that. 

“One trend that's troubling is the tendency of what's been called doomism: the stance that it's too late, there's nothing we can do, that we're past the point of making a significant impact toward a healthier world,” said psychologist Leslie Davenport, who has written a book for young people titled “All the Feelings Under the Sun: How to Deal with Climate Change.”  

Far from being a mental illness, Davenport and Hickman believe that eco-anxiety is a rational and healthy response to what's going on in the world today, but that it should be channeled constructively and not spill over into nihilism. 

Fighting climate doomism is precisely what sustainability scientist Alaina Wood, 25, has been doing on TikTok for the past few months. She’s a member of EcoTok, a TikTok account, run by a team of environmental educators and activists, that provides climate education to over 100,000 followers.

Wood says that, while we all need to be aware of the threats to our world, the non-stop stream of terrifying headlines about the climate crisis can leave people feeling overwhelmed. She believes that shifting focus to possible solutions helps relieve eco-anxiety and gives a sense of agency to people who may have felt powerless to act. 

The biggest thing that helped me was finding a counselor,” she said, speaking of her own previously debilitating fears. “They recommended that I seek out resources and people who weren't just talking about the doom.” 

“It helped my eco-anxiety to know that I could fix things.” 

Along with a sense of pessimism, a lot of young people describe a profound sense of guilt over their individual actions, such as eating meat, or driving a car. 

Henry Ferland, a 19-year-old student and TikTok content creator stresses that individual guilt is largely misplaced — after all, corporations and governments that have failed to act are the ones to blame. However, he does believe that taking small steps with tangible effects is important both for the environment and for our mental health. 

And that’s exactly what helped him to tackle his own eco-anxiety.

Ferland, known on TikTok as Traashboyyy, tasked himself with picking up litter every day, then ended up setting himself a target of 50,000 pieces of garbage. "Doing little personal actions where you can see the good impact that you're having on the environment really helps me,” he said.

After meeting his goal a month ago, he bumped it up to 500,000 and asked his followers to join in, using the hashtag #trash500k on social media. 

“It's so much fun seeing people clean up in Germany and in Mexico and in Oregon,” he said. 

Like his teammates at EcoTok, Ferland believes that building communities and a wider awareness of eco-anxiety is extremely important. “You are not alone,” he said. “People who know that climate change is real have feelings of stress about it.”

Alaina Wood agrees wholeheartedly. “At the end of the day, it's really about finding somebody you trust, who you can talk to about it and who also understands what it is,” she said. “I was running into a lot of young people saying that their mental health professionals didn't know what eco-anxiety was.”

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Roads flood regularly, cutting off people in isolated areas from their jobs, schools and basic necessities. Hurricanes and powerful storms are frequent, the most recent being Tropical Storm Claudette in June. The county sits at sea level and is surrounded by water on two sides — the Albemarle Sound to the north and the Alligator River to the east.  

Saltwater intrusion is dramatically shaping the environment and its economy. Acres of forests and farms are being replaced by grassland. 

“These are the ghost forests,” said Willy Phillips, pointing through the window of his rumbling white truck towards haunting fields of dead pine trees. “Forests that give in as the sea level rises. Gradually, it becomes uninhabitable for them.” 

Phillips has been a fisherman on the North Carolina coast for most of his life. Now 71, he runs a crab fishing business and sells his catch at Full Circle Crabs. His store is located in Columbia, the largest town in the county. “Our blood is as close to sea water as you can get,” he told me.  

Phillips has also been involved in environmental issues on a state and local level for years. 

“Adaptation is the key,” he said. “You have to be nimble, you have to be quick, and you have to recognize the signals.” 

But nine years ago, North Carolina lawmakers took action that scientists and climate activists worried would undermine the state’s ability to respond to environmental change. 

A 2010 report by scientists at the state Coastal Resource Commission predicted that sea level would rise 39 inches over the next 100 years, threatening more than 2,000 square miles of coastal land. Conservative lawmakers and real estate interests took issue with those findings. In 2011, Republican State Representative Pat McElraft introduced House Bill 819, which limited government agencies to using only historical data on sea level rise when drafting development policies and regulations. 

The bill was widely criticized as being anti-science and suppressing important information on climate change. North Carolina was ridiculed on the national stage. Jokes on the satirical news show “The Colbert Report” particularly stung. “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying that result is illegal,” said host Stephen Colbert in a 2011 episode. 

