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Environmental Group Tries to Rebuild Sinking Coastline With Recycled Oysters

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Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Jonathan Phillips says he thinks about Louisiana’s disappearing coastline every day.As a commercial fisherman and member of the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha tribe, he sees water levels rising in Plaquemines Parish firsthand. He grew up in Marrero but spent a lot of time as a child in Grand Bayou Indian Village, a small community in south Plaquemines Parish that is being threatened by the effects of climate change — rising sea levels, more intense tropical storms and land loss. With the erosion of barrier islands — which protect wetlands from storm surge and saltwater intrusion — life on the bayou is getting more precarious, said Phillips, whose parents moved back to the village after raising him in Marrero.As “soon as the tide got high you see the marsh floating away,” Phillips told Verite News, referring to Hurricane Francine, which struck southeast Louisiana last month. “Next strong storm will come and take it all away.”Communities like Grand Bayou, located outside the federal levee system, are increasingly vulnerable to storms as the shoreline recedes. Over the past 60 years, the land-to-water ratio in Grand Bayou has been steadily decreasing, according to the University of New Orleans study. In 1968, there was more than twice as much land than there was water; now the village is mostly water. The church, Evening Light Tabernacle, and the houses that make up the village are only accessible by boat. It has suffered one of the highest rates of land loss on the state’s coastline, based on a 2011 study published in the Journal of Coastal Research.Phillips, who still lives in Marrero but continues to visit the village often, said the Grand Bayou is his “paradise.” Still, the village has changed since he was a child — the land used to be higher and the marsh grass didn’t grow so close to houses. As time passed and land loss made storms more devastating, many people moved away from the village, including John’s family.“It’s hard to live here and lose everything,” Phillips said. “Take a chance of losing everything every year. So, you’re kind of forced to… move away.”Now, in order to protect the community from the effects of land loss, the tribe is partnering with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental nonprofit, to bring life back to the area by building reefs out of recycled oyster shells throughout the village. Over four days in September, volunteers with the coalition constructed oyster reefs to protect areas that would otherwise be impacted by erosion from high tides and storms.Rosina Philippe, a council elder and a traditional knowledge holder for the tribe who works on coastal restoration in the area, was at the second day of the reef building project. She said that growing up in the village was idyllic. “Everything that we needed was here,” she said. But with the fracturing and disappearance of the marshland, Grand Bayou has lost much of what once made life possible.For many years, members of the tribe lived independently, surviving off the land and finding sustenance through small-scale farming, fishing and bartering. In the past five to six years, they have grown more dependent on grocery stores because land erosion and saltwater intrusion have made growing crops and raising livestock more difficult. With high levels of salt in the remaining land, dead trees aren’t an uncommon sight in the bayou. Philippe attributes the lack of animal life, especially birds, to the loss of the marshlands. “We’re losing habitat,” Philippe said. “We’re losing rookeries. There are other life forms that depend on this place, and people tend to forget that.”Oyster shells recycled by New Orleans and Baton Rouge restaurants were sent to the village in mid-September. From there, volunteers loaded bags of shells onto boats and placed them along the shoreline to protect homes and navigational areas. The shells will support the growth of new oysters, which filter water and are considered a keystone species because of the thriving marine community they help create. Fish and crabs use the reefs that oysters create as nurseries. When living oysters grow on them, snails and other predators come to feed. The restoration of this marine habitat may provide commercial benefits for residents. Philippe said that these kinds of low-tech and relatively inexpensive solutions have high success rates. The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana said other reefs it has built have reduced shoreline erosion by up to 50%. Some of the reef was built around Carmelita Sylve’s property. Sylvie is a lifelong resident of Grand Bayou and, like Phillips, is afraid that her home, community and way of life will be lost to the water. “(There’s) a lot of waterway, and the land is disappearing,” Sylvie said. “I’m so thankful for CRCL, that has come out here to bring these shells to put around our properties so that it can — can’t maybe stop the erosion, but at least maybe slow it down.”The coalition has been working with the tribe since 2019. Their first project together was in 2022, when the tribe and coalition attempted to protect Lemon Tree Mound, a formerly elevated area built by Indigenous people. It is a sacred site to the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha, a place where people once brought offerings to their ancestors. Two years after a reef was built around the mound, aquatic life such as snails, crabs and oysters has returned to it. On Sept. 20, the land of Lemon Tree Mound was returned to the tribe by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which had acquired it through a 1991 donation as a part of a trust. In a speech to the tribe and coalition volunteers, the Rev. Marian D. Fortner, of St. Paul’s, said she felt compelled to return to the land when she found out it was sacred to the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha. She said its cultural significance was “all the more reason to entrust it back, to give it back to the mother who cares for it.” In a show of thanks, the tribe gave the church a handmade blanket. Philippe said she hopes the rematriation of the site will start a trend to return the land to its Indigenous stewards while fostering solidarity between the tribe and non-Indigenous people. Philippe’s hope is tempered by worry from a looming threat just down the road from the village. Venture Global LNG is building a liquified natural gas production and export facility in Port Sulphur, which is approximately 12 miles from the village. Al Duvernay, a Metairie resident and volunteer who helped with the reef build, said that he has hunted and fished in the waters of Grand Bayou since he was a child. He said watching the destruction of the marshland in front of his eyes was “devastating” and “heartbreaking.” “I’ve watched the oil companies dredge their canals,” Duvernay said. “I mean, literally, sitting in a duck line with my dad and the dredges are going through the marsh, tearing up the marsh.”The Plaquemines LNG terminal would destroy hundreds of acres of wetlands, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s assessment. But the agency concluded that Venture Global LNG has taken measures to mitigate wetland degradation and that impacts on the surrounding water and wetlands will not be significant. Still, environmental groups have been critical of the project, saying that the levees have design flaws that may not prevent flooding during major storms and could cause “catastrophic damage” to the surrounding areas. Verite News reached out to Venture Global LNG, but the company didn’t respond to requests for comment. Philippe called the LNG terminal a “monstrosity.” She is worried about the negative environmental effects the plant may have for generations to come. Other tribe members, like Phillips, said that oil companies and the state bypass the community and don’t listen to their concerns. He said that fighting the oil company is “fighting a losing battle.” Still, he has hope for the community’s survival. “We learn to adapt,” Phillips said. “We’re gonna survive. That’s one thing about a commercial fisherman and somebody from Grand Bayou. We will adapt. We will survive out here. This is our land.”This story was originally published by Verite News and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

A Native American tribe along the Louisiana coast is taking action to preserve their disappearing land and their way of life

Jonathan Phillips says he thinks about Louisiana’s disappearing coastline every day.

As a commercial fisherman and member of the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha tribe, he sees water levels rising in Plaquemines Parish firsthand. He grew up in Marrero but spent a lot of time as a child in Grand Bayou Indian Village, a small community in south Plaquemines Parish that is being threatened by the effects of climate change — rising sea levels, more intense tropical storms and land loss. With the erosion of barrier islands — which protect wetlands from storm surge and saltwater intrusion — life on the bayou is getting more precarious, said Phillips, whose parents moved back to the village after raising him in Marrero.

