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What Happened to Cow 13039?

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Friday, April 12, 2024

Photographs by Justin Maxon for The AtlanticThis winter, I attended a livestock auction on California’s remote northern coast. Ranchers sat on plywood bleachers warming their hands as the auctioneer mumble-chanted and handlers flushed cows into a viewing paddock one by one. Most of the cows were hale animals, careering in and cantering out. But one little brown cow moved tentatively, rheum slicking her left eye and a denim patch covering her right.That night, I went to take a closer look at her along with a pair of animal-welfare investigators and some of the traders who had participated in the auction. Cow 13039, as her ear tag identified her, was segregated with other sick or injured cattle in a pen near the viewing paddock. A farmhand led her into a squeeze chute, so that I could see her udders and feel her bony sides and scratch her head.The denim patch had been glued straight onto her right orbital rim. I helped work up the patch’s edge; when a rancher finally ripped it off, her eyeball swelled from its socket, tethered to her skull by muscle and sinew and skin. Unable to focus, the eye rotated wildly. It had ruptured, its wet inner contents extruding from the broken membrane; blood and green pus suppurated from its edges, smelling of copper and must. The cow had “cancer eye,” the rancher who had purchased her guessed, the most common bovine cancer.Cow 13039, the auction affidavit showed, came from one of the country’s preeminent dairy farms: Alexandre Family Farm, a nationwide supplier to stores including Whole Foods. Alexandre cows are pasture-raised, and the operation is validated by California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), Certified Humane, and the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Its owners, Blake and Stephanie Alexandre, won the Organic Farmer of the Year award a few years back and have been profiled by The New York Times. For $8, you can buy about a third of a gallon of its top-shelf milk.  [Annie Lowrey: Radical vegans are trying to change your diet]The Alexandres sold dozens of grievously ill and injured cows at auction over the past four years, according to a sprawling whistleblower report published by the nonprofit advocacy group Farm Forward. On the farm, the report charges, mismanagement led to “the extreme suffering of hundreds of cows.” One whistleblower contacted the local sheriff and the United States Department of Agriculture, among other organizations, to report animal-welfare violations, but without results. The report is based on hundreds of location- and date-tagged photographs and videos collected over a four-year period by people who worked either with or for Alexandre Family Farm, as well as on affidavits, veterinary reports, and interviews. (Justin Maxon for The Atlantic) Alexandre Family Farm really is a family farm, run by the Alexandres and staffed by some of their children, on multiple sites in Del Norte and Humboldt Counties. Blake and Stephanie met while studying at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the early 1980s, and from there built a pasture-raised empire. Alexandre’s 4,500 cows, which give birth to 4,000 calves a year, make it one of the largest organic dairy farms in the country.In March, I visited the farm to ask the Alexandres about the report. In that conversation, they questioned the motivations of the whistleblowers, speculating that they were disgruntled former employees and associates, and ventured that some of the photographs might have been staged or doctored. They described some of the depicted incidents as false, implausible, or exaggerated, while saying that others were tragedies or accidents to which they had responded with corrective action. “Stuff happens,” Blake told me, as we sat at his kitchen table. “Employees make mistakes. We make mistakes. We try to fix them when we become aware of them.”Alexandre is not just any farm; it is esteemed by chefs, politicians, and advocates for humane agriculture, and consumers seek out its products. The report implicates not just the farm but also the certification programs that farms like it use to assure consumers that the food they are eating is ethically sourced and cruelty-free. And it implicates the government, which does little to protect the welfare of farm animals. Laws are lax and enforcement is even more lax, despite widespread public support for animal protection.When I met Cow 13039, a dying animal sold to the highest bidder, I thought that the system had failed her. But in reporting this story, I found something far more disconcerting. No system had failed her, because there was no system to protect her in the first place.one thing is not in dispute: Alexandre cows live a life far better than those on the mega-operations that produce most of the country’s milk. They eat grass and hay instead of pellets made from corn and soybeans. They have daily access to pasture and live in herds, rather than being isolated in stalls. (Cows are sociable animals—personality-wise, they’re a lot like dogs.)The promise of happy, healthy cows has fueled the company’s success. The farm won an award from Whole Foods in 2020 and is one of only six Certified Humane bovine-dairy operations in the United States. The Alexandres have become outspoken advocates of back-to-the-earth farming; Blake was appointed to a state agricultural committee and is now on a California regenerative-farming commission.But many Alexandre cows are neither happy nor healthy, the Farm Forward report concludes. “Most of the whistleblower or undercover investigations that are done on animal farm operations are a couple of videos … maybe one whistleblower coming forward,” Andrew deCoriolis, Farm Forward’s executive director, told me. “The thing that makes this unique is the totality of the evidence.”[Annie Lowrey: What’s different about the Impossible Burger?]The details in the report are horrifying: a cow with mastitis having her teat cut off with a knife. A cow sent to auction with a spinal-cord injury that had left her incontinent and partly paralyzed. A live, alert cow being dragged by a skid steer. A cow that could not walk being left in a field for two weeks before being euthanized. Cows sprayed with a caustic combination of mineral oil and diesel fuel to tamp down on a fly infestation (which, a whistleblower says in the report, they were told to lie about to an inspector).At their farm, in a written response, and in a follow-up conversation, the Alexandres described such incidents as improbable, given the farm’s protocols. “Cutting teats off” has “never been a practice on our dairy farms,” they told me. They said that injured cows received medical treatment and when necessary were moved safely, without dragging. A farm worker had mixed red diesel into a fly spray, they told me, because that made it easier to see where the spray had been applied, and the farm stopped the practice when management learned about it.Former employees said that sick cows were regularly denied antibiotics for mastitis and hoof infections, at least in part to maintain their milk as organic—a charge corroborated by an Alexandre farm worker not involved in the report. (Once a cow is given antibiotics, her milk must be sold as conventional for the duration of her life.) The farm has “natural” treatments that “allow us to not need synthetic antibiotics,” Vanessa Nunes, Blake and Stephanie’s daughter and a dairy manager at the operation, told me. “We don’t need to give an antibiotic for mastitis. We have a tincture that we’ll use.” (Mastitis can be debilitating when not treated with antibiotics.)Whistleblowers also said cows with infections had their eyes packed with salt and had denim patches glued to their skulls. The farm responded that cows with pink eye were treated using a saline solution with cod-liver oil, and sometimes with apple cider vinegar. The farm said that the denim patch was a “gold standard” method to cure pink eye.Jim Reynolds, a large-animal veterinarian, told me that salt would be “horrible” to use in any animal’s eye and that patches had no medical benefit, and could worsen an infection by trapping dirt and irritating the eye. “I don’t know that it’s been recommended since the 1980s,” he said. He told me that the farm’s treatment for eye infections was “nonsense.”   Dairy cows generally have their horn buds destroyed with a caustic paste or a hot iron in the first weeks of life. But the report describes an incident in which Alexandre let hundreds of calves grow horns and then dehorned them as adults with a sawzall, a handheld construction tool. Horns are innervated, like fingers, not inert, like fingernails; the cows were not given anesthetic. The Alexandres said that the employees cut off only the tips of the cows’ horns, which are not sensitive, to prevent them from injuring people or other animals, and that it was a onetime event. Left: The auction yard where Alexandre Family Farm cows are sold. Right: Cow 13039, with the denim patch over her eye. (Justin Maxon for The Atlantic; courtesy of the author) Mismanagement at least once led to mass death, the report charges, when hay deliveries ran late. The whistleblowers said the animals were so famished by the time the feed truck arrived that they stampeded, and many were trampled to death or needed to be euthanized soon after. The Alexandres described this as a “tragic accident” involving 30 cows who were without food for only a few hours after an equipment breakdown; the farm said it had implemented new protocols to prevent anything similar from happening again.The farm also contested the notion that it would send ailing cows to auction, rather than euthanizing them; the auction facility would not accept such animals, the Alexandres told me, something Leland Mora, the head of the auction house, confirmed. Still, on a random Wednesday, I went to that auction. And I met an Alexandre cow with what looked like metastatic cancer, her eyeball swelling out of her head.Most American consumers abhor animal cruelty and support laws preventing it. In a recent ASPCA survey, three-quarters or more of respondents said they were concerned about farm-animal welfare and supported a ban on new factory farms. Yet cruelty, even egregious cruelty, against farm animals is often legal, provided that the suffering is “necessary” and “justifiable” by the need for farms to produce food, David Rosengard of the Animal Legal Defense Fund told me.To determine what is “necessary” and “justifiable,” lawyers and juries often look at what farms are already doing, what agricultural schools are teaching, and what Big Ag publications recommend. In effect, I gathered, animal-welfare law is slanted toward the needs of farms much more than the experience of animals.Even gratuitously abusive treatment often goes unpunished. Local authorities have jurisdiction over most animal-cruelty complaints. But cows, pigs, and chickens are not great at picking up the telephone to call those authorities. Animal-rights activists are able to perform investigations only sporadically, and at significant legal risk to themselves. Farm workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, rarely report violations.