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Development Without the Poor: The Footprint of the World Bank and IMF in Thailand
From October 12-18, 2026, the World Bank and IMF will hold their Annual Meetings in Thailand. Assembly of the Poor will mobilize to demonstrate that their policy prescriptions have inflicted severe harm on our people from the past to the present, and threaten our future.
Oct 06, 2026
Following World War II, the United States played a pivotal role in establishing the World Bank and the International Monetary Fundm or IMF. Originally tasked with post-war reconstruction, their focus soon shifted toward development aid for developing countries, including Thailand. In 1961, these two institutions guided the drafting of Thailand’s First National Economic Development Plan. They recommended large-scale infrastructure investments—ports, highways, and mega-dams—alongside import-substitution industrialization, agricultural reform through technology, chemical inputs, and genetic improvement of crops and livestock, as well as logging concessions aimed at generating national revenue. Land allocation programs were also introduced. Together, these policies triggered transformations that severely disrupted the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and peasants.
The recommendations of both institutions led directly to widespread deforestation and the destruction of natural resources through logging concessions and hydroelectric dam projects. Agricultural reforms degraded local ecosystems and drove up production costs while crop prices plummeted, pushing farmers into staggering debt and bankruptcy. Land allocation programs largely failed the rural poor; title deeds fell predominantly into the hands of bureaucrats, state officials, and wealthy investors. Smallholder farmers and peasants who did receive plots were left to clear and cultivate the land without government support, ultimately forcing many to abandon their holdings. A considerable number of people migrated to urban centers as cheap labor, crowding into slums area, facing homelessness, and becoming landless.
Development under the guidance of the World Bank and the IMF continued under subsequent National Economic and Social Development Plans—now in their 13th plan—yet consistently disregarded the poor. The two institutions hold joint Annual Meetings worldwide, having convened in Thailand for the first time in 1991. That same year, the World Bank approved a loan for the Pak Mun Dam in Ubon Ratchathani Province despite fierce opposition from many local villagers and civil society groups. The fallout from the dam was devastating: destroyed fisheries, extinction of fish species, community conflict and division, and electricity generation that fell far short of projections. It remains an indelible stain left by the World Bank in Thailand—one notably absent from its official history.
We reaffirm that genuine development must respect community rights over land, soil, water, and forests, uphold food sovereignty, and guarantee universal welfare as a fundamental human right.
The consequences of these development frameworks stirred widespread hardship among small-scale farmers, igniting protests, petitions, and grassroots resistance against top-down development in every nook and cranny. Escalating tensions between rural communities and the state led to arrests, prosecutions, violent crackdowns, and in some instances, the assassination of grassroots leaders. In December 1995, villagers impacted by dam constructions, communities evicted from forest areas, residents affected by the construction of an industrial plant, small-scale fishers affected by commercial fishing, marginalized workers, and slum dwellers gathered at Thammasat University and they announced the establishment of the “Assembly of the Poor” on December 10, 1995. The Assembly of the Poor moved their assembly to Khong Chiam District in Ubon Ratchathani Province, along the banks of the Mun River, where they drafted the "Pak Mun Declaration." The declaration proclaimed that local communities had been systematically impoverished by developmental policies that ignored their existence—leaving them poor not only economically, but impoverished in rights, opportunities, and political power. They declared that they had been made poor and would rise up to fight and demand that the state resolve their poverty.
Just two years later, during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (the "Tom Yum Kung Crisis"), the IMF stepped in with a bailout package for Thailand. To ensure rapid debt repayment, the IMF imposed stringent conditions: passing laws to regulate water usage, privatizing state enterprises to reduce public spending and boost revenue, and enacting legislation to remove universities and hospitals from the civil service system. These policies directly burdened the poor and sparked widespread popular resistance.
On September 3 this year, the World Bank released its report titled Building Thailand’s Future Today, declaring that poverty in Thailand had been virtually eradicated and touting a vision to elevate Thailand to a "high-income country" by 2037 through investment in five future industries. For the Assembly of the Poor, this represents a new wave of resource grabbing: data Center projects consuming massive amounts of water and electric power at the expense of local communities; green economy agendas and carbon credits threatening community rights; luxury tourism displacing Indigenous settlements; free trade agreements undermining local seed sovereignty; and transit-oriented developments displacing the urban poor. The report also urged immediate policy recommendations to establish legal and institutional frameworks for economic corridors beyond the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC), paving the way for continuous, long-term structural development.
Compounding this, the IMF instructed the Thai government to abandon universal social welfare in favor of "targeted welfare" to maintain fiscal discipline—forcing vulnerable citizens to undergo demeaning "poverty testing" to access basic welfare benefits. The Thai government swiftly embraced these recommendations and accelerated projects aligned with both institutions, once again shifting the burden onto the poor and small-scale farmers. This is not building the nation's future; it is mortgaging it to international capital under a development paradigm that has dominated Thailand since its First National Economic and Social Development Plans, keeping citizens impoverished in rights, opportunities, and political power for over seven decades.
From October 12-18, 2026, the World Bank and IMF will hold their Annual Meetings in Thailand once again. Assembly of the Poor will mobilize to demonstrate that their policy prescriptions have inflicted severe harm on our people from the past to the present, and threaten our future. We reaffirm that genuine development must respect community rights over land, soil, water, and forests, uphold food sovereignty, and guarantee universal welfare as a fundamental human right. What is happening in Thailand is not an isolated story; it is part of a global neoliberal model through which international financial institutions strip developing nations, the poor, and peasants of their policy sovereignty. Our mobilization during the 2026 World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings in Bangkok is an international struggle to expose these policies, demand accountability, and reclaim policy sovereignty for the people.
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Bad Trouble
Whether we need to tear it all down and start anew or not, this is an opportunity to do something.
