It’s Getting Harder to Sue Pesticide Companies for Making People Sick

Tunnel Farming Helps South Dakota Farmers Extend Growing Season by up to 4 Months

Some farmers in South Dakota are using farm tunnels to extend their growing season

When snow covers the frozen ground, and most South Dakota farmers have sold or stored their products for the season, the operators of Cedar Creek Gardens are still able to grow vegetables and harvest a lucrative crop.Located in a remote area southwest of Murdo, about 12 miles south of Interstate 90, the sprawling farm is one of dozens in the state that utilize what are called farm tunnels to extend the planting and growing seasons.The tunnels are fortified above-ground hoop buildings covered in plastic that capture heat from the sun, creating a greenhouse effect. Many of the tunnels at Cedar Creek are covered with two separated layers of plastic and have fans that circulate warm air between the layers, creating even warmer growing conditions.The tunnels differ from greenhouses in that crops are grown directly into the soil rather than in raised boxes or beds, and they are watered from the ground up instead of from above.Cedar Creek is run by Peggy Martin and Bud Manke, who are business partners and good friends. Martin and Manke were some of the first South Dakota farmers to install tunnels after reading about them online in the early 2000s.“At first, we were just going to grow food for our families,” Martin said. “But it’s become a passion, and they (the tunnels) have helped us grow to what we are now.”Beyond extending the growing season by up to four months each year, the controlled weather conditions and targeted water use also allow them to produce top-quality, organically grown vegetables.One-pound tomatoes that are firm, filled with nutrients and free of blemishes. Banana peppers as long as bananas and so crisp they snap. Sweet onions the size of softballs. Kale plants that top 5 feet in height. Tunnels part of a diversified operation On their farm, they grow crops on 14 acres, have about 1,400 free-range laying chickens, and Manke raises cattle. The farm is dotted with about a dozen tunnel buildings, the largest of which are up to 14 feet tall, 30 feet wide and 200 feet long.Martin said the tunnels have enabled them to expand their farm and its output over the past 25 years and help them grow into the largest South Dakota specialty farming operation west of the Missouri River.Martin, Manke and the farmhands they hire grow a wide variety of seasonal produce, including tomatoes (the primary cash crop) as well as pumpkins, melons, sweet and green onions, red and green peppers, kale, cabbage, broccoli, sugar-snap peas, radishes, lettuce and zucchini.The foods they grow and raise are sold at area farm stands and farmer’s markets but also through a weekly wholesale business that serves West River grocery stores, restaurants and a buyer’s group.The tunnels have allowed them to plant vegetables as early as March and maintain growth of some hearty varieties for picking as late as mid-December. The first frost date in their region is typically around Sept. 15, Manke said.“There can be snow out here in the wintertime and it’s 20 degrees when the sun comes up, but it can be 100 degrees inside the tunnels,” Manke said. “It can actually get too hot sometimes, so we have to be careful and open things up.” Higher productivity, higher profits Martin did the math to show how the tunnels can increase productivity and profits.In a 200-foot tunnel, they can place three rows of 100 tomato plants, each of which can produce 40 pounds of fruit, more than double a typical household tomato plant, she said. At an average of $2.25 per pound, and even with 20% waste, that single tunnel can produce $21,600 of tomatoes in a single grow-out.Rachel Lawton, the South Dakota urban conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, runs the federal program that provides financial assistance to qualified individuals and operations that want to install tunnel farms.Lawton, based in Sioux Falls, said the tunnels aren’t suitable for high-production farms that raise thousands of bushels of corn, soybeans or wheat. But they work well for specialty crop farmers or backyard gardeners who want to produce a stable, almost year-round crop of vegetables, she said.“The season extension with high tunnels is beneficial, but it’s even more beneficial when you look at the quality of produce they’re producing while also getting protection from wind, hail, frost, chemical drift and pests,” she said.NRCS accepts applications for financial assistance in development of tunnel gardens each fall, with recipients receiving up to 75% of the cost of a project, Lawton said. In addition, successful applicants receive NRCS help in developing a wider-ranging conservation plan for their commercial farms or home gardening projects, she said. Interest in tunnels growing in South Dakota Lawton said she has seen increased interest in tunnel farming in South Dakota in recent years.In recent years, the agency has provided funding for about 10 to 15 tunnels projects a year with money from the USDA Environmental Quality Incentive Program, or EQIP.The largest tunnels, up to about 3,000 square feet, can cost more than $20,000, though smaller tunnels with fewer amenities cost far less, Lawton said. Tunnels cannot be used for equipment storage or livestock handling, and NRCS applicants must own or rent land, be U.S. citizens and make less than $900,000 a year, she said.Lawton cautioned that people who consider construction of a tunnel should be aware that they require frequent maintenance and are susceptible to damage from the elements.“As wonderful and as cool as they are, I wouldn’t say they are the solution to everything,” she said. “There can be a lot of pitfalls and a lot of work if you aren’t an experienced grower.” Martin now a ‘resident expert’ on tunnels The tunnels come in three basic sizes, from “high tunnels” that are the tallest and widest to “caterpillar tunnels” that are shorter and more narrow to “low tunnels” which are light enough to lift and change positions quickly.Lawton refers to Martin as South Dakota’s “high tunnel resident expert” because she has more high tunnels than most South Dakota farmers and because she has more than two decades of operating them.Martin likens the tunnels to “problematic 2-year-old kids” that require patience and wisdom to manage properly. “You can’t just plant them and then leave home,” she said. “If there’s bad weather coming, you have to roll down the sides and get them buttoned up.”But for those who accept the hard work and risk, the payoff in extended growing time, improved quality of products and protection of natural resources can far outweigh those drawbacks, Lawton said. Conservation benefits include soil conservation and reduced water, pesticide and electricity use, she said.“You can do multiple successions of crops, and you have a better growing environment, which essentially translates into dollars because you can grow more and sell more or grow more food for your own family,” Lawton said. “It all starts with conservation, but the end product is something that is more efficient, more productive and more financially beneficial all at the same time.”This story was originally published by South Dakota News Watch and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

