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wildlife
An Entire Forest Born Of Just 20 Seedlings: The Forest Man of India’s Legacy
The story of how a teenager transformed an abandoned government forestry project into a lifelong obsession, creating what is arguably the largest single-handed man-made forest of the world, over the course of four decades.
Jul 28, 2026
Long before global environmental summits sensationalized terms like sustainability and ecological restoration, a young teenager in an almost forgotten corner of the world stood on a barren, sun-baked sandbar with just 20 bamboo seedlings in his hands.
He was oblivious to the future his hands would sow, a future that would etch his name in textbooks around the world. Today, observances like World Nature Conservation Day exist to remind us how crucial such grassroots action is.
In 1997, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared July 28 as the World Nature Conservation Day. Since then, it has evolved into a global movement, galvanizing governments, institutions, civil society, and individuals to advance collective action for environmental stewardship.
This World Nature Conservation Day, the story of this boy who came to be known as the "Forest Man of India" stands as a testament to the power of individual environmental stewardship.
Jadav 'Molai' Payeng
A wall carving of Jadav Payeng is displayed at Goalpara college. (Photo by Medhi Jyoti / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Popularly known as "The Forest Man of India," Payeng earned this title through years of dedication and his childhood passion for change. Change is something that many hope for, but few have the perseverance and groundwork to realize.
Starting with just 20 bamboo seedlings on a sandbar of the river Brahmaputra, he has continued to nurture the plants to this day. Despite the odds, he stood firm with limited resources and determination to keep planting, never giving up on his mission.
This article traces the evolution of his extraordinary journey, examining not only the scale of his environmental contribution but also the quiet determination that sustained it.
The Genesis: How it Started
The origin of the Molai Forest dates back to 1979. Jadav Payeng, who was then employed as a labourer under a development project of the social forestry division, was assigned the stewardship of a 200-hectare patch of land in Arunachapori (an island). The project, which was intended to last for five years, ended in three.
Payeng, who had nowhere else to go, decided to keep planting trees and taking care of the flora he had already planted. In the same year, he found many dead snakes that had died from excessive heat after floods washed them onto the treeless sandbar. It was then that he planted 20 bamboo saplings on the sandbar.
The tale of Jadav Payeng shows that an environmental transformation does not always begin with huge policy changes or major funding. At times, it starts with a single individual who plants a seed and cultivates a dream which never fades away.
It was not just that he took care of the saplings; he also planted additional trees on his own, aiming to convert the area into a forest. What Jadav Payeng has created is arguably the world’s largest man-made forest.
Marked by the recurring devastation of floods on the island of Majuli, Payeng’s childhood was profoundly shaped by the disaster that forced his parents to abandon their native village. Reflecting on his childhood, he recalls that his village provided everything—from thatch to cane needed to sustain a comfortable life in their elevated dwellings, colloquially known as “Chang Ghar.”
Molai Kathoni (Molai Forest)
The Brahmaputra River is shown. (Photo by Dipayan Choudhury / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Molai Kathoni, or the Molai Forest, is the sprawling forest reserve created by Jadav Payeng, named after him as a token of appreciation for his decades of hard work. Now this wonderful forest houses more than 100 varieties of native flora, including hydrophytic, medicinal and aromatic, orchid, fruit-bearing, and timber trees.
The story of Molai Kathoni gained widespread attention in 2008, when a herd of elephants migrated into the forest reserve from the north bank of the Brahmaputra River, moving further south. This unique and flourishing patch of greenery soon caught the eye of the media, who aptly dubbed it “Molai Kathoni,” meaning “Molai’s woods.”
Payeng’s initial efforts evolved into a self-sustaining forest from bamboo to various trees. The net area covered by this forest is a staggering 1,360 acres and shelters threatened species such as Asian elephants, Bengal tigers, and one-horned rhinoceroses. A herd of around 100 elephants regularly visits the forest every year and generally stays for around six months.
In addition, Molai Kathoni provides shelter to 250 families living in about 10 to 12 huts in different groups. Notable flora species from his forest include Arjun (Terminalia arjuna), Pride of India (Lagerstroemia speciosa), Silk trees (Albizia procera), and Cotton trees (Bombax ceiba). Bamboo alone spans over 300 hectares.
Initially, in order to irrigate the large stretch of saplings, Payeng constructed bamboo structures above the saplings and put earthen pots with very small holes in them for drip irrigation. Water was allowed to seep out gradually over several days, nourishing the delicate saplings as he went about other chores.
To transform the infertile sandbar into nutrient-rich soil, Payeng physically transported red ants, earthworms, and organic biomass from his village to the island. The insects served as biological plows, altering the soil's composition and preparing the ground for deciduous trees.
Payeng’s Recognitions
For over three decades, his creation largely remained in the dark, away from public recognition and media sensationalization. When his story finally emerged, the world stood in awe of a man who, despite not having completed his secondary education, had ignited a quiet revolution painted in countless shades of green.
Jadav Payeng went on to win the third-highest civilian award of India: "The Padma Shri" in 2015. He was awarded the "Commonwealth Point of Light" award by the government of the United Kingdom. Payeng was named the "Forest Man of India" by Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2012. In 2025, the Jyoti Prasad Trust instituted the "Jadav Payeng International Award" in his honor.
The innovative solutions he developed, utilizing coconut tree planting to control soil erosion in Majuli, have garnered recognition for helping fight climate change. His inspirational story transcended borders, inspiring a children’s book, Jadav and the Tree Place. Moreover, his story has been integrated into school curricula across the United States and beyond as a compelling lesson in ecology.
Despite international acclaim, numerous awards, and appearances in award-winning documentaries (such as William D. McMaster's Forest Man), Payeng lives a remarkably simple life. He continues to wake up before dawn, taking a boat across the river to care for his forest and earn his living from the sale of milk from his livestock.
Creating a Better World
Payeng's contribution is not just about creating a green forest. The trees that Payeng planted act as carbon sinks, absorbing carbon dioxide while enhancing ecosystem health by supporting biodiversity, regulating water cycles, and sustaining diverse habitats.
Now his focus is on spreading his forest to another sandbar of the Brahmaputra and completely turning Majuli Island into a tropical paradise. In an interview with The Better India, he said that education systems should mandate every child to plant two trees. Payeng reiterated the need to integrate planting trees in school curricula in a TED talk he was invited to in 2015.
The tale of Jadav Payeng shows that an environmental transformation does not always begin with huge policy changes or major funding. At times, it starts with a single individual who plants a seed and cultivates a dream which never fades away.
For those seeking inspiration amid the mayhem of the climate crisis, the Molai island forest is a living testimony to what one dedicated soul can achieve.
As we celebrate World Nature Conservation Day, Payeng’s towering forest whispers a powerful message: Healing our planet doesn’t require an army; it can begin with one person planting the first seed.
