After the Vermont state legislature overrode a veto from Governor Phil Scott, Vermont has now become the second state in the U.S. to ban neonicotinoids, or neonics, a type of pesticide that is particularly harmful to bees. The ban comes at the start of Pollinator Week.
The bill was vetoed by Governor Scott on May 20, 2024, but the Vermont House of Representatives and Senate voted to override the governor’s veto on June 17.
“This bill unfairly targets dairy farmers reliant on corn crops and will harm farmers without achieving its goals for pollinators,” Governor Scott said of the bill. “For these reasons I cannot sign it into law.”
Neonics are common in insecticides for agricultural and lawncare use, but they are neurotoxic. These chemicals are harmful and even deadly to bees and other pollinators. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), neonics, which were first developed in the 1990s, are now the most common insecticide class in the U.S.
A study published in 2019 found that since the rise in the use of neonics, agriculture had become 48 times more toxic to insects by 2014. The study further determined that neonics made up about 99% of total acute oral toxicity loading of insecticides in 2014.
As NRDC explained, neonics are meant for targeted pesticide use but are often used more broadly, including for corn crops. The organization reported that each conventional corn seed has enough neonics in its coating to kill around 250,000 bees, plus these chemicals can leach into soil and groundwater.
Now, Vermont is minimizing the use of neonics by requiring agronomists to provide written exemptions, or a type of prescription as described by NRDC, in order to plant crop seeds coated with neonics. The state follows New York in establishing restrictions on neonics. As reported by the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, four other states (Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii and Washington) have introduced legislation restricting neonics.
Vermont’s restrictions are similar to restrictions set in Québec, which were initially met with concerns over crop yields. However, the neonics restrictions in Canada brought the use of neonics for corn and soybean crops down to around 0.5%, leading to a decline in the amount of neonics contaminating waterways without any impact on crop yields, Times Union reported.
Following the overridden veto, the bill is slated to take effect beginning Jan. 1, 2029, VT Digger reported.
Solar panels. Heat Pumps. Electric buses. Those are just three of the things the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, is hoping to acquire in their latest negotiations for a new contract, one that would address the rising toll of climate change in the more than 500 schools in which their members teach.
Arguably one of the most powerful unions for teachers in the nation, the CTU held public negotiations last Friday in a crowded elementary school gymnasium, facing off against leaders from Chicago Public Schools, or CPS.
The two entities have a contentious relationship, made clear in the last decade with two strikes and several showdowns during the pandemic. The negotiations were also streamed, but any observers expecting the usual verbal fireworks would be disappointed. Both sides agreed that climate change is a real challenge. Now, they just have to figure out how to pay for the changes necessary.
“Chicago’s buildings, including school buildings, are a major source of carbon emissions,” said Lauren Bianchi, a social studies teacher on the city’s Southeast Side and chair of the CTU’s climate justice committee. “CPS buildings produce yearly emissions equivalent to about 900 railcars’ worth of coal.”
Nationwide, the Biden administration has encouraged school districts to begin thinking about cutting their climate emissions. To that end, the federal government has funneled millions of dollars in federal grants and technical assistance to help schools install solar panels, purchase electric buses, and update heating and cooling systems. But from California to Massachusetts, teachers unions have already started to get loud about climate justice demands.
As heat and extreme weather become more prevalent because of the climate crisis, J. Mijin Cha, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said it makes sense that climate demands are turning up in union negotiations.
“If you want a green school, you have to really think about what the challenges of the climate crisis will bring to students who are trying to study,” said Cha. “Things like heat and other things that will intensify from the climate crisis are then educational issues.”
In April, Stacey Davis Gates, the union’s president, announced a “transformative” contract proposal in which increased wages were just a starting point. The plan included hundreds of items ranging from a plan to build more affordable housing citywide to providing additional resources for the thousands of migrant children shuttled to Chicago from the Mexican border. On top of that, the union wants energy efficiency and climate resiliency written into their new contract.
To start, the CTU wants to bring the school district’s aging infrastructure into the 21st century. Chicago’s school campuses are on average more than 80 years old, twice the national average according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. The oldest school still in operation dates back to 1874, the same year as the Great Chicago Fire.
