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Opinion: I live in Flint, Michigan. Shuttering environmental justice at EPA hurts communities like mine.

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Thursday, April 3, 2025

Eleven years ago Flint, Michigan, fatefully switched its drinking water supply to the Flint River. The consequences are well-documented: significant damage to pipes, a historic outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, system-wide lead contamination. My then-three-year-old son was one of the children who drank that lead-tainted water. Because lead is only detectable in the blood for two months’ time, we, like many other Flint families, will never know exactly how much lead may have entered our child’s body, or what effects it might have had on his development. That uncertainty is just one of the many ways in which the Flint water crisis continues to reverberate throughout our community.Another notable, and much-remarked reverberation is the effect the crisis had on trust in governmental institutions. Flint parents will not soon forget the many months our children drank tainted water while officials insisted everything was fine. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for its part, was shamefully slow to act in the face of evidence that the water posed an imminent threat. In some ways, the agency is still on the wrong side of the crisis, as it continues to fight a lawsuit brought by residents. But EPA has given itself a means of addressing its blind spots, course correcting, and hopefully, minimizing mistakes like the ones we saw in Flint.The EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) was created in 1993 to provide recommendations to the EPA administrator for addressing pollution and other environmental burdens in our hardest-hit communities. NEJAC’s members are unpaid, performing their work for the council as a public service. And they hail from a wide range of backgrounds: community-based organizations, state and local government, academia, tribal government, and the business and industry sector. Credit: SHTTEFAN on Unsplash NEJAC’s open meetings offer the public inlets of influence over the federal government, giving communities the opportunity to lift up their concerns and ensure that they are taken seriously and followed up on. After the revelations about Flint’s water, NEJAC invited one of the city’s leading water activists to speak to the council and, inspired by her testimony and reports from other community advocates, authored a letter calling for prompt EPA action to address “enduring problems” in Flint. (The agency’s follow-up actions are detailed here.) Subsequently, Flint helped to inspire NEJAC’s national recommendations around water infrastructure.In 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, I began my own service on NEJAC. That year, former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler conducted a review of all advisory committees to EPA and, in his words, “reaffirmed the importance” of NEJAC’s “critical role” in helping the agency “make measurable progress improving the health and welfare of overburdened communities.”The difference between then and now is striking. Current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested that environmental justice work amounts to discrimination and has been purging EPA of all traces of its environmental justice commitments. Notably, NEJAC has been removed from EPA’s official list of advisory committees, and the fate of the council is unclear. As (presumptive) NEJAC vice-chair, I and other members of the NEJAC leadership team sent a letter to Administrator Zeldin on February 28 asking him to meet with us, as is customary for a new administrator. He has not responded.Meanwhile, like other marginalized communities, Flint waits to see whether our plight will be taken seriously by this administration. Flint remains under the EPA emergency order issued in January 2016, a reflection of our water system’s lingering issues. While significant strides have been made in getting lead out of our water, residents are awaiting the completion of lead pipe removal, and we still face many challenges in rebuilding the relationship between residents and our water utility. Under the last presidential administration, EPA employees in the environmental justice program offered resources to help facilitate the Flint Water System Advisory Council, which serves as an interface between Flint residents and the city’s water managers. Whether this support will continue, given that some of these agency allies have been placed on administrative leave and are facing termination, is very much an open question. On February 20 of this year, Administrator Zeldin made a point of visiting Flint. He toured the Flint Water Treatment Plant and pledged that EPA would remain “fully engaged” with the city’s recovery effort. What the administrator did not do, however, is take the time to hear directly from impacted community members about their needs, concerns, and recommendations.It is a contradiction to claim full engagement and to simultaneously neglect or cut off opportunities for members of our most marginalized communities to lift up their voices to EPA and other federal agencies. With the closing of EPA’s national and regional environmental justice offices, there has never been more need for the spotlight that NEJAC can shine on the environmental struggles of communities like Flint. For over 30 years, across Democratic and Republican administrations, NEJAC has provided EPA decision-makers with invaluable perspective at negligible cost to the American taxpayer. Administrator Zeldin should, like his predecessors, reaffirm its important role.

Eleven years ago Flint, Michigan, fatefully switched its drinking water supply to the Flint River. The consequences are well-documented: significant damage to pipes, a historic outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, system-wide lead contamination. My then-three-year-old son was one of the children who drank that lead-tainted water. Because lead is only detectable in the blood for two months’ time, we, like many other Flint families, will never know exactly how much lead may have entered our child’s body, or what effects it might have had on his development. That uncertainty is just one of the many ways in which the Flint water crisis continues to reverberate throughout our community.Another notable, and much-remarked reverberation is the effect the crisis had on trust in governmental institutions. Flint parents will not soon forget the many months our children drank tainted water while officials insisted everything was fine. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for its part, was shamefully slow to act in the face of evidence that the water posed an imminent threat. In some ways, the agency is still on the wrong side of the crisis, as it continues to fight a lawsuit brought by residents. But EPA has given itself a means of addressing its blind spots, course correcting, and hopefully, minimizing mistakes like the ones we saw in Flint.The EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) was created in 1993 to provide recommendations to the EPA administrator for addressing pollution and other environmental burdens in our hardest-hit communities. NEJAC’s members are unpaid, performing their work for the council as a public service. And they hail from a wide range of backgrounds: community-based organizations, state and local government, academia, tribal government, and the business and industry sector. Credit: SHTTEFAN on Unsplash NEJAC’s open meetings offer the public inlets of influence over the federal government, giving communities the opportunity to lift up their concerns and ensure that they are taken seriously and followed up on. After the revelations about Flint’s water, NEJAC invited one of the city’s leading water activists to speak to the council and, inspired by her testimony and reports from other community advocates, authored a letter calling for prompt EPA action to address “enduring problems” in Flint. (The agency’s follow-up actions are detailed here.) Subsequently, Flint helped to inspire NEJAC’s national recommendations around water infrastructure.In 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, I began my own service on NEJAC. That year, former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler conducted a review of all advisory committees to EPA and, in his words, “reaffirmed the importance” of NEJAC’s “critical role” in helping the agency “make measurable progress improving the health and welfare of overburdened communities.”The difference between then and now is striking. Current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested that environmental justice work amounts to discrimination and has been purging EPA of all traces of its environmental justice commitments. Notably, NEJAC has been removed from EPA’s official list of advisory committees, and the fate of the council is unclear. As (presumptive) NEJAC vice-chair, I and other members of the NEJAC leadership team sent a letter to Administrator Zeldin on February 28 asking him to meet with us, as is customary for a new administrator. He has not responded.Meanwhile, like other marginalized communities, Flint waits to see whether our plight will be taken seriously by this administration. Flint remains under the EPA emergency order issued in January 2016, a reflection of our water system’s lingering issues. While significant strides have been made in getting lead out of our water, residents are awaiting the completion of lead pipe removal, and we still face many challenges in rebuilding the relationship between residents and our water utility. Under the last presidential administration, EPA employees in the environmental justice program offered resources to help facilitate the Flint Water System Advisory Council, which serves as an interface between Flint residents and the city’s water managers. Whether this support will continue, given that some of these agency allies have been placed on administrative leave and are facing termination, is very much an open question. On February 20 of this year, Administrator Zeldin made a point of visiting Flint. He toured the Flint Water Treatment Plant and pledged that EPA would remain “fully engaged” with the city’s recovery effort. What the administrator did not do, however, is take the time to hear directly from impacted community members about their needs, concerns, and recommendations.It is a contradiction to claim full engagement and to simultaneously neglect or cut off opportunities for members of our most marginalized communities to lift up their voices to EPA and other federal agencies. With the closing of EPA’s national and regional environmental justice offices, there has never been more need for the spotlight that NEJAC can shine on the environmental struggles of communities like Flint. For over 30 years, across Democratic and Republican administrations, NEJAC has provided EPA decision-makers with invaluable perspective at negligible cost to the American taxpayer. Administrator Zeldin should, like his predecessors, reaffirm its important role.



