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How outdoor programs are adapting to the challenge of extreme weather

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Wednesday, August 7, 2024

The vision “How can healing our relationship to the planet help us heal our relationships with ourselves?” — Ki’Amber Thompson The spotlight The outdoors can be a healing place. Spending time in nature can inspire wonder, confer physical and mental health benefits, and deepen our understanding of the land and ecosystems around us — and our role in caring for them. That’s part of the idea behind the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project, an outdoor program in San Antonio specifically for young people whose families have been impacted by incarceration. The organization offers activities like camping trips, surfing, and community gardening, also weaving in meditation, journaling, and other exercises intended to foster introspection and empowerment. “We are not just an outdoor organization creating more access in the outdoors, or working on climate issues in a solely environmental way,” said Ki’Amber Thompson, the program’s founder. “We’re also doing deep healing work with the participants, and thinking about not only environmental but social sustainability, and how that connects.” But creating safe and joyful experiences also means overcoming many barriers these kids face in enjoying the outdoors. Those include both historical exclusion from these spaces and a continued narrative that outdoor recreation is not for people of color. And, increasingly, these barriers are compounded by extreme weather that makes it ever-harder to ensure safety, let alone restoration, in the outdoors. Thompson (who uses both they and she pronouns) started the Bloom Project to address a need they saw in their community. They had discovered a love for the outdoors while attending college in California, and wanted to make those same transformative experiences possible for young people in her hometown of San Antonio — specifically, those caught up in a system of over-policing, incarceration, and environmental injustice. This work is personal for both Thompson and Gabriela Lopez, the organization’s co-director. Lopez’s father has been in prison for most of her life, she said, and as a kid she saw nature as a form of therapy that helped her cope. She was excited to join the Bloom Project after spending many years as a teacher, and seeing how the school system was not well equipped to address some of the mental health issues and traumas that young people were experiencing. “I feel like it’s promoting healing in a way that’s really accessible,” she said of the Bloom Project’s work, “but then also creating a generation of advocates, not only for their communities, but for nature and for the outdoors and for the land.” Lopez (right) with two Bloom Project participants at a retreat in December of 2023. Courtesy of the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project In creating those experiences, the Bloom Project’s directors know they are up against prevailing narratives that outdoor recreation is not for people of color. In Texas, around 95 percent of land is privately owned, Thompson said, making access to outdoor spaces challenging — but, they added, that’s only the beginning of the issue. Despite their best efforts to make outdoor excursions feel safe and inclusive, they have still on occasion been made to feel unwelcome, a microcosm of the issues people of color face in outdoor access across the country. “We’ve done camping trips in different state parks and at Big Bend National Park in Texas, and we’ve experienced policing on multiple occasions from white park users,” they said. Many affinity organizations have emerged to create more visibility and safety in outdoor spaces for people of color, people with disabilities, queer people, and others — including Black Outside, the Texas-based organization that has housed the Bloom Project for the past five years. (Later this year, the program will be spinning off into its own nonprofit.) At the Bloom Project, the aim is not only to increase outdoor access, but to use that access to help these kids actively oppose systems of oppression — something that, as children of incarcerated parents, they experience keenly. “Knowing the extent to which Black youth are policed in schools, parks, neighborhoods, and families, in the Bloom Project, we affirm our youth for who they are and all that they bring to our community,” Thompson said. In some ways, she said, the Bloom Project is an experiment in preconfiguring a better, more just world. Sessions include healing or talking circles for sharing and processing, in an environment intentionally free from policing. And another core part of the programming is education that tackles head-on the realities of the challenges that are showing up in young people’s lives — always in an age-appropriate way, Lopez said. At a park day with a group of younger kids earlier this summer, she facilitated an experiment in which they tested how quickly ice cubes would melt on different surfaces — a fun way of learning about the urban heat island effect. But the heat melting those ice cubes also represents another, ever more pressing challenge to creating safe and enjoyable outdoor experiences. More frequent and intense extreme weather events — like Hurricane