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Seattle’s Sustainability Director on Successes, Failures, and Lessons for Other Cities

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Monday, August 12, 2024

Jessyn Farrell is late meeting me at the Seattle Green Festival in early July — not because she’s late entering the conference, but because it seems she can’t walk through a crowd of sustainability and environmental experts without being stopped. As the director of the Office of Sustainability & Environment for the city of Seattle, Farrell holds a position that, in other cities, might not be particularly high profile. But in the Emerald City, which regularly ranks as one of the most sustainable cities worldwide, it garners its own type of fame. That position — along with Farrell’s tenure on the Washington House of Representatives from 2013 to 2017, her decades of environmental and transit activism in the region, and her two (unsuccessful) runs for mayor — makes her a known figure. We hadn’t met before, but once we began our interview, we found that our personal and professional experiences overlap in several key areas. We share a passion for sustainable buildings: She helped pass legislation to decarbonize residential buildings, and I’m a U.S. Green Building Council LEED Green Associate. We’re both dedicated to food security and creative solutions for urban gardening and farming. And we’ve also both spent most of our careers living in and working toward sustainable cities — she in Seattle, and me in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.) Jessyn Farrell at the Green Festival. Photo by Molly McCluskey How did you get your start in environmental activism? A lot of my environmental consciousness and love of this place started because it’s such a beautiful, amazing place to live in. When I was a child, my uncle was a researcher for orcas at the Ken Balcombe Center on San Juan Island, and we’d go out in his little boat and, like, hang out with orcas. That was magical and incredible. And the thing that stuns me about living here is you still see whales. Even 40 years later, when my kids and I are on the ferry, we’re always scanning for whales, and they’re there. I would say that I am literally a Save the Whales environmentalist. That’s where I got my start — as, you know, an ’80s bumper sticker. An orca dorsal fin seen from Discovery Park with West Point lighthouse in background. Photo via Seattle Parks, Discovery Park Staff (CC BY 2.0) How has that love of the environment translated into your urban activism? Over time, I really came to appreciate how important it is to make cities wonderful places to live as a way of preserving our wild places. Growing up in Seattle — which, like San Francisco, is a place of really rapid change — I could really see the forests and the fields turn into suburbia over the past decade. As a result, over my career, I’ve asked myself, how do we make these cities places where everyone can live? That’s where you get into the intersection of environmental justice and affordability and human health and social capital — by asking, how do you get people to live in a dense urban environment? You do that by making it really wonderful. So that’s been the guiding principle for my career. Why has transportation been such a core piece of your professional life, given the Save the Whales environmentalism that you come from? I think one thing that all big, wonderful cities have in common is an amazing transit system. And Seattle didn’t. In the 1970s, voters [rejected] what was called Forward Thrust. Federal funding had been approved to build a system here. The voters voted against the local match, and so it never got built. After law school, I went into transit policy and ran a small nonprofit called Transportation Choices Coalition. I had an amazing team of five. Our budget the first year I was there was $250,000. We didn’t get paid very much. But we fought the highway guys and the mall guys and the oil industry on their own turf in Bellevue and got the city council to support light rail, which it had voted down for decades. It was just a lot of fun, and it was a purpose. What I love about [transportation] is that it helps address all these different issues — economic, race, and social justice, climate, livability, safety — just by building trains and having great bus service. Whether you’re old or young or middle aged, transit is literally what connects us. Why venture into politics? I was voted “most likely to be a politician” in high school. I always dreamed of going into politics, but I think, like a lot of women, I felt I needed to be credentialed. I felt like I needed to have a lot of experience. It wasn’t until I was working in a transit agency and lobbying these legislators who were five years younger than I was that I thought, if these guys can do it, I certainly can too. [That was] in 2012, [when] I had a two-year-old and a four-year-old. It was not easy by any means, but I jumped in and ran as an environmentalist and transit advocate. We are very, very polarized right now. Climate is the unifying issue. We’ve passed this building emissions performance standard. We got the climate activists and the building owners to get — maybe if not on exactly the same page, [then] to a willingness to create space to do a heavy lift on a policy. What’s your vision for Seattle? My basic take is we actually know exactly what to do around climate change. This is not a mystery. It’s not a big research and science experiment. We have the solutions. The big challenge is: How do we scale and go big, fast? And how do we do that in a way that is community-centered and people-centered? Those two things have an inherent tension, because scaling requires speed, efficiency, and cookie-cutter approaches. What we do at the Office of Sustainability & Environment is a lot of piloting and a