Eleven years ago Flint, Michigan, fatefully switched its drinking water supply to the Flint River. The consequences are well-documented: significant damage to pipes, a historic outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, system-wide lead contamination. My then-three-year-old son was one of the children who drank that lead-tainted water.

Because lead is only detectable in the blood for two months’ time, we, like many other Flint families, will never know exactly how much lead may have entered our child’s body, or what effects it might have had on his development. That uncertainty is just one of the many ways in which the Flint water crisis continues to reverberate throughout our community.

Another notable, and much-remarked reverberation is the effect the crisis had on trust in governmental institutions. Flint parents will not soon forget the many months our children drank tainted water while officials insisted everything was fine. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for its part, was shamefully slow to act in the face of evidence that the water posed an imminent threat. In some ways, the agency is still on the wrong side of the crisis, as it continues to fight a lawsuit brought by residents.

But EPA has given itself a means of addressing its blind spots, course correcting, and hopefully, minimizing mistakes like the ones we saw in Flint.

The EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) was created in 1993 to provide recommendations to the EPA administrator for addressing pollution and other environmental burdens in our hardest-hit communities. NEJAC’s members are unpaid, performing their work for the council as a public service. And they hail from a wide range of backgrounds: community-based organizations, state and local government, academia, tribal government, and the business and industry sector.

A person fills a glass with tap water Credit: SHTTEFAN on Unsplash

NEJAC’s open meetings offer the public inlets of influence over the federal government, giving communities the opportunity to lift up their concerns and ensure that they are taken seriously and followed up on. After the revelations about Flint’s water, NEJAC invited one of the city’s leading water activists to speak to the council and, inspired by her testimony and reports from other community advocates, authored a letter calling for prompt EPA action to address “enduring problems” in Flint. (The agency’s follow-up actions are detailed here.) Subsequently, Flint helped to inspire NEJAC’s national recommendations around water infrastructure.

In 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration, I began my own service on NEJAC. That year, former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler conducted a review of all advisory committees to EPA and, in his words, “reaffirmed the importance” of NEJAC’s “critical role” in helping the agency “make measurable progress improving the health and welfare of overburdened communities.”

The difference between then and now is striking. Current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested that environmental justice work amounts to discrimination and has been purging EPA of all traces of its environmental justice commitments. Notably, NEJAC has been removed from EPA’s official list of advisory committees, and the fate of the council is unclear. As (presumptive) NEJAC vice-chair, I and other members of the NEJAC leadership team sent a letter to Administrator Zeldin on February 28 asking him to meet with us, as is customary for a new administrator. He has not responded.

Meanwhile, like other marginalized communities, Flint waits to see whether our plight will be taken seriously by this administration. Flint remains under the EPA emergency order issued in January 2016, a reflection of our water system’s lingering issues. While significant strides have been made in getting lead out of our water, residents are awaiting the completion of lead pipe removal, and we still face many challenges in rebuilding the relationship between residents and our water utility. Under the last presidential administration, EPA employees in the environmental justice program offered resources to help facilitate the Flint Water System Advisory Council, which serves as an interface between Flint residents and the city’s water managers. Whether this support will continue, given that some of these agency allies have been placed on administrative leave and are facing termination, is very much an open question.

On February 20 of this year, Administrator Zeldin made a point of visiting Flint. He toured the Flint Water Treatment Plant and pledged that EPA would remain “fully engaged” with the city’s recovery effort. What the administrator did not do, however, is take the time to hear directly from impacted community members about their needs, concerns, and recommendations.

It is a contradiction to claim full engagement and to simultaneously neglect or cut off opportunities for members of our most marginalized communities to lift up their voices to EPA and other federal agencies. With the closing of EPA’s national and regional environmental justice offices, there has never been more need for the spotlight that NEJAC can shine on the environmental struggles of communities like Flint. For over 30 years, across Democratic and Republican administrations, NEJAC has provided EPA decision-makers with invaluable perspective at negligible cost to the American taxpayer. Administrator Zeldin should, like his predecessors, reaffirm its important role.

Read the full story here.
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A Few More Environmental Books From 2025 We Couldn’t Let You Miss

Before ending the year, we wanted to highlight this eclectic assortment of reading gems we couldn’t fit into our earlier book reviews. The post A Few More Environmental Books From 2025 We Couldn’t Let You Miss appeared first on The Revelator.