Agriculture

Business

Chemicals

Trump’s Tariffs Should Force a Reckoning With America’s Soy Industry

Usually, the best thing about being in the American soy business is the predictability. Buy seeds from the same companies, sow them, water them, harvest the crop, and sell to the same buyers who have been buying it for decades. The last few years have been particularly profitable, with historically high prices and a consistent client in China, the world’s biggest buyer of soy. The United States is the world’s second-biggest producer of soy, after Brazil, growing over 80 million acres of the oily bean across vast swathes of the country’s farmland. About a quarter of all that crop goes straight to China, bringing in $13.2 billion last year alone.Now that market is gone, as is any predictability. After the U.S. levied heavy tariffs on Chinese imports in April, China responded by refusing to buy American soy. That was in May. Now, with the American soy harvest nearing the end of its season, American farmers are panicking. As the global soy value chain rearranges in real time, Brazil has become China’s biggest supplier while Americans go hat in hand to small markets like Nigeria and Vietnam hoping to cut some deals. The Trump administration has hinted at a bailout. And, to add insult to injury, Argentina, which the administration just promised a $20 billion currency swap to rescue its flailing economy, is now selling shiploads of soy to China.This agricultural drama has been getting a lot of media attention over the past few weeks, in part because it is exemplary of the helter-skelter policymaking of the Trump administration and its unpredictable global implications. The bigger story about soy, though, isn’t the current trade war, but the fact we’re producing far too much of the crop—not so humans can eat it, but so animals can.In 1962, China’s per capita GDP was $71 and the average Chinese person ate about 9 pounds of meat per year. But as the country industrialized and urbanized in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, increased consumer spending power fed a growing appetite for meat, especially pork. That, in turn, drove the country to pursue agricultural modernization, replacing smallholder farms with industrialized ones and embracing an “industrial meat regime” rooted in factory farming pork and poultry. In remaking its economy, China also remade its diet. Today, China’s per capita meat consumption is 154 pounds. The country has grown into the world’s biggest pork producer and pioneered massive pig production facilities like a 26-story mega-farm in Hubei province. Factory farming entails taking animals out of fields and growing them for the entirety of their lives in enclosed warehouses where their diets can be optimized to maximize quick growth for slaughter. But to feed all those animals, the fields need to be used to grow feed like corn and soy in massive quantities. China embraced soy production, but soon its demand for meat far outstripped its supply of available land. Today it imports 85 percent of the soy it uses, representing 60 percent of all global soy imports.While China’s embrace of a meat-heavy diet is remarkable in its speed and scale, it is only catching up to Europe, which has long practiced factory farming, and still lags the United States, which pioneered industrial animal farming and where per capita meat consumption is 220 pounds per year (and more if you count fish). The geographer Tony Weis calls the remaking of food systems to serve factory farming “meatification,” which entails diverting grain and oilseed production from human food toward animal feed. In the U.S., 35 percent of all corn and over 90 percent of soy becomes animal feed. In fact, 67 percent of all crops go to animal feed while 27 percent go directly to humans (the rest goes to biofuels). (Globally, 77 percent of all soy goes to animal feed; only 7 percent goes to human food like soy milk and tofu.) While this is inefficient and environmentally dubious, at least the U.S. can handle its domestic demand. The EU and China can’t. Hence the huge market for American soy abroad and Brazil’s and Argentina’s massive soy economies.As China’s demand for foreign soy grew, American farmers grew more of it: U.S. soy production and exports have double over the past 30 years, roughly tracking increases in Chinese meat consumption and soy demand for feed. The same was the case in Brazil. Importing soy amounts to offshoring demand for land. And that means offshoring deforestation. Most deforestation to create new soy farms takes place in South America. And with the U.S. cut off by China, Brazil is ending a moratorium on deforestation to cash in. This is just one of the many harms caused by a global appetite for meat. The recently-released “EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems”—a collaboration between the Swedish food NGO EAT and the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—shows that the global food system is outstripping planetary boundaries, driving unsustainable climate change, land use change, and eutrophication of water. The single biggest culprit by far is meat. China may have offshored deforestation, but its glut of factory farms have caused a series of crises at home as well, such as widespread pollution and animal disease outbreaks, including a swine fever epidemic in 2019 that killed tens of millions of animals.The irony here is that soy itself is an incredible crop and food. It’s hardy, adaptable, cheap to grow, and it fixes nitrogen in the soil, minimizing the need for fertilizer. The soybean is highly nutritious, packed with 35 percent protein and easy to cook or process into a variety of products, from oil and soy milk through to edamame, tofu, tempeh, and plant-based meats like Impossible burgers. This polyvalence and ease of use is precisely why it’s so widely used in animal feed. It’s just that feeding it to animals, beyond the environmental downsides, is inefficient. Any animal will consume far more calories and protein over its lifetime than it will yield as meat; the average pig will only yield about 9 percent the protein that it consumes. Eating soy directly requires far less soy (and land) than feeding it to animals. It’s not that soy is inherently harmful. It’s how we use it that’s harmful.Yes, American soy farmers are suffering. But we should take this moment to reflect on why we use so much American farmland to feed pigs both at home and in China, giving fuel to an environmentally destructive industry. How much soy we produce shouldn’t be a barometer for how well our agriculture sector is doing, but for how unsustainable it is.

Agriculture

Animals

Business

When Is It Right to Kill a Wolf?