Oct 04, 2026
Tonight I find myself in Yakima. It is 90°F, and I can’t sleep. Fires burn across the valley, making the air brown and smell like a campfire. The only sounds are homeless youth setting up their tents as I walk down the Ave trying to think. No scholarly journal asked me to write about “morality” as they did Joan Didion who published her sublime essay that has haunted me for more than 30 years and speaks to me tonight along with works by Timothy Snyder, David Graeber, and James Baldwin. Maybe they inadvertently compelled me, or the times did. I hear many powerful people invoke “morality” in ways so vacuous of meaning from anything I recognize (no thanks to Nietzsche) that it seems to have disappeared from their minds entirely. I distrusted this word then, and I distrust it more and more every day. To deal with my feelings and cognitive complexity of “morality” in these times, my mind veers to the particular.
Here are some of my particulars. Settlers stole this land from the Yakama people, killing approximately 6,300 of them before 1,200 survivors signed a treaty leaving their descendants to suffer a slow torturous violence from poverty. Farmworkers here jeopardize their lives daily picking food for others who despise them. The local news talks about the fires burning all around us, which towns should evacuate, which community center has water and cots. They never say climate catastrophe. They don’t mention the latest kidnappings and disappearances. They continue ignoring news about the poisoned water wells that run brown from faucets and smell like the massive manure lagoons created by corporate-owned cattle farms. National news is negligible here, so not many people know about the latest pardoned January 6 insurrectionist, confident in his self-righteousness that our freedom was under siege, who said, “I will not stand by and let this go unanswered.”
All these instances do not help me trust “morality” more, but in a vague sense they help me grasp what it is not, because the insurrectionist meant something quite specific. According to his beliefs about god and flag, he meant that a person has a higher duty to shoot and leave on the ground to bleed out anyone who gets in the way of sustaining his tribalized views. Many of the insurrectionists expressed this twisted sense of “wagon-train morality,” not unlike the thousands of bureaucrats, politicians, and citizens who became Hitler’s willing executioners, so they could sleep without bad dreams.
We are now in a “moral” emergency, not a quandary or call to consider, but a state more grotesque than we’ve seen in my lifetime
I am trying, of course, to talk about social codes that shape our sense of “morality,” often formed by what we learn in childhood. Like many of us, my childhood was filled with Bible stories that warned us about the “wages of sin” for disobeying the 10 Commandments that Moses brought down from the mountain, intending to instill in us some sort of moral compass. For similar reasons, we were told to memorize the Lord’s Prayer and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But these stories appear to be inadequate in preventing our tendency toward self-delusion, as the neuroscientists have explained our capacity for misperception, because far too many believed then and still believe, no matter the sin, we can obtain absolution from a priest, kneel, rub some beads, and all will be fine.
These stories were hardly sufficient then and seem less so now. After centuries of the church and social groups like the Freemasons that taught their catechism for centuries, those same men, most often men, many of them the very same teachers of virtue, killed and terrorized millions in their white hoods and from behind desks in government offices. When I was young the story about Flight 571 crashing into the Andes, and what the passengers had to do to survive, spread around the world. Many also watched Soylent Green, a popular dystopian 70s film. Both these stories were less about illuminating the complexities of our social code, but more to prevent us from crossing a line we should never cross by reminding us of a visceral feeling of revulsion if we did. Given our history with “morality” and our woefully deficient track record, perhaps it is time we try another way. If we tried to tell stories that engage our moral imagination, true stories of Tulsa, Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, the Osage, the California genocide, Zoot Suite riots, Japanese internment, Indian boarding schools, and many, many others, not as cautionary tales but with an intention of sharing more values and countering a “doctrine of inevitability,” we might see a flash of hope’s light before change’s thunder.
Many of us relied on a “morality” described as duty in the Declaration of Independence, and like stories from our childhood, this seems grievously insufficient now, if it ever was. Perhaps a “morality” from Ubuntu and In lak’ech are worthy candidates for exploration and experimentation, but we may also need to clear our heads from the imprint of white supremacy culture before we dismiss them outright or misunderstand what we see in ourselves and others. Stories of Kondiarok, a genius and chief of the Windout Nation in the 17th century graciously offered a better way when he spoke with the European “intellectuals” of the day, even though they closed their ears and insisted their white supremacist ideology was better than his and his people’s “savagery.” Stories of Levi and Catharine Coffin and others who orchestrated the Underground Railroad by spending their own money to save the lives of thousands of slaves running for their lives without expectation of veneration could support teaching other values. Likewise, stories of Harriet Tubman and many other Black women, who cleaned their guns and readied themselves to shoot if it could save the lives of other Black people beyond their own families will do as well. These days I often think about the possible utility of the story “Rule by Tricks,” by Liu Ji in the 14th century, in which monkeys took down all the stockades used to harm them, leaving the sadistic old man to perish from starvation.
I don’t believe I’ve ever imposed my conscience on others, and I do not intend to start now. Not that I could, even if I wanted to, because this is only possible when we give away sovereignty of our own minds. But, if we are as clearheaded as we like to believe we are, expect to hold on to a Good Samariten view of “self,” or retain our grip on the notion that we are more civilized and evolved than Paleolithic warring tribes as truth—with our reptilian brain held in check so we can interrogate reality instead of fall for our biased perceptions—then we should be able to agree that protecting children from sexual violence and exploitation demands a “morality,” at a minimum, to disarm the perpetrators from continuing their evil acts. Some will say that this is setting our moral bar too low, and they would be correct. What then are we to do with it when these days bombs leave no human remains to retrieve and bury, when the bombardier sits comfortably on the other side of the planet pushing buttons, or when drivers of bulldozers plow over untold numbers of dead Palestinians who were just trying to love their children?
I long for any remnant of “morality” that used to lead us, in its most naked simplicity, to retrieve a young man from a cavern or a driver killed in a desert highway accident from the ravages of coyotes. In simpler times, Didion warned us about “fashionable madmen” who invoke a perversion of truth, about the sinister delusion of evil deeds, and now we see, or cannot look away from the madmen who steal, sell, and rape our children. We were in a state of madness when her essay was first published, and now these monstrous madmen run our concentration camps and surveillance data centers. (Oh, Ms. Didion, if you could see us now!) Now they seem to relish our hysteria and stoke self-delusion among as many of us as possible through algorithms, bots, and any other tool money can buy.