This year most of our “Revelator Reads” columns presented new books covering themes like environmental activism, climate anxiety, wildlife, and public lands. But not every book fits into a neat box or arrives in time to make the cut. Here’s a year-end wrap-up of terrific books — many of which showcase success stories and solutions — that we didn’t want to close out 2025 without mentioning. We’ve adapted the books’ official descriptions below, and the link in each title goes to the publisher’s page. You should also be able to find any of these titles through your local bookseller or library. The Owl Handbook: Investigating the Lives, Habits, and Importance of These Enigmatic Birds by John Shewey Charismatic, intriguing, and misunderstood: The Owl Handbook is a beautifully photographed, thoughtfully researched, and accessible guide to these enigmatic, captivating creatures. Traditions of the owl as a harbinger of doom, spirit guide, and mysterious symbol for many cultures, mythologies, and superstitions have projected our fear of the unknown onto these nocturnal birds. But these wondrous birds are so much more than shadows in the night. Lifelong birding enthusiast John Shewey leads us through an exploration of owls’ cultural impact as seen in folklore, providing in-depth profiles of 19 owls of North America and a survey of 200 more across the globe, giving advice on how to respectfully observe and protect these magnificent birds, brought to life by hundreds of full-color photographs. Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China by Jonathan C. Slaght The forests of northeast Asia are home to a marvelous range of animals — fish owls and brown bears, musk deer and moose, wolves and raccoon dogs, leopards and tigers. But by the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred tigers stepped quietly through the snow of the Amur River basin. Soon the Soviet Union fell, bringing catastrophe; without the careful oversight of a central authority, poaching and logging took a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species. Just as these changes arrived, scientists came together to found the Siberian Tiger Project. Led by Dale Miquelle, a moose researcher, and Zhenya Smirnov, a mouse biologist, the team captured and released more than 114 tigers over three decades. They witnessed mating rituals and fights, hunting and feeding, the ceding and taking of territory, the creation of families. Within these pages, characters — both feline and human — come fully alive as we travel with them through the quiet and changing forests of Amur. Sink or Swim: How the World Needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate by Susannah Fisher How can we adapt to climate change? Let’s examine the key problems and hard choices that lie ahead for the global community in this practical approach to coping in a time of chaos. Adaptation has been incremental, with governments and institutions merely tinkering around the edges of current systems. This will not be enough, and this book explores the hard choices that lie ahead concerning how people earn a living, the way governments manage relationships between countries, and how communities accommodate the displacement of people. For example, should people be encouraged to move away from the coasts? Can global food supplies be managed when parts of the world are hit by simultaneous droughts? How can conflict be handled when there isn’t enough water for a population? Based on the latest research, interviews with experts, and practical examples from across the world, Sink or Swim discusses frankly the choices that lie ahead and how we can have a livable planet. Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World by Hilary Rosner All over the globe, animals are stranded — by roads, fences, drainage systems, industrial farms, and cities. They simply cannot move around to access their daily needs. Yet as climate change reshapes the planet in its own ways, many creatures will, increasingly, have to move in order to survive. This book illustrates a massive and underreported problem: how a completely human-centered view of the world has impacted the ability of other species to move around. But it’s also about solutions and hope: How we can forge new links between landscapes that have become isolated pieces. How we can stitch ecosystems back together, so that the processes still work, and the systems can evolve as they need to. How we can build a world in which humans recognize their interconnectedness with the rest of the planet and view other species with empathy and compassion. The Whispers of Rock: The Stories That Stone Tells About Our World and Our Lives by Anjana Khatwa Can you hear the stones speak? The question seems absurd. After all, rocks are lifeless, inert, and silent. Earth scientist Anjana Khatwa asks us to think again and listen to their stories. Alternating between modern science and ancient wisdom, Khatwa takes us on an exhilarating journey through time, from origins of the green pounamu that courses down New Zealand rivers to the wonder of the bluestone megaliths of Stonehenge, from the tuff-hewn churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia, to Manhattan’s bedrock of schist. In unearthing those histories, Khatwa shows how rocks have always spoken to us, delicately intertwining Indigenous stories of Earth’s creation with our scientific understanding of its development, deftly showing how our lives are intimately connected to time’s ancient storytellers. Through planetary change, ancient wisdom, and contemporary creativity, this book offers the hope of reconnection with Earth. You won’t simply hear rocks speak, you will feel the magic of deep time seep into your bones. We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate By Michael Grunwald In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It’s an often-infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it’s also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done—and trying to do it. The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit by Priyanka Kumar As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruits, especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree — and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees, Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, unearthing a rich and complex history while illuminating how we can reimagine our relationship with nature. The Girl Who Draws on Whales Written and illustrated by Ariela Kristantina A graphic novel for middle-level children. Set in a fantasy world, several centuries after “The Great Flood,” Sister Wangi and younger brother Banyu live in a sea-village. Wangi has a special bond with the Great Whales that visit their sea-village, and they allow Wangi to draw on their backs. Sometimes they return with new drawings on them, maybe there are other sea-villages around and they are sending her people messages. None of the elders listen to her. One day, a new whale arrives in the village alone, wounded, and dying. This whale has a new drawing on its back that doesn’t look like the previous drawings. Inspired by this mystery, Wangi vows to investigate. Although forbidden by her parents and the village elders, Wangi along with her brother embark on a wondrous journey to investigate where the drawings are coming from only to find much more than they were expecting. A Window Into the Ocean Twilight Zone: Twenty-Four Days of Science at Sea by Michelle Cusolito For children and adults to share and care together and learn about our magnificent ocean biodiversity. Join scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and their international partner organizations on a research voyage to study the ocean twilight zone. Science writer Michelle Cusolito takes us along for the journey of a lifetime. From boarding the ship and unpacking equipment to facing massive storms in the middle of the Atlantic, this book details the fascinating techniques used to study the deep ocean as well as the daily details of life aboard a Spanish research vessel. Meet remarkable people, discover amazing animals, and learn more at sea than you ever imagined. *** Finally, here’s a set of companion books from Charlesbridge Publishing that parents and children can read and discuss together — a great opportunity to support our future guardians of biodiversity. Turtles Heading Home! by Liza Ketchum, Jacqueline Martin, and Phyllis Root The waters around Cape Cod used to cool off gradually, signaling to sea turtles that it was time to swim south. However, with climate change, the ocean stays warm too long and cools off too quickly, making the turtles too cold to migrate. Turtles Heading Home! follows the efforts of conservationists as they rescue the turtles, nurse them back to health, and release them into warmer waters. The operation involves hundreds of people, from the volunteers patrolling the beaches to the veterinarians looking after the turtles to the pilots who fly the turtles south. All of them share the goal of helping save the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, the most endangered sea turtle in the world. Turtle, Turtle, Watch Out! by April Pulley Sayre, illustrated by Annie Patterson Sea turtles face many dangers as they grow, eat, travel, and breed. In this basic science dramatization of one female turtle’s challenges, acclaimed nature writer April Pulley Sayre highlights the role that humans have in helping this endangered species. Previously published, this story has been re-illustrated by the artist Annie Patterson. A great read-aloud or read-along choice for environmental awareness, this child-friendly book provides information on sea turtle conservation efforts for seven species of sea turtles and how they and grown-ups alike can help save these beautiful creatures. *** Enjoy these inspiring and informative reads as we prepare ourselves for the new year. You can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives. And let us know what you’re reading: Drop us a line at comments@therevelator.org. The post A Few More Environmental Books From 2025 We Couldn’t Let You Miss appeared first on The Revelator.