Usually, after a night of carnage, the phone rings early in the morning. It sounds first at the Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, or DDT, in an eyesore of a governmental building on the outskirts of Digne, a small town nestled between the lavender fields of Provence and the sharp peaks of the Alps. The farmer on the line is usually distraught, recounting how many sheep were mauled and how the wolves attacked. Was there just one or a whole pack? Did they jump the electric fence, fight off the guard dogs? As the farmer tells his story, a government employee issues an alert, and the administrative procedure starts rolling.Sébastien Dubois takes it from there. As a royal wolf-catcher, Dubois is the latest in a centuries-long line of guardians entrusted by the rulers of France to rid the country of troublesome wolves. They did so in the 800s under the Emperor Charlemagne, and they do so in 2025 under the local prefects. Long gone are the gold-trimmed uniforms, the silver hunting knives, the throngs of hound dogs; now it’s technical outerwear, thermal cameras, high-tech rifles with night vision scopes—and tons of paperwork.Dubois starts his missions with paperwork, too. He does a background check: Does the farmer qualify for wolf-catchers’ protection? Does he have the appropriate authorizations? If all the boxes are checked, Dubois goes to the farm, sometimes hiking for hours to remote Alpine locations. He arrives long before sunset so that he can scout the terrain. He checks the weather, the direction of the wind, and the distance to the nearest woods. He checks the wolves’ tracks and the position of the neighboring houses. Then he waits.Often he stays out all night, always within 1,000 feet of the flock (the rules again). Usually, he hunts alone. He prefers it that way. It allows him to focus on the animal, immerse himself in its mind. “I shoot wolves, yes—that’s the job,” he told me. “But I respect them. We humans, we are fools compared to them. They are always one step ahead.”Most nights, he doesn’t fire a single shot. He strikes only when the wolves are close and about to attack. One time they were preparing to charge an exhausted sheepdog that had been barking up wolves every night for a week. “The dog was drained,” Dubois remembered. “It had lain down. And I saw the wolf; it was mid-attack. I think I shot it just before it pounced.”France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.With his slight frame, in jeans and a polo shirt, Dubois doesn’t look like someone you’d describe with the words “royal” or “wolf-catcher.” Yet over the last five years he has probably spent more than 100 nights hunting wolves, killing many. (He doesn’t like to keep count, he told me.) About 20 of those nights were at a farm owned by Julien Giraud, a stout, middle-aged man with a weathered face and hands cracked from years of fieldwork. When I visited in April, the place was postcard-perfect. Snowy peaks on the horizon framed rolling fields of shortly cropped lavender. The air smelled of dry grass and sun-heated soil. Dozens of sheep grazed behind an electric fence, watched over by a giant tan dog appropriately named Simba, Swahili for lion.The scene may have been peaceful, but Giraud’s voice was tense. Everything changed on June 16, 2019, he told me. More than 100 sheep killed in three nights—a massacre. When his daughter woke up for school, there were dead bodies all around the house. She was only four at the time. “It was horrible,” Giraud said. To protect the sheep, he started sleeping in his car, which he parked near the flock. In five months, he stayed home only a couple of times. He’s not sure why his wife hasn’t left him. “These dates are burned into my memory,” he said, and started to cry.That June, Dubois came over to Giraud’s farm many times. He slept in the car near the flock, too, so that Giraud could go home, get some rest. To the farmer, Dubois is a friend, a helping hand. Yet to many others, especially those on the political left, the wolf-catcher is a symbol of all things wrong: human dominance over nature, speciesism, pointless killings. There are about 1,700 wolf-catchers in France, and some have faced threats and hate mail, Dubois said. He asked me not to use his real name because he felt it would be too risky. He wanted to protect his family.Across Europe, conflicts over wolves have intensified in recent years, and the situation in France is particularly dire. You are either pro-wolf (protect it at all costs), or anti-wolf (get rid of it), with little in between. Fake news proliferates. Wolves have been used as a scapegoat for farmers’ struggles by French politicians, and as a bargaining chip during farmers’ protests. In the United States, tensions flared after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and then Idaho in the mid-1990s, after a decades-long absence. But there are less than half as many wolves in the contiguous United States and far more land. It’s possible to let them roam national parks and other nature preserves, where they’ll have little interaction with humans. “The situation in Europe is much more complicated,” said Dries Kuijper, a wildlife ecologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. There’s just not enough space for humans and wolves to avoid each other. The land has to be shared.By the end of 2024, the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention approved the European Commission’s proposal to downgrade the wolf’s protection status at the international level, a ruling that went into effect in March 2025. In May, the EU changed another law, allowing member states greater flexibility in managing their wolf populations. And on September 23, the French government relaxed the rules governing when wolves may be shot. Starting in 2026, farmers will be allowed to kill wolves attacking their livestock without prior authorization—an announcement that was met with an outcry from environmental organizations. The changes are unlikely to fix the problem, however. In human-wildlife conflicts, of which European wolves are a classic case, “most efforts have focused on finding rational solutions,” said Alexandra Zimmermann, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford. However, she pointed out, such conflicts don’t exist on the rational level alone; they go much deeper, into “the sense of not being heard, of identities clashing.” To her, France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history here for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.In a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.While there are many human-wildlife conflicts across the globe, those involving wolves are among the hardest to solve, Zimmermann said. They have arisen in Wisconsin, in Montana, in India—and now, more frequently and perhaps intensely than anywhere else, in Europe. Humans have a long history with wolves, full of myths, stories, misunderstandings, and violence. The fact that our best friend, the dog, descends directly from the Big Bad Wolf only fuels this love-hate relationship. And in a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.The gray wolf appeared in Europe about 400,000 years ago, then crossed to North America over the Bering Land Bridge, which linked the continents during ice ages. The species was remarkably successful. Split into over 30 subspecies, from the bulky Yukon wolf to the slender Arabian, it has colonized the Northern Hemisphere. Roughly 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, some wolves became dogs, either because humans selected the docile ones as companions or because certain wolves domesticated themselves for easy access to leftover food.Things were more or less OK on the human-wolf front as long as Homo sapiens stuck to hunting and gathering. Once our ancestors started farming, though, wolves became a problem—especially considering that livestock was often guarded by children. Add rabies into the mix, a disease that makes wolves