Tonight fear and grief reign heavier than the smoke. It is the sound of sorrow and wailing. If we listen, we can all hear this rending of hearts across the land, a siren warning, especially across the valley tonight, sending many to seek safety and closing themselves off in their houses, afraid to cross a street to see their neighbor. Some call their family members to find out who recently disappeared in an ICE SUV, whose child, parent, and grandparent can’t get off the floor, paralyzed from loss. Others cook their dinner outside among ash heaps and lay their heads down under tents or on bare ground struggling to sleep, not knowing when and if anyone will ever send relief.
While many of us feel like a shattered ceramic bowl from this incessant madness, I still believe we can piece ourselves back together, in the tradition of Kintsugi, and become something better, perhaps even beautiful. You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting we are now in a “moral” emergency, not a quandary or call to consider, but a state more grotesque than we’ve seen in my lifetime which begs us to find truth in our hearts, a truth that lets us see each other’s full humanity, and to truly care for each other, and set a higher bar for our social code. I am well aware of the irony in my wish that during the period when Didion’s essay was widely read we had brought immortality to its knees and snuffed it out. But we can never go back, no matter how much we pray, and this is the moment we are given, a new moment to bring an end to this sinister madness, in spite of the seemingly impossibility of defining “morality” because it may not exist outside some ideal guiding light of our aspirations. This time we cannot cave to perfectionism’s demonic voice that may stymie us from action, or continue deluding ourselves, but instead listen closely to the better angels in our hearts. This time we must change course, take action, as expediently as possible, because we are now at a point of bad trouble that we’ve been in for years but is spreading like a pandemic. Whether we need to tear it all down and start anew or not, this is an opportunity to do something. We’ve been in bad trouble for far, far too long to do nothing.
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124 Land Defenders Killed in 2025 Amid Trump-Driven Lawlessness and Aid Cuts
"When foreign aid retreats, Indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers can be left with fewer resources and less support as they defend the forests, rivers, and other ecosystems that sustain their communities and help keep the global climate stable,” one campaigner said.
Sep 16, 2026
A total of 124 people were killed defending the environment in 2025, according to a Global Witness report released Wednesday, as the global rise of authoritarianism and a dramatic decline in foreign aid makes the lives and work of environmental and humans rights advocates more challenging.
The report singles out the administration of US President Donald Trump—which dismantled the US Agency for International Development, delayed paying other United Nations fees, and has shown a broader disregard for international humans rights norms and the institutions that uphold them—for worsening the global climate for defenders. In 2025, total development aid plummeted by a record 23%, depleting the resources available to local communities and the organizations that support them.
“The effects of these budget cuts are not abstract," Juliana Vélez Echeverri, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, said in a statement. “In Colombia, projects working to promote and protect human rights and support defenders have been hit by the sudden drop in foreign aid, particularly from the US. When foreign aid retreats, Indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers can be left with fewer resources and less support as they defend the forests, rivers, and other ecosystems that sustain their communities and help keep the global climate stable.”
"We can’t prevent climate change when they kill those who protect the environment."
Colombia was the deadliest country for land defenders for the fourth year in a row with 39 killings, followed by Brazil with 26, and Honduras and the Philippines with 12 each. As the site of 85% of the killings, Latin America was the deadliest region, as it has been since Global Witness began counting the killings of environmental defenders in 2012. Indigenous people remain especially vulnerable to violence, as over three-quarters of the people killed in 2025 were either Indigenous, Afro-descendant, or small-scale farmers.
"For Indigenous peoples, land is life," said Joan Carling, executive director of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights International, in the report foreword. "Any threat to our lands, territories, and resources is a threat to our very existence—our cultures, our identities, our dignity, and our future generations. That is why our communities were willing to risk everything to protect them."
Seven of the Indigenous people killed in 2025 were members of Indigenous guards established to patrol and protect their territories from illegal encroachment. For example, the Indigenous Guard of the Kakataibo People of Peru was formed in 2022 to protect their rainforest home from illegal cocoa growing and logging.
“Defending our territory is important to us as a community and as a people, and we’re proud to support the climate that we all depend on," said Segundo Ispón, commander of Peru’s Kakataibo Indigenous Guard, in a statement. "In our culture, the work of defending our resources and territory is taught from an early age. But for this next generation coming up, the work is more dangerous than ever.”
The experience of the Kakataibo reflects another growing trend that endangers defenders: the rise of organized crime amid weakening state authority to oppose it. More than one-third of killings in 2025 were linked to organized crime or hitmen. And more than half of the killings were due to land disputes, "demonstrating how authorities’ failure to resolve competing land claims or demarcate territory paves the way for attacks on defenders and their communities," the report authors said.
As Ispón said in the report: “There is inaction from the state, inaction from the authorities. Faced with that, what do we do? We protect ourselves. We take care of each other.”
Yet the rise in lawlessness goes hand in hand with a rise in government repression against activists, making it difficult to get accurate information about the numbers of defenders killed. While the 124 figure is lower than the 142 killed in 2024 or the 196 killed in 2023, the report authors noted that "these figures are likely a significant underestimate, as many cases go unreported.
They added: "This is typical of situations involving serious armed conflict and genocide, where generalized insecurity and mass killings make identifying and verifying individual cases difficult. Research is also challenging in repressive contexts where victims and civil society groups face reprisals for reporting and documenting abuses."
Indeed, civic freedom tracker CIVICUS Monitor considers 10 of the 15 countries in which deaths were reported to be repressed.
Furthermore, the number killed does not reflect other forms of harassment and repression, such as the criminalization or weaponization of social media against activists, both of which are common in Asia.
The report comes as the state of the global environment is ever more dire, with the United Nations warning the planet is now on a path to overshoot the 1.5°C Paris Agreement goal even as the US, the No. 1 historical emitter, has jettisoned all attempts at climate policy under Trump.