As “soon as the tide got high you see the marsh floating away,” Phillips told Verite News, referring to Hurricane Francine, which struck southeast Louisiana last month. “Next strong storm will come and take it all away.”

Communities like Grand Bayou, located outside the federal levee system, are increasingly vulnerable to storms as the shoreline recedes.

Over the past 60 years, the land-to-water ratio in Grand Bayou has been steadily decreasing, according to the University of New Orleans study. In 1968, there was more than twice as much land than there was water; now the village is mostly water. The church, Evening Light Tabernacle, and the houses that make up the village are only accessible by boat. It has suffered one of the highest rates of land loss on the state’s coastline, based on a 2011 study published in the Journal of Coastal Research.

Phillips, who still lives in Marrero but continues to visit the village often, said the Grand Bayou is his “paradise.” Still, the village has changed since he was a child — the land used to be higher and the marsh grass didn’t grow so close to houses. As time passed and land loss made storms more devastating, many people moved away from the village, including John’s family.

“It’s hard to live here and lose everything,” Phillips said. “Take a chance of losing everything every year. So, you’re kind of forced to… move away.”

Now, in order to protect the community from the effects of land loss, the tribe is partnering with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental nonprofit, to bring life back to the area by building reefs out of recycled oyster shells throughout the village.

Over four days in September, volunteers with the coalition constructed oyster reefs to protect areas that would otherwise be impacted by erosion from high tides and storms.

Rosina Philippe, a council elder and a traditional knowledge holder for the tribe who works on coastal restoration in the area, was at the second day of the reef building project. She said that growing up in the village was idyllic.

“Everything that we needed was here,” she said.

But with the fracturing and disappearance of the marshland, Grand Bayou has lost much of what once made life possible.

For many years, members of the tribe lived independently, surviving off the land and finding sustenance through small-scale farming, fishing and bartering. In the past five to six years, they have grown more dependent on grocery stores because land erosion and saltwater intrusion have made growing crops and raising livestock more difficult. With high levels of salt in the remaining land, dead trees aren’t an uncommon sight in the bayou. Philippe attributes the lack of animal life, especially birds, to the loss of the marshlands.

“We’re losing habitat,” Philippe said. “We’re losing rookeries. There are other life forms that depend on this place, and people tend to forget that.”

Oyster shells recycled by New Orleans and Baton Rouge restaurants were sent to the village in mid-September. From there, volunteers loaded bags of shells onto boats and placed them along the shoreline to protect homes and navigational areas.

The shells will support the growth of new oysters, which filter water and are considered a keystone species because of the thriving marine community they help create. Fish and crabs use the reefs that oysters create as nurseries. When living oysters grow on them, snails and other predators come to feed. The restoration of this marine habitat may provide commercial benefits for residents.

Philippe said that these kinds of low-tech and relatively inexpensive solutions have high success rates. The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana said other reefs it has built have reduced shoreline erosion by up to 50%.

Some of the reef was built around Carmelita Sylve’s property. Sylvie is a lifelong resident of Grand Bayou and, like Phillips, is afraid that her home, community and way of life will be lost to the water.

“(There’s) a lot of waterway, and the land is disappearing,” Sylvie said. “I’m so thankful for CRCL, that has come out here to bring these shells to put around our properties so that it can — can’t maybe stop the erosion, but at least maybe slow it down.”

The coalition has been working with the tribe since 2019. Their first project together was in 2022, when the tribe and coalition attempted to protect Lemon Tree Mound, a formerly elevated area built by Indigenous people. It is a sacred site to the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha, a place where people once brought offerings to their ancestors. Two years after a reef was built around the mound, aquatic life such as snails, crabs and oysters has returned to it.

On Sept. 20, the land of Lemon Tree Mound was returned to the tribe by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which had acquired it through a 1991 donation as a part of a trust.

In a speech to the tribe and coalition volunteers, the Rev. Marian D. Fortner, of St. Paul’s, said she felt compelled to return to the land when she found out it was sacred to the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha. She said its cultural significance was “all the more reason to entrust it back, to give it back to the mother who cares for it.” In a show of thanks, the tribe gave the church a handmade blanket.

Philippe said she hopes the rematriation of the site will start a trend to return the land to its Indigenous stewards while fostering solidarity between the tribe and non-Indigenous people.

Philippe’s hope is tempered by worry from a looming threat just down the road from the village. Venture Global LNG is building a liquified natural gas production and export facility in Port Sulphur, which is approximately 12 miles from the village.

Al Duvernay, a Metairie resident and volunteer who helped with the reef build, said that he has hunted and fished in the waters of Grand Bayou since he was a child. He said watching the destruction of the marshland in front of his eyes was “devastating” and “heartbreaking.”

“I’ve watched the oil companies dredge their canals,” Duvernay said. “I mean, literally, sitting in a duck line with my dad and the dredges are going through the marsh, tearing up the marsh.”

The Plaquemines LNG terminal would destroy hundreds of acres of wetlands, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s assessment. But the agency concluded that Venture Global LNG has taken measures to mitigate wetland degradation and that impacts on the surrounding water and wetlands will not be significant. Still, environmental groups have been critical of the project, saying that the levees have design flaws that may not prevent flooding during major storms and could cause “catastrophic damage” to the surrounding areas. Verite News reached out to Venture Global LNG, but the company didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Philippe called the LNG terminal a “monstrosity.” She is worried about the negative environmental effects the plant may have for generations to come.

Other tribe members, like Phillips, said that oil companies and the state bypass the community and don’t listen to their concerns. He said that fighting the oil company is “fighting a losing battle.” Still, he has hope for the community’s survival.

“We learn to adapt,” Phillips said. “We’re gonna survive. That’s one thing about a commercial fisherman and somebody from Grand Bayou. We will adapt. We will survive out here. This is our land.”

This story was originally published by Verite News and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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AI Is Coming for Your Toddler’s Bedtime Story