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We Are Closer Than We Think to Losing Our Wild Neighbors
You do not need to fire a shot to kill an animal and imperil its entire species’ existence—you only need to take away the place it lives. A Trump administration Endangered Species Act rollback would do just that.
Jul 23, 2026
There is a vision of this country that still exists to anyone who grew up near its wild places: manatees drifting beneath a dock, Florida leafwing butterflies fluttering through the wind, yellow-billed cuckoos migrating in the spring and fall. For generations of Americans, these were not rare sightings. They were proof that people and wildlife could share the same natural inheritance
That inheritance is now under direct threat, and the erosion is no longer incremental. It is accelerating at an unprecedented pace.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration formally rescinded the regulatory definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—a single word that has helped to protect this nation's imperiled wildlife for more than 50 years. For decades, "harm" was understood to include not just the direct killing or injuring of an endangered animal, but the destruction or degradation of the habitat that animal depends on to breed, feed, migrate, or shelter. That understanding was not a bureaucratic technicality. It was the legal recognition of a basic ecological truth: An animal cannot survive the loss of its home and its resources for daily living any more than a person can. Each of these species has a story that will end the same way without habitat protection: not a quick death by bullet but a slow death by a thousand cuts.
Remove that definition, and you remove the government's ability to regulate clear-cutting old growth forest filled with an endangered bird’s nesting sites, draining a wetland key for an endangered frog’s breeding, or dumping pollution into the lagoon where sea turtles and marine mammals graze. You do not need to fire a shot to kill an animal and imperil its entire species’ existence. You only need to take away the place it lives.
Habitat destruction is already the leading driver of species decline in the US, and this rollback removes one of the few legal tools available to slow it.
Congress enacted the ESA in 1973 with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Republican President Richard Nixon signed it, "to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved." In the more than five decades since, the ESA has prevented the extinction of an estimated 99% of the species placed under its protection—one of the most successful conservation records in the world.
Rescinding the definition of harm will eviscerate the ESA. And it does so under the pretense of streamlining obstacles to American economic growth, as if the nation's economy runs on oil, gas, logging, and mining alone. But our national economy—and our national welfare—are inextricably linked to healthy, thriving wildlife and habitats. Wildlife watching, for example, supports a $250.2 billion industry in the US. Commercial and recreational fisheries generate $319 billion in sales and sustain 2.1 million jobs. Hunting and fishing support $400 billion in annual economic value. And the ecosystem services nature provides for free—clean water, crop pollination, flood control, pest suppression—are valued at an estimated $5 trillion a year.
Habitat destruction is already the leading driver of species decline in the US, and this rollback removes one of the few legal tools available to slow it.
Consider the Florida manatee, listed as threatened under the ESA. Manatees lack blubber and cannot fully regulate their own body temperature; in winter, their survival depends on access to water near 72°F. Coastal development and polluted runoff have devastated the seagrass beds manatees depend on and degraded the natural springs that once kept them warm through the winter. More than half of Florida's manatees now survive only because they cluster near the artificial warm-water discharge of aging power plants. Without the harm definition, it will be exponentially harder to protect and restore their foraging and sheltering habitats they need to survive and recover.
The same pattern will repeat across the country. The North American wolverine depends on vanishing high-elevation snowpack at risk of being lost to development and expanding winter recreation. The whooping crane, one of the rarest birds in North America, needs undisturbed wetland corridors to complete its migration. In the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, polar bears depend on undisturbed denning sites; seismic testing, vehicle traffic, and aircraft noise associated with oil exploration can cause mother bears to abandon their dens and cubs. For five decades, the ESA enabled economic activities in the habitats species need to survive and recover, with permitting guardrails to ensure adequate protections. Now that the administration has eliminated those guardrails, it’s open season for industry to sacrifice habitat—and the future of our imperiled wildlife species. Defenders of Wildlife, along with other conservation organizations, has already gone to federal court to challenge this unlawful action.
At the same time, we’re standing up to defend the ESA itself from anti-wildlife members of Congress who favor unfettered logging, mining, grazing, and drilling, no matter the cost to endangered animals—or to our irreplaceable natural heritage. One of the most effective actions concerned citizens can take right now is to call their representative and senators and oppose any effort to undermine this bedrock wildlife law.
We are closer than most people realize to losing the manatees in our canals, the whooping cranes in our wetlands, and the wolverines in our mountains. What remains to be seen is whether we act while there is still habitat left to save.
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Small Voices in the Jungle: An Ode to Horton the Elephant and the AI Resistance
We need to keep listening—and we need to keep speaking. For we don’t know whose “yopp” or “yapp” or any other utterance will break through the racket of the Big Tech buildout.
Jul 01, 2026
When my son was three years old, he insisted upon hearing Horton Hears a Who! every night. Twice. As this lasted for several months, I got pretty good at reading quickly, tearing through the opening page in one breath—"On the 15th of May, in the Jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool"—so that the words ran together, like a kind of Dr. Seuss verbal soup. Horton is a sweet story about a keen-eared elephant determined, against all odds,to save the diminutive Whos, despite being ridiculed because no one else could hear them.
Given all the great picture books around, this restrictive reading diet left me perplexed. Was its appeal that it was set on May 15, the day before my son’s birthday? (To this day we all mark “Horton’s Day” with a round of silly texts.) Or that it was the teensiest Who whose off-hand “yopp” finally nudged Whoville past the aural threshold? Perhaps it was Horton’s stalwart conviction that "a person’s a person, no matter how small," a sentiment that must have enchanted a small boy stuck in a land of grownups. I venture it’s all three.
The feeling the story evokes so well—that of being invisible, and, in this case, inaudible—is universal. Everyone who was once a child has been there. Despite writing a bunch of books and giving all sorts of talks, this feeling now resonates far more than when I was a young mom speed-reading to my toddler. For you don’t need to live on a speck of dust to know that today, more than ever, little people aren’t seen and their concerns rarely get heard.
We are all Whos now.
There is indeed a crescendo of voices railing against the spoilage and surrender of nature for tech.
One scenario that really makes me feel like a Who—pounding brass pans so that someone, anyone, listens—is the way new technology buildouts are harming the natural world. Here in New England, forests and once-productive farms are being cleared for solar, while water-hungry data centers claim chunks of land in areas vulnerable to drought. Around the globe—from India to Mexico, Papua New Guinea to Mongolia—entire areas are rendered toxic due to mining the metals that animate our devices. In several places, most notoriously Congo’s cobalt mines, children as young as six spend their days in tunnels plying ores with their bare hands.