And keeping the lights on in the city’s old public schools isn’t cheap.
Last week, the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Public Schools opened up contract negotiation to the public for the first time.
Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / Grist
“Chicago Public Schools will face more than a billion dollars in climate driven cooling costs by 2025,” Ayesha Qazi-Lampert, an environmental science teacher, explained.
The CTU wants to transform the city’s schools into “climate-resilient community hubs,” Qazi-Lampert said to the crowd. To do it, the union wants the school district to install heat pumps, transition to solar and geothermal power, and get all lead contamination out of the school’s drinking water.
Outside the school campuses, the teachers union wants more green spaces — expanded urban canopies and native gardens that beautify the neighborhood and capture stormwater.
“Our school buildings were not designed to withstand frequent and immediate hot and cold extremes,” said Qazi-Lampert. “We’re not only testing the integrity of the building materials, but we’re adding stress to already outdated cooling and heating systems.”
It isn’t just physical infrastructure the union wants to modernize, but also what happens inside classrooms and cafeterias. The CTU is calling for expanded career technical education that puts Chicago students on track for jobs in the emerging clean energy economy. And better lunches for the students to keep students full while they learn inside their newly solar-powered school.
But these updates won’t be quick and they won’t be cheap. Money, especially in the upcoming year, is in short supply. CPS is staring down a nearly $400 million deficit for the next school year as pandemic relief funding is beginning to run dry.
On top of impending budgetary shortfalls, CPS’s chief facilities officer, Ivan Hansen, said there is already a massive backlog of deferred updates. “Our total district immediate critical need is over $3 billion and that is just to bring the buildings to a good repair,” he said.
Still, CPS leadership agrees with the union on the broadest points: CPS has a massive footprint across the city, with over 62 millions square feet in building space and most of it is in decline. On the finer details, the city still had questions.
In one instance, David Singler, the energy and sustainability program manager for CPS, rebuffed the union’s plans to install solar panels en masse. “If we were to take every square inch of roof and put a solar panel on it, it would only generate a fraction of the amount of energy that we need in the district to operate our buildings,” he said.
Before wrapping up its first public bargaining sessions, CPS and CTU agreed to collaborate more closely on grant applications in the future. Most everything else was left in the air.
But the union is set on getting the district to enshrine its climate-mitigation proposals into the upcoming contract. Davis Gates explains that responding to climate change must be a priority, not just for the union but for the district.
“That contract means nothing if our Earth is on fire,” she said.
After decades of advocacy, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe will see 18 acres of land returned to them by the state of Minnesota. The move comes after lawmakers passed legislation last month to formally return state trust lands inside the boundaries of the Mille Lacs Band’s reservation.
Minnesota’s returning of Indigenous land is part of a much broader global landback movement that has been gaining momentum in part due to studies that show Indigenous guardianship leads to more effective ecological outcomes. As conserving biodiversity grows more critical amid rising global temperatures, Indigenous self-determination and traditions of relating to land and waters are increasingly recognized as vital climate solutions.
“This is a great opportunity for us as the Mille Lacs Band to preserve that land in a way that is respectful of nature,” said Kelly Applegate, commissioner of natural resources at the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. He said the land transfer is expected to be complete over the next month. “Whatever we do, it’ll be in a lens of environmental protection.”
The Mille Lacs’ lands in question are known as state trust lands. These trust lands, established at statehood, are grants of land from the federal government primarily created to support education and are found across the western United States. On the Mille Lacs reservation, those 18 acres represent only a fraction of the 2.5 million acres of state trust lands across Minnesota, including nearly 344,000 acres inside the borders of eight reservations. Trust lands in Minnesota typically generate revenue for education through mining, timber, and land sales, and for the 2023-24 school year, trust lands generated almost $49 million for public and charter schools. The trust lands on Mille Lacs, however, have only generated about $45 annually.
“Designating [that land] as a school trust parcel — we had no say in that, it was just a designation that was put upon that land without our original approval,” said Applegate, adding that tribal members never stopped occupying the land in question. He said the band is home to more than 5,000 enrolled members and never relinquished title to the land.
