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Working to eliminate barriers to adopting nuclear energy

Nuclear waste continues to be a bottleneck in the widespread use of nuclear energy, so doctoral student Dauren Sarsenbayev is developing models to address the problem.

What if there were a way to solve one of the most significant obstacles to the use of nuclear energy — the disposal of high-level nuclear waste (HLW)? Dauren Sarsenbayev, a third-year doctoral student at the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), is addressing the challenge as part of his research.Sarsenbayev focuses on one of the primary problems related to HLW: decay heat released by radioactive waste. The basic premise of his solution is to extract the heat from spent fuel, which simultaneously takes care of two objectives: gaining more energy from an existing carbon-free resource while decreasing the challenges associated with storage and handling of HLW. “The value of carbon-free energy continues to rise each year, and we want to extract as much of it as possible,” Sarsenbayev explains.While the safe management and disposal of HLW has seen significant progress, there can be more creative ways to manage or take advantage of the waste. Such a move would be especially important for the public’s acceptance of nuclear energy. “We’re reframing the problem of nuclear waste, transforming it from a liability to an energy source,” Sarsenbayev says.The nuances of nuclearSarsenbayev had to do a bit of reframing himself in how he perceived nuclear energy. Growing up in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, the collective trauma of Soviet nuclear testing loomed large over the public consciousness. Not only does the country, once a part of the Soviet Union, carry the scars of nuclear weapon testing, Kazakhstan is the world’s largest producer of uranium. It’s hard to escape the collective psyche of such a legacy.At the same time, Sarsenbayev saw his native Almaty choking under heavy smog every winter, due to the burning of fossil fuels for heat. Determined to do his part to accelerate the process of decarbonization, Sarsenbayev gravitated to undergraduate studies in environmental engineering at Kazakh-German University. It was during this time that Sarsenbayev realized practically every energy source, even the promising renewable ones, came with challenges, and decided nuclear was the way to go for its reliable, low-carbon power. “I was exposed to air pollution from childhood; the horizon would be just black. The biggest incentive for me with nuclear power was that as long as we did it properly, people could breathe cleaner air,” Sarsenbayev says.Studying transport of radionuclidesPart of “doing nuclear properly” involves studying — and reliably predicting — the long-term behavior of radionuclides in geological repositories.Sarsenbayev discovered an interest in studying nuclear waste management during an internship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a junior undergraduate student.While at Berkeley, Sarsenbayev focused on modeling the transport of radionuclides from the nuclear waste repository’s barrier system to the surrounding host rock. He discovered how to use the tools of the trade to predict long-term behavior. “As an undergrad, I was really fascinated by how far in the future something could be predicted. It’s kind of like foreseeing what future generations will encounter,” Sarsenbayev says.The timing of the Berkeley internship was fortuitous. It was at the laboratory that he worked with Haruko Murakami Wainwright, who was herself getting started at MIT NSE. (Wainwright is the Mitsui Career Development Professor in Contemporary Technology, and an assistant professor of NSE and of civil and environmental engineering).Looking to pursue graduate studies in the field of nuclear waste management, Sarsenbayev followed Wainwright to MIT, where he has further researched the modeling of radionuclide transport. He is the first author on a paper that details mechanisms to increase the robustness of models describing the transport of radionuclides. The work captures the complexity of interactions between engineered barrier components, including cement-based materials and clay barriers, the typical medium proposed for the storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel.Sarsenbayev is pleased with the results of the model’s prediction, which closely mirrors experiments conducted at the Mont Terri research site in Switzerland, famous for studies in the interactions between cement and clay. “I was fortunate to work with Doctor Carl Steefel and Professor Christophe Tournassat, leading experts in computational geochemistry,” he says.Real-life transport mechanisms involve many physical and chemical processes, the complexities of which increase the size of the computational model dramatically. Reactive transport modeling — which combines the simulation of fluid flow, chemical reactions, and the transport of substances through subsurface media — has evolved significantly over the past few decades. However, running accurate simulations comes with trade-offs: The software can require days to weeks of computing time on high-performance clusters running in parallel.To arrive at results faster by saving on computing time, Sarsenbayev is developing a framework that integrates AI-based “surrogate models,” which train on simulated data and approximate the physical systems. The AI algorithms make predictions of radionuclide behavior faster and less computationally intensive than the traditional equivalent.Doctoral research focusSarsenbayev is using his modeling expertise in his primary doctoral work as well — in evaluating the potential of spent nuclear fuel as an anthropogenic geothermal energy source. “In fact, geothermal heat is largely due to the natural decay of radioisotopes in Earth’s crust, so using decay heat from spent fuel is conceptually similar,” he says. A canister of nuclear waste can generate, under conservative assumptions, the energy equivalent of 1,000 square meters (a little under a quarter of an acre) of solar panels.Because the potential for heat from a canister is significant — a typical one (depending on how long it was cooled in the spent fuel pool) has a temperature of around 150 degrees Celsius — but not enormous, extracting heat from this source makes use of a process called a binary cycle system. In such a system, heat is extracted indirectly: the canister warms a closed water loop, which in turn transfers that heat to a secondary low-boiling-point fluid that powers the turbine.Sarsenbayev’s work develops a conceptual model of a binary-cycle geothermal system powered by heat from high-level radioactive waste. Early modeling results have been published and look promising. While the potential for such energy extraction is at the proof-of-concept stage in modeling, Sarsenbayev is hopeful that it will find success when translated to practice. “Converting a liability into an energy source is what we want, and this solution delivers,” he says.Despite work being all-consuming — “I’m almost obsessed with and love my work” — Sarsenbayev finds time to write reflective poetry in both Kazakh, his native language, and Russian, which he learned growing up. He’s also enamored by astrophotography, taking pictures of celestial bodies. Finding the right night sky can be a challenge, but the canyons near his home in Almaty are an especially good fit. He goes on photography sessions whenever he visits home for the holidays, and his love for Almaty shines through. “Almaty means 'the place where apples originated.' This part of Central Asia is very beautiful; although we have environmental pollution, this is a place with a rich history,” Sarsenbayev says.Sarsenbayev is especially keen on finding ways to communicate both the arts and sciences to future generations. “Obviously, you have to be technically rigorous and get the modeling right, but you also have to understand and convey the broader picture of why you’re doing the work, what the end goal is,” he says. Through that lens, the impact of Sarsenbayev’s doctoral work is significant. The end goal? Removing the bottleneck for nuclear energy adoption by producing carbon-free power and ensuring the safe disposal of radioactive waste.

Energy
Waste
Pollution

Costa Rica Shifts Toward Regenerative Tourism Alongside Other Nations

Costa Rica has long stood out for its commitment to protecting natural areas through tourism. Now, our country joins a growing number of nations that push beyond basic protection. They aim to restore and improve ecosystems damaged by past activities. This approach, called regenerative tourism, changes how visitors interact with places they travel to. In […] The post Costa Rica Shifts Toward Regenerative Tourism Alongside Other Nations appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

Costa Rica has long stood out for its commitment to protecting natural areas through tourism. Now, our country joins a growing number of nations that push beyond basic protection. They aim to restore and improve ecosystems damaged by past activities. This approach, called regenerative tourism, changes how visitors interact with places they travel to. In Costa Rica, tourism generates over 8 percent of the national economy and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. For decades, the focus stayed on sustainability—keeping beaches clean, forests intact, and wildlife safe without causing more harm. But recent efforts show a clear move to regeneration. Local projects work to rebuild habitats, boost biodiversity, and strengthen communities hit hard by environmental changes. Take Punta Leona, a coastal area in Puntarenas. Hotels there add a small fee to each booking, with funds going directly to conserve local plants and animals. This has helped protect scarlet macaws and other species facing threats from habitat loss. In the Arenal area, Rancho Margot operates as a self-sustaining farm and lodge. It grows its own food, recycles water, and teaches guests how to plant trees that restore soil eroded by old farming practices. These actions do more than maintain the status quo; they repair what was lost. Costa Rica’s government backs this trend. The Tourism Board promotes programs that encourage visitors to join conservation work, such as planting mangroves along the Pacific coast or monitoring sea turtles in Tortuguero. A group called Costa Rica Regenerativa advises businesses on how to integrate regeneration into their operations. They focus on holistic plans that cover social, cultural, and environmental needs. As a result, areas like Monteverde see improved cloud forest health, with reforestation efforts bringing back native species absent for years. This shift aligns with global patterns. New Zealand sets a strong example. Its tourism authority invites travelers to participate in restoring native forests and waterways. In places like Rotorua, canopy tours fund projects that remove invasive plants and protect geothermal sites. The country reports higher visitor satisfaction when people contribute to these efforts, leading to longer stays and more repeat trips. Saudi Arabia takes a different path but shares the goal. It invests in large-scale regeneration in desert regions, turning arid lands into green spaces through water management and planting programs. Tourism there now includes experiences where guests help with these restorations, drawing interest from eco-conscious travelers. Finland emphasizes carbon neutrality in its northern landscapes. Cities like Helsinki offer tours that involve cleaning up lakes and planting boreal forests. This not only offsets travel emissions but also enhances wildlife corridors for species like reindeer. Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands provide another case. Strict rules limit visitor numbers, but regenerative programs let people assist in removing invasive species and monitoring marine life. Revenue from these activities funds habitat restoration, helping giant tortoises and other endemic animals thrive. In Mexico, Playa Viva on the Pacific coast runs as a regenerative resort. It restores mangroves and coastal dunes while involving local communities in decision-making. Guests leave with a sense of having improved the place they visited. These examples show regenerative tourism spreading across continents. It responds to rising awareness of climate change and biodiversity loss. Travelers today seek meaningful trips that give back, and nations like Costa Rica benefit from this demand. Studies from the World Travel & Tourism Council indicate that regenerative practices can increase tourism revenue by up to 20 percent in participating areas, as they attract higher-spending visitors. Challenges remain. Mass tourism can strain resources, as seen in some Costa Rican beaches where overcrowding leads to pollution. To counter this, experts call for better regulations and education. Community involvement stays key—local people must lead these initiatives to ensure they meet real needs. Looking ahead, Costa Rica plans to expand regenerative models nationwide. Partnerships with international organizations aim to share knowledge with other countries. This positions the nation as a guide in the field, showing how tourism can heal rather than just preserve. As more nations adopt this model, the travel industry may see lasting change. For us here in Costa Rica, it means building a healthier future for our land and people. The post Costa Rica Shifts Toward Regenerative Tourism Alongside Other Nations appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

Animals
Business
Climate

Piping Plovers Inspire Volunteer Conservationists Despite New Threats From the Trump Administration

Proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act and park staffing cuts are putting the endangered coastal bird in danger. The post Piping Plovers Inspire Volunteer Conservationists Despite New Threats From the Trump Administration appeared first on The Revelator.