The expectation was that HB 819 would be disastrous for North Carolina’s climate adaptation efforts. However, by the time the bill became law in 2012, it was significantly weakened. The version that remains in effect today allowed the state to account for future projections of accelerated sea level rise — a major sticking point in the original draft.   

According to Jessica Whitehead, former chief resilience officer at the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, “When you look at the long-term impact, there wasn’t one.” 

Nearly ten years after it was passed, HB 819 serves as a rosetta stone of the contradictory strands of climate change policy in America. The law, born of political grandstanding and based on the partisan repudiation of scientific evidence, turned rising sea-levels into a politically charged subject. But while local officials in wealthy towns have found creative ways to simply work around the law and invest in climate-resistant infrastructure, poorer towns have suffered from a shortage of resources and lack of public conversation that could push local officials to prioritize climate adaptation.

As a consequence, the global dynamic of climate change — where the world's poorest nations and communities are disproportionately affected — has been replicated in two neighboring towns in North Carolina.

Life goes on

The small town of Nags Head sits along the Outer Banks, a chain of islands that buffer the North Carolina coast against the Atlantic Ocean. It’s the kind of resort town where Mayor Ben Cahoon rides his bike — complete with “Mayor” license plate — everywhere. Given its tourist spot status, there is a general awareness that climate change, erosion and flooding could cause significant harm to the economy.

HB 819 limited how the state’s Department of Coastal Management could account for sea level rise in its planning, but it did not stop local governments from addressing the issue however they saw fit. 

“That’s why Nags Head had the complete freedom to explore all these neat projects that we’ve been able to do,” Cahoon told me, sitting outside the cafe where he grabs coffee every morning.

Nags Head, with a population of roughly 3,000 people, was building towards climate adaptation before the advent of HB 819. Since 2012, it has improved canals that drain into the ocean and invested in beach nourishment, which adds sand to the shore to protect against erosion. It also adopted new local elevation standards in 2020, exceeding state regulations, which require buildings to be 12 feet off the ground on the oceanfront and nine feet elsewhere, regardless of whether the location is in a flood zone. Towns up and down the coast have also raised local elevation requirements.

The town’s approach to resiliency centers on creating systems that can be replicated in the future, Cahoon explained. He points to the outfalls where water from around the town collects to empty into the ocean. Local authorities increased the capacity of one of these drains and have established a process to do the same to the remaining ones, if necessary.

Located in one of the wealthiest counties in the state and with a municipal budget of nearly $26 million for the current fiscal year, Nags Head has plenty of resources to devote to climate adaptation, often with the support of grants.

HB 819 did manage to influence public opinion in North Carolina. Shortly after the law was introduced, sea level rise became a charged subject. “It was like a dirty word. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. It was so politicized and too volatile," said Holly White, who became the principal planner of Nags Head in December of 2014, referring broadly to communities across the state.

Still, Nags Head has found a way to address these concerns, and resistance to discussing sea level rise has dissipated. In 2015, three years after HB 819, former mayor Robert Edwards pushed the town to participate in a vulnerability, consequences and adaptation planning scenario (VCAPS). The program is run by research agencies and facilitates community outreach and climate resiliency preparation. Throughout a two-day workshop and follow-up interviews, about 60 residents described the environmental issues they saw around the island, from drainage problems to beach loss.

The process offered a valuable lesson on how to frame adaptation projects in a way that resonates with the community. Instead of focusing on the cause of the town’s problems — sea level rise — Nags Head officials opted to place the emphasis of the conversation on consequences that people could see all around them. 

“When you go into a neighborhood to solve a flooding problem that we believe is caused by sea level rise, you don’t have to go into that neighborhood and talk about sea level rise,” explained Cahoon, who has been in office since 2017. “You say ‘I’m from the government, I’m here to help you, and we’re going to solve your flooding problem.” 

“That’s what citizens really care about,” he added. “Is your problem solved?” 

On the western side of Nags Head, across town from the ocean, undeveloped marshland stretches out a couple of hundred yards into the Roanoke Sound. Shallow islands of vegetation dot the water offshore. Over the years, the marsh has receded, making properties along the sound more vulnerable to flooding. Nags Head has plans to build a living shoreline, designed to be more environmentally friendly than the concrete embankments that have traditionally protected homes from the waves.