I began this morning, as I do every morning, by reading my daughter a book. Today it was Arthur Dorros’ Abuela, illustrated by Elisa Kleven. Abuela is a sweet story about a girl who imagines that she and her grandmother leap into the sky and soar around New York City. Dorros does an elegant job weaving Spanish words and phrases throughout the text, often allowing readers to glean their meaning rather than translating them directly. When Rosalba, the bilingual granddaughter, discovers she can fly, she calls to her grandmother, “Ven, Abuela. Come, Abuela.” Her Spanish-speaking grandmother replies simply, “Sí, quiero volar.” Their language use reflects who they are—a move that plenty of authors who write for adults fail to make. Abuela was one of my favorite books growing up, and it’s one of my 2-year-old’s favorites now. (And yes, we’re reading my worn old copy.) She loves the idea of a flying grandma; she loves learning bits of what she calls Fanish; she loves the bit when Rosalba and Abuela hitch a ride on an airplane, though she worries it might be too loud. Most of all, though, she loves Kleven’s warm yet antic illustrations, which capture urban life in nearly pointillist detail. Every page gives her myriad things to look for and gives us myriad things to discuss. (Where are the dogs? What does Rosalba’s tío sell in his store? Why is it scary when airplanes are loud?) I’ve probably read Abuela 200 times since we swiped it from my parents over the summer, and no two readings have been the same. I don’t start all my days with books as rich as Abuela, though. Sometimes, my daughter chooses the books I wish she wouldn’t: ones that have wandered into our house as gifts, or in a big stack someone was giving away, and that I have yet to purge. These books have garish, unappealing computer-rendered art. Some of them have nursery rhymes as text, and the rest have inane rhymes that don’t quite add up to a story. One or two are Jewish holiday-oriented, and a couple more are tourist souvenirs. Not a single one of these books has a named author or illustrator. None of their publishers, all of which are quite small, responded to my requests for interviews, but I strongly suspect that these books were written and generated by AI—and that I’m not supposed to guess. The maybe-AI book that has lasted the longest in our house is a badly illustrated Old MacDonald Has a Farm. Its animals are inconsistently pixelated around the edges; the pink circles on its farmer’s cheeks vary significantly in size from page to page, and his hands appear to have second thumbs instead of pinkies. All of these irregularities are signs of AI, according to the writer and illustrator Karen Ferreira, who runs an author coaching program called Children’s Book Mastery. On her program’s site, she warns that because AI cannot create a series of images using the same figures, it generates characters that are—even if only subtly—dissimilar from page to page. Noting this in our Old MacDonald, I checked to see whether it was copyrighted, because the US copyright office has ruled out copyright for images created by machine learning. Where other board books have copyright symbols and information—often the illustration and text copyright holders are different—this one reads only, “All rights reserved.” It’s unclear what these “rights” refer to, given that there is no named holder; it’s possible that the publisher is gesturing at the design, but equally possible that the statement is a decoy with no legal meaning. What makes a good children’s book, and how much does it matter if a children’s book is good? I have many objections to maybe-AI books like this one. They’re ugly, whereas all our other children’s books are whimsical, beautiful, or both. They aren’t playful or sly or surprising. Their prose has no rhythm, in contrast to, let’s say, Sandra Boynton’s Barnyard Dance! and Dinosaur Dance!, which have beats that inspire toddlers to leap up and perform. (The author-illustrator Mo Willems has said children’s books are “meant to be played, not just to be read.”) They don’t give my daughter much to notice or me much to riff on, which means she gets sick of them quickly. If she chooses one, she’s often done with it in under a minute. It gives me a vague sting of guilt to donate such uninspiring books, but I still do, since the only other option is the landfill. I imagine they’ll end up there anyway. But I should admit that I also dislike the books that trigger my AI radar—that uncanny-valley tingle you get when something just seems inhuman—out of bias. I am a writer and translator, a person whose livelihood is entirely centered and dependent on living in a society that values human creativity, and just the thought of a children’s book generated by AI upsets me. Some months ago, I decided I wanted to know whether my bias was right. After all, there are legions of bad children’s books written and illustrated (or stock photo–collaged) by humans. Are those books meaningfully and demonstrably different from AI ones? If they are, how big a threat is AI to quality children’s publishing, and does it also threaten children’s learning? In a sense, my questions—not all of which are answerable—boil down to this: What makes a good children’s book, and how much does it matter if a children’s book is good? I’m not the only one worried about this. My brother- and sister-in-law, proud Minnesotans, recently sent us a book called Count On Minnesota—state merch, precisely the sort of thing that’s set my AI alarms ringing in the past—whose publisher, Gibbs Smith, includes a warning on the back beside the copyright notice: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies and systems.” Count On Minnesota is nearly wordless and has no named author, but the names of its artist and designer, Nicole LaRue and Brynn Evans, sit directly below the AI statement, reminding readers who will be harmed if Count On Minnesota gets scraped to train large vision models despite its copyright language. In this sense, children’s literature is akin to the many, many other fields that generative AI threatens. There’s a danger that machines will take authors’ and illustrators’ jobs, and the data sets on which they were trained have already taken tremendous amounts of intellectual property. Larry Law, executive director of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, told me that his organization’s member stores are against AI-created books—and, as a matter of policy, refuse to stock anything they suspect or know was generated by a large language or vision model—because “as an association, we value artists and authors and publishers and fundamentally believe that AI steals from artists.” Still, Law and many of GLIBA’s members are comfortable using AI to streamline workflow. So are many publishers. Both corporate publishing houses and some reputable independent ones are at least beginning to use AI to create the marketing bibles called tip sheets and other internal sales documents. According to industry sources I spoke to on background, some corporate publishers are also testing large language and vision models’ capacities to create children’s books, but their attempts aren’t reaching the market. The illustrations aren’t good enough yet, and it’s still easier to have a human produce text than to make a person coach and edit a large language model. “Kids are weird! They’re joyfully weird, and if you spend time with them and are able to get that weirdness and that playfulness out of them, you can really understand why a moralizing book really comes across as gross.” Other publishers, meanwhile, are shying away. Dan Brewster, owner of Prologue Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio—a shop with an explicit anti-AI policy—told me, “The publisher partners we work with every day have not done anything to make me suspect them” of generating text or illustrations with AI; many, he added, have told him, “‘You’re never going to see that from us.’” (Whether that’s true, of course, remains to be seen.) In contrast, Brewster has grown more cautious in his acquisitions of self-published books and those released by very small independent presses. He sees these as higher AI risks, as does Timothy Otte, a co-owner and buyer at Minneapolis’ Wild Rumpus, a beloved 33-year-old children’s bookstore. Its legacy and reach, he says, means they “get both traditionally published authors and self-published authors reaching out asking you to stock their book. That was true before AI was in the picture. Now, some of those authors that are reaching out, it is clear that what they’re pitching to me was at least partly, if not entirely, generated by AI.” Otte always says no, both on the grounds Law described and because the books are no good. The art often has not just inconsistencies, but errors: Rendering models aren’t great at getting the right number of toes on a paw. The text can be equally full of mistakes, as children’s librarian Sondra Eklund writes in a horrified blog post about acquiring a book about rabbits from children’s publisher Bold Kids, only to discover that she’d bought an AI book so carelessly produced that it informs readers that rabbits “can even make their own clothes…and can help you out with gardening.” (Reviews of Bold Kids’ hundreds of books on Amazon suggest that its rabbit book isn’t the only one with such issues. Bold Kids did not respond to repeated efforts to reach them for comment.) The text of more edited AI books, meanwhile, tends to condescend to young readers. Otte often sees books whose authors have “decided that there is a moral that they want to give to children, and they have asked a large language model to spit out a picture book that shows a kid coming up against some sort of problem and being given a moral solution.” In