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Almost Heaven

Amanda Uhle is the publisher of McSweeney's. She writes about culture, politics and civil rights and is at work on Long Island, a reported history of her family.

I’m in the adventurous habit of answering the phone for unknown callers. Last May, I was surprised when I slid my finger across my iPhone and heard a slight hesitation followed by an Appalachian drawl. “Mrs. Uhle?” a West Virginian asked on the other side of the line, mispronouncing my last name and using the married honorific, which, though happily married, I never allow. The caller and his charming accent explained that I was an heiress. My great-great-grandfather had bought mineral rights to an Appalachian tract in 1897, and now those rights were mine. One-eighth of them, at least. I’ve never inherited anything. When my parents died, I was left with a motley and unpleasant array of obligations — cleaning out rodent-infested storage units, sifting through years of unpaid bills — and dozens of unanswered questions about their mysterious lives. I also have the exaggerated yarns my dad constantly told, and my mother’s hazel eyes. There was no property. No fine china or financial estate. I’d never considered that anything at all would be passed down to me. Processing the surprise, I let the man on the other side of the phone talk me through it. He called himself a landman. I squeezed the phone between my ear and shoulder and Googled the term while he spoke. He said the rights came to me via an “heirship” which I misheard as “airship,” and I considered hanging up. He offered me a low five-figure dollar amount to purchase my mineral rights and asked to send me some documents. It did not quite seem legitimate. How could my working class parents and the poor generations before them not have known about, or taken advantage of, this wealth below the surface? And why would I be receiving this landman’s phone call 125 years after my great-great-grandfather bought some craggy land for $11 an acre? Like a lot of the puzzling things that are my parents’ legacy, I couldn’t properly answer the first question. My dad grew up with a redwood picnic table and benches as dining room furniture in his Miami apartment. I grew up with bill collectors calling our home so incessantly that we learned how to mute the landline. I soon learned that this West Virginia ground and its mineral rights were separated in 1904, when times in my family were tough; my relatives sold the surface and kept the rights to what was underground as a possible future rainy-day fund. The landman’s money, had any of us known about it, would have been most welcome. I told him I’d consult with my brother and call him back. I was either being scammed or being offered a life-changing fortune. Whichever it was, my ignorance put me at a drastic disadvantage. What I didn’t know at the time, but quickly discovered, was that West Virginians have been receiving calls like this and surprise knocks at their doors for a decade or more. The rural state, which historically ranks among the lowestin average family income, has been experiencing a colossal boom thanks to the fact that it sits atop the Marcellus Shale, the second-largest natural gas reservoir in the world. In the two decades between 2000 and 2020, the state saw an 882 percent increase in natural gas withdrawals, or fracking. (State tax revenue, driven in part by energy revenue, was so sky-high in January this year that Gov. Jim Justice announced his plan for a 50 percent cut in personal income tax.) And as the oil and gas companies seek to extract more and more in a fracking industry that generated about15.31billion globally in 2021, they are continually in search of additional land to mine, paying off landowners for the rights to what lies beneath their ground. There are multiple message boards online where people in West Virginia and other resource-rich states try to untangle what it means to have a stake in mineral rights connected to oil, gas and other resources under the surface of the earth. Sometimes, the oil and gas companies call to make an offer for these rights directly. Sometimes, the calls come from a third party who sniffs out an opportunity: reveal these rights to an unknowing owner and negotiate a cut of the proceeds. The array of choices and financial considerations are one thing, and quite complicated. The environmental and human consequences are even more complex and impossibly momentous, though rarely discussed on these phone calls. Unexpected earthquakes are becoming common in areas of oil and gas production. Communities near drill pads experience extreme and disruptive noise pollution from equipment, frac trucks and more. Fracking contaminates groundwater and releases toxins that create health risks from respiratory distress to cancer. When I received my first landman phone call in May 2022, it set me off on an odyssey into a part of the country I barely knew and a topic — fracking — I didn’t understand. I tested the limits of my Google research skills and the knowledge of my personal network. I finally decided that the only way to really understand the prospect of inheriting the mineral rights beneath some rural Appalachian land was to travel there myself and investigate. What I found were West Virginians who over the past 15 years have been thrust into unexpected roles as the linchpins of the fracking industry. As natural gas extraction careens forward at a breakneck pace, land and mineral rights owners — reluctant, ambivalent, avaricious alike — are left to figure out this chaotic situation on their own. Suddenly, I was one of them. Google will tell you very little about what you need to know about Appalachia. Searches of local news organizations’ websites seemed lighter than I expected on the subject of fracking, an industry which dominates the region and has revolutionized most parts of its economy. Satellite images showed me that the land passed down to me appeared hilly and rocky, very rural. I zoomed in, looking for people and buildings inside the borders of the tract. I’d recently learned that it’s commonplace for the ownership of the surface of land here to be separated from the ownership of what’s under it — a practice that started in the coal mining heyday in the first quarter of the 20th century and continues today. Based on my amateur reading of a new law, West Virginia SB 694, which passed in March 2022 and pools landowners’ rights, I was concerned that someone might live or farm on the surface of that land. If that was true, my decision to sign over these rights might have a devastating impact on the lives and livelihoods of people I’d never met. The law says that if 75 percent or more of a certain tract’s mineral rights owners agree to drill, the other 25 percent and even the owners of the surface don’t necessarily have to consent. Before receiving the landman’s call, I had an admittedly knee-jerk and generalized negative reaction to the term “fracking,” but I would have been hard-pressed to explain exactly what it is, or why I thought it was so bad. My brother, the presumptive owner of another eighth of this land parcel, and I decided we couldn’t sign anything until we knew more about both the environmental impacts and the people our decision could affect. My daughter, at 13, is a budding activist and middle school science aficionado. She declared, “We’re not fracking, Mom. It’s evil.” I zoomed in farther. No buildings. No farms. Sitting in my home 350 miles away, the wider area around these four acres of land was mystifying. For a radius of many miles, the businesses around it were limited to cemeteries and churches. Unincorporated towns were named simply: Reader, Big Run, Hundred — in honor of a centenarian founder. New Vrindaban stood out for its Indian-sounding name. Even I knew that West Virginia is about 93 percent white, one of the least racially diverse states in America. A week after his first call, the landman called again. He never used the F word on our calls. He never even said, “hydraulic fracturing.” The landman spoke, slowly and with the gently rearranged vowels of his hometown, about resources and about minerals. He spoke about what I should be considering leaving to my children and spouse. He told me he inherited mineral rights himself, sold them, gave some money to his kids, and they’re happy he did. “You’re 43,” he reminded me. His company pays for help to trawl through county and genealogy records to find rightsholders. Once it buys the rights, they sell them to oil and gas companies. The historic deed he sent me is rendered in the long, tight loops of 19th-century handwriting and specifies the parcel by saying, “Beginning at the rock in run corner …” “You don’t have forever ahead of you,” he said, suggesting I quickly sign a document selling my mineral rights to his company for a hefty one-time payment, take the money and move on. I shouldn’t wait. Wouldn’t that cash be put to good use right now while I was young enough to enjoy it? On the first phone call, he’d treated me like an heiress. One week later, I was apparently an old hag. I told him I’d think about it. Officially out of my depth, I called Christian Turak, an oil and gas attorney in Moundsville, W.Va., who joined his uncle’s law firm after a stint practicing law in Manhattan. Before 2014, he’d never lived in this state or practiced oil and gas law, and Turak, 36 and a tennis enthusiast with an Instagram-worthy haircut, still exudes a bit more New York City than Appalachia. He’s an essential intermediary between powerful oil and gas companies and everyday rural people, who often find themselves in these negotiations unexpectedly. For the second time in a few weeks, a stranger was talking me through this mineral rights situation. On our first call, Turak explained that I had two options: I could sell the rights outright, or I could lease those rights instead. This was the first I’d heard that I could lease the rights and potentially earn royalties long term, depending on what was underground. If there was indeed natural gas flowing under those acres, leasing would bring in exponentially more money, over a longer period of time. But it could also bring in nothing, if it turned out there was no natural gas beneath the surface. Turak told me if I wanted to take the landman’s offer, I should. It could be years before the land was developed and it might be easier for me than managing a long-term lease from afar. “I don’t think I want to give them permission, though,” I told him, my daughter’s voice an echo in my head. A pause. “You’re not really being asked for consent,” he said. He explained that there may already be activity on the land, and even if not, a prospective driller only needs 75 percent of rightsholders’ consent. In a one-eighth tract, both my brother and I could put up a hell-raising fight and our two-eighths, or 25 percent, dissent would amount to absolutely nothing. Or more accurately: nothing but a royalties check. The paperwork the landman had sent me listed names of cousins we never knew existed; they were the other 75 percent. Turak explained that I was probably in a situation of getting some fracking money or a whole lot of fracking money, depending on many factors, most of them obscure, many completely outside my control. Opting out because I opposed fracking wasn’t really on the table. “Do you have the parcel number?” he asked. We’d spoken in theoretical terms for 15 minutes, and I realized I was eating up time he should be using for paying clients. I guessed that he wanted to check the county records to see exactly what we were dealing with before the call ran much longer. “Oh,” Turak said a few clicks later. “A permit was approved in August 2021. There’s already a storage well on the property. They may be drilling already.” The spot where Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia converge over the Marcellus Shale formation is one thousand shades of green in July. In the deep valleys, shadows cast the trees and fields in near-black emerald green. Hilltops 1,500 feet above them are peapod green in the sun, and every other green imaginable is represented up and down each slope. The roads are serpentine and steep. The sky and peaks never end. When John Denver described this verdant place as “almost heaven” he came as close as anyone to identifying what many people find here — their personal paradise. I planned my own trip with help from Turak, who offered to