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.
Amid a divided state Legislature, Pennsylvania Democrats and Republicans are finding rare common ground in a bill designed to usher in a new industry for capturing climate-altering carbon dioxide and burying it underground.
Among other provisions, Senate Bill 831 would create an enforcement structure for carbon capture within the state, set a low bar for gaining consent from landowners near sites where carbon is injected into the ground and, in some cases, spare the fossil fuel industry from seismic monitoring — that is, watching for earthquakes, a known risk.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican representing north central Pennsylvania who has personal ties to the fossil fuel industry, cleared the Republican-controlled Senate on a 30-20 vote in April. It now moves to the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Democrats.
But a coalition of environmental groups said the bill is riddled with problems. Landowners could be left in the dark when the collected carbon is pumped into the ground near their properties, they said. Additionally, carbon dioxide could eventually leak into the atmosphere, posing a risk to both the environment and public health: In Satartia, Mississippi, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide ruptured, sending 49 people to the hospital complaining of labored breathing, stomach disorders and mental confusion.
“Our concerns with this were pretty significant,” said Jen Quinn, legislative and political director at the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club.
In introducing the legislation, Yaw pitched the bill as a proposal to direct state regulators to take over responsibility for the permitting process for carbon dioxide injection wells from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In reality, the bill, as written, would go much further than that. It would allow operators to inject carbon dioxide into underground geologic formations with permission from just 60 percent of the nearby landowners. It would allow operators to apply for a waiver ceding liability for these wells to the state after 10 years of a well’s completion. And it would allow operators to forgo seismic monitoring of the storage fields into which the carbon dioxide pumped into the earth, if they can prove that the field does not “pose significant risk.”
Several of these provisions, Quinn said, are “setting the bar very low.”
A report by the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank, showed that no state sets the landowner consent bar at less than 60 percent.
The report also argued that waiving operators’ liability over their carbon storage fields will lead to negligence: Operators that know they won’t be held responsible for any mess in the long run won’t be incentivized to run a clean operation, the report said.
Capital & Main reached out to Sen. Yaw, author of SB 831, and did not hear back by publication time. However, he said in a press release that the bill is a “proactive step” to building out the state’s carbon capture industry.
Environmentalists have long splintered over carbon capture and sequestration, known as CCS. The practice of collecting carbon dioxide from power plants and storing it underground has been criticized as costly, dangerous and largely unproven. While some say it is a useful tool among many for addressing the climate crisis, others call CCS a boondoggle that could offer a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which has ralliedaround the technology.
Environmentalists worry that in Pennsylvania, which has centuries of oil and gas drilling under its belt, the state’s geology could prove treacherous. “This idea that they’re going to go all in on carbon capture and try to inject this stuff in the same places where it’s like Swiss cheese … is just plain stupid,” said Karen Feridun, co-founder of the grassroots Better Path Coalition, a staunch opponent of burying carbon in the earth.
The state is dotted with orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells, including many that likely have yet to be located. The wells create pathways underground through which gases can travel and potentially seep into waterways or leak into the atmosphere, undoing the progress of capturing the carbon in the first place. A 2009 report by the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources said that the state’s legacy oil and gas fields could “constitute a leakage pathway for reservoir gases, including injected CO2.”
“The safest course of action would be to avoid the oldest of these oil fields,” the report added.
Feridun said she also anticipates that an influx of carbon dioxide injection wells will come with a maze of pipelines to transport the carbon.
Because the bill would permit operators to get consent from only 60 percent of property owners atop an injection site, some landowners would be left without a voice in the process, the southwestern Pennsylvania-based Center for Coalfield Justice warned in an online petition opposing the bill. The petition urges signatories to send a message to their representatives with language such as: “If 40 percent of people within a carbon storage field don’t want carbon injected beneath their feet — the project can move forward anyway.”
Ethan Story, advocacy director at the Center for Coalfield Justice, believes few Pennsylvanians are aware of the bill and what it could mean to them. “Landowners, in addition to elected officials in some communities, are very unaware and uneducated on this proposal,” he said. “The immediate reaction from a majority of the community members that we have talked to and presented this information to has been met with great pause.”