The Mille Lacs measure was 1 of several bills considered by the Minnesota Legislature this year that sought to return land to Indigenous nations and was authored by Senator Mary Kunesh, who has ancestral ties to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and is the first Native woman to serve in the Minnesota Senate.
A bill to return 3,400 acres from the University of Minnesota to the Fond du Lac Band didn’t pass, but university officials said they’re still committed to returning the property. State lawmakers also considered proposals to give back state land to the Red Lake Nation and return land within White Earth State Forest to White Earth Nation. Both measures died after facing opposition.
The Mille Lacs measure sets aside $750,000 of state funds for the state commissioner of natural resources to pay project costs such as valuation expenses, closing costs, and legal fees to complete the transfer, but not everyone is happy about the legislation. The Mille Lacs County Board of Commissioners issued a press release condemning the purchase. Dillon Hayes, county administrator of Mille Lacs County, said the transfer violates the state constitution, specifically a requirement that the state must put the land up for public auction.
“Right, wrong, or otherwise, we really have a process to follow. We have a constitution in the state of Minnesota,” said Hayes. “The board believes that we should be following that process.”
Hayes said that the estimated value of the parcel within the reservation exceeds more than $1 million due to rising property values, and that state schools are missing out on funding not only from the $750,000 appropriated to purchase the property but also from the higher price the land could have fetched at auction.
“Federally recognized Indian tribes, like the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, possess the financial means to purchase such lands at public sale,” the board wrote in a press release last week. “This legislation unfairly advantages the tribe at the expense of our local schools and taxpayers.”
Applegate said it’s unfortunate that the county isn’t supportive.
“We’re in a new era of restoring land back to Indigenous people, and people shouldn’t feel threatened by that,” Applegate said. “We’re the original caretakers of all of this land, and who better to manage it than the tribal nations?”
On Saturday afternoon, the Post Fire began in a mountainous region of California, approximately 45 miles northwest of Los Angeles, according to authorities. By Sunday, it had burned more than 14,000 acres of brush and grasslands, forcing about 1,200 people to evacuate the popular Hungry Valley state recreation area, reported The New York Times.
The wildfire was only about two percent contained as of Sunday afternoon, the state’s largest so far this year, CalFire said.
“This is a taste of what’s to come,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles, as The New York Times reported.
About 400 firefighters were fighting the blaze, which CalFire said was moving toward Pyramid Lake, reported Reuters. So far, two nonresidential structures have been destroyed.
Containing the wildfire was proving difficult due to low humidity, high temperatures and strong winds, the state’s firefighting agency said.
Firefighters were building fire lines around the perimeter of the blaze, while water-dropping aircraft tried to stop it from spreading further.
Fire crews attend to flames from a burn out operation near Hungry Valley Road as the Post Fire continues to grow north of Pyramid Lake just west of Interstate 5 on June 16, 2024. Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The fire started around 2 p.m. Saturday in Los Angeles County, west of Interstate-5, NPR said.
From there it spread west to Ventura County, where it burned 2,000 acres, mostly in Los Padres National Forest, according to LAist.
Strong winds of 55 miles per hour with gusts as high as 70 on Sunday were forecast to decrease throughout Monday, the National Weather Service said.
CalFire said the cause of the Post fire is being investigated and no injuries have been reported.
According to CalFire data, wildfires have already burned roughly 41,900 acres in 2024, which is higher than the 27,100-acre average for the same period during the past five years.
Spokesperson for the LA County Fire Department Kenichi Haskett said fire officials were optimistic about making progress on the fire, reported The New York Times.
“Our goal is hopefully to be done within the week,” Haskett said.
Swain warned California residents to be cautious of the potential for wildfires as summer begins.
Precipitation extremes due to climate change have been bringing intense rainfall along with drought conditions to the state over the past few years.
Extreme heat has made grasses and brush in the region dry and flammable, with grasslands having a tendency to burn first, since they dry out the fastest, Swain said.