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AIPAC Spent Millions to Keep Her Out of Congress. Now, She Sees an Opening. 

Growing dissatisfaction with the Israel lobby may pave a lane for Nida Allam, who launched her congressional campaign in North Carolina Thursday with the backing of Justice Democrats. The post AIPAC Spent Millions to Keep Her Out of Congress. Now, She Sees an Opening.  appeared first on The Intercept.

A progressive North Carolina official who lost her 2022 congressional race after the pro-Israel lobby spent almost $2.5 million against her sees a fresh opening this midterm cycle, as a public disturbed by the genocide in Gaza has turned pro-Israel spending into an increasing liability. Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam is preparing for a rematch against Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., for the 4th Congressional District seat she lost by nine points in 2022. This time, the Israel lobby’s potential influence has shifted: Feeling the pressure from activists and constituents, Foushee has said she won’t accept money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Allam, who launched her campaign Thursday with the backing of the progressive group Justice Democrats, told The Intercept that wouldn’t be a shift for her. “I’ve never accepted corporate PAC or dark money, special interest group money, or pro Israel lobby group money,” said Allam, whose 2020 election to the county commission made her the first Muslim woman elected to public office in North Carolina. The country’s top pro-Israel lobbying groups and the crypto industry spent heavily to help Foushee beat Allam in 2022, when they competed in the race for the seat vacated by former Rep. David Price, D-N.C. AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, and DMFI PAC, another pro-Israel group with ties to AIPAC, spent just under $2.5 million backing Foushee that year. The PAC funded by convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried also spent more than $1 million backing Foushee. Related Facing Voter Pressure, Swing-State Democrat Swears Off AIPAC Cash After nearly two years of pressure from activists in North Carolina enraged by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Foushee announced in August that she would not accept AIPAC money in 2026, joining a growing list of candidates swearing off AIPAC money in the face of a new wave of progressive challengers. This time, if pro-Israel and crypto groups spend in the race, it’s on Foushee to respond, Allam said. “If they decide to spend in this, then it comes down to Valerie Foushee to answer, is she going to stand by the promise and commitment she made to not accept accept AIPAC and pro-Israel lobby money?” Allam said. “This district deserves someone who is going to be a champion for working families, and you can’t be that when you’re taking the money from the same corporate PAC donors that are funding Republicans who are killing Medicare for all, who are killing an increased minimum wage.” Foushee’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Allam, who helped lead Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign in North Carolina, is the seventh candidate Justice Democrats are backing so far this cycle. The group — which previously recruited progressive stars including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. — is endorsing candidates challenging incumbents next year in Michigan, California, New York, Tennessee, Missouri, and Colorado. Justice Democrats is taking a more aggressive approach to primaries this cycle after only endorsing its incumbents last year and losing two major seats to pro-Israel spending. The group plans to launch at least nine more candidates by January, The Intercept reported. Related She Lost Her Job for Speaking Out About Gaza. Can It Power Her to Congress? Allam unveiled her campaign with other endorsements from independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sunrise Movement, the Working Families Party, and Leaders We Deserve, a PAC launched by progressive organizers David Hogg and Kevin Lata in 2023 to back congressional candidates under the age of 35. She said she sees the local impacts of the Trump administration on working families every day in her work as a Durham County commissioner. “What I’m hearing from our residents every single day is that they don’t feel that they have a champion or someone who is standing up and fighting for them at the federal level, and someone who is advocating for working families,” she said. “This is the safest blue district in North Carolina and this is an opportunity for us as a Democratic Party to have someone elected who is going to be championing the issues for working families — like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal — and has a track record of getting things done at the local level.” Allam is rejecting corporate PAC money and running on taking on billionaires and fighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been carrying out raids and arresting residents in the district. She’s also supporting a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and ending military aid to Israel. She began considering a run for office after a man murdered her friends in the 2015 Chapel Hill shootings. Small dollar donors powered Allam’s 2022 campaign, when she raised $1.2 million with an average donation of $30. She’s aiming to replicate that strategy this cycle, she said. “Trump is testing the waters in every way possible,” Allam said. “The only way that we’re going to be able to effectively fight back against Trump is by passing the Voting Rights Act, is by taking big corporate money out of our elections, by ending Citizens United. Because they’re the same ones who are fighting against our democracy.” In its release announcing Allam’s campaign on Thursday, Justice Democrats criticized Foushee for taking money from corporate interests, including defense contractors who have profited from the genocides in Gaza and Sudan. “In the face of rising healthcare costs, creeping authoritarianism, and ICE raids, and the highest number of federal funding cuts of any district in the country, leadership that only shows up to make excuses won’t cut it anymore,” the group wrote. Foushee served in the North Carolina state legislature for more than two decades before being elected to Congress in 2022. She first campaigned for Congress on expanding the Affordable Care Act and moving toward Medicare for All, passing public campaign financing and the Voting Rights Act, and a $15 minimum wage. Since entering Congress in 2023, Foushee has sponsored bills to conduct research on gun violence prevention, to expand diversity in research for artificial intelligence, establish a rebate for environmental roof installations, and support historically Black colleges and universities. Foushee’s evolving stance on some Israel issues reflects a broader shift among Democrats under pressure from organizers and constituents. Amid rising public outrage over the influence of AIPAC in congressional elections in recent years, Foushee faced growing criticism and protests in the district over her refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and her support from the lobbying group. After organizers tried to meet with her and held a demonstration blocking traffic on a freeway in the district, she signed onto a 2023 letter calling for a ceasefire but did not publicize her support for the letter or comment on it publicly, The News & Observer reported. Related Trying to Block Arms to Israel, Bernie Sanders Denounces AIPAC’s Massive Election Spending At a town hall in August, an attendee asked Foushee if she regretted taking AIPAC money. In response, she said she would no longer accept money from the group. Three days later, she co-sponsored Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs to Israel Act to limit the transfer of defensive weapons to Israel. “We cannot allow AIPAC and these corporate billionaires to scare us into silence,” Allam said. “It’s actually our mandate to take them on directly, especially now as they’re losing their sway in the Democratic Party.” The post AIPAC Spent Millions to Keep Her Out of Congress. Now, She Sees an Opening.  appeared first on The Intercept.