Beryl, which narrowly missed San Antonio last month — and a new normal of hotter summers mean that the very tool the Bloom Project uses to facilitate healing and connection is getting harder to access. “It’s so, so hot in San Antonio these summers,” Thompson said. Last year, the city sweltered through more than 70 days of triple-digit temperatures. Because of heat, the organization does not run camping trips locally in Texas in the summer months. “It’s really hard because [summer] is a time where we could see our youth more, since they’re on a break from school,” Lopez said. But it isn’t always worth the risk, nor conducive to the overall mission. “We don’t want to bring people outside and have them feel miserable.” Thompson said they’ve made adjustments like starting some activities earlier in the morning before it gets prohibitively hot outside and paying attention to basic protections like hats, sunscreen, and shade. The organization has also thought about emphasizing water-centric activities in the hot months, or even indoor sessions. Bloom Project participants on a trip to White Sands National Park in April 2023. Courtesy of the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project One new program the Bloom Project is piloting this later summer, in partnership with Latino Outdoors and the Casey Family Foundation, an organization aimed at improving the foster system, is a four-month special cohort dubbed the Wild Trail fellowship. That program will focus less on recreation and more on education and career pathways in different environmental and outdoor sectors. The first meeting will be in an REI store, Lopez said, where the high school-age participants will go on an indoor scavenger hunt, assemble first aid kits, and hopefully hear from a store manager. Across the country, organizations that work on outdoor access, education, and recreation are grappling with the same conundrum. José González, founder of Latino Outdoors, noted that for the first time this year, the nationwide Latino Conservation Week will be shifted from late July to late September, due to concerns about the heat. And even if an event is not cancelled or postponed, extreme weather has increasingly become a part of planning. “Many people do not know how heat can affect them — how to spot heat stroke, for example — so it’s important to note it as part of risk management and the education for participants,” he said. In May, the outdoor education organization Outward Bound coordinated three events in Vancouver, Halifax, and Toronto, bringing together more than 60 groups from across Canada to discuss how the outdoor sector can adapt to climate impacts, and also be apart of mitigation. One wilderness program manager noted that “climate change has irrevocably shifted the landscape of outdoor education.” Although the realities of climate change are compounding the challenges faced in creating restorative and joyful experiences in the outdoors, they also make it all the more pressing. The ultimate goal for the Bloom Project, Thompson said, is to imbue these young people with a sense of agency and radical imagination that will help them usher in a healthier, more just world. “Sometimes with justice education, it’s really focused on all the problems,” Thompson said. “And that’s real, and it’s important to be educated on that.” But, they said, the key is striking the right balance, and creating the right container that can allow moments of heaviness alongside moments of reflection — and fun. “Joy is what sustains us,” they said, “and just being able to access that and tune into that is so key to have the capacity to [not only] want to be here in the first place, but to envision a better world.” — Claire Elise Thompson More exposure Read: a personal essay describing the healing power that nature can have as a respite from systemic racism and injustice (Glamour) Read: about the importance of representation in the outdoors, and a push for a federal fund to make recreation more accessible (Grist) Read: some of the science behind how nature improves our health — and how much exposure we need to get those benefits (Yale Environment 360) Watch: an Instagram Live with Ki’Amber Thompson and Wawa Gatheru, discussing their paths into environmental justice and the importance of solidarity (or read some highlights from the conversation here) A parting shot If extreme heat makes it more challenging to find healing respite in the outdoors, it also amplifies risk for athletes pushing their bodies to the brink in outdoor environments — including many competing in the Paris Olympics this summer. While some countries made plans to protect their athletes by bringing portable air conditioners to Olympic Village (thwarting Paris officials’ plans to make the games more green), others, including the Olympics medical department, have suggested heat acclimatization training as a way to adapt. In this photo, spectators mill around tennis courts at Roland Garros stadium on July 31 — day five of the games, when temps in Paris reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit. IMAGE CREDITS Vision: Grist Spotlight: Courtesy of the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project Parting shot: Julian Finney / Getty Images This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How outdoor programs are adapting to the challenge of extreme weather on Aug 7, 2024.