his experience, that isn’t what children want or how they learn. “Kids are weird!” Otte says. “They’re joyfully weird, and if you spend time with them and are able to get that weirdness and that playfulness out of them, you can really understand why a moralizing book really comes across as gross. The number of times I’ve seen kids make a stank face at a book that’s telling them how to be!” AI could be no menace at all to picture-book classics, but it could make high-quality contemporary board books go extinct. But is a lazy, moralizing AI book any worse than a lazy, moralizing one written by a person? When I put this question to Otte, the only distinction he could come up with was the “ancillary ethical concerns of water usage and the environmental impact that a large language model currently has.” Other book buyers, though, pointed out that while AI can imitate a particular writer or designer’s style or mash multiple perspectives together, it cannot have a point of view of its own. Plenty of big publishers create picture books and board books—which are simple, sturdy texts printed on cardstock heavy enough to be gnawed on by a teething 8-month-old—in-house, using stock photos and releasing them without an author’s name. Very rarely is the result much good, and yet each publisher does have its own visual signature. If you’re a millennial, you can likely close your eyes and summon the museum-text layout of the pages in a DK Eyewitness book. It’s idiosyncratic even if it’s not particularly special. To deny our children even that is to assume, in a sense, that they have no point of view: that they can’t tell one book from another and wouldn’t care if they could. Frankly, though, I’m less concerned with the gap between bad AI and bad human than I am with the yawning chasm between bad AI and good human, since bad children’s books by humans are the ones more likely to become rarer or cease existing. If rendering models get good enough that corporate publishers stop asking humans to slap together, let’s say, stock-photo books about ducks, those books could, in theory, vanish. That doesn’t mean Robert McCloskey’s canonical, beautiful Make Way for Ducklings will go out of print. But it’s much less expensive to publish a book that was written years ago than it is to pay an author and illustrator for something new. It’s also less expensive to print a picture book like Make Way for Ducklings than a board book, with its heavier paper and nontoxic (again: gnawing baby) inks. AI could be no menace at all to picture-book classics, but it could make high-quality contemporary board books go extinct. Only instinct and imagination can tell you what Sandra Boynton means when she writes in ‘Dinosaur Dance!’ that “Iguanodon goes dibbidy DAH.” It doesn’t help that everyone from parents to publishers is susceptible to undervaluing board books. It’s very difficult to argue that the quality of a picture book doesn’t matter, since they are the ones that most children use to learn to read. But it’s easy to dismiss board books, which are intended for children not only too young to read, but too young to even follow a story. Can’t we just show a baby anything? According to Dr. John Hutton, a pediatrician and former children’s bookstore owner who researches the impact reading at home has on toddlers’ brain function and development, we shouldn’t. In fact, we should avoid reading our kids anything that bores us. Beginning in utero, one of the greatest benefits of shared reading is bonding, and unsurprisingly, Hutton has found that the more engaged parents are in the book they’ve chosen, the greater its impact on that front. But reading to babies is also important, he explained, because the more words a child hears, the greater their receptive and expressive vocabularies (that is, the words they know and can say) will be. This, starting around age 1, lets parents and children discuss the books they’re reading, a process that Hutton told me “builds social cognition and later dovetails with empathy.” It does this by training children’s brains to connect language to emotion—and to do so through imagination. Hutton presented this as vital neurological work. “Nothing in the brain comes for free,” he told me, “and unless you practice empathy skills—connecting, getting along, feeling what others are feeling—you’re not going to have as well-developed neural infrastructure to be able to do that.” It’s also a social equalizer. Research has shown that reading aloud exposes children whose parents have lower income levels or educational backgrounds to more words and kinds of syntax than they might otherwise hear—and, Hutton notes, this isn’t a question of proper syntax. Rather, what matters here is creativity. Some of the best board books out there bend or even invent language—only instinct and imagination can tell you what Boynton means when she writes in Dinosaur Dance! that “Iguanodon goes dibbidy DAH”—and this teaches their little listeners how to do the same. Of course, not all good board books’ strength is linguistic. Ideally, Hutton says, a book’s text and illustrations should “recruit both the language and visual parts of your brain to work together to understand what’s going on.” From ages 6 months to 18 months, my daughter was enamored with books from Camilla Reid and Ingela Arrhenius’ Peekaboo series, which have minimal text, cheery yet sophisticated illustrations, and a pop-up or slider on each page. My daughter loved it when I read Peekaboo Pumpkin to her, but she also loved learning to manipulate it herself. It was visually and tactilely appealing enough to become not just a book, but a toy—and it was sturdy enough to do so. She’s got plenty of other books with pop-ups, but Peekaboo Pumpkin and Peekaboo Lion are the only ones she hasn’t more or less destroyed. Reid and Arrhenius publish with Nosy Crow, a London-based independent press. I reached out to ask if the company was concerned about AI threatening its business and got an emphatic no from its preschool publishing director and senior art director, Tor England and Zoë Gregory. England immediately highlighted the physical durability of Nosy Crow’s books. “We believe in a book as an object people want to own,” she said, rather than one meant to be disposable. They invest in them accordingly: England and Gregory visit Arrhenius in Sweden to discuss new ideas and often spend two or three years working on a book. Neither fears that AI could compete with the quality of such painstaking work, which, for the most part, is entirely analog. Some of Nosy Crow’s books do make sounds, though—something I generally hate, but I make an exception for the shockingly realistic toddler giggle in What’s That Noise? Meow! Gregory told me that while working on that book, she couldn’t find a laugh she liked in the sound libraries Nosy Crow normally uses, so she went home, set her iPhone to record, and tickled her daughter. A good board book could become one more educational advantage that accrues disproportionately to the elite. But somebody shopping on Amazon won’t hear that giggle. Nor can an online shopper identify a shoddily printed book, which may well be cheaper than Nosy Crow’s but will certainly withstand less tugging and chewing before it falls apart. A risk that Otte and the other buyers I spoke to identified—and while it serves booksellers’ interests to say this, it is also an entirely reasonable projection—is that while independent bookstores and well-curated libraries will continue to stock high-quality books like Nosy Crow’s, Amazon, which is both the largest book retailer and the largest self-publishing service in the nation, will grow ever fuller of AI dreck. If corporate publishers turn to AI to write and illustrate their board books, this strikes me as very likely to occur. It would mean that parents with the time and resources to browse in person would be likely to provide significantly higher-quality books to their pre-reading-age children than parents searching for “train book for toddlers” online. A good board book could become one more educational advantage that accrues disproportionately to the elite. In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao writes that technology revolutions “promise to deliver progress [but have a] tendency instead to reverse it for people out of power, especially the most vulnerable.” She argues that this is “perhaps truer than ever for the moment we now find ourselves in with artificial intelligence.” The key word here is perhaps. As of now, AI children’s books are on the fringes of publishing. Large publishers can choose to keep them that way. Doing so would be a statement of conviction that the quality and humanity of children’s books matter, no matter how young the child in question is. When I asked Hutton, the pediatrician, what worried him most about AI books, he mentioned the example of “lazy writing” they set, which he fears might disincentivize both hard work and creativity. He also pointed to an often-cited MIT study showing that writing with ChatGPT dampened creativity and less fully activated the brain—that is, it’s bad for the authors, not just the readers. Then he said, “You know, there are things we can do versus things we should do as a society, and that’s where we struggle, I think.” On this front, I hope to see no more struggle. We should not give our children, whose brains are vulnerable and malleable, books created by computers. We shouldn’t give them books created carelessly. That’s up to parents and teachers, yes—but it’s also up to authors, illustrators, designers, and publishers. Gregory told me that “there’s a lot of love and warmth and heart” that goes into the books she works on. Rejecting AI is a first step toward a landscape of children’s publishing where that’s always true.