lot of iterating, and then we package up our little fledglings and pass them on to capital departments that can really scale them. One good example of that is the Green Seattle Partnership, which started at OSC, which connects nonprofits to help steward our wild parts of our parks. We started small and learned how to run that well and then passed it on to the parks department. Not everything can be a success right out of the gate. What are some initiatives that had some greater challenges or just haven’t worked out? Well, one we’re really dogged about and not willing to give up yet is dredge truck electrification. Those are the diesel trucks that run between the port and logistic facilities. Often environmental justice-impacted neighborhoods are right next to the port, and they have massive particulate impacts. There’s all of this [Inflation Reduction Act] funding, and there’s state funding, which is awesome for electrification. It offers tremendous potential, but getting there is challenging. We’re not so worried about the really big entities. They’re going to figure out how to buy or finance $500,000 trucks. It’s the small, 20-trucks-and-under, immigrant refugee-owned small businesses that can’t float loans, may not even have traditional banking. The price of these trucks is just really high. Then where do they charge? Electrification has been a city priority now for several years. Our signature environmental justice program is in the Duwamish Valley, which is a port-adjacent neighborhood. In 2016 the Duwamish Valley Action Plan, which lays out the vision for that neighborhood, identified the need to electrify these trucks because this is really impacting people’s health. So we’ve been working on this for a long time, and we’re not ready to give up. That’s one of those examples where we’re not there yet, but we’re learning a lot. Climate Pledge arena in Seattle. Photo by Molly McCluskey Seattle is implementing a multi-tiered approach for sustainability. Most cities have so many similar problems and solutions. What advice would you have for city officials in Fargo or Tempe, or smaller cities that maybe don’t have massive budgets but still want to do something to advance sustainability in their city and maybe feel overwhelmed? Where would you recommend they start? We have the Buildings Accelerator Program. We passed the regulation, and that’s the stick. It says you have to decarbonize by 2050, and you have to meet benchmarks over the next 25 years. But one of the things that we really took very seriously is how we then partner and provide resources from the technical engineering side to meet the actual funding needs of under-resourced buildings to help them meet those targets. We’re partnering first this year with affordable housing, just because there aren’t a lot of air-conditioned homes or air-conditioned multifamily homes, especially the older ones that tend to be more affordable. So that’s a really fun project born out of many, many years of working with the building community and paying really deep attention to what they need and how we can show up best as government. Because at the end of the day, we want decarbonization to happen. We have an amazing staff that has expertise, but we’re also really reliant on community expertise to understand what the barriers are. Washington shows up regularly on the top 10 states of U.S. Green Building Council LEED-certified buildings. But on that list, it’s ninth for number of credentialed LEED professionals. As Seattle moves to decarbonize its buildings, how are you fostering expertise in green buildings? We passed legislation a decade ago that was our foundation for getting to emission performance standards and building benchmarking and tune-ups. We built in a certification program where we would help support people getting their credentials. We partner with South Community College to do that, which is really cool. The feedback we received from building owners was to give them a long lead time. We’re in a downtown crisis, a commercial real estate crisis. We need time to make these big investments. And we’re willing to do it because we see the reason behind it. But they need time. That was one of the compromises, because the climate science obviously tells us we need to do this yesterday. The activists wanted a 2030 deadline. But our role as the Office of Sustainability in negotiating this was, we don’t want a goal that’s impossible to meet. We need you guys to actually decarbonize. And if that means having some flexibility around how we do it, [or] the deadlines, you have to do it. We built in a lot of flexibility because we want to have the end result. In a year from now, what do you want the Office of Sustainability & Environment to be able to say it accomplished? I would love within the next year or two to really have that sense of how we’re going to go the distance on decarbonizing our residential homes. Then there are a lot of other really exciting projects that we’re doing. One of them is creating a resilience hub strategy. Resilience hubs are trusted community facilities where people can go if there’s a heat event, but also throughout the year to build social capital. I would love to be in a place where the plan is launched, which we expect to do, and we have the political cohesion to start putting together the funding and the will to make sure that every single neighborhood in our city has these kinds of places where people can hang out when it’s too hot  — or even in floods, [or if] your refrigerator goes out [and you need] a safe place to store your food. With regards to climate, Seattle does have this ethos that’s still alive and well. I think it’s that issue that brings people together in a way that other issues don’t right now. The post Seattle’s Sustainability Director on Successes, Failures, and Lessons for Other Cities appeared first on The Revelator.