“Even though dryness levels are not record-breaking at this point, what is anomalous is just how much fuel there is,” Swain said, as The New York Times reported.
State and federal officials have used prescribed burning to reduce fuel on the ground and stop fires.
However, Swain explained that, despite efforts to prevent wildfires, climate change is creating a more dangerous and unpredictable environment.
“The more adverse the conditions, the more likely it is you get unlucky,” Swain said, as reported by The New York Times.
A landmark law to restore a fifth of the European Union’s land and sea by 2030 has been approved by the European Parliament, following months of delays.
Leonore Gewessler, Austria’s Green climate minister, ended the deadlock at the last minute by breaking with the conservative party of chancellor Karl Nehammer. The move sparked an announcement by the party that it would pursue criminal charges against Gewessler for abuse of power, reported The Guardian.
“Today’s decision is a victory for nature,” Gewessler wrote in a translated post on Instagram. “My conscience tells me unmistakably [that] when the healthy and happy life of future generations is at stake, courageous decisions are needed.”
The proposal for the nature law had been weakened as European elections approached, but even with the concessions, it very nearly didn’t pass on Monday.
“Today marks a significant day for Europe as we transition from merely protecting and conserving nature to actively restoring it,” said César Luena, Spain’s member of parliament who led negotiations for the policy, as reported by The Guardian.
For the restoration law to pass, 55 percent of member states that represented a minimum of 65 percent of the bloc’s population needed to vote in favor.
The necessary majority came after Austria and Slovakia changed their votes, pushing the law over the line by 1.07 percentage points.
“I know I will face opposition in Austria on this, but I am convinced that this is the time to adopt this law,” Gewessler said to reporters, as Reuters reported.
The purpose of the nature restoration law is to reverse the decline of natural habitats in Europe, 81 percent of which are classified as unhealthy, according to the European Environment Agency. The legislation includes set targets, like the restoration of peatlands, an important carbon sink.
Twenty EU countries voted in favor of the law, with Hungary, Itay, Finland, Poland, the Netherlands and Sweden voting against, and Belgium abstaining.
Some countries like the Netherlands had expressed concern that the law would impede wind farm expansion and other economic activities. On Monday, Poland said there was no plan for funding the policy’s protection of nature.
The law includes steps to reverse pollinator declines and requires member states to take measures to help plant a minimum of three billion trees, reported The Guardian.
“There is no time for a break in protecting our environment,” said Alain Maron, the Brussels region’s environment minister, as Euronews reported. “Today, the Council of the EU is choosing to restore nature in Europe, thereby protecting its biodiversity and the living environment of European citizens.”
Environmental activists called the vote “historic,” reported The Guardian.
“Today’s vote is a massive victory for Europe’s nature and citizens who have been long calling for immediate action to tackle nature’s alarming decline,” said an environmental coalition led by WWF Europe, as The Guardian reported.
The endangered Przewalski’s horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) is the last wild horse species on Earth, meaning a type of wild horse that is not a descendent of domesticated horses. But in the 1960s, this horse became extinct in the wild. Now, through a managed breeding and care program by the Prague Zoo, Przewalski’s horse has been returned to Kazakhstan’s Golden Steppe for the first time in at least two centuries.
In early June 2024, two Czech Army CASA aircrafts carried a total of seven Przewalski’s horses to Golden Steppe, an area of open grasslands. The first aircraft with three horses landed on June 4, according to a press release from the Prague Zoo.
“After hundreds of years, first Przewalski’s horses have returned to the steppes of central Kazakhstan,” Miroslav Bobek, the director of the Prague Zoo, said in a press release. “We still have a long way to go, but this was a historic moment. The sight of Zeta II running off into the steppe will never leave my memory.”
On June 6, the remaining four horses were transferred to the grasslands. But the project did not go as smoothly as hoped, as eight horses in total were originally planned for the trip. But in the first batch of horses, one horse named Pelle kept sitting in his crate, which the zoo noted could be dangerous for him during the long journey. Some technical difficulties also led to delays, but overall, the horses were transported safely, marking a successful project.