show me around and introduce me to some of his clients, and with a little more online detective work spurred largely by my outsized curiosity at the idea that I could be heiress to anything. Convinced that I had already been outmaneuvered by the oil and gas company, I mostly just wanted to meet people who lived in that part of West Virginia and were affected by fracking. Inside Turak’s tidy law office, I sat across a conference room table from cattle rancher Howard Clark. When Clark and his mother ignored a few solicitation calls from an oil and gas company a decade ago, a landman showed up on the farm just as Clark’s mother was departing for a funeral. He followed her, sat in a pew through the service and made his plea after the burial. “They will keep trying until they reach you, I guess,” Clark told me. Clark eventually leased the mineral rights to 320 acres in West Virginia and a similar amount in Pennsylvania. His beef cattle now co-exist with natural gas wells and compressors. The drill pads occupy about 10 percent of his land, and Clark says the cattle don’t seem to mind the noise or trucks. He is sorry to have lost some of their grazing land and has to re-seed more frequently than before, but, he said, “there have been financial rewards.” Barbara Smith, 71, drives an hour and a half each way to work in a late-night diner in the West Virginia panhandle — that narrow strip between Ohio and Pennsylvania. Her shifts are 12 or 16 hours, and when she closes the restaurant around 4 a.m. she arrives home at 5:30. The drills and compressors are going then. “I hear them. The one up above my house is pretty loud. It took me about three months to get used to it. Now I don’t notice it. Even at night, I don’t always notice it. It’s a steady rhythm. It’s just there.” During snowstorms, when the twisty roads home are impassable, she has to stay over at the restaurant because she can’t afford to miss work the next day. “It’s quiet here at night,” she said. “I sleep great those nights.” Smith lives on one acre in a house she and her late husband bought in 1981. An energy company approached her seven or eight years ago about leasing her mineral rights so it could build a fracking operation. She agreed. She’s not sure how much she’s gotten since but says she gets a check for around $1,000 every few years. She doesn’t know when she can expect the next one. “I wasn’t going to sell,” she said, “But they told me, ‘It’s like this. We can run lines, and you’d never know it.’” She says she’s content that she sold her rights. “I told them, ‘Take my gas, just don’t touch my land, don’t touch my house.’” At her home, she’s afraid to drink the spring water that runs in her pipes. “I buy bottled water to drink,” Smith said. She washes her dishes and clothes in the water out of necessity, even though she thinks the water in her plumbing is contaminated by the fracking on her property. Scientists, public health and environmental advocates say that research shows fracking causes elevated levels of pollutants in groundwater near drills. “I suspect it because it’s gotten rid of a lot of the wildlife up there. There used to be so many deer.” For all the mystery shrouding the world of fracking, the process is fairly straightforward. Drills bore holes in the earth to depths around one-mile and then highly-pressurized water, sand and other chemicals are shot into those openings. Frac sand particles are uniform and smaller than most beach sand, which means they can prop open the millions of microscopic fissures caused by drilling in underground shale and allow natural gas to flow up and out. But mysteries do remain. There is little to no accurate information about exactly what chemicals are used in fracking, or how harmful they may be to humans or the planet. Even Turak, whose career is devoted to this industry, does not know for sure and cannot compel oil and gas companies to disclose the chemicals they’re using in the deals they make with landowners. But what is clear is that the small particles of frac sand are extremely dangerous to inhale and equally difficult to avoid if you are near them. Despite widespread agreement in the scientific community about fracking’s health and environmental risks, from water contamination to public health concerns, the energy industry maintains this activity is safe, when proper regulatory guardrails are in place. The heavy explosives used to create the holes and fissures also create instability in the earth, leading to erosion and even earthquakes, like the twelve 2011 earthquakes that rocked the area around a fracking site in Youngstown, Ohio — a region that had not ever experienced a quake since such activity was observed and recorded, beginning in 1776. My general hunch, that fracking was problematic, was correct, but I didn’t judge the people who are profiting from it. Smith, who is perhaps preternaturally easygoing, is untroubled by her situation, including the fact that she won’t drink her own tap water, and appreciates the funds she gets every few years. Clark, the cattle rancher, created an education foundation with a percentage of his proceeds. Having grown up in the area, he’d seen West Virginia’s poverty and its struggles with educational attainment his entire life. “I have tried to say, OK, I’ve complained enough about what’s not right. And I feel I should be doing something. This is what I’ve devoted my retirement to.” The counties served by his Clark Opportunity Foundation have about 1,015 high school students, and more than 400 of them are now enrolled in college-level classes the foundation offers at their high schools. Through partnerships with five colleges and universities in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the foundation pays tuition for these courses, giving students who earn 60 hours the chance to graduate with an accredited associate’s degree without having to travel to and from a college campus. Clark says that those who complete fewer hours will still have a head start on college-level coursework and build their confidence and the likelihood they’ll participate in further higher education. For Clark, taking oil and gas money to improve his community was an easy decision. “You can be a spectator to this crisis level of poverty in our area, or you can do something about it,” he told me. Not every decision to engage with oil and gas money is as uncomplicated as Clark’s. In 1968, a group of Hare Krishnas moved into a ragged farmhouse on a plot of hilly West Virginia land so inaccessible that no roads served it. Devotees reached it via a two-mile walk. The community that grew there, the unincorporated village of New Vrindaban, was founded so that followers of religious leader A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada could commit their lives to “simple living and high thinking” — their own version of paradise. Prabhudpada said at the time their purpose was to, “reunite with Mother Earth and offer her products to Krishna.” Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, the group was a leader in the countercultural movement of mostly white hippies determined to drop out of traditional capitalist society; in pop culture they were most widely known in those years for proselytizing in airports and at sporting events. New Vrindaban was the first Hare Krishna commune in the United States and grew to be its largest by the mid-eighties with more than 500 adults living on its ever-expanding campus of temples, housing and other buildings. In 2011, the West Virginia chapter of ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, made an unexpected move to lease some portion of the mineral rights on their 1,204 acres, which has brought in at least $10 million across several complex deals with numerous energy companies. In addition to generous signing bonuses, royalty payments have followed in all the years since. Long ago, the citizens of the commune at New Vrindaban replaced the dirt path with asphalt. On my visit last summer, I drove tentatively up and down the steep hills leading to its entrance. Trenches were being dug and long snakes of white pipe a foot in diameter stretched up and over a hill. Horses grazed around them. At the summit of a particularly tall hill, a black and gold scalloped dome came into view, the first peek of the Hare Krishnas’ Palace of Gold. Stunningly ornate, the building was erected without blueprints by self-taught devotees, who learned stained glass and other fine craftsmanship in order to build this shrine for Prabhupada. In 2012, CNN designated it one of the eight religious wonders of the United States. The group welcomes tourists to the palace and encourages pilgrims and other visitors to spend time in New Vrindaban where there is a vegetarian restaurant, overnight accommodation, a cow sanctuary, a vibrant temple, two gift shops and numerous roaming peacocks. Funds from these activities partially finance the year-round operation where 225 people — and 70 cows — reside full-time. At one of the weekly Sunday brunch events in the Palace of Gold Rose Garden, I met Bhagavad Gita Das and Nikunja Das, a recently married couple whose previous first names were Larry and Natasha. “We live in a state of absolute truth and pure ecstasy,” Bhagavad Gita Das said. We were sharing plates of fresh fruit on a warm morning in the palace rose garden. Nikunja Das, who is always smiling, nodded in agreement and picked up a sliced orange. “I feel unbelievably amazing,” Bhagavad Gita Das says again a moment later, describing what it means to him to work as part of the ISKCON community and what it felt like to come to West Virginia after selling insurance and working as a car mechanic. “It was extremely noticeable, extremely noticeable, the happiness level that I was at. And I was like, I never felt this way, doing anything for anybody. And I’ve done a lot of cool things, but I never felt like this before. That’s why people come here, to also get that experience, that great happiness.” On my visit I saw several Indian-American couples proudly showing their children a small Americanized slice of their homeland experience — the food, the clothing, the spirituality, the architecture of India, barely separated from what’s just beyond it: rural America’s mobile homes, pickup trucks, canned soda, fossil fuel extraction and Trump MAGA flags trembling in the wind. A sari-clad mother and her teenage daughter, in a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, visited the buffet alongside me. Gopisa Das, whose given name is Gabriel Fried, negotiated the community’s mineral rights deals after what he describes as “many months of difficult conversations among devotees” who wrestled with the environmental and spiritual implications of accepting oil and gas funds even as their precarious finances threatened the viability of the commune. “I lost hair, and turned gray,” he said. In the end, a capital improvement fund for the massive property was established with the Hare Krishnas’ oil and gas money, and all but two conscientious objectors have reconciled to the idea that this compromise is the cost of their heaven. Fried says that by the time they learned about this opportunity, it was essentially already underway, with more than 50 percent of the land surrounding them under development for wells. “We had to protect ourselves.” “We are all firm believers in Mother Earth and don’t want to see harm come to her,” he said. Before they signed they collectively felt they needed to “spiritually justify this” so they added environmental safeguards to the contract, some clauses to protect their own and their neighbors’ peace and well-being. “There are designated areas where they can drill,” chosen to minimize noise pollution and interruptions in the view from the Palace of Gold. “We protected ourselves and the people around us,” Fried said of the 16-page contract he brokered with the corporation that extracts their resources and pays them handsomely. “We’re already complicit in this petroleum-based energy economy. We use electricity. We use cars. We may as well do these things in the Lord’s service,” Fried said. Ricky Whitlatch, 62, has always lived in the hilly area outside Moundsville. For 39 years he worked at a coal-fired power plant on the banks of the Ohio River. Its towering smoke stack — once the tallest in the world at 1,206 feet — is visible from Whitlatch’s rural land 20 miles east. The panorama is grand. In the evenings, he sometimes takes a beer to the summit of his land