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Climate Activists Are Turning Their Attention to Hollywood

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Thursday, March 16, 2023

On a warm, windy fall night in Los Angeles, I stood in a conference room at the Warner Bros. Discovery television-production offices, straightened my spine, and stared down my showrunner, preparing to defend my idea for a minor character in our near-future science-fiction series.“This character needs a backstory, and switching jobs because she wants to work in renewable energy and not for an oil company fits perfectly,” I told the unsmiling head honcho.His face twisted, as if his assistant had delivered the wrong lunch. “Too complicated. That just feels like a lot of information to cram into a backstory. What if her story is that she wants this job because it’s near where her brother was killed in a terrorist attack? We’d just need to invent a terrorist attack.”As I tried to come up with a response, I looked at the writers, lawyers, agents, and camera operators surrounding us. I was taking part in a workshop organized by the Climate Ambassadors Network (CAN), a group of young climate activists working in Hollywood. Along with three other workshop participants, I had received a yellow index card with a mission: to convince this pretend showrunner—a documentary filmmaker in real life—that a character in the series needed a climate-related backstory.Ali Weinstein, a 28-year-old wearing a flowered jumpsuit and a dimpled grin, leaned in to hear my answer. She was all too familiar with this situation: When working as a showrunner’s assistant, she had often suggested climate story lines to her bosses, only to be rebuffed. Now, Weinstein is using that experience to help others make a stronger case for climate stories. The goal of CAN is to “infiltrate every part of the industry with climate knowledge,” Weinstein, who is now a television writer, told the group. “Hollywood is a huge cultural influence, and so if we are starting change within Hollywood, we can change a lot of other industries as well.”While Weinstein’s “infiltration” is hardly sinister, her mission is still a provocative one. The world urgently needs to slow the destructive march of climate change, but using entertainment to send social messages can be a fraught endeavor (as well as the source of a lot of cringe television). And the industry has little experience with climate stories: A collaboration between USC’s Media Impact Project and a nonprofit story consultancy called Good Energy found that 2.8 percent of the 37,453 film and television scripts that aired in the United States and were written between 2016 and 2020 used any climate change key words. Ten percent of stories that depicted “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes and wildfires tied them to any form of climate change.Weinstein and her allies argue that it’s time for the industry to tell more—and more varied—climate stories, not only to nudge societal attitudes but to create better, more believable entertainment. Television, with its ability to tell stories on a human scale, might have an especially important role to play: Recent research by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that while 65 percent of American adults said they were worried about the climate crisis, only 35 percent reported discussing the topic even occasionally. Could the stories we see on-screen, in the intimacy of our homes, get us talking about the realities of life in an altered climate?Anna Jane Joyner, who founded the Good Energy story agency, says climate stories are infinitely more varied than writers and audiences might assume. When researchers from her agency and USC asked 2,000 people for examples of climate-themed movies or television shows, the most frequent answers were The Day After Tomorrow, which is almost 20 years old, and 2012, which is about the end of the world, not climate change.In an effort to expand Hollywood’s definition of a climate story, Joyner’s group created the Good Energy Playbook, a guide for writers who want to integrate climate change into their scripts. The playbook encourages writers to think beyond apocalypse, and instead approach climate change, in all its awful manifestations, as an opportunity for more inventive scriptwriting. What would a climate story look like as a Hallmark holiday movie? Could a rom-com be set at a ski resort that can no longer depend on snow and has to pivot to another business model? How might a hotter summer impact the Mafia’s waste-disposal work—and would Tony Soprano talk about it in his therapy sessions?In October 2021, the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy aired an episode called “Hotter than Hell” that depicted a heat wave in Seattle. It was a story proverbially ripped from the headlines: The previous summer, a record-shattering heat dome had enveloped the Pacific Northwest, causing ecological turmoil and human misery. Zoanne Clack, a former ER physician who is an executive producer of Grey’s Anatomy and Station Eleven, wanted to feature a disease caused by climate change, but none of the possibilities were acute enough to work within the show. She opted for a failing HVAC system that created dangerously high temperatures in the hospital’s operating rooms.Clack says climate change is now so familiar to viewers that it can serve as a convenient cheat code for scriptwriters. While Grey’s Anatomy strained viewers’ credulity in its fifth season, in 2008, with an episode about a freak ice storm—an unusual occurrence in Seattle, where the show is set—Clack says now she can attribute all kinds of wild, injury-inducing weather to climate change. “You don’t have to explain anything or go into big discussions about it, how weird it is. If you say those two words, people get it.”Dorothy Fortenberry, a writer and producer on The Handmaid’s Tale and the upcoming climate-themed anthology Extrapolations, says writers are only beginning to explore the creative possibilities. “If all the climate stories are the same, and the same type of view, it will be boring and bad,” she says. “My hope is every creative person takes this in the direction that is fruitful for the narrative and we end up with a real panoply of narratives.”Faced with the realities of climate change, some people switch abruptly from complacency to doomerism—perhaps because certainty of any kind feels safer than the muddle of a looming crisis. Joyner says climate-themed stories can help audiences navigate between these extremes, by either offering examples of courage and creativity or providing opportunities to process grief. There’s nothing wrong with apocalypse narratives, she says, but other approaches offer more hope: “Stories help create a world that isn’t the apocalypse, but shows us something more positive or somewhere in between—a vision for something we’re working towards.”Screenwriters have reason to believe that even passing mentions of climate change can transform public attitudes. Americans watch an average of three hours of television every day, meaning that they spend almost a fifth of their waking lives in the worlds it creates. History shows that issues raised on television can lead to real-world change—for better, and for worse.Producers of the show Cheers, which aired from 1982 to 1993, helped to popularize the concept of a “designated driver” by showing the patrons of the show’s eponymous bar calling cabs or getting a ride home after drinking. The term, which Harvard’s Center for Health Communication began promoting in 1988 in an effort to prevent alcohol-related deaths, became so common after appearing in the show’s dialogue that in 1991, it was listed in the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary. Seven years later, a poll showed that a majority of adults who drank had either been a designated driver or been driven home by one—and the uptake of the practice was strongest among the youngest drinkers. Between 1988 and 1992, alcohol-related traffic fatalities dropped by 25 percent, a decrease researchers attributed in part to the messages of shows like Cheers.Will & Grace, which first appeared on NBC in 1998, was the first popular sitcom with two gay lead characters. At the height of the show’s popularity, 17.3 million people tuned in each week to watch two successful men living openly as a couple. In 2006, the final year of the show’s original run, a study analyzed attitudes around homosexuality. “For those viewers with the fewest direct gay contacts, exposure to Will & Grace appears to have the strongest potential influence on reducing sexual prejudice,” the authors wrote, “while for those with many gay friends, there is no significant relationship between levels of prejudice and their exposure to the show.” In 2012, then Vice President Joe Biden cited the show as one reason for Americans’ support of marriage equality—cementing the show’s legacy as a landmark influence.The power of television isn’t always harnessed for health and equity. A recent study that compared tobacco use in cities that had access to TV in the 1940s, when it first appeared, with those that didn’t concluded that television increased the share of smokers in the population by 5 to 15 percent, creating 11 million additional smokers in the U.S. In 2023, the industry-funded Propane Education and Research Council plans to spend $13 million on its anti-electrification campaign, including $600,000 in fees to “influencers” such as cable-TV home-makeover stars who extol the virtues of propane as they remodel houses. Meanwhile, shows ranging from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to The Kardashians glamorize private planes, huge homes, and ways of living that are far from sustainable.When I asked Weinstein about the frequent characterization of climate content as a form of propaganda, she shrugged. Every detail in a TV show is a choice, and in her view, show creators can use those details, and the stories that surround them, to address climate change and its potential solutions—or they can choose not to. Those who choose not to, Weinstein and her allies argue, risk being left behind by their audiences. Most viewers surveyed by the USC and Good Energy researchers believed that they care more about climate change than the characters they see on television and in film. Half of the respondents wanted to see more climate-related stories in scripted entertainment, and another quarter were open to them.Joyner acknowledges that major studios are still wary of being perceived as environmental activists, and that writers, and their bosses, have long avoided touchy political and cultural issues out of fear of alienating audiences: “Historically, there were two things you couldn’t talk about in a writer’s room: abortion and climate.” But resistance from the top might be softening. At COP 26, the international climate meeting held in Glasgow, Scotland, in late 2021, 12 of the U.K. and Ireland’s biggest entertainment CEOs signed a Climate Content Pledge, and representatives of major U.S. studios now meet regularly to discuss how to better represent sustainability on-screen.  This winter, as rain flooded the streets of Los Angeles and hillsides started to liquefy in Northern California, I logged on to a restricted website to watch a few episodes of a new experiment in climate storytelling: the drama series Extrapolations, which begins streaming tomorrow on Apple+. The show begins in the near future, in 2037, and follows a mix of characters into the 2040s and beyond.In the world of the show, the science is familiar: Oceans are so acidified that biodiversity has dropped precipitously, wildfires rage everywhere, and companies race to bank species’ genomes before they go extinct for a future zoo. Yet the dramatic tension in Extrapolations is less about whether the characters will die from climate change than about how they can live through it, and with it: A rabbi in Miami tries to convince the city that his temple is worth saving from rising seas; a mother struggles to help her young son, who suffers from a genetic heat-related health condition, imagine his future in a warming world.Scott Z. Burns, a writer and director of Extrapolations, also produced Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. When the film opened, he was confident that its evidence would persuade people to drastically change their ways. “It was like, well, that’ll solve the problem—certainly the world can’t be the same again after this,” Burns told me over Zoom, with a dry laugh. “But I think what we learned is that the problem is so large and so systemic, that obviously a documentary wasn’t going to change the way people saw life on Earth or their own behavior.”Burns started to think about storytelling that, instead of threatening disaster, simply brought the event horizon closer, transforming climate change from an unimaginable eventuality into an immediate and pervasive problem. “I wanted to tell human stories set against a world that had a very different climate,” he said. He found inspiration in World War II–era novels, movies, and shows, and points out that the war, while obviously a historic tragedy, was also a source of great creative energy for people in the middle of the last century. “Climate is sort of our World War II,” he said. “This is the existential moment that this generation faces—and where are the great works of art that help us come to terms with this? I think we’re beginning to see them.”As he finished pitching the show in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic began to lock down the world. Burns had also written Contagion, a movie that turned out to be an eerily accurate portrayal of a pandemic’s spread. He wanted the scientific underpinnings of Extrapolations to be just as solid. But while past pandemics informed his work on Contagion, the human-caused climate change we’re experiencing today has no precedent. “It’s a very reckless gamble,” he told me. “But as a screenwriter, a reckless gamble is also a suspense movie. And that’s what I tried to do, was look at the science and what it suggests may happen, and then look at human beings and think about how they behave.”Burns found the serialized nature of a television show more compelling than a two-hour movie—it allowed for the narrative to unfold as chapters, with overlapping characters and story lines that extended over decades. It allowed a viewer to follow the slow-moving climate crisis as it intensified.When Apple+ bought Burns’s show, he called up Adam McKay, who at the time was working on Don’t Look Up, a satire about climate-change denial that was released in 2021. McKay’s generous response was instructive, Burns said. “It was like, great—there’s more than one cop show. There’s more than one hospital show. There needs to be more than one show about this.”Some people will see climate change as a social-justice story, he said, while others will see it as a parenting story. “Everybody has a different way in which this constellation of issues is going to encroach on your life,” Burns told me. “My first hope is that we maybe crack open the door a little bit to get executives at streamers and platforms to think, Oh, there’s cool work to be done in this area, and artists to think, What stories can we tell in this space that might make a difference?”Burns has heard the old adage that audiences don’t want to watch something that’s not hopeful, but he disagrees. He likes to replace the word hope with courage: “What sort of courageous act can my characters do?” he asked. “What I’m interested in telling is the story that says, right up until the moment we’re going to die, we get to live. What do we do with that life?”This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