“This is an event of historical import: the seven ‘Przewalski’s’ that we transported here by two CASA planes represent the first individuals of this species in central Kazakhstan in hundreds of years,” Bobek said in an update. “With this double transport, we have taken a major step towards returning the last wild horse to another area where it was found in the past. Our goal is to slowly transport at least forty individuals here, so that a viable population can be set up. Hardly anything could be a better demonstration of the purpose of modern zoos than the Return of the Wild Horses.”
The horses will roam in an area spanning 80 hectares and will be closely monitored by researchers, EuroNews reported.
Przewalski’s horses were once abundant across Europe and Asia, but environmental changes and competition with livestock and humans led their habitat to shrink, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute reported. Eventually, they became extinct in the wild. But reintroduction projects, like those led by Prague Zoo, have helped return the species to the wild at sites in Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China.
The San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park has also led a major breeding program for the species, with more than 157 Przewalski’s horses bred since 1969. According to the zoo, it sends the offspring to reintroduction programs and other zoos to help with species recovery.
As EuroNews reported, Prague Zoo is slated to transfer additional horses to Golden Steppe in 2025. In addition to the 40 total horses Prague Zoo plans to eventually reintroduce to Golden Steppe, the zoo is expected to send more Przewalski’s horses to Mongolia in two years.
“We are still responsible the fact this wild horse disappeared and now we can sort of reverse that, and give it back to nature,” Filip Mašek, spokesperson for Prague Zoo, told the BBC. “To sort of be these Noah’s Arks which have all these endangered species. If it’s possible — and sometimes it’s not — we should try and do everything to return them to their original environments.”
In an often-excerpted passage from his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain describes how his perceptions of the Mississippi River changed after he spent months piloting a steamboat up and down its muddy length. “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book,” he said, allowing him to read the bends and eddies that meant nothing to his passengers. But the tragedy of this “valuable acquisition” was that “the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river.”
“All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat,” he wrote.
Even for those of us who will never pilot a steamboat, there is a vestigial lesson in this passage about how we perceive and talk about the environment. A body of water like the Mississippi River is something we experience with our eyes, ears, and noses, and it is in large part because of its beauty that we want to protect it. But it also has a specific human history — the river runs between artificial levees, or provides conveyance to ships carrying oil, or drains toxic runoff from factory farms.
In his fascinating new book, The Great River, the writer Boyce Upholt tells the story of the Mississippi not through the eddies and mudflats Twain passed in his steamboat, but through the stories of men who have sought to master the river for well over two centuries. Ranging across thousands of miles, he demonstrates how the United States has deformed and manipulated one of the world’s largest watersheds in the short-sighted service of economic development, often with catastrophic, unintended consequences. If Twain read the river as a book, Upholt gets more specific and reads it as a tragedy wrought by colonial hubris.
This focus on the people who carved and dredged the river for their own ends, rather than on the wilds of the river itself, produces a story that has profound lessons for coastal cities and western deserts as well as those who live in the river’s great watershed.
The most interesting question, Upholt argues, is not how the Mississippi River will fare in a changing climate, but what the history of that river tells us about how the rest of us will fare. In reviewing how “engineers worked to tame this god,” he rings an alarm about other efforts to control the flux of nature. For all our expertise and prowess, he argues, we are little more powerful than the boat passengers Twain mocked as blind to the river’s ways.
The first section of the book recounts the centuries that preceded this effort of domination. Upholt explores a growing body of archaeological research about several Indigenous societies that rose and fell along the Mississippi many hundreds of years before European settlers arrived, including one city, Cahokia, in modern-day Illinois, which housed more than 10,000 people around a central pyramid more than a hundred feet high. He contemplates the cosmic purpose of earthwork mounds like the ones in Poverty Point, Louisiana, which represent “Indigenous knowledge encoded in the land,” telling a story in which “a flood is not a catastrophe but an asset.”