"We can’t prevent climate change when they kill those who protect the environment," Amnesty Norway policy adviser Frank Conde Tangberg wrote on social media in response to the report.
The Indigenous and local voices being violently silenced could have a lot to teach global leaders at a crucial moment, if only they would listen.
As Carling wrote:
In today’s world, that ancestral knowledge is vindicated every day. From sustainable agriculture to climate-resilient water management, Indigenous peoples’ customs offer effective climate solutions.
But the climate crisis is testing our capacity to adapt to the natural world. It is too drastic, too vast in scale. Rather than try to respond to this emergency on our own, we want to contribute to collective global efforts.
Instead of being listened to, however, Indigenous peoples are being excluded from major decision-making spaces. As a result, the very projects touted as solutions—renewable energy, transition minerals—drive land grabs, dispossession, and violence. We call this “green colonialism.”
After land grabs, mining was the industry linked to the most deaths in 2025, followed by logging and agribusiness.
Yet another way forward is still possible. As Carling concluded: "Indigenous peoples and our knowledge must be at the heart of climate decision-making. Our role as custodians of land, our understanding of the consequences of climate breakdown, and our collective resistance to dispossession must have an influence on policy at the centre of power."
"But this can only happen when our territories are secure and our people protected from harm," she said. "States and leaders must work with us firstly to ensure that our communities are safe—and then to tackle the environmental crises that pose an existential threat to us all."
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The Downstream Consequences
Many lakes and streams across the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over; this has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.
Sep 13, 2026
Water has always held a sacred place in Black life. Long before environmental policy debates filled congressional hearing rooms, water shaped our stories. Creeks, marshes, and wetlands provided both livelihood and refuge when access to land and opportunity was denied elsewhere. For many Black communities, water is not just a resource. It symbolizes memory, survival, and possibility.
Today, many Black neighborhoods are cut off from the waterways that sustained earlier generations. Despite their cultural and ecological importance, many lakes and streams across the Midwest and the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over. This has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.
Until now, the rivers, lakes, and streams that flow through national parks and other federally protected landscapes have been spared this fate. Despite bipartisan support for protecting our nation’s most beloved lands and waters, their future is at risk. Some are losing long-standing safeguards, opening the door to mining, fracking, and data center development. We’re seeing this right now in the West, where the administration recently slashed Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by a staggering 91%.
These two landscapes are sacred to Tribal Nations that have called them home for millennia, carefully tending the cliffs, canyons, and plateaus as well as the rivers that run through them. They have fought tirelessly to close them to development. At Bears Ears, the administration abruptly dissolved an Inter-Tribal Coalition meant to co-manage the lands, ignoring the long history of stewardship by the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and the Ute Indian Tribe, and jeopardizing their ability to hunt, fish, and collect plants and medicines. The Tribes are fighting this decision, backed up by a broad range of partners that understand the shared stakes for people and the planet.
Let’s make sure we’re electing leaders who will fight for the rights of communities that have borne the brunt of past injustice, and a future where we can all count on clean water and learn our shared history.
As a Black woman who works at the intersection of parks and water, I am watching the ongoing push to restore protections at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante closely. We know that access to the outdoors is already racialized in this country, much like access to clean air or safe drinking water.
When environmental and health protections get stripped away, Black and Indigenous communities are the first to suffer. But the impacts are not isolated. They cascade across communities, as pollution flows downstream, tainting streams where families boat and swim, and driving up drinking water treatment costs.
Fortunately, parks and clean water are two areas where people across the political spectrum agree: The public good must be put above corporate profit, keeping public lands in public hands, and preventing pollution at the source to ensure safe and affordable water in every home in America. And we’re seeing people rise up.
Black and brown leaders are stepping forward as champions for water protection and climate resilience. They are notching important victories, from restoring a federal environmental justice grants program to historic water funding in Texas and hyperlocal wins like a new well in Allensworth, California, to closing coal plants to build parks and gardens in Chicago.
These bright spots show what’s possible when ordinary people come together to defend our national heritage and demand basic needs like clean water and livable communities.
This fall, we’ll have a chance to make our voices heard at the ballot box. Let’s make sure we’re electing leaders who will fight for the rights of communities that have borne the brunt of past injustice, and a future where we can all count on clean water and learn our shared history by visiting parks and monuments that celebrate the beauty and diversity of this magnificent place we call home.
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'Embarrassing': Google Maps Renames 'Lake Ontario' as 'Lake America' in US
The name change followed President Donald Trump's executive order and "served as a reminder that billionaires will always side with authoritarians, because authoritarians will always protect billionaires at the expense of democracy and the working class."
Aug 30, 2026
Tech giant Google faced widespread criticism over the weekend for becoming the first major online map provider to change the name of "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" for its US users, after President Donald Trump ordered the name change in an executive order on Thursday.
Google presented the decision as a procedural one in its statement on Saturday:
The US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" in the United States. Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the US, people using Maps in the US will see "Lake America," those in Canada will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the US and Canada will see both names. These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.
However, advocates, lawmakers, and commenters saw the shift as another example of Big Tech in general, and Google in particular, caving to Trump's whims. Notably, the CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, attended Trump's inauguration with a host of other Silicon Valley moguls.
"This is so embarrassing for @Google and served as a reminder that billionaires will always side with authoritarians, because authoritarians will always protect billionaires at the expense of democracy and the working class," Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media.
Zero integrity over at @Google.
Resign, @sundarpichai.
Fuck you, @googlemaps. pic.twitter.com/ERxPc5sZ88
— Killed by Google (@killedbygoogle) August 30, 2026
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) threatened the company with congressional questioning for its capitulation, writing on social media: "Hey @Google, how about an option for thinking people vs. cultish sheep? I don’t wanna have to see your brown lips from Trump. How about calling it what it is? Don’t forget, when the Majority changes in the House and Senate, you might have some answering to do. Correction. WILL."
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), in response to another social media post about the change, wrote sarcastically, "That's definitely going to make food more affordable."
Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, asked, "Is Google really so terrified of Trump that it has to play along with his childishness?"
Is Google really so terrified of Trump that it has to play along with his childishness? pic.twitter.com/tHOrwJoiCy
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) August 30, 2026
Trump biographer Seth Abramson chastised the company, writing, "Thing #1 that you *do not do* for a psychopath: appease them."
While Google was the first digital map provider to make the change, it will not be the last, according to Wired, which reported that Apple and Bing are expected to follow suit. All three companies changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America following Trump's redesignation at the start of his second term.
Trump did receive pushback from other quarters at the time, with The Associated Press losing access to presidential events because it refused to change its style guide to prefer "Gulf of America."
This new name change, which Trump issued as part of an ongoing trade war with Canada, has also met with resistance both within and beyond the US.
On the day of Trump's order, MapQuest announced simply, "We're not changing it."
We’re not changing it. pic.twitter.com/NdeE9v2BNO
— MapQuest (@MapQuest) August 27, 2026
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the name change in a social media post on Thursday, pointing to the Indigenous origins of the name Ontario.
"The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means 'the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.' The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America," he wrote. "We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms. Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario—then, now, and always."
The upstate New York-based Seneca Nation on Friday asked Trump to rescind the order, saying it violated an over 225-year-old treaty signed by President George Washington and the Haudenosaunee confederacy, of which the Seneca are a member.
Seneca Nation President J. Conrad Seneca said the name change showed "blatant disrespect" to Indigenous groups, adding, "The President cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it through irresponsible political action."
On Saturday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford unveiled a billboard on the lake's edge that reads, "Lake Ontario, now and always" in English and French.
It’s Lake Ontario, now and always. pic.twitter.com/KNahtPAMeJ
— Doug Ford (@fordnation) August 29, 2026
"President Trump can call it whatever he wants, but I can tell you the rest of the world will always call it Lake Ontario," Ford said.
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'One-Two Punch': After Attacking Roadless Rule, Trump Targets Off-Road Vehicle Limits
One critic said the administration clearly plans to weaken restrictions requiring "the Forest Service to carefully manage our natural resources and listen to the public, then open the gates to industry and extraction."
Aug 21, 2026
Still under fire for attacking the Roadless Area Conservation Rule this week, President Donald Trump's administration provoked a fresh wave of criticism on Friday by targeting another policy meant to protect public lands.
The US Forest Service announced Friday that it was moving forward with a proposed revision to the Travel Management Rule that "simplifies the regulatory requirements to enhance quicker local decision-making and increase access, including for motorized vehicles, e-bikes, and other mobility devices."
While leaders at the Forest Service and its parent agency, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), framed the pending changes as progress, Defenders of Wildlife called out the administration for trying to "gut" the rule managing off-road vehicles.
"The USDA's announcement to gut the Travel Management Rule and the roadless rule in the same week is a one-two punch that together deals a tremendous blow to wildlife," said Vera Smith, who directs the advocacy group's national forests and public lands program, in a statement.
"The Travel Management Rule states simply that motorized vehicles must stay on routes and areas designated locally for that use," Smith said. "The Forest Service issued the rule over 20 years ago to curb damage from unmanaged recreation, reduce user conflict, and protect public safety. Rescinding it now is irresponsible and reckless."
Hilary Eisen, federal policy director at the organization Wild Montana, was similarly critical, explaining that "the Travel Management Rule is why dirt bikers and snowmobilers can share national forest lands with hikers and backcountry skiers without conflict. It's why our national forests provide habitat to support thriving wildlife populations. It is built on local decision-making, with a designation process that ensures that no user group gets steamrolled and all our national forest values are protected."
"Just two days after doubling down on repealing the roadless rule, this announcement makes the administration's plan obvious: Gut the rules that require the Forest Service to carefully manage our natural resources and listen to the public, then open the gates to industry and extraction," Eisen warned.
"Forest Service leadership has already shown during the roadless rescission how much it values public input, science, and expert management: not at all," she added. "Agency leadership has lost the public's trust, and should expect the public to hold them accountable."
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins confirmed Tuesday that the administration was working to fully rescind the 2001 roadless rule that blocked road building and commercial logging on about 30% of all national forest land. She attempted to frame it as a move to prevent wildfires, but conservation groups contested her claims.
Josh Hicks, director of conservation campaigns at the Wilderness Society, declared that "opening our backcountry forests to more roads and development, and therefore more ignitions, is... not a wildfire solution, and never will be."
Criticism of that pending rollback had continued throughout the week, with the Wilderness Society's senior director of native lands partnerships, Starlyn Miller, calling out the administration's "failure to engage in meaningful government-to-government consultation with tribal nations," which she said "undermines tribal sovereignty and federal trust responsibilities."
"This failure disregards tribes' deep cultural, historical, and ongoing connections to these roadless lands and the clean water and wildlife they sustain," said Miller, a Little Shell Chippewa citizen who is of Menominee and Mohican descendant. "We stand with tribal nations and Indigenous communities in defending their freedom to shape and manage forests that are vital to their cultures, identities, and future generations."
National Congress of American Indians executive director Larry Wright Jr. also spoke out on Friday, saying that "tribal nations possess an inherent and legally recognized relationship with these lands, which remain the foundation of our cultural identities. Attempting to fast-track the removal of the roadless rule circumvents the mandatory government-to-government consultation process required by federal law."
Wright, who is from the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, added that "upholding the federal trust responsibility means honoring our treaty rights and ensuring that the protection of sacred sites is recognized as an uncompromisable legal obligation, not an afterthought."
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Trump: The Empire-First President
Whereas previous administrations let pundits and strategists do the dirty work of advocating for empire, the Trump administration is presenting its own arguments.
Aug 09, 2026
The Trump administration marked the 250th anniversary of US independence with a series of statements in support of American empire.