If TV can change Americans’ views on gay marriage, why not the environment?

On a warm, windy fall night in Los Angeles, I stood in a conference room at the Warner Bros. Discovery television-production offices, straightened my spine, and stared down my showrunner, preparing to defend my idea for a minor character in our near-future science-fiction series.

“This character needs a backstory, and switching jobs because she wants to work in renewable energy and not for an oil company fits perfectly,” I told the unsmiling head honcho.

His face twisted, as if his assistant had delivered the wrong lunch. “Too complicated. That just feels like a lot of information to cram into a backstory. What if her story is that she wants this job because it’s near where her brother was killed in a terrorist attack? We’d just need to invent a terrorist attack.”

As I tried to come up with a response, I looked at the writers, lawyers, agents, and camera operators surrounding us. I was taking part in a workshop organized by the Climate Ambassadors Network (CAN), a group of young climate activists working in Hollywood. Along with three other workshop participants, I had received a yellow index card with a mission: to convince this pretend showrunner—a documentary filmmaker in real life—that a character in the series needed a climate-related backstory.

Ali Weinstein, a 28-year-old wearing a flowered jumpsuit and a dimpled grin, leaned in to hear my answer. She was all too familiar with this situation: When working as a showrunner’s assistant, she had often suggested climate story lines to her bosses, only to be rebuffed. Now, Weinstein is using that experience to help others make a stronger case for climate stories. The goal of CAN is to “infiltrate every part of the industry with climate knowledge,” Weinstein, who is now a television writer, told the group. “Hollywood is a huge cultural influence, and so if we are starting change within Hollywood, we can change a lot of other industries as well.”

While Weinstein’s “infiltration” is hardly sinister, her mission is still a provocative one. The world urgently needs to slow the destructive march of climate change, but using entertainment to send social messages can be a fraught endeavor (as well as the source of a lot of cringe television). And the industry has little experience with climate stories: A collaboration between USC’s Media Impact Project and a nonprofit story consultancy called Good Energy found that 2.8 percent of the 37,453 film and television scripts that aired in the United States and were written between 2016 and 2020 used any climate change key words. Ten percent of stories that depicted “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes and wildfires tied them to any form of climate change.