more aggressive, and it just went downhill. Sheep got killed. Kids got killed. So we told stories of Red Riding Hood, of the Three Little Pigs, teaching children that wolves are to be feared. “A lot of narratives have been built around that, and they are perpetuated to this day,” observed Ugo Arbieu, a social ecologist at the Paris-Saclay University.In ancient Greece, prizes for killing wolves were offered as early as the sixth century BCE. In Rome, hunters called luparii scattered poisoned meatballs to rid the countryside of wolves, but the practice was likely uncommon. At the time, the wolf was often admired in Europe. The Romans believed the founders of their city were nursed by a she-wolf. Then Christianity changed everything with its idea of Jesus as the lamb of God. The wolf became a symbol of evil, a threat to the holy flock—and the hunting began in earnest.The institution of the royal wolf-catcher was created in France by Emperor Charlemagne, a devout Christian. Depending on whom you ask, it happened either in 812 or 813, which makes wolf-catchers one of the oldest branches of the French administration. The position was paid: first in grain from royal coffers, then in bounty collected from villagers for each beast killed, a practice that soon led to abuses and conflicts. The hunts were often grand affairs, with horses, packs of dogs, horns, and nets. Some wolf-catchers had at least a dozen servants, including, at one point, a baker for the hunting dogs’ bread. By the dawn of the French Revolution, the institution cost the country dearly: the equivalent of five years of a mason’s salary to kill a single wolf. And so it was abolished. Napoleon brought wolf-catchers back, but with more regulation. In 1815, for instance, the official uniform was decreed to be blue, with velvet cuffs trimmed in gold and yellow metal buttons embossed with a wolf. The position was strictly voluntary.By the 1930s, effectively no wolves were left in France, however, and very few in the rest of Europe. (In the lower 48 U.S. states, wolves were nearly decimated by the 1960s.) They were driven to extinction by habitat loss, poaching, and, yes, wolf-catchers. Yet bizarrely, the positions survived, as wolf-catchers took to chasing deer off crops instead. The only thing wolf-related was their name—and the buttons on their uniforms.Contrary to rumors circulating online, the government didn’t release the wolves, they returned on their own. Once legal protection was introduced in 1979 under the Bern Convention, and then in 1992 under the Habitats Directive, the wolves that still survived in pockets of Europe, in Italy, in Poland, in the Balkans, returned to their old territories. A single wolf can settle more than 900 miles from its birthplace. “We’ve found wolves that were born in Croatia, traveled through Slovenia and Austria before settling in Italy, in only 98 days,” Arbieu said.There are now more than 20,000 wolves across 23 EU countries. (In the contiguous United States, there are around 8,000.) In France, the official number for 2024 was 1,013, up from zero in 1991. Yet Adrian Treves, an environmental scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, doesn’t like such precise numbers. “To give the public one number is to treat the public like idiots,” he explained. “We never know the exact number of wolves. Never.”Wolf packs are fluid; individual wolves join and leave, walking long distances. Their nighttime habits and their tendency to avoid humans make counting them hard. To get some idea of the numbers, scientists use camera traps, which take photos of passing animals, track wolves via radio collars, and genetically sample wolf poop. In the winter, they use snow-track surveys, following paw prints in the snow. And in the summer, to count the litters of pups, they howl.Jérémy Lopez, the head of the pastoralism unit at Digne’s Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, whose name fittingly derives from Latin for wolf, found himself in the middle of a howling survey in 2019. “It was very strange,” he told me. There were several teams trained to imitate wolves, spread out across Alpine slopes. After the sun set, the humans started howling, each person going on for about 30 seconds. Lopez joined, too. “It looked like a bunch of people hanging about trying to sound like wolves, with traffic cones for megaphones,” he laughed. Then, the wolves responded: first one pack, then another. “We ended up in the middle of two packs answering each other, and that went on for like 45 minutes,” Lopez said. It was at once silly, awesome, and humbling.While howling surveys may seem bizarre, they are commonly used to count wolf packs and their litters. Although the howls of adult wolves blend together into one voice, the pups can’t howl, and yelp instead. Such yelps can be counted, giving researchers an idea of how fast the animals are breeding.And they do breed fast, at least in Europe. The numbers of wolves across the continent, as imprecise as they may be, are up more than 50 percent over a decade. In Germany, between 2015 and 2023, the number of wolf packs increased over four times. For some, that breeds fear. What also breeds fear are media reports on wolf attacks, many of them inaccurate. A 2021 study by Arbieu and his colleagues found that articles in which the victim was allegedly bitten by a wolf tend to be more misleading—the headlines exaggerated and sensational—than those describing dog attacks.Elia Pergolizzi, a cattle farmer with large blue eyes and a large crease between them, doesn’t hide her fear of wolves. Since the attacks on her farm, which is north of Digne, started several years ago, she dreams of wolves, of hunting. “It’s fascination mixed with terror,” she said. As we talked over coffee at her wooden dining table, Pergolizzi kept getting up and walking to the wall of windows overlooking a gently sloping Alpine meadow beyond her house, dotted with rust-colored cows. Her daughter was playing out there on her own, and Pergolizzi was worried. With wolves, you just never know.Over the past decades, no humans were killed by wolves in Europe. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. Europeans did fall victim to wolves’ jaws in the past, as evidenced by data from parish death registries. There were plenty of legends, too, such as that of La bête de Touraine, a monster of a wolf that supposedly terrorized France sometime in the late seventeenth century. It was said to have devoured more than 250 people.Folktales aside, such a fate likely wasn’t common. French historian Jean-Marc Moriceau calculated, based on public and private archive records, that wolves in France claimed only about 18 victims per year over five centuries, starting in 1575. What’s more, research suggests that rabies, which was widespread in seventeenth-century France, might have been responsible for many of the attacks—and tales of monster wolves. Yet France has been rabies-free since 2001, and the disease is now very rare across the rest of Europe, too. No rabies, no monsters.While modern Europeans are unlikely to fall victim to wolves, that’s not the case for their livestock. In 2023, wolves killed more than 10,000 farm animals in France, about a fifth of the total number of those killed across the union. That’s between two and three sheep, cows, or goats per wolf—and much more than claimed by their American cousins. (In Montana, which has an estimated wolf population of 1,096, only 31 cattle and sheep were killed in 2023.)Yet, taken alone, these numbers still don’t explain the ferocity of the European war on the wolf. For one, in absolute terms, 56,000 mauled farm animals is not that much—there are 271 million livestock in the EU. And two, farmers do get reimbursed for their losses. “Per sheep, it’s now somewhere around 260 euros,” Lopez said, “which is in general above market value.” The government also pays for indirect damages: the loss of genetic material, the stress to the rest of the flock that can result in miscarriages or lower output of milk. In 2024, wolves cost the French government about 43,000 euros per wolf in compensation to farmers and grants for livestock protection measures, such as electric fences.Julien Giraud appreciates the compensation he gets for the sheep he loses to wolves. Yet he believes that all this talk about money misses the point. “People say, ‘You’re compensated—what are you whining about?’ But until you’ve experienced it, people can’t understand,” he said. For him, it’s about the trauma of seeing your sheep gutted and bleeding all over your fields. It’s about having to finish them off to end their suffering. It’s about feeling alone with that trauma and about no one listening, really listening. It’s about governments making decisions up there in Paris and Brussels and pushing them onto farmers like him. “It’s not about the money,” he told me, shaking his head.Between 2022 and 2024, farmers’ frustration erupted into protests across Europe. In Switzerland, to decry the return of the wolf, farmers dumped dead sheep in front of a government building. In the Netherlands, they performed mock wolf hangings. In western France, pro-wolf protesters faced anti-wolf protesters. The protests weren’t just about the wolves, of course. In each country, the reasons behind the unrest were different, but there were common threads: discontent with low food prices paired with high price tags for fertilizer and feed, concerns about cheap imports of farm products from outside the EU, resentment over tightening environmental rules, and, above all, frustration with low incomes. “Farmers feel that they are stuck in liberalized markets on which they have to produce for the lowest price possible,” explained Jeroen Candel, a political scientist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “They have relatively little bargaining power vis-à-vis retailers and food processors.”Two triggers for the protests were the new Common Agricultural Policy, formally passed in January 2023, and the European Green Deal. In order to make the continent’s agriculture more planet-friendly, these policies required farmers to set aside more land to support biodiversity, rotate crops, and reduce pesticide use, all while adding red tape. To many farmers, it sounded like making a tough life even tougher.As Europe was due for elections to the European Parliament in June 2024, favorable policies were exchanged for electoral support, Candel said. Environmental legislation turned into “a new political cleavage both within the member states and in Brussels, where especially the conservatives and right-wing groups portray the Green Deal as a leftish, elitist project,” he said. A study of German online media revealed that the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, made the wolf its campaign issue. In readers’ comments, being anti-wolf was strongly linked to anti-EU sentiments and to a belief in conspiracies by “elites,” such as scientists falsifying data to encourage nature protection. In 2019, Julia Klöckner, then a minister of agriculture from the German Christian Democratic Union party, called the wolf “a campaign booster for the AfD.” The predator became a symbol of an urban hobby that threatens farmers’ livelihoods, a symbol of left versus right, of nature versus human. “Wolves are very high in symbolism,” said Fabien Quétier, the head of landscapes at Rewilding Europe, a nonprofit.The EU changed the law to make killing wolves easier apparently to placate farmers and preserve “rural livelihoods.” Some critics said that the move was not really about the farmers, but the result of a personal vendetta of Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, whose beloved pony, Dolly, was killed in 2022 by a wolf in Beinhorn, Germany. Later, von der Leyen was quoted as saying that European wolves had “become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans.” Many researchers and environmental NGOs were appalled by the weakened protections, calling them a “major blow to science.” Wolves are not the enemy, they said—they bring important benefits to both nature and humanity. Take road accidents, for example. A study in Wisconsin showed that wolves make roads safer: Their presence in the state reduced collisions with deer by almost a quarter. It’s not simply that wolves eat prey so that there are fewer deer caught in literal headlights. With large predators around, the prey “start behaving differently,” Kuijper said. Deer, moose, and boars have to be on a constant lookout, which also includes paying more attention while crossing roads.Fear also forces prey to avoid spots where they may be exposed to danger, with benefits to biodiversity. “If you don’t have any predators, deer can just walk wherever they like, and they go to the places with the best food. Once you add a predator to the system, they don’t do that anymore,” Kuijper said. As a result, some parts of forests are intensely browsed by deer, while others are left to flourish. In Wisconsin, one study showed, areas inhabited by wolves are particularly rich in shrubs and wildflowers, from honeysuckles and hazelnuts to bog orchids and bluebead lilies. The differences are obvious to the naked eye: Compared to forests teeming with wolves, areas without them look as if someone had mowed down the vegetation.Yet the problem with downgrading protection of wolves, critics say, is not simply that these predators benefit ecosystems; it’s also that killing them often does little to actually protect farms (even if you wiped them all out, other predators would likely replace them). Slovakia is a case in point. A study in this central European country found no relationship between the number of wolves hunted down and the number of sheep lost by farmers. In France, the results of similar studies were mixed. On three sites, killing wolves brought the desired effects (sheep spared); on five sites, there were no effects; and on one site, the hunting actually backfired, with more livestock devoured by wolves.That is less impossible than it may seem. Wolves hunt best when they do so in large, intact packs. Kill a few individuals, and the packs break up, making the remaining wolves less efficient. “Like in a sports team, if you remove one or two members, the team will not function as it used to,” Treves said. Livestock make for easier prey than wild animals do, and so that’s what the wolves from broken packs go for.Scientists and NGOs argue that instead of simply killing wolves, we should focus on nonlethal control options, such as electric fencing, guard dogs, and shepherds. “If you don’t protect livestock, you can forget about preventing conflicts with wolves,” Kuijper said. One effective technique is fladry—a rope with flags that flutter in the wind, scaring off wolves. Electric fencing works, too, but it cuts through landscapes, preventing wildlife from moving freely. To complicate matters, wolves are fast learners. Fences can be jumped over or dug under. In one study, fladry worked for two months, and then it didn’t: The wolves figured out thxat it was just flapping cloth.Jérôme Bach, a livestock farmer north of Digne, believes that if you want to protect livestock, guard dogs are a great option. “You have to have dogs. If you don’t, the wolves will realize quickly it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet,” he said. A decade ago, Bach quit the circus where he worked as a juggler, took his beloved sidekick, a border collie, and started herding sheep. He liked the idea of being alone in nature. Now he is still in nature, but less alone. He lives with his wife and four kids on a farm in a community where everyone knows each other. He breeds guard dogs for local farmers and assists with training.On the day I visited, Bach’s barn smelled of fresh hay. Among a group of brown goats, three cream Anatolian shepherd puppies played with an empty bucket, their thick legs uncertain on a carpet of straw. They were born here, right