Animals

Business

Education

Beloved eagle, a school mascot, electrocuted on power lines above Bay Area elementary school

A beloved eagle, a school mascot, was electrocuted on PG&E power lines near an elementary school in the Bay Area. Could anything have been done to prevent it? How often does this happen?

MILPITAS, Calif. — As scores of students swarmed out of their Milpitas elementary school on a recent afternoon, a lone bald eagle perched high above them in a redwood tree — only occasionally looking down on the after-school ruckus, training his eyes on the grassy hills along the western horizon.The week before, his mate was electrocuted on nearby power lines operated by PG&E.Kevin Slavin, principal of Curtner Elementary School, said the eagles in that nest are so well-known and beloved here that they were made the school’s mascots and the “whole ethos of the school has been tied around them” since they arrived in 2017. What exactly happened to send Hope the eagle off the pair’s nest in the dark of night and into the live wires on the night of Nov. 3 is not known (although there’s some scandalous speculation it involved a mysterious, “interloper” female). According to a spokesperson from PG&E, an outage occurred in the area at around 9 p.m. Line workers later discovered it was caused by the adult eagle.The death, sadly, is not atypical for large raptors, such as bald and golden eagles.According to a 2014 analysis of bird deaths across the U.S., electrocution on power lines is a significant cause of bird mortality. Every year, as many as 11.6 million birds are fried on the wires that juice our televisions, HVAC systems and blow driers, the authors estimated. The birds die when two body parts — a wing, foot or beak — come in contact with two wires, or when they touch a wire and ground source, sending a fatal current of electricity through the animal’s body.Because of their massive size, eagles and other raptors are at more risk. The wingspan of an adult bald eagle ranges from 5.5 to 8 feet across; it’s roughly the same for a golden eagle.According to a report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Forensics Laboratory, which analyzed 417 electrocuted raptors from 13 species between 2000 and 2015, nearly 80 percent were bald or golden eagles.Krysta Rogers, senior environmental scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Investigations Laboratory, examined the dead eagle.She found small burns on Hope’s left foot pad and the back of her right leg. She also had singed feathers on both sides of her body, but especially on the right, where Rogers said the wing looked particularly damaged. She said most birds are electrocuted on utility poles, but Hope was electrocuted “mid-span,” where the wires dip between the poles. Melissa Subbotin, a spokesperson for PG&E, said the poles and wires near where the birds nested had been adapted with coverings and other safety features to make them safe for raptors. However, it appears the bird may have touched two wires mid-span. Subbotin said the utility company spaces lines at least 5 feet apart — a precaution it and other utility companies take to minimize raptor deaths. “Since 2002, PG&E has made about 42,990 existing power poles and towers bird-safe,” Subbotin said. The company has also retrofitted about 41,500 power poles in areas where bird have been injured or killed. In addition, she said, in 2024, the company replaced nearly 11,000 poles in designated “Raptor Concentration Zones” and built them to avian-safe construction guidelines.Doug Gillard, an amateur photographer and professor of anatomy and physiology at Life Chiropractic College West in Hayward, who has followed the Milpitas eagles for years, said while there is safety equipment near the school, it does not extend into the nearby neighborhood, where Hope was killed.Gillard said a photographer who lives in the neighborhood took a photo of the eagle hanging from the wires that Gillard has seen. The Times was unable to access the photo.Not far from the school is a marshy wetland, where ducks, geese and migrating birds come to rest and relax, a smorgasbord for a pair of eagles and their young. There are also fish in a nearby lake. Gillard said one of the nearby water bodies is stocked with trout, and that late fall is fishing season for the eagles. He said an army of photographers is currently hanging around the pond hoping to catch a snapshot of the father eagle catching a fish.Rogers said the bird was healthy. She had body fat, good muscle tone and two small feathers in her gut — presumably the remnants of a recent meal. She also had an enlarged ovary and visible oviduct — an avian fallopian tube — suggesting she was getting ready for breeding, which typically happens in January or February.Slavin, the principal, said that a day or two before the mother’s death, he saw the couple preparing their nest, and saw a young female show up. “It was a very tense situation among the eagles,” he said. Gillard, the photographer, said the “girlfriend” has black feathers on her head and in her tail, suggesting she isn’t quite five years old.Gillard and Slavin say they’ve heard from residents there may have been some altercation between the mom and the interloper that sent Hope off the nest and into the wires that night.The young female remains at the scene, and is not only being “tolerated” by the father, but occasionally accompanies him on his fishing trips, Gillard said. Eagles tend to mate for life, but if one dies, the other will look for a new mate, Gillard said. If the female eagle sticks around, it will be the dad’s third partner.Photographers can identify the father, who neighbors just call “Dad,” by the damaged flexor tendon on his right claw, which makes it appear as if he is “flipping the bird” when he flies by.

Animals

Health

Water

‘Forever chemicals’ contaminate more dolphins and whales than we thought – new research

The sex and age of an animal turn out to be stronger predictors than habitat for higher PFAS levels, suggesting they accumulate over a lifetime.