Former politician turned city official Jessyn Farrell, who still calls herself a “Save the Whales environmentalist,” tackles sustainability from all angles. The post Seattle’s Sustainability Director on Successes, Failures, and Lessons for Other Cities appeared first on The Revelator.

Jessyn Farrell is late meeting me at the Seattle Green Festival in early July — not because she’s late entering the conference, but because it seems she can’t walk through a crowd of sustainability and environmental experts without being stopped.

As the director of the Office of Sustainability & Environment for the city of Seattle, Farrell holds a position that, in other cities, might not be particularly high profile. But in the Emerald City, which regularly ranks as one of the most sustainable cities worldwide, it garners its own type of fame. That position — along with Farrell’s tenure on the Washington House of Representatives from 2013 to 2017, her decades of environmental and transit activism in the region, and her two (unsuccessful) runs for mayor — makes her a known figure.

We hadn’t met before, but once we began our interview, we found that our personal and professional experiences overlap in several key areas. We share a passion for sustainable buildings: She helped pass legislation to decarbonize residential buildings, and I’m a U.S. Green Building Council LEED Green Associate. We’re both dedicated to food security and creative solutions for urban gardening and farming. And we’ve also both spent most of our careers living in and working toward sustainable cities — she in Seattle, and me in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Jessyn Farrell at the Green Festival. Photo by Molly McCluskey

How did you get your start in environmental activism?

A lot of my environmental consciousness and love of this place started because it’s such a beautiful, amazing place to live in. When I was a child, my uncle was a researcher for orcas at the Ken Balcombe Center on San Juan Island, and we’d go out in his little boat and, like, hang out with orcas. That was magical and incredible.

And the thing that stuns me about living here is you still see whales. Even 40 years later, when my kids and I are on the ferry, we’re always scanning for whales, and they’re there.

I would say that I am literally a Save the Whales environmentalist. That’s where I got my start — as, you know, an ’80s bumper sticker.

Orca
An orca dorsal fin seen from Discovery Park with West Point lighthouse in background. Photo via Seattle Parks, Discovery Park Staff (CC BY 2.0)

How has that love of the environment translated into your urban activism?

Over time, I really came to appreciate how important it is to make cities wonderful places to live as a way of preserving our wild places. Growing up in Seattle — which, like San Francisco, is a place of really rapid change — I could really see the forests and the fields turn into suburbia over the past decade.

As a result, over my career, I’ve asked myself, how do we make these cities places where everyone can live? That’s where you get into the intersection of environmental justice and affordability and human health and social capital — by asking, how do you get people to live in a dense urban environment?

You do that by making it really wonderful. So that’s been the guiding principle for my career.

Why has transportation been such a core piece of your professional life, given the Save the Whales environmentalism that you come from?

I think one thing that all big, wonderful cities have in common is an amazing transit system. And Seattle didn’t. In the 1970s, voters [rejected] what was called Forward Thrust. Federal funding had been approved to build a system here. The voters voted against the local match, and so it never got built.

After law school, I went into transit policy and ran a small nonprofit called Transportation Choices Coalition. I had an amazing team of five. Our budget the first year I was there was $250,000. We didn’t get paid very much. But we fought the highway guys and the mall guys and the oil industry on their own turf in Bellevue and got the city council to support light rail, which it had voted down for decades. It was just a lot of fun, and it was a purpose.

What I love about [transportation] is that it helps address all these different issues — economic, race, and social justice, climate, livability, safety — just by building trains and having great bus service.

Whether you’re old or young or middle aged, transit is literally what connects us.

Why venture into politics?

I was voted “most likely to be a politician” in high school. I always dreamed of going into politics, but I think, like a lot of women, I felt I needed to be credentialed. I felt like I needed to have a lot of experience.

It wasn’t until I was working in a transit agency and lobbying these legislators who were five years younger than I was that I thought, if these guys can do it, I certainly can too. [That was] in 2012, [when] I had a two-year-old and a four-year-old. It was not easy by any means, but I jumped in and ran as an environmentalist and transit advocate.

We are very, very polarized right now. Climate is the unifying issue. We’ve passed this building emissions performance standard. We got the climate activists and the building owners to get — maybe if not on exactly the same page, [then] to a willingness to create space to do a heavy lift on a policy.

What’s your vision for Seattle?

My basic take is we actually know exactly what to do around climate change. This is not a mystery. It’s not a big research and science experiment. We have the solutions. The big challenge is: How do we scale and go big, fast? And how do we do that in a way that is community-centered and people-centered? Those two things have an inherent tension, because scaling requires speed, efficiency, and cookie-cutter approaches.