This organization helps young people heal through outdoor experiences. It's working around the sweltering Texas summer.

Illustration of large tree with flowers in foreground

The vision

“How can healing our relationship to the planet help us heal our relationships with ourselves?”

— Ki’Amber Thompson

The spotlight

The outdoors can be a healing place. Spending time in nature can inspire wonder, confer physical and mental health benefits, and deepen our understanding of the land and ecosystems around us — and our role in caring for them.

That’s part of the idea behind the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project, an outdoor program in San Antonio specifically for young people whose families have been impacted by incarceration. The organization offers activities like camping trips, surfing, and community gardening, also weaving in meditation, journaling, and other exercises intended to foster introspection and empowerment.

“We are not just an outdoor organization creating more access in the outdoors, or working on climate issues in a solely environmental way,” said Ki’Amber Thompson, the program’s founder. “We’re also doing deep healing work with the participants, and thinking about not only environmental but social sustainability, and how that connects.”

But creating safe and joyful experiences also means overcoming many barriers these kids face in enjoying the outdoors. Those include both historical exclusion from these spaces and a continued narrative that outdoor recreation is not for people of color. And, increasingly, these barriers are compounded by extreme weather that makes it ever-harder to ensure safety, let alone restoration, in the outdoors.

. . .

Thompson (who uses both they and she pronouns) started the Bloom Project to address a need they saw in their community. They had discovered a love for the outdoors while attending college in California, and wanted to make those same transformative experiences possible for young people in her hometown of San Antonio — specifically, those caught up in a system of over-policing, incarceration, and environmental injustice.

This work is personal for both Thompson and Gabriela Lopez, the organization’s co-director. Lopez’s father has been in prison for most of her life, she said, and as a kid she saw nature as a form of therapy that helped her cope. She was excited to join the Bloom Project after spending many years as a teacher, and seeing how the school system was not well equipped to address some of the mental health issues and traumas that young people were experiencing. “I feel like it’s promoting healing in a way that’s really accessible,” she said of the Bloom Project’s work, “but then also creating a generation of advocates, not only for their communities, but for nature and for the outdoors and for the land.”

A woman and two teenage girls embrace, smiling at the camera

Lopez (right) with two Bloom Project participants at a retreat in December of 2023. Courtesy of the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project

In creating those experiences, the Bloom Project’s directors know they are up against prevailing narratives that outdoor recreation is not for people of color. In Texas, around 95 percent of land is privately owned, Thompson said, making access to outdoor spaces challenging — but, they added, that’s only the beginning of the issue. Despite their best efforts to make outdoor excursions feel safe and inclusive, they have still on occasion been made to feel unwelcome, a microcosm of the issues people of color face in outdoor access across the country. “We’ve done camping trips in different state parks and at Big Bend National Park in Texas, and we’ve experienced policing on multiple occasions from white park users,” they said.

Many affinity organizations have emerged to create more visibility and safety in outdoor spaces for people of color, people with disabilities, queer people, and others — including Black Outside, the Texas-based organization that has housed the Bloom Project for the past five years. (Later this year, the program will be spinning off into its own nonprofit.)

At the Bloom Project, the aim is not only to increase outdoor access, but to use that access to help these kids actively oppose systems of oppression — something that, as children of incarcerated parents, they experience keenly. “Knowing the extent to which Black youth are policed in schools, parks, neighborhoods, and families, in the Bloom Project, we affirm our youth for who they are and all that they bring to our community,” Thompson said. In some ways, she said, the Bloom Project is an experiment in preconfiguring a better, more just world. Sessions include healing or talking circles for sharing and processing, in an environment intentionally free from policing. And another core part of the programming is education that tackles head-on the realities of the challenges that are showing up in young people’s lives — always in an age-appropriate way, Lopez said.

At a park day with a group of younger kids earlier this summer, she facilitated an experiment in which they tested how quickly ice cubes would melt on different surfaces — a fun way of learning about the urban heat island effect.

But the heat melting those ice cubes also represents another, ever more pressing challenge to creating safe and enjoyable outdoor experiences. More frequent and intense extreme weather events — like Hurricane Beryl, which narrowly missed San Antonio last month — and a new normal of hotter summers mean that the very tool the Bloom Project uses to facilitate healing and connection is getting harder to access.