Building up this brackish stretch of land will better mitigate erosion and high waves during storms, but it also makes the area more resilient to sea level rise. It will be one of Nags Head’s most ambitious climate adaptation projects and is popular among residents. Rather than focusing on sea level rise specifically, the conversation with the community has addressed resiliency in broad terms.

Waiting for the flood

In the low-lying neighborhood of Goat Neck in Tyrrell County, about 45 minutes from Nags Head, the response to sea level rise has been very different. Tucked deep in the woods and  surrounded by marshes, Goat Neck floods frequently and its residents have standing water in their yards for eight or nine months of the year. The amount of water in the ground is steadily increasing, so the land remains muddy even on a hot spring day.

“People say when sea level rises, the tide comes into the yard. No, it comes up through the yard,” said Willy Phillips, who has lived in the county for decades. 

The soil is so wet that people can only bury their relatives in the community’s small graveyard during the hottest seasons, and coffins are covered in concrete to keep them from rising to the surface after they are interred. 

Goat Neck, which consists of around 17 inhabited homes and several more abandoned ones, is one of the most vulnerable areas in North Carolina. However, owing to its location on the edge of the Albemarle Sound, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean, all of Tyrrell County feels the effects of environmental change. 

People are accustomed to frequent damage to their houses caused by repeat flooding, so many have either built more space underneath or put ducts for heating and air conditioner units higher off the ground.

Saltwater intrusion is destroying agricultural land. Most farmers grow cash crops like corn, wheat and soybeans, which don’t do well in saline soils. Farmers are installing expensive pumps to drain excess water, but that’s a temporary solution, at best. 

“It’s sort of like the finger in the dike. You’re just able to hold it back long enough to get a couple more harvest seasons out of it,” said Phillips. 

Now, farmers are abandoning their fields, thereby slashing their profits. Agriculture is the largest industry in the county, but the acres of arable farmland decreased 18% from 2012 to 2017, according to the US Department of Agriculture. 

Despite the obvious damage that sea level rise is causing, Tyrrell County has been powerless to react in any meaningful way. The reasons for this reflect a global trend in which the communities hit hardest by climate change are often the ones least able to do anything about it. 

This inability to take action is due, in large part, to a lack of resources. Tyrrell County is one of the poorest in the state, with a median household income of around $35,000 a year — about half the national average — and 25% of its residents live below the federal poverty level of $26,500 a year for a family of four.

Many homeowners in Goat Neck don’t have the resources to elevate their houses, which sit a foot off the ground, at risk of sustained damage from rising water. Deserted trailers dot the neighborhood. The people who remain have done what they can to adapt. Philips and I passed one house that had several two-by-four planks stacked on cinder blocks, forming a makeshift bridge from the front door to the road. There was a heatwave that day and the yard was dry, but people are always prepared for the next flood.

Tyrrell County doesn’t have the money to take on the big infrastructure projects that would make neighborhoods like Goat Neck more resilient to climate change. Around 4,000 people live there now, making it the least populated county in the state, and the population has declined nearly 9 percent since 2010. As residents age and younger people move away, the tax base is diminishing, leaving the government with limited funds.  

“The bottom line is when it comes back to implementing some of the things that we recommended that we do, they're just too darn expensive,” said Rhett White, town manager of Columbia, the largest town in Tyrrell County.

As a result, county leadership tends to focus on projects that experts believe to be short-sighted, like dredging drainage canals. In Goat Neck, the canal that drains excess water into the Albemarle Sound is filled with debris, fallen trees and sediment. While clearing it could dry the ground, the ditch will eventually be lower than the water level. 

“You can’t drain landscapes that are a foot below sea level,” explained Dr. Ryan Emanuel, a hydrologist at North Carolina State University. 

Longer-term solutions include the installation of pumps to dry out the ground, but such measures are expensive. “Who’s going to maintain them? Who's going to pay for the electricity or the diesel fuel to run those pumps,” said Ty Flemming, the director of the Tyrrell Soil and Water Conservation Department.

The ongoing Band Aid fixes applied in places like Goat Neck are not rooted in denial of science. They simply cannot afford to invest in climate adaptation that will adequately serve residents in the future. 