and watches the long progression of the sun setting across the grassy mountains. He shares the 150-acre property with his son, daughter-in-law, twin grandbabies and preteen granddaughter, along with bears, coyotes, deer and more. Since 2017, he’s also shared the space with a drill pad of about 200,000 square feet, room enough for seven natural gas wells, parking for dozens of trucks and a trailer, where he just discovered one of the workers has been staying overnight. The noise is constant, and when I visit I have trouble hearing him clearly over the rumble of compressors, even though we’re 200 yards away. “Don’t notice it,” he says. He wears a royal blue do-rag, wrap-around shades and a sleeveless muscle shirt. His beard is pure white. “I just hate the trucks.” Whitlatch’s deal was signed in 2017 and the process of flattening one of his hilltops and constructing the drill pad was extremely disruptive. Then, the fracking began. I imagined several trucks — for sand, for water, workers — zigzagging up the tight turns of the hills to reach the drill pad for a week or two, and I could see how that would be annoying. Whitlatch corrected me. “It’s convoys. Trains of trucks. One after the other. Truck, truck, truck. And it took them most of a year.” Throughout the region, I noticed signs, both hand-painted and official-looking, that warned truckers, “No Jake Brake” or “No J-Brake” in reference to the ear-splitting compression release brake that trucks often use to slow down on steep grades. The curving narrow roads here were never meant to be shared with hundreds of heavy trucks, and the people who live in this rural splendor never imagined hearing the staccato grunt of truck brakes day and night. To better enjoy his personal nirvana, Whitlatch bought two off-road four-wheeler buggies that he drives around the property. He insisted I hop in one of them for the full tour. Like Barbara Smith, he has a few concerns — mostly the truck noise — but seems generally unworried about the fracking activity on his property. The monthly checks he receives allowed him to retire, to provide a home for his son’s family, and to generally not have to worry about money for the rest of his life. It’s a new feeling. Joyous. The summer sun blasts us, but the buggy’s partial roof offers a little shade, and Whitlatch drives me up and down the hills at speeds that generate a cool wind. He laughs and revs the engine, hot-dogging up a hill that must be a 45 degree grade. “You wanted the tour!” he shouts at me, grinning. I can’t decide whether the Hare Krishnas or Whitlatch are living in a deeper state of ecstasy. He pulls our little vehicle to a stop, and Turak, driving the other buggy, joins us. After water and chemicals are pumped into the ground for fracking, the toxic liquid, often called brine, is pumped out. Brine is classified as radioactive by the EPA. Per Whitlatch’s agreement, it’s supposed to be pumped off and away from his property. It’s up to the energy company to dispose of it. We see a thick black corrugated pipe which shoots the wastewater across the crest of a hill and to its destination, where it will be stored briefly and then hauled away by more trucks. Last year, “it ruptured,” he said. He noticed the pressurized brine shooting up in the air and spilling down the hill and called the company, whose representatives fixed the leak and replaced the top soil in that area. Whitlatch was still concerned. “They think of stuff to tell you to make you happy and hope you can go away,” he said, laughing again. We stood downhill from the site where the brine line had ruptured. All around us were variations of vibrant green, except for a 30-ft-wide stretch of land leading all the way down the slope. Here, the grass — even though it had been replanted by the gas company after the rupture — was dry and brown and the trees were leafless in an otherwise resplendent July. The company had replaced some of the top soil, but obviously not enough. Turak says that a constant part of his work is to hold energy companies accountable. After our visit today, Turak will call and find out why there’s a worker sleeping in the trailer on Whitlatch’s drill pad, and he’ll follow up about the remediation for the site of the rupture. The dangers and annoyances are many and unknown. Fracking sites leak methane, and occasionally spontaneous explosions occur at drill pads. When one erupted at another client’s site recently, Turak tried to get the media involved to cover the story. “I told them it’s not for publicity for the law firm. This is a public service story,” he said. But no one covered it. When my father was about my age, in his mid-40s, he made the radical decision to quit life as a businessman, enroll in a Lutheran seminary and become a pastor. He made no formal vow of poverty, but the effect was similar. He was chasing his own spiritual awakening, his personal quest for an idyll on earth. “The meek shall inherit the earth,” he sometimes teased, reminding me that “meek” could mean “poor,” in other words, us. He reminded my brother and me all the time that we were blessed in other ways. He never encountered the term “mineral rights” in his entire life. Late in the day, I finally headed to my ancestors’ land. Before my trip, I noticed that Google Maps had updated the aerial photos around it. Now a white rectangle — a drill pad — was visible amid the green, just adjacent to the tract I was told I partially owned. I assumed it was newly built following the permit that was approved ten months ago. I set out to see it, and to see what I could of the land whose minerals were partly mine. Just when I thought I’d established a tentative détente with the wild twists and pitched hills of West Virginia’s panhandle, the roads reminded me again that I was the outsider here. The acreage I was visiting is many miles deep in the hills on the narrowest and crookedest roads. Photographer Scott Goldsmith gamely rode shotgun, keeping an eye on the deer that routinely darted in front of the car at dusk. The trip was long and conducted largely outside the range of my phone’s 5G coverage. The drive confirmed my research; there were an outsized number of cemeteries. It also confirmed some of what non-West Virginians might assume about the state knowing its legacy of poverty, and a still increasing affliction of opioid drugs. Chickens and pigs roamed unkempt yards. A beach towel printed with the Confederate flag drooped on a clothesline. People observed my rental car climbing hills from their decrepit porches. The extended time in the car gave me time to reflect on how Turak and Clark see things. “In an ideal world, there would be no fracking,” Turak told me in the lobby of his law office. “But then you have to think about the people here. Without this money, what choices do they have?” Clark agrees, and it’s the reason he started his foundation. “When you’re discussing oil and gas development, you really have to look at the environment, the production, and the local residents,” he said. “How are the local residents benefiting? And really those three things are interrelated. You cannot take one away and say, we’re going to only work on this one, or we’re only going to make this successful. All three have to be successful together.” Clark believes that if you have the capacity to see how the environment, the gas and its plentiful financial resources, and the local population are connected, it makes sense to “find ways to improve, to help move all three of those forward together.” He may be happy that he’s leased his substantial mineral rights and begun this important work in his community, but he’s not blind to the yet-unknown environmental risks. He told me that there have been several “unexplained deaths” of cows on his land in recent years, but says, “I can’t point to oil and gas and say that’s why. Animals do pass away.” When it comes to fracking, the research and other information available makes it very challenging to draw a sharp line equating causes and effects. When we arrive at the drill pad adjacent to the tract of my ancestors’ land, it appears a lot like Whitlatch’s with one major difference. Instead of looking crisp and brand-new, it looks a bit tattered. A metal sign is bent inward, and rust creeps up the sides of the six wells sunk into the drill pad’s gravel. This isn’t a new site; a document there appears to be from 2013. A placard says the site’s status is “producing.” It’s possible this drill is only accessing the land beneath it. But if this drill is already accessing my land, too, with the permit approved in August 2021, then the landman has left out something important in this story. The land I came to see is not being considered for development. It’s quite plainly been developed. The vast, leafy slopes immediately south of us, where my acreage begins, are unreachable; there are no roads. From here, it’s impossible to tell if that uninhabited expanse is being tapped for what’s below. Like many West Virginians, I feel ill-equipped to determine what’s happening or how to protect my rights, if I even have any. A few weeks ago, Turak suggested that I would probably be due some money or lots of money from these mineral rights. A third option suddenly seemed as likely as any — no money. If the ground is already being tapped with permission from someone else, I may have neither consent nor any income on the line. By now, early evening shadows are stretching long across the gravelly ground. I want to begin the return drive before it’s dark. I also want to know whether my ancestors’ land is being fracked, or will be soon, but the answers are out of reach, too deep in the void of unfamiliar hills for me to discern tonight. Every turn on the circuitous way back to Moundsville opens a new panorama. The sun is setting spectacularly, and pink and blue clouds are like thick cotton candy above us. Summer light shoots across the hills. Gold is everywhere. At 4:52 a.m. I woke in the New Vrindaban commune guest quarters to my neighbors chanting “Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama, Rama, Hare, Hare, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna,” on their way to the 5 a.m. temple festivities. Wrecked with exhaustion, I turned off my scheduled alarm and slept until just after 7 a.m. when a frac truck trundled heavily and loudly up the hill on the road between my room and the cow sanctuary. It was time for me to get out of West Virginia. Back home, the landman had been suspiciously silent for several weeks. Having learned the tract number from Turak, I was able to approach the company that held the permit and try to learn more. While I waited for their investigation and reply, I wondered why the landman had not called to cajole me some more. I called him and never heard back. I had to assume that he’d met the 75 percent consent needed and I was out of luck. Weeks later, the oil and gas company finally completed its research into county records and returned to me with a disappointing determination. “You are not a mineral owner,” the customer service representative emailed me. My brother and I would have been mineral rights holders to that land I visited in July, but for the fact that my great-grandmother had exacted revenge on her daughter in a newly-discovered last will and testament from the 1920s. “I hereby give, will, devise and bequeath to my beloved daughter …” the passage began, going on to hand all mineral rights and other assets to a great aunt I never knew. “I have intentionally omitted to provide herein for or to make any bequest to …” it continued, naming her other daughter, my grandmother. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. In the 1920s, my grandmother left Appalachia to pursue her own dreams in Florida. In addition to “doing hair” as she called it, my grandmother played drums in an all-lady jazz band at a Miami nightclub called The Gray-Wolf. She enjoyed gin. She’d run toward her own heaven and forsaken whatever inheritance might have come from her backcountry roots. I was, officially, not an heiress. Whether or not the landman was offering me a fair deal when he approached me with his offer, in this instance, he was simply referencing an outdated document. The will that was discovered later in the summer of 2022 superseded the 1897 deed book that prompted his first few calls. In the confusing, high-stakes, ever-shifting, every man and woman for themselves environment that is 21st century West Virginia, I can hardly hold it against him.