[Peter Singer: The meat paradox]Plus, as I learned from speaking with the Alexandres and interviewing the whistleblowers, agricultural communities are tight-knit. The people involved in this story have long, complicated histories with one another—personal grievances, financial entanglements, legal disputes. The whistleblowers declined to be quoted by name, fearing for their livelihoods, save for one, a rancher named Ray Christie, who has bought hundreds if not thousands of Alexandre cattle. In 2009, after a raid, he was put on two-year probation for possessing cockfighting instruments; in 2018, he was charged with felony animal cruelty himself over the state of his cows. (He recently accepted a plea bargain, agreeing to misdemeanor littering charges for improperly disposing of animal carcasses.) Given the personalities involved, I focused on the documentary evidence about the cows themselves.The condition of some Alexandre cattle spurred one of the whistleblowers to try to get law enforcement involved. In January 2021, the whistleblower told Humboldt County Sheriff William F. Honsal that mistreated Alexandre cattle were being sold at auction, and sent him photos and videos of the cows. The sheriff responded, saying that he would send a deputy to the auction house; the sheriff’s office later referred the whistleblower to animal control. (The sheriff did not respond to requests for comment, and the Alexandres told me they had never been visited by a police officer.)The whistleblower also attempted to involve a local state veterinarian, Meghan Mott. Mott is a mandated reporter of animal abuse, and frequently attended auctions at the facility I visited. Why hadn’t she intervened? I could not reach her for comment, but Steve Lyle, the director of public affairs at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, told me that the head state veterinarian “tries to convey the idea of ‘if you see something, say something’ to staff.” But he explained that state veterinarians are functionally epidemiologists, checking for conditions like influenza. “If an animal is sick and the cause is not one of the emergency or regulated diseases requiring CDFA action,” care would be the responsibility of the animal’s owner, and negligence the responsibility of law enforcement.Finally, the whistleblower went to the USDA. The agency has regulatory authority over American farms, but does not perform animal-welfare inspections. “There’s a regulatory system in place to make sure that if we eat a cheeseburger from McDonald’s, we’re not going to get E. coli,” Amanda Hitt, the founder of the Food Integrity Campaign at the Government Accountability Project, told me. “That doesn’t happen in animal welfare.”That said, the USDA does administer the National Organic Program, which mandates that animals have “sufficient nutrition,” are given “medicines to minimize pain, stress and suffering,” and are “fit for transport” when they are sent to slaughter. But the NOP is mainly aimed at environmental stewardship. Its humane standards are low, and sometimes counterproductive. The program’s restrictions on the use of antibiotics, for instance—intended to prevent farmers from providing the drugs prophylactically, which facilitates overcrowding and contributes to antibiotic resistance—leads farmers to withhold medicine from sick animals, too. That’s particularly cruel for newborns and recently delivered mothers, who are especially vulnerable to infection. (Other countries do things differently: The European Union allows organic dairy cows to get antibiotics up to three times a year.)  Ag agencies don’t make great cops. The NOP does not audit farms directly, instead relying on third-party certifiers that farms themselves sometimes pick, accommodating widespread fraud. California Certified Organic Farmers performs surprise visits, tests for pesticide residue, does intensive paperwork audits, and sometimes stakes out farms to make sure animals are really living outside, April Vasquez, CCOF’s chief certification officer, told me. But it is also a trade group that promotes organic agriculture and financially supports at-risk farms; its board is made up of organic farmers. Stephanie Alexandre sat on it for years.The USDA passed the whistleblower’s complaint to the CDFA, which sent a state special investigator to the Alexandre farm sites in May 2023. A USDA document obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the investigation found no wrongdoing. Talking about fraud in the organic program with a USDA officer, the whistleblower became incensed on behalf of the cows and the consumers shelling out for supposedly high-quality products. “You got these single-parent homes, the moms, the young couples, struggling with all the inflation going up,” the whistleblower said. “They’re going to the store, spending their money on this stuff, thinking it’s the best thing for their kids. And it’s all bullshit!” A compost pile with cow carcasses at Alexandre Family Farm (Justin Maxon for The Atlantic) The regulatory void around animal welfare has been filled by dedicated nonprofits offering their own certifications for farms meeting high standards. The godparent of this private system is Adele Douglass Jolley, a former employee of the American Humane Association. In 2000, while touring pig farms in the U.K., Jolley learned about the animal-welfare verification program run by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She cashed out her 401(k) to set up a similar program stateside.Now called Certified Humane, it gives its seal of approval to hundreds of operations caring for 417 million animals in 25 countries. Auditors ensure that farms are meeting its standards, which are set by an independent panel of experts. Farms pay a monthly fee, and they (or the companies packaging the food they produce) get to put the Certified Humane logo on their products—and charge consumers more. But the whistleblower report indicates that Alexandre was far out of compliance. Why hadn’t Certified Humane caught the cruelty?Perhaps because Alexandre does meet the program’s general standards. Its cows live in herds on pasture; they eat grass and hay; they are not given preventive antibiotics. Perhaps because the private certification system is based on trust and support as much as verification and skepticism. Audits generally happen only once a year, in consultation with the farms in question. Farmers sometimes know their auditors. Producers found to be out of compliance are given a chance to correct the problems.Certified Humane provided Alexandre with its stamp of approval in early 2021. (Some of the incidents in the whistleblower report predate the farm’s relationship with the nonprofit.) In 2022, Certified Humane received a complaint from one of the whistleblowers about cruelty on the farm. The complainant had taken photographs of two cows they said had eye injuries, Mimi Stein, the group’s executive director, told me in an interview. “These were some very strange pictures,” she told me. “They were not high quality.”[Read: ‘Plant-based’ has lost all meaning]When Stein called the Alexandres to ask what had happened, they were “upset” and “passionate,” she told me. They said one cow had had an eye damaged after sale and the other was “fine, as much as anybody could tell.” Stein’s sense was that the Alexandres “would have taken care of them and euthanized them on site” had they been severely injured or ill, as Certified Humane requires.  The organization followed up with an in-person audit, which found no problems. Basically, Stein told me, “if animals were that damaged, chances are they wouldn’t sell them, because they wouldn’t have any value. It just wouldn’t make any sense.”  Alexandre also touts its certification from the Regenerative Organic Alliance, which holds farms to even higher animal-welfare standards. Elizabeth Whitlow, its executive director, told me that the incidents and practices depicted in the report would represent gross violations of its rules. But I was surprised to learn that only a small share of Alexandre cows are actually certified by the group.You couldn’t blame a consumer for being bewildered—about what is going on with Alexandre products or any others bearing a claim about the conditions in which the animals are raised. There are more than a dozen humane certifiers, some with rigorous standards, some that are just industry fronts. “It has this patina of a Yelp review: five stars for this processor!” Hitt, the founder of the Food Integrity Campaign, told me. “This is a certification to make you feel better about eating a certain product. But it has no basis in any kind of reality.”In addition to certification logos, products feature wholesome-sounding but hard-to-parse terms: free-roaming, naturally grown, ethically raised. For some, such as free-range, the USDA sets a standard and asks companies for evidence of compliance. But enforcement is patchy, and the USDA has in the past accepted applications with little or no substantiation. For others, the USDA sets no standards at all. Food manufacturers know they can charge more for products that consumers think are ethical, Dena Jones, who directs the farmed-animal program at the Animal Welfare Institute, told me. So companies just “start slapping” words and logos on things.The USDA, to its credit, is tightening up its rules and enforcement. Yet dairy will still “fall through the cracks,” Jones told me. The labels on milk and yogurt are the purview of the Food and Drug Administration, not the USDA. And the FDA holds that it has no role in validating animal-raising claims. As far as the federal government is concerned, when it comes to milk and the cows that produce it, anyone can claim almost anything. (Justin Maxon for The Atlantic) The Alexandre farm I toured with the family occupies a damp flat between the Pacific Ocean and an old-growth redwood forest. Hundreds of fat, calm cows chewed emerald grass and slept in the mist alongside a herd of wild elk. Heavily pregnant cows idled in a spacious barn, overseen 24 hours a day by a herdsman. Younger cows rushed up to meet me.The farm appeared to provide as close to perfect conditions as possible, I thought. Yet dairy is hard—that was something I heard again and again while reporting this piece. On ranches, beef cattle live outdoors, mostly undisturbed, before being moved to feedlots; mothers and calves spend months together. In contrast, dairy cows are repeatedly inseminated or bred, calved, and separated from their babies. They are milked twice a day. And when their bodies begin to give out, they keep getting milked until they are euthanized or slaughtered.Jorie Chadbourne, a retired brand inspector (a government official who verifies an animal’s ownership at the point of sale or slaughter), told me the Alexandre cows she had encountered over the years were no better or worse than those from other organic farms in the region. But, she added, at auction, organic cows were usually in worse shape than conventional cows, because of the program’s medication restrictions: “It is like an older person, at the end of their life, not having medicine to comfort them or make them well.” (She told me the antibiotic rules are why she raises her own animals conventionally.)The best certifiers, like Certified Humane, are great at validating farms’ general conditions. But, as Mimi Stein noted, the program certifies the farm—not the animal. Cows get sold off. Cruel incidents happen. And many other certifiers are less rigorous.[Read: The evidence for a vegan diet]What is a consumer who wants to support a gentle, green system of agriculture to do? DeCoriolis of Farm Forward had a blunt answer: Give up dairy. “As a consumer, you’re just playing roulette,” he told me. Yet the overwhelming majority of American consumers are unwilling to give up milk or cheese for ethical reasons. What they are willing to do is support stricter rules for agricultural producers and pay more for milk and cheese from farms that treat their animals well. The country is failing to provide those consumers with a reliable and navigable system. That’s a policy problem, and a solvable one.At a minimum, the USDA should require third-party certification of animal-welfare and animal-raising claims, and apply strict regulations to certifiers: preventing conflicts of interest, requiring surprise inspections, and cracking down on rubber-stamping of industry norms. To meet American consumers’ more ambitious demands, Congress should create a farmed-animal welfare standard and an agency separate from the USDA to enforce it, akin to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.Such changes would improve the welfare of billions of animals in our food system. Yet any changes would be too late for one. In the end, nobody stepped in to aid Cow 13039—not law enforcement, not the state veterinarians, not the auction employees. Alexandre Family Farm gave her vitamins and an eye patch, Nunes told me. They should have sold her sooner, she said. Cow 13039 was ailing. And ailing cows are not worth much.They are worth something, though. At auction, Cow 13039 got 10 cents a pound. For $119, less auction fees, she spent the final moments of her life not grazing on pasture with her herd but isolated, hungry, terrified, and in pain. Ray Christie’s brother, also a rancher, had purchased her. But she was too sick to have her eye excised. At the slaughterhouse, her carcass would have been condemned.The morning after I met her, a farmhand shot her between her blighted eyes.Gisela Salim-Peyer contributed reporting to this story.

