Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Deja vu comes to Arkansas as lithium follows oil

News Feed
Wednesday, September 25, 2024

This story was supported by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists. In the dusty light of a decades-old lunch counter in Lewisville, Arkansas, Chantell Dunbar-Jones expressed optimism at what the lithium boom coming to this stretch of the state will mean for her hometown. She sees jobs, economic development, and a measure of prosperity returning to a region that needs them. After waving to a gaggle of children crossing the street in honey-colored afternoon sunshine, the city council member assessed the future as best she could. “Not to say that everything’s perfect, but I feel like the positives way outweigh the negative,” she said. Lewisville sits in the southwest corner of the state, squarely atop the Smackover Formation, a limestone aquifer that stretches from northeast Texas to the Gulf Coast of Florida and has for 100 years spurted oil and natural gas. The petroleum industry boomed here in the 1920s and peaked again in the 1960s before declining to a steady trickle over the decades that followed. But the Smackover has more to give. The brine and bromine pooled 10,000 feet below the surface contains lithium, a critical component in the batteries needed to move beyond fossil fuels. Exxon Mobil is among at least four companies lining up to draw it from the earth. It opened a test site not far from Lewisville late last year and plans to extract enough of the metal to produce 100,000 electric vehicle batteries by 2026 and 1 million by 2030. Another company, Standard Lithium, believes its leases may hold 1.8 million metric tons of the material and will spend $1.3 billion building a processing facility to handle it all. All of this has Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders predicting that her state will become the nation’s leading lithium producer.  With so much money to be made, Dunbar-Jones and other public officials find themselves being courted by extraction company executives eager to tell them what all of this could mean for the people and places they lead. They have been hosting town meetings, promising to build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with the communities and residents of the area. So far, Dunbar-Jones and many others are optimistic. They see a looming renaissance, even as other community members acknowledge the mixed legacies of those who earn their money pulling resources from the ground. Such companies provide livelihoods, but only as long as there is something to extract, and they often leave pollution in their wake.  The companies eyeing the riches buried beneath the pine forests and bayous promise plenty of jobs and opportunities, and paint themselves as responsible stewards of the environment. But drawing brine to the surface is a water-intensive process, and similar operations in Nevada aren’t expected to create more than a few hundred permanent jobs. It’s high-paying work, but often requires advanced degrees many in this region don’t possess. Looking beyond the employment question, some local residents are wary of the companies looking to lease their land for lithium. It brings to mind memories of the unscrupulous and shady dealings common during the oil boom of a century ago. For residents of Lewisville, which is majority-Black, such concerns are set against a broader history of bigotry and the fact that even as other towns prospered, they have long been the last to benefit from promises of the sort being made these days. Folks throughout the area are quick to note that the wealth that flowed from the oil fields their parents and grandparents worked benefited some more than others, even as they lived with the ecological devastation that industry left behind. Dunbar-Jones is confident that, if nothing else, concern about their reputation and a need to ensure cordial relations with community leaders will sway lithium companies into supporting local needs. “All I can say is right now it’s up in the air as to what they will do,” she said, “but it seems promising.”  Lewisville sits just west of Magnolia, El Dorado, and Camden, three cities that outline the “golden triangle” region that prospered after the discovery of oil in 1920. In an area long dependent upon timber, the plantation economy transformed almost instantly as tenant farmers, itinerant prospectors, and small landholders became rich. Within five years, 3,483 wells dotted the land, and Arkansas was producing 73 million barrels annually.  Although the boom created great wealth, Lewisville remained largely rural, and its residents labored in the fields that made others rich. Still, the oil economy, coupled with the timber industry, brought a rush of saloons, itinerant workers, and hotels to many towns. Restaurants, supermarkets, and other trappings of a middle-class community soon followed, though Lewisville always lagged a bit behind. That prosperity lasted a bit longer than the oil did. The first wells ran dry by the end of the 1920s, but the Smackover continued producing 20 to 30 million barrels annually until 1967, when it began a steady decline. These days, it offers about 4.4 million a year. A fading map of Arkansas on a building in Lafayette County. Grist/Lou Murrey The shops that once served Lewisville and the furniture and feed factories that employed those who didn’t work the fields have long since gone. Jana Crank, who has lived here for 58 years, came of age in the 1960s and remembers prosperous times. She runs a community gallery in what’s left of downtown, where most buildings sport faded paint and cracked windows. “It used to be a TV fix-it shop,” Crank, a retired high school art teacher, said of the space. As she spoke, a group of friends painted quietly. Canvases showing sunsets, crosses, and landscapes lined the walls. The scenes, bright and cheerful, stood in contrast to Lewisville, where retailers have moved on, the hospital has closed, and the schools have been consolidated to save money. Fewer than 900 people live here, about half as many as during the town’s peak in the 1970s. They tend to be older, with a median household income of around $30,000. “People are just dying out, their children don’t even live in town,” Crank said. “They have nothing to come back for.”  That could change. Jobs associated with mining rare-earth minerals are highly compensated and highly sought-after, many of them netting as much as $92,000 per year. State Commerce Secretary Hugh McDonald believes the state could provide 15 percent of the world’s lithium needs, and Sanders has said Arkansas is “moving at breakneck speed to become the lithium capital of America.” A few steps in that direction already have been taken around Lewisville, the county seat of Lafayette County. It is home to 13 lithium test wells, the most in the region. They’re tucked away behind pine trees, fields of cattle, and, occasionally, homes. The dirt and gravel roads leading to them have been churned to slurry by heavy equipment. A dirt road in Lafayette County leads to a lithium test well. Grist/Lou Murrey Those who own and work the wells arrived quietly last year, their presence indicated by the increasing number of trucks with plates from nearby Texas and Louisiana, sparking rumors throughout the region. They officially announced themselves to Mayor Ethan Dunbar last fall, in visits to local officials, mostly county leaders, to initiate friendly relations and establish the basis for economic partnerships. Mayor Dunbar and the Lewisville City Council were invited to a public meeting where lithium company executives discussed their plans and took questions.   The town’s motto is “Building Community Pride,” something Dunbar-Jones, who is the mayor’s sister, takes seriously. She and others have hosted movie nights, community dinners, and, in a particular point of pride, clinics to help people convicted of crimes get their records expunged. Meanwhile, the city council, joined by a number of residents, has come together to nail down just what the lithium boom will mean for the town and to ensure everyone knows what’s in store.  That’s particularly important, Dunbar-Jones said, because 60 percent of the town’s residents are Black. “Typically in minority neighborhoods, people are not as aware of what’s going on, because the information just doesn’t trickle down to them the way it does to other people,” she said. “At the meetings with the actual lithium companies, there may be a handful of people of color there versus others. So that lets you know who’s getting that information.” Chantell Dunbar-Jones talks her town’s future in the Burge’s restaurant, Lewisville’s only thriving business. Grist/Lou Murrey A representative of Exxon, the only company that responded to a request for comment, said it has strived to build ties with communities throughout the region. “We connect early and often with elected officials, community members and local leaders to have meaningful conversations, provide transparency, and find ways to give back,” the representative said. It has opened a community liaison office in Magnolia and has worked with the city’s Chamber of Commerce to sponsor community events. It also established a $100,000 endowment for Columbia and Lafayette counties to provide grants for “education, public safety, and quality-of-life initiatives.” Folks in Lewisville would like to see more of that kind of attention. In March, the city, working with the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana, hosted a town hall meeting so residents could speak to lithium executives and express concerns. The mayor recalls it drawing a standing room-only crowd that expressed hope that the industry would bring jobs and revenue to town, but also worried about the environmental impact. Folks called on Exxon and other companies to support new housing and establish pathways for young people to work in the industry.  Venesha Sasser, who at 29 is the chief development officer of the local telephone company, sees the coming boom providing an opportunity to build generational wealth for families and resources, like broadband internet access, for communities. Any company that can invest $4 billion in a lithium operation can surely afford to toss a little back, Sasser said. “We want to make sure that whoever is investing in our community, and who we are investing in, actually means our people good.” Sasser followed a trajectory common among young Black professionals from the area: She left to pursue an education, then returned to care for loved ones. As she got more involved in the community, she often found herself being treated a little differently, an experience Mayor Dunbar delicately described as bumping up against “old systems.” Lewisville is a majority-Black town in a majority-white county, and as of 2022, had a poverty rate of 23 percent. Although community leaders say they work well with colleagues in other towns and with county leaders, they also feel that they’ve had to elbow their way into conversations with lithium companies. They worry that the dynamics of the oil days, when Black men worked alongside whites but often in lower-paying, less desirable jobs and most of the money stayed in wealthier cities like El Dorado, will repeat themselves. “You had people from Magnolia and El Dorado and Spring Hill and other places coming in and doing the work and reaping the benefits, and then when it was gone, they were gone,” said Virginia Perry, a retired school teacher who grew up in Lewisville and lives in Little Rock. Her ex-husband drilled for oil years ago, and the experience left her with a sour taste in her mouth. “I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty much the same,” she said. “They’re going to ease in, they want to do all this work and create all these jobs for somebody and then ease out when it’s done in a few years. Then here we’ll be with soil that can’t grow anything, contaminated water, and a whole bunch of kids with asthma.” Mayor Dunbar, who is midway through his second term, is trying to balance reservations with optimism. “‘Imagine the possibilities.’ That’s my tagline,” he said, settling into a chair at City Hall. A blackboard behind him outlined his priorities: housing, recreation, education. He hopes support from companies like Tetra Technologies, which is developing a 6,138-acre project not far away, will finance those goals and give people a future that’s more stable than the past, one in which Lewisville’s children can pursue the same opportunities that kids in nearby, better-resourced communities can.  “Think about Albemarle in Magnolia,” he said, referring to the bromine plant about 30 miles up the road. “Get a job at Albemarle, you stay there 25 years, you earn a decent salary, you’d have a decent retirement. You can live well. Quality of life is good. We are hoping to see the same thing here.”  Ethan Dunbar, mayor of Lewisville, sits in front of a blackboard filled with notes on his priorities as mayor. Grist/Lou Murrey Many of the people poised to benefit from the lithium beneath their feet seem ambivalent about climate change. In El Dorado, in a bar called The Mink Eye, an oil refinery worker grimaced at the mention of electric vehicles. The next morning, retired oil workers gathered at Johnny B’s Grill scoffed at the idea of a boom. A waitress admitted that she’d bought stock in lithium companies, but said any faith that the industry will bring renewed prosperity does not necessarily mean folks are on board with the green transition. “These men drive diesels,” she said, pointing toward her customers. Still, she said, any jobs are good jobs. That attitude pervades the state capitol in Little Rock, where politicians who don’t give much thought to why the energy transition is necessary cheer the state’s emerging role in it. The governor, who has cast doubt on human-caused climate change, has appeared at industry events like the Arkansas Lithium Innovation Summit to proclaim the state “bullish” on its reserves of the element. “We all knew that towns like El Dorado and Smackover were built by oil and gas,” Sanders told the audience. “But who knew that our quiet brine and bromine industry had the potential to change the world.” Much of the world’s lithium is blasted out of rocks or drawn from brine left to evaporate in vast pools, leaving behind toxic residue. The companies descending on Arkansas plan to use a more sustainable method called direct lithium extraction, or DLE. It seems to be a bit more ecologically friendly and much less water-intensive than the massive pit mines or vast evaporation ponds often found in South America. It essentially pumps water into the aquifer, filters the lithium from the extracted brine, then returns it to the aquifer in what advocates call a largely closed system. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, in a report prepared for the Nature Conservancy, said that “DLE appears to offer the lowest impacts of available extraction technologies.” Still, the technology is relatively new. According to Yale Environment 360, Arkansas provides a suitable proving ground for the approach because it has abundant water, a large concentration of lithium, and an established network of wells, pipelines, and refineries. But there are concerns about the amount of water required and the waste material left behind, despite repeated assurances from lithium companies that the process is safe and sustainable. Although DLE doesn’t require as much water as brine evaporation, in which that water is lost, “it is a freshwater consumption source,” Patrick Donnelly, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an interview with KUAF radio in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The waste generated by the process is another concern, he said, “in particular, a solid waste stream. It’s impossible for them to extract only the lithium.”   Locals are well aware of the impact brine can have on the land. Before anyone realized its value, oil and gas producers didn’t worry much about it leaking or spilling onto the ground, literally salting the earth. Some are concerned that the pipelines that will carry brine to refineries might leak, as they did in the oil days. Such fears are compounded by the fact the state Department of Environmental Quality relies on individuals to report problems and doesn’t appear to do much outreach to residents. A churned-up entrance to a lithium test site in Lafayette County. Grist/Lou Murrey There’s also a lot of skepticism about how many jobs the boom may create. So far, Standard Lithium’s plant in El Dorado employs 91 people, said Douglas Zollner, who works with the Arkansas branch of the Nature Conservancy and has toured the facility. No one’s offered any projections on how many people might find work in the budding industry, but a lithium boom in Nevada suggests it may not be all that many. Construction of the Thacker Pass mine, which could produce 80,000 metric tons of lithium annually, is expected to generate 1,500 temporary construction and other jobs — but it will only employ 300 once operational. Those jobs pay well, but typically require advanced training. Public universities like Arkansas Tech University are revising science and engineering curricula to meet the lithium industry’s needs, hoping to connect students with internships in the field. However, locals worry that disinvestment in schools in rural and largely Black communities will leave those who most need these jobs unable to attain the training necessary to land them. Just how much money might flow into local communities remains another open question. Fossil fuel companies lease the land they drill and pay landowners royalties of 16.67 percent of their profit. Any oil pumped from the land also is taxed at 4 to 5 percent of its market value. This fee, called severance tax, is paid to the counties or towns from which the resource was extracted.  None of these things apply to lithium. So far, there is no severance tax on the metal, though the state levies a tax of $2.75 for every 1,000 barrels of the brine from which it is extracted. The state Oil and Gas Commission continues haggling over a royalty rate, though it seems unlikely the fee will be as high as those paid on oil and gas leases. When the state sought a double-digit royalty, the industry balked, arguing that extracting and processing lithium is expensive and officials ought to wait until production begins in earnest before deciding what’s fair.  Companies cannot extract and sell the metal for commercial use until the commission sets a royalty rate, a process expected to drag on for some time. On July 26, the major players in the Arkansas lithium industry filed a joint application seeking a rate of 1.82 percent. The South Arkansas Mineral Association — which represents the majority of landowners, which is to say, timber companies, oil companies, and other corporate interests — demanded a higher share.  Small landowners still hope to benefit, and the lack of clarity around royalties hasn’t done much to engender trust among locals wary of the companies looking to lease their land. Some folks, already offered terms, are using online forums to determine if they’re being stiffed. Others fear efforts to wrest land from the few Black families who own property, often passed between generations informally without a deed or title. Such land, called heirs’ property, accounts for more than one-third of Black-owned property in the South, and without the documentation required to prove ownership, land can be subject to court-ordered sales.  Many in Lewisville, say they regularly receive calls and texts from people interested in buying land, and Perry has seen people checking out properties and attending auctions. During a visit to the Lafayette County courthouse archives, I noticed a woman thumbing through mineral rights records. Although she wouldn’t identify herself, she politely explained that she was checking such documents throughout Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, bringing to mind the speculators who, during the oil boom, did the same before approaching naive residents who may not know about the riches under their land.  Beyond the timber companies with holdings in the region, most of the major landowners are white and wealthy, and any spoils, Perry suspects, will simply pass from one affluent family or powerful company to another, with no benefit to people like her. “What land, honey?” she said with a small, sardonic laugh. “That’s a pie in the sky type dream to me.” Despite the concerns, the hype and fanfare surrounding the possibility of an economic revival remains high. City officials in Lewisville, and the people they lead, are trying to remain open-minded and easygoing even if unanswered questions linger about how many jobs might be coming, how the boom will benefit their town, and what it will mean for the environment. “You know, it’s kind of frustrating because the questions get asked at these meetings,” Dunbar, the mayor, said. But he feels the lithium companies often meet questions with the same pleasant, if unhelpful, answer of “We can’t talk about it.” They’re always so careful in their responses. ”They deliberately did not say anything until they knew what they wanted to do and say, that’s the same with what they want to provide communities,” Dunbar said.  Mayor Ethan Dunbar stands outside Lewisville city hall. Grist/Lou Murrey As for the $100,000 commitment from Exxon, no one’s sure exactly who will receive that money or how allocations will be made. The mayor, discussing that point, showed some frustration. He said he has tried, and will continue to try, to get the companies to put their promises of jobs and support for local infrastructure in writing. The balance of goodwill that he is trying to maintain between everyone involved is delicate: the lithium companies, whose jobs and support his community desperately needs; the county officials he must work with; the residents of Lewisville; and the mayors he collaborates with on grant applications. These towns are small, and word spreads quickly; relationships are as precious as the riches deep below the ground. As Dunbar-Jones, the city council member, finished her turkey sandwich in the late afternoon light of the diner, she spoke of her faith in the ties between the people of Lewisville. “It’s hard to get a group of people to work together, period, especially when they don’t know each other,” she said. “But we all know each other.” Despite her confidence, she knows she’s dealing with relationships in which companies take what they can and leave, where the question of what they owe the communities that enrich them is naive. Her father benefited from his job at Phillips 66, but it couldn’t last forever. When the oil was gone, those who profited from it were, too. From their perspective, she said, it’s a question of “How long am I going to support a community I’m no longer in? It would be unrealistic to think that there will be some long-term benefits from it.” The same is true of lithium, and the companies that will mine it. At some point, they will leave, and take their jobs and their money with them. Dunbar-Jones only hopes they leave Lewisville a little better off once they’ve left. Editor’s note: Climeworks is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Deja vu comes to Arkansas as lithium follows oil on Sep 25, 2024.