WA's Christmas tree': what mungee, the world's largest mistletoe, can teach us about treading lightly

Mungee is a revered teacher to Noongar people with lessons for us all. This mighty mistletoe knows how to prosper in the hostile, infertile, but biologically rich landscapes of southwestern Australia.

Alison Lullfitz, Author providedNoongar Country of southwestern Australia is home to the world’s largest parasitic plant, a mighty mistletoe that blooms every December. That’s why it’s commonly known as WA’s Christmas Tree. But it also goes by other names, mungee and moodjar. And it holds great significance for Noongar people including the Merningar people of the south coast. While the unique biology and charisma of the species (Nuytsia floribunda) has been recognised by Traditional Owners for millennia, such rich Indigenous knowledge is barely known to Western science. Our research team includes three generations of Merningar alongside non-Indigenous scientists. In our new research, we set out to explore mungee’s physiology, ecology and evolution from both Indigenous and Western science perspectives. The plant’s ability to access a wide array of resources is remarkable, enabling it to prosper in the hostile, infertile, but biologically rich landscapes of southwestern Australia. This is also the case for Noongar people, whose traditional diet reflects the biological richness of their Country. Mungee is a revered teacher to Noongar people, with lessons for us all about living sustainably and in harmony with one another. Three generations of the Merningar Knapp family have contributed to this research: (left to right) Harrison Rodd-Knapp, Jessikah Woods, her grandmother Lynette Knapp and mother Shandell Cummings, with flowering mungee near Waychinicup, on Merningar Country. Alison Lullfitz, Author provided Read more: Ancient knowledge is lost when a species disappears. It's time to let Indigenous people care for their country, their way A sand-loving parasite Nuytsia floribunda is widespread across Noongar Country (Boodja) and known to most Noongar as moodjar. But it’s also called mungee by Merningar and other southern Noongar groups. Being mostly Merningar, we call it mungee and use that term here. Mungee is a mistletoe tree that grows up to 10m tall in sandy soils. It’s endemic to southwestern Australia, but widespread throughout. The parasitic capability of the plant comes from highly modified, ring-shaped roots (haustoria) that act like secateurs to mine other plants for water and nutrients. We used “two way science” (cross-cultural ecology) methods – including a literature review, shared recording of visits on Country, and an author workshop – to investigate mungee more thoroughly than would be possible through Western science alone. Read more: To address the ecological crisis, Aboriginal peoples must be restored as custodians of Country A revered teacher offering divine guidance Like other Indigenous Australian knowledge systems, Merningar lore is place-based. It inextricably links people, specific places, other organisms and non-living entities of Country. Mungee tells specific stories through where it lives, the plants it lives with, and when it flowers. The species is widely held as sacred among Noongar peoples. For Merningar, it has the highest status of all plants. Mungee holds important lore about how we as humans relate to each other and with the world around us, similar to a cornerstone religious text such as the Christian Bible. For Merningar, mungee is a powerful medium that helps restless spirits move on to the afterlife, known to us as Kuuranup. This enables those of us still living to be untroubled by their presence. Senior elder Lynette describes mungee as her teacher, providing guidance on how to exist in Merningar Boodja. The annual summer flowers represent her ancestors returning to their Country, reminding her to cherish and respect both her old people and her Boodja. Lynette calls the ring-shaped haustoria of mungee her “bush lolly”. Under Merningar lore, digging for these sweet treats is not allowed when mungee is flowering. This is when bush lollies are scarce, so the rule is about living within seasonal constraints. The specialised ring-shaped haustorium of the mungee tree Nuytsia floribundataps into the resources of other plants. Mike Shayne An example of living sustainably Mungee primarily reproduces by cloning, sending out suckers up to 100m from the parent plant to produce identical copies. This results in patches of mungee clones gathered together in tight-knit populations. We saw parallels between patches of mungee and the communal kinship structures of Noongar society, where family is more important than individuals. Before European settlement, extended Noongar families lived in largely separate groups, interconnected with other family groups as part of a wider geopolitical system. We see mungee as a botanical exemplar of putting community before individuals, for the greater good. Mungee accesses water and nutrients by tapping into a wide range of host plants. This diversity of hosts enables mungee to live in many different landscapes. This parallels with the sophisticated, but often place-specific knowledge of Noongar peoples across their botanically rich Boodja, which has enabled use of a wide range of traditional plants. Living a prosperous life within environmental boundaries is achieved by conservatively drawing upon a wide range of resources. It provides a lesson for all who live in dry and infertile regions such as southwestern Australia. Mungee in full flower at Stirling Range National Park, about 300km south-east of Perth. Steve Hopper A tree to be celebrated Mungee’s bright orange flowers bring joy to all who witness their display during the celebratory summer months in southwestern Australia. The plant’s unique biology, ingenuity and charisma has long been recognised by Noongar peoples and their lore. Prolific annual flowers are a memorial to the many old people who have cared for their Boodja through millennia. They also remind us to protect the old peoples’ legacy. To Merningar, mungee is a valuable teacher and exemplar of prosperous biological (including human) existence in the southwest Australian global biodiversity hotspot. It has much to teach the rest of us, too. Thynnid wasps (flower wasps) on a mungee flower at Torndirrup National Park, 10km south of Albany in WA. Steve Hopper Read more: Connecting to culture: here's what happened when elders gifted totemic species to school kids All authors work on the Walking Together project, which is delivered by UWA in partnership with South Coast NRM and supported financially by Lotterywest. A second project worked on by Alison Lullfitz and Steve Hopper is funded by an ARC Discovery Indigenous grant.Please see statement under Alison LullfitzPlease see statement under Alison Lullfitz.

From banning hugs to gentle parenting, how are you supposed to raise kids, anyway?