In the book, Horton is repeatedly mocked for tending the particle upon which the Whos live. The mama kangaroo and her joey say, "Humpf!" and the gang of monkeys calls the existence of Whos “nonsense”—before conspiring to drop the speck in a sea of clover. Here in our jungle equivalent, hostility to tech infrastructure is derided as “NIMBYISM” and those opposed to it scorned as Luddites. Expanding computation and energy capacity is vital for progress, even marquee environmentalists tell us. As for the ecological and human cost, well, we can’t achieve a “green energy transition” without making a bit of a mess.
We also hear from our political reps, many of whom stand to benefit handily from AI expansion, that the spread of resource-intensive computational apparatus is “unstoppable” and “not going away.” Really? The truth is: People don’t want this. At college commencements, tech titans called in to inspire new graduates about AI’s rosy future have been met with boos. But you have to listen hard, past the din of machines and the money—a bunch of zeros on a screen—that feeds them. It seems the plan is to ram all this development through so that a critical mass are dependent on the technology and the rest of us have no choice but to use it. “Inevitable,” indeed.
We need to keep listening—and we need to keep speaking. For we don’t know whose “yopp” or “yapp” or any other utterance will break through the racket. It could be the cries of juvenile sea turtles that drift about the Blake Plateau, a biodiverse undersea basin now eyed for mining nodules rich in rare metals. Or the weeping of Gullah-Geechee ancestors, thousands of whom died here during the Middle Passage en route to Charleston. Or the plaint of hundreds of villagers in a 1,000-year-old Scottish village gathered to call bullshit on claims that a massive new “hyperscale” data center would serve the community. Or the high-pitched cackle of the Andean Flamingo: outrageously pink on stick-thin legs—Dr. Seuss would have had fun drawing them. The birds are lamenting that their wetland habitat in the Atacama Desert highlands is being pumped to produce the lithium essential for energy storage.
There is indeed a crescendo of voices railing against the spoilage and surrender of nature for tech. Just like the townsfolk of Whoville, we need all of us to exclaim, "We are here! We are here! We are here!"
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'They Knew Exactly Who Mona Khalil Was': Israel Kills Lebanese Turtle Conservationist
"The murder of Mona Khalil sends a chilling message: Even those whose only weapon is compassion, whose only mission is preservation, are not spared," said one observer.
Jun 22, 2026
For more than 25 years, she protected the endangered sea turtles that laid their eggs near her beachside home in southern Lebanon. But Mona Khalil could not protect herself from Israeli invaders who spared neither her sanctuary nor its steward.
Khalil, 76, was mortally wounded when Israeli forces bombed her brightly painted conservation hub and ecotourism site, called the Orange House, in al-Mansouri, Tyre province, on June 4. She suffered injuries including severe burns during the attack, which also wounded her Ethiopian assistant, and was transported to a hospital in Beirut for treatment.
"They knew exactly who Mona Khalil was," Lebanese journalist and professor Marwa Osman said on social media following Khalil's death. "They knew the bright orange house... They knew it was not a military site, not a command center, not a battlefield position. It was one of the most recognizable symbols of environmental conservation on Lebanon's southern coast; a sanctuary dedicated to protecting endangered sea turtles and preserving life."
The Israel Defense Forces said Saturday that Khalil "was not a target."
"There is no known IDF strike in which she was injured,” the military said. “However, strikes were conducted in the area after the IDF issued evacuation warnings.”
Khalil—who was born in Nigeria in 1949 and held Dutch and Lebanese citizenship—co-founded the Orange House Project in 1999 in what had once been her grandmother's home. Khalil and volunteers gathered there each nesting season to protect sea turtles, their eggs, and hatchlings from both predators and people. She also fought against the privatization of beaches, habitat destruction, dynamite fishing, and other threats.
"For decades, Mona dedicated her life to protecting endangered sea turtles and their nesting habitats," the Lebanese environmental group Green Southerners said on Instagram. "Through the Orange House, she inspired generations of Lebanese to value and protect their natural heritage and coastal ecosystems. Her work made her one of Lebanon’s most respected voices for marine conservation and biodiversity protection."
Green Southerners co-founder Hisham Younes told the BBC on Saturday that Khalil "used to talk about the beach like it was a person."
"Her bond to the sunset, her bond to the water and the turtles... she was really into conservation, and into the soul, the spirit of conservation," Younes added.
According to Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health, Israeli attacks have killed at least 4,106 people—including 383 women, 251 children, and 135 medical workers—and wounded 12,153 others since March 2. Over 1 million Lebanese have also been forcibly displaced.
Over the weekend, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said his country's forces "need to go berserk" and "obliterate" Lebanon, all of which, he said, "must burn."
Ben-Gvir's comments were widely viewed as part of Israel's efforts to sabotage an elusive peace agreement between the United States and Iran, which has endured 114 days of an illegal US-Israeli war of choice.
Israel's Lebanon onslaught, occurring amid a backdrop of its ongoing genocide in Gaza, did not deter Khalil.
"When the war broke out, she said, 'No one should tell me to leave. I don't want to leave,'" Lebanese journalist and environmentalist Fadia Joumaa told Al Jazeera on Monday. "She made the decision to stay. What she said was, 'I'm a civilian. I don't have a weapon. I'll lock myself inside my home. This is my life.' She made that choice and remained in her house."
The Lebanese environmental group Green Southerners decried the Israeli strike, which "targeted a site that had long been known for environmental conservation, biodiversity protection, and public awareness."
"[Khalil's] death stands as a stark reminder of the devastating toll that Israeli attacks continue to exact on civilians, environmental defenders, and the natural heritage they sought to protect," the group said on Instagram. "We condemn the killing of Mona Khalil and reaffirm that those responsible for attacks on civilians and environmental defenders must be held accountable."
Recalling Khalil's successful campaign to ban dynamite fishing and the violent backlash it sparked from opponents, Joumaa told NPR: "Mona was a fighter. She did not like diplomacy. There were times when they shot at her house."
"She always told me: Defend the beach, defend the turtles, defend your country," she added.
Osman called the Israeli strike that killed Khalil "an assault on a woman whose life's work was devoted to safeguarding life itself, a woman known internationally for her environmental activism, whose name had become synonymous with the protection of Lebanon's coastline and its endangered sea turtles."
"The murder of Mona Khalil sends a chilling message: Even those whose only weapon is compassion, whose only mission is preservation, are not spared," Osman added.
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In an Era of Hardening Borders, Wildlife Corridors Bridge Peoples and Species
From Costa Rica to Colorado, wildlife corridors have been about the connections people make when they care about animal mobility.
Jun 14, 2026
Driving on the Interamerican Highway from Monteverde Biological Reserve to Rincón de la Vieja National Park, I couldn’t help but notice a series of rope bridges that crossed the six lanes of traffic. Each crossing structure featured traffic warning signs with silhouette images of monkeys or sloths as nonstop flows of diesel semitrucks and electric cars zoomed by.