For a piping plover, access to safe habitat means the difference between merely staying alive and preparing for the next generation. Chris Allieri knows this dynamic all too well. He saw the federally endangered shorebirds — and the drama around protecting their breeding habitat — up close for the first time in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. “I saw people up on the dunes, kites, drones, off-leash dogs,” he says. No one was paying any attention to the birds’ need for a protected space. “There were no signs, there was no fencing.” He says he “couldn’t believe” the petite-sized birds were essentially left to fend for themselves. Allieri’s epiphany led to the creation of the NYC Plover Project, the first volunteer nonprofit in New York City dedicated to the birds. A communications professional by trade, he now spends most of his free time as the unpaid executive director of the nonprofit, where he has four paid employees on staff. The heart of the program, Allieri says, lies in the hundreds of volunteers who care for the piping plovers every day of their nesting season, from March to September, after which the birds and their young head down the coast. Similar stories unspool across the country. Piping plovers (Charadrius melodus) have found their home across the beaches of the United States, trailing down the Atlantic coast, around the Great Lakes, into the northern Great Plains. Between nesting and migrating, piping plovers can be seen and heard across dozens of U.S. states, dashing across the sand in quick spurts of energy and sounding off with their signature bell-like peeps. While the species remains federally endangered (they’re designated as “threatened” in the Atlantic Coast and Great Plains), the piping plovers’ population have been rebounding in some areas due to the stewardship of wildlife agencies, as well as various volunteer groups. But even with those major conservation wins, piping plovers today face a new challenge: the Trump administration. Cuts and ‘Harm’ Allieri points to firings at federal agencies that manage national parks and public lands as a threat to plover management. Conservation experts in Michigan warned that piping plovers “will die” due to the administration’s cuts, as reported by MLive. In Maine staff levels for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service partners were down in 2025, which required Maine Audubon and other nonfederal partners to do more work, according to Laura Minich Zitske, director of Maine Audubon’s coastal birds project. The organization’s funding for 2025 was set in 2023, but Minich Zitske says they are “anxiously waiting” to see how funding plays out for next season. On top of budgetary and personnel issues, the Trump administration has also proposed a rollback of the Endangered Species Act, the foundational law that has provided a critical safety net to protecting threatened species and their habitats.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by NYC PLOVER PROJECT (@nycploverproject) The Trump administration wants to change the way the law is interpreted, specifically the definition of the word “harm.” Historically the law has upheld harm to include any attacks on a species’ habitat. Now the administration is looking to narrow that definition to only recognize killing the protected species. “Harming habitat is also harming endangered species,” says Jewel Tomasula, national policy director of the Endangered Species Coalition, an environmental nonprofit that helps connect conservation groups like the NYC Plover Project to the national network of conservation groups to share strategies. “Species need a safe place to live. They need places to find food, to reproduce, and that is so integral to species survival,” she says. “Habitat loss is also the driving factor for extinction for [the] majority of species, especially our terrestrial species.” Problems for Plovers This potential definition change is really concerning to the NYC Plover Project, says Allieri. “A plover without habitat cannot exist. A plover doesn’t just go to another beach. It doesn’t just go to a wetland or go to a marsh. It doesn’t nest in a tree… This is a very specific species that has a very specific breeding range and it’s already been winded down to within an inch of its life to where it can survive.” Allieri says the group already sees the birds having difficulties due to sea-level rise and narrowing beaches, which has caused competition within the species and with other beach-nesting birds. “We’re seeing purgation of nests by other birds,” he adds. “We’re having a lot of nest loss early in the season, and this will only continue.” Wherever conservationists work to protect wild species, uncertainty now runs high. “It’s sort of hard to wrap our heads around all these challenges to the ESA could influence how we manage endangered species demands,” says Minich Zitske. She worries about the potential that the plovers’ habitats could be damaged while the birds are away on migration, which would not count as a violation of the ESA if the “harm” rule changes. Maine Audubon has been working to monitor piping plovers since 1981 and manages most of the nesting sites across the state with some help from their partners at the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge. General concerns are echoed by the group’s volunteer base. “I do think that there is a perception that violations of the ESA will not be prosecuted or taken seriously,” says Minich Zitske. “This is a longstanding concern, but it has increased. Volunteers feel discouraged when they are working hard to help our most vulnerable species alive when those in power are reluctant to engage or enforce laws.” The Importance of Volunteers Out of all Maine Audubon’s efforts, more people volunteer to work with piping plovers than any other program. Some work as general monitors, while others focus on educating beachgoers or identifying new nesting sites. “A lot of our volunteers are especially committed currently because they do want to demonstrate the public support for the Endangered Species Act,” says Minich Zitske. The NYC Plover Project has also seen that wave of support for the birds grow over time. “​​That first season we were really just like, ‘we have to get some boots on the ground.’ We have to get some volunteers out there [to] just help educate and to be arms and legs for the park service,” Allieri says. They started with about a dozen volunteers but escalated quickly. In their second season, they were named volunteer group of the year by the National Park Service, beating out groups from huge West Coast national parks. Their fifth season — which just wrapped up — had an estimated 300 to 400 volunteers patrolling the stretch of beaches along the Rockaways and looking after about 100 piping plovers whose breeding sites are protected by temporary fencing or structures put up by the NYC Parks Department. “We’ve done nearly 18,000 hours of volunteer time,” Allieri says. Their volunteers are positioned at each end of the enclosure, sometimes from 6 in the morning till 9 o’clock at night. Plovers Meet the Public In addition to directly protecting the birds, the volunteers help spread the word about the species and efforts to protect them. “We’ve connected with literally tens of thousands of people who have come to the beaches in the Rockaways,” Allieri says. If you live around an area with piping plovers, you may have heard some hate against the small birds, sometimes through the form of “piping plovers taste like chicken” bumper stickers. Talking to people who don’t understand the necessity of plover enclosures is part of the job for volunteers across the nation. It occasionally causes debates about people not getting enough beach access due to the fenced-off sections. That’s less of an issue in Maine, due to the state’s strong cultural wildlife values, according to Minich Zitske. In New York City, an area known for its attitude and abundance of tourists, these conversations can get heated, but Allieri says that’s starting to change. “Sometimes people show up to the beach ready to fight — like they’re ready to fight about a bird — but that’s fewer and far between,” he says. “I think with each season we are seeing more and more support and more and more advocacy on the part of everyday New Yorkers who really are rooting for the plover.” NYC Plover Project volunteers are all trained in de-escalation tactics to address these sorts of situations, which includes giving folks the benefit of the doubt. Allieri thinks the majority of people — even those who are trying to bust volunteers’ chops — are reachable by introducing them to the bird. “We’re gonna be able to point out a piping plover and maybe even a chick or a fledgling to you,” he says. Spreading Their Wings As the NYC Plover Project grows, it’s expanding its programs to include more enhanced coastal ecosystem management and advocacy. “Even though our core program of our volunteer engagement will always be with us, we are moving into public schools and we have a full education program,” Allieri says. “Then we also have community engagement with our local elected officials — not just on the federal level, but also city and state level as well.” Allieri has less patience for elected officials who act like limited beach access or ditching controversial firework shows are merely “equity” issues. “There’s some real public safety concerns out there,” Allieri says. “Dare I say, temporary beach closures are not on the list of injustices.” As threats to endangered species ramp up, the NYC Plover Project is looking to do more year-round programming. “We are realizing quickly that we are no longer just a seasonal operation,” Allieri says. “We haven’t been for years now.” They start to wrap up their volunteer recruitment at the end of the year, and by Jan. 1 they’re fully in the planning stages for next year. In the offseason, they keep the public engaged with a volunteer Slack channel, webinars, mailing lists, and their popular social media pages. Part of their latest program expansion includes making the public aware of the similar battles various endangered species face. “The piping plover has more in common with like grizzlies and gray wolves than most people know,” Allieri says. “Don’t tell [plovers] that they’re tiny. I think that they think that they’re grizzlies.” They’re currently working on a campaign that ties these similarities together. While federal leadership’s actions may paint a different picture, the shorebirds have found support across party lines. “In terms of the voters in the Rockaways, it is everybody from one of the most prevalent Trump-supporting districts to the opposite end of the spectrum,” Allieri says. “We are not hearing one word on the ground about the need to remove endangered species protections. There are a lot of Republican community members who come up to us on the beach and ask, ‘How are the plovers doing?’” Flying Forward While volunteers’ level of commitment is up to the individual, Allieri and Minich Zitske both voice worries about potential burnout, especially with the current attacks on endangered species. “I have concerns that if this continues, at what point will people just start to give up? I don’t know. I hope not, but it’s hard to know the future, especially the way things are going,” Minich Zitske says. Still, even with what sometimes feels like an unsustainable dedication level, Allieri is certain that people will keep showing up for piping plovers, even if the harm definition change is enacted. “What would the plover want us to do? The plover would want us to fight like hell. That’s what we have to do right now.” Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator: Studies: Extreme Weather Fueled by Climate Change Is Adding to Bird Declines The post Piping Plovers Inspire Volunteer Conservationists Despite New Threats From the Trump Administration appeared first on The Revelator.

Conservation
Climate
Energy

Ohio vineyard owner relied on toxic weed killer. Now facing Parkinson’s, he wants it banned

Dave Jilbert was diagnosed with Parkinson's after he used a paraquat product at his Ohio vineyard. He's now suing the pesticide manufacturer and trying to get paraquat banned.

Dave Jilbert always wanted to be a farmer. He went to agricultural school, moved to a homestead, started a winery and eventually purchased 16 acres of farmland in the central Ohio valley. He grew grapes for about five years, until he felt himself slowing down. It wasn’t long before the tremors started. Jilbert, at the age of 61, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2021. “I’m not a doctor,” he said, “but all I know is I used paraquat and I got Parkinson’s.” There’s no definitive cause of Parkinson’s, a brain disease with no cure that gets worse over time, but researchers have found a majority of cases are environmental. Now Jilbert is suing. He argues that spraying a toxic pesticide called paraquat is to blame. And now he’s trying to get it banned. “I’m trying to keep people from doing what I did,” said Jilbert, now 66. “I don’t want people to be damaged like me.” With evidence of its harms stacking up, paraquat has already been banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China, where it’s made. Yet last year, its manufacturer Syngenta, a subsidiary of a company owned by the Chinese government, continued selling paraquat in the United States and other nations that haven’t banned it. Paraquat is highly toxic, but one of the biggest concerns are the mounting allegations that low-level that exposure over a long period of time could be linked to Parkinson’s disease. Thousands of U.S. farmers have made this claim in court, but the cases are still pending.  Ramsey Archibald | rarchibald@al.com‘It’s degenerative’ When Jilbert started growing grapes, he did his research on weed control. He needed to contain suckers, shoots that quickly sprout at the base of the vine, strangling the fruit. It would either take weeks to clip the suckers by hand, or Jilbert could spend a couple of days spraying Gramoxone, a paraquat product manufactured by Syngenta. “It was a great herbicide,” he said. From 2014 through 2018, Jilbert loaded Gramoxone into a 50-gallon sprayer on the back of his tractor and wound through the vineyard, misting the seed bed of the vines. He needed a license to buy it from a farming co-op. But at the time, the only precautions involved wearing rubber gloves, a heavy shirt and goggles. Now, the regulators require respirators, enclosed cabs, among other safety measures. By 2020, Jilbert felt his hands stiffen as he changed the oil on his tractor. He chalked it up to getting older. When the tremors started, a doctor diagnosed Jilbert with Parkinson’s, telling him the brain disease is degenerative. Parkinson’s occurs when the brain cells that make dopamine, a chemical that controls movement, stop working or die. It’s the fastest growing neurodegenerative disease in the world with Parkinson’s Foundation research showing U.S. cases have risen by 50%. Ray Dorsey, a neurologist, says Parkinson’s disease is “largely preventable” with research showing that 87% of those with the disease do not have any genetic risk factors, or in other words, the cause “lies not within us but outside of us.” “If we clean up our environment, we get rid of Parkinson’s disease,” he said. Ohio farmer fights to ban pesticide after Parkinson's diagnosisBefore taking medication, Jilbert couldn’t fasten buttons, tuck in his shirt or tie his shoes. The next step was getting a DaTscan of his brain for a research trial. During that trial, a doctor explained that a healthy brain scan will light up with two bright commas. A brain scan with Parkinson’s will illuminate two periods. Jilbert walked out and looked at his scan results: two periods. “It’s degenerative,” he said. “That’s what keeps ringing back in my mind.” Almost five years in, Jilbert now takes 11 pills a day. His movements have improved, but his head bobs. He has off days and on days. “I’ve got a farm. I’ve got 26 acres. I’ve got the homestead,” Jilbert said. “It looks beautiful. The roads are straight and weeds in check. I followed all the labels. And then I get Parkinson’s.” Mass litigation After learning more about paraquat, Jilbert joined the mass action lawsuit against Syngenta and Chevron USA in 2021. He’s one of thousands of people who claim the chemical manufacturers knew about the dangers of paraquat but sold it anyway. The manufacturers “should have known that paraquat was a highly toxic substance that can cause severe neurological injuries,” the lawsuit argues, and should have taken steps “to ensure that people would not be harmed” by paraquat use. Jilbert’s suit argues he was exposed when mixing, loading and spraying paraquat on his vineyard. During that time, the lawsuit says he breathed in small droplets of the pesticide. “Once absorbed, the paraquat entered his bloodstream, attacked his nervous system and was a substantial factor in causing him to suffer Parkinson’s disease,” the suit claims. Jilbert did not comment on the lawsuit while it’s pending. Dave Jilbert bought a vineyard to grow grapes for his winery, Jilbert Winery, in Valley City, Ohio. After about five years, he felt himself starting to slow down. By 2021, Jilbert was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He has since retired from farming and winemaking, but he's now suing the manufacturer of a pesticide called Gramoxone, a paraquat product.  David Petkiewicz | cleveland.comA settlement agreement was reached earlier this year, which would resolve thousands of cases in Illinois, but the negotiations are still being worked out. Without a settlement, it could go to trial in 2026. Syngenta says settling does not imply paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease, but litigation can be costly and distracting. “We stand by the safety of paraquat,” a statement said. Syngenta has also rejected the claims, saying “despite decades of investigation and more than 1,200 epidemiological and laboratory studies of paraquat, no scientist or doctor has ever concluded in a peer-reviewed scientific analysis that paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease.” Chevron, which has never manufactured paraquat and has not sold it since 1986, also disputes the claims. Growing effort to ban In recent decades, more than 70 countries have banned paraquat because of its risks to human health. But it’s still allowed, and widely used, in the United States after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency re-registered paraquat for another 15 years because it did not find a clear link between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease. “I’m not a doctor, but all I know is I used paraquat and I got Parkinson’s.”Dave Jilbert, an Ohio farmer Several advocacy groups sued the EPA over this decision. Jilbert, since getting diagnosed with Parkinson’s, has joined a growing movement to get paraquat banned. He’s been to Washington D.C. twice to lobby lawmakers. “I didn’t ask for this, so that’s what makes me mad,” he said. “I wanted to tell my story and maybe I can keep it off the market. Do my part to stop the nonsense.” A coalition of Democratic U.S. lawmakers, expressing “grave concern,” also urged the EPA last year to ban paraquat. And legislation has been floated in California and Pennsylvania that would prohibit it on a state level. In the meantime, Jilbert retired from making wine this summer. His future with Parkinson’s feels uncertain. But he knows he wants to spend his remaining time with his wife of 37 years. “I’m reinventing my future philosophy for what’s to come,” he said. “Because I don’t know what’s going to come.”