SB 831 has been met with a different reaction in the state Legislature, where it’s earned — and sometimes lost — votes from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Affirmative votes in the Senate came from a handful of Democrats, including state Sens. Jay Costa from Pittsburgh and Christine Tartaglione from Philadelphia. Those who opposed the bill included Sen. Doug Mastriano, a far-right Republican from south central Pennsylvania who made headlines in 2022 with a failed gubernatorial run and his full embrace of various hard-line policies, including a firm pro-fossil fuel stance.
Carbon capture “is, to a degree, cutting across what we would probably classify as traditional ideological divisions,” said Sean O’Leary, senior researcher, energy and petrochemicals, at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
One of carbon capture’s most crucial endorsements in the state came from Gov. Josh Shapiro. Shapiro, a Democrat, ran on an all-of-the-above strategy for tackling the climate crisis. He has now thrown his weight behind the technology as the state has pursued federal funding for hydrogen hubs. Carbon capture was also recently included in two of the governor’s climate proposals.
“Carbon capture is crucial to Pennsylvania’s energy future,” Shapiro spokesperson Manuel Bonder told Capital & Main. “We are glad to see a bipartisan group of senators agree with the governor that we need to invest in carbon capture and sequestration.
“The Administration looks forward to continuing to work with leaders in both parties to ensure bipartisan legislation contains appropriate environmental, public health, and safety protections as it moves through the legislative process,” Bonder added.
Shapiro’s support for carbon capture could be key to getting SB 831 over the goal line in the Democratically controlled state House, despite warnings from environmentalists. It also has the backing of the Pennsylvania State Building & Construction Trades Council, which makes campaign contributions to members on both sides of the aisle and which has supported fossil fuel and renewable projects alike.
The bill currently sits in the House Consumer Protection, Technology, and Utilities Committee, where a handful of more straightforward climate bills — including one that would improve school district access to solar energy and another that would legalize community solar projects across the commonwealth — have advanced with unanimous support before winning votes on both sides of the aisle on the full floor.
Capital & Main reached out to Democratic Rep. Rob Matzie, chair of the House Consumer Protection, Technology and Utilities Committee, for comment on the bill. Matzie did not respond by publication time. In the past, he has championed bills that proved to be a boon for fossil fuels, including one subsidizing a Shell Chemical Appalachia LLC plastics plant in southwestern Pennsylvania. When Shapiro released his carbon capture-infused energy plan, Matzie signaled his support: “These proposals will create good energy jobs, promote opportunities for technologies that will deliver power while reducing their carbon footprint, and — most importantly — maintain our status as a net exporter of energy,” he said in a news release in March.
It’s an open question whether some of the provisions of SB 831 that are stoking environmentalists’ concern will make it through the House. But Democratic Rep. Emily Kinkead has offered an alternative proposal to the bill that incorporates provisions to protect environmental justice communities that have long been scarred with the detritus of the oil and gas industry. It would also offer heightened protections for landowners situated near carbon sequestration projects. Kinkead, from Pittsburgh, circulated a memo describing the bill on March 25 but has yet to introduce formal legislation.
Kinkead told Capital & Main she’s not certain such legislation will pass, but she hopes it will at least offer a starting point for negotiations to amend SB 831.
“I think the goal of my bill is, at the very least, to demonstrate that we don’t have to do it exactly the way that it’s outlined,” she said. “We can incorporate some better practices.”
If SB 831 passes the House without amendments, O’Leary, the Ohio River Valley Institute senior researcher, fears immediate repercussions for residents. At least one company — Omaha, Nebraska-based Tenaska — is already planning carbon dioxide injection in the fracking-heavy southwestern part of Pennsylvania. The company envisions using 80,000 acres stretching across Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia for up to 20 injection wells that would extend as far as 10,000 feet horizontally underground. This will require a yet unknown number of pipelines. Those who oppose burying carbon under their land, but fall into the 40 percent minority, will be out of luck.
Bioremediation is a process that uses plants and microorganisms like bacteria, fungi and algae to treat contaminated soils, water and other pollution.
Microorganisms are very small organisms that live naturally in the environment and bioremediation stimulates the growth of certain microbes that use contaminants as a source of food and energy.