In the energy towns of Arkansas, the coming lithium rush is bringing with it the risk of repeating the same mistakes and inequities of the past.

This story was supported by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

In the dusty light of a decades-old lunch counter in Lewisville, Arkansas, Chantell Dunbar-Jones expressed optimism at what the lithium boom coming to this stretch of the state will mean for her hometown. She sees jobs, economic development, and a measure of prosperity returning to a region that needs them. After waving to a gaggle of children crossing the street in honey-colored afternoon sunshine, the city council member assessed the future as best she could. “Not to say that everything’s perfect, but I feel like the positives way outweigh the negative,” she said.

Lewisville sits in the southwest corner of the state, squarely atop the Smackover Formation, a limestone aquifer that stretches from northeast Texas to the Gulf Coast of Florida and has for 100 years spurted oil and natural gas. The petroleum industry boomed here in the 1920s and peaked again in the 1960s before declining to a steady trickle over the decades that followed. But the Smackover has more to give. The brine and bromine pooled 10,000 feet below the surface contains lithium, a critical component in the batteries needed to move beyond fossil fuels.

Exxon Mobil is among at least four companies lining up to draw it from the earth. It opened a test site not far from Lewisville late last year and plans to extract enough of the metal to produce 100,000 electric vehicle batteries by 2026 and 1 million by 2030. Another company, Standard Lithium, believes its leases may hold 1.8 million metric tons of the material and will spend $1.3 billion building a processing facility to handle it all. All of this has Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders predicting that her state will become the nation’s leading lithium producer. 

With so much money to be made, Dunbar-Jones and other public officials find themselves being courted by extraction company executives eager to tell them what all of this could mean for the people and places they lead. They have been hosting town meetings, promising to build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with the communities and residents of the area. So far, Dunbar-Jones and many others are optimistic. They see a looming renaissance, even as other community members acknowledge the mixed legacies of those who earn their money pulling resources from the ground. Such companies provide livelihoods, but only as long as there is something to extract, and they often leave pollution in their wake

The companies eyeing the riches buried beneath the pine forests and bayous promise plenty of jobs and opportunities, and paint themselves as responsible stewards of the environment. But drawing brine to the surface is a water-intensive process, and similar operations in Nevada aren’t expected to create more than a few hundred permanent jobs. It’s high-paying work, but often requires advanced degrees many in this region don’t possess. Looking beyond the employment question, some local residents are wary of the companies looking to lease their land for lithium. It brings to mind memories of the unscrupulous and shady dealings common during the oil boom of a century ago.

For residents of Lewisville, which is majority-Black, such concerns are set against a broader history of bigotry and the fact that even as other towns prospered, they have long been the last to benefit from promises of the sort being made these days. Folks throughout the area are quick to note that the wealth that flowed from the oil fields their parents and grandparents worked benefited some more than others, even as they lived with the ecological devastation that industry left behind.

Dunbar-Jones is confident that, if nothing else, concern about their reputation and a need to ensure cordial relations with community leaders will sway lithium companies into supporting local needs. “All I can say is right now it’s up in the air as to what they will do,” she said, “but it seems promising.” 


Lewisville sits just west of Magnolia, El Dorado, and Camden, three cities that outline the “golden triangle” region that prospered after the discovery of oil in 1920. In an area long dependent upon timber, the plantation economy transformed almost instantly as tenant farmers, itinerant prospectors, and small landholders became rich. Within five years, 3,483 wells dotted the land, and Arkansas was producing 73 million barrels annually. 

Although the boom created great wealth, Lewisville remained largely rural, and its residents labored in the fields that made others rich. Still, the oil economy, coupled with the timber industry, brought a rush of saloons, itinerant workers, and hotels to many towns. Restaurants, supermarkets, and other trappings of a middle-class community soon followed, though Lewisville always lagged a bit behind.