Cristina Spanò for Vox The endless cycling — and recycling — of parenting advice. Part of the issue Everything old is new again from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world. On a recent Monday, my son didn’t want to go to school. The straps of his bicycle helmet were too loose, or possibly too tight, and because he is 4, this was a catastrophe that simply could not be borne. He informed me, through tears, that he would not be leaving the house, and neither would I nor his baby brother, who was already strapped to my chest and ready for day care. Then he lay down on his bed with his shoes on and refused to move. As a millennial parent in 2023 with a phone and a medium Instagram addiction, I had a lot of advice at my fingertips for handling such a situation. “Authoritative” parenting, a calm but firm style characterized by clear boundary-setting, would probably dictate that I explain to my child, without raising my voice, that his behavior was not okay and we needed to go to school (I tried this). Advocates of “gentle” parenting, a more recent trend that discourages rewards and time-outs in favor of trying to understand the feelings behind a child’s behavior, might suggest I ask my son why he didn’t want to go to school (I tried this, too). Some of the homesteading, homeschooling influencers I see on my feeds might suggest that I pull the kid out of pre-k entirely and go live in the woods (I won’t say I didn’t think about it). I probably could have tried some tricks from devotees of free-range parenting, French parenting, or tiger parenting, schools of thought Jessica Grose of the New York Times mentions in a recent rundown, but I was getting pretty exhausted. The fact that none of my tactics worked and I was still fruitlessly begging, bribing, and ordering my son out of bed half an hour past school drop-off time illustrates an age-old truth about parenting: It is hard, confusing work, and we are often eager for people to tell us how in the world to do it. To parents, it can seem like a new child-rearing trend pops up every few years, complete with new buzzwords and new ways to screw up. Each parenting philosophy presents itself as the definitive way to raise happy, well-adjusted, hard-working kids. The advice we get, however, is often both more and less than we bargained for. The effect can be dizzying — are we doing gentle parenting now or what? Indeed, child-rearing advice tends to be cyclical and reactionary, with each trend reversing what came before. Making sense of the conflicting and overlapping ideologies of parenthood is, to some degree, about tuning out the noise and tuning in to your individual family; as Mia Smith-Bynum, a professor of family science at the University of Maryland College Park, put it, “listen to your child and adapt accordingly.” It’s also, on a broader level, about understanding the history of parenting advice, one that’s steeped in racism, classism, and a kind of toxic individualism that seeks to blame everything on Mom rather than finding systemic solutions for the problems that plague families. [Parenting] is hard, confusing work, and we are often eager for people to tell us how in the world to do it Pushing back on this kind of blaming and shaming requires us to understand parenting less as a series of individual success and failures, and more as something we do as part of a community. It requires us “to really value the logistical, intellectual, and emotional labor of caregiving,” said historian Jodi Vandenberg-Daves. Parents have always gotten advice from one another and from their elders. It’s “just part of the human experience,” said Vandenberg-Daves, a professor at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse and the author of Modern Motherhood: An American History. But at least in the US, larger cultural trends in advice for mothers, specifically, began to come to the fore in the 1830s and 1840s, with the rise of women’s magazines that promulgated “the idea of the moral mother, the pure and pious woman who operates from her sphere of influence, which is the domestic sphere.” This represented a shift in attention toward mothers and away from fathers, who had previously been seen as “the moral leaders of the family and especially as the disciplinarians,” Vandenberg-Daves said. The mid-19th century also brought the new idea of children as innocent and better suited to the “gentle, soft influence” that mothers could provide. The idea of the mother at home, softly tending to the children, was always “full of assumptions about race and class, as well as gender,” Vandenberg-Daves said. In the 1830s, for example, millions of Black women in America were enslaved, many of them forced to care for the children of white families rather than their own. While the norms of parenthood in general and motherhood in particular would shift in the decades that followed, the commentators dishing out parenting advice would continue, explicitly or implicitly, to hold up a white, middle- or upper-middle-class family arrangement as the ideal. Adhering to this ideal wasn’t just an individual responsibility — indeed, good parenting has long been sold as both a moral and social imperative. “Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules,” the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards once said in a sermon. “And family education and order are some of the chief means of grace.” Though child-rearing ideology lost some of its explicitly religious character with time, the idea that bringing up children correctly was part of a greater or higher good continued to hold sway — and may help explain why Americans, expert or not, have long felt entitled to comment on one another’s families. After all, American babies, children, and even pregnant people are often treated as a kind of communal property, even if their well-being is not a communal responsibility. Outside commentary on families and children became more formal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as child-rearing advice became more professionalized, with a crop of mostly male doctors and psychiatrists putting themselves forth as experts, said Paula Fass, a professor of history emerita at UC Berkeley and the author of The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child. Pediatrics was emerging as a medical specialty, and science was replacing religion as the main influence on parenting ideals, Vandenberg-Daves said. By the 1920s, American families got “an explosion of parenting advice,” Fass said, much of it sending the message that “mothers don’t know what they’re doing, and that they need to turn their children over to the advice of those who do.” American babies, children, and even pregnant people are often treated as a kind of communal property, even if their well-being is not a communal responsibility Such allegedly knowledgeable people included John B. Watson, father of the psychological discipline of behaviorism, which held essentially that humans were no more or less than a collection of responses to conditioning — or, as Fass put it, “you are what you are trained to do.” In 1928, Watson published Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which became the most influential parenting book of its time. Watson was “very skeptical about mothers’ and women’s roles” and wanted to replace women’s supposedly “tender emotions” with a sterner approach, Fass said — he instructed parents not to hug or kiss their children. Watson was also responsible for the notorious “Little Albert” experiment, in which he and colleague Rosalie Rayner trained a baby to fear a white rat, and later furry things in general, by playing loud noises at him. In addition to discouraging hugs, the parenting experts of the early 20th century spent a lot of time telling immigrant parents to make their children more American. Advice included “do not give them the foods of your home country,” said Bethany L. Johnson, a doctoral student in history at the University of South Carolina and co-author of the book You’re Doing it Wrong! Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise. American doctors of the period warned that a non-American diet would make children sick, and advocated bland staples like cornflakes, milk, and stewed pears. Child welfare programs of the period dispensed advice for families in poverty about how to keep their homes clean, sterilize bottles for safe infant feeding, and make sure their children got sunlight and fresh air. The organizers of these programs rarely acknowledged that poor parents might not have the money, space, or time to keep a spotless home or guarantee their children ample outdoor playtime. Instead, the idea was “if you just tried harder, you would be like these middle-class people who have clean children,” Johnson said. The tide began to shift again in 1946, with the publication of Benjamin Spock’s bestselling book Baby and Child Care. Dr. Spock, as he became known, “wanted to bring back confidence in American mothers,” Fass said. His famous maxim was, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” Spock’s advice was less judgmental than the finger-wagging of Watson and the behaviorists, but it was also “based on this idea of essential maternal instincts that all women have,” said Vandenberg-Daves. “There are a lot of gendered assumptions in Dr. Spock.” Despite (or perhaps in part because of) these assumptions, Spock reigned supreme for decades — Baby and Child Care has sold more than 50 million copies, and is now in its 10th edition. In fact, there has arguably yet to be a central figure in American parenting discourse to unseat him. But what has come to the fore since about the 1980s, scholars argue, is a more generalized movement often called intensive parenting, based on the idea that, as Vandenberg-Daves put it, “to be a really good parent you have to be extremely involved.” A constellation of factors, from an increase in women entering the workforce to a media-fueled panic over kidnappings to deepening income inequality and financial insecurity among the middle class, likely led to the rise of intensive parenting. Whatever the cause, the result was that parents, especially moms, were asked to put a new level of time and energy into child-rearing, even above the norms of the supposedly family-obsessed 1950s. Indeed, working moms in the 2010s spent as much time with their kids as stay-at-home moms in the 1970s, and across income groups, parents are spending more of their money on their kids than they did in 1980. Vandenberg-Daves has tracked the shift using Mama Bear from the Berenstain Bears books — the bonnet-headed matriarch starts out her career relaxing in the treehouse, but by the 1990s she’s chasing her cubs with sunblock at the beach, trying to get them to watch less TV, and “lying awake at night worrying about her children while Papa Bear lies there,” Vandenberg-Daves said. “She is doing intensive parenting.” But what kind of intensive parenting? Today, in 2023, there are many ways of doing the most. Attachment parenting, which rose to prominence in the 1980s, emphasizes bed-sharing, babywearing, and breastfeeding on demand as ways of establishing a secure attachment between a parent (almost always the mother) and child, which adherents say will help that child grow up into a confident and emotionally healthy adult. The philosophy has inspired a backlash, with critics arguing that its emphasis on the nursing parent’s constant physical availability to a child is emotionally taxing, guilt-inducing, and often incompatible with work and adult relationships. Still, Instagram and TikTok are full of parenting coaches and enthusiastic amateurs ready to tell you that if you don’t nurse your baby in response to every cry, you are a monster. A more recent trend is “positive” parenting, sometimes called “gentle,” “conscious,” or “respectful” parenting. Popularized by experts like Janet Lansbury and Becky Kennedy, the approach discourages time-honored tactics like the sticker chart and the time-out in favor of trying to suss out the feelings behind children’s behavior and helping them regulate those feelings. As Jessica Winter writes in the New Yorker, “Instead of issuing commands (‘Put on your shoes!’), the parent strives to understand why a child is acting out in the first place (‘What’s up, honey? You don’t want to put your shoes on?’) or, perhaps, narrates the problem (‘You’re playing with your trains because putting on shoes doesn’t feel good’).” Much like the parenting philosophies of the past, gentle parenting requires a set of resources that simply aren’t available in every home. In America today, “we do not have guaranteed paid parental leave, we do not have a universal pre-K, and then we’re in a period of inflation,” said Smith-Bynum, the family science professor. “If you take any parent, and you put that kind of constant economic pressure on that family, you’re just going to have less patience.” Also, “you’re going to have less time.” Still, as with attachment parenting, there are plenty of passionate devotees of the gentle/positive/conscious ethos out there making shouty TikToks about how raising kids any other way will doom them to a life of