The truth behind some of the most expensive “certified humane” milk in the country

Photographs by Justin Maxon for The Atlantic

This winter, I attended a livestock auction on California’s remote northern coast. Ranchers sat on plywood bleachers warming their hands as the auctioneer mumble-chanted and handlers flushed cows into a viewing paddock one by one. Most of the cows were hale animals, careering in and cantering out. But one little brown cow moved tentatively, rheum slicking her left eye and a denim patch covering her right.

That night, I went to take a closer look at her along with a pair of animal-welfare investigators and some of the traders who had participated in the auction. Cow 13039, as her ear tag identified her, was segregated with other sick or injured cattle in a pen near the viewing paddock. A farmhand led her into a squeeze chute, so that I could see her udders and feel her bony sides and scratch her head.

The denim patch had been glued straight onto her right orbital rim. I helped work up the patch’s edge; when a rancher finally ripped it off, her eyeball swelled from its socket, tethered to her skull by muscle and sinew and skin. Unable to focus, the eye rotated wildly. It had ruptured, its wet inner contents extruding from the broken membrane; blood and green pus suppurated from its edges, smelling of copper and must. The cow had “cancer eye,” the rancher who had purchased her guessed, the most common bovine cancer.

Cow 13039, the auction affidavit showed, came from one of the country’s preeminent dairy farms: Alexandre Family Farm, a nationwide supplier to stores including Whole Foods. Alexandre cows are pasture-raised, and the operation is validated by California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), Certified Humane, and the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Its owners, Blake and Stephanie Alexandre, won the Organic Farmer of the Year award a few years back and have been profiled by The New York Times. For $8, you can buy about a third of a gallon of its top-shelf milk.  