That prosperity lasted a bit longer than the oil did. The first wells ran dry by the end of the 1920s, but the Smackover continued producing 20 to 30 million barrels annually until 1967, when it began a steady decline. These days, it offers about 4.4 million a year.

A fading map of Arkansas on a building in Lafayette County. Grist/Lou Murrey

The shops that once served Lewisville and the furniture and feed factories that employed those who didn’t work the fields have long since gone. Jana Crank, who has lived here for 58 years, came of age in the 1960s and remembers prosperous times. She runs a community gallery in what’s left of downtown, where most buildings sport faded paint and cracked windows. “It used to be a TV fix-it shop,” Crank, a retired high school art teacher, said of the space.

As she spoke, a group of friends painted quietly. Canvases showing sunsets, crosses, and landscapes lined the walls. The scenes, bright and cheerful, stood in contrast to Lewisville, where retailers have moved on, the hospital has closed, and the schools have been consolidated to save money. Fewer than 900 people live here, about half as many as during the town’s peak in the 1970s. They tend to be older, with a median household income of around $30,000. “People are just dying out, their children don’t even live in town,” Crank said. “They have nothing to come back for.” 

That could change. Jobs associated with mining rare-earth minerals are highly compensated and highly sought-after, many of them netting as much as $92,000 per year. State Commerce Secretary Hugh McDonald believes the state could provide 15 percent of the world’s lithium needs, and Sanders has said Arkansas is “moving at breakneck speed to become the lithium capital of America.”

A few steps in that direction already have been taken around Lewisville, the county seat of Lafayette County. It is home to 13 lithium test wells, the most in the region. They’re tucked away behind pine trees, fields of cattle, and, occasionally, homes. The dirt and gravel roads leading to them have been churned to slurry by heavy equipment.

A dirt road in Lafayette County leads to a lithium test well.
Grist/Lou Murrey

Those who own and work the wells arrived quietly last year, their presence indicated by the increasing number of trucks with plates from nearby Texas and Louisiana, sparking rumors throughout the region. They officially announced themselves to Mayor Ethan Dunbar last fall, in visits to local officials, mostly county leaders, to initiate friendly relations and establish the basis for economic partnerships. Mayor Dunbar and the Lewisville City Council were invited to a public meeting where lithium company executives discussed their plans and took questions.  

The town’s motto is “Building Community Pride,” something Dunbar-Jones, who is the mayor’s sister, takes seriously. She and others have hosted movie nights, community dinners, and, in a particular point of pride, clinics to help people convicted of crimes get their records expunged. Meanwhile, the city council, joined by a number of residents, has come together to nail down just what the lithium boom will mean for the town and to ensure everyone knows what’s in store. 

That’s particularly important, Dunbar-Jones said, because 60 percent of the town’s residents are Black. “Typically in minority neighborhoods, people are not as aware of what’s going on, because the information just doesn’t trickle down to them the way it does to other people,” she said. “At the meetings with the actual lithium companies, there may be a handful of people of color there versus others. So that lets you know who’s getting that information.”

Chantell Dunbar-Jones talks her town’s future in the Burge’s restaurant, Lewisville’s only thriving business. Grist/Lou Murrey

A representative of Exxon, the only company that responded to a request for comment, said it has strived to build ties with communities throughout the region. “We connect early and often with elected officials, community members and local leaders to have meaningful conversations, provide transparency, and find ways to give back,” the representative said. It has opened a community liaison office in Magnolia and has worked with the city’s Chamber of Commerce to sponsor community events. It also established a $100,000 endowment for Columbia and Lafayette counties to provide grants for “education, public safety, and quality-of-life initiatives.”

Folks in Lewisville would like to see more of that kind of attention. In March, the city, working with the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana, hosted a town hall meeting so residents could speak to lithium executives and express concerns. The mayor recalls it drawing a standing room-only crowd that expressed hope that the industry would bring jobs and revenue to town, but also worried about the environmental impact. Folks called on Exxon and other companies to support new housing and establish pathways for young people to work in the industry. 

Venesha Sasser, who at 29 is the chief development officer of the local telephone company, sees the coming boom providing an opportunity to build generational wealth for families and resources, like broadband internet access, for communities. Any company that can invest $4 billion in a lithium operation can surely afford to toss a little back, Sasser said. “We want to make sure that whoever is investing in our community, and who we are investing in, actually means our people good.”

Sasser followed a trajectory common among young Black professionals from the area: She left to pursue an education, then returned to care for loved ones. As she got more involved in the community, she often found herself being treated a little differently, an experience Mayor Dunbar delicately described as bumping up against “old systems.” Lewisville is a majority-Black town in a majority-white county, and as of 2022, had a poverty rate of 23 percent. Although community leaders say they work well with colleagues in other towns and with county leaders, they also feel that they’ve had to elbow their way into conversations with lithium companies. They worry that the dynamics of the oil days, when Black men worked alongside whites but often in lower-paying, less desirable jobs and most of the money stayed in wealthier cities like El Dorado, will repeat themselves.

“You had people from Magnolia and El Dorado and Spring Hill and other places coming in and doing the work and reaping the benefits, and then when it was gone, they were gone,” said Virginia Perry, a retired school teacher who grew up in Lewisville and lives in Little Rock. Her ex-husband drilled for oil years ago, and the experience left her with a sour taste in her mouth. “I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty much the same,” she said. “They’re going to ease in, they want to do all this work and create all these jobs for somebody and then ease out when it’s done in a few years. Then here we’ll be with soil that can’t grow anything, contaminated water, and a whole bunch of kids with asthma.”

Mayor Dunbar, who is midway through his second term, is trying to balance reservations with optimism. “‘Imagine the possibilities.’ That’s my tagline,” he said, settling into a chair at City Hall. A blackboard behind him outlined his priorities: housing, recreation, education. He hopes support from companies like Tetra Technologies, which is developing a 6,138-acre project not far away, will finance those goals and give people a future that’s more stable than the past, one in which Lewisville’s children can pursue the same opportunities that kids in nearby, better-resourced communities can. 

“Think about Albemarle in Magnolia,” he said, referring to the bromine plant about 30 miles up the road. “Get a job at Albemarle, you stay there 25 years, you earn a decent salary, you’d have a decent retirement. You can live well. Quality of life is good. We are hoping to see the same thing here.” 

Ethan Dunbar, mayor of Lewisville, sits in front of a blackboard filled with notes on his priorities as mayor. Grist/Lou Murrey

Many of the people poised to benefit from the lithium beneath their feet seem ambivalent about climate change. In El Dorado, in a bar called The Mink Eye, an oil refinery worker grimaced at the mention of electric vehicles. The next morning, retired oil workers gathered at Johnny B’s Grill scoffed at the idea of a boom. A waitress admitted that she’d bought stock in lithium companies, but said any faith that the industry will bring renewed prosperity does not necessarily mean folks are on board with the green transition. “These men drive diesels,” she said, pointing toward her customers. Still, she said, any jobs are good jobs.

That attitude pervades the state capitol in Little Rock, where politicians who don’t give much thought to why the energy transition is necessary cheer the state’s emerging role in it. The governor, who has cast doubt on human-caused climate change, has appeared at industry events like the Arkansas Lithium Innovation Summit to proclaim the state “bullish” on its reserves of the element. “We all knew that towns like El Dorado and Smackover were built by oil and gas,” Sanders told the audience. “But who knew that our quiet brine and bromine industry had the potential to change the world.”