psychological problems. All this is extra confusing because a number of other parenting styles also have their own, opposing camps — no matter what you’re doing, you can certainly find someone to tell you you’re doing it wrong. “What we have today is a mishmash,” Fass says. “There’s just a lot of continuing and contradictory advice.” Part of cutting through those contradictions is simply understanding how little is truly new when it comes to childrearing ideology. Parenting advice tends to evolve less through innovation than through reaction, as Katie Pickert pointed out in her viral Time cover story on attachment parenting back in 2012. Spock was reacting to the harshness of Watson; positive parenting is, to an extent, reacting against a strand of baby boomer helicopter parenting that some millennials argue resulted in a generation of anxious people-pleasers. Parenting TikTok is rife with references to “cycle-breaking,” or interrupting the generational cycle of trauma by raising your children differently than you were raised. It is, of course, possible to avoid repeating a previous generation’s mistakes, and we’ve certainly learned some lessons as a culture since the days of the “Little Albert” experiment. There is now broad consensus among experts, for instance, that corporal punishment is abusive and results in worse behavior in children over time. Still, the problems of the past are all too evident in a lot of parenting advice today. Parenting advice tends to evolve less through innovation than through reaction For example, 21st-century experts do tend to acknowledge that fathers exist — revised editions of The Baby Book, the 1992 “attachment-parenting bible” written by William Sears, include sections on “attachment fathering.” But mothers still do a disproportionate amount of child care in American families; mothers were the ones most affected by the daunting new parenting challenges of the pandemic; most of the people listening to Becky Kennedy and poring over parenting books at night are moms. “Fathers are being addressed in child-rearing advice” today, Fass says. “But it’s still mothers who are being made crazy.” Mainstream parenting texts have also become somewhat more inclusive of queer families over time — the 2004 edition of Spock’s Baby and Child Care included advice for gay parents. But images and anecdotes of cisgender, heterosexual couples still dominate American parenting discourse. In the 2021 memoir The Natural Mother of the Child, Krys Malcolm Belc writes about the legal and social hoops he’s forced to jump through as a transmasculine parent who has given birth — when one of his kids “asks when we can meet other families like ours,” he writes, “I say, honestly, that I do not know.” Indeed, despite some gestures toward gender, racial, and class equity, today’s culture of parenting advice is not so different from the 19th-century tips about keeping a clean house. Then, as now, child-rearing philosophy centered on the idea that “we can fix the problems that ail children and families through maternal education,” Vandenberg-Daves said. If we just tell women the right things to do, they’ll raise healthy, well-adjusted children — no outside support required. “We have a very privatized model of parenting and the family,” Vandenberg-Daves said, “and an assumption that mothers will take so much upon themselves.” This kind of thinking can result in advice that’s at best unhelpful, and at worst stigmatizing. Recommendations to limit kids’ access to screens, for example, assume that parents have the time and resources to entertain their families in screen-free ways. “It’s all very well and good to say, when you’re in the car together, listen to stories or talk to each other,” Johnson said. “But if you don’t have access to your own car, you have to take three buses to get your kids to day care so you can go to work, there might be a reason that you’re making different choices about your parenting.” The American hyperfocus on individual maternal behavior can be actively dangerous for families — Black moms, for example, have been literally policed for their parenting choices, to the point of having their children taken away if they let them play without constant supervision. Short of that, there’s the constant fear of social media shaming, like what a mom experienced in 2016 when she was photographed looking at her phone in an airport while her baby lay on a blanket nearby. American mothers in 2023 are “being surveilled by others at all times,” said Margaret M. Quinlan, a professor of communication at the University of North Carolina Charlotte and co-author of You’re Doing It Wrong. None of this is to say that parenting advice today is entirely toxic or useless. Indeed, the basic tenets of “gentle” parenting have been practiced by many families for generations, and not only in affluent homes, Smith-Bynum said. When people say they didn’t have a lot of money growing up, but “we had a lot of love,” she explained, “that’s gentle parenting.” Taking what works from child-rearing wisdom past and present, then, is about understanding that while kids have some needs in common, every family situation is unique. “Kids need to feel loved,” Smith-Bynum said. “They need to feel valued and respected. They need clear guidance and direction. And you as the parent need to adapt to the demands on the ground.” That can mean ignoring certain maxims if they don’t work for you or your kid. “My children have different personalities,” Johnson said. Some responses “that feel really good and really respectful to my daughter,” like making eye contact during a tantrum, just make her other child upset. “If you’re trying to do something, and it’s not working in your family, go ahead and give yourself the freedom to just not do it,” she said. Parents (and non-parents) need to extend the same grace to other families, Johnson said. “If you find something that resonates with you and works on your family, go for it. But don’t assume that’s going to work for anyone else.” On a broader social level, navigating the chaos and stigma of parenting advice is also about recognizing that child-rearing shouldn’t be an individual task that moms (always: moms) succeed or fail at, but something people do in concert with others, both in their families and in the wider world. Vandenberg-Daves calls for a return to “community-building around the work of caregiving and advocacy around the work of caregiving,” which can look like parents’ groups, advocacy groups devoted to issues like gun violence or environmental justice, or using “public schools as spaces to bring families together.” Child care as a collective act is already common in many communities. “Black folks have a long tradition of caregiving that goes back many generations, particularly when caring for what we might call play kin or fictive kin,” Smith-Bynum said. “I myself have several play-nephews and nieces.” For people who don’t have support close at hand, or who may be marginalized in their geographical area, such as parents of trans kids, social media can be a powerful tool. Families “can find a space online that may help build community that they may not have in their immediate physical environment,” Vandenberg-Daves said. I wish I could say that when my son refused to go to school, I called on my neighbors or friends for help, or that I reached out to one of the many authors and journalists of my generation who are writing wisely about caregiving and who I’ve come to think of as a kind of intellectual community. The truth is that, eventually, I pulled the book Everyone Poops off the shelf and read it to my screaming kid. This allowed him to think about poop, which is all he ever wants, and it improved his mood enough that he agreed to leave the house. Parenting is difficult and confusing; it’s also ridiculous, silly, and absurd. We are all doing what we can with what we have. These truths have not changed in decades, maybe centuries. They are something to hold on to, even as everything else shifts.

In Sweden, a proposed iron mine threatens a World Heritage Site, and the culture that made it

How some UNESCO World Heritage Sites can threaten Indigenous lives.

This story is co-published with Indian Country Today and is part of The Human Cost of Conservation, a Grist series on Indigenous rights and protected areas. The rivers that run through the steep valleys and rocky cliffs of the Laponian Area are fed by crystalline alpine lakes and glacial streams. Many of the forests that tower over the land have stood for more than 700 years and teem with wildlife. In the spring and summer, when the midnight sun traces wide circles across the bright blue sky, crowberries blanket the meadows and yellow globe flowers dot the snow-capped peaks. In those warm months, this region in the far north of Sweden provides a bounty for large migrating herds of reindeer: grass, birch, and herbs. Snow patches in the high mountains provide relief from insects on hot days, and the verdant lowland provides ample grazing as the nights cool. When winter arrives, rivers and marshes ice over, and the reindeer venture south beyond the Laponian Area along well-worn pathways, traveled by generations of Sámi reindeer herders, to winter grazing lands. This migration of both the reindeer and the Sámi who tend to them, reveals an ancient relationship with the land that persists to this day. “It is the variation of landscape that makes the area so good,” said Helena Omma, who is Sámi and president of the Association of World Reindeer Herders. “Reindeer use all these landscapes during different times and conditions.” An aerial view of Stora Sjöfallets National Park and a Sami village. The area belongs to “Laponian Area,” a UNESCO world heritage site. Maria Swärd / Getty Images Nestled deep in the heart of Sápmi, the traditional homelands of the Sámi, the Laponian Area covers nearly 4,000 square miles. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, considers it a place of “exceptional beauty” and its stewardship by Sámi hunters, fishers, and herders “an outstanding example” of traditional land use. That combination of natural and Indigenous values was essential in the agency’s decision to declare it a World Heritage Site.  Since earning that designation in 1996, Sámi leaders and the Swedish government have, for the most part, enjoyed a successful and cooperative relationship managing the area. But an iron mine, recently approved on land barely 20 miles south of the Laponian Area’s border, is straining that collaboration. If the British-owned Kallak mine is built, it will impede the migration of reindeer to critical winter grazing lands and sever routes Sámi families and villages have relied upon for centuries.  “We need the lands outside of Laponia to ensure that the Sámi culture within Laponia can survive,” said Omma, who is also co-chair of the Laponiatjuottjudus Association, the administrative body that oversees the World Heritage Site. “We want to protect the land because the reindeer need the land, and we need the land.” A teenage Sami boy stands with a reindeer in the snow at the Sami village of Ravttas near Kiruna, Sweden. Wolfgang Kaehler / LightRocket via Getty Images To protect the Laponian Area, their culture, and their livelihoods, Sámi leaders say Sweden must stop the mine. By threatening their way of life, they argue, the mine threatens the Laponian Area’s status as a UNESCO site. These tensions highlight growing international concerns about UNESCO’s treatment and inclusion of Indigenous communities in establishing and managing World Heritage Sites. Although this occurs around the world, it is perhaps most explicit in Thailand and Tanzania, where violent evictions and killings define relations between Indigenous peoples, governments, and the U.N. agency’s reputation. The issue, which has unfolded over decades, could grow more widespread. World Heritage Sites, which are protected by the United Nations, are rich with biodiversity, making them a small, but essential, part of the successful implementation of the global conservation program 30×30. That ambitious effort calls for setting aside 30 percent of the world’s land and sea for permanent protection against development by 2030. Given that Indigenous territories comprise almost 20 percent of Earth’s land and shelter almost 80 percent of its remaining biodiversity, human rights experts worry that a history of systemic mistreatment of Indigenous peoples coupled with so rapid a timeline could be detrimental — even deadly — if it does not specifically include and respect those communities and their knowledge.  “UNESCO cannot turn away from its obligations,” said Lola García-Alix, senior adviser on global governance at the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, or IWGIA, a human rights advocacy organization. “States can, but not UNESCO, and we should not allow it to do so.” When Sweden sought World Heritage Site status for the Laponian Area, its application was based solely on the region’s natural beauty. UNESCO rejected that application, saying Laponia’s splendor was not unique enough to warrant protection. However, the committee said the inclusion of its cultural values in a subsequent application could reopen the process. The country followed that guidance, and in 1996, with essential help from Sámi reindeer herders, secured the land’s protection. It remains just one of a few World Heritage Sites with an internationally recognized connection to living Indigenous cultures, effectively making the Sámi true stakeholders with authority over its management.  