Weinstein and her allies argue that it’s time for the industry to tell more—and more varied—climate stories, not only to nudge societal attitudes but to create better, more believable entertainment. Television, with its ability to tell stories on a human scale, might have an especially important role to play: Recent research by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that while 65 percent of American adults said they were worried about the climate crisis, only 35 percent reported discussing the topic even occasionally. Could the stories we see on-screen, in the intimacy of our homes, get us talking about the realities of life in an altered climate?

Anna Jane Joyner, who founded the Good Energy story agency, says climate stories are infinitely more varied than writers and audiences might assume. When researchers from her agency and USC asked 2,000 people for examples of climate-themed movies or television shows, the most frequent answers were The Day After Tomorrow, which is almost 20 years old, and 2012, which is about the end of the world, not climate change.

In an effort to expand Hollywood’s definition of a climate story, Joyner’s group created the Good Energy Playbook, a guide for writers who want to integrate climate change into their scripts. The playbook encourages writers to think beyond apocalypse, and instead approach climate change, in all its awful manifestations, as an opportunity for more inventive scriptwriting. What would a climate story look like as a Hallmark holiday movie? Could a rom-com be set at a ski resort that can no longer depend on snow and has to pivot to another business model? How might a hotter summer impact the Mafia’s waste-disposal work—and would Tony Soprano talk about it in his therapy sessions?

In October 2021, the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy aired an episode called “Hotter than Hell” that depicted a heat wave in Seattle. It was a story proverbially ripped from the headlines: The previous summer, a record-shattering heat dome had enveloped the Pacific Northwest, causing ecological turmoil and human misery. Zoanne Clack, a former ER physician who is an executive producer of Grey’s Anatomy and Station Eleven, wanted to feature a disease caused by climate change, but none of the possibilities were acute enough to work within the show. She opted for a failing HVAC system that created dangerously high temperatures in the hospital’s operating rooms.

Clack says climate change is now so familiar to viewers that it can serve as a convenient cheat code for scriptwriters. While Grey’s Anatomy strained viewers’ credulity in its fifth season, in 2008, with an episode about a freak ice storm—an unusual occurrence in Seattle, where the show is set—Clack says now she can attribute all kinds of wild, injury-inducing weather to climate change. “You don’t have to explain anything or go into big discussions about it, how weird it is. If you say those two words, people get it.”

Dorothy Fortenberry, a writer and producer on The Handmaid’s Tale and the upcoming climate-themed anthology Extrapolations, says writers are only beginning to explore the creative possibilities. “If all the climate stories are the same, and the same type of view, it will be boring and bad,” she says. “My hope is every creative person takes this in the direction that is fruitful for the narrative and we end up with a real panoply of narratives.”

Faced with the realities of climate change, some people switch abruptly from complacency to doomerism—perhaps because certainty of any kind feels safer than the muddle of a looming crisis. Joyner says climate-themed stories can help audiences navigate between these extremes, by either offering examples of courage and creativity or providing opportunities to process grief. There’s nothing wrong with apocalypse narratives, she says, but other approaches offer more hope: “Stories help create a world that isn’t the apocalypse, but shows us something more positive or somewhere in between—a vision for something we’re working towards.”

Screenwriters have reason to believe that even passing mentions of climate change can transform public attitudes. Americans watch an average of three hours of television every day, meaning that they spend almost a fifth of their waking lives in the worlds it creates. History shows that issues raised on television can lead to real-world change—for better, and for worse.

Producers of the show Cheers, which aired from 1982 to 1993, helped to popularize the concept of a “designated driver” by showing the patrons of the show’s eponymous bar calling cabs or getting a ride home after drinking. The term, which Harvard’s Center for Health Communication began promoting in 1988 in an effort to prevent alcohol-related deaths, became so common after appearing in the show’s dialogue that in 1991, it was listed in the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary. Seven years later, a poll showed that a majority of adults who drank had either been a designated driver or been driven home by one—and the uptake of the practice was strongest among the youngest drinkers. Between 1988 and 1992, alcohol-related traffic fatalities dropped by 25 percent, a decrease researchers attributed in part to the messages of shows like Cheers.

Will & Grace, which first appeared on NBC in 1998, was the first popular sitcom with two gay lead characters. At the height of the show’s popularity, 17.3 million people tuned in each week to watch two successful men living openly as a couple. In 2006, the final year of the show’s original run, a study analyzed attitudes around homosexuality. “For those viewers with the fewest direct gay contacts, exposure to Will & Grace appears to have the strongest potential influence on reducing sexual prejudice,” the authors wrote, “while for those with many gay friends, there is no significant relationship between levels of prejudice and their exposure to the show.” In 2012, then Vice President Joe Biden cited the show as one reason for Americans’ support of marriage equality—cementing the show’s legacy as a landmark influence.

The power of television isn’t always harnessed for health and equity. A recent study that compared tobacco use in cities that had access to TV in the 1940s, when it first appeared, with those that didn’t concluded that television increased the share of smokers in the population by 5 to 15 percent, creating 11 million additional smokers in the U.S. In 2023, the industry-funded Propane Education and Research Council plans to spend $13 million on its anti-electrification campaign, including $600,000 in fees to “influencers” such as cable-TV home-makeover stars who extol the virtues of propane as they remodel houses. Meanwhile, shows ranging from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to The Kardashians glamorize private planes, huge homes, and ways of living that are far from sustainable.

When I asked Weinstein about the frequent characterization of climate content as a form of propaganda, she shrugged. Every detail in a TV show is a choice, and in her view, show creators can use those details, and the stories that surround them, to address climate change and its potential solutions—or they can choose not to. Those who choose not to, Weinstein and her allies argue, risk being left behind by their audiences. Most viewers surveyed by the USC and Good Energy researchers believed that they care more about climate change than the characters they see on television and in film. Half of the respondents wanted to see more climate-related stories in scripted entertainment, and another quarter were open to them.

Joyner acknowledges that major studios are still wary of being perceived as environmental activists, and that writers, and their bosses, have long avoided touchy political and cultural issues out of fear of alienating audiences: “Historically, there were two things you couldn’t talk about in a writer’s room: abortion and climate.” But resistance from the top might be softening. At COP 26, the international climate meeting held in Glasgow, Scotland, in late 2021, 12 of the U.K. and Ireland’s biggest entertainment CEOs signed a Climate Content Pledge, and representatives of major U.S. studios now meet regularly to discuss how to better represent sustainability on-screen.  

This winter, as rain flooded the streets of Los Angeles and hillsides started to liquefy in Northern California, I logged on to a restricted website to watch a few episodes of a new experiment in climate storytelling: the drama series Extrapolations, which begins streaming tomorrow on Apple+. The show begins in the near future, in 2037, and follows a mix of characters into the 2040s and beyond.