Without massive financial investment, the Goat Neck community, which has existed since before the Civil War, will soon cease to exist. Recently, the county commissioner asked Phillips if he would see if residents, many of whom are older, would be willing to take a relocation buyout. Everyone he asked declined. 

“They said, “We can’t leave our people in the ground.’ It’s the people in the cemetery, you know. They just can’t go,” he told me. “But sooner or later, they make their choice and they leave.” 

A present-day imperative

The challenges that Tyrrell County faces in responding to climate change also extend beyond finances. There is little in the way of local conversation, or effective outreach and education. For some, it seems like the subject of rapidly encroaching environmental change is not even on the agenda. 

Angus Spencer, 28, only remembers learning about sea level rise once in middle school. In 2017, he met scientists working with the nonprofit North Carolina Sea Grant and North Carolina State University, who came to town to talk about climate resiliency, but the topic hasn’t come up since.

Matt Jurjonas, an environmental social scientist, was part of that outreach effort. He explained that people in Tyrrell County know that they are vulnerable to flooding and severe storms, however, many have never seen projections for sea level rise and what it could mean for them.

“If they aren’t aware, they’re obviously not planning for it,” he said.

Spencer grew up in the county and now leads youth groups and Bible study classes at the Columbia Christian Church. He thinks there needs to be a sustained dialogue about the environmental threats the area faces. 

“Even if it was just a week within the community, this is what we’re going to talk about,” he said. “But nobody has gotten to that level. There’s nobody to really start that conversation.”

Columbia’s residents appear to want to learn about environmental change. Spencer’s 19-year-old cousins Da’Shawn and Ka’Shawn told me that they have questions about climate adaptation for their elected representatives, but that there have been no community meetings where they could raise them. 

But precedents for community-driven change do exist. In the past, people in Tyrrell County have successfully advocated for and secured environmental protections. Years ago, the state government wanted to build a hazardous waste incinerator in the area. Locals, including Phillips, dragged an old TV to the grocery store, set up chairs, gave out popcorn and played a short documentary about the health risks it could bring. Within days, the community united against the proposal, and the development was shelved. 

To date, similar action has not been taken regarding climate adaptation. After all, it’s not a top priority for many people, said Spencer. In a poor and isolated rural area with few jobs and high unemployment, people are more focused on supporting their families today than they are on considering environmental threats that feel far in the future. 

For Spencer, outreach on sea level rise and climate change needs to be framed as a present-day imperative.

“Don’t bring it to us as a want, bring it to us as a need,” he said. “‘You need to have knowledge about this, if you want this community to be able to survive and not become Atlantis.’”

Small gains

In the nine years since HB 819 was passed, the apocalyptic warnings about anti-science lawmakers setting the state back years in its response to climate change have not panned out. Sea level rise is acknowledged by the state government, including in the June 2020 North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, which says it is “virtually certain” that oceans along North Carolina’s coast will continue to rise and that the intensity of storms will increase.

The law may have even been beneficial in a roundabout way, said Jessica Whitehead, the state’s former chief resiliency officer. In places like Nags Head, it forced state agencies and local governments to be creative about how they framed an often politically charged topic  to engage as many people as possible.

“If we could just say sea level rise and run with it, in the long run, would we have lost ground?” Whitehead asked. “In terms of getting things done, I think we had to think more carefully about what do we need to get out of this. What does this really mean for people? We couldn’t fall back on scientific jargon.” 

While HB 819 may have caused national outrage, the factors that have undermined the ability of communities to respond to climate change are deeper and more systemic than the edicts of anti-science politicians. Now, In Tyrrell County, even drastic action may be too little too late. 

As Phillips told me, the trees in the ghost forests are “dying in parallel with the community.” 

“It’s going to be under water. That’s just what’s going to happen. The county will cease to exist. There’s nobody that’s going to save Tyrrell County.” 

Photos by Caitlin Thompson.

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Nouri has worked the surrounding waters since he was 17. He believes that his health problems are caused by pollution from a nearby industrial port. 

“The port has destroyed me, my health and my livelihood,” he said.

Sat on the floor in his living room, Nouri pointed in the direction of a large plant, operated by the state-run chemical company Groupe Chimique Tunisien (GCT). Dedicated to the processing of raw phosphate, its imposing chimneys belch fumes into the air and its drains discharge millions of tons of toxic black sludge into the sea every year. 