within the herd. To be a good guardian, Bach tells me, a dog has to identify with the herd—not as a sheep or as a goat, but as their family. “Before his eyes even open, he hears the sounds of sheep, the sounds of goats, and he smells them,” Bach said. The dog gets attached to livestock, and his protective instincts, hardwired within the breed, kick in. If one day a wolf approaches the herd, the dog will feel the sheep’s distress—and he will do anything to protect them. One time, Bach heard sheep bells in the middle of the night, going off in every direction. He jumped out of bed and ran outside in his underwear. “The dogs were going wild,” he said. They barked, and they won. The wolves gave up.Yet guard dogs are not a perfect solution. The wolves often outsmart them, tricking the dogs to follow one predator while the rest of the pack attacks in a different spot. In direct combat, the dogs lose. They bother neighbors. They attack hikers. What’s more, they cost a lot of money and time. “It adds a lot of work. It’s really restrictive for us. And we already have a lot to do,” Bach said, shaking his head. Bach, like Giraud, like Pergolizzi, simply feels tired. Tired and ignored. “I’m worn out, both physically and mentally,” Pergolizzi said.For Zimmermann, these feelings—the exhaustion, the frustration, the sadness—mean that the whole discussion of the pluses and minuses of different methods of controlling wolves misses the point. It’s not about the efficacy of fladry versus fencing, or whether shooting a certain number of wolves would limit attacks. Using ideas from peace-building, Zimmermann and her colleagues identified three levels of human-wildlife conflict. The first, and the mildest, is when things are just beginning to stir, when people are still willing to talk, and practical measures such as fencing can fix the problem. That’s where human-elephant conflicts in northeast India stand. At level two, the waters become muddier: Some hurtful things were said in the past, other things were not done, and resentment is growing. At level three, the conflict becomes about identities, not animals. You know when you’ve hit level three when people start using polarized language, when they talk about threats to their way of life, about not being heard. “There is deliberate blaming of each other, hostility, completely different realities,” Zimmermann said. That’s wolves in Europe. “Wolves do seem to be an extreme case, where they’re more polarizing than any other wildlife that we’ve studied,” Treves observed.Trying to solve a level-three conflict as if it were a level-one may be self-defeating. Rational fixes come naturally to conservation scientists, Zimmermann said, but you may end up stomping on that sense of not being heard. Say an NGO turns up and tells farmers that it’s found the perfect new solar fence that is going to solve all their problems—“They will not be impressed. It’s clumsy,” she said. “The farmers might feel that they have not been heard on this, that they are always being told what to do by the scientists.” This may also explain why research shows that compensation for wolf-inflicted damages often does little to increase acceptance of these predators, and sometimes even adds fuel to the fire. “In decision-making circles, they look down on us,” Pergolizzi said. “Because for us, this is our life. It’s not just a financial matter. It’s not just, ‘Oh, I lost an animal, and it cost me this much.’ I don’t care about that—they paid me for it. It’s not about the money. It’s about physical and psychological integrity. And it goes deep. It goes very, very deep.”Pergolizzi is not your stereotypical right-wing farmer. She is anti-pesticide and worries about climate. Her house is dotted with organic products. She produces meat, but tells people to eat less of it: In her view, meat should be nature’s gift, celebrated on special occasions. In the wolf debate, she feels she is caught in between the conservative rural right and the green urban left.She didn’t believe in shooting wolves—until a few years ago, that is, when she saw one of her pregnant cows disemboweled by wolves. The cow was still alive, licking her dead calf. “I had a lot of nightmares after that,” she said. Last year, the attacks started again, even though she changed her farming practices and built a shed where the cows could calve indoors. And so she called DDT in Dinge, and a wolf-catcher came. He stayed one night, then another. He observed. It was always the same pack, and the same wolf that would initiate the attacks. So he shot that wolf, and the attacks ended. But Pergolizzi was still shaken. She felt it was a deep moral failure that she couldn’t keep her animals safe. “Psychologically, it was terrible,” she said. That’s why one day Dubois turned up at her doorstep with a psychologist. He saw that she needed to talk.Sometimes Dubois plays the therapist himself. “I’ve seen farmers—tough guys, hardened types—who’ve been holding it together for months, but when I called them, I found them in tears,” Dubois said. “There are farmers—the wolves have broken something in them. We’ve seen it happen. Sometimes the wolf-catcher goes to meet the farmer before a nighttime patrol and never leaves. He stays to talk for hours.”When Lopez interviews candidates who want to be wolf-catchers (their term is five years, but can be renewed), he tries to weed out “would-be cowboys,” he said. He is looking for people who have a sense of duty toward their community. “We don’t only ask them to go and be good shooters. We also ask them to be our eyes and ears in the field … to call the farmers, spend a couple of minutes talking with them, see how they’re doing.”Talking and listening are also at the heart of mediation—one thing that, according to Zimmermann, can actually help solve human-wildlife conflicts that have reached level three. “You really need to start bringing in people who know how to resolve conflicts, do mediation work—that’s a completely different skill set from your classic natural scientist,” she explained. Such mediators need to get to the bottom of things. Is it about cheap food imports from outside the continent? Is it about subsidies going to the wrong places? Or is it about feeling ignored? In Denmark, “The Wolf Dialogue Project,” which involved a group of people from across the political spectrum, took over two years, but ended up reducing polarization and producing several potential solutions to test, such as DNA identification of problem wolves. A similar approach, based on a method called Multicriteria Decision Analysis, showed promise in Italy.But mediation can be scary. You have to let the other side suggest solutions, even if that solution is shooting wolves. “Without even allowing that to be discussed, you are never going to get further anyway,” Zimmermann said. Simply considering shooting as an option could bring people closer—and maybe, just maybe, when people feel they’ve been heard, a compromise might emerge.Pergolizzi accepts that sometimes wolves may need to be shot, even though she doesn’t like the idea. “I’m not anti-wolf, despite everything. If I see one among my cows and I can legally kill it, I will. But I would really like us to talk about this—about the killing, about that violence—because it’s part of nature, too,” she said. She feels that, so far, there is not much real discussion about wolves in France, just two sides shouting at each other. “What exhausted me was feeling judged, unsupported, misunderstood,” she said. Everything is black and white, and so polarized. “It’s insane,” she added.But nature is not black and white—just like the wolf, it’s all about shades of gray. Yes, nature is wild, it’s beautiful, it’s free—but it’s violent, too. Nature is full of complexity, Pergolizzi said, and that complexity is what we need right now in the public discourse on wolves. “There is no easy solution,” she reflected. “We just need to understand each other.” The phone at Digne’s DDT keeps ringing.