In the world of the show, the science is familiar: Oceans are so acidified that biodiversity has dropped precipitously, wildfires rage everywhere, and companies race to bank species’ genomes before they go extinct for a future zoo. Yet the dramatic tension in Extrapolations is less about whether the characters will die from climate change than about how they can live through it, and with it: A rabbi in Miami tries to convince the city that his temple is worth saving from rising seas; a mother struggles to help her young son, who suffers from a genetic heat-related health condition, imagine his future in a warming world.

Scott Z. Burns, a writer and director of Extrapolations, also produced Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. When the film opened, he was confident that its evidence would persuade people to drastically change their ways. “It was like, well, that’ll solve the problem—certainly the world can’t be the same again after this,” Burns told me over Zoom, with a dry laugh. “But I think what we learned is that the problem is so large and so systemic, that obviously a documentary wasn’t going to change the way people saw life on Earth or their own behavior.”

Burns started to think about storytelling that, instead of threatening disaster, simply brought the event horizon closer, transforming climate change from an unimaginable eventuality into an immediate and pervasive problem. “I wanted to tell human stories set against a world that had a very different climate,” he said. He found inspiration in World War II–era novels, movies, and shows, and points out that the war, while obviously a historic tragedy, was also a source of great creative energy for people in the middle of the last century. “Climate is sort of our World War II,” he said. “This is the existential moment that this generation faces—and where are the great works of art that help us come to terms with this? I think we’re beginning to see them.”

As he finished pitching the show in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic began to lock down the world. Burns had also written Contagion, a movie that turned out to be an eerily accurate portrayal of a pandemic’s spread. He wanted the scientific underpinnings of Extrapolations to be just as solid. But while past pandemics informed his work on Contagion, the human-caused climate change we’re experiencing today has no precedent. “It’s a very reckless gamble,” he told me. “But as a screenwriter, a reckless gamble is also a suspense movie. And that’s what I tried to do, was look at the science and what it suggests may happen, and then look at human beings and think about how they behave.”

Burns found the serialized nature of a television show more compelling than a two-hour movie—it allowed for the narrative to unfold as chapters, with overlapping characters and story lines that extended over decades. It allowed a viewer to follow the slow-moving climate crisis as it intensified.

When Apple+ bought Burns’s show, he called up Adam McKay, who at the time was working on Don’t Look Up, a satire about climate-change denial that was released in 2021. McKay’s generous response was instructive, Burns said. “It was like, great—there’s more than one cop show. There’s more than one hospital show. There needs to be more than one show about this.”

Some people will see climate change as a social-justice story, he said, while others will see it as a parenting story. “Everybody has a different way in which this constellation of issues is going to encroach on your life,” Burns told me. “My first hope is that we maybe crack open the door a little bit to get executives at streamers and platforms to think, Oh, there’s cool work to be done in this area, and artists to think, What stories can we tell in this space that might make a difference?

Burns has heard the old adage that audiences don’t want to watch something that’s not hopeful, but he disagrees. He likes to replace the word hope with courage: “What sort of courageous act can my characters do?” he asked. “What I’m interested in telling is the story that says, right up until the moment we’re going to die, we get to live. What do we do with that life?”


This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

Read the full story here.
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NW Natural customers to see smaller rate increase, won’t pay for pipeline expansion

NW Natural’s residential customers will see a rate increase of 4.5% on November bills, a much smaller increase than the company wanted.

NW Natural’s residential customers will see a rate increase of 4.5% on November bills, a much smaller increase than the company wanted.Customers will also no longer bear the cost of paying for the expansion of the natural gas system in Oregon and for the gas company’s political lobbying.The smaller-than-anticipated rate increase is the result of two separate decisions reached by state regulators over the past week.Last December, NW Natural, the state’s largest natural gas company, filed a general rate case seeking to increase its revenues by $154.9 million, or a rate increase of nearly 17%. General rate cases allow utilities to recover the costs of operating expenses, investments and capital costs.NW Natural was seeking to recover costs related to replacing its aging metering infrastructure, updates to its information technology systems, seismic upgrades to regional operations buildings and improvements to its distribution system and storage facility.But in a decision last Friday, the Oregon Public Utility Commission approved a multi-party settlement reached this summer that set NW Natural’s annual revenue increase at just $95 million, lowering the rate increase to about 10% across all customers.That rate was further lowered Tuesday when the commission approved a decrease in the annual cost of buying natural gas. (why is this a decrease?)The combined impact of the two decisions means a residential customer’s average bill is expected to be about 4.5 % higher than the previous years’ bill, the commission said.The increase goes into effect this Friday.As part of its decision last week, the commission also ordered NW Natural to remove costs for the company’s lobbying activities from rates and to stop charging customers for gas pipeline expansion by 2027.NW Natural will have to phase out charges called line extension allowances, in which all existing customers subsidize the cost of connecting new buildings to the gas pipeline system. Without the subsidies, an individual developer or homeowner would have to cover the costs.State regulators had previously ordered NW Natural in 2022 to reduce – but not completely phase out – those subsidies.A natural gas fact-finding investigation released by the Public Utility Commission in January 2023 found that growing the gas system in Oregon and adding new hookups will increase emissions and drive up utilities’ costs to comply with the state’s climate mandate to reduce fossil fuel emissions – which is likely to lead to rate increases for all customers.Oregon is now one of just a handful of states that have decided to remove the subsidies from customer rates. California, Washington, Colorado, and Connecticut have also taken a similar approach.Getting rid of the subsidies won’t greatly reduce individual residential customers’ rates because new gas connections are paid for over a long period and the cost is spread over hundreds of thousands of customers. (I’m confused – I thought the subsidies would go away and the hundreds and thousands of people won’t have to pay anymore? Or are you saying that it would cause a big reduction because the subsidies are paid over long periods by the utility’s hundreds of thousands of customers.)But activists hailed it a win for the planet and said it will result in more affordable energy bills for Oregonians.“Over time, those costs would have become substantial. We’re nipping the problem at the bud to prevent costs from escalating in the future. Everything adds up,” Earthjustice attorney Jaimini Parekh told The Oregonian/OregonLive. The Seattle-based nonprofit focuses on environmental advocacy.Parekh said phasing out the subsidies may slow the expansion of the natural gas system that contributes to climate warming and lead to the electrification of more buildings.NW Natural — which controls 80% of the state’s natural gas market – is responsible for 9% of Oregon’s carbon dioxide emissions. Natural gas also emits methane, which is responsible for up to 30% of global warming.The utility has continued to expand. In 2023, NW Natural added 4,685 new service lines for residential, commercial and industrial customers, though most of the connections are residential.NW Natural has about 708,000 customer accounts in Oregon, consisting of approximately 644,000 residential, 62,000 commercial, and 840 industrial customers. Almost 90% of the utility’s customers are in Oregon.NW Natural spokesperson David Roy said the company is “committed to providing essential, reliable energy to our customers at an affordable price.” Roy said the utility is disappointed with the commission’s decision on phasing out charges for new hookups.“Line extension allowances are not subsidies – they help lower the up-front costs and are paid back by the new customer over the course of their service,” Roy said.He also pointed to the company’s expansion of its residential bill discount program to help reduce low-income customers’ rate increases. NW Natural is increasing its discounts from 40% to 80% off bills for customers with income less than 15% of the state median and from 25% to 40% off bills for customers with income less than 30% of the state median.