Gabès Governorate covers 4,450 square miles and is home to almost 400,000 residents. It is also the only coastal oasis in the Mediterranean. Once a pristine agricultural and maritime community, the region was famed for its abundant marine life and verdant rows of pomegranate trees, henna plants and date palms. 

Locals tell stories of visitors marveling at the land’s natural beauty, but any tourism potential was lost in the 1970s, when the government turned it into the main centre of Tunisia’s phosphate industry. Phosphate rock, mined 100 miles away, in the hills of the Gafsa region, are a vital component in the production of a variety of exportable goods, including fertilizers and food preservatives.

Industrial pollution is devastating coastal communities around the world, from France to India. In Morocco, another phosphate-rich North African nation, chemical plant workers have reported high rates of respiratory disease and cancer, according to the charity SwissAid, and local arable farmers have experienced depleted harvests. 

A similar story is playing out in Tunisia, but the subject of pollution and its effects on the environment and public health has long been ignored in Gabès. Under the Tunisian dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, people feared the consequences of talking about it and efforts to carry out studies were routinely thwarted by the state. After Ben Ali’s fall in the revolution of 2011, residents hoped for something better. However, while people are now free to protest, little attention is being paid to their concerns and even less action taken. 

Ignoring the problem

In the city of Gabès, the governorate’s capital, an old electronic display board on the side of the road is supposed to show the levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ammonia in the air. According to passersby, it has been broken for years. 

The sign was installed by GCT, the largest manufacturer operating in the port. In addition to three GCT factories, the area contains some 20 plants operated by private companies, including two other highly polluting facilities that produce aluminum fluoride for use in metal foundries, and phosphate salt, which is used in the making of detergents and ceramics. 

Trains deliver up to 3.5 million tons of raw phosphate to the GCT factories each year. It is processed and exported by container ships to dozens of countries abroad. Nearly 5,000 people work in the region’s chemical industry, more than 2,800 for GCT.

While the company brings much-needed jobs to the area, the effects of pollution are clear to see. The stretch of beach between the town of Chott Salem and the industrial zone, less than a mile away, is composed of a thick black layer of phosphogypsum — a waste product created during the production of phosphoric acid. A 2018 European Union report found that GCT dumps around five million tons of it into the Mediterranean each year.

Phosphogypsum is mildly radioactive and contains both uranium and radium. According to a 2012 government study, fish catches near the coast contracted by more than 30% between 1997 and 2006, owing to the effects of chemical waste. The document noted that the marine ecosystem has been “severely damaged and that the situation is now totally irreversible.”

Nouri says local fishermen have suffered a dramatic decline in income. “Since the 1990s there has been nothing here. You used to be able to bring home 150 pounds of squid in one day,” he said, adding that now, a typical haul has fallen to seven pounds. Now, he rents his small boat to a fisherman in another town and pays for his cancer treatment with donations from his neighbors. He misses his old life desperately. “My heart is the sea. I’m heartbroken,” he added. 

According to the conservation group BirdLife TunisiaAir, air pollution has contributed to a fall in bird populations. Rumors persist among locals of falling fertility rates and frequent miscarriages. 

In 2017, the Tunisian government pledged to dismantle the existing GCT factories and move them to a new location, far away from residential areas. It also promised to stop dumping phosphogypsum into the sea. No further plans have been announced.

This week, there were renewed calls from local environmentalists for increased regulation and the removal of the factories, after the death of five workers in an accidental fire at an asphalt factory in the industrial zone. 

“We fear that one day Gabès will be nothing but ashes,” said Haifa Bedoui, an activist with the local campaign group Stop Pollution, to hundreds of people gathered in front of governor of Gabès Mongi Thameur’s office on Wednesday. On a visit following the fire, President Kais Saied, acknowledged the environmental crisis in the region and promised a cancer treatment centre for residents. The Tunisian government has launched an inquiry to determine the cause of the blaze. 

Speaking by telephone, Moez Haddad, GCT’s secretary-general, insisted that there are no proven detrimental consequences of the marine disposal of phosphogypsum. “A few studies show there are small problems — not a big problem,” he said. He did, however, concede that GCT plans to fall in line with international norms and end the practice “as a precaution.”