Activism
Health
Water

Montana youth activists who won landmark climate case push for court enforcement

In 2023, court had ruled in favor of 16 plaintiffs that officials violated their constitutional right by promoting fossil fuelsThe young Montanans who scored a landmark triumph in the lawsuit Held v Montana are calling on the state’s highest court to enforce that victory.In a groundbreaking legal decision in August 2023, a Montana judge ruled in favor of 16 youth plaintiffs who had accused state officials of violating their constitutional rights by promoting fossil fuels. The state’s supreme court affirmed the judge’s findings in late 2024. But state lawmakers have since violated her ruling, enshrining new laws this year that contradict it, argue 13 of the 16 plaintiffs in a petition filed on Wednesday. Continue reading...

The young Montanans who scored a landmark triumph in the lawsuit Held v Montana are calling on the state’s highest court to enforce that victory.In a groundbreaking legal decision in August 2023, a Montana judge ruled in favor of 16 youth plaintiffs who had accused state officials of violating their constitutional rights by promoting fossil fuels. The state’s supreme court affirmed the judge’s findings in late 2024. But state lawmakers have since violated her ruling, enshrining new laws this year that contradict it, argue 13 of the 16 plaintiffs in a petition filed on Wednesday.“These new policies mean the state is going to just continue to act in a way that will increase greenhouse gasses which during the Held case were shown to be disproportionately harming youth,” said Rikki Held, the 24-year-old lead petitioner who was also the named plaintiff in the earlier lawsuit. “It means we’ll continue down a path we already know and have proven is detrimental.”The Held decision stated that state laws limiting state agencies’ ability to consider greenhouse gas emissions and climate impacts during environmental reviews are unconstitutional. It also said that though the climate crisis is a global issue, Montana bears responsibility to address the harms that are being caused by greenhouse gas emissions within the state.“The decision confirmed that laws which put blinders on agencies during environmental reviews are unconstitutional,” said Nate Bellinger, supervising staff attorney at Our Children’s Trust, the non-profit law firm that filed the petition and Held v Montana. “But now the state is essentially re-blindering agencies.”During the 2025 Montana legislative session, the new challenge says, elected leaders passed a law prohibiting the state from adopting air quality standards more stringent than those incorporated in the federal Clean Air Act. It’s a “complete inversion” where the federal standards will serve as a cap on regulation instead of a floor, Bellinger said.The legislature also amended the state’s Environmental Policy Act, naming just six climate warming gases for the state to inventory while conducting environmental reviews of energy projects. It also dictated that upstream and downstream emissions – or those resulting from transporting fossil fuels or out-of-state combustion of the fuels produced in Montana – should not to be incorporated in the analysis, even though agencies used to consider these impacts.In an “even more egregious” provision, said Bellinger, lawmakers explicitly barred state agencies from using the resulting information about pollution to condition or deny permits for those proposals.“Those provisions are unconstitutional,” Bellinger said.The state of Montana was not immediately available for comment.Lawmakers behind the new policies made it “pretty clear” that their proposals were a response to the youth challengers’ 2023 victory, said Bellinger. Late last year, the incoming state senate president and house speaker even issued a joint statement telling the court to “buckle up” for the following session.In the new petition, challengers are asking the Montana’s supreme court to strike down these new laws. They say that is a necessary step to ensure the state is upholding duties laid out in its constitution, which guarantees the right to a “clean and healthful environment”.The challenge comes amid an assault on climate and environmental regulations from the Trump administration. Those attacks make it all the more important for states to protect their citizens, said the youth activist Held.“It’s a time when we really should be seeing more action from our government on greenhouse gas emissions,” said Held.Montana has moved in the opposite direction, said Bellinger, with the state’s governor creating a taskforce to provide recommendations to “unleash” fossil fuel output, echoing an executive order Trump signed in January. State officials are actively evaluating proposals to expand coal, oil, and gas in compliance with Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda, he said.“We need to get these laws off the books as quick as possible so they can have all the tools they need before them to deny those permits and not feel like they have to approve,” Bellinger said.Held says she has directly felt the impacts of the climate crisis, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. On her family’s ranch where she grew up, drought has taken a toll on the health of livestock and crops, while extreme weather limited her ability to spend time outside. Between the filing of Held v Montana in 2020 and plaintiffs’ victory in the case three years later, global warming became worse, she said.“We don’t have another five years to wait for protections while the state keeps using fossil fuels,” she said. “This is really urgent.”

Activism
Climate
Energy

It’s Not Safe to Live Here.' Colombia Is Deadliest Country for Environmental Defenders

Jani Silva is a renowned environmental activist in Colombia’s Amazon, but she has been unable to live in her house for nearly a decade