Op-ed: Rethinking policing and parks

“What would a world without police look like?” In 2017, when I was 23 years old, I found myself in a room full of other Black and Brown Buffalonians who were part of a collective discussing this question. We held political education meetings to develop a shared language and political vision so as a collective we could alter policing in Buffalo, NY, and beyond. While others found themselves able to imagine what the world would look and feel like, if policing, surveillance and militarization disappeared, I struggled. To read a version of this story in Spanish click here. Haz clic aquí para leer este reportaje en español. The knot in my stomach came from the fact that I come from a family of cops – my mom, my grandfather, my cousins, my uncles – all were or still are cops. As you can imagine, me, the grand-daughter and daughter of former New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers, found it difficult to answer this question. Growing up in a family connected to the NYPD, I wasn’t taught to question how policing came to be, let alone what a world without it would look like. For most of my life I took it as something that could not be changed; as well as something that was a public good. But in 2012, during my senior year of high school, Trayvon Martin was murdered. His murder challenged the idea that my neighborhood, the suburbs of Long Island, or even my class status would keep me safe. Then in college Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and Alton Sterling were murdered. Each time I learned about another Black person being killed by the police, their deaths chipped away at what I had been told about policing in the United States. While I learned more about the harms of policing after each of these murders, I had never considered what a world without police would look like until that day in 2017. Agents of Change in Environmental Justice · Greer Hamilton on arts-based environmental justice research Seven years later, I am still thinking about this question, especially in the way it connects to the relationship between policing and our surroundings, both natural and built. If you think about it, throughout history policing has shaped people’s relationships to different environments. From loitering laws to practices barring people from accessing certain establishments because of identities they hold, policing can be understood not just as an institution, but as a set of practices that reinforce inequalities. In this sense, there is a more subtle and nefarious form of policing that everyday people engage in: citizen-based policing. It relies on the use of emergency (9-1-1) and non-emergency (3-1-1) phone calls to try and reduce behaviors a group of people believe to be unfit, often in public spaces like parks and the outdoors. In New York City, researchers have found that wealthier, white residents moving into majority non-white neighborhoods are likely to call 3-1-1 to complain about loud music or noise. Media narratives and people choosing to physically occupy the space can reinforce it. These calls can result not only in citations, but also increase the presence of police in a neighborhood. The over policing of non-white communities can lead to fines or summons’, arrest, but also as we have vividly seen over the past 12 years or so, death. I’ve come to believe that to fully engage with the question of a world without police, we need to address the social ways we police and patrol our neighbors and greenspaces. While we all can engage in citizen-based policing, historically citizen-based policing has been used by white people to limit the access of Black and Brown people to public parks and other greenspaces, cutting them off from the mental, social and spiritual wellbeing green spaces provide. This way of policing perpetuates a history of exclusion of Black and Brown people from the outdoors. A brief history of citizen-based policing and public parksThere is a longstanding and well-documented history of citizen-based policing in and around urban public parks in the United States. For decades, urban public parks were built to materialize the ideals and needs of white, upper-class people. For example, the social elites behind the creation of Central Park wanted a greenspace that would not only increase the value of their properties near the park but would provide a dedicated recreation and leisure space for white, wealthy people in the area. Long before Central Park was even an idea, Dutch settlers had the Lenape people removed from the area in 1626. Then in 1857, to realize the goal of a large, urban public park, the City of New York used its power to take control of private property for the purposes of public use to dismantle the Black settlement Seneca Village, a neighborhood that offered Black residents a refuge from discrimination. Many parks in bustling industrial cities like Chicago or Baltimore followed the same process of removing people from an area to make way for parks that were meant to reinforce the white dominant class ideals. Often, these processes contributed to Black and other oppressed communities losing access to greenspaces, creating what researchers have called a “nature gap”, a term that describes how low income and communities of color lack access to nature-based spaces. This has health and civic engagement implications for people. Despite this unjust exclusion, parks such as Washington Square Park (New York City) have been a site for protest dating as far back as 1834. Similarly, the People's Park at UC Berkeley has been home to anti-war rallies and demonstrations since the 1960s. Unfortunately, the same process of denying low income and communities of color from these spaces continues today through citizen policing. In 2018, a news story broke about Jennifer Schulte, a white woman who became known as “BBQ Becky”, who called the police on Black men barbecuing at a park in Oakland, California, because she believed that they were doing something inappropriate. Two years later, Amy Cooper, a white woman falsely accused Christian Cooper (not related), a Black birdwatcher, of threatening her life when he asked her to leash her dog in an area of Central Park where dogs are required to be leashed. Researchers of Chicago’s efforts to “revitalize parks” have found that youth of color living near the 606, an urban greenway, were often monitored by white residents to control their behaviors. In all of these examples, citizen-based policing pretends to reinforce public parks as “white spaces”, which leads to non-white people having to prove that they are credible enough to use and enjoy the space.The case of La Salle ParkIn my own research, I have learned firsthand from residents of Buffalo, NY, how the redevelopment of an urban public park can lead to increased policing and citizen policing. The 77-acre park where I develop my research includes baseball fields, soccer fields and picnic areas, and was built in 1932 on a former industrial lot. While originally named Centennial Park to celebrate Buffalo’s Centennial Celebration in 1932, the park would later be renamed after René-Robert Cavalier de La Salle (a French settler) but to this day is lovingly known as the “People’s Park,” as it was a gathering place for all people in the city for decades. Cultural events held at the park like the Puerto Rican Day parade or World Refugee Day reinforced it as a place that brought many kinds of people together as it is surrounded by mixed income and migration status neighborhoods. Even after the City’s Master Plan to reconfigure the park to include sports fields in 1998, it remained used and loved by the community.This began to change in 2019. That year, the City of Buffalo received approximately $50 million dollars from Ralph Wilson Jr. Foundation to turn LaSalle Park into a “destination park”, or a park that usually has features such as playgrounds and trails that make someone want to travel to it.For my study, I talked to seven long-time residents of the West Side of Buffalo who often frequented LaSalle Park. They recounted how the redevelopment led to an increased presence of the Buffalo police department. One of my study participants told me that “as a Black man, I actually feel really uncomfortable with the amount of police that I see trafficking along that area,” he said. “I don't necessarily know the history of violence in LaSalle Park or what that looks like if that is a thing. But I know that I often feel just really uncomfortable, whenever me and my friends are down there. It feels like we're being watched.”The seven people I talked to for hours also believed that redevelopment led to the arrival of white, suburban residents who brought different ideals about public space. This led them to retreat from the park that they loved so much out of fear for their safety. As one of the residents said, “… it feels weird because I look at them looking at me like, ‘what am I doing here’?”These experiences are sadly not unique to the residents of Buffalo who participated in my study. Urban public parks being redeveloped or in changing neighborhoods have been found to become visible representations of gentrification, as they are made in the image of those they want to attract, rather than the current users. As a result, the new park users monitor the behaviors and leisure of people they deem to not be of the community or engage with the space in the way that they agree, like “BBQ Becky”.In recent years, much has been written about communities of color lacking access to public greenspaces. This work has highlighted how not having access to greenspaces such as parks can impact people’s health and well-being, linking access to parks is with improved mental health, reduced obesity, and lower blood pressure. But I think we need to transcend this research, and think about how greenspaces are related to citizenry, to a person’s right to be a participatory member of a community. Parks have been spaces for activism and spaces for social gatherings and celebrations, which means they’re places where political and cultural rights are realized. Even when people can access a park, if we are not attuned to the history of the place and the ways that parks are designed to reinforce oppressive ideals, potential social and political interactions are lost.I am still developing my understanding of what a world without policing would look and feel like. What I do know is that green spaces such as public parks are not void of power, but rather are one manifestation of it. While we challenge the institution of policing, we must also interrogate the ways that we – yes, you and even me– can contribute to the policing of others. As scary as it may be, considering what a world without police would look like would mean bringing about a world that not only removes the physical police forces we have, but the social ways we police and patrol.This essay was produced through the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice fellowship, a partnership between Environmental Health News and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