Agriculture

Animals

Climate

Ocean Acidification Threshold Pushes Earth Past Another Planetary Boundary

Earth has breached a critical boundary for ocean acidification, with potentially grim effects for ocean ecosystems and human livelihoods

Our planet is sick, and its life-threatening symptoms are getting worse, a new report warns.Earth has been pushed past multiple physical and chemical boundaries crucial for keeping the world a livable place. Beyond already exceeded thresholds set by scientists for rising temperatures, biodiversity loss and chemical pollution, we have now also breached the boundary on ocean acidification. The milestone comes with grim ramifications for marine ecosystems and human livelihoods.“More than three-quarters of the Earth’s support systems are not in the safe zone,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, said in a statement announcing the 2025 evaluation of the planetary boundaries. “Humanity is pushing beyond the limits of a safe operating space, increasing the risk of destabilizing the planet.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Humans and many other species evolved to thrive in the climate of the Holocene, a period that began around 10,000 years ago. But as societies industrialized and began widely burning fossil fuels in the 19th century, greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere, trapping heat and transforming Earth and its climate in many ways besides raising global temperatures.Beginning in 2009, PIK flagged and prioritized research on nine geophysical limits that make up a sort of planetary life-support system; staying within these limits, they argue, is the best hope for maintaining the clement climatic conditions we and most of Earth’s other denizens have adapted to. In 2023 researchers published a study that quantified those boundaries and established where we are in relation to them. At the time, six of the boundaries had been surpassed, with many well into what the scientists called a “zone of increasing risk.”“It’s like blood pressure,” said the 2023 study’s lead author Katherine Richardson, an earth systems scientist at the University of Copenhagen, in an interview with Scientific American at the time. “If your blood pressure is over 120 over 80, it’s not a guarantee that you’re going to have a heart attack, but it does raise the risk, and therefore we do what we can to bring it down.”Among the nine boundaries is of course climate change, which is measured in part by the amount of world-warming carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide concentrations reached a record global high of 422.7 parts per million (ppm) last year, compared with 280 ppm prior to the industrial revolution and the 350 ppm that many scientists consider a “safe” limit (which was surpassed in 1987). The burning of fossil fuels is the indisputable culprit.Fossil fuels are also behind the new boundary breaching—the ocean absorbs some of the atmosphere’s excess carbon dioxide, causing waters to become more acidic. Since the industrial revolution, the ocean’s surface pH has dropped by 0.1; this may seem minuscule, but because the pH scale is logarithmic, it reflects roughly a 30 percent increase in acidity.Ocean acidification can have profound impacts on marine ecosystems by depleting seawater of certain carbon compounds that corals and other shell building animals need to construct their protective homes. At low enough pH levels, corals and shells can even begin to dissolve. These effects could destabilize entire ecosystems and devastate many commercially valuable species, such as oysters. A 2020 report by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that ocean acidification would cost the country’s economy billions of dollars.“The movement we’re seeing is absolutely headed in the wrong direction. The ocean is becoming more acidic, oxygen levels are dropping, and marine heatwaves are increasing. This is ramping up pressure on a system vital to stabilize conditions on planet Earth,” Levke Caesar, co-lead of PIK’s Planetary Boundaries Science Lab, said in the new evaluation’s press statement.The not-so-short list of other boundaries we’ve blown past is sobering. Excess phosphorus and nitrogen from the widespread use of fertilizers flows into rivers and seas to spark toxic algal blooms. Artificial chemicals, such as plastics, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and “forever chemical” perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) disruptively accumulate in food chains. Agriculture and other changes in land use strip away forests and diminish available fresh water. And as all these problems grow, more and more of Earth’s biodiversity is disappearing.According to the new report, just two of the nine limits remain intact: ozone depletion and aerosols in the atmosphere. Only the former shows clear progress away from the planetary boundary, as a result of the success of the Montreal Protocol, the international agreement through which countries are phasing out chemicals that erode Earth’s protective ozone layer. Aerosol emissions have declined globally—partly from efforts to reduce pollution from global shipping—but absent any unified policy framework for reductions, levels could easily surge back.The overall prognosis for the planet’s health is poor, given that a number of countries, including the U.S. in particular, are moving away from meaningful action to tackle environmental problems.“We are witnessing widespread decline in the health of our planet. But this is not an inevitable outcome. The drop in aerosol pollution and healing of the ozone layer, shows that it is possible to turn the direction of global development. Even if the diagnosis is dire, the window of cure is still open,” Rockström said in the press statement. “Failure is not inevitable; failure is a choice. A choice that must and can be avoided.”It’s Time to Stand Up for ScienceIf you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.I’ve been a Scientific American subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.If you subscribe to Scientific American, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can't-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world's best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you’ll support us in that mission.

Agriculture

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Chemicals

Meat is a leading emissions source – but few outlets report on it, analysis finds

Sentient Media reveals less than 4% of climate news stories mention animal agriculture as source of carbon emissionsFood and agriculture contribute one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions – second only to the burning of fossil fuels. And yet the vast majority of media coverage of the climate crisis overlooks this critical sector, according to a new data analysis from Sentient Media.The findings suggest that only about a quarter of climate articles in 11 major US outlets, including the Guardian, mention food and agriculture as a cause. And of the 940 articles analyzed, only 36 – or 3.8% – mentioned animal agriculture or meat production, by far the largest source of food-related emissions. Continue reading...