When questioned further about high rates of cancer and respiratory problems reported by residents in the Gabès region, he added that “there are no official studies that show a causal link between health problems and the effects of Groupe Chimique Tunisien on the environment.” 

“Flagrant lack of information”

The residents of Chott Salem and Ghannouch can see and smell the pollution from the chemical factories in their homes. Traditional houses in the region are built around an open courtyard. This communal space is meant for people to congregate and children to play in. Now, parents tell their sons and daughters to stay in their bedrooms.

In 2017, nine students from a primary school in Bouchema, a town just over a mile away from the plants, were taken to the hospital with symptoms of asphyxiation after gases produced during the processing of sulphuric acid and ammonium nitrate were released into the air. The local governor brushed off residents’ concerns as mere “panic.” 

Local healthcare workers regularly treat patients who appear to be suffering from long-term health issues caused by pollution. Dr. Hamida Kwass, who works on the respiratory ward at Mohammed Ben Sassi regional hospital in Gabès, says that asthma is particularly common among children in the town of Ghannouch. 

“The factory is almost in their houses,” she said. 

Kwass plans to carry out a study on air pollution and its effects on inhabitants. “There are polluting particles from the chemical industry that are known to be associated with an increase in respiratory diseases, whether they cause a disease or are an exacerbating factor,” she added.

Awatef Mansour, 30, lives in Ghannouch and makes around six trips to the regional hospital each month. Her three children, aged three, six and seven all suffer from asthma. 

“When the wind changes direction to come from the port, my children find it hard to breathe,” she said. 

She noted that her children’s health problems cleared up last year, when her family briefly lived in the town of Zarzis, 80 miles down the coast from the factories. “The doctor says it is allergies from the port,” she added.

Samir Aloulou, head of Mohamed Ben Sassi hospital’s cancer ward, says that the incidence of nasopharyngeal cancer is alarmingly high in Chott Salem and Ghannouch. This particular form of the disease, which Nouri is fighting, affects the part of the throat connecting the back of the nose to the mouth. 

Aloulou believes that it is difficult to establish a “100% true link” between its prevalence and the chemical factories. “There is certainly a link between pollution and cancer, but cancer is a multifactorial disease — there is pollution, tobacco, food, obesity,” he said.

“There is a flagrant lack of information and credible data available from the Tunisian authorities,” said Mounir Majdoub, an economist who worked on a report, published by the EU in 2018, on air quality in the Gabès region. It found that elevated levels of particles that can easily pass into the lungs and have been linked to cancer and heart and respiratory infections. “The conclusions are not revealing of the real health situation due to pollution, they reveal the need for a study,” he added. 

However, other illnesses appear far easier to connect to the chemical industry. Rachid Ben Othman used to work as a mechanic for Flourine Chemical Industries (ICF), a private company in the industrial zone that produces aluminum fluoride. When we met, he held out his right arm in front of him, his elbow crooked at somewhere around 140 degrees. It wouldn’t move further. He suffers from fluorosis, caused by overexposure to fluorine. 

“It started in the wrists, and then the elbows. It is the calcification of the ligaments. Sometimes my knee just stops. It is like a car with no petrol,” he said. 

Othman first began to notice a problem in 2000. His joints were stiff to the point that he could neither fully stretch nor bend them. It became harder to work and, eventually, too difficult to put on gloves. But he was not successfully diagnosed until 2011. 

He says that he is one of the few ICF workers to have successfully claimed compensation for his disability — a payment of $135 per month and 40% of his medical bills. Othman suspects some of his colleagues have fluorosis too. “They talk to me about aches in their shoulders, aches here and here, the calcification. I know the symptoms,” he said.

A taboo subject

In addition to state inaction, organizations that should be standing up for the safety and wellbeing of workers are refusing to do anything. Executives at the local branch of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), do not consider it their role to speak out on matters of public health and pollution. 

When I brought up the subject to two members of the regional union’s executive committee in Gabès and a manager from one of the GCT factories, the latter laughed quietly and said, “That’s a taboo subject.” 

One of the union executives said that he didn’t want to talk about pollution because the factories have led to development in the region and provide employment for thousands of people. 