Much of the world’s lithium is blasted out of rocks or drawn from brine left to evaporate in vast pools, leaving behind toxic residue. The companies descending on Arkansas plan to use a more sustainable method called direct lithium extraction, or DLE. It seems to be a bit more ecologically friendly and much less water-intensive than the massive pit mines or vast evaporation ponds often found in South America. It essentially pumps water into the aquifer, filters the lithium from the extracted brine, then returns it to the aquifer in what advocates call a largely closed system. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, in a report prepared for the Nature Conservancy, said that “DLE appears to offer the lowest impacts of available extraction technologies.”

Still, the technology is relatively new. According to Yale Environment 360, Arkansas provides a suitable proving ground for the approach because it has abundant water, a large concentration of lithium, and an established network of wells, pipelines, and refineries. But there are concerns about the amount of water required and the waste material left behind, despite repeated assurances from lithium companies that the process is safe and sustainable.

Although DLE doesn’t require as much water as brine evaporation, in which that water is lost, “it is a freshwater consumption source,” Patrick Donnelly, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an interview with KUAF radio in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The waste generated by the process is another concern, he said, “in particular, a solid waste stream. It’s impossible for them to extract only the lithium.”  

Locals are well aware of the impact brine can have on the land. Before anyone realized its value, oil and gas producers didn’t worry much about it leaking or spilling onto the ground, literally salting the earth. Some are concerned that the pipelines that will carry brine to refineries might leak, as they did in the oil days. Such fears are compounded by the fact the state Department of Environmental Quality relies on individuals to report problems and doesn’t appear to do much outreach to residents.

A churned-up entrance to a lithium test site in Lafayette County. Grist/Lou Murrey

There’s also a lot of skepticism about how many jobs the boom may create. So far, Standard Lithium’s plant in El Dorado employs 91 people, said Douglas Zollner, who works with the Arkansas branch of the Nature Conservancy and has toured the facility. No one’s offered any projections on how many people might find work in the budding industry, but a lithium boom in Nevada suggests it may not be all that many. Construction of the Thacker Pass mine, which could produce 80,000 metric tons of lithium annually, is expected to generate 1,500 temporary construction and other jobs — but it will only employ 300 once operational.

Those jobs pay well, but typically require advanced training. Public universities like Arkansas Tech University are revising science and engineering curricula to meet the lithium industry’s needs, hoping to connect students with internships in the field. However, locals worry that disinvestment in schools in rural and largely Black communities will leave those who most need these jobs unable to attain the training necessary to land them.

Just how much money might flow into local communities remains another open question. Fossil fuel companies lease the land they drill and pay landowners royalties of 16.67 percent of their profit. Any oil pumped from the land also is taxed at 4 to 5 percent of its market value. This fee, called severance tax, is paid to the counties or towns from which the resource was extracted. 

None of these things apply to lithium. So far, there is no severance tax on the metal, though the state levies a tax of $2.75 for every 1,000 barrels of the brine from which it is extracted. The state Oil and Gas Commission continues haggling over a royalty rate, though it seems unlikely the fee will be as high as those paid on oil and gas leases. When the state sought a double-digit royalty, the industry balked, arguing that extracting and processing lithium is expensive and officials ought to wait until production begins in earnest before deciding what’s fair. 

Companies cannot extract and sell the metal for commercial use until the commission sets a royalty rate, a process expected to drag on for some time. On July 26, the major players in the Arkansas lithium industry filed a joint application seeking a rate of 1.82 percent. The South Arkansas Mineral Association — which represents the majority of landowners, which is to say, timber companies, oil companies, and other corporate interests — demanded a higher share

Small landowners still hope to benefit, and the lack of clarity around royalties hasn’t done much to engender trust among locals wary of the companies looking to lease their land. Some folks, already offered terms, are using online forums to determine if they’re being stiffed. Others fear efforts to wrest land from the few Black families who own property, often passed between generations informally without a deed or title. Such land, called heirs’ property, accounts for more than one-third of Black-owned property in the South, and without the documentation required to prove ownership, land can be subject to court-ordered sales. 

Many in Lewisville, say they regularly receive calls and texts from people interested in buying land, and Perry has seen people checking out properties and attending auctions. During a visit to the Lafayette County courthouse archives, I noticed a woman thumbing through mineral rights records. Although she wouldn’t identify herself, she politely explained that she was checking such documents throughout Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, bringing to mind the speculators who, during the oil boom, did the same before approaching naive residents who may not know about the riches under their land. 

Beyond the timber companies with holdings in the region, most of the major landowners are white and wealthy, and any spoils, Perry suspects, will simply pass from one affluent family or powerful company to another, with no benefit to people like her. “What land, honey?” she said with a small, sardonic laugh. “That’s a pie in the sky type dream to me.”


Despite the concerns, the hype and fanfare surrounding the possibility of an economic revival remains high. City officials in Lewisville, and the people they lead, are trying to remain open-minded and easygoing even if unanswered questions linger about how many jobs might be coming, how the boom will benefit their town, and what it will mean for the environment.

“You know, it’s kind of frustrating because the questions get asked at these meetings,” Dunbar, the mayor, said. But he feels the lithium companies often meet questions with the same pleasant, if unhelpful, answer of “We can’t talk about it.” They’re always so careful in their responses. ”They deliberately did not say anything until they knew what they wanted to do and say, that’s the same with what they want to provide communities,” Dunbar said. 

Mayor Ethan Dunbar stands outside Lewisville city hall. Grist/Lou Murrey

As for the $100,000 commitment from Exxon, no one’s sure exactly who will receive that money or how allocations will be made. The mayor, discussing that point, showed some frustration. He said he has tried, and will continue to try, to get the companies to put their promises of jobs and support for local infrastructure in writing.

The balance of goodwill that he is trying to maintain between everyone involved is delicate: the lithium companies, whose jobs and support his community desperately needs; the county officials he must work with; the residents of Lewisville; and the mayors he collaborates with on grant applications. These towns are small, and word spreads quickly; relationships are as precious as the riches deep below the ground.

As Dunbar-Jones, the city council member, finished her turkey sandwich in the late afternoon light of the diner, she spoke of her faith in the ties between the people of Lewisville. “It’s hard to get a group of people to work together, period, especially when they don’t know each other,” she said. “But we all know each other.”

Despite her confidence, she knows she’s dealing with relationships in which companies take what they can and leave, where the question of what they owe the communities that enrich them is naive. Her father benefited from his job at Phillips 66, but it couldn’t last forever. When the oil was gone, those who profited from it were, too. From their perspective, she said, it’s a question of “How long am I going to support a community I’m no longer in? It would be unrealistic to think that there will be some long-term benefits from it.” The same is true of lithium, and the companies that will mine it. At some point, they will leave, and take their jobs and their money with them. Dunbar-Jones only hopes they leave Lewisville a little better off once they’ve left.

Editor’s note: Climeworks is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Deja vu comes to Arkansas as lithium follows oil on Sep 25, 2024.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Designing a new way to optimize complex coordinated systems

Using diagrams to represent interactions in multipart systems can provide a faster way to design software improvements.