“It’s so, so hot in San Antonio these summers,” Thompson said. Last year, the city sweltered through more than 70 days of triple-digit temperatures. Because of heat, the organization does not run camping trips locally in Texas in the summer months.

“It’s really hard because [summer] is a time where we could see our youth more, since they’re on a break from school,” Lopez said. But it isn’t always worth the risk, nor conducive to the overall mission. “We don’t want to bring people outside and have them feel miserable.”

Thompson said they’ve made adjustments like starting some activities earlier in the morning before it gets prohibitively hot outside and paying attention to basic protections like hats, sunscreen, and shade. The organization has also thought about emphasizing water-centric activities in the hot months, or even indoor sessions.

A group of around seven young people walk along a bright white sandy dune with blue sky overhead

Bloom Project participants on a trip to White Sands National Park in April 2023. Courtesy of the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project

One new program the Bloom Project is piloting this later summer, in partnership with Latino Outdoors and the Casey Family Foundation, an organization aimed at improving the foster system, is a four-month special cohort dubbed the Wild Trail fellowship. That program will focus less on recreation and more on education and career pathways in different environmental and outdoor sectors. The first meeting will be in an REI store, Lopez said, where the high school-age participants will go on an indoor scavenger hunt, assemble first aid kits, and hopefully hear from a store manager.

Across the country, organizations that work on outdoor access, education, and recreation are grappling with the same conundrum. José González, founder of Latino Outdoors, noted that for the first time this year, the nationwide Latino Conservation Week will be shifted from late July to late September, due to concerns about the heat. And even if an event is not cancelled or postponed, extreme weather has increasingly become a part of planning. “Many people do not know how heat can affect them — how to spot heat stroke, for example — so it’s important to note it as part of risk management and the education for participants,” he said.

In May, the outdoor education organization Outward Bound coordinated three events in Vancouver, Halifax, and Toronto, bringing together more than 60 groups from across Canada to discuss how the outdoor sector can adapt to climate impacts, and also be apart of mitigation. One wilderness program manager noted that “climate change has irrevocably shifted the landscape of outdoor education.”

Although the realities of climate change are compounding the challenges faced in creating restorative and joyful experiences in the outdoors, they also make it all the more pressing. The ultimate goal for the Bloom Project, Thompson said, is to imbue these young people with a sense of agency and radical imagination that will help them usher in a healthier, more just world.

“Sometimes with justice education, it’s really focused on all the problems,” Thompson said. “And that’s real, and it’s important to be educated on that.” But, they said, the key is striking the right balance, and creating the right container that can allow moments of heaviness alongside moments of reflection — and fun. “Joy is what sustains us,” they said, “and just being able to access that and tune into that is so key to have the capacity to [not only] want to be here in the first place, but to envision a better world.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

A parting shot

If extreme heat makes it more challenging to find healing respite in the outdoors, it also amplifies risk for athletes pushing their bodies to the brink in outdoor environments — including many competing in the Paris Olympics this summer. While some countries made plans to protect their athletes by bringing portable air conditioners to Olympic Village (thwarting Paris officials’ plans to make the games more green), others, including the Olympics medical department, have suggested heat acclimatization training as a way to adapt. In this photo, spectators mill around tennis courts at Roland Garros stadium on July 31 — day five of the games, when temps in Paris reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

An aerial shot of a crowd walking between two red clay tennis courts on a hot day

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Courtesy of the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project

Parting shot: Julian Finney / Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How outdoor programs are adapting to the challenge of extreme weather on Aug 7, 2024.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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How a species of bamboo could help protect the South from future floods

In the face of mounting climate disasters, tribes, scientists, and Southern communities are rallying around a nearly forgotten native plant.