What we do at the Office of Sustainability & Environment is a lot of piloting and a lot of iterating, and then we package up our little fledglings and pass them on to capital departments that can really scale them. One good example of that is the Green Seattle Partnership, which started at OSC, which connects nonprofits to help steward our wild parts of our parks. We started small and learned how to run that well and then passed it on to the parks department.

Not everything can be a success right out of the gate. What are some initiatives that had some greater challenges or just haven’t worked out?

Well, one we’re really dogged about and not willing to give up yet is dredge truck electrification. Those are the diesel trucks that run between the port and logistic facilities.

Often environmental justice-impacted neighborhoods are right next to the port, and they have massive particulate impacts. There’s all of this [Inflation Reduction Act] funding, and there’s state funding, which is awesome for electrification. It offers tremendous potential, but getting there is challenging.

We’re not so worried about the really big entities. They’re going to figure out how to buy or finance $500,000 trucks.

It’s the small, 20-trucks-and-under, immigrant refugee-owned small businesses that can’t float loans, may not even have traditional banking. The price of these trucks is just really high. Then where do they charge?

Electrification has been a city priority now for several years. Our signature environmental justice program is in the Duwamish Valley, which is a port-adjacent neighborhood. In 2016 the Duwamish Valley Action Plan, which lays out the vision for that neighborhood, identified the need to electrify these trucks because this is really impacting people’s health. So we’ve been working on this for a long time, and we’re not ready to give up.

That’s one of those examples where we’re not there yet, but we’re learning a lot.

Climate Pledge arena with Space Needle in the background.
Climate Pledge arena in Seattle. Photo by Molly McCluskey

Seattle is implementing a multi-tiered approach for sustainability. Most cities have so many similar problems and solutions. What advice would you have for city officials in Fargo or Tempe, or smaller cities that maybe don’t have massive budgets but still want to do something to advance sustainability in their city and maybe feel overwhelmed? Where would you recommend they start?

We have the Buildings Accelerator Program. We passed the regulation, and that’s the stick. It says you have to decarbonize by 2050, and you have to meet benchmarks over the next 25 years. But one of the things that we really took very seriously is how we then partner and provide resources from the technical engineering side to meet the actual funding needs of under-resourced buildings to help them meet those targets.

We’re partnering first this year with affordable housing, just because there aren’t a lot of air-conditioned homes or air-conditioned multifamily homes, especially the older ones that tend to be more affordable.

So that’s a really fun project born out of many, many years of working with the building community and paying really deep attention to what they need and how we can show up best as government. Because at the end of the day, we want decarbonization to happen. We have an amazing staff that has expertise, but we’re also really reliant on community expertise to understand what the barriers are.

Washington shows up regularly on the top 10 states of U.S. Green Building Council LEED-certified buildings. But on that list, it’s ninth for number of credentialed LEED professionals. As Seattle moves to decarbonize its buildings, how are you fostering expertise in green buildings?

We passed legislation a decade ago that was our foundation for getting to emission performance standards and building benchmarking and tune-ups. We built in a certification program where we would help support people getting their credentials. We partner with South Community College to do that, which is really cool.

The feedback we received from building owners was to give them a long lead time. We’re in a downtown crisis, a commercial real estate crisis. We need time to make these big investments. And we’re willing to do it because we see the reason behind it. But they need time. That was one of the compromises, because the climate science obviously tells us we need to do this yesterday.

The activists wanted a 2030 deadline. But our role as the Office of Sustainability in negotiating this was, we don’t want a goal that’s impossible to meet.

We need you guys to actually decarbonize. And if that means having some flexibility around how we do it, [or] the deadlines, you have to do it. We built in a lot of flexibility because we want to have the end result.

In a year from now, what do you want the Office of Sustainability & Environment to be able to say it accomplished?

I would love within the next year or two to really have that sense of how we’re going to go the distance on decarbonizing our residential homes.

Then there are a lot of other really exciting projects that we’re doing.

One of them is creating a resilience hub strategy. Resilience hubs are trusted community facilities where people can go if there’s a heat event, but also throughout the year to build social capital. I would love to be in a place where the plan is launched, which we expect to do, and we have the political cohesion to start putting together the funding and the will to make sure that every single neighborhood in our city has these kinds of places where people can hang out when it’s too hot  — or even in floods, [or if] your refrigerator goes out [and you need] a safe place to store your food.

With regards to climate, Seattle does have this ethos that’s still alive and well. I think it’s that issue that brings people together in a way that other issues don’t right now.