Costa Rica is known for its protected areas, which cover one-third of the country and function as core zones for conservation, but the “green republic” should also be recognized for its corridors. What started as an NGO effort in the 2000s when organizations like Kids Saving The Rainforest started installing aerial bridges to improve habitat connectivity later became national policy with a 2024 presidential decree requiring electrical companies to build crossing structures so that animals like howler monkeys and kinkajous avoided electrocution from using power lines. These monkey bridges also keep tropical rainforest more intact for mobile creatures.
Beyond Central America, wildlife corridors are popular in the western United States. According to recent surveys from the Environment America Research and Policy Center and the Pew Charitable Trust, respondents approve creating more wildlife crossings at rates of 85-90%. And that support spans the political spectrum. In March 2026, the Idaho State Legislature passed Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 124, officially supporting the development of wildlife crossing infrastructure, such as highway overpasses and underpasses, to reduce animal-vehicle collisions. In December 2026, California’s Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is set to be completed across 10 lanes of Los Angeles freeway, making it the largest structure in the world.
Wildlife corridors could receive a financial boost by the bipartisan BUILD America 250 bill, considered by US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this week. If passed, it would increase funding for the Federal Highway Administration’s very popular Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program (WCPP) to $80 million annually ($400 million total). The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $350 million to 35 projects across 30 states, but demand far exceeded with $500 million in requests.
Today, the benefits of conserving wildlife corridors might be just as much about the social as the biological.
If we’re living in a worldwide golden age for wildlife corridors, where did this idea come from? I trace the origins of this dominant conservation strategy in my new book, Borders of Biodiversity: How Gray Wolves, Monarch Butterflies, and Giant Sequoia Transformed Large Landscape Conservation, published by University of North Carolina Press.
In the 1970s and 1980s, new technologies provided windows into animal mobility. For wolves, radio- and satellite- telemetry allowed US biologist Diane Boyd and Canadian biologist Paul Paquet to track the interchange of dispersing juveniles along the Rockies. For example, Boyd collared wolf #8551, named Kay, west of Glacier National Park; the wolf turned up six months later dead after it was legally shot near Pouce Coupe, British Columbia. The 600-mile movement northward was interesting scientifically because it was two-thirds of the way to the Yukon Territory, but Kay’s movement also had major conservation implications. Wildlife corridors facilitated wolf dispersals; transborder dispersals could facilitate wolf recovery under the Endangered Species Act.
In the 1990s, wildlife corridors were thought of as proactive tools against habitat fragmentation. Responding to Boyd and Paquet’s work, conservationists in Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming created the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative in 1993 to keep core areas—like Yellowstone National Park or Banff National Park—connected. Projects included lobbying the Canadian government to build wildlife overpasses and underpasses along the Trans-Canada Highway, which Y2Y founder Harvey Locke called the “Berlin Wall of Biodiversity” for its high rate of wolf and elk fatalities. Or investing in predator-deterrence tools like range riding and electrified fladry fencing for ranching communities so wolves and grizzlies could use rural spaces as biological passageways.
By the 2000s, however, wildlife corridors were also understood to help with climate adaptation in a warming world. A scientific meta-analysis documented that of 4,000 animals recently tracked, almost three-quarters of them shifted their ranges to cooler lands or waters. Terrestrial species, on average, were moving 12 miles (or 20 kilometers) every decade toward the poles. Animals relocate to adapt.
Today, the benefits of conserving wildlife corridors might be just as much about the social as the biological. In 2012, Ben Bobowski of Rocky Mountain National Park and Yaxine María Arias Núñez of Santa Elena Biological Reserve created a series of personnel exchanges between the two protected areas called the Naturalmente Juntos-Naturally Together Project. Their connection was based on bird banding studies that revealed 150 bird species, like yellow warblers, migrated along the Continental Divide between Colorado and Costa Rica. In 2015, Rocky and Santa Elena entered a formal sistering agreement.
From Costa Rica to Colorado, wildlife corridors have been about the connections people make when they care about animal mobility. In an era of border-hardening nationalism, corridors can help people of different nationalities facilitate solidarities among shared species.
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Thousands March in Albania After PM Says Pristine Land 'Belongs' to Kushner-Backed Group
"One week later, we are still here, stronger than yesterday," said one group opposing a proposed luxury resort project supported by Jared Kushner.
Jun 08, 2026
Albanians took to the streets in droves for the eighth consecutive day on Sunday to protest a proposed $1.6 billion luxury resort complex backed by US President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, one of several investors in the project, which opponents say is both corrupt and disastrous for wetlands and wildlife.
"One week later, we are still here, stronger than yesterday," said the Albanian Ornithological Society, a leading critic of the proposed development. "Millions around the world are united in one voice for nature, for justice, and for the protection of what belongs to everyone, standing for every protected area in Albania."
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has vocally defended the project amid mounting public backlash, saying in a recent interview that the land marked for development "belongs to the investors," not the Albanian people.
Rama also criticized the thousands of people who have turned out to protest the luxury hotel project as well as international media coverage of the demonstrations, saying that "there is no chance" that "the projects in Albania will be defined by street protests."
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama admits Jared Kushner’s new private island will be exclusively for the elite.
He says the land no longer belongs to the Albanian people and is now under the control of Jared Kushner and his investors.
"The aim is to build the most exclusive."… pic.twitter.com/95IM0YX6xI
— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) June 7, 2026
Demonstrators, many raising pink flamingo cutouts to decry the project's expected impacts on the vulnerable bird and other wildlife, have demanded cancellation of the resort project and Rama's resignation, accusing him of steamrolling environmental concerns to bolster the country's tourism industry and curry favor with the Trump administration. Kushner currently works for the administration as a "special peace envoy."
"We are stronger than your bulldozers," chanted demonstrators over the weekend.
Thousands of Albanians took to the streets of Tirana in the largest protest this week against a plan by a company linked to Trump's son-in-law to build a luxury resort in an environmentally sensitive area pic.twitter.com/aJaKz3ju0A
— Reuters (@Reuters) June 7, 2026
As The New York Times reported last year, Rama heads the government committee that gave "Kushner and his business partners the right to move ahead with accelerated negotiations to build the luxury resort on a 111-acre section of the 2.2-square-mile island of Sazan that will be connected by ferry to the mainland."
"Mr. Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a private equity company backed with about $4.6 billion in money mostly from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East sovereign wealth funds, is pursuing the Albania project along with Asher Abehsera, a real estate executive that Mr. Kushner has previously teamed up with to build projects in Brooklyn, New York," the Times added.
Lea Ypi, an Albanian academic, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian on Monday that "Albanians know that real-estate speculation without state support means ordinary citizens will struggle to buy a flat or pay the rent."
"They know that luxury tourism means holidays in your own country become a privilege for the few," Ypi added. "With no unions to speak of and a labor movement that only appears in communist-era footage of May Day parades, work conditions are so exploitative that only those from countries even more desperate are willing to take the jobs that arise."