Maria Parazo Rose / Grist The Laponian Area is one of the 1,157 World Heritage Sites worldwide. The U.N. established UNESCO in 1959 after Egypt proposed building a dam that would flood the valley containing the Abu Simbel temples and other antiquities. The campaign saved those treasures, leading to similar efforts in Italy, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Today, 167 countries have at least one place on the list, ranging from iconic locales like the Taj Mahal and Chichen-Itza to smaller gems like the Madriu-Perafita-Claror Valley in Andora, which provides, in the words of UNESCO, “a microcosmic perspective of the way people have harvested the resources of the high Pyrenees over millennia.” Such a designation often brings a boom in tourism. Worldwide, these sites attract some 8 billion visitors per year and generate as much as $850 billion in revenue. But the infrastructure needed to handle those tourists often strains the very places and ecosystems UNESCO hopes to protect. Angkor Wat, which was designated a World Heritage Site in 1992, in Cambodia, for example, saw tourism increase 300 percent between 2004 and 2014 alone. Beyond the on-site human impact, places like the Great Barrier Reef, near Australia, and the city of Venice, Italy, face mounting threats from climate change.  Tourists lead reindeer through the snow at the Sami village of Ravttas near Kiruna, Sweden. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images Yet many of these cherished places could prove essential to the planet’s survival. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which advises UNESCO, estimates that two-thirds of natural World Heritage Sites are crucial sources of water, while those in tropical regions store nearly 6 billion tons of carbon. These locations make up more than 1 million square miles of protected terrain and represent approximately 8 percent of all protected areas worldwide. However, only 48 percent of them are considered by the Union to have effective protection and management while nearly 12 percent raise serious concern. Sámi communities tended the Laponian Area centuries before the Kingdom of Sweden in 1532. That kind of history is not uncommon across the UNESCO system; many World Heritage Sites are near, or overlap, traditional Indigenous territories. What is uncommon is how it has been managed. It took more than a decade after its inscription as a World Heritage Site to establish Laponia’s oversight board, Laponiatjuottjudus. “It started when I was a child, in ’96, ” said Omma. “It was a 15-year-long struggle where the Sámi’s really worked hard to get a majority on the board, to create consensus-based decision-making processes, and to get reindeer herding rights respected within the Laponia site. It was a long, long struggle against authorities.” Today, Laponiatjuottjudus is legally responsible for managing the entire region. Representatives of nine Sámi villages work with local and county officials and the national Environmental Protection Agency to manage and maintain the area. Decision-making is grounded in Sámi cultural values and the collaboration has been so successful that the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples lauded the relationship. A Sami man from the Vilhelmina Norra Sameby uses his snow scooter during a 2016 reindeer herding near the village of Dikanaess. JONATHAN NACKSTRAND / AFP via Getty Images But Indigenous peoples worldwide have long raised concerns about violations of their rights within UNESCO sites. Three U.N. special rapporteurs on the rights of Indigenous peoples — independent human rights experts appointed by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights — have reported recurring problems at World Heritage Sites, including a lack of Indigenous participation in the nomination, declaration, and management process of sites; significant restrictions on access to resources and sacred sites; and harassment, criminalization, violence, and killings of Indigenous peoples. As a United Nations agency, UNESCO must comply with international obligations, including the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Traditionally, the challenge has been doing so in countries where the government regularly mistreats, or even refuses to recognize, Indigenous peoples and declarations of their rights. The United Nations has no punitive tools for dealing with such cases, and UNESCO can only threaten to delist a site — something that has happened only twice in the last 50 years, and never as retribution for human rights violations.  Putting aside that serious shortcoming, UNESCO fails to consider Indigenous communities in even the most fundamental tasks, like telling people the land they’ve lived on for centuries is slated for conservation. “Many Indigenous peoples are not aware that there will be a World Heritage Site perhaps until they are in a World Heritage Site,” said García-Alix of the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. “They have never been informed. Information is not publicly available.” A reindeer herd is rounded up in Laponia, Sweden. The Laponian area is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Arctic Images via Getty Images Currently, 186 proposed World Heritage Sites are pending review, and although UNESCO’s website states that fact, it offers no details about how they are considered. Evidence suggests the process is increasingly politicized. One study found that political or economic factors played heavily in cases in which the World Heritage Committee ignored recommendations that it decline designation or defer a decision pending additional information.  In other cases, the body seemingly overlooks any consideration of the communities impacted by its decision. Such was the case in 2021, when the World Heritage Committee ignored reports of human rights violations in Thailand’s Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex, and inscribed it to the World Heritage List despite pleas from the Indigenous Karen communities within the park, a U.N. human rights panel, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to defer the nomination. “Kaeng Krachan is a stain on the whole U.N. system,” said García-Alix. “It raises questions about the accountability of UNESCO as a U.N. organization.” Maria Parazo Rose / Grist The Karen have for hundreds of years lived as gatherers and farmers in what is now known as the Kaeng Krachan Forest. In 1981, the Thai government named the area a national park and began relocating the Karen communities from the upper Bangkloy to the Pong Luik-Bang Kloy in 1996. In exchange for voluntarily leaving their traditional homeland, they would receive land to farm and financial support.  Many of them agreed, but upon arriving at their new homes, some families found only sandy, rocky land unfit for farming. What’s more, the support the Thai government promised never arrived, or very little did. The Karen immediately demanded authorities follow through on their promises. When good land and support failed to materialize, communities faced two options: return home or migrate to towns looking for jobs. A 2021 photo shows the Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex in Thailand. The Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex was added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s UNESCO World Heritage List on July 26, 2021. Wang Teng / Xinhua via Getty Images “When we talk with the Karen people who live there, they say that they are not against the World Heritage Site, but their concerns and issues need to be resolved,” said Kittisak Rattanakrajangsri, who is Mien and chairs the Council of Indigenous Peoples in Thailand. “The land issues remain. That’s why they decided to go back to their homelands again.” The Karen have tried to return home at least three times. Each time, Thai authorities responded with violence, harassment, and forced evictions. Park officials have burned homes and rice barns, confiscated ceremonial items, seized fishing nets, and arrested Indigenous residents and activists. Timeline of the Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex1981: Kaeng Krachan National Park is created, leading to the displacement of Karen peoples from their homelands.1996: Nearly 60 Karen families are forced to move from their homes to Pong Luek Bang Kloi village. After promises of farmable land fail to materialize, some people move back home. 2010: The Thai government passes a resolution on “the restoration of Karen’s way of life,” directing park officials to protect the Karen community and not arrest them for traditional practices, but implementation is weak.2011: Park officials lead a group of armed soldiers to Bang Kloi village, burning and destroying nearly 100 homes and forcing Karen peoples to move, once again, to Pong Luek-Bang Kloi village.2021: In January, roughly 85 Karen people return to their homeland in Chai Phaen Din village. In February, park officials threaten fines and prosecution for trespassing. Throughout the spring, Karen peoples are forcibly detained and relocated to Pong Luek Bang Kloi village.2021: In July, the Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex is designated as a World Heritage Site.2021: On March 5, the court issues warrants of arrest to 30 Karen villagers; 22 people are arrested and imprisoned. On March 7, all are temporarily released from imprisonment. The legal case has been ongoing. At least two human rights defenders have been killed. Tatkamol Ob-om, who was helping the Karen report illegal logging and human rights abuses, was shot by an unknown assassin in 2011. Three years later park officers arrested Por La Jee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen, who assisted affected villagers to file a legal complaint against park officials over the destruction of Karen housing. He vanished until 2019, when Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation identified his remains after discovering a burnt skull fragment in an oil barrel at the bottom of a reservoir. This had no impact on the World Heritage Committee’s decision to add the site to the list. Rattanakrajangsri says there will be a review of the site’s World Heritage status every five years. “If the independent study shows that the situation is not getting better, and on the contrary, is getting worse, I think that it sends a strong message to UNESCO and other conservation agencies,” he said. Such abuses, and what appears to be a history of indifference to them, go back decades. The Maasai of Tanzania have faced repeated violent evictions from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a UNESCO site since 1979. The Maasai, mobile pastoralists much like the Sámi, have moved through the region for centuries, and although UNESCO has insisted that it never called on Tanzanian authorities to expel them from the park, it has done little to address the tens of thousands of Maasai who have been forced from their homelands, injured, and even shot and killed. In the last year alone, nine U.N. human rights experts and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature have called on Tanzanian officials to halt relocation until consulting with the Maasai. Human rights defenders have demanded UNESCO sever ties with the Tanzanian government. “The World Heritage Committee is closely monitoring the state of conservation of the mentioned properties,” said a spokesperson for the World Heritage Centre. “Including the issues related to the rights of the Indigenous peoples.” The agency could begin to address such injustices by establishing a mechanism under which Indigenous peoples and human rights watchdogs could bring evidence of violations to its attention, said Nicolás Süssmann, conservation and Indigenous peoples project director with Project Expedite Justice, a human rights organization. He also says UNESCO could be more open and clear in its handling of human rights complaints. “The consequences cannot just be removing or firing an eco-guard who conducted an operation,” he said. “This is not a problem of rogue eco-guards. This is a problem with a conservation model that is incompatible with Indigenous peoples.” But that conservation model has been the global standard for more than a century, and with more than 100 countries expressing support for 30×30, Süssmann and other human rights experts say the situation will get worse. “You can say you respect Indigenous peoples,” said Süssmann, “but when you have a deadline and you’re used to doing things without Indigenous peoples’ real, and meaningful, involvement, you’re not going to change the way you do things if you don’t have to.” Read Next How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence Joseph Lee Süssman says this is especially true when you read the fine print: Under 30×30, countries don’t have to preserve 30 percent of their own lands and waters by 2030. The plan calls only for preserving 30 percent of the world’s land and waters by then. “Nobody is going to demolish a couple of buildings near Central Park to make it bigger,” said Süssmann. “They’re going to get that 30 percent from other parts of the world.” Much of that land will, almost inevitably, encompass Indigenous territories, which make up nearly a quarter of the planet. In 2016, human rights experts estimated that 50 percent of protected areas worldwide encompassed traditional Indigenous lands covering more than 6 million square miles. Today, protected areas comprise nearly 9 million square miles – an area roughly the size of China, India, Mongolia, and the United States combined. To reach 30% by 2030, more than 15 million square miles must be protected – an area nearly the size of Russia. All told, protected areas represent just 16 percent of the Earth’s surface, and while there is no disagreement that safeguarding biodiversity is critical to planetary survival, advocates say failing to make human rights foundational to global conservation efforts may continue to drive evictions, violence, and killings in Indigenous territories. “World Heritage Sites, which are U.N. protected areas, at the minimum, should be the ones who respect and protect Indigenous people’s rights,” said García-Alix. “If I have to be diplomatic: UNESCO has a lack of sensitivity about human rights issues, particularly when it comes to World Heritage.” Beyond ensuring Indigenous rights and traditional knowledge are respected, such arrangements could advance UNESCO’s preservation goals and help mitigate the impacts of climate change.  