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wildlife
Reclaiming a Disposable Planet
Tossing out the trash is something you’re just supposed to do, no questions asked, at least if you want to live a normal, respected life. But what if you're missing something wondrous?
Feb 21, 2026
Hey, want to read a poem with me? Warning: It opens several disturbing doors, the least disturbing of which is the “crazy old coot” part, i.e., me. Once you start getting lost in the paradoxes of life, you need to watch out. They could start coming after you.
But more disturbing is the paradox itself, which is both environmental and spiritual. And it’s right there on my front lawn. The life I’ve been given—the lives we’ve been given—are partially disposable, apparently. Mostly I took this for granted, but suddenly one summer afternoon, as I was pushing my hand mower up and down the lawn, something shifted in me. I started feeling... reverence for garbage? Tossing out the trash is something you’re just supposed to do, no questions asked, at least if you want to live a normal, respected life. Doubting this could be a tad problematic.
The poem is called “Buddha’s Lawn.” I wrote it a decade ago. Back when I still had a lawn to mow.
I mow the lawn and feel gratitude
my neighbors
haven’t pigeonholed me as a crazy old coot.
I’m stalled in my transition
from a lifestyle and sense of order based on
killing things,
like weeds, mice, whatever,
to one based on reverence for all stuff,
however weird.
It’s a cool day but
I work up a sweat.
On the lawn, I pick up a shred
of burst red balloon, a used napkin,
a transparent plastic juice container.
This stuff is all just litter
and the weeds are still weeds.
If I really let myself
see them differently,
I’d be the crazy neighbor, right?
Well, sorry (I apologize to myself.) I can’t help it. Once the door opens and a ray of awareness shines in, burst balloons, tossed straws, plastic grocery bags, discarded pop bottles, etc., etc., aren’t what they used to be. There’s an inner awareness that won’t go away. You might call it “litteracy”—an awareness of what happens next.
For instance, according to the Center for Biological Diversity: “In the first decade of this century, we made more plastic than all the plastic in history up to the year 2000. And every year, billions of pounds of more plastic end up in the world’s oceans. Studies estimate there are now 15-51 trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans—from the equator to the poles, from Arctic ice sheets to the sea floor. Not one square mile of surface ocean anywhere on Earth is free of plastic pollution...”
The analysis goes on:
Thousands of animals, from small finches to blue whales, die grisly deaths from eating and getting caught in plastic...
Hundreds of thousands of seabirds ingest plastic every year. Plastic ingestion reduces the storage volume of the stomach, causing starvation. It’s estimated that 60% of all seabird species have eaten pieces of plastic, with that number predicted to increase to 99% by 2050. Dead seabirds are often found with stomachs full of plastic, reflecting how the amount of garbage in our oceans has rapidly increased in the past 40 years...
Dead whales have been found with bellies full of plastic.
I can’t dismiss this with a shrug... just toss the plastic in the trash and go on mowing my lawn, being normal. I start to stare with curiosity and wonderment at the litter. And this is where the old coot starts looking, or at least feeling, crazy, at least until his sense of awareness expands: “The word ‘garbage’ means a resource nobody is smart enough to use yet.”
Hmmm. Really? I quoted these words in a column I wrote in 2013. Called (I kid you not) “Reverence for Garbage,” it talks abouts the documentary Landfill Harmonic, about a Paraguayan village built on a landfill. Reclaiming and reselling the trash was the residents’ primary means of survival. But they did something else as well. Inspired by a local musician, the residents also started making musical instruments out of the trash: “violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates.”
Real instruments were beyond expensive, far more costly than anyone there could afford. But children in the village learned to play the instruments hand-crafted from the landfill trash. And what was worthless became heavenly.
Is there a larger cultural takeaway pulsating in this story? Could it be that we value too little of our own planet? I wonder if maybe.. maybe... we should begin crumpling up our certainties and tossing them in the trash.
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Trump Admin Condemned for Pushing Big Oil Leases in Arctic Refuge
The Bureau of Land Management is seeking nominations for which parts of ANWR's Coastal Plane should be offered up to fossil fuel companies for potential drilling.