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'Gift to Corporate Polluters': Republicans Advance Massive Assault on Wildlife and EPA
“This morally bankrupt bill will only lead to dirtier air, more toxic water, and countless species shoved over the extinction cliff," said one wildlife defender.
Jun 04, 2026
Congressional Republicans on Wednesday approved an appropriations bill containing massive cuts to Environmental Protection Agency funding, more than 20 riders undermining the Endangered Species Act, and other provisions harmful to the environment and wildlife—while boosting mining on federal lands.
Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee advanced the fiscal year 2027 Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies funding bill, which slashes total expenditures for the EPA by 20% and reduces its enforcement budget by $169 million—or nearly half, compared to last year’s levels. GOP lawmakers claim the dramatic reduction in EPA funding "safeguards American taxpayer dollars."
The bill also cuts the US Fish and Wildlife Service's listing budget nearly in half, "effectively dismantling the program in charge of determining which animals and plants deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act," according to a letter sent by a coalition of 80 conservation groups to House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.).
"The legislation also contains a total of at least 21 anti-wildlife poison pill riders—the largest number of policy riders that has ever been included in the base bill in the history of the Endangered Species Act," the groups' letter notes. "These riders would cause irreparable harm by undoing decades of progress to stabilize and recover some of our most iconic species."
The riders include measures blocking or weakening protections for imperiled species including the greater sage-grouse, lesser prairie chicken, northern long-eared bat, northern spotted owl, Canada lynx, and seven species of freshwater mussels.
Provisions in the bill also prohibit the federal government from banning or restricting lead in ammunition or fishing gear, block the reintroduction of grizzly bears in the North Cascades and Bitterroot ecosystems, and revive Florida’s illegal wetland destruction permitting program that harms species, including the Florida panther and frosted flatwoods salamander.
The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), one of the groups leading the letter to House Appropriations Committee leaders, noted Thursday that the legislation also codifies climate denialism into law "by exempting federal land management agencies from updating their plans when new information shows endangered species are being harmed or killed on public lands."
Meanwhile, the bill contains provisions intended to expand mining on federal lands, including reinstating certain mineral leases and limiting some land withdrawals.
"Instead of lowering the cost of living and confronting the climate crisis, House Republicans are raising utility bills and energy prices," the office of House Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee Ranking Member Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) said in a statement Wednesday.
"The legislation takes an aggressive anti-environment, pro-corporate polluter stance with cuts to the EPA and policy provisions that endanger public health and fail to confront the climate crisis," Pingree's office added. "The bill also guts resources for the arts and museums while failing to prevent the administration from misusing funds to build President [Donald] Trump’s Garden of Heroes and Triumphal Arch."
The Republicans’ spending bill for Interior + Environment is a disaster:🚨 20% cut to EPA🚨 Free passes to polluters🚨 Rollbacks on PFAS regulations🚨 Millions for Trump’s vanity projectsThey care more about the president’s ego than the health of people and our planet.We're in for a FIGHT.
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— Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (@pingree.house.gov) June 3, 2026 at 9:32 AM
Pingree's office said the bill:
- Raises utility bills by shifting costs onto state and local governments and making electricity more expensive through funding cuts and policies that would cripple renewable energy development;
- Worsens the climate crisis by cutting critical EPA work;
- Slashes funding for national parks, cutting facility operations and maintenance by $163 million;
- Guts resources for museums, arts, and culture;
- Favors polluters over public health through harmful policies that undermine EPA’s ability to regulate pollution; and
- Exploits public lands and accelerates ecosystem decline by allowing harmful and dirty mining activities and by removing Endangered Species Act protections for numerous species.
Democrats offered amendments to the bill during full committee markup, including measures to remove all the poison pills from the legislation, promote renewable energy, ban coastal oil drilling in California and Florida, provide funding for environmental justice initiatives, and prevent the construction of Trump vanity projects including his White House ballroom and bunker. Republicans rejected all of the amendments.
"This bill is a gift to corporate polluters, who would poison our communities in pursuit of even greater profits," DeLauro said in a statement Wednesday. "It saddles cities, towns, and working families with higher utility bills. And it allows President Trump to continue raiding public funds to pay for his own vanity projects."
"At a time when the American people are struggling to make ends meet, this bill makes the problem worse," she added. "It does nothing to bring down costs, while allowing the billionaires and big corporations, who have profited by polluting our communities, to get even richer. Meanwhile, the air we breathe and the water we drink gets less and less safe.”
CBD director of government affairs Stephanie Kurose said Thursday that "it's a disgrace that House Republicans want to dismantle decades of environmental progress and hand polluters unprecedented power over the health of our communities, public lands, and wildlife."
“This morally bankrupt bill will only lead to dirtier air, more toxic water, and countless species shoved over the extinction cliff," Kurose added. "Future generations will pay the price for this staggering level of political irresponsibility.”
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The Hawk at the Edge of Doing and Being
I suspect this hawk has never once felt the nag of the question, “What can I do?” Not about the climate crisis. Perhaps not about anything. What to do is something other animals seem to know innately and intimately, or perhaps don't need to know at all.
May 05, 2026
I live in the very heart of Atlanta, Georgia, affectionately called the "city in a forest." From my desk, where I work most days, I look out onto a stand of trees. Right at canopy height, it is the perfect view for getting distracted, especially by our resident red-tailed hawk, who is strikingly visible in the loose thatching of bare winter limbs.
Sudden squirrel scatter, and she alights on the branch of a maple tree to scan for potential prey. Her fleet perch and keen watch, her grandeur of feather and hunt—it breaks through the primacy of my screen and shakes me from the fathomless digital world. Interruption gladly received.
Each time the hawk stops through these trees, I am struck by the sudden proximity of a taloned huntress to me, encased in my condo-version of captivity. More than once, I have grabbed my phone to quickly frame the hawk and catch ill-focused evidence that I too am alert and alive. Enraptured by a raptor, I have "Slacked" the flattened scene to my colleagues: “Afternoon visitor!” With a feather and a heart emoji afterword. (As if icons in miniature could limn her.)
But I am struck by another proximity, too, between what the hawk does and who the hawk seems to be. Her doingness and her beingness are so close as to become one.
What might open up for us if we shift the question ever so slightly—from What can I do? to Who can I be? Or, Who am I already?
I suspect this hawk has never once felt the nag of the question, “What can I do?” Not about the climate crisis. Perhaps not about anything. What to do is something other animals seem to know innately and intimately, or perhaps don't need to know at all.
Evolution has made things more complicated for us Homo sapiens, who ponder and puzzle. As essayist and author Margaret Renkl writes, "Every living thing—every bird and mammal and reptile and amphibian, every tree and shrub and flower and moss—is pursuing its own vital purpose, a purpose that sets my human concerns in a larger context." As I watch the hawk's wings lift and lower and propel her back into the air, I marvel and muse whether life itself might offer another way in.