In early 2024, Michael Fedoroff trekked out to Tuckabum Creek in York County, Alabama. The environmental anthropologist was there to help plant 300 stalks of rivercane, a bamboo plant native to North America, on an eroded, degraded strip of wetland: a “gnarly” and “wicked” area, according to Fedoroff. If successful, this planting would be the largest cane restoration project in Alabama history. He and his team got the stalks into the ground, buttressed them with hay, left, and hoped for the best.  A few days later, rains swept through the area and the river rose by 9 feet. “We were terrified,” said Fedoroff. He and his team raced back to the site, expecting to find bare dirt. Instead, they found that the rivercane had survived — and so, crucially, had the stream bank. Rivercane used to line the streams, rivers, and bogs of the Southeast from the Blue Ridge Mountains down to the Mississippi Delta. 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Ocean Warmed by Climate Change Fed Intense Rainfall and Deadly Floods in Asia, Study Finds

Ocean temperatures warmed by human-caused climate change fed the intense rainfall that triggered deadly floods and landslides across Asia in recent weeks, according to an analysis released Wednesday

BENGALURU, India (AP) — Ocean temperatures warmed by human-caused climate change fed the intense rainfall that triggered deadly floods and landslides across Asia in recent weeks, according to an analysis released Wednesday.The rapid study by World Weather Attribution focused on heavy rainfall from cyclones Senyar and Ditwah in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka starting late last month. The analysis found that warmer sea surface temperatures over the North Indian Ocean added energy to the cyclones.Floods and landslides triggered by the storms have killed more than 1,600 people, with hundreds more still missing. The cyclones are the latest in a series of deadly weather disasters affecting Southeast Asia this year, resulting in loss of life and property damage.“It rains a lot here but never like this. Usually, rain stops around September but this year it has been really bad. Every region of Sri Lanka has been affected, and our region has been the worst impacted,” said Shanmugavadivu Arunachalam, a 59-year-old schoolteacher in the mountain town of Hatton in Sri Lanka’s Central Province. Warmer sea surface temperatures Sea surface temperatures over the North Indian Ocean were 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average over the past three decades, according to the WWA researchers. Without global warming, the sea surface temperatures would have been about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than they were, according to the analysis. The warmer ocean temperatures provided heat and moisture to the storms.When measuring overall temperatures, the world is currently 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than global average during pre-industrial times in the 19th century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.“When the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture. As a result, it rains more in a warmer atmosphere as compared to a world without climate change,” said Mariam Zachariah, with the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and one of the report's authors. Using tested methods to measure climate impacts quickly The WWA is a collection of researchers who use peer-reviewed methods to conduct rapid studies examining how extreme weather events are linked to climate change. “Anytime we decide to do a study, we know what is the procedure that we have to follow,” said Zachariah, who added that they review the findings in house and send some of their analysis for peer review, even after an early version is made public.The speed at which the WWA releases their analysis helps inform the general public about the impacts of climate change, according to Zachariah.“We want people everywhere to know about why something happened in their neighborhood," Zachariah said. “But also be aware about the reasons behind some of the events unfurling across the world.”The WWA often estimates how much worse climate change made a disaster using specific probabilities. In this case, though, the researchers said they could not estimate the precise contribution of climate change to the storms and ensuing heavy rains because of limitations in climate models for the affected islands. Climate change boosts Asia's unusually heavy rainfall Global warming is a “powerful amplifier” to the deadly floods, typhoons and landslides that have ravaged Asia this year, said Jemilah Mahmood, with the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, a Malaysia-based think tank that was not involved with the WWA analysis.“The region and the world have been on this path because, for decades, economic development was prioritized over climate stability,” Mahmood said. “It’s created an accumulated planetary debt, and this has resulted in the crisis we face.”The analysis found that across the affected countries, rapid urbanization, high population density and infrastructure in low lying flood plains have elevated exposure to flood events.“The human toll from cyclones Ditwah and Senyar is staggering,” said Maja Vahlberg, a technical adviser with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “Unfortunately, it is the most vulnerable people who experience the worst impacts and have the longest road to recovery.”Delgado reported from Bangkok, Thailand.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 – December 2025

Climate
Crisis
Health

MacKenzie Scott Has Given $26B to Nonprofits Since 2019. Here's What She Supported in 2025

The billionaire and author MacKenzie Scott revealed $7.1 billion in donations to nonprofits Tuesday, bringing her overall giving since 2019 to $26.3 billion