Feb 02, 2026
The Trump administration on Monday took the first step toward holding controversial oil and gas lease sales in the Coastal Plane of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The Bureau of Land Management announced on Monday that it was seeking nominations for which parts of ANWR's Coastal Plane should be offered up to fossil fuel companies for potential drilling, fulfilling a mandate passed by the US Senate in late 2025. However, the move goes against the wishes of Indigenous people who consider the plane sacred as well as conservationists, scientists, and many members of the American public who value US public lands for their beauty and wildlife.
“People have worked together for decades to defend the Arctic Refuge, because this unique landscape is too special to be sacrificed to the oil industry for profit," Earthjustice managing attorney Erik Grafe said in a statement. "Tripling down on oil development in the Arctic takes us in exactly the wrong direction in our existential fight to curb climate change and protect these critically important public lands."
The sales would continue US President Donald Trump's push to increase oil and gas production, including in Alaska, ramping up an agenda that has dominated both of his terms. The Senate's action in 2025 followed an October decision by the Department of the Interior (DOI) to open the Coastal Plane to drilling, overriding Biden-era protections. The DOI, led by pro-fossil fuel Doug Burgum, also reversed Biden administration protections for Alaska's Western Arctic.
"The Arctic Refuge is no place for drilling."
"The Trump administration spent 2025 waging an all-out assault on public lands in Alaska’s Arctic, while ignoring the voices of Indigenous communities that hold these lands sacred and jeopardizing the survival of Arctic wildlife," Grafe said. "We’ve already taken steps to challenge Interior’s overall leasing plan for the Arctic Refuge in court, and we’re prepared to continue the fight as this lease sale process grinds on.”
The Trump administration's plan for the Arctic faces wide opposition—public comments on nominations for portions of the Western Arctic to lease featured tens of thousands of calls for protection rather than exploitation.
However, opponents of the plan also noted it may not be as popular with the industry as Trump hopes. Lease sales in ANWR in 2021 and 2024 received little interest from oil and gas companies, with the latter not receiving a single bid.
“The Trump administration is hung up on oil and gas leasing in the Arctic Refuge because they cannot admit that the original Trump leasing plan—established following the 2017 Tax Act—was a complete and utter failure,” said Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, in a statement.
The Alaska Wilderness League appealed to the industry itself, noting that the area has some of the highest production costs on the continent while being an increasingly difficult place to work due to extreme weather and other changes caused by the climate crisis, an uncertain regulatory environment, competition from cheaper forms of renewable energy, and the fact that many Americans do not support drilling in the Arctic.
“Serious companies don’t gamble their future on the most remote, expensive, and controversial oil on Earth from one of the most unparalleled ecosystems left on this planet,” said league executive director Kristen Miller. “If companies are still looking to drill the Arctic Refuge in 2026, it’s a sign that they can’t read the writing on the wall: Smart money has already walked away.”
But whatever the decision of the oil and gas industry, Indigenous communities and their allies are determined to fight for the land that is home to polar bears, millions of birds, and the Porcupine caribou herd.
“We condemn these actions, and encourage officials in the Trump administration—and our representatives in the Alaska delegation—to acknowledge and accept what we as Gwich’in know, and what the majority of the American people agree on: The Arctic Refuge is no place for drilling," Moreland continued. "It deserves to be protected and preserved for the wildlife that depend on it, and for all our futures.”
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Whatever Industry Wants: How the FCC Is Steamrolling Locals in the Cell Tower Rollout
Two new FCC proposals would render an already weak NEPA process largely meaningless, strip local and state governments of nearly all of their congressionally granted authority, and leave the agency even less accountable to the public.
Jan 02, 2026
The Federal Communications Commission is poised to release two orders that would steamroll states and communities on behalf of the wireless industry. Long in bed with that industry, it will soon eliminate virtually any say locals have in the rollout of new infrastructure. Reflecting the industry’s wish list, these rules would override already-limited state and local control over how and where cell tower infrastructure is built, further erode environmental review safeguards, and trample on states’ rights.
Federal law already restricts states and communities from taking actions that “prohibit or effectively prohibit” the provision of wireless service. Yet Congress also recognized that local governments serve an essential role in responsible siting of telecommunications deployment through land-use planning, zoning, engineering oversight, public safety, and preservation of neighborhood character.
