Earlier this year, Arizona lawmakers sued the Biden administration over the newly created Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument — arguing that the establishment of national monuments should be state matters and calling the move a “land grab.” Now, the Hopi, Havasupai, and Navajo Nation, whose ancestral lands overlap with the national monument, have intervened in the case and joined with the federal government to protect the area.
“Even if the Tribal Nations and federal government share similar goals and legal positions in this litigation, the United States cannot adequately represent the Tribal Nations’ sovereign interest,” the tribes’ intervention stated.
The nearly one-million acre national monument protects areas tribes called home before being forcibly removed by the federal government, as well as places where tribal citizens hunt, pray, and gather foods and medicines. The area is also important for wildlife migration routes and potential burial sites.
If successful, Arizona’s lawsuit would open Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni to more economic development, and specifically, livestock grazing and uranium mining. Currently, there is only one uranium mine in operation within the boundaries of the national monument. The lawsuit argues that limiting mining of uranium around the Grand Canyon will make the U.S. more dependent on acquiring it from foreign countries for energy purposes.
Arizona’s lawsuit is focused specifically on the Antiquities Act. Passed in 1906 to protect areas of scientific and historical significance, President Biden used the act to create Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni after decades of Indigenous advocacy focused on protecting the Grand Canyon from uranium mining. According to Arizona, the national monument ties up too much land, impacting revenue generation that could affect funding for schools as well as the economies of small towns in the area who have also joined in the suit against the federal government.
“Under the constitution, Congress is the policy making branch of government that decides how federal land is used,” Kim Quintero, a spokesperson for the Arizona Legislature. “Not presidential edicts.”
“When you think about Baaj Nwaanjo I’tah Kukveni and the creation of this monument, it’s an immensely important place for the tribal nations,” said Mathew Campbell, a member of the Native Village of Gambell in Alaska, and legal counsel for the Havasupai Tribe and the Hopi Tribe. “The tribes fought very hard for the establishment of the monument and are here to defend it.”
Last year, a federal judge in Utah dismissed a similar lawsuit filed by states challenging the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante—two national monuments recently-created through the Antiquities Act with strong tribal ties. In that case, District Judge David Nuffer held that the Antiquities Act gives the president authority to create monuments and that the courts have no power to dispute it. That case is now in appeal.
But Kim Quintero of the Arizona Legislature says their case is different. She cites a 2021 lawsuit where a group of commercial fishermen challenged President Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act that protected around five-thousand miles of ocean floor off the coast of New England, and put a ban on fishing.
While the Supreme Court declined to review the case, Chief Justice John Roberts indicated interest in looking at the size of monuments writing that “the scope of the objects that can be designed under the Act, and how it measures the area necessary for their proper care and management, may warrant consideration– especially given the myriad restrictions on public use this purely discretionary designation can serve to justify.”
Quintero says the Arizona Legislature is banking on the Supreme Court taking the case. If successful, she said there will be other avenues for tribes to utilize in protecting the area.
“Tribal members, like other members of the public, can petition Congress to pass laws to protect areas of federal land they believe should be protected,” said Quintero.
Nine conservation organizations including the Grand Canyon Trust, Center for Biological Diversity, and Sierra Club have signed on to protect Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni. “The conservation groups are very much following the lead of the tribes,” said Michal Toll, staff attorney for the Grand Canyon Trust. “These are their ancestral homelands.”
Mathew Campbell said it will likely take months before the intervention is ruled on by the court and years before the lawsuit is settled.
Native plants support pollinators by providing nectar for hummingbirds, native bees, butterflies, moths, bats and others. They support other wildlife by providing critical habitat and essential food.
Native plants have evolved for survival and tend to be more naturally adapted to local growing conditions. Due to deep roots that withstand long periods of dry weather, they are drought-resistant and require little or no watering after they are established.
Since native plants adapt to their ecosystem’s soil, whether it be poor or fertile, they can survive from what nutrients are available without the aid of fertilizer.
Native plants in the U.S. are under threat from habitat loss, construction, overgrazing, wildfires, invasive species, bioprospecting — the search for plant and animal species from which medicinal drugs, biochemicals and other commercially valuable material can be obtained — and climate change.
Benefits of Native Plants
A butterfly feeds on a native coneflower in a pollinator garden of the East Decatur Greenway in Decatur, Georgia. Thomas Cizauskas / Flickr
Native plants are indigenous plant species that evolve naturally on land or in the water, and are an integral piece of thriving ecosystems, providing critical habitat for insects, birds, mammals and other animals that form an interconnected web of mutually beneficial interactions.