“What would a world without police look like?” In 2017, when I was 23 years old, I found myself in a room full of other Black and Brown Buffalonians who were part of a collective discussing this question. We held political education meetings to develop a shared language and political vision so as a collective we could alter policing in Buffalo, NY, and beyond. While others found themselves able to imagine what the world would look and feel like, if policing, surveillance and militarization disappeared, I struggled. To read a version of this story in Spanish click here. Haz clic aquí para leer este reportaje en español. The knot in my stomach came from the fact that I come from a family of cops – my mom, my grandfather, my cousins, my uncles – all were or still are cops. As you can imagine, me, the grand-daughter and daughter of former New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers, found it difficult to answer this question. Growing up in a family connected to the NYPD, I wasn’t taught to question how policing came to be, let alone what a world without it would look like. For most of my life I took it as something that could not be changed; as well as something that was a public good. But in 2012, during my senior year of high school, Trayvon Martin was murdered. His murder challenged the idea that my neighborhood, the suburbs of Long Island, or even my class status would keep me safe. Then in college Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and Alton Sterling were murdered. Each time I learned about another Black person being killed by the police, their deaths chipped away at what I had been told about policing in the United States. While I learned more about the harms of policing after each of these murders, I had never considered what a world without police would look like until that day in 2017. Agents of Change in Environmental Justice · Greer Hamilton on arts-based environmental justice research Seven years later, I am still thinking about this question, especially in the way it connects to the relationship between policing and our surroundings, both natural and built. If you think about it, throughout history policing has shaped people’s relationships to different environments. From loitering laws to practices barring people from accessing certain establishments because of identities they hold, policing can be understood not just as an institution, but as a set of practices that reinforce inequalities. In this sense, there is a more subtle and nefarious form of policing that everyday people engage in: citizen-based policing. It relies on the use of emergency (9-1-1) and non-emergency (3-1-1) phone calls to try and reduce behaviors a group of people believe to be unfit, often in public spaces like parks and the outdoors. In New York City, researchers have found that wealthier, white residents moving into majority non-white neighborhoods are likely to call 3-1-1 to complain about loud music or noise. Media narratives and people choosing to physically occupy the space can reinforce it. These calls can result not only in citations, but also increase the presence of police in a neighborhood. The over policing of non-white communities can lead to fines or summons’, arrest, but also as we have vividly seen over the past 12 years or so, death. I’ve come to believe that to fully engage with the question of a world without police, we need to address the social ways we police and patrol our neighbors and greenspaces. While we all can engage in citizen-based policing, historically citizen-based policing has been used by white people to limit the access of Black and Brown people to public parks and other greenspaces, cutting them off from the mental, social and spiritual wellbeing green spaces provide. This way of policing perpetuates a history of exclusion of Black and Brown people from the outdoors. A brief history of citizen-based policing and public parksThere is a longstanding and well-documented history of citizen-based policing in and around urban public parks in the United States. For decades, urban public parks were built to materialize the ideals and needs of white, upper-class people. For example, the social elites behind the creation of Central Park wanted a greenspace that would not only increase the value of their properties near the park but would provide a dedicated recreation and leisure space for white, wealthy people in the area. Long before Central Park was even an idea, Dutch settlers had the Lenape people removed from the area in 1626. Then in 1857, to realize the goal of a large, urban public park, the City of New York used its power to take control of private property for the purposes of public use to dismantle the Black settlement Seneca Village, a neighborhood that offered Black residents a refuge from discrimination. Many parks in bustling industrial cities like Chicago or Baltimore followed the same process of removing people from an area to make way for parks that were meant to reinforce the white dominant class ideals. Often, these processes contributed to Black and other oppressed communities losing access to greenspaces, creating what researchers have called a “nature gap”, a term that describes how low income and communities of color lack access to nature-based spaces. This has health and civic engagement implications for people. Despite this unjust exclusion, parks such as Washington Square Park (New York City) have been a site for protest dating as far back as 1834. Similarly, the People's Park at UC Berkeley has been home to anti-war rallies and demonstrations since the 1960s. Unfortunately, the same process of denying low income and communities of color from these spaces continues today through citizen policing. In 2018, a news story broke about Jennifer Schulte, a white woman who became known as “BBQ Becky”, who called the police on Black men barbecuing at a park in Oakland, California, because she believed that they were doing something inappropriate. Two years later, Amy Cooper, a white woman falsely accused Christian Cooper (not related), a Black birdwatcher, of threatening her life when he asked her to leash her dog in an area of Central Park where dogs are required to be leashed. Researchers of Chicago’s efforts to “revitalize parks” have found that youth of color living near the 606, an urban greenway, were often monitored by white residents to control their behaviors. In all of these examples, citizen-based policing pretends to reinforce public parks as “white spaces”, which leads to non-white people having to prove that they are credible enough to use and enjoy the space.The case of La Salle ParkIn my own research, I have learned firsthand from residents of Buffalo, NY, how the redevelopment of an urban public park can lead to increased policing and citizen policing. The 77-acre park where I develop my research includes baseball fields, soccer fields and picnic areas, and was built in 1932 on a former industrial lot. While originally named Centennial Park to celebrate Buffalo’s Centennial Celebration in 1932, the park would later be renamed after René-Robert Cavalier de La Salle (a French settler) but to this day is lovingly known as the “People’s Park,” as it was a gathering place for all people in the city for decades. Cultural events held at the park like the Puerto Rican Day parade or World Refugee Day reinforced it as a place that brought many kinds of people together as it is surrounded by mixed income and migration status neighborhoods. Even after the City’s Master Plan to reconfigure the park to include sports fields in 1998, it remained used and loved by the community.This began to change in 2019. That year, the City of Buffalo received approximately $50 million dollars from Ralph Wilson Jr. Foundation to turn LaSalle Park into a “destination park”, or a park that usually has features such as playgrounds and trails that make someone want to travel to it.For my study, I talked to seven long-time residents of the West Side of Buffalo who often frequented LaSalle Park. They recounted how the redevelopment led to an increased presence of the Buffalo police department. One of my study participants told me that “as a Black man, I actually feel really uncomfortable with the amount of police that I see trafficking along that area,” he said. “I don't necessarily know the history of violence in LaSalle Park or what that looks like if that is a thing. But I know that I often feel just really uncomfortable, whenever me and my friends are down there. It feels like we're being watched.”The seven people I talked to for hours also believed that redevelopment led to the arrival of white, suburban residents who brought different ideals about public space. This led them to retreat from the park that they loved so much out of fear for their safety. As one of the residents said, “… it feels weird because I look at them looking at me like, ‘what am I doing here’?”These experiences are sadly not unique to the residents of Buffalo who participated in my study. Urban public parks being redeveloped or in changing neighborhoods have been found to become visible representations of gentrification, as they are made in the image of those they want to attract, rather than the current users. As a result, the new park users monitor the behaviors and leisure of people they deem to not be of the community or engage with the space in the way that they agree, like “BBQ Becky”.In recent years, much has been written about communities of color lacking access to public greenspaces. This work has highlighted how not having access to greenspaces such as parks can impact people’s health and well-being, linking access to parks is with improved mental health, reduced obesity, and lower blood pressure. But I think we need to transcend this research, and think about how greenspaces are related to citizenry, to a person’s right to be a participatory member of a community. Parks have been spaces for activism and spaces for social gatherings and celebrations, which means they’re places where political and cultural rights are realized. Even when people can access a park, if we are not attuned to the history of the place and the ways that parks are designed to reinforce oppressive ideals, potential social and political interactions are lost.I am still developing my understanding of what a world without policing would look and feel like. What I do know is that green spaces such as public parks are not void of power, but rather are one manifestation of it. While we challenge the institution of policing, we must also interrogate the ways that we – yes, you and even me– can contribute to the policing of others. As scary as it may be, considering what a world without police would look like would mean bringing about a world that not only removes the physical police forces we have, but the social ways we police and patrol.This essay was produced through the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice fellowship, a partnership between Environmental Health News and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