Chemicals
Government
Health

Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson’s. They blame a deadly pesticide.

Paraquat is banned in more than 70 countries, but still legal in the United States. Now, a growing number of U.S. farmers are blaming the toxic pesticide for their Parkinson's disease in a large lawsuit.

Paul Friday remembers when his hand started flopping in the cold weather – the first sign nerve cells in his brain were dying.He was eventually diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a brain disease that gets worse over time. His limbs got stiffer. He struggled to walk. He couldn’t keep living on his family farm. Shortly afterward, Friday came to believe that decades of spraying a pesticide called paraquat at his peach orchard in southwestern Michigan may be the culprit.“It explained to me why I have Parkinson’s disease,” said Friday, who is now 83, and makes that claim in a pending lawsuit.The pesticide, a weed killer, is extremely toxic.With evidence of its harms stacking up, it’s already been banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China, where it’s made. Yet last year, its manufacturer Syngenta, a subsidiary of a company owned by the Chinese government, continued selling paraquat in the United States and other nations that haven’t banned it. Health statistics are limited. Critics point to research linking paraquat exposure to Parkinson’s, while the manufacturer pushes back, saying none of it is peer-reviewed. But the lawsuits are mounting across the United States, as farmers confront Parkinson’s after a lifetime of use, and much of the globe is turning away from paraquat. It has many critics wrestling with the question: What will it take to ban paraquat in the United States? “What we’ve seen over the course of decades is a systemic failure to protect farmworkers and the agricultural community from pesticides,” said Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization that advocates against paraquat.Paul Friday was a lifelong peach farmer in Coloma, Michigan until he developed Parkinson's Disease in 2017. Photo provided by Luiba FridayThousands of lawsuits pile upIt was hard for Ruth Anne Krause to watch her husband of 58 years struggle to move his hands. He was an avid woodcarver, shaving intricate details into his creations, before it became too difficult for him to hold the tools.Jim Krause was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019, after he spent decades operating a 20-acre stone fruit farm in central California. His wife says he often donned a mask and yellow rubber boots to spray paraquat on the fields.Krause, who had no family history of neurological disease as is typical, died in 2024.“I want people to know what happened,” said Ruth Anne Krause, who is worried that paraquat is still being sold to American farmers. Krause is one of thousands of people who have sued Syngenta, a manufacturer, and Chevron USA, a seller, over paraquat exposure. They’re alleging the chemical companies failed to warn of the dangers of paraquat despite knowing it could damage human nerve cells and studies showing it’s linked to Parkinson’s disease. Between 11 million and 17 million pounds of paraquat are sprayed annually on American farms, according to the latest data from the U.S. Geological Survey. The pesticide is used as a burn down, meaning farmers spray it to quickly clear a field or kill weeds. It's effective, but highly toxic. (Julie Bennett | preps@al.com) Julie Bennett | preps@al.comChevron, which never manufactured paraquat and hasn’t sold it since 1986, has “long maintained that it should not be liable in any paraquat litigation.”“And despite hundreds of studies conducted over the past 60 years, the scientific consensus is that paraquat has not been shown to be a cause of Parkinson’s disease,” the company said in a statement.Syngenta has emphasized there is no evidence that paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease.“We have great sympathy for those suffering from the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease,” a Syngenta spokesperson said in a statement. “However, it is important to note that the scientific evidence simply does not support a causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease, and that paraquat is safe when used as directed.”More than 6,400 lawsuits against Syngenta and Chevron that allege a link between paraquat and Parkinson’s are pending in the U.S. District Court of Southern Illinois. Another 1,300 cases have been brought in Pennsylvania, 450 in California and more are scattered throughout state courts.“I do think it’s important to be clear that number is probably not even close to representative of how many people have been impacted by this,” said Christian Simmons, a legal expert for Drugwatch. Syngenta told its shareholders in March that an additional 1,600 cases have been voluntarily dismissed or resolved. In 2021, the company settled an unspecified number in California and Illinois for $187.5 million, according to a company financial report. Some others have been dismissed for missing court deadlines. None have gone to trial yet. Behind these thousands of lawsuits, a list growing nearly every day, is a person suffering from Parkinson’s disease.In Ohio, there’s Dave Jilbert a winemaker who sprayed the pesticide on his vineyard south of Cleveland. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2020 and now he is suing and working to get paraquat banned. Terri McGrath believes years of exposure to paraquat at her family farm in rural Southwest Michigan likely contributed to her Parkinson’s. Six other family members also have the disease. And in south Alabama, Mac Barlow is suing after receiving a similar diagnosis following years of relying on paraquat.“For about 40 years off and on, I’ve been using that stuff,” Barlow said. “I’ll be honest with you, if I knew it was going to be that bad, I would have tried to figure out something else.”In Alabama, farmer Mac Barlow was diagnosed with Parkinson's after years of spraying paraquat. Teri McGrath believes years of exposure to paraquat at her family farm in rural Southwest Michigan contributed to her Parkinson’s. In Ohio, there’s Dave Jilbert a winemaker who sprayed the pesticide on his vineyard. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2020. Like Barlow, Jilbert is now suing. Photos by Julie Bennett, Isaac Ritchey and David PetkiewiczParaquat in the United StatesSince hitting the market in the 1960s, paraquat has been used in farming to quickly “burn” weeds before planting crops. The pesticide, originally developed by Syngenta and sold by Chevron, rips tissue apart, destroying plants on a molecular level within hours.“It’s used because it’s effective at what it does. It’s highly toxic. It’s very good at killing things,” said Geoff Horsfield, policy director at the Environmental Working Group. “And unfortunately, when a pesticide like this is so effective that also means there’s usually human health impacts as well.”By the 1970s, it became a tool in the war on drugs, sprayed to kill Mexican marijuana plants. In 1998, that history landed it in Hollywood when the Dude in “The Big Lebowski” calls someone a “human paraquat,” a buzzkill.Today, between 11 million and 17 million pounds of paraquat are sprayed annually to help grow cotton, soybean and corn fields, among other crops, throughout the country, the U.S. Geological Survey, USGS, reports. And despite the alleged known risks, its use is increasing, according to the most current federal data, more than doubling from 2012 to 2018. The USGS says on its website new pesticide use data will be released in 2025. It hasn’t been published yet. Because paraquat kills any growth it touches, it’s typically used to clear a field before any crops are planted. Low levels of paraquat residue can linger on food crops, but the foremost threat is direct exposure. Pesticides are among the most common means of suicide worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and paraquat is frequently used because of its lethality. After some nations, like South Korea and Sri Lanka, banned it, they saw a significant drop in suicides, research shows.The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency already restricts paraquat, labeling it as “registered use,” with a skull and crossbones, meaning it can only be used by people who have a license. Because of its toxicity, the federal government requires it to have blue dye, a sharp smell and a vomiting agent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, CDC. Sprayers are also told to wear protective gear. Despite those safety measures, U.S. poison centers have gotten hundreds of paraquat-related calls in the past decade, their annual reports show.Swallowing is the most likely way to be poisoned by paraquat, according to the CDC, but skin exposure can also be deadly. In fact, if it spills on someone, health officials say they should wash it off immediately and quickly cut off their clothes. That way they don’t risk spreading more deadly pesticide on their body as they pull their shirt over their head. In one 2023 case documented by America’s Poison Centers, a 50-year-old man accidentally sipped blue liquid from a Gatorade bottle that turned out to be paraquat. After trying to throw it up, he went to the emergency room, struggling to breathe, nauseous and vomiting.Doctors rushed to treat the man, but he turned blue from a lack of oxygen and his organs failed. He died within three days.In another poison center report, a 65-year-old man spilled paraquat on his clothes and kept working. Ten days later, he went to the emergency room with second-degree burns on his stomach. Dizzy and nauseous, he was admitted for two days before going home.A week later, he went back to the ICU as his kidney, lungs and heart stopped working. He died 34 days after the spill.These annual poison center case summaries provide insight into paraquat’s toxicity, but it’s unclear exactly how many people in the U.S. have been injured or killed by the weed killer, because there’s only a patchwork of data creating an uneven and incomplete picture.The latest annual National Poison Data System report logged 114 reports and one death caused by paraquat in 2023. Over a decade, from 2014 to 2023, this system documented 1,151 paraquat calls. And a separate database shows the EPA has investigated 82 human exposure cases since 2014.Even secondary exposure can be dangerous. One case published in the Rhode Island Medical Journal described an instance where a 50-year-old man accidentally ingested paraquat, and the nurse treating him was burned by his urine that splashed onto her forearms. Within a day, her skin blistered and sloughed off.And a former Michigan State horticulture student is suing the university for $100 million, claiming that she developed thyroid cancer from her exposure to pesticides including paraquat, glyphosate and oxyfluorfen.Meanwhile, a much more widespread threat looms large in the background: long-term, low-level exposure.Parkinson’s on the riseParkinson’s disease is the fastest growing neurological disorder in the world, with cases projected to double by 2050, partly due to an aging population, according to a study published in The BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical journal. It occurs when the brain cells that make dopamine, a chemical that controls movement, stop working or die.The exact cause is unknown, likely a mix of genetic and, largely, environmental factors. A Parkinson’s Foundation study found that 87% of those with the disease do not have any genetic risk factors. That means, “for the vast majority of Americans, the cause of Parkinson’s disease lies not within us, but outside of us, in our environment,” said neurologist and researcher Ray Dorsey.That’s why Dorsey, who literally wrote the book on Parkinson’s, calls the disease “largely preventable.”There’s a long list of environmental factors linked to Parkinson’s, but pesticides are one of the biggest threats, according to Dorsey.“If we clean up our environment, we get rid of Parkinson’s disease,” he said. Paul Friday dedicated his life to growing peaches on his 50-acre farm in Coloma, Michigan. After buying 50 acres of land in 1962, he started experimenting with crossbreeding to develop the perfect peach. He is now one of thousands of farmers who have filed lawsuits claiming a toxic pesticide called paraquat is to blame for their Parkinson's, a neurological disease. Photo courtesy of Paul FridayResearch, dating back decades, has explored this link.An early 1987 case report published in Neurology discusses the case of a 32-year-old citrus farmer who started experiencing tremors, stiffness and clumsiness after 15 years of spraying paraquat. But “a cause-and-effect relationship is difficult to establish,” a doctor wrote at the time.A decade later, an animal study from Parkinson’s researcher Deborah Cory-Slechta found that paraquat absorbed by mice destroys the specific type of dopamine neuron that dies in Parkinson’s disease. More recently, her research has found paraquat that’s inhaled can also bypass the blood-brain barrier, threatening neurons. “It’s quite clear that it gets into the brain from inhalation models,” Cory-Slechta said. Critics point to other epidemiological studies being more definitive.In 2011, researchers studied farmworkers exposed to two pesticides, rotenone and paraquat, and determined those exposures increased the risk of developing Parkinson’s by 150%. Another study, published last year, looked at 829 Parkinson’s patients in central California. It found people who live or work near farmland where paraquat is used have a higher risk of developing the disease. “It’s kind of like secondhand smoke,” Dorsey said. “You can just live or work near where it’s sprayed and be at risk.”This is a growing concern in American suburbs where new houses press up against well-maintained golf courses. A study published in JAMA this year found that living within a mile of a golf course increased the risk of Parkinson’s disease by 126%. It didn’t name specific chemicals but did point to pesticides.The EPA in 2021 banned paraquat from golf courses “to prevent severe injury and/or death” from ingestion.Despite all that, it’s difficult to prove whether paraquat directly causes Parkinson’s because it develops years after exposure.