Getty ImagesNowhere in the ocean is now left untouched by a type of “forever chemicals” called “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances”, known simply as PFAS. Our new research shows PFAS contaminate a far wider range of whales and dolphins than previously thought, including deep-diving species that live well beyond areas of human activity. But most surprising of all, where an animal lives does not predict its exposure. Instead, sex and age are stronger predictors of how much of these pollutants a whale or dolphin accumulates in its body. This means chemical pollution is more persistent and entrenched in ocean food webs than we realised, affecting everything from endangered coastal Māui dolphins to deep-diving beaked and sperm whales. This graphic shows that PFAS contamination affects a range of marine mammals, from nearshore dolphins to deep-diving predators. Science of the Total Environment, CC BY-ND PFAS were originally designed to make everyday products more convenient, but they have ultimately become a widespread environmental and public health concern. Our work provides stark evidence that no part of the ocean is now beyond the reach of human pollution. What are PFAS, and why are they a problem? PFAS are a group of more than 14,000 synthetic chemicals that have been used since the 1950s in a wide range of everyday products. This includes non-stick cookware, food packaging, cleaning products, waterproof clothing, firefighting foams and even cosmetics. Many everyday products contain PFAS. Author provided, CC BY-SA They’re known as forever chemicals because they don’t break down naturally. Instead, they travel through air and water, eventually reaching their final destination: the ocean. There, PFAS percolate through seawater and sediments and enter the food web, taken up by animals through their diet. Once inside an animal, PFAS can attach to proteins and accumulate in the blood and organs such as the liver, where they can disrupt hormones, immune function and reproduction. Like humans, whales and dolphins sit high in the food web, which makes them especially vulnerable to building up these pollutants over their lifetime. Whales and dolphins are the ocean’s canaries Marine mammals are an early warning system of the ocean. Because they are large predators with long lifespans, their health reflects what’s happening in the wider ecosystem, including risks that can affect people, too. This idea is at the heart of the OneHealth concept, which links environmental, animal and human health. New Zealand is one of the best places in the world to study human impacts in a OneHealth framework. More than half of the world’s toothed whales and dolphins (odontocetes) occur here, making Aotearoa a rare hotspot for marine mammals and an ideal place to assess how deeply PFAS have entered ocean food webs. We analysed liver samples from 127 stranded whales and dolphins, covering 16 species across four families, from coastal bottlenose dolphins to deep-diving beaked whales. For eight of these species, including Hector’s dolphins and three beaked whale species, this was the first time PFAS had ever been measured globally. PFAS contamination is an additional stress factor for Hector’s dolphins, which are endemic to New Zealand and already threatened. Getty Images We expected coastal species living closer to pollution sources to show the highest contamination, with deep-ocean species being much less exposed. However, our results told a different story. Habitat played only a minor role in predicting PFAS levels. Some deep-diving species had PFAS concentrations comparable to (or even higher than) coastal animals. It turns out biology matters more than habitat. Older, larger animals had higher PFAS levels, indicating they accumulate these chemicals over time. Males also tended to have higher burdens than females, consistent with mothers transferring PFAS to their calves during pregnancy and lactation. These patterns were consistent across all major types of PFAS chemicals. Why this matters Our findings show PFAS contamination has now entered every layer of the marine food web, affecting everything from nearshore dolphins to deep-diving predators. While diet is a major exposure pathway, animals could also be absorbing PFAS through other mechanisms, including potentially their skin. PFAS may further interact with other stressors, including climate change, shifting prey availability and disease, adding further pressure to species already under threat. Knowing that PFAS are present across different habitats and species raises urgent questions about their health impacts. Are these chemicals already affecting populations? Could PFAS contamination weaken immunity and increase disease risk in vulnerable species, such as Māui dolphins? Understanding how PFAS exposure affects reproduction, immunity and resilience to environmental pressures is now central to predicting whether species already under threat can withstand accelerating environmental change. Even the most remote whales carry high PFAS loads and we know humans are not isolated from these contaminations either. Answering these questions is not optional but essential if we want to protect both marine wildlife and the oceans we all depend on. The research was a trans-Tasman collaboration which also included Gabriel Machovsky at Massey University, Louis Tremblay at the Bioeconomy Science Institute and Shan Yi at the University of Auckland. Frédérik Saltré receives funding from the Australian Research Council.Emma Betty, Karen A Stockin, and Katharina J. Peters do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Animals

Chemicals

Food

Watch a Wolf Cleverly Raid a Crab Trap for a Snack. It Might Be the First Evidence of a Wild Canid Using a Tool

Footage from British Columbia shows just how intelligent wild wolves can be, but scientists are divided as to whether the behavior constitutes tool use

Watch a Wolf Cleverly Raid a Crab Trap for a Snack. It Might Be the First Evidence of a Wild Canid Using a Tool Footage from British Columbia shows just how intelligent wild wolves can be, but scientists are divided as to whether the behavior constitutes tool use Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent November 19, 2025 11:53 a.m. Members of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation caught the crafty female wolf on camera. Artelle et al. / Ecology and Evolution, 2025 Key takeaways: A dispute over tool use A female wolf figured out how to pull a crab trap from the ocean onto shore to fetch a tasty treat. Scientists debate whether the behavior represents tool use, or if the animal needed to have modified the object for it to count. Something strange began happening on the coast of British Columbia, Canada, in 2023. Traps set by members of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation to control invasive European green crabs kept getting damaged. Some had mangled bait cups or torn netting, but others were totally destroyed. But who—or what—was the culprit? Initially, the Indigenous community’s environmental wardens, called Guardians, suspected sea lions, seals or otters were to blame. But only after setting up several remote cameras in the area did they catch a glimpse of the true perpetrators: gray wolves. On May 29, 2024, one of the cameras recorded a female wolf emerging from the water with a buoy attached to a crab trap line in her mouth. Slowly but confidently, she tugged the line onto the beach until she’d managed to haul in the trap. Then, she tore open the bottom netting, removed the bait cup, had a snack and trotted off. Now, scientists say the incident—and another involving a different wolf in 2025—could represent the first evidence of tool use by wild wolves. They describe the behavior and lay out their conclusions in a new paper published November 17 in the journal Ecology and Evolution. This wolf has a unique way of finding food | Science News “You normally picture a human being with two hands pulling a crab trap,” says William Housty, a Haíɫzaqv hereditary chief and the director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, to Global News’ Amy Judd and Aaron McArthur. “But we couldn’t figure out exactly what had the ability to be able to do that until we put a camera up and saw, well, there’s other intelligent beings out there that are able to do this, which is very remarkable.” Members of the Haíɫzaqv Nation weren’t surprised by the wolves’ cleverness, as they have long considered the animals to be smart. That view has largely been shaped by the community’s oral history, which tells of a woman named C̓úṃqḷaqs who birthed four individuals who could shape-shift between humans and wolves, reports Science News’ Elie Dolgin. Scientists weren’t shocked, either, as they have long understood that wolves are intelligent, social creatures that often cooperate to take down their prey. People aren’t sure how the wolves figured out the crafty crab trap trick. The animals may have learned by watching Haíɫzaqv Guardians pull up the traps, or their keen sense of smell may have helped them sniff out the herring and sea lion bait inside. Or perhaps they started with traps that were more easily accessible, before moving on to more challenging targets submerged in deep water. Wolves are also largely protected in Haíɫzaqv territory, which may have given them the time and energy they needed to learn a new, complex behavior, reports the Washington Post’s Dino Grandoni. Whatever the explanation, experts are divided as to whether the behavior technically constitutes nonhuman tool use, which has been previously documented in crows, elephants, dolphins and several other species. The debate stems mostly from varying definitions of tool use. Under one definition, animals can’t simply use an external object to achieve a specific goal—the creature must also manipulate the object in some way, like a crow transforming a tree branch into a hooked tool for grabbing hidden insects. Against this backdrop, some researchers say the wolves’ behavior represents object use, not tool use. However, some of the disagreement may also be rooted in bias. “For better or for worse, as humans, we tend to afford more care and compassion to other people or other species that we see most like us,” says study co-author Kyle Artelle, an ecologist with the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, to the Washington Post. Marc Bekoff, a biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved with the research, echoes that sentiment, telling Science’s Phie Jacobs that “if this had been a chimpanzee or other nonhuman primate, I’m sure no one would have blinked about whether this was tool use.” Regardless, scientists say the footage suggests wild wolves are even smarter than initially thought. In less than three minutes, the female efficiently and purposefully executed a complicated sequence of events to achieve a specific goal. She appeared to know that the trap contained food, even though it was hidden underwater, and she seemed to understand exactly which steps she needed to take to access that food. Tool use or not, the findings point to “another species with complex sociality [that] is capable of innovation and problem solving,” says Susana Carvalho, a primatologist and paleoanthropologist at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique who was not involved with the research, to the New York Times’ Lesley Evans Ogden. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Animals

Energy

Food

What Catastrophes Get Our Attention, and Why It Matters

When catastrophe becomes celebrity, we stop witnessing and start scrolling, turning suffering into spectacle. But we can break that cycle. The post What Catastrophes Get Our Attention, and Why It Matters appeared first on The Revelator.