Once the colonists arrive and President Thomas Jefferson sends them rampaging out into the Midwest, Upholt swings up and down the main stem of the river and along its major tributaries, the Missouri and the Ohio, describing how fur traders speared their way downstream in “keelboats [that] hugged the inner bends of the river’s curves,” fortified by “whiskey chased by a cup of river water.” Upholt announces at the start of the book that he won’t proceed in a strict chronological order, which is understandable enough since his book isn’t a traditional work of history, but his attempts to toggle backward and forward in time as well as between various tributaries can often leave the reader feeling lost.
The book hits its narrative stride, however, once Upholt introduces the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that has controlled the river for almost two centuries. Since the 19th century, the Corps has spent untold billions of dollars to dredge, levee, dam, undam, channelize, divert, reroute, and re-reroute the river, attempting to control flooding and facilitate navigation for freight. This audacious effort to tame Mother Nature has achieved a degree of success that could most charitably be described as middling, and some of the best sections of the book are those in which Upholt describes the many levee and dredge projects the Corps has built against the better judgment of river experts, as well as common sense.
The squabbling engineers who have led the Corps, often hapless but always unfailingly self-serious, are the closest that Upholt gets to main characters, and their stories function as parables about the relationship between the U.S. and the environment it sought to colonize and reshape. The most famous of these was the contest between James Buchanan Eads, a brilliant civil engineer who advocated making space along the river’s banks for its water to flow and flood, and Andrew Humphreys, an Army general who advocated sealing most of the river off with man-made levees. Humphreys won the debate, with catastrophic results: In 1927, as the Corps of Engineers was finalizing its levees along the lower river, a massive flood burst through them and inundated much of Louisiana and Arkansas, killing 500 people and displacing hundreds of thousands more.
A more sympathetic character is Harold Fisk, an Army Corps cartographer who designed beautiful maps of the river’s vestigial pathways, showing how it had meandered back and forth across the heartland in the centuries before the Corps walled it off — one such map adorns the cover of Upholt’s book. Fisk’s now-legendary ribbon map “highlighted rather than obscured the wildness of the Mississippi,” and in the process discovered that the river was on the verge of cresting its banks in Louisiana and rushing southwest away from New Orleans, which would have left the city high and dry.
The Army Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carré Spillway in southern Louisiana to divert floodwaters away from New Orleans. The agency has built numerous levees and control structures along the Mississippi River. Mario Tama / Getty Images
The pinnacle of the book is when Upholt visits the Old River control system, which was designed to hold the river in place and prevent Fisk’s prophecy from coming true. As he approaches the site, Upholt sees “concrete wing walls flare outward, funneling water toward a series of five steel gates” held in place by giant beams, and then “just upstream a second line of gates, six times longer, looms over a patch of batture … from a concrete catwalk built along the confluence, the river looked like a varicose vein … so swollen that it was ready to pop.”
It’s hard to comprehend the modern Mississippi until you’ve seen this structure. Its hubris typifies the destructive human effort Upholt is trying to depict throughout the book, and holds a lesson for regions and nations attempting to tackle the threat of climate change. If the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation struggled to tame nature before the Earth warmed by a degree and a half, it does not bode well for its efforts to fend off sea level rise with concrete walls or solve drought problems by constructing more dams.
But the solution, as Upholt makes clear in the end, isn’t just to tear everything down, to insist on seeing the river as a pure manifestation of nature. Rather, he points us back to the Indigenous earthworks that preceded colonization, relics of a society that tried to live with the rhythms of a flood-prone river rather than change those rhythms to suit human needs, finding a harmony between Twain’s two ways of seeing the Mississippi.
“This river has never been alone,” Upholt writes after seeing an earthwork in Louisiana near a village of the Grand Bayou Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha Tribe. He goes on to describe the half-submerged earth structure as “a monument … not to the beauty of empty nature, but to the possibility of a human connection”; rather than a “celebratory” structure, he sees the mounds as “insurance, anchor amid the chaos. They provide a lesson in how to respect nature without seeing it as something separate from human life.”
In the matter of climate change, an area where politicians often appeal to the ferocious power of nature and to our ability to right the course of the Earth itself, it’s a point well taken. To really achieve sustainability, on the Mississippi or elsewhere, we’ll have to give up some amount of control.