Bioremediation may take place “in situ” at the contamination site, or “ex situ” away from the site.
For bioremediation to be effective, the right temperature, nutrients and food must be present. Proper conditions allow the right microbes to grow and multiply — and eat more contaminants.
Bioremediation can also be used on pollution caused by natural disasters like hurricanes, tsunamis and wildfires.
What Is Bioremediation?
Over the last century, urbanization and industrialization, combined with poor waste management, has led to an alarming rise in the amount of pollution in our soils, waterways, groundwater and air.
Heavy metal toxins from industrial production, chemicals from the agriculture sector, untreated wastewater, plastic pollution, crude oil leaks and spills, toxins from the increasing wildfires, and other pollutants need systems-level change. However, natural processes in the environment do offer solutions.
Bioremediation is a process by which plants and microbes that are already present in the environment — like fungi, algae and bacteria — have the power to remove or reduce environmental pollution — even plastic pollution.
While natural bioremediation has been around since the dawn of time (microbes were the earliest known life forms), modern bioremediation offers techniques that stimulate and augment these processes.
Types of Bioremediation
There are several forms of bioremediation. Here are some of the more prominent examples.
Microbial Remediation
Microbial remediation uses microorganisms to degrade organic contaminants or to bind heavy metals to make them less available to other organisms. Microorganisms can use them for food, or metabolize them along with food.
This can be done by breeding bacteria in high numbers and then introducing them into contaminated areas, through a process called bioaugmentation, or it can be done through a process called biostimulation, which creates the conditions for an ideal habitat for bacterial growth in the contaminated soil or water.
The byproduct of microbial remediation floats in the lagoon at the French Limited Superfund site in Houston, Texas on July 1, 1993. An industrial waste facility where oils, grease, acids and solvents were dumped, the site was treated with naturally occurring bacteria that digest toxic sludge. Paul S. Howell / Liaison
Phytoremediation
Phytoremediation uses plants to clean up contaminated soil, water and air. There are several subprocesses by which plants can do this.
With phytoextraction, contaminants are removed from the soil and concentrated in the plant tissue above ground. Some plants used to extract heavy metal contaminants are sunflowers, willow and Indian mustard.
Phytostabilization uses plants to sequester toxic heavy metals below ground to prevent migration into the ecosystem, helping to reduce the chance of metals entering the food chain. Poplar trees are one of the plants used for this process.
Phytoremediation with hydroponic plants at the abandoned Cunha Baixa uranium mine in Viseu, Portugal on May 30, 2014. Daniela / Flickr
In phytovolatilization, plants can also absorb contaminants, convert them into less toxic substances, then through transpiration, which is the exhalation through pores of the plant, let them evaporate in the atmosphere. Also, in the process of rhizofiltration, plants filter water through a root system that removes toxic substances and excess nutrients.
Mycoremediation
This process uses fungi’s digestive enzymes to break down contaminants in the environment. Fungi canbreak down chemical pollutants, including oil and pesticides, can extract or bind heavy metals, and can filter water. Fungi can also break down certain plastics.
Bioremediation Processes
While there are numerous bioremediation types, there are also several processes that have been utilized and are either done in situ (at the place of contamination) or ex situ (off-site of the contamination).
Some in-situ processes can involve bioventing, which is a process of aerating soils in order to promote bioremediation by stimulating the biological activity of indigenous microbial populations. Or it can involve the opposite, which is biosparging, injecting pressurized air or gas into contaminated zones in order to target chemical compounds that degrade under aerobic conditions.
There are also pump-and-treat methods that remove and treat contaminated groundwater.
Ex-situ processes can include landfarming, which is a waste treatment process that transports contaminated soil and spreads it on the ground at another site, stimulating microbial activity within the soils through aeration and/or the addition of minerals, nutrients and moisture.
As mentioned above through bioventing and biosparging, processes also involve whether or not an organism requires oxygen to break down an environmental contaminant, which is aerobic bioremediation, or if an organism carrying out bioremediation can breathe some other molecule besides oxygen, which is anaerobic bioremediation.
Bioremediation of Hazardous Waste Sites
In 1980, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established the Superfund program to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances. Thousands of contaminated sites exist nationally and the waste is primarily due to hazardous waste being dumped or improperly managed by manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills, mining sites and pollution from the military.