Not an Act of God.' How the Rev. Richard Joyner Became a Farmer, Then a Climate Activist

Rev. Richard Joyner, a 71-year-old pastor, has turned into a climate change activist after the farm he started out of his small Baptist church flooded during Hurricane Helene

CONETOE, N.C. (RNS) — Congregants at Conetoe Chapel Missionary Baptist Church thought their pastor was crazy when he suggested his rural community take up farming as a way to improve their health and become more self-sufficient.The small, predominantly Black community, about 80 miles east of Raleigh, is surrounded by vast, fertile farmland but has no grocery store for miles around. According to figures from the Census Bureau, 67% of the residents of Conetoe (pronounced Kuh-NEE-tuh) live below the poverty line.It turned out, the Rev. Richard Joyner was prophetic. The venture, which in 2007 was spun off into its own nonprofit, the Conetoe Family Life Center, now produces 1,500 boxes of vegetables a week on land it either bought or leases. It partners with multiple outfits including public schools, hospitals, the North Carolina Food Bank and local churches to plant, grow, harvest and package the produce, some of which is sold, but most of which is donated.This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.Funerals, which Joyner used to conduct too many of, are less common, and the health and wellbeing of his congregants who partake of the vegetables, grown without any synthetic chemicals, has improved, he said.But now Joyner has another problem. Last month, Hurricane Helene flooded some of his fields, wiping out the late August plantings of salad greens, radishes and beets. The soil was already wet from weeks of rain when the hurricane blew in, dumping 17 inches of rain over a two week period. Back in 2016, Hurricane Matthew also flooded the nonprofit’s fields.Members of Joyner’s congregation, about 100 people, have suggested maybe God is trying to tell him something.“We’re in the Bible Belt,” Joyner said. “When my farm floods, people go, ‘Well, God don’t want you to do that. That’s why he keeps flooding it and you need to stop being hard-headed.’”Joyner’s new rejoinder: “God is not flooding the land. Our behavior is destroying the environment. That’s what flooded the land.”Over the last few years, the 71-year-old pastor has become not only a farmer but a climate change activist. Last month, he lent his name to a new group, Extreme Weather Survivors, which provides trauma-informed support for people harmed by natural disasters. Some of the group’s members, including Joyner, participated in a Climate Week forum in New York City earlier this month intended to convey the message that extreme weather should not be labeled an “act of God” but an “act of Man.”Speakers such as Delta Merner, a scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, testified that in North Carolina studies have shown that climate change has significantly increased heavy rainfall. In other spots, such as Arizona, she said, science can now show a connection between climate change and record-breaking heat waves, which have become more frequent and intense.Merner, who studies “attribution science,” a field that aims to determine how much human-caused climate change has directly influenced extreme weather events, said researchers are now able to trace climate change back to major fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.Explaining this to church members has not always been easy, but Joyner now sees it as his calling.Joyner himself was a late convert to both farming and environmentalism. He grew up on the outskirts of Greenville, North Carolina, one of 13 children to parents who worked as sharecroppers. His father, who always kept a garden and some livestock, loved to farm and was especially good at it. But the landowners always cheated him of his earnings, and that soured Joyner on farming.When he finished high school, Joyner joined the U.S. Army and later the National Guard. He studied chaplaincy at Shaw University and started working as a chaplain at WakeMed in Raleigh and at Nash General Hospital in Rocky Mount. He initially worked with patients who had HIV, the AIDS virus, and later with mothers in labor and delivery. Finally he worked as a hospice chaplain, and that’s where he said his own sense of spirituality was cultivated.In 2004, he became the pastor of Conetoe Chapel Missionary Baptist Church at the prodding of his mentor, who in his dying days transferred the leadership of the small church to Joyner. Many of the church’s members were suffering from preventable diseases, including diabetes and high blood pressure.At the time, Joyner was still working in hospice care, and he watched their slow demise and later presided over their funerals.Convincing members to change their diets and begin exercising was not easy. He said he came to it reluctantly after learning there was no chance a major grocery chain would locate in such a small town, population 671, a classic example of a food desert.In 2005, Joyner found three property owners willing to let him use their land for a community garden. The first garden was on two acres located a quarter mile from the church.Church members resisted the idea. Those with painful personal memories of the legacy of Black exploitation working the land were especially suspicious of farming.But he was able to win over the children and eventually the adults, too. The gardens grew to encompass a wide range of crops, in addition to 30 beehives. (The honey is sold locally.)Joyner won several awards for his burgeoning community farm, including a 2014 Purpose Prize, which recognizes social innovators older than 60. The farm partnered with several universities to study whether food-as-medicine interventions work on people with chronic diseases. It also started a health kiosk on the farm where people can contact health providers online. CNN did a feature story about the enterprising pastor and his community farm. More recently, the Conetoe Family Life Center built a kitchen on the farm where people can learn to prepare plant-based nutritious meals.Church members caught on.“I was very heavy into the meat in the vegetables that you cook and I have almost completely gotten away from that,” said Betty Jones, a retired high school cafeteria manager who is a church member and takes advantage of the fresh vegetables from the farm.She acknowledged, “There’s one last food that I have not gotten away from the meat yet — and those are my collard greens — but everything else, I’m doing it without the meat in there, and they taste good.”Now, Joyner is studying how to change farm practices in a time of climate change.Walking across his ruined fields — a vast gray zone of brittle soil and dead weeds that crackle underfoot, he points to the road built several decades ago that divided the field in two.“You could tell the elevation of that road is higher than this land,” he said. “This field has become a catch basin. It took me a while to see it until one of the guys came up and said, ‘your farm is sitting in a mud hole.’”He’s now considering different ways of farming. He recently learned that tractors can compact soil and increase the risk of flooding by making the soil less porous. He also knows that high tunnels — unheated, plastic-covered hoop-house structures — can provide some protection from rain and include some anti-flooding drainage systems. One such high tunnel on the farm saved rows of peppers — banana peppers and habaneros — from being ruined. He now wants to build more.But finally, there’s the job of advocacy — getting people to understand that they live in a relationship with creation and that if they abuse and manipulate that relationship there will be consequences.Living in relationship to the earth and to other human beings and sharing that bounty is now the core of his spiritual journey. “I’ve been in Christianity all my life,” Joyner said. “But, these fields have become the most powerful place of worship I’ve ever been on.”It’s a lesson his parents and grandparents knew and one he hopes more people can recover.“My grandma would always say, this is God’s beautiful earth and you have one responsibility, to leave it better than when you got here,” Joyner said. “I take that seriously.”Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Biden administration approves Nevada lithium mine, amid local pushback