Another environmental catastrophe season brought destruction and death to North America this summer. Amid extreme heatwaves and weather, fires raged in northern and western Canada. In Manitoba alone more than 28,000 people, largely rural or Indigenous, were evacuated from their homes. At the same time, floods washed out Hill Country in Texas when the Guadalupe River rapidly overflowed its banks, killing at least 135 people. Similar events could go on indefinitely. Chances are you’ve seen news reports about these disasters, or others like them, but this isn’t just the stuff of headlines. Fires and floods make news because they grab attention, unlike the daily realities of the economically depressed rural and Indigenous communities they often hit so hard. This is the strange logic of catastrophe in the digital age: Some crises become “celebrity” catastrophes while others remain “commonplace,” meaning they’re normalized and invisible on an ongoing basis. Who gets our attention — and who doesn’t — isn’t random. It reveals the value systems we’ve internalized and the limits of the stories we tell ourselves about suffering and survival, and in turn those that invite responsibility. The real currency of the 21st century is attention. And most people, if they’re going to pay attention, want something spectacular: an event worth watching. When Tragedy Turns to Spectacle Our engagement with this reality came from a course we taught at the University of British Columbia on the role of language in shaping environmental behaviors. What started as classroom conversations over a few years eventually evolved into our forthcoming book, Becoming Ecological: Navigating Language and Meaning for Our Planet’s Future, as a way to continue this conversation in public. In characterizing different discourses we’ve been exposed to (and been a part of), we noticed trends in global reporting of catastrophic events. That reporting tends to emphasize spectacular events over those that are just as detrimental, if not more, but occur over longer periods of time without affecting highly visible populations — particularly visible in terms of people who attract mainstream media notice. Our aim is not so much to critique the ways certain types of media function, from traditional broadcasters to social news like TikTok, but to look at how meaning is made and conveyed as catastrophe stories. The ways in which meanings are socially constructed shape what people believe, how they act and interact, and create possibilities to nurture more broadly relational understandings of our roles and responsibilities on and for Earth. They can also hinder or inhibit other possibilities. The systems of language and environment are intricately interconnected. We find it useful to speak of catastrophe by using the term polycrisis — the overlaying of multiple crises where a breakdown in one system leads to cascading effects, causing reverberations through climatic, biological, social, economic, political, scientific, temporal (and so on) systems. The problem with catastrophe in contemporary environmental discourse is that the original meaning, the gravity of this word in ancient Greek — katastrophē, or sudden end — is completely lost. Catastrophe now is characterized as being visually spectacular, rooted in the notion of spectacle, making it newsworthy. To put it crudely, tragedy comes with a photo op or not at all. Yet catastrophe originally implied the point at which fate and destiny are sealed. All hope is lost. No Hollywood ending. Greek tragic theatre made the pain of such a loss accessible safely; it had the effect of making audiences appreciate their existence and work to prevent such events from happening. Today we’re saturated with an unending stream of high-profile catastrophes. They’ve gone from occasional newsworthy stories to a regular feature. But the truth is environmental catastrophe discourse at present has very little in common with ancient Greek theatre. Catastrophe isn’t witnessed as a universal condition. It’s more like getting voted out of a reality TV competition, with winners and losers. It signifies a form of virtual entertainment. It’s a money genre in the economy of attention. What Makes a Catastrophe ‘Go Viral’? Celebrity catastrophes, as we’ve come to call them, are disasters that strike at the right time, in the right place, and often to the “right” people — like the Los Angeles wildfires, which literally affected celebrities, among others, or the floods in Spain. They tend to be sudden and extreme, making them photogenic and emotionally gripping. There’s often an implicit narrative arc involving villains, victims, and often a final resolution or judgment; celebrity catastrophes provide an overabundance of social platforms to spread the story. But what about commonplace catastrophes? These are the slow, grinding emergencies — some might even say boring, meaning people won’t pay attention. In other words, they won’t pay for the attention. Such emergencies might include boil water advisories for rural communities off the grid that stretch into decades, the rising tide of the urban unhoused, lack of accessible healthcare for generations, or the multigenerational trauma of environmental injustice in poorer communities. These quotidian catastrophes don’t trend on social media. They rarely get press briefings in broadcast media. They certainly don’t receive attention from political figures. And yet they shape the lives of millions every day. Beyond being a digital communication problem, it’s also a societal pattern. As environmental educators, we see it in our classrooms often, where students feel despair over ecological collapse but struggle to connect that grief to local issues like energy poverty, food shortages, or environmental racism. It’s as though they understand tragedy, but catastrophe means its hopeless. But if they give up hope, then there’s no motivation other than individualistic ones, a competitive endgame everyone winds up losing. Without hope for the next generation, another turn of civilization’s wheel. There’s nothing they can do but watch catastrophes happen, transfixed by impending fate. That’s what’s selling. The problem isn’t apathy or lack of education. It’s attention. There’s simply too much on the celebrity catastrophes and not enough on the commonplace world they inhabit every day. The Ecology of Attention We often talk about ecosystems in scientific terms of carbon, water, species, and so forth. But attention is an ecosystem too. And like all ecosystems, it can be thrown out of balance. In a healthy attention economy, we would recognize and respond to both sudden shocks and slow harms. We could hold space for grief, not just in the wake of a celebrity wildfire in Maui but in response to ongoing loss — such as land, language, or life — in communities displaced by extractive industries. But right now our attention is hyper-curated. We’re all being filtered by algorithms in our social media feeds, Spotify playlists, or Google searches, among many other aspects of our daily lives, and this influences our political and societal conversations. That warped attention is like water on drought-stricken ground, particularly in how it rushes off quickly, collects in rivers, and overflows. This means that some people must fight for a cup of visibility, while others are flooded with it. It also creates dissonance. Why do we cry over burning vineyards in California but ignore scorched farmlands in Sudan? Why are floodwaters in Germany more moving than footage from Pakistan’s devastating 2022 monsoon season? Our attention has been hyper-curated to look for the extremes and pay (for) attention to the sensationalized events. Disaster as Event There’s a reason why celebrity catastrophes dominate headlines and grab our attention, whether we want it or not. They fit within a monetized logic that values spectacle and saviorism. Disasters become “events” with start and end dates, with heroes and villains, victims and saviors. They can be marked in time, which makes them easier to be marketed. More specifically, they can be monetized, as author Naomi Klein and others have shown. They can sell headlines, influence policy agendas, or affect branded charity campaigns. But commonplace catastrophes resist this framing. There’s no clear starting point to systemic racism or global warming and the cascading effect of “events” reverberates throughout the world. These slow emergencies demand long-term commitment, not quick PR campaigns. They’re part of larger complex of socioecological systems that are often uncontainable, like weather patterns or world hunger. In contrast, becoming more ecologically focused requires that we understand crises as entangled and complex. The flood is not separate from the housing crisis. The wildfire is not separate from extractive economies. Witnessing through this lens challenges us to see the whole picture and act from that place. We’re not suggesting we turn away from the immediate or the dramatic. But keeping up with the latest catastrophic event, and being affected by it, is not enough. It catches us in a loop of mental doomism or constant anxiety, especially when it becomes expected, like a performance — amplified one moment and forgotten the next. The truth is that our attention reveals what we value and what we make time for. And right now, too many people live and die in the fallout of commonplace catastrophes. But there are ways to make the commonplace more important. Witnessing as a Radical Act So how do we begin to rebalance our attention? Something that affects our responses to climate breakdown? One way is through the practice of witnessing. Not just seeing, but being present with, and responding to, what we encounter. Witnessing insists that we don’t turn away from the slow, uncomfortable, or inconvenient. Witnessing brings with it an ongoing responsibility. To bear witness means a duty to speak to what one has witnessed, requiring a different kind of attention. Calls for critical digital literacy are the typical way of addressing this social need to nurture a healthy information intake. But another way is to consider the language we use and how it gets used when we talk about the environment. What stories are being prioritized? Not every catastrophe fits neatly into a sound-bite narrative or a one-liner headline enticing people to click. There’s no easy resolution to poisoned water in Grassy Narrows, how much roadkill happened last night, or positive spins on colonial displacement. But those stories matter, and they need our attention. Language, the fuel of attention, is a powerful site of witnessing. It’s not just a medium of communication. Language is an adaptive, living system. Communication and dialogue are catalysts for ecological transformation. Words evolve, meanings shift, and sometimes, even a single word can carry the weight of an entire worldview. Consider words like “nature” or “climate.” The latter has become a euphemism for a justice movement as much as a science, on the one hand, and a political weapon of division on the other. When we witness deeply, we begin to understand that these so-called “commonplace” events aren’t background noise. And that insight can spark empathy, as well as awareness and action in more profound ways. A Call to Witness The choice isn’t simply between caring about celebrity catastrophes and caring about commonplace ones. It’s about learning to see how they’re connected and how the imbalance of attention itself causes harm. This is a polycrisis in which all the social, linguistic, and ecological systems we rely on are interconnected. Stories must be told even when they’re revealing what Al Gore famously termed an “inconvenient truth” — through them, we begin to see how all facets of our daily lives are interconnected with the sustainability of the planet. And this gives ground to hopefulness, to the sense that what you do and say does matter in the bigger picture. It is the bigger picture, even if there are no film crews and helicopters there to broadcast it, no smart phones to capture and post it within seconds. These actions and the language that promotes them form a periphery around the visible mainstream news. If we look at what’s just outside the camera frame or press release or keynote speech, we see a surrounding discourse, a complex ecosystem of discussion across languages and initiatives that are hidden from regular sight, the actual “movements” of environmentalism. Let’s take an example not from a celebrity catastrophe but from a celebrity event: the COP30 climate summit. Such events, where people tell stories from all over and come together to mobilize global effort toward planetary care, are invaluable for our hope for the future of the species. And yet, some profound ironies exist: To make this happen, we need to facilitate more harmful disruption of natural systems. We also need such events to have celebrity status in order to compete with attention. Ideally, they are exotic and photogenic. COP30 took place this year in Belém, a history-laden freeport town tucked away in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. To make it easy for attention-grabbing, celebrity global leaders and digital communication to reach the city, government contractors plowed a 13-kilometer road called Avenida Liberdade through protected rainforest. This is land where people and plants and animals coexist and co-depend. The devastation was all in aid of an environmental event that lasted for 11 days (Nov. 10-21). But those jungle-dwelling lives will be affected forever — a prime example of where celebrity meets commonplace. When we’re called to witness the impact on local environments of the attention economy, we start to become aware of how the celebrity and the commonplace are interwoven. We are no longer just spectators of hopeless collapse. As educators we’ve seen what happens when students begin to witness. Not just from a distance, but with proximity and purpose. They stop asking, “Why don’t people care?” and start asking, “What stories do we need to tell?” They begin to name the socioecological systems that make some lives visible and others disposable. In a time of overlapping catastrophes, witnessing isn’t passive. It’s an act of awareness and engagement. And perhaps more importantly, it’s an act of hope, one that integrates the celebrity and commonplace catastrophe in an increasingly unstable world. And sustained witnessing might just be the most radical act we have left. Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator The Last Breath of the Himalayas: Can We Stop the Collapse? The post What Catastrophes Get Our Attention, and Why It Matters appeared first on The Revelator.