Coordinating complicated interactive systems, whether it’s the different modes of transportation in a city or the various components that must work together to make an effective and efficient robot, is an increasingly important subject for software designers to tackle. Now, researchers at MIT have developed an entirely new way of approaching these complex problems, using simple diagrams as a tool to reveal better approaches to software optimization in deep-learning models.They say the new method makes addressing these complex tasks so simple that it can be reduced to a drawing that would fit on the back of a napkin.The new approach is described in the journal Transactions of Machine Learning Research, in a paper by incoming doctoral student Vincent Abbott and Professor Gioele Zardini of MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).“We designed a new language to talk about these new systems,” Zardini says. This new diagram-based “language” is heavily based on something called category theory, he explains.It all has to do with designing the underlying architecture of computer algorithms — the programs that will actually end up sensing and controlling the various different parts of the system that’s being optimized. “The components are different pieces of an algorithm, and they have to talk to each other, exchange information, but also account for energy usage, memory consumption, and so on.” Such optimizations are notoriously difficult because each change in one part of the system can in turn cause changes in other parts, which can further affect other parts, and so on.The researchers decided to focus on the particular class of deep-learning algorithms, which are currently a hot topic of research. Deep learning is the basis of the large artificial intelligence models, including large language models such as ChatGPT and image-generation models such as Midjourney. These models manipulate data by a “deep” series of matrix multiplications interspersed with other operations. The numbers within matrices are parameters, and are updated during long training runs, allowing for complex patterns to be found. Models consist of billions of parameters, making computation expensive, and hence improved resource usage and optimization invaluable.Diagrams can represent details of the parallelized operations that deep-learning models consist of, revealing the relationships between algorithms and the parallelized graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware they run on, supplied by companies such as NVIDIA. “I’m very excited about this,” says Zardini, because “we seem to have found a language that very nicely describes deep learning algorithms, explicitly representing all the important things, which is the operators you use,” for example the energy consumption, the memory allocation, and any other parameter that you’re trying to optimize for.Much of the progress within deep learning has stemmed from resource efficiency optimizations. The latest DeepSeek model showed that a small team can compete with top models from OpenAI and other major labs by focusing on resource efficiency and the relationship between software and hardware. Typically, in deriving these optimizations, he says, “people need a lot of trial and error to discover new architectures.” For example, a widely used optimization program called FlashAttention took more than four years to develop, he says. But with the new framework they developed, “we can really approach this problem in a more formal way.” And all of this is represented visually in a precisely defined graphical language.But the methods that have been used to find these improvements “are very limited,” he says. “I think this shows that there’s a major gap, in that we don’t have a formal systematic method of relating an algorithm to either its optimal execution, or even really understanding how many resources it will take to run.” But now, with the new diagram-based method they devised, such a system exists.Category theory, which underlies this approach, is a way of mathematically describing the different components of a system and how they interact in a generalized, abstract manner. Different perspectives can be related. For example, mathematical formulas can be related to algorithms that implement them and use resources, or descriptions of systems can be related to robust “monoidal string diagrams.” These visualizations allow you to directly play around and experiment with how the different parts connect and interact. What they developed, he says, amounts to “string diagrams on steroids,” which incorporates many more graphical conventions and many more properties.“Category theory can be thought of as the mathematics of abstraction and composition,” Abbott says. “Any compositional system can be described using category theory, and the relationship between compositional systems can then also be studied.” Algebraic rules that are typically associated with functions can also be represented as diagrams, he says. “Then, a lot of the visual tricks we can do with diagrams, we can relate to algebraic tricks and functions. So, it creates this correspondence between these different systems.”As a result, he says, “this solves a very important problem, which is that we have these deep-learning algorithms, but they’re not clearly understood as mathematical models.” But by representing them as diagrams, it becomes possible to approach them formally and systematically, he says.One thing this enables is a clear visual understanding of the way parallel real-world processes can be represented by parallel processing in multicore computer GPUs. “In this way,” Abbott says, “diagrams can both represent a function, and then reveal how to optimally execute it on a GPU.”The “attention” algorithm is used by deep-learning algorithms that require general, contextual information, and is a key phase of the serialized blocks that constitute large language models such as ChatGPT. FlashAttention is an optimization that took years to develop, but resulted in a sixfold improvement in the speed of attention algorithms.Applying their method to the well-established FlashAttention algorithm, Zardini says that “here we are able to derive it, literally, on a napkin.” He then adds, “OK, maybe it’s a large napkin.” But to drive home the point about how much their new approach can simplify dealing with these complex algorithms, they titled their formal research paper on the work “FlashAttention on a Napkin.”This method, Abbott says, “allows for optimization to be really quickly derived, in contrast to prevailing methods.” While they initially applied this approach to the already existing FlashAttention algorithm, thus verifying its effectiveness, “we hope to now use this language to automate the detection of improvements,” says Zardini, who in addition to being a principal investigator in LIDS, is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.The plan is that ultimately, he says, they will develop the software to the point that “the researcher uploads their code, and with the new algorithm you automatically detect what can be improved, what can be optimized, and you return an optimized version of the algorithm to the user.”In addition to automating algorithm optimization, Zardini notes that a robust analysis of how deep-learning algorithms relate to hardware resource usage allows for systematic co-design of hardware and software. This line of work integrates with Zardini’s focus on categorical co-design, which uses the tools of category theory to simultaneously optimize various components of engineered systems.Abbott says that “this whole field of optimized deep learning models, I believe, is quite critically unaddressed, and that’s why these diagrams are so exciting. They open the doors to a systematic approach to this problem.”“I’m very impressed by the quality of this research. ... The new approach to diagramming deep-learning algorithms used by this paper could be a very significant step,” says Jeremy Howard, founder and CEO of Answers.ai, who was not associated with this work. “This paper is the first time I’ve seen such a notation used to deeply analyze the performance of a deep-learning algorithm on real-world hardware. ... The next step will be to see whether real-world performance gains can be achieved.”“This is a beautifully executed piece of theoretical research, which also aims for high accessibility to uninitiated readers — a trait rarely seen in papers of this kind,” says Petar Velickovic, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and a lecturer at Cambridge University, who was not associated with this work. These researchers, he says, “are clearly excellent communicators, and I cannot wait to see what they come up with next!”The new diagram-based language, having been posted online, has already attracted great attention and interest from software developers. A reviewer from Abbott’s prior paper introducing the diagrams noted that “The proposed neural circuit diagrams look great from an artistic standpoint (as far as I am able to judge this).” “It’s technical research, but it’s also flashy!” Zardini says.