Federal officials on Thursday granted final approval to a southwestern Nevada lithium mining project, which they say could supply enough of the resource to power nearly 370,000 electric vehicles (EVs). The Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron mining project, located in the state's Silver Peak Range, aims to bolster critical mineral development in the United States and create job opportunities...

Federal officials on Thursday granted final approval to a southwestern Nevada lithium mining project, which they say could supply enough of the resource to power nearly 370,000 electric vehicles (EVs). The Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron mining project, located in the state's Silver Peak Range, aims to bolster critical mineral development in the United States and create job opportunities for local community and tribal members. “We have moved quickly to build a robust and sustainable clean energy economy that will create jobs to support families, boost local economies, and help address environmental injustice," Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the Interior Department, said in a statement. "The Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine project is essential to advancing the clean energy transition and powering the economy of the future,” Daniel-Davis added. Yet despite federal reassurances that the project will protect surrounding ecosystems, opponents warn that it poses severe threats to the area's biodiversity, other natural resources and cultural landscapes. Scientists in June sent a letter to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials contending that the mine would "cause significant impacts up to and including the potential extinction of Tiehm's buckwheat," a rare species endemic to the region. Conservation activists, meanwhile, fear that the project could harm water resources and sacred sites of the Western Shoshone people. “By greenlighting this mine the Bureau of Land Management is abandoning its duty to protect endangered species,” Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “We need lithium for the energy transition, but it can’t come with a price tag of extinction.” The Rhyolite Ridge mine will encompass about 7,166 acres of land, of which 6,369 acres will be operational and 797 acres will house an access road and infrastructure corridor, according to BLM plans. The company Ioneer will be responsible for constructing, operating, reclaiming and closing the lithium-boron quarrying project, which will result in a total of 2,266 acres of new surface disturbance, per the plans. The project, which is expected to occur over 23 years, will also involve fencing in about 719 acres of designated critical habitat for Tiehm's buckwheat, the document states. The BLM said that the mine as proposed will employ up to 500 workers during the construction phase and about 350 people during operations. Ioneer has estimated earnings of about $125 million in wages annually for the lifespan of the project and has committed to investing in the community through future job training programs and scholarships, according to the BLM. In addition to extracting lithium, the mine will also produce substantial quantities of boron, a material used extensively in glass, ceramics, abrasives, semiconductors, insecticides, insulation and defense applications, the agency added. Nonetheless, environmental activists maintained that the mine would threaten the survival of Tiehm's buckwheat, a rare Nevada wildflower that they described as "a linchpin of the local ecosystem." They also expressed alarm about the dangers the mine could pose to area water resources, which sustain desert bighorn sheep and mule deer — animals that Western Shoshone people have hunted throughout history. Also of concern was the potential threat to the nearby Cave Spring, an important cultural site with rock art. “By fast-tracking lithium projects, ignoring water scarcity, environmental impacts and the opposition of local communities and Indigenous peoples, we see how future projects will be implemented," Fermina Stevens, executive director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project, said in a statement. "For over 150 years the Western Shoshone people have been fighting for land and treaty rights and throwing pennies at us does not relieve the United States of their debt to the Western Shoshone people," Stevens said. "All of Nevada belongs to Indigenous people." But federal officials stressed that the project would surface critical minerals that are the "essential building blocks of the modern economy" while limiting impacts to local ecosystems and communities. Throughout the environmental evaluation process, BLM planners consulted with numerous tribal nations across the region and with state officials, according to the agency. “Our goal at the Bureau of Land Management is to safeguard the health of public lands as we help deliver critical minerals to our nation," BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement. "This project will help us do just that, supplying lithium that will power our clean energy future,” Stone-Manning added.  

Jane Fonda to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award From Actors’ Guild

Actor and humanitarian Jane Fonda is adding the SAG life achievement award to her many accolades

Actor and humanitarian Jane Fonda is adding the SAG life achievement award to her many accolades. The 86-year-old will be given the prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in February, the guild said Thursday.Fonda said in a statement that she was “deeply honored and humbled” that she was chosen.“I have been working in this industry for almost the entirety of my life and there’s no honor like the one bestowed on you by your peers,” Fonda said.In her over six decades in the business, Fonda has won two Oscars — for “Klute” and “Coming Home" — two BAFTA Awards, an Emmy and seven Golden Globes. With an activist spirit spanning back to her antiwar protests in the 1960s and 70s, she’s also used her platform to advocate for gender equality, civil rights and environmental issues. Last year, Fonda spent her 85th birthday raising $1 million for a non-profit in Georgia aimed at educating school-aged children to make healthy life decisions.SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher called Fonda a “trailblazer.”“We honor Jane not only for her artistic brilliance but for the profound legacy of activism and empowerment she has created,” Drescher said.Fonda was born Dec. 21, 1937, in New York City, the first child of the late actor Henry Fonda and socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw, who died by suicide at 42 when Jane was 12. Her brother, Peter, the Oscar-nominated actor and screenwriter, died in 2019. Fonda reflects on her extraordinary life, family, career, relationships and activism in the 2018 multipart documentary “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” which is streaming on MAX.SAG Life Achievement Award recipients are nominated and voted on by a SAG-AFTRA committee, intended to honor an actor who represents the “finest ideals” of the profession.The 31st annual Screen Actors Guild Awards will stream live on Netflix on Feb. 23 at 8 p.m. ET.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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