[Annie Lowrey: Radical vegans are trying to change your diet]

The Alexandres sold dozens of grievously ill and injured cows at auction over the past four years, according to a sprawling whistleblower report published by the nonprofit advocacy group Farm Forward. On the farm, the report charges, mismanagement led to “the extreme suffering of hundreds of cows.” One whistleblower contacted the local sheriff and the United States Department of Agriculture, among other organizations, to report animal-welfare violations, but without results. The report is based on hundreds of location- and date-tagged photographs and videos collected over a four-year period by people who worked either with or for Alexandre Family Farm, as well as on affidavits, veterinary reports, and interviews.

view of Alexandre farms
(Justin Maxon for The Atlantic)

Alexandre Family Farm really is a family farm, run by the Alexandres and staffed by some of their children, on multiple sites in Del Norte and Humboldt Counties. Blake and Stephanie met while studying at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the early 1980s, and from there built a pasture-raised empire. Alexandre’s 4,500 cows, which give birth to 4,000 calves a year, make it one of the largest organic dairy farms in the country.

In March, I visited the farm to ask the Alexandres about the report. In that conversation, they questioned the motivations of the whistleblowers, speculating that they were disgruntled former employees and associates, and ventured that some of the photographs might have been staged or doctored. They described some of the depicted incidents as false, implausible, or exaggerated, while saying that others were tragedies or accidents to which they had responded with corrective action. “Stuff happens,” Blake told me, as we sat at his kitchen table. “Employees make mistakes. We make mistakes. We try to fix them when we become aware of them.”

Alexandre is not just any farm; it is esteemed by chefs, politicians, and advocates for humane agriculture, and consumers seek out its products. The report implicates not just the farm but also the certification programs that farms like it use to assure consumers that the food they are eating is ethically sourced and cruelty-free. And it implicates the government, which does little to protect the welfare of farm animals. Laws are lax and enforcement is even more lax, despite widespread public support for animal protection.

When I met Cow 13039, a dying animal sold to the highest bidder, I thought that the system had failed her. But in reporting this story, I found something far more disconcerting. No system had failed her, because there was no system to protect her in the first place.

one thing is not in dispute: Alexandre cows live a life far better than those on the mega-operations that produce most of the country’s milk. They eat grass and hay instead of pellets made from corn and soybeans. They have daily access to pasture and live in herds, rather than being isolated in stalls. (Cows are sociable animals—personality-wise, they’re a lot like dogs.)

The promise of happy, healthy cows has fueled the company’s success. The farm won an award from Whole Foods in 2020 and is one of only six Certified Humane bovine-dairy operations in the United States. The Alexandres have become outspoken advocates of back-to-the-earth farming; Blake was appointed to a state agricultural committee and is now on a California regenerative-farming commission.

But many Alexandre cows are neither happy nor healthy, the Farm Forward report concludes. “Most of the whistleblower or undercover investigations that are done on animal farm operations are a couple of videos … maybe one whistleblower coming forward,” Andrew deCoriolis, Farm Forward’s executive director, told me. “The thing that makes this unique is the totality of the evidence.”

[Annie Lowrey: What’s different about the Impossible Burger?]

The details in the report are horrifying: a cow with mastitis having her teat cut off with a knife. A cow sent to auction with a spinal-cord injury that had left her incontinent and partly paralyzed. A live, alert cow being dragged by a skid steer. A cow that could not walk being left in a field for two weeks before being euthanized. Cows sprayed with a caustic combination of mineral oil and diesel fuel to tamp down on a fly infestation (which, a whistleblower says in the report, they were told to lie about to an inspector).

At their farm, in a written response, and in a follow-up conversation, the Alexandres described such incidents as improbable, given the farm’s protocols. “Cutting teats off” has “never been a practice on our dairy farms,” they told me. They said that injured cows received medical treatment and when necessary were moved safely, without dragging. A farm worker had mixed red diesel into a fly spray, they told me, because that made it easier to see where the spray had been applied, and the farm stopped the practice when management learned about it.

Former employees said that sick cows were regularly denied antibiotics for mastitis and hoof infections, at least in part to maintain their milk as organic—a charge corroborated by an Alexandre farm worker not involved in the report. (Once a cow is given antibiotics, her milk must be sold as conventional for the duration of her life.) The farm has “natural” treatments that “allow us to not need synthetic antibiotics,” Vanessa Nunes, Blake and Stephanie’s daughter and a dairy manager at the operation, told me. “We don’t need to give an antibiotic for mastitis. We have a tincture that we’ll use.” (Mastitis can be debilitating when not treated with antibiotics.)

Whistleblowers also said cows with infections had their eyes packed with salt and had denim patches glued to their skulls. The farm responded that cows with pink eye were treated using a saline solution with cod-liver oil, and sometimes with apple cider vinegar. The farm said that the denim patch was a “gold standard” method to cure pink eye.

Jim Reynolds, a large-animal veterinarian, told me that salt would be “horrible” to use in any animal’s eye and that patches had no medical benefit, and could worsen an infection by trapping dirt and irritating the eye. “I don’t know that it’s been recommended since the 1980s,” he said. He told me that the farm’s treatment for eye infections was “nonsense.”   

Dairy cows generally have their horn buds destroyed with a caustic paste or a hot iron in the first weeks of life. But the report describes an incident in which Alexandre let hundreds of calves grow horns and then dehorned them as adults with a sawzall, a handheld construction tool. Horns are innervated, like fingers, not inert, like fingernails; the cows were not given anesthetic. The Alexandres said that the employees cut off only the tips of the cows’ horns, which are not sensitive, to prevent them from injuring people or other animals, and that it was a onetime event.

cow 13039 at an auction house
Left: The auction yard where Alexandre Family Farm cows are sold. Right: Cow 13039, with the denim patch over her eye. (Justin Maxon for The Atlantic; courtesy of the author)

Mismanagement at least once led to mass death, the report charges, when hay deliveries ran late. The whistleblowers said the animals were so famished by the time the feed truck arrived that they stampeded, and many were trampled to death or needed to be euthanized soon after. The Alexandres described this as a “tragic accident” involving 30 cows who were without food for only a few hours after an equipment breakdown; the farm said it had implemented new protocols to prevent anything similar from happening again.

The farm also contested the notion that it would send ailing cows to auction, rather than euthanizing them; the auction facility would not accept such animals, the Alexandres told me, something Leland Mora, the head of the auction house, confirmed. Still, on a random Wednesday, I went to that auction. And I met an Alexandre cow with what looked like metastatic cancer, her eyeball swelling out of her head.

Most American consumers abhor animal cruelty and support laws preventing it. In a recent ASPCA survey, three-quarters or more of respondents said they were concerned about farm-animal welfare and supported a ban on new factory farms. Yet cruelty, even egregious cruelty, against farm animals is often legal, provided that the suffering is “necessary” and “justifiable” by the need for farms to produce food, David Rosengard of the Animal Legal Defense Fund told me.

To determine what is “necessary” and “justifiable,” lawyers and juries often look at what farms are already doing, what agricultural schools are teaching, and what Big Ag publications recommend. In effect, I gathered, animal-welfare law is slanted toward the needs of farms much more than the experience of animals.