“The disease unfolds over decades, and the seeds of Parkinson’s disease are planted early,” Dorsey said.Where do the lawsuits stand? The legal case over paraquat inched toward a settlement earlier this year.Most of the lawsuits have been brought in Illinois under what’s known as multi-district litigation. Unlike a class-action lawsuit, this puts individual cases in front of one federal judge. A few bellwether cases are then chosen to represent the masses and streamline the legal process.Syngenta, Chevron and the plaintiffs agreed to settle in April, which would wrap up thousands of cases, but an agreement is still being hammered out, court records show. If details can’t be finalized, it will go to trial.“It’s kind of like secondhand smoke. You can just live or work near where it’s sprayed and be at risk.”Ray Dorsey, a Parkinson's disease researchSyngenta has adamantly denied the lawsuits’ allegations, saying it backs paraquat as “safe and effective” when it’s used correctly and emphasizing there has been no peer-reviewed scientific analysis that shows paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease.“Syngenta believes there is no merit to the claims, but litigation can be distracting and costly,” a spokesperson said. “Entering in the agreement in no way implies that paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease or that Syngenta has done anything wrong. We stand by the safety of paraquat.”Chevron has also denied the claims saying the “scientific consensus is that paraquat has not been shown to be a cause of Parkinson’s disease.” What company files showA trove of internal documents released during litigation, as reported by The Guardian and the New Lede, appeared to show that the manufacturers were aware of evidence that paraquat could collect in the brain.But the New Lede acknowledged the documents do not show company scientists believed that paraquat causes Parkinson’s, Syngenta officials pointed out. The trail of bread crumbs started as early as 1958 when a company scientist wrote about a study of 2.2 dipyridyl, a chemical in paraquat, saying it appears to have moderate toxicity “mainly by affecting the central nervous system, and it can be absorbed through the skin,” the internal documents said. Imperial Chemical Industries, which later became Syngenta, started selling paraquat under the brand name Gramoxone in 1962, according to research. Gramoxone contains nearly 44% paraquat. Syngenta sells paraquat under the brand name Gramaxone, as a resgistered-use pesticide. It's labeled with a skull and cross bones and the warning "one sip can kill." The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also puts the regulations and rules for use on the label. It's dyed blue and has a strong odor as safety mechanisms. (Photo by Rose White | MLive) Rose White | rwhite@MLive.comThe internal documents show by 1974, the company updated safety precautions, recommending that anyone spraying the pesticide wear a mask, as there were the first reports of human poisoning and concerns about the effects of paraquat started to grow.A year later, Ken Fletcher from Imperial Chemical wrote a letter to Chevron scientist Dr. Richard Cavelli, saying the chemical company knew of “sporadic reports of CNS (central nervous system) effects in paraquat poisoning” that he believed to be coincidental.Within months, Fletcher also indicated “possible chronic effects” of paraquat exposure, calling it “quite a terrible problem” that should be studied more, the documents say.“Due possibly to good publicity on our part, very few people here believe that paraquat causes any sort of problem in the field,” he wrote in the mid 1970s. “Consequently, any allegation of illness due to spraying never reaches serious proportions.”By the 1980s, outside research started to pick at the question of paraquat and Parkinson’s.“As more researchers dug into it, it’s only been more firmly established,” said Horsfield with the Environmental Working Group. Syngenta pushes back on this, though, saying two recent reports cast doubt on these claims. A 2024 scientific report from California pesticide regulators found recent evidence was “insufficient to demonstrate a direct causal association with exposure to paraquat and the increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.” And a September analysis from Douglas Weed, an epidemiologist and independent consultant, reached a similar conclusion.Syngenta also claims on its website to be a target of a “mass tort machine” that hovers behind multi-district litigation. Why hasn’t the EPA banned it?In 1981, Norway became the first country to outlaw paraquat due to the risk of poisoning. One by one, more countries followed suit. In 2007, the European Union approved a blanket ban for all 27 member countries, according to media reports. Yet Syngenta is still allowed to manufacture paraquat in countries that have banned its use. It’s been prohibited in the United Kingdom for 18 years and China banned paraquat to “safeguard people’s life, safety and health,” in 2012, according to a government announcement. Yet about two-thirds of the paraquat imported to the U.S. between 2022 and 2024 came from companies owned by the Chinese government, SinoChem and Red Sun Group, according to a joint report published by three advocacy organizations in October.It found most of the 40 million and 156 million pounds imported annually over the past eight years comes from Chinese manufacturing facilities, in either China or Syngenta’s big factory in northern England. Although hundreds of companies sell paraquat, Syngenta says it accounts for a quarter of global sales.According to previous media reports, SinoChem, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, acquired Syngenta in a 2020 merger. SinoChem posted $3.4 billion in profits last year, but it’s unclear how much came from paraquat sales because the company doesn’t make earnings reports public. Syngenta reported $803 million in sales of its “non-selective herbicides,” the class that includes paraquat-containing Gramoxone, according to its 2024 financial report. While Chinese companies supply paraquat to American farmers, the report points out China is also a big purchaser of crops, like soybeans, that are grown with help from the pesticide.“In these two ways, China economically benefits from the application of paraquat in the U.S., where it outsources many of its associated health hazards,” the report said.Paraquat, now prohibited in more than 70 countries, according to the Environmental Working Group, was reauthorized by the EPA in 2021 when it passed a regularly scheduled 15-year review — a move challenged by critics. “EPA has the same information that those countries have,” said Kalmuss-Katz, the attorney with EarthJustice. “EPA has just reached a fundamentally different, and what we believe is a legally and scientifically unsupported position, which is: massive amounts of paraquat can continue to be sprayed without unreasonable risk.”The federal agency determined paraquat remains “an effective, inexpensive, versatile, and widely used method of weed control,” and any risks to workers are “outweighed by the benefits” of farms using the weed killer.“It is one of the mostly highly regulated pesticides available in the United States,” the agency said in a statement.This decision allowed it to be used with “new stronger safety measures to reduce exposure,” like requiring buffer zones where pesticides can’t be sprayed. For plants like cotton, alfalfa, soybeans and peanuts, the EPA wrote in its decision “growers may need to switch to alternative (weed-killers), which could have financial impacts.” Unlike other pesticides, paraquat works well in low temperatures and early in the season, according to the agency.“What we’ve seen over the course of decades is a systemic failure to protect farmworkers and the agricultural community from pesticides.”Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz from EarthJusticeMore than 200,000 public comments have been submitted to the EPA’s docket on paraquat over the years. Industry groups, farmers, advocacy organizations and others have all chimed in, arguing for or against the weed killer.One submitted by a North Dakota farmer, Trey Fischbach, urged the EPA to continue allowing paraquat to fight resistant weeds like kochia, writing it’s the “last tool in the toolbox.” The EPA also noted there weren’t many other options. “The chemical characteristics of paraquat are also beneficial as a resistance management tool, where few alternatives are available.” But farmers can get trapped on what critics call the “pesticide treadmill,” in which broad pesticide use leads to “superweeds” that require stronger and stronger pesticides to be knocked down.A comment submitted by Kay O’Laughlin, from Massachusetts, urged instead: “Do your job and ban paraquat because it is killing people. I speak as someone who lost a brother to Parkinson’s. People should not be disposable so that big agro can make ever greater profits!”The EPA’s 2021 decision was challenged within two months by environmental and farmworker groups who sued the EPA. Kalmuss-Katz said the groups challenged the EPA over reapproving paraquat without “truly grappling” with the connection to Parkinson’s.“The EPA here failed to adequately protect farmworkers,” he said.After that, the environmental agency shifted under President Joe Biden. The EPA decided to consider the issues raised in the lawsuits and started seeking additional information last year. In early 2025, it asked the courts for more time to assess the human health risks of paraquat.But the EPA wasn’t focused on Parkinson’s, saying in its decision the “weight of evidence was insufficient” to link paraquat exposure to the neurological disease. Rather, the federal question was over how the weed killer turns into a vapor that could harm people when inhaled or touched. “Parkinson’s Disease is not an expected health outcome of pesticidal use of paraquat,” the EPA said in its review. The study could take up to four years, according to the EPA, saying it’s “complex, large scale and is conducted under real world conditions,” while paraquat remains on the market. The agency in October updated the review, saying it’s now seeking additional information from Syngenta. Meanwhile, the EPA has shifted again. The Trump administration this year put four former industry lobbyists or executives, from the agricultural, chemical and cleaning industries, in charge of regulating pesticides at the EPA. And while it’s not clear where the agency stands on paraquat, there has been an early sign of backing away from opposition to controversial pesticides. Shortly after Kyle Kunkler, a recent American Soybean Association lobbyist, was tapped to lead pesticide policy, the EPA moved to reapprove the use of a different, controversial weed killer that had previously been banned by federal courts.Growing pressure to ban itBut grassroots pressure to ban paraquat continues to mount.“This is a pivotal time for whether paraquat is going to remain active in the United States,” said Simmons, a legal expert for Drugwatch.Last year, more than 50 Democratic lawmakers, expressing “grave concern” in letters, urged the EPA to ban paraquat.“Due to their heightened exposure to paraquat, farmworkers and rural residents are hardest hit by the harmful health effects of paraquat like Parkinson’s,” said an Oct. 7, 2024, letter signed by U.S. representatives. A separate letter was signed by a small group of senators. California, a heavy user of paraquat as the top agricultural state, became the first to move toward banning paraquat last year. But the bill ended up getting pared back with Gov. Gavin Newsom signing a law to fast-track reevaluating paraquat’s safety, reporting shows. Pennsylvania lawmakers are also considering banning it under state bills introduced this year. “There are better, healthier alternatives,” said state Rep. Natalie Mihalek, a Republican who introduced the Pennsylvania legislation.On a federal level, outside the EPA, pesticides appear to be in the crosshairs. Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has criticized chemicals being used in farming. But a new Make America Healthy Again report shows Kennedy has backed away from restricting pesticides after agricultural groups pushed back on the “inaccurate story about American agriculture and our food system.”At the same time, there’s been a reported industry effort to pass state laws that would protect pesticide manufacturers from liability. Two states, North Dakota and Georgia, already passed these laws, according to the National Agricultural Law Firm. But a federal bill introduced this year would ensure the manufacturers can’t be held responsible for harming farmers in any state.“This is a pivotal time for whether paraquat is going to remain active in the United States.”Christian Simmons, legal expert for DrugWatchAs this tug of war continues, paraquat continues to be sprayed on agricultural fields throughout the United States. The EPA is still assessing its risks. And nearly 90,000 Americans are getting diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease every year. Meanwhile for critics, the evidence seems clear: it’s too dangerous. “The easiest thing to do is we should ban paraquat,” Dorsey said.AL.com reporter Margaret Kates contributed to this story.