PUERTO ASIS, Colombia (AP) — Jani Silva sits inside the wooden house she built on the banks of Colombia’s Putumayo River — a home she hasn't slept in for more than eight years.The longtime environmental activist has been threatened for work that includes protecting part of the Amazon from oil and mining exploitation. She describes a tense escape one night through a back window after community members tipped her that armed men were outside.“Since leaving because of the threats, I’m afraid ... it’s not safe to live here,” she told The Associated Press. She only comes now for brief daytime visits when accompanied by others. “The two times I’ve tried to come back and stay, I’ve had to run away.”Activists like Silva face steep risks in Colombia, the deadliest country in the world for people protecting land and forests. Global Witness, an international watchdog monitoring attacks on activists, recorded 48 killings in Colombia in 2024, nearly a third of all cases worldwide. Colombia says it protects activists through its National Protection Unit, which provides bodyguards and other security measures. Officials also point to recent court rulings recognizing the rights of nature and stronger environmental oversight as signs of progress.Silva, 63, now lives under guard in Puerto Asis, a river town near the Ecuador border. She has had four full-time bodyguards for 12 years provided by the National Protection Unit. Yet the threats have not pushed her from her role at ADISPA, the farming association that manages the Amazon Pearl reserve she previously lived on and has worked to protect.“I have a calling to serve,” Silva said. “I feel like I am needed … there is still so much to do.”Colombia's ministries of Interior, National Defense and Environment did not respond to requests for comment.About 15,000 people nationwide receive protection from the NPU, the Interior Ministry said in a 2024 report. They include environmental and human rights defenders, journalists, local officials, union leaders and others facing threats, though watchdog groups say protections often fall short in rural conflict zones. Community buffer stands in a violent corridor The Amazon Pearl is home to roughly 800 families who have spent decades trying to keep out oil drilling, deforestation, illicit crops and the armed groups that enforce them. Silva describes the community-run reserve, about 30 minutes by boat down the Putumayo from Puerto Asis, as “a beautiful land … almost blessed, for its biodiversity, forests and rivers.”The preserve's 227 square kilometers (87 square miles) host reforestation projects, programs to protect wetlands and forest threatened by oil exploration and efforts to promote agroecology. The farming association has community beekeeping projects to support pollination and generate income, organizes community patrols, supports small sustainable farming and has carried out major restoration, including cultivating more than 120,000 native seedlings to rebuild degraded riverbanks and forest corridors.Silva has been a main voice challenging oil operations inside the reserve. As president of ADISPA, she documented spills, deforestation and road-building tied to Bogota-based oil company GeoPark's Platanillo block and pushed environmental regulators to investigate. Advocates say those complaints, along with ADISPA’s efforts to keep new drilling and mining out, have angered armed groups that profit from mining and oil activity in the region.GeoPark said it complies with Colombian environmental and human-rights regulations and has not received environmental sanctions since operations began in 2009. The company maintains formal dialogue with local communities, including Silva, and “categorically rejects” threats or links to armed groups and its activities require environmental licenses and undergo regular inspections, GeoPark said in a written statement to the AP. Rubén Pastrana, 32, runs one of the Pearl’s beekeeping projects in the riverbank community of San Salvador, where ADISPA works with children using native stingless bees to teach biodiversity and forest conservation. “They’re very gentle,” he said of the bees, and their calm nature lets children learn without fear.More than 600 families now take part in conservation and agroecology projects, many launched through community initiative.“The first project was started on our own initiative,” Silva said. “We started setting up nurseries at our homes … and reforesting the riverbank.”Women exchanged native seeds and organized replanting drives, and the community agreed to temporary hunting bans after seeing pregnant armadillos killed — a move Silva said allowed wildlife to recover. Families now map their plots to balance production with conservation. Border Commandos control the territory Armed groups known locally as Comandos de la Frontera, or Border Commandos, operate throughout this stretch of Putumayo, controlling territory, river traffic and parts of the local economy. The Commandos emerged after Colombia’s 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the Marxist guerrilla army whose demobilization ended a half-century conflict but left power vacuums across the Amazon and Pacific regions. In places like Putumayo, those gaps were quickly filled by FARC dissidents, former paramilitaries and other criminal networks.The Commandos enforce control through extortion, illegal taxation and by regulating, or profiting from, coca cultivation, clandestine mining and key river routes. Residents say the group forces some communities to perform unpaid labor or face fines, further eroding livelihoods in an area where most families rely on tending their farms. The AP saw illegal coca growing near the beekeeping project via drone imagery.Human Rights Watch on Friday said armed groups in Putumayo have tightened their control over daily life and committed serious abuses against civilians including forced displacement, restricting movement and targeting local leaders. Andrew Miller, head of advocacy at the U.S.-based advocacy group Amazon Watch, said Colombian authorities must go beyond providing bodyguards and prosecute those behind threats and attacks on defenders. Developing the next generation Pastrana, from the beekeeping project, said Silva’s long-term vision has nurtured new leaders and guided young people, helping them develop the grounding to resist recruitment by armed groups.Silva's daughter, Anggie Miramar Silva, is part of ADISPA’s technical team. The 27-year-old grew up inside the reserve’s community process and watched her mother move constantly between meetings, workshops and patrols, pushing others to defend the land. She admires that resolve, even as she lives with the same fear that trails her mother. While people often suggest she might one day take her mother’s place, she is not convinced. “My mother’s work is extremely hard," Miramar said. “I don’t know if I would be willing to sacrifice everything she has.”Jani Silva knows the risks. But stopping doesn't feel like an option.“We have to continue defending the future," she said, "and we need more and more people to join this cause.”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the 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 – Nov. 2025

Activism
Climate
Forests

The Strange Disappearance of an Anti-AI Activist

Sam Kirchner wants to save the world from artificial superintelligence. He’s been missing for two weeks.