Historically, states and localities have retained the authority to charge industry reasonable fees and to regulate for public welfare—setting standards for structural safety, wildfire risk, flood exposure, resiliency, decommissioning, environmental protection, and aesthetics. Before siting, city councils, boards of supervisors, and other officials evaluate the impacts of large, industrial towers on homes and critical community assets, like parks, slope stability, or historic buildings.
For years, however, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has steadily chipped away at these core local functions through litigation and rulemakings that sharply curtail community authority to impose requirements on carriers. In November, the FCC proposed an even more aggressive series of changes that would all but obliterate what remains of local authority over wireless siting. The FCC claims these measures are necessary to “free towers and other wireless infrastructure from unlawful regulatory burdens imposed at the state and local level.”
As wireless technologies proliferate—with presumably even less scrutiny, oversight, and public input—the environmental and community impacts will only multiply.
One proposal would mandate automatic approval of tower and small-cell applications if localities miss federal deadlines. California officials warn these “unrealistic timelines” risk incomplete safety review and “threaten to silence the very people who must live with the consequences.”
The FCC would broadly preempt local aesthetic standards and cap fees that fund environmental review, rights-of-way management, and safety inspections, shifting industry costs on to taxpayers. It would treat setbacks aimed at limiting noise and visual impacts as impermissible RF radiation regulation, bar local requirements for industry-funded RF testing to verify compliance, prohibit updated safety and design standards at permit renewal, and override requirements that carriers consider less intrusive alternatives or demonstrate actual service need.
Taken together, these measures would eviscerate any local role in siting decisions that consider neighborhoods, landscapes, safety, and environmental integrity in communities across the nation, and replace it with the will of the wireless industry.
At the same time, the FCC is finalizing another rule that would eliminate community input in the agency’s already weak environmental review process. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), federal agencies must assess and disclose environmental impacts and consider public concerns, yet the FCC has one of the least rigorous NEPA frameworks of any agency. Few of its authorized activities undergo any meaningful review. It delegates the preliminary environmental review to industry with no oversight or agency record; industry also prepares the few environmental assessments that may be required from the preliminary review. Its notice and comment procedures seem designed to exclude the public, and, unlike most agencies, the FCC has no web page devoted to NEPA documents or compliance. It has almost never enforced its environmental rules against industry violators.
The consequences of these failures are visible nationwide: protected landscapes and historic viewsheds marred, wetlands filled, endangered species habitat destroyed, sacred sites desecrated, burial mounds disturbed, and fragile underwater environments degraded. Equally important, the voices of communities and citizens have been suppressed and ignored.
Now, echoing industry demands to cut “regulatory red tape,” the FCC is proposing to further weaken its skeletal NEPA rules, exempt more of its actions from environmental review, and further exclude the public. It would redefine which actions trigger environmental review so that even fewer authorizations—covering most cell towers and satellite deployments—would be assessed for environmental effects. It would narrow the scope of the few environmental documents that remain and make them less available to the public. Most egregiously, the FCC proposes eliminating its lone public notice provision that alerts communities when a new tower is proposed, thereby allowing residents to object. Although the FCC routinely dismisses objections, the provision complies with a key NEPA requirement.
Both of the FCC’s proposals are a draconian solution to a nonexistent “problem.” At the end of 2024, industry statistics show 651,000 cell towers and wireless facilities operating nationwide, with thousands more, including satellites, approved or underway. Every major wireless carrier has nationwide coverage. Industry has prepared few environmental assessments over the years, and the FCC has never produced a more thorough environmental impact statement. Contrary to industry claims, red tape has not hindered deployment.
As wireless technologies proliferate—with presumably even less scrutiny, oversight, and public input—the environmental and community impacts will only multiply. Taken together, the FCC’s twin proposals would render an already weak NEPA process largely meaningless, strip local and state governments of nearly all of their congressionally granted authority, and leave the agency even less accountable to the public.
With almost 30 bills introduced on accelerating broadband siting this session, Congress too is doing its part to “free” industry from local control and environmental laws. Any and all of these radical new frameworks will hand industry a carte blanche to deploy infrastructure that runs roughshod over local, state, and public interests as well as the environment.
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