What might open up for us if we shift the question ever so slightly—from What can I do? to Who can I be? Or, Who am I already?
The hawk, like all of us existing on this planet, is an inheritor of a 3.8-billion-year history: From single-celled organisms to plants and vertebrates, life has continued to move forward toward more life, overcoming unthinkable odds. Weighty and unwavering and in so many ways impenetrable—this dynamic defines Earth as a living planet. When we think about a hive of honeybees gathering their ingredients from flowers, or black corals siphoning plankton over centuries, or the sudden emergence of mushrooms from a shrouded fungal network, we can see this dynamic in action. Even kudzu offers testimony with its rampant return, however unwelcome, each spring.
Who can we be? One thing we already are: an expression of Earth's life force, right here, right now, made possible by a series of miracles that have blossomed over eons. This is true simply by virtue of breathing.
Life force unfurls through each of us in such beautifully different ways. We explore the unknown and document our discoveries. We design new things and give them form. We expose what's ruptured and source the means to mend it. We reflect, wonder, and imagine. We craft stories and art and shows. We make ritual. We convene people and foster conversation and collaboration. We care for one another. We strategize, organize, and orchestrate. We engineer and implement. We manage the details. We show up, stand up, and speak up. We share wisdom and tell jokes. We cook and sing and clean and plant and build and nap. And all of that is just the briefest inventory of human beings' doings.
There are things we do that are so wholly connected with who we are—that spring up from within us in such an organic way—that the space between our doing and our being shrinks or even vanishes. In those moments, our small expression of the vast life force we've inherited and embody is especially effervescent. We may find ourselves buzzing, flowing, or sensing a particular warmth. We may be especially porous and focused both.
It is a radical act to believe in our ability to thrive, both individually and as a planet, by being who we are.
I imagine this is how the hawk might feel as she swoops into the circle of life. It's how I wish many more of us to feel as we take wing to heal the climate crisis.
In Climate Wayfinding, we think of the ways we each express life force as our unique talents, gifts, or superpowers—all of which are so very needed in this era of change. Two lenses help illuminate them: authentic power and deep joy.
Authentic power is something that rises up from within us—internal and genuine, not gained at others' expense or expended upon them. It's a feeling of ability, capacity, strength, weight, energy, vigor. It aligns what swells within us with how we move in the world.
Deep joy is a feeling of great pleasure, happiness, delight, exhilaration, radiance, bliss. It, too, rises from within and spills out, intermingling with the world around us. It is often the emotional glow of meaning or connection. Joy may also feel out of place in the face of the climate crisis. Who are we to taste joy when so much is hurting? But joy is all the more necessary, and all the more holy, in difficult times.
As Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass: "Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift."
In my own experience, moving at the nexus of authentic power and deep joy might be our closest approximation to life force itself. When I have strayed far into zones of not-power and not-joy—most often for employment or another hard-tugging should—I have found myself in struggle, disconnection, and even depression. Stubborn is the soul, intent on a space where it belongs.
It is a radical act to believe in our ability to thrive, both individually and as a planet, by being who we are. I mean radical in the fullest sense: from the root, fundamental, and far-reaching. A person anchored and aglow—that is the kind of revolutionary that's called for in this time.
Looking inward to shape our outward contributions—this, I think, is a form of courage. When we refuse to lose touch with our sources of authentic power and deep joy, and when we dare to center them somehow in our lives, we reach toward calling. Whether loudly or in a whisper, these things summon us, insisting that our lives can be alive—sprouting and blooming, swooping and flying high—and that we can be part of making it so.
Just now, the red-tailed hawk draws my eye. It's a beautiful, bewitching thing to behold a being in the fullness of herself. But I realize, watching her in motion, that I am rapt by more than the solitary bird. At the edges of the self, there is a zone, almost an aura, of arising. We find there, at the periphery, a space populated by all that is emergent with, and only with, the world around us.
For the hawk, that emergent edge exists in the remarkable everyday interplay of hunger and wing and wind. And perhaps it is so for all of us, along our own edges, as we muster skill and strength for a planet in want, in wish.
Perhaps you, too, can feel the vibration at the eager verge of doingness and beingness and the wide, long, insistent breath of life.
This piece was adapted from Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home by Katharine K. Wilkinson (Andrews McMeel, 2026). Used with permission of the publisher. Do not republish.
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Trump's Border Wall Is a Destructive Monument to Greed and Fear
As it devastates borderland communities and wildlife, the wall stands for shutting out complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump’s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.
May 03, 2026
A leading preoccupation of the first Trump administration has all but slipped from view. Except when ostensible conservatives speak out against it, the major media have scarcely breathed a word on the subject. But it’s still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron.
The media’s lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities, and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to all of that a federal paramilitary kidnapping people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while murdering the occasional protester, and one’s journalistic cup runneth over.
The meta story of the US government’s comprehensive abandonment of its Enlightenment heritage needs telling, too. Goodbye to empiricism and the troublesome scientific discourse it produces. Goodbye as well to empiricism’s political collaterals, including the “created equal” credo of the Declaration of Independence, which the current regime finds distinctly irritating. There is simply too much to report on as the new monarchy, as if in a sped-up nature film, blossoms flowerlike, its palace under renovation, the king’s signature being prepared to grace the currency, and myriad kickback mechanisms whirring like gold-plated turbines to enrich an aristocracy of tech bros and oil emirs.
So, dear reader, it’s not just logical but inevitable that Donald Trump’s border wall, a major story during his first administration, has essentially fallen out of the news. Rest assured, though, that the world’s least pragmatic and most performative construction project continues to prosper.
Spend Now, Think Later
Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams, and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there’s no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated $46.55 billion for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance, and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related. The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.
Such border largesse means that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can go all out on all three tactical approaches at the US-Mexico border—patrol, surveillance, and a wall—simultaneously, without troubling to eliminate redundancies, tailor tactics to the environment, or streamline coordination. Daddy has proudly given DHS his credit card.
In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity.
In a victory-lap cabinet meeting four days after enacting the OBBBA, Trump told Kristi Noem, then still his DHS secretary, “You’re loaded up on the border.” He essentially admitted that the bill’s munificence demonstrated power, not budgetary acumen, simultaneously adding, “We had zero [migrants] come in last month, so I am not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall is largely built.” The president then continued with fact-free claims that the migrant population abounded with murderers and mental defectives.