Since 1999, the EPA has utilized bioremediation in cleanups involving petroleum and chemicals found in crude oil, pesticides and other contaminants. One of the most common methods used is bioventing, also known as biostimulation — aerating soils to stimulate the biological activity of indigenous microbes.
One of the sites they cleaned up is an example of anaerobic bioremediation and was used to remediate the groundwater at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The area was contaminated by industrial activity and hazardous waste storage. Remediation began in 2006, and since then over 240,000 gallons of a solution of vegetable oil and sodium lactate were injected into the location to provide carbon sources to fuel the growth of microorganisms.
As of 2022, 1329 Superfund sites across the country were on the national priorities list, with 452 cleaned up since the program’s establishment. Though $1 billion dollars was recently allocated toward cleaning up 22 toxic sites, the program has languished for years due to a lack of funding.
Hemp phytoremediation on the former Loring Air Force Base – a Superfund site. Upland Grassroots
Grassroots organizations have also stepped up to use bioremediation. Upland Grassroots in Limestone, Maine is working to remediate Loring Air Force Base, which has been identified by the EPA as one of several sites with PFAS (also known as forever chemicals) in the soil, which can cause cancer and other adverse health effects.
The site has since been taken over by the M’ikmaq Nation, the Indigenous Tribe of Aroostook County. Tribal members teamed up with scientists to start a phytoremediation project that involved planting fiber hemp to pull the PFAS out of the ground, which they’ve done successfully since 2019.
Bioremediation Uses on Agriculture Land
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the United States uses more than 1 billion pounds of pesticides every year, and as little as 0.1% of an applied pesticide interacts with its targeted weed or pest. The remainder contaminates the soil, air and water and can have significant impacts throughout the ecosystem and on public health.
Over the last century, industrial agriculture has led to more application of pesticides. The pesticides are a major threat to ecosystem biodiversity, compromising soil health alongside other unsustainable agriculture methods.
Cleanup of soil contaminated by the use of pesticides on a former orchard, at Lincoln Elementary School in Wenatchee, Washington in 2006. Washington State Department of Ecology
Application of animal waste from industrial animal facilities can also be a cause of heavy metal contamination from metals in feed, including copper, zinc and lead. Animal waste from factory farms that is spread on agricultural fields may also contain harmfulmicrobes and antibiotics, with other pharmaceutical residues that can affect soil.
Conventional approaches to remediation, which involve chemicals and physical extraction, are costly, and introduce other pollutants. However, phytoremediation approaches are more sustainable when reclaiming soils.
The Rhizae Renewal Collective phytoremediates a lead-contaminated lot in Baltimore’s Johnston Square,using sunflowers and fungi to make it suitable for food production, pictured on Sept. 18, 2020. Baltimore Heritage / Flickr
Currently, the Upland Grassroots folks are also planting fiber hemp on farmland owned by the Tribal Nation contaminated with pesticides and fungicides.
Other microbial remediation methods include biostimulation, through using indigenous microbes, nutrients and other substances to encourage microbes to feed on chemical pollutants. Bioaugmentation can also be used by introducing bacterial microbes sourced from outside the soil to aid in remediation.
Another method studied has been the use of microalgae. With its ability to grow rapidly in moist locations, microalgae can absorb and degrade toxic contaminants and heavy metals. Some of the non-degraded particles can be absorbed by microalgae, and then be turned into biomass for use in biodiesel production.
Construction equipment levels gravel and soil during a remediation project on the site of the old Pacific Rod and Gun Club at Lake Merced in San Francisco, California on Dec. 1, 2015. Paul Chinn / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Bioremediation of Marine and Freshwater Environments
Our marine, coastal and freshwater resources are constantly impacted by human-caused pollution. Bioremediation methods are used with plastics, industrial and agricultural waste, chemicals from pesticides contaminating waterways and groundwater, raw sewage, fuel and other pollutants.