Despite the fact that President Donald Trump campaigned against endless war and the White House issued a National Security Strategy that rejected “global domination,” the Trump administration celebrated the nation’s 250th anniversary by glorifying empire as one of the country’s highest achievements. Administration officials praised moments in US history when US leaders embraced empire, such as when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams spoke in favor of an “empire of liberty” and Theodore Roosevelt acted to take Panama.
At a time when many people in the country were reflecting on the ideals of liberty and equality that Jefferson had emphasized in the Declaration of Independence, the Trump administration glorified the country’s imperial history, creating a rationale for Empire First.
“We just tamed the wilderness and conquered the frontier and built the empire,” Trump said in an address from the National Mall on the Fourth of July. “It’s called the empire of liberty.”
Imperial Apologia
In recent decades, several thought leaders have been making the case for American empire. Bucking the norm of empire denial, which holds that the United States is not an empire, they have characterized the United States as an empire and called on the United States to play an imperial role in the world.
Advocates of empire gained ground during the years before and after 9/11, when they produced an outpouring of work that brought discussion of empire into the mainstream of US political discourse. Max Boot built momentum in articles such as “The Case for American Empire” and “American imperialism? No Need to Run Away From Label.” In a major feat of imperial apologia, Niall Ferguson constructed a lengthy defense of American empire in his book Colossus.
“Let me offer you the following straightforward conclusion,” Ferguson said in 2003. “The United States is an empire. It has long been an empire. It should be an empire.”
Although the country’s imperial apologists grew quiet as the Bush administration’s military operations turned into unpopular forever wars, the Trump administration is now bringing imperial rhetoric back into the mainstream of US political discourse.
Strategists and diplomats also spoke in favor of empire, although they did so largely in unofficial roles. Before joining the Bush administration as its first director of policy planning, Richard Haass advocated for Imperial America. Prior to becoming ambassador to NATO in the Obama administration, Ivo Daalder insisted that the United States is an empire.
Perhaps the closest a high-level official came to calling the United States an empire occurred in 2004, when a senior adviser to President George W. Bush told The New York Times that “we’re an empire now.” Various observers have speculated that the adviser was Karl Rove, one of the president’s closest aides, but Rove was careful not to openly advocate for empire.
In public, the Bush administration accepted the norm of empire denial. Again and again, Bush denied that the United States is an empire.
“We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire,” Bush said in his State of the Union address in 2004. “Our aim is a democratic peace, a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.”
The Latest Imperial Turn
Although the country’s imperial apologists grew quiet as the Bush administration’s military operations turned into unpopular forever wars, the Trump administration is now bringing imperial rhetoric back into the mainstream of US political discourse. Having spent much of its initial time in office calling for the annexation of other lands and countries, it is now openly talking about empire, something previous administrations avoided.
A major turning point came during the country’s celebrations of its 250th anniversary. Rather than simply delivering platitudes in praise of freedom and democracy, as many US leaders did, the Trump administration added an extra dimension by openly glorifying empire.
During his visit to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in early July, Trump repeatedly commended the country’s imperial history. He praised Roosevelt for his role in seizing colonies from Spain during the War of 1898.
When the country’s founders envisioned the United States as an empire of liberty, they were thinking of white US settlers moving into new territories, displacing Indigenous people, taking over their lands, and creating new states for entry into the United States.
“We got them all,” Trump said, citing Guam and Puerto Rico, both of which remain US colonies today. He also cited Cuba, a country which he wants to take for the United States. “After many, many decades, it’s coming our way,” he said.
In addition, Trump hailed Roosevelt for taking action to seize Panama, which had been part of Colombia. The acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone, Trump indicated, may have been the former president’s greatest achievement.
Roosevelt made the United States into “one of the greatest empires,” Trump said, making the point in both a speech and statement posted on the White House’s website.
After returning to Washington, Trump then gave a major speech in which he openly celebrated American empire. Speaking from the National Mall on the Fourth of July, Trump praised the conquest of the continent and declared that the United States is “the empire of liberty.”
Although many commentators dismissed the president’s remarks, with Rolling Stone calling them “bizarre,” he was not alone in bragging about empire. War Department official Elbridge Colby also delivered remarks in which he boasted that the United States is an empire.
“We are already, as our Founders put it, an empire of liberty unto ourselves,” Colby told a conference of defense ministers on July 8th. “I say this with pride, of course, not arrogance.”
With his remarks, Colby made an effort to reframe some of the president’s commentary. Providing context for the concept of an empire of liberty, Colby connected it to the country’s origins, when founders such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had used the phrase.
In addition, Colby attempted to disassociate American empire from imperialism. Whereas Trump had glorified American conquest and expansion, Colby insisted that “we do not need imperial possessions or dependencies.”
The American empire has nearly always featured imperial possession and territories, however, from its earliest history to the present day. By invoking the concept of an empire of liberty, both Trump and Colby appealed to an imperial idea that featured conquest and expansion at its very core.
When the country’s founders envisioned the United States as an empire of liberty, they were thinking of white US settlers moving into new territories, displacing Indigenous people, taking over their lands, and creating new states for entry into the United States. The founders may have claimed that expansion would provide liberty for white US settlers, but they also knew that it would mean dispossession and extirpation for Indigenous people.
“If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi,” Jefferson wrote. “In war they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”
A Basis for Empire First
Apologia for American empire may not have been a main theme of most people’s celebrations on the Fourth of July, but the Trump administration presented its own vision. Rather than sticking to the liberal ideals of the Declaration of Independence, including its powerful symbolism of opposition to empire, the Trump administration lauded the United States for being an imperial power.
The Trump administration’s actions marked a significant shift in modern US politics. Whereas previous administrations let pundits and strategists do the dirty work of advocating for empire, the Trump administration is presenting its own arguments.
The administration’s empire talk is also promoting imperial values. With the president flouting international law and threatening countries with war crimes, the administration is cultivating an imperial culture. US military forces are taking pride in conducting extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
“The United States military is killing people and bragging about it,” Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) observed last month.
Congressional leaders have refrained from condemning American empire, but they may not be able to ignore the issue much longer now that the Trump administration is glorifying empire as an ideal to be praised and celebrated rather than avoided and condemned.