The billionaire and author MacKenzie Scott revealed $7.1 billion in donations to nonprofits Tuesday, bringing her overall giving since 2019 to $26.3 billion. Scott first pledged to give away the majority of her wealth in 2019 after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Since, she's distributed large, unrestricted gifts to nonprofits without asking for applications or progress reports. Largely, her giving has focused in the U.S., though not exclusively. Scott doesn't have a public foundation and so it's not easy to independently track her giving. But she's revealed her gifts in occasional blog posts and essays posted to her website, Yield Giving, which also now includes a database of her grants. The amount of her annual giving has fluctuated, ranging from a reported $2.1 billion in 2023 to $7.1 billion in 2025. In 2025, Scott's gifts showed a particular focus on supporting colleges and universities, especially historically Black and tribal schools, as well as community colleges. She also gave major gifts to organizations focused on mitigating and adapting to climate change. A new emphasis on climate organizations When the list of 2025 recipients was published Tuesday, it included a number of significant gifts to climate groups, with the largest — $90 million — going to the collaborative Forests, People, Climate, which focuses on stopping tropical deforestation. The nonprofit Panorama Global has analyzed Scott's giving over the years and found that historically, giving to the environment has represented a small part of her overall donations. In 2024, only 9.4% of Scott's gifts went to environmental groups, though on average the amount of those gifts was larger than to other areas, according to their research. “What we’re now seeing is different years have different focus areas,” said Gabrielle Fitzgerald, founder and CEO of The Panorama Group. “So last year, there was a really big economic security focus. This year, I really see education and climate.” Scott's assets have grown even as she's given away a fortune When Scott started detailing her giving in 2020, her fortune was valued around $36 billion, according to Forbes. It's fluctuated over the years, but today, Forbes estimates her net worth to be $33 billion, even as she's given away more than $26 billion. Initially, Scott told grantees not to expect or plan for a second gift, but over time, she has given additional gifts to some of the same organizations, often larger than her original grant. “She clearly is getting comfortable with reinvesting in partners that she thinks are doing good work,” said Fitzgerald. At least one organization, CAMFED, which supports girl's education in African countries, has now received four gifts from Scott, including the largest so far, $60 million, in 2025, according to Scott's website. Many generous gifts to minority colleges and universities In addition to at least $783 million Scott gave to historically Black colleges and universities in 2025, her website details many gifts to tribal colleges, community colleges and scholarship funds. “It looks like she sees a lot of need, particularly in two areas ensuring people are getting higher education and ensuring that groups are working to protect the climate,” said Fitzgerald. While Scott has given to higher education since 2020, those gifts have historically been a smaller portion of her education funding. In a 2024 analysis, Panorama Global found nearly 30% of Scott's education grantees were focused on youth development. Marybeth Gasman, a professor at Rutgers University and expert on HBCUs, said she noticed that what sets many of the HBCUs who receive Scott's funding apart from others is steady, consistent leadership and Gasman said, “She’s very interested in institutions that are rooted in community.” The value of unrestricted grants Scott does not put any conditions on her donations, allowing recipients to decide how and when to spend the funds. Unrestricted funding is rare from major donors and foundations, with many choosing to support very specific projects over specific timeframes. However, research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy in 2023 found that concerns about nonprofits misusing Scott's funds or growing unsustainably have largely not been born out. In part, that may be because Scott's team researches and vets groups extensively before making donations. Unrestricted gifts can help nonprofits weather disruptions, test new approaches or technologies or invest in the systems and infrastructure that underpin their work. For example, after the Trump administration cut funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the nonprofit Village Enterprise, which runs antipoverty programs, used a grant it received from Scott in 2023 to keep essential programs running.Additionally, Scott allows groups the flexibility to decide whether to publicly share how much they've received, with more than a third of recipients in 2025 not disclosing the grant amounts in Scott's grant database. Fitzgerald said altgoether, she thinks Scott tries to not make her giving about herself. “In her essays, she’s always talking about other stakeholders and other people’s contributions," Fitzgerald said. "So it’s very different than many other philanthropists who are often the center of the story of their gift.” Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and non-profits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – December 2025