The UK Says at an Energy Summit That Green Power Will Boost Security, as the US Differs

Britain has announced a major investment in wind power as it hosts an international summit on energy security

LONDON (AP) — Britain announced a major investment in wind power Thursday as it hosted an international summit on energy security — with Europe and the United States at odds over whether to cut their reliance on fossil fuels.U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government will invest 300 million pounds ($400 million) in boosting Britain’s capacity to manufacture components for the offshore wind industry, a move it hopes will encourage private investment in the U.K.’s renewable energy sector.“As long as energy can be weaponized against us, our countries and our citizens are vulnerable and exposed,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told delegates.He said “low-carbon power” was a route to energy security as well as a way to slow climate change.Britain now gets more than half its electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, and the rest from natural gas and nuclear energy. It aims to generate all the U.K.’s energy from renewable sources by 2030.Tommy Joyce, U.S. acting assistant secretary of energy for international affairs, told participants they should be “honest about the world’s growing energy needs, not focused on net-zero politics.”He called policies that push for clean power over fossil fuels "harmful and dangerous," and claimed building wind turbines requires "concessions to or coercion from China" because it supplies necessary rare minerals.Hosted by the British government and the International Energy Agency, the two-day summit brings together government ministers from 60 countries, senior European Union officials, energy sector CEOs, heads of international organizations and nonprofits to assess risks to the global energy system and figure out solutions. Associated Press writer Jennifer McDermott contributed to this story. ___The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Steelhead trout rescued from Palisades fire spawn in their new Santa Barbara County home

After a stressful journey out of the burn zone in Malibu, the endangered trout have spawned in their adopted stream in Santa Barbara County.

Wildlife officials feared critically endangered steelhead trout rescued from the Palisades fire burn scar might not be up for spawning after all they’d been through over the last few months.After their watershed in the Santa Monica Mountains was scorched in January, the fish were stunned with electricity, scooped up in buckets, trucked to a hatchery, fed unfamiliar food and then moved to a different creek. It was all part of a liberation effort pulled off in the nick of time. “This whole thing is just a very stressful and traumatic event, and I’m happy that we didn’t really kill many fish,” said Kyle Evans, an environmental program manager for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which led the rescue. “But I was concerned that I might have just disrupted this whole months-long process of getting ready to spawn.” Steelhead were once abundant in Southern California, but their numbers plummeted amid coastal development and overfishing. A distinct Southern California population is listed as endangered at the state and federal level. (Alex Vejar / California Department of Fish and Wildlife) But this month spawn they did.It’s believed that there are now more than 100 baby trout swishing around their new digs in Arroyo Hondo Creek in Santa Barbara County.Their presence is a triumph — for the species and for their adopted home.However, more fish require more suitable habitat, which is lacking in Southern California — in part due to drought and the increased frequency of devastating wildfires. Steelhead trout are the same species as rainbow trout, but they have different lifestyles. Steelheads migrate to the ocean and return to their natal streams to spawn, while rainbows spend their lives in freshwater.Steelhead were once abundant in Southern California, but their numbers plummeted amid coastal development and overfishing. A distinct Southern California population is listed as endangered at the state and federal level.The young fish sighted this month mark the next generation of what was the last population of steelhead in the Santa Monica Mountains, a range that stretches from the Hollywood Hills to Point Mugu in Ventura County. They also represent the return of a species to a watershed that itself was devastated by a fire four years ago, but has since recovered. It’s believed that there are now more than 100 baby trout swishing around their new digs in Arroyo Hondo Creek in Santa Barbara County. (Kyle Kusa / Land Trust for Santa Barbara County) The Alisal blaze torched roughly 95% of the Arroyo Hondo Preserve located west of Santa Barbara, and subsequent debris flows choked the creek of the same name that housed steelhead. All the fish perished, according to Meredith Hendricks, executive director of the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, a nonprofit organization that owns and manages the preserve.“To be able to … offer space for these fish to be transplanted to — when we ourselves had experienced a similar situation but lost our fish — it was just a really big deal,” Hendricks said. Arroyo Hondo Creek bears similarities to the trout’s native Topanga Creek; they are both coastal streams of roughly the same size. And it has a bonus feature: a state-funded fish passage constructed under Highway 101 in 2008, which improved fish movement between the stream and the ocean.Spawning is a biologically and energetically demanding endeavor for steelhead, and the process likely began in December or earlier, according to Evans.That means it was already underway when 271 steelhead were evacuated in January from Topanga Creek, a biodiversity hot spot located in Malibu that was badly damaged by the Palisades fire.It continued when they were hauled about 50 miles north to a hatchery in Fillmore, where they hung out until 266 of them made it to Arroyo Hondo the following month.State wildlife personnel regularly surveyed the fish in their new digs but didn’t see the spawning nests, which can be missed. VIDEO | 00:16 Steelhead trout in Arroyo Hondo Creek in Santa Barbara County Steelhead trout in Arroyo Hondo Creek in Santa Barbara County. (Calif. Dept. of Fish & Game) Then, on April 7, Evans got a text message from the Land Trust’s land programs director, Leslie Chan, with a video that appeared to show a freshly hatched young-of-the-year — the wonky name for fish born during the steelheads’ sole annual spawn.The following day, Evans’ team was dispatched to the creek and confirmed the discovery. They tallied about 100 of the newly hatched fish. The young trout span roughly one inch and, as Evans put it, aren’t too bright. They hang out in the shallows and don’t bolt from predators.“They’re kind of just happy to be alive, and they’re not really trying to hide,” he said.By the end of summer, Evans estimates two-thirds will die off. But the survivors are enough to keep the population charging onward. Evans hopes that in a few years, there will be three to four times the number of fish that initially moved in.The plan is to eventually relocate at least some back to their native home of Topanga Creek.Right now, Topanga “looks pretty bad,” Evans said. The Palisades fire stripped the surrounding hillsides of vegetation, paving the way for dirt, ash and other material to pour into the waterway. Another endangered fish, northern tidewater gobies, were rescued from the same watershed shortly before the steelhead were liberated. Within two days of the trouts’ removal, the first storm of the season arrived, likely burying the remaining fish in a muddy slurry. Citizen scientists Bernard Yin, center, and Rebecca Ramirez, right, join government agency staffers in rescuing federally endangered fish in the Topanga Lagoon in Malibu on Jan. 17. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times) Evans expects it will be about four years before Topanga Creek is ready to support steelhead again, based on his experience observing streams recover after the Thomas, Woolsey, Alisal and other fires. There’s also discussion about moving around steelhead to create backup populations should calamity befall one, as well as boost genetic diversity of the rare fish.For example, some of the steelhead saved from Topanga could be moved to Malibu Creek, another stream in the Santa Monica Mountains that empties into Santa Monica Bay. There are efforts underway to remove the 100-foot Rindge Dam in Malibu Creek to open up more habitat for the fish.“As we saw, if you have one population in the Santa Monica Mountains and a fire happens, you could just lose it forever,” Evans said. “So having fish in multiple areas is the kind of way to defend against that.”With the Topanga Creek steelhead biding their time up north, it’s believed there are none currently inhabiting the Santa Monicas. Habitat restoration is key for the species’ survival, according to Evans, who advocates for directing funding to such efforts, including soon-to-come-online money from Proposition 4, a $10-billion bond measure to finance water, clean energy and other environmental projects.“It doesn’t matter how many fish you have, or if you’re growing them in a hatchery, or what you’re doing,” he said. “If they can’t be supported on the landscape, then there’s no point.”Some trout will end up making their temporary lodging permanent, according to Hendricks, of the Land Trust. Arroyo Hondo is a long creek with plenty of nooks and crannies for trout to hide in. So when it comes time to bring the steelhead home, she said, “I’m sure some will get left behind.”