While Tunisia has long been one of the world’s biggest phosphate exporters, the industry has contracted in recent years, owing to political instability and frequent protests by unemployed young people demanding jobs in the phosphate mines. 

In the years since the revolution, Groupe Chimique Tunisien’s annual production has averaged less than a third of what it was in 2010, according to Habib Wahachi, deputy secretary general of the Gabès bureau of the UGTT. Tunisia was forced to import phosphates from neighboring Algeria for the first time last October. 

GCT has not made any new hires in the region since 2017. National unemployment is currently at 17.4%. In Gabès, it stands at 24% overall and more than 50% among young people.

Hundreds of Gabèsian youth blocked the industrial zone in Ghannouch and the GCT administration building in Gabès town center from late November into December last year. Many denounced the pollution yet demanded jobs in the factories. 

“Give me a job so I can survive — we are the ones directly affected by this pollution,” said Youssef Hajej, an unemployed university graduate, from Ghannouch. 

He insisted that the GCT owes local people work as compensation for the destruction the company has wrought on the area and its traditional industries. “They are destroying everything, it is normal that people here are asking to profit at least a little bit from that.”

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Shirtless and wearing a buffalo-horned fur hat, Jacob Chansley — also known as Jake Angeli and the QAnon Shaman — perfectly embodied the chaos of the January 6 insurrection. Examination of Chansley’s social media activity appears to indicate his involvement with a set of hardline right-wing environmentalist beliefs known as eco-fascism. Meanwhile, photographs of rioters affiliated with the Proud Boys and the paramilitary hate group The Base, which have both embraced aspects of this school of thought, show that they also played a central role in the unrest.

Having existed on the fringes of the far-right for decades, the ideologies of green nationalism and eco-fascism are on the rise around the world, spurred on by the intensifying climate crisis and the ongoing rise of populist and authoritarian political movements. Instead of deploying the usual anti-immigration rhetoric, certain elements of the extreme right are now attracting new recruits and pushing their broader agendas while promoting a very specific brand of reactionary environmental activism.

The adoption of these positions is not just a cynical ploy, either. Far-right environmentalism is based on beliefs of racial purity and homeland that form the very foundations of white nationalist thinking. As such, it should not be viewed as mere political opportunism.

“We should take what they say seriously,” said Bernhard Forchtner, author of the academic book “The Far-right and the Environment.” “If we simply say, it’s opportunistic, well it might be, but that robs us of a better understanding of what drives these actors.”

Far-right involvement in the environmental movement is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the term “ecology” was first coined in the mid-1800s by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a social Darwinist and dedicated racist whose writings went on to inspire Hitler’s National Socialist movement.

By the early 20th century, racist environmentalists in the U.S. had developed strong ties with European fascists. In 1916 the prominent eugenicist Madison Grant — who helped to found the Bronx Zoo and the Denali, Olympic, Everglades and Glacier National Parks — published a book titled “The Passing of the Great Race,” which Hitler later referred to as “my Bible.” 

According to Cassidy Thomas, who researches eco-fascism at Syracuse University, contemporary far-right discourse has “revitalized rhetoric that was very prominent in the early 1900s.” By way of example, Thomas points to the writings of alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer, which praise the national park system and highlight the importance of wilderness preservation from a white nationalist perspective.

“It’s hard to really get at fascism without understanding the ecological connections,” said Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State University's Center for the Analysis of the Radical Right. 

In the mid-2010s, Ross belonged to some of Oregon’s more radical, left-wing environmental circles. After seeing far-right elements creeping into green activist groups, he began to study the ideological roots and spread of fascist environmentalism. 

“I was trying to make sense of some of these entry points where fascists actually join and bind in these movements,” he explained. 

As part of this work, he now monitors Telegram, a messaging app popular with right-wing extremists in the U.S. According to Ross, groups such as the Proud Boys began to promote eco-fascist ideas in earnest last year, using a network of far-right channels known by their users as Terrorgram. Following the Capitol riots, these channels have experienced a surge in new subscribers, some growing by as much as 80% in a matter of days.

Radical right-wing environmentalist ideologies are rooted in a broader framework of racist anti-humanism that foregrounds ideas such as ethnopluralism — the belief that different ethnic groups should remain distinct, separate and restricted to their supposedly native lands — and the perceived perils of overpopulation. However, groups and individuals promoting these positions ignore a number of basic facts.