Agriculture
Animals
Chemicals

‘I Didn’t Vote for This’: A Revolt Against DOGE Cuts, Deep in Trump Country

Cassidy Randall is a freelance writer based in Montana.

The road to the tiny hamlet of Marion in northwest Montana is lined with the thick trees of the Flathead National Forest, with modern homesteads of trailers and modest homes dotting clearings here and there. Outside a timber frame café called the Hilltop Hitching Post, one of the only gathering spots for Marion’s population of less than 1,200, hunter Terry Zink pulled up in a dusty, well-used F-150 pickup and got out wearing a camo jacket against the early September chill, and a ball cap atop wire-rimmed glasses.Zink, 57, is a third-generation houndsman who hunts big game, including mountain lions and bears. He also owns an archery target business. He’s a rural Montanan whose way of life and livelihood depend on public lands.He led me into the Hilltop, where half the people inside knew his name, to a corner where we sat drinking diner coffee. “You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,” Zink said.“This” is the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) deep cuts earlier this year to federal public lands agencies’ funding, and to the staff at those agencies who administer that funding and steward public lands and wildlife.Zink voted for Trump but said he doesn’t agree with everything the president does. Zink clarifies he calls himself a “conservative” over calling himself a “Republican.” He doesn’t like Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. “I prefer common sense in the middle,” he said.He believes wolves need to be hunted to manage their numbers; abortion should only be legal in cases of rape, incest and to protect the mother’s life; and he’s an ardent Second Amendment supporter. He’s also a passionate advocate for public lands and wildlife. And the cuts have, frankly, ticked him off.He is vocal not just about protecting public lands, but also about protecting the staff at those agencies. “We have to listen to our wildlife biologists. We have to be strong advocates for those people,” Zink said.Hunting season had yet to open when we spoke, but Zink was already hearing from fellow hunters who had to cut their own way into trails to hunting camps after Forest Service trail crews were laid off en masse. He worries about wildlife management with agency scientists also terminated.Zink’s story is just one example of how the DOGE cuts to public lands agencies are hitting rural, conservative communities — one of this administration’s strongest voting bases — the hardest. Starting in February, an estimated 5,200 people have been terminated from the agencies that manage the 640 million acres of federal public lands in the U.S. That number doesn’t include the many who took the administration’s buyout or early retirement offers also meant to cut staff. Further, Trump’s 2026 budget proposes more budget cuts and a reduction of nearly 18,500 more public lands employees.Much of the national spotlight has fallen on the impacts of these cuts to national parks, as that is the public lands model the majority of Americans are most familiar with: Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, the Grand Canyon, to name just a few of the most iconic. In the rural West, though, federal public lands are more than just a scenic spot to take a family vacation once a year. These agencies are often the primary employers in the communities adjacent to public lands.Steve Ellis, chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees who was stationed in small towns in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and Alaska, said that “the federal payroll from the BLM, the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service in these small rural communities is huge. It helps pay taxes. It helps keep the little hospital open. Federal employees have kids in the schools where the funding from the state depends on the number of students.” Hollow out the agencies, he said, and the communities themselves are hollowed out.In addition to the employees and their families who’ve been impacted, those staffing cuts are also affecting the ways of life and livelihoods that are major economic drivers out here for almost everyone else, too. Ranchers and farmers use public lands for agriculture; outfitters and guides take guests into them; hunters access them regularly to put food in the family freezer; and forestry, timber and sawmill workers fulfill contracts on them for wildfire mitigation and lumber.Trump won Montana by nearly 20 points in the 2024 election. Voters also ousted three-term Democratic Senator Jon Tester, a third-generation farmer from rural eastern Montana and the last legislator in the Senate who maintained a full-time job outside his political career, in favor of novice MAGA Republican Tim Sheehy. That race shattered spending records as Republicans went all in to flip the seat to win the Senate. For the first time in nearly a century, Montana — a famously purple state — went all red.But here, support for public lands is not a partisan issue. A 2024 poll of Montanans showed 95 percent of respondents had visited public lands in the last year, nearly half of them at least 10 times. The same poll showed 98 percent of Democrats, 84 percent of independents and 71 percent of Republicans said conservation issues are important to their voting decisions.Yet many national Republicans, including Trump, don’t seem to understand what a nonstarter cuts to public lands are for voters in Montana, and much of the rest of the rural West — even though, when Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee wrote a provision into Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill to sell off public lands to pay for tax cuts, Montana’s two Republican senators, followed by Idaho’s, led the outcry that got the proposal pulled. Out of all the controversial pieces of that bill, the public lands sale proposal was one of the few that made MAGA senators break from the party line. And public land sales are just the tip of the iceberg here.I spoke to people across Montana, from different professions and down the political range from independent to staunchly conservative, and they all agreed on a few things: They support adequately staffed public lands and continued public access to them; and with further cuts and rollbacks proposed at the same time people are beginning to personally feel the impacts of public lands attacks, policymakers are waking a political sleeping giant.“You cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, and water restoration, and healthy forests,” Zink said. “People in Washington D.C., on the West Coast, East Coast — they don't understand what that means to us out here.”Dust billowed behind Denny Iverson’s pickup as he drove past the irrigation pivot on his ranchland in Montana’s Blackfoot River valley. He was only irrigating a small strip of grass for his cattle to graze later in the season. Montana was experiencing its worst drought in 50 years, and the river was as low as Iverson, 67, had ever seen it.He stopped the truck and gazed out at his fields from under the brim of a ball cap as worn as his jeans. The landscape here is beautiful, cupped as it is in federal public lands. The surrounding mountains are national forest, managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Much of the Blackfoot River is managed by the Bureau of Land Management.Iverson explained that most ranches in Montana have a base ranch with significant acreage, and then rely on nearby federal land or state land for summer pasture in what are called grazing allotments. His allotment is on BLM land in the mountains near the old mining town of Garnet, land he treats like his own, taking care not to overgraze it. A ranch this size, 700 private acres, could still operate without a public land allotment by leasing other private land, but that’s much more expensive — prohibitively so, for most ranchers. Down in the Southwest, he said, many ranches are a whopping 90 percent federal land allotments; it’s often much less than that in western Montana.“We’re trying to keep enough water in the river to keep the fish alive,” Iverson said. He’s part of the Blackfoot Challenge, a community group made up of landowners, public land agency partners and organizations that coordinate efforts to conserve the rural way of life and natural resources in the valley and administers federal funding to do so. “My hay production was at 60 percent this year. We’re in a terrible drought and getting assistance with that will be slow to come.”From January to May, the Blackfoot Challenge saw $4.6 million in already appropriated multi-year funds from federal public land agencies — including USFS, BLM and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — frozen. Those funds, which the Challenge receives directly and then uses to work on collaborative projects, went to “implement good water and irrigation practices, good weed management, good grazing practices,” and myriad other projects, Iverson said. Those included drought resilience and wildfire mitigation, which ranchers rely on to keep their lands healthy and their operations viable.Funding was also frozen for conservation easements, voluntary legal agreements between land owners and land trusts or public lands agencies that permanently protect the land for its working and conservation values while limiting development and subdivision. Those easements are a solution for ranchers and farmers who might otherwise struggle to keep their working land as its value soars in a rapidly gentrifying West. They also stitch together large landscapes for wildlife to travel as development pressure fragments old family ranches and farms. The frozen funds left many families in unintended debt.Montana’s congressional delegation does seem to be listening to voters somewhat; the Blackfoot Challenge has seen much of its funding unfrozen after calls, letters and congressional visits from landowners and other advocates.But in other ways, Republicans’ attacks on public lands seem to only be ramping up. In his 2026 budget, Trump proposed cutting a program called WaterSMART, which is administered through the Bureau of Reclamation and has historically provided millions for rural communities in Montana to address water security in a region where it is often scarce. And the U.S. House recently voted to throw out three huge public lands management plans, including one in eastern Montana. These plans had been developed over years with input from ranchers, farmers, tribes, agencies, energy companies and conservationists on how to use parcels of land and balance economic activities like oil and gas extraction and grazing with wildlife conservation and outdoor recreation. Instead, individual land use decisions would reroute through Congress — "people who don’t know the particulars of managing that land,” reported Montana Public Radio. Both Montana Republican Representatives, Troy Downing and Ryan Zinke, voted in favor, claiming it would unlock coal leasing in the Powder River basin.None of Montana’s congressional delegation — Senators Sheehy and Steve Daines, and Zinke and Downing — responded to multiple requests for comment for this story.“When programs get cut, when you lose staff ... ” Iverson trails off. “I’m worried about what this means in the long term, what it’s going to look like in the future.”Iverson is representative of Montana politics up until 2024, when the population was still small enough that it was possible to know national elected officials on a first-name basis — in fact, Iverson went to college with Zinke — and people often voted for the person rather than the party. “I’m pretty darn moderate, but I tend to lean conservative, vote Republican,” said Iverson. “But I never vote a straight-party ticket.”He voted for Trump — although he’s not a fan of Trump’s plan to lower beef prices and import Argentine meat, or Trump’s tariffs that are affecting fertilizer and fuel. He also voted for Tester, because “we worked with him a lot on conservation issues and other farm bill issues, and he was always responsive to folks in Montana.” Sheehy has to earn his trust, he says.When I asked Iverson if these cuts are affecting how he’ll vote, he said, “For me, it’s about, what are they doing for Montana? Are they advocating for conservation and farmers and ranchers, and the things I really care about?” He’s waiting for things on the ground to shake out.One of the other major sectors in rural Montana reeling from the cuts is forestry: a big umbrella that includes wildfire mitigation specialists, sawmill workers and other timber workers. I spoke to a forester in western Montana who owns a forestry business and employs a hand crew that does wildfire mitigation, thinning projects, service work on timber sales and tree planting. He was granted anonymity due to concerns for his business if he appeared in an article about politics.Like most people here who work on public land, he told me he doesn’t do it for the money; there’s not much money in it, anyway, belying the DOGE claims of significant cost saving to taxpayers as a whole. The four major public lands agencies — USFS, BLM, National Park Service, and FWS — had a combined total of $15.7 billion in government-appropriated funds in 2024. (For comparison, ICE’s newly expanded 2025 budget is $170 billion.) “I started in 1985 and I’m 57 now. I realized pretty early on, you're not going to get rich,” he said. “I just love to be in the woods. It gets into your blood.”When the cuts came down, they hit him hard. “Fifty percent of my income comes from federal dollars,” he said, some administered by groups like the Blackfoot Challenge, and some direct from public lands agencies that work with private contractors. He was out of work for a month in the spring due to the cuts. And it wasn’t just him losing out on income; he couldn’t pay his employees, either.“I wrote the senators and called, but I got no response, ever. I don’t want to have to go through this every year.” While some funds were unthawed and he was able to get to work, he says the uncertainty about the administration enacting more cuts is “nerve-wracking.” “The unknown of if I’m going to have contracts next year — it's very stressful. And then you’ve got to tell your employees what's going on, and they might be thinking about finding another job. I can't think of anything more stressful than not having a job that you're counting on.”Juanita Vero, Missoula County commissioner and fourth-generation owner of the E Bar L Guest Ranch, which is also part of the Blackfoot Challenge, confirms that as commissioner, she heard from a lot of people who were similarly affected. “These are folks who are skilled at working in the woods. … A lot of these guys were on a payment plan for buying equipment, ready to do this contracted work, and funds are frozen, and they can't do their work. They don't have a cushion. That was really scary and frustrating.”In March, Trump signed an executive order to increase logging on public lands. But DOGE cut many of the agency employees needed to administer the timber sales for logging, and for thinning and fire mitigation. If there’s no one to administer the sales, then private forestry contractors like the forester I spoke to can’t execute those projects. In addition, the U.S. no longer has the infrastructure to process the increased timber mandated by the executive order, and the government doesn’t appear to be investing in resurrecting it.When it comes to wildfire, the cuts represent a threat for entire rural counties. Ravalli County, which Trump won by 60 points (and is home to the famous ranch in the show Yellowstone), is surrounded by public lands. It’s frequently listed as one of the most at-risk counties in Montana, if not the entire West, for wildfires that consume properties and homes. In response to the cuts, the Ravalli County Collaborative, a group appointed by the county commissioners to promote the wise use of natural resources, pleaded with Montana’s congressional delegation to stand up to DOGE and re-staff the Bitterroot National Forest to mitigate wildfire — to no avail.Most people in Montana believe it’s only luck that the state didn’t see its usual major fire this year, or a big windstorm that decimates trails. Either of those would have exposed the new fragility of the agencies to respond to disaster, and even everyday maintenance needs — a fragility that many suspect may be intentional. Some worry that this administration’s cuts to public lands are a deliberate attempt to sabotage the system as an excuse to sell those lands for profit.“Hollowing out staffing, cutting budgets, changing priorities — all of that very much lends itself to the idea of essentially causing those agencies to fail at meeting their mandates, and that will lead to the call for privatization,” Sarah Lundstrum, Glacier program manager with the National Parks Conservation Association, told me for a story I reported for The Guardian on cuts that affected Glacier National Park. “Because if the government can't manage that land, then obviously somebody else should, right? In documents like Project 2025, there are calls for the privatization of land, or the sell-off of land.”In response, a representative from the Department of the Interior said that the DOI “is committed to stewarding America’s public lands and any suggestion that this Administration is seeking to sell them off is simply false ... Our mission remains to protect public lands, support rural livelihoods and ensure communities are more resilient in the face of increasing wildfire risk.”Many Montanans spoke sweepingly and passionately about the way of life here that has been created and sustained by public lands, and it’s clear those lands engender a value system around conservation and environmental stewardship that is unique to these regions. It’s indicative of a larger concern at play here: that this way of life itself, which is both rural and conservationist, is under threat because of continued attacks on public lands.Hunters, who rely on public lands, are some of the greatest conservationists in the state. They often help inform agency biologists of wildlife numbers on the ground. The group, including Zink, is responsible for rebounding mountain lions in the state by advocating for improved lion management. Nationally, hunters and anglers fund wildlife restoration, habitat improvement and land acquisition for conservation through a tax on hunting and angling equipment and licenses that sportsmen themselves lobbied for and helped pass. Zink regularly donates goods and dollars from his business to hunting organizations dedicated to protecting public lands and wildlife.To Zink, any political agenda that attacks public lands is a non-starter. He’s already watching wealthy people buy up land in Montana and close off access to adjacent public lands — or buying up a whole mountain range, in one case. “Both the rich and the poor get to use public lands. I believe every piece of public land in the West should be able to be accessed by public land hunters. The wildlife belongs to we the people.”That’s true even though 80 percent of the U.S. population lives east of the Mississippi River, while about 90 percent of all public land lies in Western states. But just because many Americans may not spend as much time in them, that doesn’t mean they should have less value to people in the East, says outfitter Jack Rich.Rich is one of more than 100 outfitters and guides who make up a major economic engine in the state; in 2024, outfitting and guiding brought in nearly $314 million to Montana. He owns the Rich Ranch, an outfitting and guest ranch outside Seeley on the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, one of the largest wildernesses in the Lower 48. Rich — whose ancestors came to Montana before it was even named a territory — hosts guests at the ranch and takes people hiking, horseback riding, hunting, fishing and on pack trips. He speaks in the soaring oratorial style of famous outdoorsmen like John Muir and Bradford Washburn and sometimes falls into reciting poetry.“Outfitters play an incredible, vital role, which is sometimes underappreciated, in making sure that those people who don't have the skills and equipment can still enjoy America’s great outdoors — and in the process, become advocates for it in their own right,” he said. “We have a partner in that: the government. And the partnership only works if both partners work together for the same end goal, which is to care for the resources and serve the people.”Outfitters and guides have permits to operate on public lands and rely on agency staff to administer the permits, in addition to maintaining those lands, from wildlife habitat to trail clearing. As the DOGE cuts came down and trail crews were laid off, outfitters across the state, including Rich, have been obligated to clear more trails on their own, many without compensation for the labor. Rich also said that high-level USFS employees that he’d had longtime working relationships with — the regional forester, forest supervisor, and district ranger — all took the early retirement package the administration offered, gutting the institutional knowledge on the Flathead National Forest.Many Montanans I spoke to were all for more government efficiency and agreed that some “fat” needed to be trimmed, but that fat, they said, was most often in the middle management ranks. While hard numbers have been difficult to pin down, and the employees remaining at agencies often aren’t authorized to speak to media, the general sense from ex-employees and people working adjacent to the agencies is that the DOGE approach instead wiped out the upper ranks with institutional knowledge through buyout offers and early retirement packages — which means taxpayers are now paying for those ex-employees to do nothing rather saving the money DOGE touted. At the same time, the terminations targeting probationary and seasonal employees eliminated the next generation of public lands stewards. “It’s a pretty dismal way to do business,” Rich said.Most voters seem to be waiting to see how this administration’s cuts and policies, and the response to them from Montana’s congressional delegation, play out on the ground after court stays; essentially, they’re waiting to see what will stick. Daines is up for re-election in 2026. Although no Democrat has galvanized enough support to represent a real challenge and take advantage of this unrest around public lands, there is still time — especially since most agree that the ripple effects from the cuts, while people are already feeling them, have yet to fully hit.And it's only very recently that Montana shifted from a purple state to red. If national Republicans continue to make public lands a target of budget cuts, without understanding the unique politics of them in Western states like Montana, some suggest the party will likely have to face the wrath of these voters.“If we get poked too hard on this, they’re going to get primaried and voted out,” Zink said.A mostly Republican group of voters who are highly motivated by public lands has organized and caused an upset before. In 2018, midway through Trump’s first administration, which slashed national monuments and opened increased amounts of public land to resource extraction, hunters and anglers in Idaho and Wyoming voted down Republican gubernatorial candidates who attacked public lands in the Trump vein. Something similar could easily happen here. Montana is home to more hunters than Idaho or Wyoming — or any other Western state, for that matter — with more than three in five voters considering themselves a hunter or an angler.Rich, who’s registered Independent, recently took a retired senator and congressman, both of whom represented Eastern states, out into the Bob on horseback.“We were standing at a high mountain lake and I said, ‘Remember, the coolest thing is that this belongs to every American equally, whether you’re in New York City or Montana. We have the money and the technology to tame every single landscape. The reason we have wild places in their natural state is because we as a society have chosen that. If we no longer choose that, it will go away.’”“I think that if there is a place that can galvanize across the geopolitical spectrum, it's the treasure of our public lands, waters, wildlife and fisheries,” Rich said, “the things that we have that are uniquely American.”