Food and agriculture contribute one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions – second only to the burning of fossil fuels. And yet the vast majority of media coverage of the climate crisis overlooks this critical sector, according to a new data analysis from Sentient Media.The findings suggest that only about a quarter of climate articles in 11 major US outlets, including the Guardian, mention food and agriculture as a cause. And of the 940 articles analyzed, only 36 – or 3.8% – mentioned animal agriculture or meat production, by far the largest source of food-related emissions.The data reveals a media environment that obscures a key driver of the climate crisis. Meat production alone is responsible for nearly 60% of the food sector’s climate emissions and yet its impact is sorely underestimated: a 2023 Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found 74% of US respondents believe eating less meat has little to no effect on the climate crisis.Sentient Media analyzed the most recent online articles about climate change from 11 major U.S. outlets – the Guardian, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, CNN, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, New York Times, Reuters, Star Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Opinion pieces, syndicated stories, and articles that mention climate change only in passing were excluded.The final group of 940 stories was collected using artificial intelligence and then reviewed individually for accuracy. Of all the causes surveyed in the report, including mining, manufacturing, and energy production (55.9%); fossil fuels (47.9%); and transportation (34%), livestock and meat consumption were by far discussed the least.Sentient Media’s editor-in-chief, Jenny Splitter, who helped oversee the report, said she had long noticed the omission as a reporter covering the intersection of climate and food. “We thought one way to start the conversation with other journalists and newsrooms was to put some numbers to the question,” she said.Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director and co-founder of Covering Climate Now, a non-profit that helps newsrooms strengthen their climate reporting, said daily news outlets struggle to emphasize the deeper root causes of climate change – often focusing on incremental updates over the larger why.“It’s not necessarily nefarious,” he said. “But as the climate crisis has accelerated, it is increasingly indefensible for news coverage of climate change not to make it clear that this crisis is driven by very specific human activities – primarily burning fossil fuels. And in second place is food, agriculture, forestry.”Hertsgaard, who has reported on the climate crisis since 1990, said food and agriculture had long been a “gross oversight” in climate circles. The United Nations climate change summit had no dedicated agriculture focus until 2015, reflecting its neglected status in the world of policymakers, thinktanks, and NGOs – which contributed into the media’s illiteracy on the topic, Hertsgaard said.Dhanush Dinesh, the founder of the food-systems focused thinktank Clim-Eat, said climate organizations sometimes shy away from the topic due to food’s fraught cultural status, which may have helped to keep it from the media spotlight.When you eat a burger, you’re not just eating a cow ... You’re eating the Amazon. You’re eating the earth.Michael Grunwald, journalist“Nobody wants to put themselves out there and tell people what to eat – it’s just too sensitive,” he said. “Even within the [climate advocacy] space, we see it’s quite polarizing.”That tension isn’t always so organic. When a 2019 report published by the Lancet showed how reduced-meat diets could feed the world without causing environmental breakdown, an industry-backed coalition helped to fund some of the backlash against it. Beef industry groups take an active approach to messaging, including staffing a 24/7 “command center” in Denver that scans social media for negative stories and deploys counter-messaging.Journalist Michael Grunwald said that the food conversation today is lagging about twenty years behind the energy and fossil fuels conversation. He spent years covering climate issues for outlets including Time, Politico and the Washington Post before he started to see the links between the food on our plates and changes in the atmosphere.“I didn’t know squat,” he said. “Here’s this important part of the climate equation that I was spectacularly ignorant about. And I realized others probably were, too.”skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionGrunwald’s new book, We Are Eating the Earth, unpacks how dietary choices shape the planet’s surface, playing a massive role in its ultimate fate. That is in part because ruminant livestock – particularly cattle – are a major source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, that warms the planet 80 times faster than carbon dioxide.But feeding billions of farm animals also takes up a lot of space. Half of the earth’s habitable land is already devoted to agriculture, and most of that – about 80% – is grazing pasture and cropland for animal feed, making meat consumption a major driver of deforestation globally. Today, we clear a soccer field’s worth of tropical forest every six seconds, a loss dramatically worsened by humanity’s growing hunger for meat.“When you eat a burger, you’re not just eating a cow,” Grunwald said. “You’re eating macaws and jaguars and the rest of the cast of Rio. You’re eating the Amazon. You’re eating the earth.”And yet this toll tends to be broadly misunderstood, when it is not ignored altogether. Only about 15% of stories analyzed Sentient Media mention land-use changes in connection with the climate crisis.Princeton senior researcher Timothy Searchinger has spent decades making the case that we cannot solve the climate issue without rethinking how we use land.“Every tree, after you take out the water, is about 50% carbon. So forests store vast quantities of carbon,” he said. “If we continue to clear forests, we have the capability to dramatically increase climate change.”That conversion of forest into agricultural land takes an unthinkable toll, responsible globally for as much carbon emissions each year as the entire United States. Meanwhile, the global population is expected to grow from 8 billion to 10 billion by 2050. So fixing the climate crisis will mean growing more food with fewer emissions on the same amount of land – or, ideally, even less land.“There’s kind of no way to solve the land use problems in the world unless there is moderation of diets – meat consumption, particularly beef – in the developed world,” Searchinger said.If ruminant meat consumption in wealthy countries such as the US declined to about 1.5 burgers per person per week – about half what it is now, still well over the national average for most countries – that alone would nearly eliminate the need for additional deforestation due to agricultural expansion, even in a world with 10 billion people, according to an analysis by the World Resources Institute.Though she acknowledges the 3.8% figure is low, Jessica Fanzo, a professor of climate at Columbia University, said she didn’t blame media as much as the challenge of translating scientific consensus into real action – a structural gridlock that’s made progress, and therefore storytelling, more difficult.“Governments are reluctant to push hard on dietary change, livestock emissions, or fertilizer dependence because they trigger cultural sensitivities and risk political backlash,” she said, by email. She also said it is difficult to take action on the vast, decentralized agricultural sector. Climate advocate and author Bill McKibben agreed, pointing out in emailed comments that 20 fossil fuel companies are responsible for much of the world’s emissions, whereas food comes down to the actions of millions of farmers.Meanwhile, US agriculture policy is mostly geared toward ramping up commodity grain and animal-feed production through subsidies – an approach that prioritizes cheap calories over reducing carbon emissions. And available demand-side solutions, such as meat taxes or meatless Mondays at public schools, risk touching a cultural third rail.But in this divided environment, media can play a crucial role, said David McBey, a University of Aberdeen behavioral scientist focused on diet-climate links.“Information campaigns don’t change behavior,” he said. “But they do lay an important bedrock. If you want behavior to change, it’s important that people know why it should change.”

Agriculture

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Climate

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