Even gratuitously abusive treatment often goes unpunished. Local authorities have jurisdiction over most animal-cruelty complaints. But cows, pigs, and chickens are not great at picking up the telephone to call those authorities. Animal-rights activists are able to perform investigations only sporadically, and at significant legal risk to themselves. Farm workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, rarely report violations.

[Peter Singer: The meat paradox]

Plus, as I learned from speaking with the Alexandres and interviewing the whistleblowers, agricultural communities are tight-knit. The people involved in this story have long, complicated histories with one another—personal grievances, financial entanglements, legal disputes. The whistleblowers declined to be quoted by name, fearing for their livelihoods, save for one, a rancher named Ray Christie, who has bought hundreds if not thousands of Alexandre cattle. In 2009, after a raid, he was put on two-year probation for possessing cockfighting instruments; in 2018, he was charged with felony animal cruelty himself over the state of his cows. (He recently accepted a plea bargain, agreeing to misdemeanor littering charges for improperly disposing of animal carcasses.) Given the personalities involved, I focused on the documentary evidence about the cows themselves.

The condition of some Alexandre cattle spurred one of the whistleblowers to try to get law enforcement involved. In January 2021, the whistleblower told Humboldt County Sheriff William F. Honsal that mistreated Alexandre cattle were being sold at auction, and sent him photos and videos of the cows. The sheriff responded, saying that he would send a deputy to the auction house; the sheriff’s office later referred the whistleblower to animal control. (The sheriff did not respond to requests for comment, and the Alexandres told me they had never been visited by a police officer.)

The whistleblower also attempted to involve a local state veterinarian, Meghan Mott. Mott is a mandated reporter of animal abuse, and frequently attended auctions at the facility I visited. Why hadn’t she intervened? I could not reach her for comment, but Steve Lyle, the director of public affairs at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, told me that the head state veterinarian “tries to convey the idea of ‘if you see something, say something’ to staff.” But he explained that state veterinarians are functionally epidemiologists, checking for conditions like influenza. “If an animal is sick and the cause is not one of the emergency or regulated diseases requiring CDFA action,” care would be the responsibility of the animal’s owner, and negligence the responsibility of law enforcement.

Finally, the whistleblower went to the USDA. The agency has regulatory authority over American farms, but does not perform animal-welfare inspections. “There’s a regulatory system in place to make sure that if we eat a cheeseburger from McDonald’s, we’re not going to get E. coli,” Amanda Hitt, the founder of the Food Integrity Campaign at the Government Accountability Project, told me. “That doesn’t happen in animal welfare.”

That said, the USDA does administer the National Organic Program, which mandates that animals have “sufficient nutrition,” are given “medicines to minimize pain, stress and suffering,” and are “fit for transport” when they are sent to slaughter. But the NOP is mainly aimed at environmental stewardship. Its humane standards are low, and sometimes counterproductive. The program’s restrictions on the use of antibiotics, for instance—intended to prevent farmers from providing the drugs prophylactically, which facilitates overcrowding and contributes to antibiotic resistance—leads farmers to withhold medicine from sick animals, too. That’s particularly cruel for newborns and recently delivered mothers, who are especially vulnerable to infection. (Other countries do things differently: The European Union allows organic dairy cows to get antibiotics up to three times a year.)  

Ag agencies don’t make great cops. The NOP does not audit farms directly, instead relying on third-party certifiers that farms themselves sometimes pick, accommodating widespread fraud. California Certified Organic Farmers performs surprise visits, tests for pesticide residue, does intensive paperwork audits, and sometimes stakes out farms to make sure animals are really living outside, April Vasquez, CCOF’s chief certification officer, told me. But it is also a trade group that promotes organic agriculture and financially supports at-risk farms; its board is made up of organic farmers. Stephanie Alexandre sat on it for years.

The USDA passed the whistleblower’s complaint to the CDFA, which sent a state special investigator to the Alexandre farm sites in May 2023. A USDA document obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the investigation found no wrongdoing. Talking about fraud in the organic program with a USDA officer, the whistleblower became incensed on behalf of the cows and the consumers shelling out for supposedly high-quality products. “You got these single-parent homes, the moms, the young couples, struggling with all the inflation going up,” the whistleblower said. “They’re going to the store, spending their money on this stuff, thinking it’s the best thing for their kids. And it’s all bullshit!”

Compost pile at Alexandre Farms
A compost pile with cow carcasses at Alexandre Family Farm (Justin Maxon for The Atlantic)

The regulatory void around animal welfare has been filled by dedicated nonprofits offering their own certifications for farms meeting high standards. The godparent of this private system is Adele Douglass Jolley, a former employee of the American Humane Association. In 2000, while touring pig farms in the U.K., Jolley learned about the animal-welfare verification program run by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She cashed out her 401(k) to set up a similar program stateside.

Now called Certified Humane, it gives its seal of approval to hundreds of operations caring for 417 million animals in 25 countries. Auditors ensure that farms are meeting its standards, which are set by an independent panel of experts. Farms pay a monthly fee, and they (or the companies packaging the food they produce) get to put the Certified Humane logo on their products—and charge consumers more. But the whistleblower report indicates that Alexandre was far out of compliance. Why hadn’t Certified Humane caught the cruelty?

Perhaps because Alexandre does meet the program’s general standards. Its cows live in herds on pasture; they eat grass and hay; they are not given preventive antibiotics. Perhaps because the private certification system is based on trust and support as much as verification and skepticism. Audits generally happen only once a year, in consultation with the farms in question. Farmers sometimes know their auditors. Producers found to be out of compliance are given a chance to correct the problems.

Certified Humane provided Alexandre with its stamp of approval in early 2021. (Some of the incidents in the whistleblower report predate the farm’s relationship with the nonprofit.) In 2022, Certified Humane received a complaint from one of the whistleblowers about cruelty on the farm. The complainant had taken photographs of two cows they said had eye injuries, Mimi Stein, the group’s executive director, told me in an interview. “These were some very strange pictures,” she told me. “They were not high quality.”

[Read: ‘Plant-based’ has lost all meaning]

When Stein called the Alexandres to ask what had happened, they were “upset” and “passionate,” she told me. They said one cow had had an eye damaged after sale and the other was “fine, as much as anybody could tell.” Stein’s sense was that the Alexandres “would have taken care of them and euthanized them on site” had they been severely injured or ill, as Certified Humane requires.  

The organization followed up with an in-person audit, which found no problems. Basically, Stein told me, “if animals were that damaged, chances are they wouldn’t sell them, because they wouldn’t have any value. It just wouldn’t make any sense.”  

Alexandre also touts its certification from the Regenerative Organic Alliance, which holds farms to even higher animal-welfare standards. Elizabeth Whitlow, its executive director, told me that the incidents and practices depicted in the report would represent gross violations of its rules. But I was surprised to learn that only a small share of Alexandre cows are actually certified by the group.

You couldn’t blame a consumer for being bewildered—about what is going on with Alexandre products or any others bearing a claim about the conditions in which the animals are raised. There are more than a dozen humane certifiers, some with rigorous standards, some that are just industry fronts. “It has this patina of a Yelp review: five stars for this processor!” Hitt, the founder of the Food Integrity Campaign, told me. “This is a certification to make you feel better about eating a certain product. But it has no basis in any kind of reality.”