Agriculture
Business
Conservation

Mothers' Milk Might Be Key To Avoiding Childhood Food Allergies

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterMONDAY, Dec. 15, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Farm kids tend to have far fewer allergies than urban children, and a...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterMONDAY, Dec. 15, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Farm kids tend to have far fewer allergies than urban children, and a new study offers one possible explanation: The milk provided by breastfeeding moms.Children who grow up in farming communities have immune systems that mature faster, with higher levels of protective antibodies during their first year of life, researchers reported Dec. 10 in Science Translational Medicine.They’re getting these antibodies — and the immune cells that produce them — from their mothers’ milk, researchers say.Researchers came to this conclusion studying infants from Old Order Mennonite farming families in New York’s Finger Lakes region.“We’ve known that Old Order Mennonite children are remarkably protected from allergies,” said senior researcher Dr. Kirsi Järvinen-Seppo, chief of pediatric allergy and immunology at the University of Rochester Medicine’s Golisano Children’s Hospital.“What this study shows is that their B cell and antibody responses are essentially ahead of schedule compared to urban infants,” she continued in a news release. “Their immune systems seem better equipped, earlier in life, to handle foods and other exposures without overreacting.”For the new study, researchers compared 78 mother/child pairs from the Old Order Mennonite community with 79 moms and kids from urban and suburban Rochester. They followed the mothers and children through the first year of life, collecting blood, stool, saliva and human milk samples.Results showed that farm-exposed babies had higher levels of immune cells, suggesting that their immune systems were more mature than those of city kids.The researchers also found higher levels of antibodies in the human milk samples provided by their moms.The research team then took a closer look at egg allergies, one of the most common food allergies in young children.Farm children had higher levels of egg-specific antibodies in their blood, and mothers had higher levels of egg-specific antibodies in their breast milk, the study found.Meanwhile, Rochester babies had varying levels of egg-specific antibodies in their blood, and this was linked to their risk for egg allergy. The more antibodies, the lower their risk of egg allergy.“We saw a continuum: the more egg-specific antibodies in breast milk, the less likely babies were to develop egg allergy,” Järvinen-Seppo said. “We cannot prove causality from this study, but the association is compelling.”Why did Mennonite moms have more of these egg-specific antibodies? Probably diet, researchers said.Old Order Mennonite families typically raise their own chickens and eat a lot of eggs. That repeated exposure seems to boost mothers’ antibody levels against egg proteins, and they pass that protection on to their children through breast milk.“Just as an infection or a vaccine can boost your antibody levels, regularly eating certain foods could do the same,” Järvinen-Seppo said. “Mennonite mothers eat more eggs, and that may help them pass more egg-specific antibodies to their babies through breast milk.”Mennonite infants were also born with higher cord blood levels of antibodies to dust mites and horses, reflecting the environmental allergens to which their moms are regularly exposed, researchers said.But Rochester babies had higher levels of antibodies to peanuts and cats, reflecting the more common allergen exposures of suburban and urban moms.These results show why breastfeeding has not been consistently linked to a lower risk of food allergies, Järvinen-Seppo said, because it all depends on what a mom has been eating.“Our data suggest there may be particular benefit when mothers have high levels of food-specific antibodies in their milk,” she said. “Not every mother does, and that could help explain why results have been mixed on the association between breast feeding and food allergy.”However, mothers’ milk likely isn’t the only reason why farm kids have fewer allergies, Järvinen-Seppo said.Daily exposure to farm animals and germs, drinking well water, less use of antibiotics and distinctly different patterns of gut bacteria all have been previously shown to also help shape the allergy resistance of rural children, researchers said.They’re now conducting a clinical trial involving expecting mothers who will be assigned to either eat or avoid egg and peanut during late pregnancy and early breastfeeding. The team then will compare mothers’ antibody levels and their kids’ development of food allergies.“We already know that introducing peanut and egg directly to babies early in life can lower allergy risk,” Järvinen-Seppo said. “Now we’re asking whether mothers’ diets during pregnancy and breastfeeding can add another layer of protection through the antibodies they pass to their babies. Ultimately, our goal is to translate what we learn from these communities into safe, practical strategies for all families.”The American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology has more on food allergies.SOURCES: University of Rochester, news release, Dec. 9, 2025; Science Translational Medicine, Dec. 10, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Food
Health
Science

Supersized data centers are coming. See how they will transform America.

These AI campuses consume more power than major U.S. cities. Their footprints are measured in miles, not feet.

Supersized data centers are coming. See how they will transform America.This coal plant in central Pennsylvania, once the largest in the state, was shuttered in 2023 after powering the region for over 50 years.Earlier this year, wrecking crews blasted the plant’s cooling towers and soaring chimneys.Rising from the dust in Homer City will be a colossal artificial intelligence data center campus that will include seven 30-acre gas generating stations on-site, fueled by Pennsylvania’s natural gas boom.December 15, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EST6 minutes agoShawn Steffee of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers is hopeful.“The closing of the coal plant had been really brutal,” he said. “But this project just took the entire chess board and flipped it.”The Homer City facility will generate and consume as much power as all the homes in the Philadelphia urban area. It is among a generation of new supersized data centers sprouting across the country, the footprints of which are measured in miles, not feet.They are part of an AI moon shot, driven by an escalating U.S.-China war over dominance in the field. The projects are starting to transform landscapes and communities, sparking debates about what our energy systems and environment can sustain. The price includes increasing power costs for everyone and worrying surges in emissions and pollutants, according to government, industry and academic analyses.By 2030, industry and government projections show data centers could gobble up more than 10 percent of the nation’s power usage.Estimates vary, but all show a dizzying rise of between 60 and 150 percent in energy consumption by 2030. On average, they project U.S. data centers will use about 430 trillion watt-hours by 2030. That is enough electricity to power nearly 16 Chicagos.Some forecasts project it will keep growing from there.“These things are industrial on a scale I have never seen in my life,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a House committee earlier this year.Power use by U.S. data centers is growing exponentially, with large forecast uncertaintySource: Washington Post analysis of IEA, BNEF, LBNL and EPRI estimates. Past uncertainty stems from varying inventories of data centers and assumptions about their utilization.Tech companies that once pledged to use clean energy alone are fast reconsidering. They now need too much uninterrupted power, too fast. According to the International Energy Agency, the No. 1 power source to meet this need will be natural gas.“While we remain committed to our climate moonshots, it’s become clear that achieving them is now more complex and challenging across every level,” Google states in its 2025 environmental impact report. The company says meeting its goal of eliminating all emissions by 2030 has become “very difficult.”Data center firms have already approached the Homer City project’s natural gas provider, EQT, seeking enough fuel to power the equivalent of eight more Homer City projects around the country, EQT CEO Toby Rice said in an interview. And EQT is just one of dozens of U.S. natural gas suppliers.What’s at stakeData centers’ surging electricity needs are straining America’s aging power grid and undercutting tech companies’ climate goals.A single supersized “data campus” would draw as much power as millions of homes.The boom is riding on burning huge amounts of planet-warming natural gas, once cast as a transition fuel on the way to a cleaner grid.Not building the projects, however, risks ceding AI dominance to China.Some question if all these gas power plants will be necessary as AI technology rapidly becomes more efficient.“We’ll be shipping more gas than we ever thought,” said Arshad Mansoor, president and CEO of the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute. “We are even unretiring coal.”Mansoor predicts it will all work out: He and others in the industry foresee the crushing demand leading to swift breakthroughs in clean energy innovation and deployment. That could include futuristic fusion power, they said, or more conventional technologies that capture natural gas emissions.But some are more skeptical. The independent monitor charged with keeping tabs on the PJM power grid — which serves 65 million customers in the eastern U.S. — is warning that it can’t handle more data centers. It urged federal regulators to indefinitely block more data centers on its grid to protect existing customers.Even in cities yearning to become the next data center hub — with unions welcoming the burst of construction jobs and elected officials offering lucrative tax packages — some apprehension remains.“It’s going to be new to everybody,” said Steffee, of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. “We all have to figure out how to start transitioning into this and what the ripple effects will be.”Homer City offers a glimpse of what is coming nationwide.In the Texas Panhandle, the company Fermi America broke ground this year on what it says will be a 5,800-acre complex of gas plants and giant nuclear reactors that would ultimately feed up to 18 million square feet of on-site data centers. It would dwarf Homer City in energy use.Tech companies are planning data ‘campuses’ that would dwarf existing centersIn Cheyenne, Wyoming, developers are aiming to generate 10 gigawatts of electricity for on-site data centers. That’s enough energy to power every house in Wyoming 20 times over. In rural Louisiana, Meta is building a $30 billion cluster of data center buildings that will stretch nearly the length and width of Manhattan.Such facilities will create a major climate challenge. By the mid 2030s, forecasts show the world’s data centers could drive as much carbon pollution as the New York, Chicago and Houston metro areas combined.Check our workDrone video of the Homer City power plant post-demolition courtesy of Homer City Redevelopment LLC. Photo of the power plant before demolition by Keith Srakocic/AP.The data centers map is based on extracts from datacentermap.com and CleanView. The map showing planned projects includes sites already under construction.The chart showing the aggregate power demand from U.S. data centers averages historical estimates and future projections from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, IEA, BloombergNEF and EPRI.To estimate the power consumption of a data center, The Post assumed a 67 percent utilization rate. For comparison, residential electricity use in various cities was estimated from household counts and state-level per-household averages from the EIA.