The post Seattle’s Sustainability Director on Successes, Failures, and Lessons for Other Cities appeared first on The Revelator.

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Measles Misinformation Is on the Rise – and Americans Are Hearing It, Survey Finds

Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely as Democrats to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease.

By Arthur Allen | KFF Health NewsWhile the most serious measles epidemic in a decade has led to the deaths of two children and spread to nearly 30 states with no signs of letting up, beliefs about the safety of the measles vaccine and the threat of the disease are sharply polarized, fed by the anti-vaccine views of the country’s seniormost health official.About two-thirds of Republican-leaning parents are unaware of an uptick in measles cases this year while about two-thirds of Democratic ones knew about it, according to a KFF survey released Wednesday.Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely (1 in 5) as Democrats (1 in 10) to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease, according to the survey of 1,380 U.S. adults.Some 35% of Republicans answering the survey, which was conducted April 8-15 online and by telephone, said the discredited theory linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism was definitely or probably true – compared with just 10% of Democrats.Get Midday Must-Reads in Your InboxFive essential stories, expertly curated, to keep you informed on your lunch break.Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S. News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy.The trends are roughly the same as KFF reported in a June 2023 survey. But in the new poll, 3 in 10 parents erroneously believed that vitamin A can prevent measles infections, a theory Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought into play since taking office during the measles outbreak.“The most alarming thing about the survey is that we’re seeing an uptick in the share of people who have heard these claims,” said co-author Ashley Kirzinger, associate director of KFF’s Public Opinion and Survey Research Program. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.“It’s not that more people are believing the autism theory, but more and more people are hearing about it,” Kirzinger said. Since doubts about vaccine safety directly reduce parents’ vaccination of their children, “that shows how important it is for actual information to be part of the media landscape,” she said.“This is what one would expect when people are confused by conflicting messages coming from people in positions of authority,” said Kelly Moore, president and CEO of Immunize.org, a vaccination advocacy group.Numerous scientific studies have established no link between any vaccine and autism. But Kennedy has ordered HHS to undertake an investigation of possible environmental contributors to autism, promising to have “some of the answers” behind an increase in the incidence of the condition by September.The deepening Republican skepticism toward vaccines makes it hard for accurate information to break through in many parts of the nation, said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer at The Immunization Partnership, in Houston.Lakshmanan on April 23 was to present a paper on countering anti-vaccine activism to the World Vaccine Congress in Washington. It was based on a survey that found that in the Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma state assemblies, lawmakers with medical professions were among those least likely to support public health measures.“There is a political layer that influences these lawmakers,” she said. When lawmakers invite vaccine opponents to testify at legislative hearings, for example, it feeds a deluge of misinformation that is difficult to counter, she said.Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Ladera Ranch, California, which was hit by a 2014-15 measles outbreak that started in Disneyland, said fear of measles and tighter California state restrictions on vaccine exemptions had staved off new infections in his Orange County community.“The biggest downside of measles vaccines is that they work really well. Everyone gets vaccinated, no one gets measles, everyone forgets about measles,” he said. “But when it comes back, they realize there are kids getting really sick and potentially dying in my community, and everyone says, ‘Holy crap; we better vaccinate!’”Ball treated three very sick children with measles in 2015. Afterward his practice stopped seeing unvaccinated patients. “We had had babies exposed in our waiting room,” he said. “We had disease spreading in our office, which was not cool.”Although two otherwise healthy young girls died of measles during the Texas outbreak, “people still aren’t scared of the disease,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has seen a few cases.But the deaths “have created more angst, based on the number of calls I’m getting from parents trying to vaccinate their 4-month-old and 6-month-old babies,” Offit said. Children generally get their first measles shot at age 1, because it tends not to produce full immunity if given at a younger age.KFF Health News’ Jackie Fortiér contributed to this report.This article was produced by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF. It was originally published on April 23, 2025, and has been republished with permission.