Climate
Education
Forests

Why we only recently discovered space is dark not bright

For centuries, Europeans thought that eternal daylight saturated the cosmos. The shift to a dark universe has had a profound psychological impact upon us

Adobe Stock Photo/Phoebe Watts A blue Earth ascends over the barren surface of the moon, against the black void of space. This famous photograph, Earthrise, was taken on Christmas Eve of 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders. After almost six decades, we take this image for granted. But imagine a different Earthrise, in which space isn’t black but bright blue, like the clear day sky. As strange as it may strike you, this is how most Europeans imagined it for centuries. We know our understanding of the universe has undergone other major transformations, with far-reaching effects. For example, the shifts from an Earth-centred to a sun-centred universe and from a finite to an infinite universe weren’t only scientific discoveries. They made people genuinely rethink their place in the cosmos. The shift from a bright to a dark universe is of comparable significance, but it has been almost lost to history. In recent years, through my research in literary history and the history of science, I have tried to piece together when this shift happened. When, so to speak, did space turn dark? And I’ve found myself asking: what happened to us in the process? Earthrise, a photograph taken from the lunar surface in 1968, crystallized the idea that space was darkNASA Consider the testimony of Domingo Gonsales, the protagonist of the first English science-fiction novel, Francis Godwin’s 1638 Man in the Moone. Travelling to the moon aboard a swan-powered spacecraft, Gonsales reports seeing very few stars – and these few, “by reason it was always day, I saw at all times alike, not shining bright, as upon the earth we… see them in the night time, but of a whitish colour, like that of the moon in the day time with us”. Why does he see fewer stars than we do from Earth? And why are they pale, like the moon seen in the daytime sky? Because his space simply is the daytime sky. The sun has dimmed the light of the brightest stars and drowned out completely that of fainter ones. From our perspective, Gonsales’s universe is upside down. In his version, it is in daytime that we see it as it really is, whereas at night it is obscured by Earth’s dark shadow. But if we ascended into space at midnight, we would eventually break out of the shadow, into the eternal day beyond. In Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone, the protagonist Domingo Gonsales sets sail for the moon in his swan-powered spacecraftHoughton Library Gonsales doesn’t mention the shadow, but we catch a glimpse of it in another early space travel story, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Approaching Earth, Milton’s Satan sees “the circling canopy / Of night’s extended shade”. In imagining a premodern Earthrise, then, we should add this shadow into the picture – a dark cone extending from the gibbous planet into the blue heavens and disappearing below the lunar horizon. Other authors explain why space isn’t just bright, but bright blue. The most common explanation is that the “firmament” – the variously imagined vault of the cosmos – was blue in colour. This is the view, notes Milton’s contemporary, the atomist philosopher Walter Charleton, held “not only by vulgar, but many transcendently learned heads”. In looking at the day sky, they thought they were simply looking at the end of the universe. The path towards Earthrise This universe also appears in visual art. Here, again, comparison with Apollo 8 is instructive. Some hours after capturing Earthrise, the crew delivered a radio broadcast to Earth from lunar orbit. Commander Frank Borman wished Earthlings a merry Christmas and read from the biblical account of creation. For the first time, humans attained a comparable, godlike perspective on their blue planet, sparkling in the black abyss. But when premodern artists illustrated these same biblical verses, they often drew the inverse: dark Earths, suspended in azure heavens. To complete the alternative Earthrise, imagine one of these darker Earths, rather than the familiar “blue marble”, ascending over the lunar surface. And it wasn’t just poets and painters. Philosophers and scientists also imagined such universes. Aristotle describes “the shadow of the earth (which we call night)”. Two millennia later, so does Copernicus, writing that “while the rest of the universe is bright and full of daylight, night is clearly nothing but the Earth’s shadow, which extends in the shape of a cone and ends in a point”. There was nothing irrational about such views. Early European thinkers simply had no compelling evidence to the contrary, especially regarding the nature of outer space and of Earth’s light-refracting atmosphere. Without such evidence, why suspect that night is the rule and day the exception? What reason had a premodern Christian to break with centuries of tradition and no longer view the heavens – the abode of God, angels and blessed souls – as a realm of eternal light, but one of eternal darkness? A 