They have a host of other benefits — something one might consider when it comes to what is grown in the yard.
A front yard featuring native plants instead of a lawn. California Native Plant Society / Flickr
They require much less maintenance by using less water. According to a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2017, one-third of water for residential use is for landscape irrigation. Because of native plants’ deep root systems, they don’t just require less water, but it makes them drought tolerant, and slows down the flow of water that in turn helps prevent soil erosion, flooding and surface runoff that can lead to the pollution of waterways.
The root system acts as a filter for pollutants. Silver birch, yew and elder trees have been found to trap up to 70 percent of particulates in the air.
An ancient yew tree forest in the UK. Matthew J Thomas / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Native plants will save you money on fertilizer, since they adapt to the nutrients in the soil, whether depleted or nutrient rich. They also don’t need pesticides, having developed natural resistance over time.
In terms of climate mitigation, they sequester carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to help mitigate climate change.
Impacts of Non-Native and Invasive Plants
To those not aware, non-native plants, and invasives (which is what non-natives are called after they rapidly grow and spread over large areas) look pretty innocuous, but they wreak havoc on the ecosystem.
Invasive plants arrived with colonization. According to a 2020 study, researchers quantified 65 plant species, subspecies and varieties that have been lost forever in the wild since Europeans arrived.
Invasive plant species aggressively compete with native species, and typically outcompete them, leading to potential extinction of not only the native plants, but the animals and their habitats, as well as food sources.Some non-native plants produce chemicals in their leaves or root systems that inhibit the growth of other plants around them, which results in reduced biodiversity, increased erosion and genetic alterations of native species through hybridization.
Invasive plants affect water availability and damage soil nutrients, by decreasing water flows and reducing the transportation of nutrients. This can also increase runoff and create erosion.
A monarch caterpillar on a native showy milkweed plant. Jim Wadsworth / California Native Plant Society / CC BY 2.0
Invasive plants also affect human health by providing habitat for vectors of disease. For example, Japanese barberry was introduced into the states in the late 1800s as an ornamental plant. Now it exists across 30 states and forms dense thickets that are favored by deer ticks that cause lyme disease.
Besides competing with invasives, native plants over the last several decades have been up against several other conditions that threaten their existence. The following are some of the major concerns.
Climate Change
Higher temperatures cause native plants to experience heat-related stress, which causes higher water demand. Higher amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere promote growth of invasive plants that box native plants out of their spaces.
More than 70 native plant species can be found on the 19 acres surrounding the Piedras Blancas Light Station on California’s central coast. Bureau of Land Management
Bioprospecting is the search for useful products derived from plants, animals and microorganisms that can be developed further for commercialization. Some examples include the poppy seed for morphine and the white willow tree that helped develop aspirin.
Often, this doesn’t just result in what is called biopiracy — which involves the appropriation of plants and cultural knowledge, where corporations use Indigenous people to locate biological material that has a medicinal purpose, then bring it back to the lab and patent it as their own invention without proper compensation or acknowledgement. It also can deplete resources from overharvesting native species that could lead to local extinction. Medicinal plants are especially vulnerable to this.
Native Plant Restoration Projects
There are several native plant restoration projects across the country. Here is a small selection.
Part of the Sustainability in Prisons Project, this environmental partnership between the Institute for Applied Ecology, Department of Corrections and the Bureau of Land Management provides unique and meaningful ecological activities to incarcerated men and women with the goal of restoring sagebrush habitat in the great basin region through a multi-state grow out initiative.
Based in Framingham, Massachusetts, as one of the nation’s first plant conservation organizations, the Native Plant Trust saves native plants in the wild, grows them for gardens and restorations and provides education initiatives on their values and uses.
This community-led watershed restoration organization in California, restores and conserves ecosystems on the Mattole River. One of their projects is to produce native plants through collecting seed from a mix of locally adapted native plants throughout the Mattole Watershed and King Range National Conservation Area and are grown at their Native Plant Nursery and Native seed farm.
California-based Back to Natives promotes the use of locally native plants as well as habitat restoration and preservation by providing service learning and volunteer-based habitat restoration programs. They also design, install and maintain locally native landscapes for homeowners and businesses with all proceeds supporting their environmental education and habitat restoration programs.
This O’ahu-based nonprofit educates residents of Hawai‘i and visitors to the Pūpūkea Marine Life Conservation District about the importance of this special area’s marine life and protected status. In an effort to help reduce erosion and sedimentation at Sharks Cove, they started the Native Hawaiian Plant Coastal Restoration Project.