Evangelical churches in Indiana turn to solar and sustainability as an expression of faith

A growing number of evangelical churches and universities in Indiana are embracing renewable energy and environmental stewardship as a religious duty, reframing climate action through a spiritual lens.Catrin Einhorn reports for The New York TimesIn short:Churches across Indiana, including Christ’s Community Church and Grace Church, are installing solar panels, planting native gardens, and hosting events like Indy Creation Fest to promote environmental stewardship.Evangelical leaders say their work aligns with a biblical call to care for creation, distancing it from politicized language around climate change to appeal to more conservative congregations.Christian universities such as Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor are integrating environmental science into academics and campus life, fostering student-led sustainability efforts rooted in faith.Key quote:“It’s a quiet movement.”— Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental NetworkWhy this matters:The intersection of faith and environmental action challenges longstanding cultural divides in the climate conversation. Evangelical communities — historically less engaged on climate issues — hold substantial political and social influence, particularly across the Midwest and South. Framing sustainability as a religious obligation sidesteps partisan divides and invites wider participation. These faith-led movements can help shift attitudes in rural and suburban America, where skepticism of climate science and federal intervention runs high. And as the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence grow — heatwaves, water scarcity, air pollution— the health and well-being of families in these communities are increasingly at stake. Read more: Christian climate activists aim to bridge faith and environmental actionPope Francis, who used faith and science to call out the climate crisis, dies at 88

A growing number of evangelical churches and universities in Indiana are embracing renewable energy and environmental stewardship as a religious duty, reframing climate action through a spiritual lens.Catrin Einhorn reports for The New York TimesIn short:Churches across Indiana, including Christ’s Community Church and Grace Church, are installing solar panels, planting native gardens, and hosting events like Indy Creation Fest to promote environmental stewardship.Evangelical leaders say their work aligns with a biblical call to care for creation, distancing it from politicized language around climate change to appeal to more conservative congregations.Christian universities such as Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor are integrating environmental science into academics and campus life, fostering student-led sustainability efforts rooted in faith.Key quote:“It’s a quiet movement.”— Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental NetworkWhy this matters:The intersection of faith and environmental action challenges longstanding cultural divides in the climate conversation. Evangelical communities — historically less engaged on climate issues — hold substantial political and social influence, particularly across the Midwest and South. Framing sustainability as a religious obligation sidesteps partisan divides and invites wider participation. These faith-led movements can help shift attitudes in rural and suburban America, where skepticism of climate science and federal intervention runs high. And as the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence grow — heatwaves, water scarcity, air pollution— the health and well-being of families in these communities are increasingly at stake. Read more: Christian climate activists aim to bridge faith and environmental actionPope Francis, who used faith and science to call out the climate crisis, dies at 88

Will the next pope be liberal or conservative? Neither.

If there’s one succinct way to describe Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Catholic Church over the last 12 years, it might best be  done with three of his own words: “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone.” Francis, who died Monday morning in Vatican City, was both a reformer and a traditionalist. He didn’t change […]