In addition to certification logos, products feature wholesome-sounding but hard-to-parse terms: free-roaming, naturally grown, ethically raised. For some, such as free-range, the USDA sets a standard and asks companies for evidence of compliance. But enforcement is patchy, and the USDA has in the past accepted applications with little or no substantiation. For others, the USDA sets no standards at all. Food manufacturers know they can charge more for products that consumers think are ethical, Dena Jones, who directs the farmed-animal program at the Animal Welfare Institute, told me. So companies just “start slapping” words and logos on things.

The USDA, to its credit, is tightening up its rules and enforcement. Yet dairy will still “fall through the cracks,” Jones told me. The labels on milk and yogurt are the purview of the Food and Drug Administration, not the USDA. And the FDA holds that it has no role in validating animal-raising claims. As far as the federal government is concerned, when it comes to milk and the cows that produce it, anyone can claim almost anything.

cows at Alexandre Farms
(Justin Maxon for The Atlantic)

The Alexandre farm I toured with the family occupies a damp flat between the Pacific Ocean and an old-growth redwood forest. Hundreds of fat, calm cows chewed emerald grass and slept in the mist alongside a herd of wild elk. Heavily pregnant cows idled in a spacious barn, overseen 24 hours a day by a herdsman. Younger cows rushed up to meet me.

The farm appeared to provide as close to perfect conditions as possible, I thought. Yet dairy is hard—that was something I heard again and again while reporting this piece. On ranches, beef cattle live outdoors, mostly undisturbed, before being moved to feedlots; mothers and calves spend months together. In contrast, dairy cows are repeatedly inseminated or bred, calved, and separated from their babies. They are milked twice a day. And when their bodies begin to give out, they keep getting milked until they are euthanized or slaughtered.

Jorie Chadbourne, a retired brand inspector (a government official who verifies an animal’s ownership at the point of sale or slaughter), told me the Alexandre cows she had encountered over the years were no better or worse than those from other organic farms in the region. But, she added, at auction, organic cows were usually in worse shape than conventional cows, because of the program’s medication restrictions: “It is like an older person, at the end of their life, not having medicine to comfort them or make them well.” (She told me the antibiotic rules are why she raises her own animals conventionally.)

The best certifiers, like Certified Humane, are great at validating farms’ general conditions. But, as Mimi Stein noted, the program certifies the farm—not the animal. Cows get sold off. Cruel incidents happen. And many other certifiers are less rigorous.

[Read: The evidence for a vegan diet]

What is a consumer who wants to support a gentle, green system of agriculture to do? DeCoriolis of Farm Forward had a blunt answer: Give up dairy. “As a consumer, you’re just playing roulette,” he told me. Yet the overwhelming majority of American consumers are unwilling to give up milk or cheese for ethical reasons. What they are willing to do is support stricter rules for agricultural producers and pay more for milk and cheese from farms that treat their animals well. The country is failing to provide those consumers with a reliable and navigable system. That’s a policy problem, and a solvable one.

At a minimum, the USDA should require third-party certification of animal-welfare and animal-raising claims, and apply strict regulations to certifiers: preventing conflicts of interest, requiring surprise inspections, and cracking down on rubber-stamping of industry norms. To meet American consumers’ more ambitious demands, Congress should create a farmed-animal welfare standard and an agency separate from the USDA to enforce it, akin to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Such changes would improve the welfare of billions of animals in our food system. Yet any changes would be too late for one. In the end, nobody stepped in to aid Cow 13039—not law enforcement, not the state veterinarians, not the auction employees. Alexandre Family Farm gave her vitamins and an eye patch, Nunes told me. They should have sold her sooner, she said. Cow 13039 was ailing. And ailing cows are not worth much.

They are worth something, though. At auction, Cow 13039 got 10 cents a pound. For $119, less auction fees, she spent the final moments of her life not grazing on pasture with her herd but isolated, hungry, terrified, and in pain. Ray Christie’s brother, also a rancher, had purchased her. But she was too sick to have her eye excised. At the slaughterhouse, her carcass would have been condemned.

The morning after I met her, a farmhand shot her between her blighted eyes.


Gisela Salim-Peyer contributed reporting to this story.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Freedom of Voice: A Newcomer’s Guide to Safe and Effective Protesting

How to participate in causes you believe in — in a manner that will be noticed, respected, and heard. The post Freedom of Voice: A Newcomer’s Guide to Safe and Effective Protesting appeared first on The Revelator.