Workers from the Lake Restoration company pump gallons of alum into Lake Rebecca near Rockford, Minnesota on Nov. 10, 2010. The compound improves water quality by precipitating out phosphates in the lake water. David Brewster / Star Tribune via Getty Images
Oil Spills
Bioremediation methods were used during the devastating 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil spill of 11 million gallons over 1300 miles of Alaska coastline, killing hundreds of harbor seals and bald eagles.
Around 110,000 pounds of nitrogen in fertilizer was applied to numerous areas for three years. Through biostimulation, the nutrients added to the soils enabled local microbes to degrade contaminants more efficiently.
Another approach to bioremediation of oil spills is bioaugmentation, which uses oil-degrading bacteria to supplement the existing microbial population.
Treatment requires certain conditions to be effective. For example, the nutrients need to remain intact with the oiled material, and the concentration of nutrients, like in the fertilizer, needs to support the maximum growth rate of the microbes, both of which don’t work in open water environments, because anything applied to a floating oil slick would disperse.
However, hundreds of kinds of bacteria, fungi and archaea (microbes different from bacteria) are capable of degrading petroleum.
Phytoremediation is also utilized in oil cleanups. In one instance, researchers reported that a floating treatment wetland, which used four different plant species to vegetate a floating mat made of locally sourced materials, successfully remediated a majority of contamination at a water stabilization pit in Pakistan. The plants and the water in the pit were inoculated with different hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria.
Eutrophication
Eutrophication is when a body of water becomes overloaded on nutrients, as a result of human activity like sewage discharge, surface runoff from industrial agricultural practices with manure and fertilizers, and home lawn practices. This leads to acidification, harmful algal blooms which produce toxins that make humans and animals sick, and the depletion of oxygen, resulting in dead zones and fish kills.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 65% percent of the estuaries and coastal waters in the contiguous U.S. studied by researchers are moderately to severely degraded by excessive nutrient inputs.
A floating island of plants to filter stormwater runoff and remove excess nutrients from the water is installed at Angelica Creek Park in Reading, Pennsylvania on Sept. 22, 2016. Lauren A. Little / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images
Phytoremediation has been used as a solution, with species that soak up the nitrates and phosphates, abating overnutrition and eutrophication. Commonly used plants for this task are macrophytes, which are aquatic plants that float on the water, such as water hyacinth or water lettuce.
After the species soaks up the excess nutrients, the plants used to target the issue are harvested and disposed of, and depending on the kinds of pollutants in the area, might be composted and reused as fertilizer.
Bioremediation and Natural Disasters
While wildfires are typically human-caused, they are still considered natural disasters, and they often leave behind many toxins through dangerous ash, remains of incinerated hazardous household waste and building materials, charred paint, pesticides, cleaning products, and other items that leave pollutants in the soil like arsenic, asbestos, copper, lead and zinc.
California, which has suffered severe wildfire devastation in recent years, has utilized bioremediation.
The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, known as CalRecycle — a department within the California Environmental Protection Agency — promotes the benefits of mycoremediation after wildfires.
Wildfires eliminate the soil’s protective vegetative layer, exposing it to wind and rain. This can lead to sediments being washed during heavy rainfall into waterways, roads and neighborhoods, and potentially dangerous mudslides.
Utilizing compost restores soil properties, provides a protective layer, binds and absorbs contaminants, increases water infiltration, protects against erosion and helps reestablish vegetation.
After the wildfires in 2017, as federal and state workers used traditional methods to remove a lot of the toxic debris, a coalition of fire remediation experts, local businesses and ecological activists in Sonoma County worked together to try mycoremediation with oyster mushrooms.
Called the Fire Remediation Coalition, they installed 40 miles of wattle — straw-filled tubes designed to prevent erosion — inoculated with oyster mushrooms around parking lots, along roads and across hillsides. These divert runoff from sensitive waterways, while the mushrooms break down the toxins.
Following the 2018 Camp Fire, a mushroom farmer who lost his property founded the nonprofit Butte Remediation to provide his neighbors with no-cost mycoremediation. The founder, Cheetah Tchudi, is now working alongside ecological restoration nonprofit CoRenewal, which after the 2020 fires has been experimenting with mycoremediation in some of the burn zones.
Mushrooms sprout from wattle following California’s Camp Fire in 2018. Butte Remediation
As Lahaina on Maui moves forward with recovery from a devastating fire last August, some residents are encouraging the local government to utilize bioremediation to clean up toxic pollutants in the water and soil.