“Their shared emphasis on population growth directs blame onto the non-white global south while ignoring the outsized consumption of the more static northern populations,” explained Blair Taylor, director of the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont.

Historically, influential far-right environmentalists such as the Finnish deep ecologist Pentti Linkola and the American white nationalist Garrett Hardin have sought to justify extreme anti-democratic measures, up to and including genocide. For instance, Linkola, who died in 2020, advocated for a complete halt to immigration, the reversion to a technology-free way of life and strict controls on birthrates. Dictatorships, he wrote, were better suited to limiting population growth and rolling back the environmental destruction of the industrial era.

Radical-right environmentalism may have been around for a while, but its existence came to widespread public attention in 2019, following the mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas. Both gunmen had written manifestos in which they described themselves as eco-fascists. According to Ross, they are now revered by the broader far-right community “literally as saints.”

On a grassroots level, white nationalist organic farmers recently made headlines in the U.S. by showing up at local markets in cities such as Bloomington, Indiana. Meanwhile, in the U.K., former members of the far-right youth movement Generation Identity have been exposed as the organizers of a group promoting local food production and green issues.

Far-right environmentalist ideas are also seeping into electoral politics. In France, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Rally party has ditched its denial of human-driven climate change in favor of a carefully branded “patriotic ecology.” 

In Serbia, the far-right environmentalist group Levijatan regularly courts controversy by “patrolling” migrant camps and advocating for the protection of the environment from “unwelcome” foreigners. In May 2020, Filip Radovanovic  — a prominent member of both Levijatan and the ruling populist Serbian Progressive Party — deliberately drove a car into a refugee reception center on the outskirts of Belgrade. Party members then joined him outside to protest against what they referred to as illegal immigration.

Placing emphasis on environmental issues is likely to make the far-right’s reactionary views palatable to a much wider constituency than they otherwise would be. That is why some campaign groups are taking decisive steps to spot and block right-wing incursions into the green cause. 

For the past year, the German chapter of the international organization Nature Friends has been running weekly government-financed seminars on far-right infiltration of the green movement. The meetings examine both the historical and contemporary links between environmentalist thought and extreme right-wing ideologies.

Some are more obvious than others. During a recent Zoom gathering, a group of activists discussed the forgotten origins of nudism. Richard Ungewitter, the early 20th-century pioneer of the movement, argued that German women who were exposed to naked Aryan male bodies would become uninterested in other “exotic” races, which would, in turn, allow white people to flourish and their bloodline to remain undiluted.

However, more contemporary issues tend to take precedence. One example is the far-right party Alternative for Germany’s recent focus on animal rights as a means to attack Muslim and Jewish communities over traditional methods of slaughter used in food production. The people behind Nature Friends recognize that such issues are ripe for exploitation by those seeking to create racial and religious divisions and are determined not to fall prey to such efforts. 

As program director Yannick Passeick explained, “There is a need to teach people how to be for the environment and not against human beings.”

Additional reporting by Oleksandr Ignatenko

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Climate has become a polarizing debate about beliefs and identity as much as about science. Leaders have begun to seize on climate change to advance ideologically rooted positions. Many take the side of climate skeptics to win votes. Big industries have undermined public discourse by funneling millions into groups denying climate change, threatening decades of research and climate consensus. 

Meanwhile, we watch as forest fires ravage Australia and climate change denialism dominates the social media, as quick-spreading and uncontrollable as the flames themselves.

In 2019, more than 40,000 fires swept through the Amazon rainforest, which absorbs two million tons of CO2 per year. The fires filled many of Brazil’s cities with acrid smoke. Yet the country is presided over by Jair Bolsonaro, a president who called his government’s scientific research on the Amazon “lies.”

In July 2019, United Nations poverty and human rights expert Philip Alston warned of a “climate apartheid” where 120 million more people would be living in poverty by 2030 as a result of rising temperatures, threatening democracy, and human rights.

As the climate crisis begins to exceed scientific expectations, Coda Story will hold to account individuals, institutions, and companies who seek to undermine climate science for profit or political gain. We will also examine how those campaigns impact policy around the world. We’re also going to visit the most climate-ravaged parts of the earth to understand how populations are being directly affected by climate denialism.

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