Category Archives: Uncategorized

Environmental issues, concerns, and conflicts are constant throughout human history, which may come as a surprise because our emphasis in history has all too often been on war and politics, rather than environment, culture and development. 

Yet evidence of  this longstanding concern for the environment has always been  available in manuscripts, publications and historical archives. Early concerns are sometimes overlooked because they are found under labels like conservation, public health, preservation of nature, smoke abatement, municipal housekeeping, occupational disease, air pollution, water pollution, home ecology, animal protection, and many other topic areas. Continue reading →

By Rhett Ayers Butler 
Mongabay 

In the mountains of central Veracruz, scientific work is rarely abstract. It means walking narrow paths through cloud forest, speaking patiently with communities, and learning to read landscapes that yield information slowly. It also means accepting risk as a condition of knowledge. Field research unfolds in places where the state is often distant and authority is uneven.

That context matters for understanding the disappearance of Miguel Ángel de la Torre Loranca, a Mexican biologist who was kidnapped on November 21, 2025, after leaving his home in the Sierra de Zongolica. He had gone out in response to what was described as a request for dialogue. Hours later, his family received a ransom demand. After an initial payment, communication stopped. Since then, there has been no verified information about his whereabouts.

De la Torre Loranca was not a public figure in the conventional sense. He was

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Censorship by the new Trump administration has meant the loss of thousands of datasets from federal websites along with a thorough scrubbing of inconvenient information from federal websites.  Information about climate change and renewable energy, among many other topics, is being lost in what many see as a Trumpist cultural revolution.

“We’re losing our environmental history,” Rachel Santarsier of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in an article published March 5, 2025.  

Honduran activist Juan Lopez (murdered September 2024) in a photo taken in front of portrait of fellow Honduran Carlos Escaleras (murdered 1997). (Photo by Lucy Edwards).

Every year, land and environmental defenders around the world are brutally murdered for daring to resist environmental exploitation. In 2023, Global Witness  documented 196 defender killings.

The number this year tips the official total to over 2,000 globally since Global Witness started reporting data in 2012. The organization now estimates  that the total stands at 2,106 murders.

Global Witness published “Missing Voices: the violent erasure of land and environmental defenders”  in September 2024.

Killings in Peru have also been tied to environmental crimes in the Peruvian Amazon,  Mongabay, an environmental webzine, reported in September 2024.

A 2024 journal article on Ecopoliticide. by Delon A. Omrow & Peter Stoett from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs, argues that the strategic murder of environmental activists “is a fundamental threat to human and environmental security.”

Reporting threats to environmental activists and the environment is also dangerous, according to a March, 2024 UNESCO report: “Press and planet in danger: safety of environmental journalists; trends, challenges and recommendations.”

History cannot ignore these atrocities, and this site continues to keep track of developments.      

Thirty years ago, when David Helvarg wrote “The War Against the Greens,”  both major political parties agreed that serious efforts to protect the environment were needed.  Most of the opposition to environmental protection, at the time,  came from polluting  corporations and the extreme far right of the political spectrum.  Today, that war has expanded into a global effort led by the American Republican party, says Helvarg in an April 2024 Daily Kos article.

Helvarg writes:

The rightwing Heritage Foundation has written “Project 2025,” a plan for what it hopes will be a second Trump administration.  The plan calls for rapidly expanding fossil fuel emissions and includes a chapter on opening up the Department of Interior’s lands to mineral mining and oil drilling written by Wise Use veteran, William Perry Pendley…

In just the last decade 1,700 environmentalists and land-defenders including many indigenous leaders around the world have been murdered according to a recent report put out by the investigative group Global Witness.

In the U.S. one of the nation’s two major political parties has effectively merged with the fossil fuel industry and made climate denial a litmus test of loyalty.  Donald Trump says if re-elected he’ll be a dictator on day one in order to, “close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

“Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up.” — BioScience, Oct 24, 2023, State of the Climate Report. 

Humpback whale off the US Atlantic coast.  (By Pierre Gleizes, © Greenpeace). Audio: Songs of the Humpback Whale, 1972, recorded by Roger Payne.

By Chris Greenberg,  Source: Greenpeace 

Whales could always speak for themselves. Humans just didn’t hear them.

Roger Payne changed that with a simple, empathetic act: He listened. And then we all did.

In 1970, Payne (1935-2023) made sure the world finally paid attention to the “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” Payne’s landmark 35-minute album of recorded whale song in the wild deepened humanity’s connection with the natural world, catalyzed the global movement to stop commercial whaling, and had a lasting impact on the growing ecology movement, including Greenpeace.

Payne, who passed away in June 2023 at age 88 at his home in Vermont, founded Ocean Alliance in 1971 and was an inspiration and friend to Greenpeace activists during and far beyond the iconic “Save The Whales” campaign that garnered international in the 1970s and played a key role in the adoption of an commercial whaling moratorium in 1986.

Born in New York City, educated at Harvard and Cornell, Payne’s pioneering whale song recordings and decades of study of their communications have arguably done more to dispel the Moby Dick myth of the violent and solitary whale than anything else. His first record of what he described as an “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound,” made with the help of researcher Scott McVay, would go on to sell more than 100,000 copies, making it the bestselling environmental album of all time.

“My idea was, if you can move people emotionally, you can also get them to act,” Payne told Nautilus in 2021. “To see if I was right, I started playing humpback whale sounds to friends and other small audiences, and soon it became very clear that these sounds moved people deeply. In fact, some friends wept when they heard them—they’re that powerful.”

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Excerpts from a Paul Krugman opinion piece in the New York Times about the June 30, 2022 Supreme Court climate decision:

“Clearly, the way this court interprets the law is almost entirely determined by what serves Republican interests… Ultimately our paralysis in the face of what looks more and more like a looming apocalypse comes down to the G.O.P.’s adamant opposition to any kind of action… The question is, how did letting the planet burn become a key G.O.P. tenet?

“It wasn’t always thus. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope for action the court just moved to limit, was created by none other than Richard Nixon. As late as 2008, John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, ran on a promise to impose a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“Republican positioning on the environment is also completely unlike that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western nations… The United States is the only major nation in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections yet controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to block actions that might prevent climate catastrophe.”

Patrick Parenteau

Professor of Law, Vermont Law School

In a highly anticipated but not unexpected 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled on June 30, 2022, that the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act.

The ruling doesn’t take away the EPA’s power to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, but it makes federal action harder by requiring the agency to show that Congress has charged it to act – in an area where Congress has consistently failed to act.

The Clean Power Plan, the policy at the heart of the ruling, never took effect because the court blocked it in 2016, and the EPA now plans to develop a new policy instead. Nonetheless, the court went out of its way to strike it down in this case and reject the agency’s interpretation of what the Clean Air Act permitted.

Having said what the EPA cannot do, the court gave no guidance on what the agency can do about this urgent problem. Beyond climate policy, the ruling poses serious questions about how the court will view other regulatory programs. Continue reading →