Climate
Energy
Government

Deep-learning model predicts how fruit flies form, cell by cell

The approach could apply to more complex tissues and organs, helping researchers to identify early signs of disease.

During early development, tissues and organs begin to bloom through the shifting, splitting, and growing of many thousands of cells.A team of MIT engineers has now developed a way to predict, minute by minute, how individual cells will fold, divide, and rearrange during a fruit fly’s earliest stage of growth. The new method may one day be applied to predict the development of more complex tissues, organs, and organisms. It could also help scientists identify cell patterns that correspond to early-onset diseases, such as asthma and cancer.In a study appearing today in the journal Nature Methods, the team presents a new deep-learning model that learns, then predicts, how certain geometric properties of individual cells will change as a fruit fly develops. The model records and tracks properties such as a cell’s position, and whether it is touching a neighboring cell at a given moment.The team applied the model to videos of developing fruit fly embryos, each of which starts as a cluster of about 5,000 cells. They found the model could predict, with 90 percent accuracy, how each of the 5,000 cells would fold, shift, and rearrange, minute by minute, during the first hour of development, as the embryo morphs from a smooth, uniform shape into more defined structures and features.“This very initial phase is known as gastrulation, which takes place over roughly one hour, when individual cells are rearranging on a time scale of minutes,” says study author Ming Guo, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “By accurately modeling this early period, we can start to uncover how local cell interactions give rise to global tissues and organisms.”The researchers hope to apply the model to predict the cell-by-cell development in other species, such zebrafish and mice. Then, they can begin to identify patterns that are common across species. The team also envisions that the method could be used to discern early patterns of disease, such as in asthma. Lung tissue in people with asthma looks markedly different from healthy lung tissue. How asthma-prone tissue initially develops is an unknown process that the team’s new method could potentially reveal.“Asthmatic tissues show different cell dynamics when imaged live,” says co-author and MIT graduate student Haiqian Yang. “We envision that our model could capture these subtle dynamical differences and provide a more comprehensive representation of tissue behavior, potentially improving diagnostics or drug-screening assays.”The study’s co-authors are Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; George Roy and Tomer Stern of the University of Michigan; and Anh Nguyen and Dapeng Bi of Northeastern University.Points and foamsScientists typically model how an embryo develops in one of two ways: as a point cloud, where each point represents an individual cell as point that moves over time; or as a “foam,” which represents individual cells as bubbles that shift and slide against each other, similar to the bubbles in shaving foam.Rather than choose between the two approaches, Guo and Yang embraced both.“There’s a debate about whether to model as a point cloud or a foam,” Yang says. “But both of them are essentially different ways of modeling the same underlying graph, which is an elegant way to represent living tissues. By combining these as one graph, we can highlight more structural information, like how cells are connected to each other as they rearrange over time.”At the heart of the new model is a “dual-graph” structure that represents a developing embryo as both moving points and bubbles. Through this dual representation, the researchers hoped to capture more detailed geometric properties of individual cells, such as the location of a cell’s nucleus, whether a cell is touching a neighboring cell, and whether it is folding or dividing at a given moment in time.As a proof of principle, the team trained the new model to “learn” how individual cells change over time during fruit fly gastrulation.“The overall shape of the fruit fly at this stage is roughly an ellipsoid, but there are gigantic dynamics going on at the surface during gastrulation,” Guo says. “It goes from entirely smooth to forming a number of folds at different angles. And we want to predict all of those dynamics, moment to moment, and cell by cell.”Where and whenFor their new study, the researchers applied the new model to high-quality videos of fruit fly gastrulation taken by their collaborators at the University of Michigan. The videos are one-hour recordings of developing fruit flies, taken at single-cell resolution. What’s more, the videos contain labels of individual cells’ edges and nuclei — data that are incredibly detailed and difficult to come by.“These videos are of extremely high quality,” Yang says. “This data is very rare, where you get submicron resolution of the whole 3D volume at a pretty fast frame rate.”The team trained the new model with data from three of four fruit fly embryo videos, such that the model might “learn” how individual cells interact and change as an embryo develops. They then tested the model on an entirely new fruit fly video, and found that it was able to predict with high accuracy how most of the embryo’s 5,000 cells changed from minute to minute.Specifically, the model could predict properties of individual cells, such as whether they will fold, divide, or continue sharing an edge with a neighboring cell, with about 90 percent accuracy.“We end up predicting not only whether these things will happen, but also when,” Guo says. “For instance, will this cell detach from this cell seven minutes from now, or eight? We can tell when that will happen.”The team believes that, in principle, the new model, and the dual-graph approach, should be able to predict the cell-by-cell development of other multiceullar systems, such as more complex species, and even some human tissues and organs. The limiting factor is the availability of high-quality video data.“From the model perspective, I think it’s ready,” Guo says. “The real bottleneck is the data. If we have good quality data of specific tissues, the model could be directly applied to predict the development of many more structures.”This work is supported, in part, by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Health
Nature

What your cheap clothes cost the planet

A global supply chain built for speed is leaving behind waste, toxins, and a trail of environmental wreckage.