Notwithstanding Trump’s comments, DHS administrators and the contractors who are their most immediate constituents show no sign of leaving money on the table. At the border, their blank-check funding meets a matching regulatory void—the most extensive waiver of laws and regulations in American history. In addition to suspending laws intended to protect the environment, wildlife, national parks, national wildlife refuges, lands sacred to Native Americans, and historic and cultural sites, the Trump administration has also waived more than 60 contracting and procurement regulations. In the name of a national emergency, which is no emergency at all—illegal border crossings (as measured by apprehensions) have indeed plunged—the president has stripped the playing field of all boundaries and opened the door to cronyism and corruption.
Under showers of money and in the absence of restraint, a single border wall is no longer viewed as adequate. Double-walling has become the norm and certain select areas now boast triple walls. With no cap on costs, whole mountaintops, rugged and unvisited, have been sheared apart to make way for the standard 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard wall, even at costs exceeding $41 million per mile, or almost $8,000 per foot. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol’s terminally bored agents (giving new meaning to bored-er) sit behind the wall in white trucks, looking at their phones and incubating their hemorrhoids.
The Non-Monetary Costs Are No Less Astronomical
It’s easy to think of the mostly arid US-Mexico border zone as empty, but biologically it’s a busy place. The grasslands of the San Rafael Valley in Arizona, for instance, are home to 17 threatened and endangered species. For years, existing vehicle barriers, bolstered by remote detection technology, have allowed jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, mule deer, and other wildlife to move back and forth across the valley’s 30 miles of border and disperse according to their ancient ways. A network of 60 remote cameras along that stretch, monitored by the Sky Island Alliance, recorded just one possible migrant per camera every 20 months. Besides being easily patrolled, the valley is also heart-stoppingly beautiful. Nonetheless, DHS intends to double wall all of it. In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity. And for nothing, save symbolism, bragging rights, and contractor profits.
No detail illuminates the mentality behind border enforcement better than this: In cooperation with US Customs and Border Protection, military elements at Fort Huachuca, Arizona are now engaged in “the largest Concertina wire (C-wire) emplacement in US territorial history.” “C-wire,” or “razor wire,” is designed to lacerate any flesh, human or animal, that comes in contact with it. Fort Huachuca soldiers are deploying 43,000 rolls of it, the largest single purchase ever.
Usually C-wire is used atop a wall or fence to prevent people from climbing over. Ominously, it’s now being spread on the ground, sometimes in areas where there is no wall, but also in front of the wall and between double walls—a policy of pure viciousness, not necessity. Someone should explain this deployment to the bighorn sheep of California’s Jacumba Mountains, which are now separated from their key Mexican waterhole by thickets of the nasty stuff, which will become ever more camouflaged and treacherous as grass and brush grow through it.
Buoy, Oh, Buoy, What a Wall!
For treachery, however, it’s hard to top CBP’s plans to “secure” 536 miles of the border in Texas by mooring a chain of cylindrical buoys, linked end to end, down the middle of the Rio Grande. Once in place, the array will look like an orange sausage, five feet in diameter, floating on the river. The anchors and mooring lines, of course, will be invisible. What could possibly go wrong?
This ill-conceived plan offers a retro-snapshot of American life before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law in 1970, back when strip mines and other land-wrecking ventures could be launched with no evaluation of their impact, no public involvement, and no second opinions as to their necessity. The waiver of NEPA and every other environmental constraint means that no modeling of the “Buoy Wall’s” hydrodynamics (that is, its reaction to flooding), if any exists, has been made public.
The Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo, Texas, however, commissioned its own study. The results are unequivocal. The Buoy Wall will be a debris trap during floods, as when a hurricane lodges over the region. It will redirect flows of water and raise water levels, especially in places where it’s paired with river-crowding segments of the wall. And if a section of buoys should break loose from the sandy, unstable riverbed, the likelihood of disaster will soar.
Geomorphologist Mark Tompkins, who authored the report, concludes, “Failures will cause catastrophic flooding, damage, and destruction to property, and risks to the health and safety of people near the river corridor.” Thousands of people living adjacent to the river in Laredo and other communities in both Mexico and the US will be put at risk.
Conflicts Brewed and Brewing
Walls have their place. They can be effective in urban areas. But DHS startled more than a few onlookers with plans to build a wall among the cliffs and arid wildlands of Big Bend National Park. Even the sheriffs of West Texas, one of the reddest regions in the country, got riled up. Although DHS may yet fall back to a more sensible “detection technology” alternative for the national park, it has failed to communicate a clear decision, while nearby private lands and Big Bend Ranch State Park remain at risk.
Even worse uncertainty may be brewing in Arizona, where the lands of the Tohono O’odham people, whose presence predates the border by many centuries, are spread on either side of the line. The tribe’s exemplary cooperation with border authorities includes tribal enforcement teams that have helped keep illegal crossings at a historic low. But the rigid minds and hungry contractors of the “CBP industrial complex” remain unsatisfied. The agency’s “smart wall map” indicates that it aims to build a double wall across the Tohono O’odham reservation, splitting apart families, clans, and longstanding webs of relationship.
And then there’s the unhappy Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, which serves Sunland Park, New Mexico. Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. However, there is an unwalled gap at Monte Cristo Rey, a steep-sided peak long considered impractical for barrier construction. Not now, though. Blasting for the Border Wall began on Cristo Rey in March, in time to appall the thousands of Holy Week pilgrims who visit the statue of Christ the King on the mountain’s summit.
The land available to CBP, however, is not sufficient to finish the job on Cristo Rey, and the adjacent landowner, the Catholic Church, refuses to sell. CBP claims it may assert the right of eminent domain, while the church has said it will fight, although its best tool for resistance, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, has predictably been among the many laws waived by DHS.
Orgasms for Birders
On a recent trip to the border, I visited one of the most exquisite places in the entire Southwest. To get to it, I drove 40 miles on dirt roads across broken, arroyo-carved desert. The Border Wall was almost always in sight.
Apart from the roadway itself, the commonest evidence of a human presence were signs at the approach to each arroyo: DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, which is good advice in an area where flash floods from local thunderstorms can sweep away a heavy truck. All the arroyos that the road crosses are also crossed by the Border Wall. Floods pile tons of debris against the wall, and sometimes the accumulated weight is enough to push the structure down. CBP continues to experiment with designs for swinging water gates, but a durable solution remains unproven.
Between a pair of “lay-bys”—bulldozed flats where the wall contractor has assembled fleets of eighteen-wheelers, excavators, scrapers, dumpers, pickups, bulldozers, loaders, and cement trucks—I veered down a rough track to a steel gate and let myself in. A little way beyond that, I stopped my car beside a lazy creek at the bottom of a canyon. White-barked sycamores and cottonwoods, just coming into leaf, towered overhead. Amid their shadows, the air smelled of duff and wet sand. The birds were not just singing, they were yelling. When I opened a birding app on my phone, the bird-call IDs scrolled by like movie credits.
From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power.