Indeed, the Trump administration is providing its own apologia for American empire, creating a basis for Empire First, with the president playing the leading role.
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Alaska's Vital Waters Are Already Under Stress; They Don't Need Deep-Sea Mining
The untested practice will further disrupt already fragile ecosystems, creating increased pollution from discarded sediments, sharp increases in noise, and other potential dangers to the marine environment and food security of Arctic Peoples.
Aug 09, 2026
In July, the US launched the first of three controversial 2026 deep-seabed mining lease sales in the waters of American Samoa, to be finalized in August; the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, to be finalized in November; and Alaska, to be finalized in December. Once the lease sales are sold, it is nearly impossible to reverse the sales unless they are purchased back from the federal government.
In Alaska, fishing is not just a sport; it is a critical element of food security for many Alaskans. As the Arctic faces increasing pressure on fish stocks, including but not limited to overfishing, marine pollution, and rising ocean temperatures, the US is now debating issuing deep-sea mining permits in Alaska waters, the use of which could further harm our marine ecosystems affecting everything from phytoplankton to whales.
Proponents of deep-sea mining argue that the minerals extracted from the seabed are critical to strengthening modern supply chains for technological advancement and national security. At this time, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is assessing the potential for Alaska’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to mine cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements.
At Pacific Environment, we are deeply concerned about the permits that BOEM is considering selling. Deep-sea mining isn’t just about sticking a vacuum on the ocean floor to surgically suck up particular minerals. It also involves large-scale exploration and extraction that will further disrupt already fragile ecosystems, creating increased pollution from discarded sediments, sharp increases in noise, and other potential dangers to the marine environment and food security of Arctic Peoples.
The Risks of Deep-Sea Mining in Alaska
Deep-sea mining would deploy mining equipment in some of the deepest and least understood areas of the ocean such as hydrothermal vents and seamounts. The wildlife that inhabit these areas—including plankton, corals, fish, and marine mammals—often exist only in those places and nowhere else on the planet. When damaged, these ecosystems are slow to recover, and the damage is likely to be permanent. Sea mining activities also result in massive sediment plumes that smother marine life on the bottom and in the water column.
When BOEM opened a commenting period for the public to weigh in on deep-seabed mining, over 90,000 comment letters poured in from individuals and groups opposing the sale of leases for this largely untested technology.
It is proven that noise in the ocean disrupts whale communication and migration and may also impact other communities of ocean life. Deep-sea mining will increase noise pollution in ways that are yet to be studied because it is challenging and costly to study deep ocean ecosystems.
Alaskans are already seeing declines in our salmon populations, creating a fishing crisis along the Yukon River and elsewhere, empty smokehouses, and Indigenous communities without a primary protein resource and with cultural traditions unpracticed. We are seeing whale strikes and die-offs along the Northwest coast of the United States, further negatively impacting coastal communities. We watch as the ocean warms; Arctic sea ice melts at a faster and faster pace and a critical tipping point for nitrogen—a critical element of ocean life—has passed.
Public Opposition Reflects Growing Concern
When BOEM opened a commenting period for the public to weigh in on deep-seabed mining, over 90,000 comment letters poured in from individuals and groups opposing the sale of leases for this largely untested technology. These comments highlight concerns about the lack of understanding of the long-term impacts these leases will have on Arctic waters that depend on intricate balances to support marine life.
While arguments can be made that we need to secure additional access to critical minerals, the risks of what we could lose are very significant. Arctic ocean ecosystems are fragile, not well understood, and already under intense pressure as the region warms four times faster than the rest of the planet. Alaska, and the world, depend on the marine environment for so many things; it makes no sense to jeopardize this sensitive ecosystem for an unproven and largely untested technology.
This piece was first published on the Pacific Environment blog.
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Out-of-Control Canadian Wildfires Prompt Calls for 'Nuremberg Trials for Big Oil'
“Climate change isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime. The fossil fuel industry are arsonists at a global scale. It’s their pollution that’s fueling these horrific wildfires," one climate advocate told Common Dreams.
Jul 16, 2026
As wildfires raged across Canada on Thursday, sending dangerous smoke across the border into major US cities, climate advocates called for accountability for the fossil fuel industry, which knew for decades that its products were largely responsible for the climate crisis, yet chose to push climate denial instead.
While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of Canada's boreal forests, the heating of the atmosphere due to the burning of oil, gas, and coal has made fires more frequent and extreme.
"We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil," the youth-led Sunrise Movement wrote on social media in response to the fires.
We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil. https://t.co/nHhbDXB06X
— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026
Climate Defiance agreed, posting, "Nuremberg-style trials are in order for the fossil fuel executives who knew what they were doing to our children’s futures and did anyway."
There were 884 fires burning in Canada on Thursday, with 124 out of control, according to the country's national wildland fire summary. Over 100 fires were raging in Ontario alone, where they have forced the evacuation of at least 15 rural communities; destroyed homes in the Indigenous community of Collins First Nation, or Namaygoosisagagun; and polluted the skies over parts of the upper Midwest and Northeastern US.
As of Thursday evening Eastern time, the four cities with the worst air quality in the world were Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Toronto, according to IQAir.
People have shared dramatic footage of the fires on social media. One video shows a train moving through a blaze near Armstrong, Ontario. Thankfully, all crew members were evacuated safely, The Guardian reported.
This is near Armstrong, Ontario.
When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident? pic.twitter.com/6bKJYugeR0
— Sol Mamakwa (@solmamakwa) July 14, 2026
Indigenous photographer Nadya Kwandibens shared images of flames rising over a lake with the words, "“My family hometown, Collins Ontario, is GONE."
Residents of the community fled the blaze in boats before the flames damaged and destroyed several homes and other structures, according to CBC News.
“Collins has burned to the ground. This is a tragedy and we are grateful that everyone got out safely,” Lise Vaugeois, the provincial representative for the region, said, as The Guardian reported. “Fires are part of a natural cycle, but the extreme temperatures we are experiencing across the county and the growing severity of weather events are indicators of climate change.”