The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the most beautiful and forbidding places on Earth, so dry that it’s sometimes used by scientists to test run Mars missions. Most years the area sees less than half a centimeter of rain, but this past September unusually heavy precipitation brought forth a desert bloom, blanketing the ground with delicate purple flowers that disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared. It was a rare treat for locals used to grimmer ornamentation: Since 2001, colorful mountains of used clothing have been the main feature growing across the Atacama. By the time the largest mound was set on fire in 2022, it contained some 100,000 tons of discarded fabric, roughly the weight of an aircraft carrier. Today, piles like it continue to grow. This fashion graveyard has become so large that some outlets have dubbed it the “great fashion garbage patch.” It owes its growth to the nearby duty-free port of Iquique, where Chile imports all manner of international goods without customs or taxes — including heaps of used clothing from the United States, Europe, and Asia. While the best items are resold to international markets, overwhelming volumes of cheap fast-fashion pieces don’t make the cut. Instead, they are dumped in the desert — an open secret that the government largely ignores. The burnings, whether they’re intended to destroy the evidence or make more space, fill nearby towns with smoky, unhealthy air. Women sort through used clothes amid the tons that are discarded in the Atacama desert, in 2021 in Alto Hospicio, Iquique, Chile. Martin Bernetti / AFP via Getty Images Activists have been fighting against this desert dumping for years, documenting the burnings and suing both the federal and local governments to stop it. But the real blame for Chile’s mess lies beyond the country’s borders. From the moment these garments are spun from fibers to the time of their undignified disposal, they are part of a vast global pollution machine — one that has grown massively as the world economy has globalized and factories have begun pumping out ever-cheaper, ever-faster styles to customers half a world away.  This new hyper-vast, hyper-fast-fashion system is phenomenally destructive. Today, the clothing trade generates some 170 billion garments a year — roughly half of which wind up being thrown out within that year, and almost all of which despoil the world’s land, air, and seas. In the process, it generates as much as 10 percent of all planet-warming emissions, making it the second-largest industrial polluter, while also holding the distinction of being the world’s second-largest consumer and polluter of water. When all its many offenses are cataloged and counted, fashion is the third-most-polluting industry on the planet, after energy and food.  Things weren’t always this bad. While fashion has long left trails of environmental devastation in its wake — just ask the poor snowy egret, sacrificed by the thousands to decorate a generation of women’s hats — it was kept in relative check, even as globalization ramped up, by a 1974 trade agreement known as the Multi Fibre Arrangement. This agreement allowed nations to regulate the number of textile and clothing imports allowed into their countries, thereby protecting domestic production. But its expiration on January 1, 2005, essentially heralded fashion’s NAFTA moment. Low-cost goods from countries such as China and Bangladesh began flooding the United States and the European Union, which undercut domestic production in developing countries by saturating those markets with used clothing. The loosening of the century-old de minimis loophole in 2016, which allowed packages under $800 to enter the United States without tariffs, allowed Shein and Temu, the notorious Chinese e-commerce giants, to grow exponentially. Some observers of the fashion industry have speculated that it might be on the cusp of a reckoning. The elimination of the de minimis exemption, together with Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, has sent shock waves through the industry, rattling U.S. consumers — and with them, major brands like Shein and Temu. Both have already begun to compensate for the drop in U.S. sales by redirecting their efforts toward Europe and Australia while moving their operations to other countries. Other companies, meanwhile, have simply begun offsetting their losses by trimming their sustainability efforts, raising serious fears of an even faster race to the bottom. All of which raises the questions: How did we get into this situation? And, more important, how do we get out?  The typical fast-fashion jeans are worn only seven times before being tossed, giving the garment a carbon footprint that is more than 10 times higher per wear than traditional denim. Olga Pankova / Getty Images Step 1: A dirty, bloated underbelly To understand how our garments got so noxious, it helps to go back to the beginning: to how our clothes become clothes in the first place. Take any item of attire — from Lululemon athleisure leggings to the summer of 2024’s viral Uniqlo baby tee; from the swankiest gowns to the most nondescript knockoff jeans — and the story is almost always the same: Most clothes start their lives deep in the ground, either as seeds of cotton or in the nearly 342 million barrels of crude oil that go into the making of synthetic fabrics every year. Most of the problems start with one of these two origin stories. Today, synthetic fibers make up nearly 70 percent of all textile production. Polyester has become particularly ubiquitous across styles and brands, whether those brands are fast-fashion behemoths or rarefied luxury houses. Its soft, stretchy nature can mimic traditional textiles or be engineered into modern, high-performance meshes. Its low cost — just half the price of cotton in some instances — makes it an attractive option for brands and suppliers looking to snag profits while offering lower prices to customers.  But beneath its malleable folds lies a nasty business. Commercialized by the chemical giant DuPont in the mid-1900s, the process of making polyester involves superheating two petroleum-based chemicals — ethylene glycol (also used in antifreeze) and terephthalic acid (commonly used in plastic bottles) — and extruding the mixture through tiny holes to form yarn. In 2015, this process was estimated to produce as much annual carbon pollution as 180 coal-fired power plants. As the resulting polyfabrics are woven, washed, treated, and sewn into garments, they continually shed plastic microfibers. Meanwhile, plant-based fibers like linen and cotton, which currently make up a quarter of global textile production, come with their own complications. Compared to other major crops, cotton is considered resource-intensive, earning a reputation among environmental organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Justice Foundation, as particularly thirsty, based on the amount of water it consumes, and dirty, based on the quantity of chemical pesticides used to grow it. The cotton fiber needed to manufacture a classic jeans-and-tee outfit requires roughly 500 gallons of irrigation water (and an additional 1,500 gallons of rainwater) to grow. And while cotton takes up a little less than 3 percent of all farmable land, its production accounts for some 5 percent of all pesticide sales and 10 percent of insecticide sales. Other, less common fashion fabrics, such as viscose (made from the pulp of more than 100 million trees per year), come with their own environmental trade-offs — a 2023 report found that nearly a third of those trees came from old-growth or endangered forests. Over the past decade, blended fabrics that mix various types of synthetic fibers and organic ones have become increasingly common, creating an engineering headache for recycling initiatives and spreading plastic’s presence ever further.  The environmental impact of your jacket Higher impact: Quilted jackets stuffed with down — generally goose feathers — have been standard-issue for the last century. But polyester fill has begun to dominate the market, and manufacturers have relied on a toxic group of chemicals known as PFAS to waterproof the jackets. These “forever chemicals” don’t degrade naturally, and they have infiltrated drinking water, farmland, and the human body. Down carries its own baggage: It often involves plucking feathers from birds while they’re still alive. Lower impact: Brands have begun developing alternatives to PFAS in anticipation of bans that went into effect in 2025 in California and New York. Patagonia and Vaude have phased out PFAS use entirely, while Gore-Tex, Fjällräven, and Sympatex all offer PFAS-free options. Patagonia, Houdini, and Cotopaxi have also revamped their process for making synthetic fill to use recycled and plant-based materials and produce less emissions.   The environmental impact of your T-shirt Higher impact: Growing, weaving, dyeing, and manufacturing cotton into a T-shirt can require more than 700 gallons of water — enough for a single person to drink for 900 days. Cotton cultivation also requires heavy chemical use; some estimates indicate the crop accounts for roughly 16 percent of all insecticides sold worldwide. Lower impact: Hemp-jersey blends can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of a T-shirt. Hemp has low water needs, requiring as much as 90 percent less water than cotton. And because the plant sequesters a lot of CO2 as it grows, its overall carbon footprint is significantly lower than that of other fibers. Step 2: Toxic textiles Once the requisite materials have been grown, harvested, or extracted from DuPont’s primordial ooze, they’re turned into fabric, bleached, and dyed. This is an enormously toxic process that’s estimated to be responsible for 20 percent of water pollution worldwide. Pesticides used to grow cotton are flushed into waterways, along with bleach and the heavy metals — such as cadmium, chromium, lead, and arsenic — found in dye. The World Bank has identified at least 72 toxic chemicals involved in the standard industrial dyeing process, and once those chemicals make their way into aquifers, the knock-on effects are dire.  Dark sludge from clothing factories fills nearby lakes and streams, blocking the light needed for photosynthesis and destroying aquatic ecosystems. Even rinsing synthetic fabrics sends microplastics racing down the drain, and experts estimate that about half a million metric tons of microplastics make their way into the oceans each year — equivalent to the weight of 50 Eiffel Towers. Some of this contaminated water is then reused to irrigate local crops, causing health problems for the surrounding community, reducing crop yields, and harming biodiversity.  The Citarum River, in West Java, Indonesia, is a toxic testament to this process — the transformation of raw fabric into the pretty hues and bright patterns that make our wardrobes pop. Once a pristine waterway that flowed past cozy farming villages and bustling cities, it became a dumping site for hundreds of textile mills in the 1980s. As more and more arose along its banks, they spilled their waste directly into the river and its tributaries, staining them blue, red, yellow, and black and saturating them with mercury, lead, chromium, and other chemicals. For years, people who live near the river have reported skin rashes and intestinal problems along with more serious conditions like renal failure and tumors — and while the Indonesian government vowed in 2018 to make the river’s waters clean enough to drink by 2025, that deadline has come and almost gone. The river remains one of the most polluted in the world. Piles of rags sorted by color await recycling in a textile factory in Valencia Province, Spain. Only 1 percent of used clothes are recycled and used to manufacture new clothes. Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty Images Step 3: How fast is too fast? Once the clothes have been manufactured and are ready to be shipped, fashion can generally be sorted into several buckets: fast, faster, and ultra-fast. More traditional brands like Levi’s, Gap, and Nike will design a collection of apparel in advance of a season and then commission the production of their garments to factories in other countries, thus starting the clothing’s journey along a lengthy supply chain. According to McKinsey, the lag time between design and sale can be as little as 12 weeks. Fast-fashion brands like Zara, H&M, and Forever 21 move through “microseasons” still more quickly, releasing dozens of collections per year. And ultra-fast-fashion brands like Shein, Temu, and Cider can design, manufacture, and ship a new garment in a matter of days.  All this speed means different kinds of waste, depending on which bucket a garment falls into. To know exactly how much of each garment to make, traditional and fast-fashion retailers try to predict demand. But because each individual blouse, skirt, and jacket requires its own bespoke assembly line, factories incentivize retailers to buy in bulk, which lowers the brand’s cost per item and helps the supplier stay efficient. It’s a tricky balance, but with profits and savings in mind, the default is to order too much. If you’re curious about which brands might be overstocking offenders, keep an eye out for frequent sales or steep discounts. In 2022, the apparel giant Asos was left with over $1 billion of unsold stock after sales dropped from the previous year. It struck a deal with a resale company to sell its remaining stock at a heavy discount. In the same year, Gap Inc. — which owns brands including Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta — went on a discounting marathon, with multiple sales events in a row to trim down its warehouse bloat. Luxury fashion brands, which are known for destroying their excess merchandise to maintain their products’ exclusivity and value, are also responsible for the largest Black Friday discounts, with up to 46 percent of stock marked down in previous years.   Available statistics suggest that this global surplus could amount to anywhere between 8 billion and 60 billion garments a year, as reported in The Guardian. And that’s not including the textiles that never get turned into clothing. The destiny of all that material varies: Some of it is sold at a discount or recycled, but much of it winds up in landfills or incinerated. A discarded shoe floats in the waters off Okinawa, Japan, in June. The footwear industry accounts for about 1.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than half that of the airline industry. D3_plus D.Naruse @ Japan / Getty Images Paradoxically, the new ultra-fast-fashion models embraced by brands like Shein are “more efficient,” according to Valérie Moatti, a former professor of fashion supply-chain management and strategy. Shein, for instance, claims to make only 100 to 200 copies of each garment, with unsold inventory in the single digits — thanks, largely, to its data-forward business model, which leverages predictive AI algorithms to identify “microtrends” in fashion. Yet that efficiency creates its own problems. In 2023, Shein nudged out Zara for the title of biggest polluter in fast fashion. Shein’s e-commerce model, while speedy, relies on small-package air shipment, which is highly carbon-intensive, instead of the bulk ocean shipping typically used by fashion brands. With up to 10,000 new items released for sale on its site every day, Shein has flooded the U.S. postal system with as many as 900,000 packages a day. This air shipping accounts for up to 38 percent of Shein’s emissions, which nearly doubled between 2022 and 2023 to 16 million metric tons of CO2. By contrast, Inditex, which owns Zara and uses primarily sea and road shipping, reported that it released a little over 2 million metric tons of CO2 transporting its products in the same year. The environmental impact of your jeans Higher impact: New denim jeans, traditionally made mostly of cotton, carry many of the same environmental burdens as a cotton T-shirt. In recent years, elastic textures made from synthetic blends have added microplastics to the denim equation. Washing a single pair of jeans can release up to 56,000 microfibers into wastewater systems. They spread from there into the environment. Lower impact: Buying secondhand jeans can cut carbon costs by 90 percent, while cold-washing and and line-drying may reduce the carbon cost by 70 percent compared with machine-washing. Extending the lifespan of your garments by just nine months can reduce their carbon, water, and waste footprints by 20 percent. The environmental impact of your leggings Higher impact: Most exercise leggings are synthetic, generally made up of roughly 85 percent polyester and 15 percent Lycra (commonly known as spandex). This means they’re a fossil fuel product and will shed microplastics when washed or worn. Lower impact: Since 2019, the production of activewear made from recycled polyester has increased by 80 percent. Buying from brands like Puma, Patagonia, and Adidas that use recycled polyester may help curb the carbon cost of your outfit. To prevent your clothes from shedding microfibers, the company Guppyfriend offers an eco-friendly washing bag. Step 4: From closet to landfill Once the spoils of someone’s latest shopping spree have found a home in their closet, they likely won’t remain there for long. In 2024, researchers found that the average fast-fashion pair of jeans is worn only seven times, giving them a carbon footprint 11 times higher per wear than traditional denim pants. A typical pair of jeans is kept, on average, for four years before being tossed. Even when clothes are donated, they often end up burned or in a landfill, where they belch greenhouse gases, like methane, as they decay. Anything made with synthetic fibers, like stretchy “denim,” see-through mesh, and athletic wear, sheds plastic microfibers into soil and waterways. And while California and New York have banned the toxic forever chemicals known as PFAS in apparel and textiles, decades of their use in waterproofing outdoor wear means that our discarded rain jackets are leaching the pollutants too.  “In the United States, we consume the most apparel in the world, and so we are also the largest exporters and waste creators of fashion,” said Rachel Kibbe, who leads American Circular Textiles, a coalition that lobbies for fashion policies that are “sustainable, profitable, and resilient” in the U.S. “It’s a missed opportunity to recapture resources that we’ve already put a lot of time, labor, energy, water, and chemicals into.”  Kibbe’s organization is at the forefront of the emerging movement around “circularity,” a term that refers to a closed-loop supply chain that continually repurposes clothing. Touted by international nonprofits, major brands, and advocates alike, the word has become the de facto slogan for those promoting clothing recycling. For Kibbe, circularity means extending the life of the materials as long as possible. Last year, her coalition provided technical feedback on a California bill that requires manufacturers to manage the recycling and reuse of their textiles. The law, passed in September 2024, mirrors a flurry of similar fast-fashion waste regulations in the European Union. But turning old rags into new garments poses a steep technical challenge. While features like zippers and buttons create their own difficulties for recycling clothes into new fabrics, the bigger issue is the industry’s growing reliance on blended fabrics — an intricate mix of synthetic and natural fibers that are difficult to pull back apart.  Although the technology exists to separate these fibers for reuse, it remains in its early stages and is costly to scale. In 2024, Renewcell, a textile-recycling company that partnered with major brands like H&M and Levi’s, went bankrupt. The environmental impact of your leather boots Higher impact: The leather used in shoes and handbags depends on cattle ranching, which is the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon. Many vegan-leather options consist of synthesized plastics, which come with a heavy chemical burden. Soles are often made of synthetic rubber, a fossil fuel product that produces three to six tons of CO2 per ton of polymer material. Meanwhile, natural rubber has caused the deforestation of more than 4 million hectares of tropical forests over the past three decades. Lower impact: There’s a limited number of sustainability-minded shoe brands. Experts say that the most sustainable option for buying leather are stores that use local small-scale suppliers or source the hide as a byproduct from fair-trade farmers. In the future, other alternatives may be made from fungi. In 2023, the biotech start up MycoWorks announced the successful production of the world’s first commercial-scale mycelium biomaterial, which has 80 percent lower emissions than cow leather. The environmental impact of your running shoes Higher impact: A single running shoe contains as many as 65 discrete parts that require 360 processing steps to assemble, which is often done using coal-powered machines. On average, making a pair of shoes emits the equivalent of 30 pounds of carbon dioxide, over two-thirds of which come from the manufacturing process. Lower impact: Companies like Allbirds are producing new types of biofoam materials made from sugarcane and a bioplastic made with methane waste. In 2023, Allbirds introduced its MO.Onshot sneaker, a “net-zero carbon shoe.” Other companies, like Saye, are also using alternative biomaterials, such as plant-based leathers made from cactus, corn, and bamboo yarn. The circularity movement isn’t an isolated phenomenon. As the outrage over fashion’s many environmental faux pas has grown, so have the efforts to force the industry to mend its ways — through protests, the rise of a robust secondhand clothing market, and textile recycling regulations in the European Union and California. And the industry, ever image-conscious, has started to listen. Many historic offenders like Shein, H&M, and Burberry have set voluntary sustainability goals, including using recycled fabrics, reducing freshwater use, limiting packaging, and cutting emissions. But these efforts have often been slow and stuttering — more greenwashing than greening. And even at their most rigorous, they have come up against a problem that goes to the very heart of the modern fashion industry: speed. At the same time that brands have begun ramping up their sustainability efforts, many have also begun speeding up their production cycle, churning out ever more clothes at ever faster rates. The result is a fundamental incongruity: an industry hurtling forward at breakneck speed, even as it tries to change course. Or as Kristy Caylor, who has founded several sustainable apparel brands, including the clothing-recycling startup Trashie, observed: “We all know people who are doing a much better job, but overall, we’re still in the speedy cycle. If we’re still consuming at a rapid rate and the materials are better, but we’re still throwing it all out, have we really done a better job?” Lynda Grose, a designer and professor of design and critical studies at California College for the Arts, agrees that it’s too easy right now to produce new clothes. Even ethical fashion brands produce a great deal of waste. “I would say that the entire industry adopts fast-fashion tactics,” Grose said. “I don’t want fast fashion to be used as a scapegoat — the whole industry needs a magnifying glass.” A selection of used clothes hang on racks in a secondhand shop. Each year, roughly 700,000 tons of used clothing from the U.S. ends up in foreign markets in countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, and Chile. Triocean / Getty Images The industry, which remains largely unregulated, also can’t really be trusted to police itself. To slow the warp-speed pace of modern fashion requires more than ad hoc efforts by individual brands. Tariffs, waste quotas, and taxes on waste could all cut down on the fashion industry’s seemingly intractable garbage issues. And a handful of places are already trying. In 2024, the European Union introduced rules banning large companies from destroying unsold textiles and footwear, while France recently approved legislation that imposes a mix of taxes, advertising bans, and sustainability standards on fast-fashion giants. And while some brands might bristle, many of these efforts — such as incentivizing clothing repair and recycling — could benefit the companies as well as the consumer.  For Lilah Horwitz, the director of content and marketing at Eileen Fisher Renew, which saves and repurposes old Eileen Fisher clothing, sustainability is about taking responsibility for the full life cycle of the clothes, even after they pass into the consumer’s hands. “We will take them back, no matter the condition, and we’re going to spend years trying to figure out what is the best thing to do with them,” she said. The catch is that “you have to make a good product the first time. You make something that hopefully lasts, and then you build the infrastructure and the systems to keep it lasting.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What your cheap clothes cost the planet on Dec 15, 2025.

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