Before Sam Kirchner vanished, before the San Francisco Police Department began to warn that he could be armed and dangerous, before OpenAI locked down its offices over the potential threat, those who encountered him saw him as an ordinary, if ardent, activist.Phoebe Thomas Sorgen met Kirchner a few months ago at Travis Air Force Base, northeast of San Francisco, at a protest against immigration policy and U.S. military aid to Israel. Sorgen, a longtime activist whose first protests were against the Vietnam War, was going to block an entrance to the base with six other older women. Kirchner,  27 years old, was there with a couple of other members of a new group called Stop AI, and they all agreed to go along to record video on their phones in case of a confrontation with the police.“They were mainly there, I believe, to recruit people who might be willing to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, which they see as the key to stopping super AI,” Sorgen told me,  a method she thought was really smart. Afterward, she started going to Stop AI’s weekly meetings in Berkeley and learning about the artificial-intelligence industry, adopting the activist group’s cause as one of her own. She was impressed by Kirchner and the other leaders, who struck her as passionate and well informed. They’d done their research on AI and on protest movements; they knew what they were talking about and what to do. “They were committed to nonviolence on the merits as well as strategically,” she said.They followed a typical activist playbook. They passed out flyers and served pizza and beer at a T-shirt-making party. They organized monthly demonstrations and debated various ideas for publicity stunts. Stop AI, which calls for a permanent global ban on the development of artificial superintelligence, has always been a little more radical—more open to offending, its members clearly willing to get arrested—than some of the other groups protesting the development of artificial general intelligence, but Sorgen told me that leaders were also clear, at every turn, that violence was not morally acceptable or part of a winning strategy. (“That’s the empire’s game, violence,” she noted. “We can’t compete on that level even if we wanted to.”) Organizers who gathered in a Stop AI Signal chat were given only one warning for musing or even joking about violent actions. After that, they would be banned.Kirchner, who moved to San Francisco from Seattle and co-founded Stop AI there last year, publicly expressed his own commitment to nonviolence many times, and friends and allies say they believed him. Yet they also say he could be hotheaded and dogmatic, that he seemed to be suffering under the strain of his belief that the creation of smarter-than-human AI was imminent and that it would almost certainly lead to the end of all human life. He often talked about the possibility that AI could kill his sister, and he seemed to be motivated by this fear.“I did perceive an intensity,” Sorgen said. She sometimes talked with Kirchner about toning it down and taking a breath, for the good of Stop AI, which would need mass support. But she was empathetic, having had her own experience with protesting against nuclear proliferation as a young woman and sinking into a deep depression when she was met with indifference. “It’s very stressful to contemplate the end of our species—to realize that that is quite likely. That can be difficult emotionally.”  Whatever the exact reason or the precise triggering event, Kirchner appears to have recently lost faith in the strategy of nonviolence, at least briefly. This alleged moment of crisis led to his expulsion from Stop AI, to a series of 911 calls placed by his compatriots, and, apparently, to his disappearance. His friends say they have been looking for him every day, but nearly two weeks have gone by with no sign of him.Though Kirchner’s true intentions are impossible to know at this point, and his story remains hazy, the rough outline has been enough to inspire worried conversation about the AI-safety movement as a whole. Experts disagree about the existential risk of AI, and some think the idea of superintelligent AI destroying all human life is barely more than a fantasy, whereas to others it is practically inevitable. “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Wynd Kaufmyn, one of Stop AI’s core organizers, told me of Kirchner. What might you do if you truly felt that way?“I am no longer part of Stop AI,” Kirchner posted to X just before 4 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, November 21. Later that day, OpenAI put its San Francisco offices on lockdown, as reported by Wired, telling employees that it had received information indicating that Kirchner had “expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees.”The problem started the previous Sunday, according to both Kaufmyn and Matthew Hall, Stop AI’s recently elected leader, who goes by Yakko. At a planning meeting, Kirchner got into a disagreement with the others about the wording of some messaging for an upcoming demonstration—he was so upset, Kaufmyn and Hall told me, that the meeting totally devolved and Kirchner left, saying that he would proceed with his idea on his own. Later that evening, he allegedly confronted Yakko and demanded access to Stop AI funds. “I was concerned, given his demeanor, what he might use that money on,” Yakko told me. When he refused to give Kirchner the money, he said, Kirchner punched him several times in the head. Kaufmyn was not present during the alleged assault, but she went to the hospital with Yakko, who was examined for a concussion, according to both of them. (Yakko also shared his emergency-room-discharge form with me. I was unable to reach Kirchner for comment.)On Monday morning, according to Yakko, Kirchner was apologetic, but seemed conflicted. He expressed that he was exasperated by how slowly the movement was going and that he didn’t think nonviolence was working. “I believe his exact words were ‘the nonviolence ship has sailed for me,’” Yakko said. Yakko and Kaufmyn told me that Stop AI members called the SFPD at this point to express some concern about what Kirchner might do, but that nothing came of the call.After that, for a few days, Stop AI dealt with the issue privately. Kirchner could no longer be part of Stop AI, because of the alleged violent confrontation, but the situation appeared manageable. Members of the group became newly concerned when Kirchner didn’t show at a scheduled court hearing related to his February arrest for blocking doors at an OpenAI office. They went to Kirchner’s apartment in West Oakland and found it unlocked and empty, at which point they felt obligated to notify the police again and to also notify various AI companies that they didn’t know where Kirchner was and that there was some possibility that he could be dangerous.Both Kaufmyn and Sorgen suspect that Kirchner is likely camping somewhere—he took his bicycle with him, but left behind other belongings, including his laptop and phone. They imagine he’s feeling wounded and betrayed, and maybe fearful of the consequences of his alleged meltdown. Yakko told me that he wasn’t sure about Kirchner’s state of mind but that he didn’t believe that Kirchner had access to funds that would enable him to act on his alleged suggestions of violence. Remmelt Ellen, an adviser to Stop AI, told me that he was concerned about Kirchner’s safety, especially if he is experiencing a mental-health crisis.Almost two weeks into his disappearance, Kirchner’s situation has grown worse. The San Francisco Standard recently reported on an internal bulletin circulated within the SFPD on November 21, which cited two callers who warned that Kirchner had specifically threatened to buy high-powered weapons and to kill people at OpenAI. Both Kaufmyn and Yakko told me that they were confused by that report. “As far as I know, Sam made no direct threats to OpenAI or anyone else,” Yakko said. From his perspective, the likelihood that Kirchner was dangerous was low, but the group didn’t want to take any chances. (A representative from the SFPD declined to comment on the bulletin; OpenAI did not return a request for comment.)The reaction from the broader AI-safety movement was fast and consistent. Many disavowed violence. One group, PauseAI, a much larger AI- safety activist group than Stop AI, specifically disavowed Kirchner.  