Pope Francis meets students at Portugal’s Catholic University on August 3, 2023, in Lisbon for World Youth Day, an international Catholic rally inaugurated by St. John Paul II to invigorate young people in their faith. | Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images If there’s one succinct way to describe Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Catholic Church over the last 12 years, it might best be  done with three of his own words: “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone.” Francis, who died Monday morning in Vatican City, was both a reformer and a traditionalist. He didn’t change church doctrine, didn’t dramatically alter the Church’s teachings, and didn’t fundamentally disrupt the bedrock of Catholic belief. Catholics still believe there is one God who exists as three divine persons, that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that sin is still a thing. Only men can serve in the priesthood, life still begins at conception, and faith is lived through both prayer and good works. And yet it still feels like Pope Francis transformed the Church — breathing life into a 2,000-year-old institution by making it a player in current events, updating some of its bureaucracy to better respond to earthly affairs, and recentering the Church’s focus on the principle that it is open to all, but especially concerned with the least well off and marginalized in society. With Francis gone, how should we think of his legacy? Was he really the radical progressive revolutionary some on the American political right cast him as? And will his successor follow in his footsteps?   To try to neatly place Francis on the US political spectrum is a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s precisely because Francis and his potential successors defy our ability to categorize their legacies within our worldly, partisan, and tribalistic categories that it’s not very useful to use labels like “liberal” and “conservative.” Those things mean very different things within the Church versus outside of it. Instead, it’s more helpful to realize just how much Francis changed the Church’s tone and posturing toward openness and care for the least well off — and how he set up to Church to continue in that direction after he’s gone. He was neither liberal nor conservative: He was a bridge to the future who made the Church more relevant, without betraying its core teachings. That starting point will be critical for reading and understanding the next few weeks of papal news and speculation — especially as poorly sourced viral charts and infographics that lack context spread on social media in an attempt to explain what comes next. Revisiting Francis’s papacy Francis’s papacy is a prime example of how unhelpful it is to try to think of popes, and the Church, along the right-left political spectrum we’re used to thinking of in Western democracies.  When he was elected in 2013, Francis was a bit of an enigma. Progressives cautioned each other not to get too hopeful, while conservatives were wary about how open he would be to changing the Church’s public presence and social teachings. Before being elected pope, he was described as more traditional — not as activist as some of his Latin American peers who embraced progressive, socialist-adjacent liberation theology and intervened in political developments in Argentina, for example. He was orthodox and “uncompromising” on issues related to the right to life (euthanasia, the death penalty, and abortion) and on the role of women in the church, and advocated for clergy to embrace austerity and humility. And yet he was known to take unorthodox approaches to his ministry: advocating for the poor and the oppressed, and expressing openness to other religions in Argentina. He would bring that mix of views to his papacy. The following decade would see the Church undergo few changes in theological or doctrinal teachings, and yet it still appeared as though it was dramatically breaking with the past. That duality was in part because Francis was essentially both a conservative and a liberal, by American standards, at the same time, as Catholic writer James T. Keane argued in 2021. Francis was anti-abortion, critical of gender theory, opposed to ordaining women, and opposed to marriage for same-sex couples, while also welcoming the LGBTQ community, fiercely criticizing capitalism, unabashedly defending immigrants, opposing the death penalty, and advocating for environmentalism and care for the planet. That was how Francis functioned as a bridge between the traditionalism of his predecessors and a Church able to embrace modernity. And that’s also why he had so many critics: He was both too liberal and radical, and not progressive or bold enough. Francis used the Church’s unchanging foundational teachings and beliefs to respond to the crises of the 21st century and to consistently push for a “both-and” approach to social issues, endorsing “conservative”-coded teachings while adding on more focus to social justice issues that hadn’t been the traditionally associated with the church. That’s the approach he took when critiquing consumerism, modern capitalism, and “throwaway culture,” for example, employing the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life to attack abortion rights, promote environmentalism, and criticize neo-liberal economics. None of those issues required dramatic changes to the Church’s religious or theological teachings. But they did involve moving the church beyond older debates — such as abortion, contraception, and marriage — and into other moral quandaries: economics, immigration, war, and climate change. And he spoke plainly about these debates in public, as when he responded, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about LGBTQ Catholics or said he wishes that hell is “empty.” Still, he reinforced that softer, more inquisitive and humble church tone with restructuring and reforms within the church bureaucracy — essentially setting the church up for a continued march along this path. Nearly 80 percent of the cardinals who are eligible to vote in a papal conclave were appointed by Francis — some 108 of 135 members of the College of Cardinals who can vote, per the Vatican itself. Most don’t align on any consistent ideological spectrum, having vastly different beliefs about the role of the Church, how the Church’s internal workings should operate, and what the Church’s social stances should be — that’s partially why it’s risky to read into and interpret projections about “wings” or ideological “factions” among the cardinal-electors as if they are a parliament or house of Congress. There will naturally be speculation, given who Francis appointed as cardinals, that his successor will be non-European and less traditional. But as Francis himself showed through his papacy, the church has the benefit of time and taking the long view on social issues. He reminded Catholics that concern for the poor and oppressed must be just as central to the Church’s presence in the world as any age-old culture war issue. And to try to apply to popes and the Church the political labels and sets of beliefs we use in America is pointless.

Grassroots activists who took on corruption and corporate power share 2025 Goldman prize

Seven winners of environmental prize include Amazonian river campaigner and Tunisian who fought against organised waste traffickingIndigenous river campaigner from Peru honouredGrassroots activists who helped jail corrupt officials and obtain personhood rights for a sacred Amazonian river are among this year’s winners of the world’s most prestigious environmental prize.The community campaigns led by the seven 2025 Goldman prize winners underscore the courage and tenacity of local activists willing to confront the toxic mix of corporate power, regulatory failures and political corruption that is fuelling biodiversity collapse, water shortages, deadly air pollution and the climate emergency. Continue reading...