Laura Chasmer, a professor of geography and the environment at the University of Western Ontario, noted that fires in Canada like the ones raging across Ontario have increased since 2015.
"This is associated with some of the extreme climate warming that we've been seeing, and the atmospheric drying of the surface," she told BBC News.
Brandi Morin, a Cree-Iroquois-French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, noted in her Substack that Canada was warming at twice the global average. Despite this, the Canadian government has made progress on three major fossil fuel pipelines this July.
"Every barrel these new pipelines are built to move adds to the exact warming that’s turning our boreal forests into tinder," Morin wrote.
On the other side of the border, Michigan regulators late Wednesday approved important permits from the controversial Enbridge Line 5 pipeline.
Political leaders and climate advocates responded to the fires and smoke with calls to abandon fossil fuel projects, transition to renewable energy, and hold oil and gas companies accountable for the harms they have caused.
"We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly. The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns," the Sunrise Movement said.
We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly.
The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns. https://t.co/6oqGxoC8m3
— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026
As smoke drifted over Boston on Wednesday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote on social media: "Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal."
Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal. https://t.co/pXo5XOOt0q
— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) July 15, 2026
“Climate change isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime. The fossil fuel industry are arsonists at a global scale. It’s their pollution that’s fueling these horrific wildfires," Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, told Common Dreams. "Instead of approving new pipelines, the Canadian government should be holding the industry accountable and using their record profits to help communities on the frontlines of this crisis.”
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Indigenous and Climate Campaigners Decry 'Deep Betrayal' as Michigan Issues Key Enbridge Line 5 Permits
State regulators said the permits for a tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac would have "significant impacts" on wildlife and sacred Indigenous burial grounds, but issued them nonetheless.
Jul 16, 2026
Anti-fossil fuel campaigners on Wednesday emphasized that Michigan state regulators had issued key permits for the Enbridge Line 5 tunnel in the Straits of Mackinac on the same day that "wildfire smoke from climate change blotted out the Mackinac Bridge from view" and as the US and other countries faced extreme heatwaves.
Despite the mounting evidence that—as energy and climate experts have long warned—continued fossil fuel extraction is heating the planet and causing dangerous extreme weather, Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy handed down a permit Wednesday to allow the Canadian company Enbridge to construct a tunnel that EGLE officials acknowledged will likely have "significant impacts" on threatened or endangered species and Indigenous burial ground in the Straits.
“The magnitude of impacts to recognized historic and cultural values of this proposed project exceeds that of any other that EGLE has reviewed,” said EGLE in its statement on the permits.
Enbridge has sought to build a tunnel around its Line 5 pipeline in the Straits for years, following a massive oil spill from its Line 6B pipeline in the Kalamazoo River. Line 5 has been struck by ships' anchors numerous times, heightening concerns.
EGLE said in its explanation that the oil spill risk was found to be "unacceptable" and that the need for the tunnel outweighed its risks.
But opponents who have argued that Line 5 should be permanently shut down, including the Bay Mills Indian Community, condemned the agency for "rewarding" Enbridge with new permits even after its fossil fuel infrastructure has caused hazardous oil spills.
“Enbridge has spilled oil, committed safety violations, trespassed on lands, shattered ecosystems, pierced aquifers, violated our laws, and repeatedly shown contempt for tribal sovereignty," said Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community. "They have left devastation in their wake, and now they’re being rewarded with responsibility over one of the most precious and sacred resources in our state. The Great Lakes are not safe in their hands. This decision is a deep betrayal of our Great Lake State, and we will confront it immediately, fiercely, and without hesitation.”
The state Department of Natural Resources also issued a permit following EGLE's decision, granting permission for the tunnel despite its potential impact on rare plants and animal habitats.
According to Michigan Bridge, about 1.53 acres of wetlands in Mackinac County would be impacted by the tunnel project, as well as 0.17 acres of Lake Michigan bottomlands in Emmet County, where Enbridge is expected to build a water intake structure.
The environmental legal organization Earthjustice, which has helped represent the Bay Mills Indian Community in its legal challenges against Enbridge, said that with the permits, the company will "transform the Straits of Mackinac into an industrial construction zone for at least six years, destroying views, displacing wildlife, and interrupting tourism dollars."
“Our environmental laws, the looming climate crisis, and simple common sense tells us that an oil pipeline doesn’t belong in the Great Lakes,” said Earthjustice managing attorney Debbie Chizewer. “Today’s decision is a setback, but we’re not giving up. A future without oil in the Great Lakes is still possible.”
EGLE is also expected to rule by September 30 on an Enbridge request to discharge millions of gallons of treated wastewater per day into Lake Michigan while it is constructing the tunnel, and the Michigan Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit brought by four Tribal Nations, including Bay Mills, alleging that the Michigan Public Service Commission improperly issued a key tunnel permit in 2023.
The state is also fighting Enbridge over Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's 2020 order to shut down Line 5 over oil spill concerns. She had campaigned in 2018 on a promise to shut down the pipeline. A federal judge ruled last year that the state had no authority to terminate the use of the pipeline, and the state appealed that ruling.
Advocates expressed anger on Wednesday at Whitmer as her government issued the permits.
“It’s incredibly disappointing that a governor who ran on a commitment to the climate and protecting the Great Lakes has now decided to instead endorse a Canadian industrial tunnel project that still threatens the Great Lakes and will contribute fossil fuels to the climate,” David Holtz, coalition coordinator for the anti-Line 5 group Oil & Water Don’t Mix, told Bridge Michigan.
David Gover, managing attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said that "the Straits of Mackinac are not a piece of Enbridge oil infrastructure; they are the heart of creation for Anishinaabe people and a vital source of life for all who depend on the Great Lakes."
“We will pursue every legal avenue," Gover said, "to defend treaty rights, protect drinking water, and preserve tribal lifeways from another Enbridge disaster.”
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