The “No Kings” protests in June drew an estimated 4-6 million people to more than 2,000 events around the country — making it one of the largest protest turnouts in history. Many attendees interviewed during “No Kings” revealed that they had never attended a protest before. This continues two trends we’ve seen since the Women’s March in 2017: More and more people are protesting, and every event is someone’s first protest. Environmental causes have been a big part of this. The 2019 Global Climate Strike was the largest climate protest to date. And a recent survey found that 1 in 10 people in the United States attended environmental protests between June 2022 and June 2023. But protesting for the planet (or against oppressive government actions) poses risks that newcomers should understand. Protesting itself can be physically demanding. Meanwhile, legislatures around the country (and the world) have taken steps to criminalize protest, and right-wing agitators have increasingly used violence to harm or intimidate protestors. With all of that in mind, The Revelator has launched a multipart series on protest safety, especially geared toward first-timers. After all, it’s going to be a long, hot summer for environmental advocates seeking to make their voices heard in public across America and the globe. Before the Protest Are there meetings, including virtual meetings, from the organizing entity? Attend if you can; they’ll help you to understand the specific protest messaging so everyone is on the same page before the protest. Learn if there’s a check-in process: Will there be signs, T-shirts, hats, or other identifying items to receive while registering or when you show up for this protest? Make sure you sign up for text lists and other communications in case of inclement weather, parking issues, and other last-minute changes for the location and presentation of the protest. Know who to contact and what to do if you run into trouble while protesting. Decide how you’re getting there (in an eco-friendly way, if possible): Find out if public transportation or carpools are available, or organize your own rideshares. What to Bring to a Protest — and What NOT to Bring Plan ahead: Bring the right supplies for a day of protesting. What to Bring: A backpack and belt bag that are durable and not bulky. The belt pack keeps your hands free. Comfortable, quality walking shoes. This is non-negotiable. Wear closed-toe shoes that are broken-in and for walking long distances. Protest signs that clearly display your message in big, bold letters and can be easily read from far away. Make sure your signs are made with sturdy, bright, durable boards, with a comfortable handle. Short messages are better than a block of text. Stay hydrated. Bring a lot of water — which may also prove useful for clearing eyes and face of tear gas and pepper spray. (Milk has been disproven as tear-gas relief.) Lightweight, nutritious, protein-rich snacks: energy bars, nuts, etc. A face mask and safety goggles for smoke and tear gas. These can also hide your identity from cameras and police surveillance. A hat, sunglasses, jacket, umbrella…Clothing should be appropriate for changing weather conditions and can perform double duty as cover for any identifying skin markings. These items can also obscure your face from facial recognition technology. A change of clothes (just in case). Hand sanitizer and wipes. A first-aid kit if the organization does not provide a medical station or personnel that can be easily identified as first aid providers in the crowd. Your ID in case you’re detained. Your phone. (Essential for staying connected, but digital privacy may be a concern. See our resources section below for some guidance.) A power bank to charge devices. Other items might include a cooling towel; flashlight or headlamp; and a lanyard with a list of emergency contacts, medical conditions and medications. Things Not to Bring for a Demonstration: Alcohol or drugs. Spray paint. Firearms, knives, mace, pepper spray, tasers or weapons of any sort, even items that might be construed as weapons (such as a small Swiss army knife, metal eating utensils, etc.). Firecrackers or fireworks or anything explosive. Flammable liquids. Flares and smoke bombs. Torches (flashlights are okay). While You’re at the Protest The late civil rights icon John Lewis said, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” encouraging people to challenge the status quo. Do: engage in group activities, meet and greet people. This is a great opportunity to forge friendships behind a greater cause, and for future protests or community organizing. Help those around you. Study your surroundings and people around you. Stay alert and be aware of the people in your group: Is there someone who has joined the demonstration who seems too aggressive and appears to be carrying firearms, weapons, and other tools of violence? If you get triggered and feel overly emotional with what’s happening, take that as your cue to head home. Empirical research shows that the most effective protests are non-violent. Political scientist Omar Wasow saw this in a study of the 1960s U.S. Civil Rights movement, finding that when protesters were violent, it prompted news stories focused on crime and disorder, and lent more sympathy to the opposition, who then become viewed as promoting law and order. In contrast, peaceful demonstrations that are violently repressed by the state make media coverage sympathetic to the protesters and strengthen peaceful movements. Remember that you’re not protesting in a vacuum. Don’t take actions that feed the opposition news media. Your behavior, attire, and reactions to provocative actions by the opposition and the police, National Guard, or military could be recorded by smart phones or the media, especially social media. Assume you’re being watched and that your words are being listened to. Don’t taunt or antagonize the opposition and de-escalate any confrontations that are becoming heated or aggressive. Stay calm and focused. Don’t rise to the bait of police or military force. Don’t throw things at them. Be passive but firm in your presentation. If you are arrested, don’t struggle or fight. Be polite and compliant — and the only word coming from your mouth should be, “lawyer.” Staying calm and respectful can be challenging when participating in a protest demonstration. Emotions run high, especially in the hot summer months. However, being a “peaceful protester” with resolute calm and dignity makes a greater impression on the public, many of whom sit on the fence about current issues and events. These are people who may be getting inaccurate information and have become dismissive of our endeavors as “unserious” activism. Screaming, yelling, and deriding don’t win them over but reinforce their opinion of us as obnoxious troublemakers. Opposition media outlets will cherry-pick video footage of “bad actors” and edit these bits of footage in loops that will play constantly in the media. As a result, your protest message will be ignored over the more inflammatory messaging about your cause. Coming Up: This series will continue with a look at the history of peaceful protesting and tips on how to organize a protest. And we want to hear from you. What questions do you have about protesting? What advice would you share? Send your comments, suggestions, questions, or even brief essays to comments@therevelator.org. Sources and Resources: Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action The Activist Handbook and other sources below provide practical guides and resources so you can plan your demonstration successfully. Indivisible  and No Kings offer training and education on protesting safely and effectively, as well as new and upcoming protest events. The Human Rights Campaign: Tips for Preparedness, Peaceful Protesting, and Safety ACLU Guide: How to Protest Safely and Responsibly Amnesty International Protest Guide Wired: How to Protest Safely: What to Bring, What to Do, and What to Avoid Infosec 101 for Activists “The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists”  by Lisa Mueller “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting”  by Omar Wasow “Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha)”  by M. K. Gandhi Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator: Saving America’s National Parks and Forests Means Shaking Off the Rust of Inaction The post Freedom of Voice: A Newcomer’s Guide to Safe and Effective Protesting appeared first on The Revelator.

Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action

America’s summer celebrations are upon us, and these eight books will inspire environmentalists to act for our country and our planet. The post Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action appeared first on The Revelator.