Animals

Climate

Crisis

Suggested Viewing

Wildlife in Our Backyard

It is often said that we must tolerate wildlife, but what happens if we learn to thrive with them instead? What can this mean for the wildlife? What can it mean for the people of Florida? And what can it mean for the endangered Florida panther? Wildlife in Our Backyard shows us some of the problems facing the wildlife as well as the hope of a brighter future as we learn to share the landscape with them.

Animals

Land Use

Extinction

The Custodians of the Andean Gold

In the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, more than 3 800 meters above sea level, live alpaca and vicunia breeders. Quechua and Aymara families protect their animals live off of the sale of the animals’ fiber. Gold mining is another activity that predates the Conquest and is widespread among families living in the border area between Peru and Bolivia. The difficult compatibility on the same territory of these two production activities increases the need for environmental protection and workers' rights. It has become indispensable to support producers so that this activity does not disappear with the migration of native peoples, abandoning traditions and animals.

Animals

Indigenous

Business

Flying With Monarchs

Flying With Monarchs is a short dance film celebrating the beauty of Monarch butterfly migration.

Dance

Music

Animals

A Whale's Worth

The Canary Islands are a whale Paradise. Their waters hold more than a third of the world’s species, making it the most important enclave in the European Union, and one of the most relevant globally.Today, this paradise is being threatened by different human pressures, such as boat collisions, plastic consumption and climate change. This struggle aggravates their mortality each year and makes us face ourselves as the ones responsible for their survival, forcing us to rethink how much we value these animals currently.How much is a whale worth? Can you put a price on the life of such a majestic animal? How can we estimate that value? How has the value that human beings give to whales changed throughout history? What are whales used and needed for?To answer all these questions, Natacha Aguilar, an eminent Canarian scientist and whale expert, backed up by a group of scientists and non-profit organizations, will guide us in a spectacular journey through time and space to discover the never-told stories of the lives of these animals.

Animals

Culture

Climate

Dipsas Speaks

Dipsas Speaks is a poetic reflection on the human-wildlife conflict in the Andean Amazon cloud forest of Ecuador, one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Dipsas klebbai, a snake, observes changes in her world. 100% wildlife cast.

Forests

Conservation

Animals

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Environmental Group Tries to Rebuild Sinking Coastline With Recycled Oysters

Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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Join us to forgea sustainable future

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

Join us to forge
a sustainable future