The Maui Bioremediation Group is looking to remediate the environment using genki balls — biodegradable capsules filled with clay and beneficial microorganisms to clean the waterways — and like the Fire Remediation Coalition in California, use fungi-inoculated wattles.
Bioremediation for Plastic
Bioremediation can be one of the solutions to our plastic crisis. Research has shown a few ways this can occur. One is through mealworms, which can eat and fully degrade plastic in hours due to microscopic bacteria in their guts that result in them secreting an enzyme that allows for the breakdown.
Another study from a team of researchers in Queensland has pointed to superworms as a source to devour plastic. The team has been seeking to identify which superworm gut enzyme is most effective at degrading plastic, and they hope to reproduce it at scale for recycling.
Several different microorganisms like fungi, bacteria and algae have different enzymes that lead to degradation.
To date, 436 species of fungi and bacteria have been found to degrade plastic, while researchers continue to make new discoveries.
Scientists recently found two strains of fungi in soils that can break down polypropylene (plastic that is often used to make bottle caps and food containers) in just 140 days.
In 2016, scientists in Japan discovered a bacteria in sludge outside a bottling factory in Japan had developed the ability to devour or decompose PET plastics, leading some to believe breakthroughs like this might lead to industrial-scale facilities that can tackle plastic waste that otherwise might end up in a landfill.
Bacteria and fungi have also been found in the Alps and the Arctic that only work at cold temperatures. Nineteen strains, including 11 fungi and 8 bacteria, were able to digest polyester-polyurethane, while 14 fungi and 3 bacteria were able to digest polybutylene adipate terephthalate (used in food packaging, agricultural, textile and other industries) and polylactic acid (used in clothing, disposable cutlery and medical implants).
During the process of mineralization, algae has been found to transform plastic waste into metabolites such as water and carbon dioxide as well as new biomass. Microalgae, specifically, has also been a promising candidate to destroy microplastics, and is said to be easily cultivated on a large scale, because it doesn’t require fertile land, freshwater or pesticides to grow.
Research is ongoing in the bioremediation of marine plastic pollution, utilizing bacteria, fungi and microalgae to accelerate the biodegradation process that turns certain plastics into a source of carbon, hydrogen or methane.
Policy
In 2021, the EPA put out a document for Principles for Greener Cleanups, which outlines policy for evaluating and minimizing the environmental footprint when cleaning up contaminated sites. The document includes EPA’s recommended best management practices fact sheets for project managers and stakeholders.
Before and after photos of a green remediation project at the Elizabeth Mine in South Strafford, Vermont. U.S. Department of Environmental Protection
It includes processes such as biostimulation, bioaugmentation and bioreactors, which all in some ways promote the growth of microbes, or create the right conditions to help the process of allowing them to thrive to be able to aid in the breakdown of contaminates.
It also promotes the beneficial use of locally generated industrial byproducts like wood chips, sawdust or agricultural byproducts, as well as manure, wastewater and pesticide-free compost from mushroom farms instead of using new products.
Formerly known as Amazon MycoRenewal Project, this nonprofit organization provides education and research in ecosystem restoration, health and healing, and sustainable community dynamics utilizing mycoremediation.
After the fires in Lahaina, a coalition of biologists, cultural practitioners, ecologists, conservationists and specialists teamed up to work towards using several bioremediation methods for cleanup of the wildfire disaster.
Established in 2018 in response to the Camp Fire in Northern California, this organization provides soil testing bioremediation with mycoremediation, and provides consulting and educational outreach.
This Illinois-based company uses fungi to reduce toxins in some landfill materials like gypsum, carpet, rubber and asphalt, as well as to absorb and digest waste, then converts it into reusable materials that can be used in compost or building materials.
This grassroots organization in Maine does phytoremediation research on fiber hemp’s ability to remove toxins. They are currently working on a Superfund site at the former Loring Air Force Base on land contaminated with jet fuel, as well as former farmland owned by the Mi’kmaq Nation that is contaminated with pesticides and fungicides.