13th-century manuscript depicts a grey Earth casting a black shadow into a blue universe (left). The newly created Earth is also imagined as a black marble surrounded by a blue cosmos in a 15th-century manuscriptHeritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy; Bibliothèque nationale de France Which isn’t to say bright space was universal, even in premodernity. Thinkers of the Islamicate world, for example, accepted dark space from the 9th century onwards, though the reach of their views in the West seems to have been limited. By all accounts, dark space had to be rediscovered by European thinkers in the 17th century. For one thing, the period saw major advances in the scientific understanding of the atmosphere. Indeed, “atmosphere” is a 17th-century word, and one of the first to use it in English was Walter Charleton, whose universe can be described as the missing link in the story: neither bright nor dark, but changing from one to the other as the observer turns towards and away from the sun. This is because Charleton’s universe is still bounded by a firmament – although a black one, “and not azure, as most suppose” – and is also filled with swarms of tiny particles or “atoms”, driving him to speculate about their visual effects. But for Otto von Guericke, who accepted an unbound, infinite universe, and made groundbreaking experiments studying the vacuum, space is, precisely, space. If we found ourselves in such “pure”, “empty” space, with “no body lighted by the sun either underneath or before” us, we would “see nothing other than shadow”. From this point on, dark space is increasingly accepted by European scientists and scientifically literate thinkers. But that isn’t where the story ends, because bright space still survives for centuries in the popular imagination. Fast-forwarding to 1858, here is the astronomer James Gall, imagining ascending into space in a work aimed at the Victorian general reader: “We look around, and oh, how strange! the heavens are black”. Gall knows space is black, but he doesn’t expect his audience to know it. And this audience isn’t necessarily uneducated in other departments. It isn’t an ignoramus or a child who, as late as 1880, still believes the universe is an “enormous sphere of blue” – it is a distinguished literary historian, David Masson. Isolated instances continue into the 1920s, the very doorstep of the Space Age. We are dealing, then, not only with a lost, but also remarkably recent shift in our cosmological imagination. Because some of the most striking evidence appears in literary works, especially space travel narratives, it was first noticed by literary scholars: C. S. Lewis and, more recently, John Leonard. But it is yet to receive sustained study, and its cultural impact remains almost entirely uncharted. This impact has been profound, although it often hides in plain sight. For example, it is widely recognised that images like Earthrise transformed our planetary and environmental consciousness. Earth became “whole” and “blue”, but also “fragile”: emblematic of the imperatives of political unity and ecological sustainability, as well as the threat of nuclear warfare and anthropogenic climate change. What isn’t recognised, however, is that this transformation wasn’t due solely to a new view of the planet, but also of what surrounded it. Whole Earths had been imagined, depicted and reflected on since antiquity. But most floated in bright universes, eliciting very different reactions. The impact of Earthrise was therefore even greater than commonly understood. Once such images entered mass circulation, they wiped away even the last remaining vestiges of the old, bright cosmos, searing its exact inversion into the popular imagination: Earth as a luminous oasis in a dark cosmic desert. Earth was never “blue” or “fragile”, as such. It appeared so against the lethal darkness around it, which now became not only a scientific but also a cultural and psychological reality.

Climate
Cosmos
Nature

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Rise and Fall

A film to provide an awareness of climate change and the individual measures we can take to combat it. The production process of Rise and Fall began as your stereotypical documentary meant to showcase various aspects of the Earth and Ocean Sciences Department at UNCW. Still, as the interview process was underway, it was quickly decided to move in another direction. It is an essay film about the science of climate change, what we can do in our day-to-day lives to combat it, and its impacts. Without using talking heads, the images of the natural world provide a sensual look at what will be affected by climate change.

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Can Hydroponic Farming Help Reduce the Effects of Climate Change?

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The Wisdom To Survive: Climate Change, Capitalism & Community

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Sustainable Living with Patrick Lang

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THE WATER WILL TAKE US

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Water
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