Chicago Teachers Union secures clean energy wins in new contract

The Chicago Teachers Union expects its new, hard-fought contract to help drive clean energy investments and train the next generation of clean energy workers, even as the Trump administration attacks such priorities. The contract approved by 97% of union members this month represents the first time the union has…

The Chicago Teachers Union expects its new, hard-fought contract to help drive clean energy investments and train the next generation of clean energy workers, even as the Trump administration attacks such priorities. The contract approved by 97% of union members this month represents the first time the union has bargained with school officials specifically around climate change and energy, said union Vice President Jackson Potter. The deal still needs to be approved by the Chicago Board of Education. If approved, the contract will result in new programs that prepare students for clean energy jobs, developed in collaboration with local labor unions. It mandates that district officials work with the teachers union to seek funding for clean energy investments and update a climate action plan by 2026. And it calls for installing heat pumps and outfitting 30 schools with solar panels — if funding can be secured. During almost a year of contentious negotiations, the more than 25,000-member union had also demanded paid climate-educator positions, an all-electric school bus fleet, and that all newly constructed schools be carbon-free. While those provisions did not end up in the final agreement, leaders say the four-year contract is a ​“transformative” victory that sets the stage for more ambitious demands next time. “This contract is setting the floor of what we hope we can accomplish,” said Lauren Bianchi, who taught social studies at George Washington High School on the city’s South Side for six years before becoming green schools organizer for the union. ​“It shows we can win on climate, even despite Trump.” The climate-related provisions are part of what the Chicago Teachers Union and an increasing number of unions nationwide refer to as ​“common good” demands, meant to benefit not only their members in the workplace but the entire community. In this and its 2019 contract, the Chicago union also won ​“common good” items such as protections for immigrant students and teachers, and affordable housing–related measures. The new contract also guarantees teachers academic freedom at a time when the federal government is trying to limit schools from teaching materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Black history, Indigenous history, climate science — that’s protected instruction now,” said Potter. Chicago Public Schools did not respond to emailed questions for this story, except to forward a press release that did not mention clean energy provisions. Training Chicago’s students for clean energy jobs The union crafted its proposals based on discussions with three environmental and community organizations, Bianchi said — the Southeast Environmental Task Force, People for Community Recovery, and ONE Northside. The Southeast Environmental Task Force led the successful fight to ban new petcoke storage in Chicago, and the group’s co-executive director Olga Bautista is also vice president of the 21-member school board. People for Community Recovery was founded by Hazel Johnson, who is often known as ​“the mother of the environmental justice movement.” And ONE Northside emphasizes the link between clean energy and affordable housing. Clean energy job training was a priority for all three of the organizations, Potter said. Under the contract, the union and district officials will work with other labor unions to create pre-apprenticeship programs for students, which are crucial to entering the union-dominated building trades to install solar, do energy-efficiency overhauls, and electrify homes with heat pumps and other technology. The contract demands the district create one specific new clean energy jobs pathway program during each year of the four-year contract. It also mandates renovating schools for energy efficiency and installing modern HVAC systems, and orders the school district to work with trade unions to create opportunities for Chicago Public Schools students and graduates to be hired for such work. “The people in the community have identified jobs and economic justice as being essential for environmental justice,” said Bianchi. ​“I’ve mostly taught juniors and seniors; a lot expressed frustration that college is not their plan. They wish they could learn job skills to enter a trade.” Chicago schools progress on solar, energy efficiency, and electrification Installing solar could help the district meet its clean energy goals, which include sourcing 100% of its electricity from renewables by this year. The district has invested more than $6 million in energy efficiency and efficient lighting since 2018, and cut its carbon dioxide emissions by more than 27,000 metric tons, school district spokesperson Evan Moore told Canary Media last fall as contract negotiations were proceeding. The schools are eligible for subsidized solar panels under the state Illinois Shines program, and they can tap the federal 30% investment tax credit for solar arrays, with a new direct-pay option tailored to tax-exempt organizations like schools.

Costa Rica Proposes Strict Penalties for Illegal National Park Entries

Costa Rica is cracking down on illegal entries into its national parks and protected areas, citing dangers to visitors and environmental harm. Franz Tattenbach, Minister of Environment and Energy (MINAE), has called on lawmakers to approve a bill imposing fines of up to ¢2.3 million (approximately $4,400) on individuals and tour operators who access these […] The post Costa Rica Proposes Strict Penalties for Illegal National Park Entries appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

Costa Rica is cracking down on illegal entries into its national parks and protected areas, citing dangers to visitors and environmental harm. Franz Tattenbach, Minister of Environment and Energy (MINAE), has called on lawmakers to approve a bill imposing fines of up to ¢2.3 million (approximately $4,400) on individuals and tour operators who access these areas without authorization. Over 500 unauthorized entries into Costa Rica’s 30 national parks and reserves, have been reported so far this year. High-risk areas like Poás, Turrialba, Rincón de la Vieja, and Arenal volcanoes are frequent targets, where illegal tours bypass safety protocols. Unscrupulous operators promote these “exclusive” experiences on social media, often lacking insurance, safety equipment, or trained guides. “These operators abandon clients if intercepted by authorities, leaving them vulnerable in hazardous areas,” Tattenbach said. Poás Volcano National Park, closed since March 26 due to seismic activity and ash emissions, remains a hotspot for illegal tours. The proposed bill, under discussion by MINAE and the National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC), would introduce fines ranging from ¢1.3 million to ¢2.3 million ($2,500 to $4,400) for unauthorized entry, targeting both operators and participants. If a rescue operation is required, involving the Costa Rican Red Cross or MINAE personnel, an additional fine of ¢2.3 million ($4,400) could be imposed. Current laws penalize illegal entry under Article 58 of Forestry Law 7575, with three months to three years in prison, but enforcement is inconsistent. The new bill aims to strengthen deterrence. “These hikes involve steep slopes, toxic gases, and the risk of volcanic eruptions, which can be fatal,” Tattenbach warned, citing the 2017 Poás eruption that closed the park for over a year. Illegal entries also threaten Costa Rica’s biodiversity, which includes 5% of the world’s species. Unauthorized trails disrupt ecosystems and increase risks of poaching, according to Jorge Mario Rodríguez, Vice Minister of Environment. The Volcanological and Seismological Observatory of Costa Rica (OVSICORI) monitors volcanic activity to inform park closures, but illegal tours undermine these safety measures. Increased Surveillance SINAC, the Costa Rican Fire Department, Red Cross, and Police Force will intensify surveillance going forward, targeting high-risk national parks and roadways to prevent unauthorized access, wildlife extraction, hunting, and trade in protected flora and fauna. “These operations safeguard our natural heritage and ensure visitor safety,” Tattenbach said. SINAC’s year-round efforts have intercepted numerous illegal tours in 2025. Visiting Parks Safely: MINAE and SINAC urge visitors to use authorized operators and purchase tickets via the SINAC website or park entrances. Guided tours, available through platforms like Viator or Get Your Guide, offer safe experiences in parks like Manuel Antonio or Corcovado. Tourists should check park statuses before planning visits, as closures due to volcanic activity or weather are common. “Respecting regulations protects both you and Costa Rica’s natural treasures,” Rodríguez said. Preserving Ecotourism: As the proposed bill awaits Legislative Assembly review, MINAE urges compliance to maintain Costa Rica’s status as a global conservation leader. For updates on the bill or park regulations, visit MINAE’s Website The post Costa Rica Proposes Strict Penalties for Illegal National Park Entries appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

Suggested Viewing

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.