“A patriot…wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where their country can be loved and sustained. The patriot has universal values, standards by which they judge their nation, always wishing it well — and wishing that it would do better.” — Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny It’s the summer season: Barbeques are firing up, the stars and stripes are in view, and people are preparing to make a difference in the second half of the year. As we look to the “patriotic threesome” of holidays celebrated across the United States — Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day — it’s a good time to ask how you’ll show your patriotism for the planet. It’s especially important this year, given the current wave of misappropriation and compromises facing our natural lands and resources. Eight new environmental books might offer you some ideas on how to accomplish that. They offer ideas for getting involved in politics, improving your activism, and making important changes in your homes and communities. We’ve excerpted the books’ official descriptions below and provided links to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to find these books in a variety of formats through your local bookstore or library. Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook edited by Nick Mucha, Jessica Flint, and Patrick Thomas The need for activism is more urgent than ever before and the risks are greater, too. Safe and effective activism has always required smart strategic planning, clear goals and creative tactics, and careful and detailed preparation. Without these, activists can end up injured, penalized, or jailed. If anything, these risks are greater today as powerful forces in government and industry resist the big changes needed to slow the climate crisis and keep Earth livable for generations to come. Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook reflects the wisdom and best advice from activists working in today’s volatile world. A go-to resource for driving change, it offers timely and relevant insights for purpose-aligned work. It is intended as a primer for those new to activism and a refresher for seasoned activists wanting to learn from their peers, a reassuring and inspirational companion to the environmental and justice movements that we desperately need as a society. When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership by Amanda Litman Most leadership books treat millennials and Gen Z like nuisances, focusing on older leadership constructs. Not this one. When We’re in Charge is a no-bullshit guide for the next generation of leaders on how to show up differently, break the cycle of the existing workplace. This book is a vital resource for new leaders trying to figure out how to get stuff done without drama. Offering solutions for today’s challenges, Litman offers arguments for the four-day workweek, why transparency is a powerful tool, and why it matters for you to both provide and take family leave. A necessary read for all who occupy or aspire to leadership roles, this book is a vision for a future where leaders at work are compassionate, genuine, and effective. Scientists on Survival: Personal Stories of Climate Action by Scientists for XR In this important and timely book, scientists from a broad range of disciplines detail their personal responses to climate change and the ecological crises that led them to form Scientists for XR [Extinction Rebellion] and work tirelessly within it. Whether their inspiration comes from education or activism, family ties or the work environment, the scientists writing here record what drives them, what non-violent direct action looks like to them, what led them to become interested in the environmental crisis that threatens us all, and what they see as the future of life on Earth. Public Land and Democracy in America: Understanding Conflict over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by Julie Brugger Public Land and Democracy in America brings into focus the perspectives of a variety of groups affected by conflict over the monument, including residents of adjacent communities, ranchers, federal land management agency employees, and environmentalists. In the process of following management disputes at the monument over the years, Brugger considers how conceptions of democracy have shaped and been shaped by the regional landscape and by these disputes. Through this ethnographic evidence, Brugger proposes a concept of democracy that encompasses disparate meanings and experiences, embraces conflict, and suggests a crucial role for public lands in transforming antagonism into agonism. The State of Conservation: Rural America and the Conservation-Industrial Complex since 1920 by Joshua Nygren In the twentieth century, natural resource conservation emerged as a vital force in U.S. politics, laying the groundwork for present-day sustainability. Merging environmental, agricultural, and political history, Nygren examines the political economy and ecology of agricultural conservation through the lens of the “conservation-industrial complex.” This evolving public-private network — which united the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Congress, local and national organizations, and the agricultural industry — guided soil and water conservation in rural America for much of the century. Contrary to the classic tales of U.S. environmental politics and the rise and fall of the New Deal Order, this book emphasizes continuity. Nygren demonstrates how the conservation policies, programs, and partnerships of the 1930s and 1940s persisted through the age of environmentalism, and how their defining traits anticipated those typically associated with late twentieth-century political culture. Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future by Slavoj Žižek We hear all the time that we’re moments from doomsday. Around us, crises interlock and escalate, threatening our collective survival: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with its rising risk of nuclear warfare, is taking place against a backdrop of global warming, ecological breakdown, and widespread social and economic unrest. Protestors and politicians repeatedly call for action, but still we continue to drift towards disaster. We need to do something. But what if the only way for us to prevent catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened — to accept that we’re already five minutes past zero hour? Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Žižek forge a vital new space for a radical emancipatory politics that could avert our course to self-destruction. He illuminates why the liberal Left has so far failed to offer this alternative, and exposes the insidious propagandism of the fascist Right, which has appropriated and manipulated once-progressive ideas. Pithy, urgent, gutting and witty Žižek’s diagnosis reveals our current geopolitical nightmare in a startling new light, and shows how, in order to change our future, we must first focus on changing the past. How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change by Jens Beckert For decades we have known about the dangers of global warming. Nevertheless, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. How can we explain our failure to take the necessary measures to stop climate change? Why are we so reluctant to act? Beckert provides an answer to these questions. Our apparent inability to implement basic measures to combat climate change is due to the nature of power and incentive structures affecting companies, politicians, voters, and consumers. Drawing on social science research, he argues that climate change is an inevitable product of the structures of capitalist modernity which have been developing for the past 500 years. Our institutional and cultural arrangements are operating at the cost of destroying the natural environment and attempts to address global warming are almost inevitably bound to fail. Temperatures will continue to rise, and social and political conflicts will intensify. We are selling our future for the next quarterly figures, the upcoming election results, and today’s pleasure. Any realistic climate policy needs to focus on preparing societies for the consequences of escalating climate change and aim at strengthening social resilience to cope with the increasingly unstable natural world. Parenting in a Climate Crisis: A Handbook for Turning Fear into Action by Bridget Shirvell In this urgent parenting guide, learn how to navigate the uncertainty of the climate crisis and keep your kids informed, accountable, and hopeful — with simple actions you can take as a family to help the earth. Kids today are experiencing the climate crisis firsthand. Camp canceled because of wildfire smoke. Favorite beaches closed due to erosion. Recess held indoors due to extreme heat. How do parents help their children make sense of it all? And how can we keep our kids (and ourselves) from despair? Environmental journalist and parent Bridget Shirvell has created a handbook for parents to help them navigate these questions and more, weaving together expert advice from climate scientists, environmental activists, child psychologists, and parents across the country. She helps parents answer tough questions (how did we get here?) and raise kids who feel connected to and responsible for the natural world, feel motivated to make ecologically sound choices, and feel empowered to meet the challenges of the climate crisis—and to ultimately fight for change. Enjoy these summer reads throughout the holidays and get involved with activities and protests that support our environment and wildlife. Whether it’s changing the way you celebrate to more sustainable fun or joining environmental summer pursuits, we hope you’ll make good trouble this holiday season. For hundreds of additional environmental books — including several on staying calm in challenging times — visit the Revelator Reads archives. Republish this article for free! The post Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action appeared first on The Revelator.

Climate Activist Throws Bright Pink Paint on Glass Covering Picasso Painting in Montreal

The stunt is part of an environmental organization's efforts to draw attention to the dangerous wildfires spreading through Canada

Climate Activist Throws Bright Pink Paint on Glass Covering Picasso Painting in Montreal The stunt is part of an environmental organization’s efforts to draw attention to the dangerous wildfires spreading through Canada The activist threw paint on Pablo Picasso’s L'hétaïre (1901). Last Generation Canada A climate activist threw pink paint at Pablo Picasso’s L’hétaïre (1901) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last week. The 21-year-old man, identified as Marcel, is a member of Last Generation Canada, an environmental organization that works to combat climate change. After splashing Picasso’s portrait with the paint, Marcel made a speech in French to the gallery, which was captured on video and posted on social media by Last Generation Canada. “There are more than 200 wildfires in Canada at this moment, 83 of which are not protected [and] which are out of control,” he said. “There are too many problems here. There are people who are dying. … If Canada doesn’t do much, soon we will all be dying.” Quick fact: Picasso’s blue period Pablo Picasso created L’hétaïre during his famous “blue period,” when the artist painted monochromatic artworks in shades of blue and blue-green. Canada is in the midst of its wildfire season, which occurs between April and October. The blazes have consumed almost nine million acres across four Canadian provinces, report the New York Times’ Nasuna Stuart-Ulin and Vjosa Isai. This season is a particularly bad one. In early June, satellite data revealed that the number of fire hotspots was four times higher than normal, per the Associated Press’ M.K. Wildeman. Marcel’s stunt is part of a three-week “action phase” by Last Generation Canada, according to a statement from the organization. The group is demanding that the Canadian government form a “Climate Disaster Protection Agency” to aid those “whose homes, communities, lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by extreme weather, including wildfires worsened by the burning of fossil fuels.” Picasso’s L’hétaïre, which was on loan from the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, Italy, was covered by a layer of protective glass, and the pink paint caused no visible damage, according to a statement from the museum. Two museum security guards confronted Marcel and turned him over to the Montreal police. Officials tell Hyperallergic’s Maya Pontone that Marcel has been released from custody and will later appear in court. “It is most unfortunate that this act carried out in the name of environmental activism targeted a work belonging to our global cultural heritage and under safekeeping for the benefit of future generations,” Stéphane Aquin, the director of the museum, says in the statement. “Museums and artists alike are allies in the fight for a better world.” In recent years, damaging the glass protecting famous artworks has become a popular method of protest among some climate change groups. However, one of the best-known groups, a British organization called Just Stop Oil, announced in March that it would start winding down such tactics after the United Kingdom decided to stop issuing new oil and gas licenses. “We value paint strokes and color composition over life itself,” Marcel says in the statement from Last Generation Canada. “A lot more resources have been put in place to secure and protect this artwork than to protect living, breathing people.” The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was displaying L’hétaïre as part of the exhibition “Berthe Weill, Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde,” focused on the 20th-century French gallery-owner who exhibited Picasso’s early work. After the June 19 incident, the museum was closed for a short period before reopening later that day. L’hétaïre has not yet returned to the gallery. “I am not attacking art, nor am I destroying it. I am protecting it,” says Marcel in a social media post by Last Generation Canada. “Art, at its core, is depictions of life. It is by the living, for the living. There is no art on a dead planet.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

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.

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