The canyon has a perfectly good name, but I’ll call it Paradox Canyon in recognition of the contrast between the vigorous life it contains and the brutalist-walled horizon looming above it. During the first Trump administration, the nearest mountain peak was cleaved open like a watermelon, leaving the landscape not just scarred but grotesquely amputated.
The current contractor, Fisher Industries, is no stranger to disassembling and rearranging mountains. Besides installing the standard bollard wall, Fisher is pouring a concrete patrol road at the foot of the wall, portions of which, rising above Paradox Canyon, are so steep that, absent the paving, no wheeled vehicle can climb it.
The next mountain, however, is too steep even for a patrol road. The previous contractor’s employees dubbed the peak “Widow Maker,” and the zigzag scars of switchbacks and ledges by which they gained access to the path of the wall make it easy to understand why.
Fisher is the largest player in the wall-building business. Based in North Dakota, it was the contractor for “We Build the Wall,” a crowd-funded enterprise that got its promoters, including Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally, convicted for fraud. “We Build the Wall” funded Fisher to build 3.5 miles of wall on private land beside the Rio Grande near Mission, Texas. The Department of Justice and the International Boundary Waters Commission subsequently sued Fisher for shoddy work and violation of the boundary treaty with Mexico. The suit has since been settled, with Fisher having agreed to make immediate repairs and carry out future repairs subject to the forfeit of a $3-million bond.
The Paradox Canyon rancher whom I came to visit is philosophical about the wall. The assault on his land began at the end of Trump I and, after a Biden-era pause, has resumed at full strength. The “shock and awe” accompanying Trump’s resumption of office, he says, left no room for negotiating a more sensible path forward. He believes that the symbolism of the wall is its real power, as it channels the fears of the MAGA faithful. The wall, he says, stands for more than shutting out migrants and narcos. It stands for shutting out other complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump’s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.
Making War at Home and Abroad
My rancher friend feels that his present task is to weather the storm of wall building and await a time when wiser heads prevail, when the rush to spend and build might yield to thoughtful redesign, when gaps for wildlife might be installed and properly monitored, and when the wall’s proponents and its enemies might find a “third path.”
Meanwhile, the excavators, scrapers, bulldozers, and haulers carry on. From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power. Both were conceived with disdain for the complexities of the real world. Both serve rhetorical as much as tangible purposes.
The war with Iran has confounded Trump’s expectation of a quick victory. Thousands of gravestones will be its monument. The Border Wall, in its own slow way, will provide another sort of monument. It won’t be the graves of those who died crossing it or flanking it by sea, for they will rarely be marked at all. And it won’t be the local extinctions of plants or animals, for they will simply vanish. It will instead be a tottering, linear, soulless version of Stonehenge—think of it as America’s Steelhenge—built on sand and made of haste, fear, and avarice.
It will memorialize Trump’s success in making America less and less great.
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'David-and-Goliath': Ocean Defenders Collide With Industrial Krill Trawler in Antarctica
"The Bandero delivered a gentle but deliberate nudge to the stern of the Antarctic Sea, accompanied by a message: Stop despoiling the ecological integrity of the Southern Ocean," said activists aboard the ship.
Apr 01, 2026
An ocean conservation ship operated by anti-whaling campaigner Paul Watson collided Tuesday with a commercial krill trawler off Antarctica in what the fishing vessel's owner described as a "deliberate attack," but activists called "a David-and-Goliath battle against an industrial giant."
The Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF) said on Facebook that, as part of its Operation Krill Wars campaign, the Bandero is currently targeting "two of the largest Norwegian trawlers operating in Antarctic waters, the Antarctic Endurance and the Antarctic Sea,"—both of which are owned by Aker QRILL Company of Lysaker, Norway.
"Earlier today, both trawlers released lines into the water to move the Bandero, a dangerous maneuver that could have disabled our ship," the foundation alleged. "In response, the Bandero delivered a gentle but deliberate nudge to the stern of the Antarctic Sea, accompanied by a message: Stop despoiling the ecological integrity of the Southern Ocean."
Aker QRILL is owned by New York City-based American Industrial Partners and Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke, and calls itself "the world's leading krill company."
Company CEO Webjørn Barstad responded to the incident by claiming in an interview with Reuters that "our crew were put at risk in some of the most remote waters on Earth, and only luck avoided potential environmental damage."
"If the steel plates... had ruptured, it could have caused a spill," Barstad added. "It was probably just luck that it didn't cause more damage."
CPWF scoffed at the company's claims of danger, saying on Facebook that "I understand your need to play the victim while you scoop life from the sea."
As the Operation Krill Wars campaign explains:
Krill is the keystone species of the ecosystem in Antarctica. The majority of Antarctic species are reliant on krill as their primary food source or krilI is the the food source of their prey. From the great whales down to the penguins, seals, and seabirds, all rely on an abundance of krill to survive.
Currently the quota set by the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources is 620,000 tons which is said to represent 1% of the total biomass of krill. However the fishing of krill is in concentrated areas, meaning that the likelihood of ecological collapse in those areas is far more likely.
After the near extinction of several large whale species in the 19th and 20th centuries, conservation efforts in the later half of the 20th century and 21st century have seen whale populations recovering. Though not back to their pre-commercial whaling numbers, this increase in whale populations obviously requires a greater amount of krill for food. Yet what we are seeing is a greater extraction of krill by human commercial enterprises.
“If the ocean dies, we die,” Paul Watson said in a statement. “Krill are the blood of the sea. Without them, the whales, penguins, fish, and birds will starve, and the ocean will fall silent.”
Watson is best known as the co-founder of Greenpeace and, later, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He has dedicated his life to defending marine wildlife—especially mammals like whales—from harm. A controversial figure, Watson was arrested and jailed in Greenland in 2024 on an international warrant issued by Japan over his anti-whaling activism. However, he was freed after Denmark—which controls Greenland's foreign affairs—refused Japan's extradition request.
CPWF said that the issue of ocean exploitation must be "confronted legally and brought to global attention."
"We are here in the Southern Ocean to oppose a crime against nature and humanity—aggressively, but nonviolently," the group said Wednesday. "We welcome the opportunity to defend our actions in court and expose the true cost of krill fishing to the world."
The Bob Brown Foundation, an Australian green group, defended CPWF in a statement Wednesday calling "for the complete end to krill fishing in Antarctica."
"The krill fishing industry is fully aware of the damage they cause, such as killing whales in their nets, yet they do all they can to greenwash krill products," said Bob Brown Foundation Antarctic and marine campaigner Alistair Allan. "We applaud the brave actions of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, who are ensuring that the plunder of krill does not go unchallenged.”
“Krill is violently sucked out of Antarctica’s fragile wilderness all for products we don’t need, such as fish farm feed, pet food, and supposed health products," Allan added. "It’s time for the world to boycott all products with krill in them."
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