PauseAI is notably staid—they include property damage in their definition of violence, for instance, and don’t allow volunteers to do anything illegal or disruptive, like chain themselves to doors, barricade gates, or otherwise trespass or interfere with the operations of AI companies. “The kind of protests we do are people standing at the same place and maybe speaking a message,” the group’s CEO, Maxime Fournes, told me. “But not preventing people from going to work or blocking the streets.”This is one of the reasons that Stop AI was founded in the first place. Kirchner and others, who met in the PauseAI Discord server, thought that genteel approach was insufficient. Instead, Stop AI situated itself in a tradition of more confrontational protest, consulting Gene Sharp’s 1973 classic, The Methods of Nonviolent Action, which includes such tactics as sit-ins, “nonviolent obstruction,” and “seeking imprisonment.”In its early stages, the movement against unaccountable AI development has had to face the same questions as any other burgeoning social movement. How do you win broad support? How can you be palatable and appealing while also being sufficiently pointed, extreme enough to get attention but not so much that you sabotage yourselves? If the stakes are as high as you say they are, how do you act like it?Michaël Trazzi, an activist who went on a hunger strike outside of Google DeepMind’s London headquarters in September, also believes that AI could lead to human extinction. He told me that he believes that people can do things that are extreme enough to “show we are in an emergency” while still being nonviolent and nondisruptive. (PauseAI also discourages its members from doing hunger strikes.)The biggest difference between PauseAI and Stop AI is the one implied in their names. PauseAI advocates for a pause in superintelligent AI development until it can proceed safely, or in “alignment” with democratically decided ideal outcomes. Stop AI’s position is that this kind of alignment is a fantasy, and that AI should never be allowed to progress further toward superhuman intelligence than it already has. For that reason, their rhetoric differs as much as their tactics. “You should not hear official PauseAI channels saying things like ‘we will all die with complete certainty,’” Fournes told me. By contrast, Stop AI has opted for very blunt messaging. Announcing plans to barricade the doors of an OpenAI office in San Francisco last October, organizers sent out a press release that read, in part, “OpenAI is trying to build something smarter than humans and it is going to kill us all!” More recently, the group promoted another protest with a digital flyer saying “Close OpenAI or We’re All Gonna Die!”Jonathan Kallay, a 47-year-old activist who is not based in San Francisco but who participates in a Stop AI Discord server with just under 400 people in it, told me that Stop AI is a “large and diverse group of people” who are concerned about AI for a variety of reasons—job loss, environmental impact, creative-property rights, and so on. Not all of them fear the imminent end of the world. But they have all signed up for a version of the movement that puts that possibility front and center.Yakko, who joined Stop AI earlier this year, was elected the group’s new leader on October 28. That he and others in Stop AI were not completely on board with the gloomy messaging that Kirchner favored was one of the causes of the falling out, he told me. “I think that made him feel betrayed and scared.”Going forward, Yakko said that Stop AI will be focused on a more hopeful message and will try to emphasize that an alternate future is still possible—“rather than just trying to scare people, even if the truth is scary.” One of his ideas is to help organize a global general strike (and to do so before AI takes a large enough share of human jobs that it’s too late for withholding labor to have any impact).Stop AI is not the only group considering and reconsidering how to talk about the problem. These debates over rhetoric and tactics have been taking place in an insular cultural enclave where forum threads come to vivid life. Sometimes, it can be hard to keep track of who’s on whose side. For instance, Stop AI might seem a natural ally of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a famous AI doomer whose recent book co-authored with Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, predicts human extinction in its title. But they are actually at odds. (Through a representative, Yudkowsky declined to comment for this article.)Émile P. Torres, a philosopher and historian who had been friendly with Kirchner and attended a Stop AI protest this summer, has criticized Yudkowsky for engaging in a thought exercise about about how many people it would be ethical to let die in order to prevent a superintelligent AI from taking over the world. He also tried to persuade Kirchner and other Stop AI leaders to take a more delicate approach to talking about human extinction as a likely outcome of advanced AI development, because he thinks that this kind of rhetoric might provoke violence either by making it seem righteous or by disturbing people to the point of totally irrational behavior. The latter worry is not merely conjecture: One infamous group who feared that AI would end the world turned into a cult and was then connected to several murders (though none of the killings appeared to have anything to do with AI development).“There is this kind of an apocalyptic mindset that people can get into,” Torres told me. “The stakes are enormous and literally couldn’t be higher. That sort of rhetoric is everywhere in Silicon Valley.” He never  worried that anybody in Stop AI would resort to violence; he was always more freaked out by the rationalist crowd, who might use “longtermism” as a poor ethical justification for violence in the present (kill a few people now to prevent extinction later). But he did think that committing to an apocalyptic framing could be risky generally. “I have been worried about people in the AI-safety crowd resorting to violence,” he said. “Someone can have that mindset and commit themselves to nonviolence, but the mindset does incline people toward thinking, Well, maybe any measure might be justifiable.”Ellen, the Stop AI adviser, shares Torres’s concern. Though he wasn’t present for what happened with Kirchner in November (Ellen lives in Hong Kong and has never met Kirchner in person, he told me), his sense from speaking frequently with him over the past two years was that Kirchner was under an enormous amount of pressure because of his feeling that the world was about to end. “Sam was panicked,” he said. “I think he felt disempowered and felt like he had to do something.” After Stop AI put out its statement about the alleged assault and the calls to police, Ellen wrote his own post asking people to “stop the ‘AGI may kill us by 2027’ shit please.”Despite that request, he doesn’t think apocalyptic rhetoric is the sole cause of what happened. “I would add that I know a lot of other people who are concerned about a near-term extinction event in single-digit years who would never even consider acting in violent ways,” he told me. And actually, he had other issues with the apocalyptic framing aside from the sort of muddy idea that it can lead people to violence. He worries, too, that it “puts the movement in a position to be ridiculed,” if, for instance, the AI bubble bursts, development slows, and the apocalypse doesn’t arrive when the alarm-ringers said it would. They could be left standing there looking ridiculous, like a failed doomsday cult.His other fear about what did or didn’t (or does or doesn’t) happen with Kirchner is that it will “be used to paint with a broad brush” about the AI-safety movement, depicting its participants as radicals and terrorists. He saw some conversation along those lines earlier in November, when a lawyer representing Stop AI jumped onstage to subpoena Sam Altman during a talk—one widely viewed post referred to the group as “dangerous” and “unhinged” in response to that incident. And in response to the news about Kirchner, there has been renewed chatter about how activists may be extremists in waiting. This is a tactic that powerful people often use in an attempt to discredit their critics: Peter Thiel has taken to arguing that those who speak out against AI are the real danger, rather than the technology itself.In an interview last year, Kirchner said, “We are totally for nonviolence and we never will turn violent.” In the same interview, he said he was willing to die for his cause. Both statements are the kind that sound direct but are hard to set store in—it’s impossible to prove whether he meant them, and, if so, how he meant them. Hearing the latter statement about Kirchner’s willingness to die, some saw a radical on some kind of deranged mission. Others saw a guy clumsily expressing sincere commitment. (Or maybe he was just being dramatic.)Ellen told me that older activists he’d talked with had interpreted it as well meant, but a red flag nonetheless. Generally, when you dedicate yourself to a cause, you don’t expect to die to win. You expect to spend years fighting, feeling like you’re losing, plodding along. The problem is that Kirchner—according to many people who know him—really believes humanity doesn’t have that much time.

Activism
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