Phytoremediation using hemp at the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine. Chelli Stanley / Upland Grassroots
Hawai’i-based nonprofit using genki balls (mud balls made with clay, soil, rice, bran, molasses and other components) to restore the ecosystem at the polluted Ala Wai Canal on O’ahu, so it can once again be swimmable and fishable.
As a flock of about 2,000 sheep graze between rows of solar panels, grazier Tony Inder wonders what all the fuss is about. “I’m not going to suggest it’s everyone’s cup of tea,” he says. “But as far as sheep grazing goes, solar is really good.”
Inder is talking about concerns over the encroachment of prime agricultural land by ever-expanding solar and windfarms, a well-trodden talking point for the loudest opponents to Australia’s energy transition.
But on Inder’s New South Wales property, a solar farm has increased wool production. It is a symbiotic relationship that the director of the National Renewables in Agriculture Conference, Karin Stark, wants to see replicated across as many solar farms as possible as Australia’s energy grid transitions away from fossil fuels.
By keeping the grass trimmed, which can otherwise pose a fire risk during dry summer months, sheep save the developer the cost of slashing it themselves.
In exchange, the panels provide shelter for the sheep, encourage healthier pasture growth under the shade of the panels and create “drip lines” from condensation rolling off the face of the panels.
“We had strips of green grass right through the drought,” Dubbo sheep grazier Tom Warren says. Warren has seen a 15 percent rise in wool production due to a solar farm installed on his property more than seven years ago.
Despite these success stories, a 2023 Agrivoltaic Resource Centre report authored by Stark found that solar grazing is under utilised in Australia because developers, despite saying they intend to host livestock, make few planning adjustments to ensure that happens.
“The result is that many solar farms are poorly suited for sheep,” Stark says. “Developers need to be talking to landholders earlier than they currently are.”
Prof Bernadette McCabe, the director of the Centre for Agricultural Engineering at the University of Southern Queensland, says farming and solar are “two very different activities” and there’s “minimal research and demonstrated success” of running them in combination.
The expectation to retain farming land for primary production is driving greater interest in the coexistence of agriculture and renewable energy but McCabe says “misaligned incentives” between the developers and farmers must be better managed.
It’s these conflicting goals that are giving anti-renewable voices “fodder to attack the renewable energy industry,” according to former New South Wales solar developer Ben Wynn.
He says energy developers often “talk up the possibility” of coexisting with livestock production but don’t have “genuine desire to do so”.
Wynn is now part of a community group opposing a large solar farm proposed south of Tamworth because it lies on productive cropping country.
“We need this transition to speed up, but if we take up highly arable black soils we are giving oxygen to the naysayers,” he says.
Wynn also led the construction of a prototype solar farm outside Tamworth, raised high off the ground with steel posts to stay out of reach of a cattle herd below.
“Cattle are massive, they will rub and scratch themselves up against anything,” Wynn says.
The project was a success but Wynn says it is too expensive to be feasible on a large scale because the installation costs are three-to-four fold the cost of regular low-lying solar panels.
The integration of sheep and solar is “highly feasible,” McCabe says, because they can graze under ordinary height panels. But she says it is “still early days” to know if it will become economically viable for cattle.
Dr Nicholas Aberle, the energy generation and storage policy director at the Clean Energy Council, says solar developers should explore dual land use options but warns it be may not be suitable for every project. He adds that “the abundance of land in Australia means it isn’t always necessary.”
According to an analysis by the Clean Energy Council, less than 0.027 percent of land used for agriculture production would be needed to power the east coast states with solar projects – far less than the one-third of all prime agricultural land that the rightwing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs has claimed will be “taken over” by renewables. That argument, which has been heavily refuted by experts, has been taken up by the National party, whose leader, David Littleproud, said regional Australia had reached saturation point with renewable energy developments.
Queensland grazier and the chair of the Future Farmers Network, Caitlin McConnel, has sold electricity to the grid from a dozen custom-built solar arrays on her farm’s cattle pastures for more than a decade.
“Trial and error” and years of modifications have made them structurally sound around cattle and financially viable in the long-term, she says.
“As far as I know, we are the only farm to do solar with cattle,” McConnel says. “It’s good land, so why would we just lock it up just for solar panels?”
(@townie.tay)