Grassroots activists who helped jail corrupt officials and obtain personhood rights for a sacred Amazonian river are among this year’s winners of the world’s most prestigious environmental prize.The community campaigns led by the seven 2025 Goldman prize winners underscore the courage and tenacity of local activists willing to confront the toxic mix of corporate power, regulatory failures and political corruption that is fuelling biodiversity collapse, water shortages, deadly air pollution and the climate emergency.This year’s recipients include Semia Gharbi, a scientist and environmental educator from Tunisia, who took on an organised waste trafficking network that led to more than 40 arrests, including 26 Tunisian officials and 16 Italians with ties to the illegal trade.Semia Gharbi campaigning in Tunisia. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeGharbi, 57, headed a public campaign demanding accountability after an Italian company was found to have shipped hundreds of containers of household garbage to Tunisia to dump in its overfilled landfill sites, rather than the recyclable plastic it had declared it was shipping.Gharbi lobbied lawmakers, compiled dossiers for UN experts and helped organise media coverage in both countries. Eventually, 6,000 tonnes of illegally exported household waste was shipped back to Italy in February 2022, and the scandal spurred the EU to close some loopholes governing international waste shipping.Not far away in the Canary Islands, Carlos Mallo Molina helped lead another sophisticated effort to prevent the construction of a large recreational boat and ferry terminal on the island of Tenerife that threatened to damage Spain’s most important marine reserve.Carlos Mallo Molina. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThe tourism gravy train can seem impossible to derail, but in 2018 Mallo swapped his career as a civil engineer to stop the sprawling Fonsalía port, which threatened the 170,000-acre biodiverse protected area that provides vital habitat for endangered sea turtles, whales, giant squid and blue sharks.As with Gharbi in Tunisia, education played a big role in the campaign’s success and included developing a virtual scuba dive into the threatened marine areas and a children’s book about a sea turtle searching for seagrass in the Canary Islands. After three years of pressure backed by international environmental groups, divers and residents, the government cancelled construction of the port, safeguarding the only whale heritage site in European territorial waters.“It’s been a tough year for both people and the planet,” said Jennifer Goldman Wallis, vice-president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation. “There’s so much that worries us, stresses us, outrages us, and keeps us divided … these environmental leaders and teachers – and the global environmental community that supports them – are the antidote.”For the past 36 years, the Goldman prize has honoured environmental defenders from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions, recognising their commitment and achievements in the face of seemingly insurmountable hurdles. To date, 233 winners from 98 nations have been awarded the prize. Many have gone on to hold positions in governments, as heads of state, nonprofit leaders, and as Nobel prize laureates.Three Goldman recipients have been killed, including the 2015 winner from Honduras, the Indigenous Lenca leader Berta Cáceres, whose death in 2016 was orchestrated by executives of an internationally financed dam company whose project she helped stall.Environmental and land rights defenders often persist in drawn-out efforts to secure clean water and air for their communities and future generations – despite facing threats including online harassment, bogus criminal charges, and sometimes physical violence. More than 2,100 land and environmental defenders were killed globally between 2012 and 2023, according to an observatory run by the charity Global Witness.Latin America remains the most dangerous place to defend the environment but a range of repressive tactics are increasingly being used to silence activists across Asia, the US, the UK and the EU.In the US, Laurene Allen was recognised for her extraordinary leadership, which culminated in a plastics plant being closed in 2024 after two decades of leaking toxic forever chemicals into the air, soil and water supplies in the small town of Merrimack, New Hampshire. The 62-year-old social worker turned water protector developed the town’s local campaign into a statewide and national network to address Pfas contamination, helping persuade the Biden administration to establish the first federal drinking water standard for forever chemicals.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionLaurene Allen. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThree of this year’s Goldman recipients were involved in battles to save two rivers thousands of miles apart – in Peru and Albania – which both led to landmark victories.Besjana Guri and Olsi Nika not only helped stop construction of a hydroelectric dam on the 167-mile Vjosa River, but their decade-long campaign led to the Albanian government declaring it a wild river national park.Guri, 37, a social worker, and Nika, 39, a biologist and ecologist, garnered support from scientists, lawyers, EU parliamentarians and celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio, for the new national park – the first in Europe to protect a wild river. This historic designation protects the Vjosa and its three tributaries, which are among the last remaining free-flowing undammed rivers in Europe.In Peru, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, 56, led the Indigenous Kukama women’s association to a landmark court victory that granted the 1,000-mile Marañón River legal personhood, with the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination.Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThe Marañón River and its tributaries are the life veins of Peru’s tropical rainforests and support 75% of its tropical wetlands – but also flow through lands containing some of the South American country’s biggest oil and gas fields. The court ordered the Peruvian government to stop violating the rivers’ rights, and take immediate action to prevent future oil spills.The Kukama people, who believe their ancestors reside on the riverbed, were recognised by the court as stewards of the great Marañón.This year’s oldest winner was Batmunkh Luvsandash from Mongolia, an 81-year-old former electrical engineer whose anti-mining activism has led to 200,000 acres of the East Gobi desert being protected from the world’s insatiable appetite for metal minerals.

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