A rapidly expanding body of science shows that working with Indigenous communities can accelerate conservation efforts. Legal recognition of Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest have led to increased reforestation. Studies show that the world’s healthiest forests often stand on protected Indigenous lands, and sustainable pastoralism, like that of Maasai or Sámi herders, offers benefits ranging from preserving soil fertility to maximizing genetic diversity. Formal recognition of territory and rights also creates legal pathways to stopping the development of extractive industries: Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel projects in North America is thought to have stopped or delayed the creation of greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least 25 percent of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions. That resistance, however, is often criminalized by state authorities. Humans have shaped and sustained landscapes for more than 12,000 years, and Indigenous communities continue to care for the territories that have sustained them for generations. Embracing and applying that knowledge – and the understanding that Earth is an interconnected system of physical, biological, cultural, and spiritual networks that extend beyond borders — could go a long way toward addressing the climate crisis. In some cases, like the Kallak iron mine, it even means the difference between life and death. Read Next How protecting the Earth became an excuse for murder Gord Hill “We know how this will affect our culture and our livelihoods,” said Omma. “But it’s very common that our knowledge is viewed as opinions, not as knowledge.” Human rights experts continue to urge Sweden to stop the project, and the World Heritage Centre says a report on its potential impacts will be presented to the World Heritage Committee at its annual conference this September. The committee will then offer recommendations to the Swedish government. For the Sámi, there can be one way forward. “You can’t coexist with a mine,” said Omma. “It’s not possible.” But to Indigenous communities like the Sámi, the issue is so much bigger than one mine. Truly protecting a place goes beyond preserving its landscapes and historic sites. It must include the protection, respect, and participation of the people who have, for millennia, lived in good relation with that land and know, perhaps better than anyone, how to protect it for future generations. “Protection of land is good,” said Helena Omma, “if Indigenous peoples are part of that protection.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Sweden, a proposed iron mine threatens a World Heritage Site, and the culture that made it on Apr 18, 2023.

Connecting to culture: here's what happened when elders gifted totemic species to school kids

The 10-week pilot program Totemic Species in Schools shows how Indigenous science can be woven into the existing curriculum. Students, teachers and parents provided positive feedback.

Nicolas Rakotopare, Author providedIn Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, a totem is a spiritual emblem from the natural world, such as a plant or animal. The totem is gifted to an individual by a parent or elder, usually around the time of their birth. Some people have several totems. The connection is mutually beneficial: the totem is a protector of the person, who in turn shows their respect for the totem by caring for it. We wanted to find out if totemic species, when gifted to schools by Traditional Custodians, could generate care for threatened species - while also embedding cultural awareness and Indigenous knowledge in the Australian science curriculum. We ran a pilot program to test the idea and build an evidence base. The program was successful. Care for the totemic species increased and students expressed enthusiasm for this approach. And there were other benefits too. Connecting kids with nature and culture: A totemic species for Carlton North Primary School. Read more: First Peoples' knowledge of 'mysterious fairy circles' in Australian deserts has upended a long-standing science debate Caring for the matted flax-lily The matted flax-lily (Dianella amoena) is culturally significant to the Wurundjeri people. The berries and leaves are used for food and tea, weaving and making whistles to deter snakes. But the species is critically endangered in Victoria and listed as endangered nationally. After land clearing for urban development, it is thought only 1,400 plants remain. Students in all year levels at Carlton North Primary School in Melbourne worked with Uncle Dave Wandin, a Wurundjeri Elder, to create habitat for the flax-lily and learn about the species. The program sought to embed both Indigenous and Western knowledge in a balanced and holistic way. Over ten weeks, the biology curriculum addressed sustainability and the environment, incorporating interactive and outdoor activities. In one activity, students helped to construct a grassland ecosystem habitat with plantings of the flax-lily. Other activities included interactive food web role play, scientific drawing, seed planting, learning about Indigenous land management and the use of native ingredients in modern baking. The grassland flax-lily has blue, star-shaped flowers from spring through autumn followed by purple berries. Shutterstock Connecting to nature We used surveys of students, teachers and parents to understand the outcomes of the program. After participating in the program, students had a better understanding of the matted flax-lily and its ecology. They also felt more connected with nature and indicated that they had learned about the Traditional Custodians and the importance of the totemic species. One student said: I really enjoyed science this term (and) I feel much closer to our Indigenous culture than I ever have. Students told the lead teachers that they wanted to bring the blue-banded bee back and plant native species in their own gardens: I never knew about the matted flax-Lily and that it was going extinct and now I’m planning to plant some in my backyard! Teachers also told us they felt better equipped to teach students about traditional ecological knowledge in a culturally appropriate manner. The main educators in the program thought the approach could be extended to other disciplines, including engineering, art and mathematics. Parents and guardians also felt positive, referencing their child’s high engagement as well as their own interest in learning more about Indigenous culture and totemic species. One parent stated their child started to ask regularly if they could “plant native plants because of how important they are”. Students went beyond the project team’s expectations and began to take care of the garden themselves, protecting their species during break times at school, showing the garden to their families and teaching them about the different species within it. Overall, the program improved student engagement with nature and science. This permeated through to parents and guardians. Weaving into the curriculum Our research has the potential to improve teaching of Indigenous content across Australia. The program shows how Indigenous science can be embedded into the existing curriculum in a holistic way. Student engagement with nature and science also increased along with personal feelings of connection and responsibility to the environment. Additional benefits included the creation of habitat for threatened species. Imagine if every school in Australia contributed in this way to the conservation of biodiversity? The murnong or yam daisy has white tuberous roots that may be eaten raw or baked. Nicholas Rakotopare, Author provided There’s also evidence that children playing in biodiverse schoolyards have improved cognitive function and reduced behavioural issues. Finally, greening our schoolyards can provide a critical cooling function. Key to the program’s success was recognition of the time commitment from teachers and Wurundjeri Elders and recompensing them appropriately. This was crucial for facilitating deep involvement. The school curriculum is already crowded with many competing demands. Expecting that an additional body of material can be incorporated without appropriate time and resources would have been impractical. Likewise, the time and knowledge of Traditional Owners is in high demand, so adequate provision of resources was an important feature of the program. Further, embedding the material into an existing subject school-wide meant the program did not impose further demands on the curriculum. Instead, it was an efficient and effective way to deliver the material. This also generated a sense of the topic being “core” to the curriculum, rather than an optional “add-on”. This alignment of the program with existing curriculum and the fact that the budget – while critical - was modest, mean it is entirely feasible to imagine implementation of similar programs in many other schools. We hope that the program will be picked up and implemented in other schools across Australia. Ideally, the concept of totemic species will ultimately become integrated into the Australian curriculum. The authors would like to acknowledge Emily Gregg, Benjamin May, Dave Wandin, Michael Harrison, Marnie Pascoe, Fiona McConachie and Alex Kusmanoff for their contribution to the research that underpins this article. Thanks also to the principal, staff, students and parents of Carlton North Primary School for supporting the project. Visit our website to download the Totemic Species in Schools resources, including the program curriculum, findings factsheet, and evaluation survey. Zadie was one of 283 students involved in the pilot Totemic Species in Schools program at Carlton North Primary School, which culminated in the planting of a native garden. Sarah Bekessy, Author provided Read more: Indigenous spiritual teaching in schools can foster reconciliation and inclusion Natasha Ward research cited in this article was undertaken by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub with funding from the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program (Phase 1).Bradley J. Moggridge is affiliated with the University of Canberra, is a Governor with WWF Australia and a Member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists Georgia Garrard receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Research cited in this article was undertaken by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub with funding from the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program (Phase 1). She is chair of Birdlife Australia's Research and Conservation Committee, a member of Zoos Victoria's Scientific Advisory Committee and a member of the Sustainable Subdivisions Framework advisory group for the Council Alliance for a Sustainable Built Environment.Sarah Bekessy receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Ian Potter Foundation and the European Commission. Research cited in this article was undertaken by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub with funding from the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program (Phase 1) and the Victorian Department of Land, Water, Environment and Planning. She is a Lead Councillor of the Biodiversity Council, a Board Member of Bush Heritage Australia, a member of WWF's Eminent Scientists Group and a member of the Advisory Group for Wood for Good.