Over the course of two years, 3000 volunteers helped restore 100,000 native plants (10,000 trees and 90,000 herbs and shrubs) to five sites in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
Native Plant Sanctuaries
Since many native plant species are at risk because of habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change, many have set up plant sanctuaries to help preserve and protect these species by providing a protected area for growth.
There are several throughout the United States.
For example, Maine is home to a wildflower reservation that is open to the public and contains 100 wildflower species over 177 acres. Hobbs Fern Sanctuary in New Hampshire has 250 acres filled with 40 varieties of native ferns. In Vermont, there is a bog sanctuary on 41 acres with boardwalk access, and in Pennsylvania the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources creates 35 secret sanctuaries across the state.
Since then, the USDA’s Forest Service created a policy (FSM 2070) in 2008 designed to combat invasive species and mitigate the impacts of climate change and maintain healthy forests. The policy stipulates that native plants will be the first choice in revegetation for restoration and rehabilitation of native ecosystems, where native plant communities might not regenerate naturally on their own.
Other legislation has been state by state.
In Maryland, the senate passed House Bill 322, which compels Homeowners’ Associations (HOAs) and other organizations to allow “low-impact landscaping” such as rain gardens, native plant gardens, pollinator gardens and xeriscaping in subdivisions. The law also forbids an HOA from requiring yards consisting of turf grass.
The bill was led by a homeowner in Howard County who experienced harassment from her neighbors and her HOA over planting a pollinator garden. The HOA hired a law firm to force her to replace it.
In 2017, New Jersey adopted a bill that requires the Department of Transportation and other authorities to use native plants on roadway landscapes.
In Hawai’i, Act 233 was passed and requires that, whenever possible, Hawaiian plants known to occur on a particular island will be used for landscaping in that particular place, and shall be sourced from that same island.
The silver sword is endemic to the island of Maui, Hawai’i and listed as threatened on the IUCN red list. Vince Barnes / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Several other states declared proclamations for native plant month.
Overall, though, it is said that at-risk plants have less conservation funding and legal protection than animals in the country. Plants are also only safeguarded on federal lands, not private.
What Can You Do to Help?
Volunteers work to help native plants grow at the Native Seed Farm in Irvine, California on March 27, 2019. Paul Bersebach / MediaNews Group / Orange County Register via Getty Images
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Within a thicket of the Big Cypress National Preserve, established a half-century ago to protect the marshes and sloughs here that make up a vital part of the Florida Everglades, a series of wells extracts oil from more than two miles underground.
The oil field is situated deep within a pine forest of the preserve — the first in the country — which channels more than 40 percent of the water flowing into Everglades National Park and shelters iconic and imperiled species like the fabled ghost orchid and Florida panther, the official state animal. The wells penetrate thousands of feet beneath an underground aquifer, an important drinking water source, and draw up oil from the so-called Sunniland trend, a reserve stretching across southwest Florida from Miami to Fort Myers, although most of the reserve is situated beneath Big Cypress.
For decades, oil production has endured in this corner of the fragile Everglades, a watershed that spans much of the peninsula and is the focus of a $21 billion federal and state restoration effort, one of the most ambitious in human history. Big Cypress is among some 10 percent of federally protected lands nationwide where the government owns the surface terrain while private entities retain the mineral rights underneath.
“Big Cypress National Preserve is very sacred to us,” said Talbert Cypress, elected chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, a federally recognized tribal nation located in the Everglades. “We have a lot of ceremonial grounds that have been in Big Cypress National Preserve, burial grounds, places where we gather our traditional medicine. So just seeing that sort of damage in a place that really matters to us a lot, it’s sad to see it.”
Now the Miccosukee, longtime environmental stewards in Florida who notably helped steer stringent water quality standards for their sacred “river of grass,” have a plan for phasing out oil drilling within Big Cypress.
The tribe has joined with WildLandscapes International, a nonprofit land conservation group, to engineer a multimillion-dollar deal with the Collier family, which owns the vast majority of the mineral rights beneath the preserve. If the agreement is finalized, the family would give up the mineral rights associated with some 465,000 acres to the federal government.
“Unfortunately I cannot share. It’s under a non-disclosure,” said David Houghton, director of WildLandscapes International, when asked about the details. “The deal includes all the lands that the Colliers own the mineral rights on, minus what they currently have under lease.”
The proposal comes amid interest in expanding oil exploration and development within Big Cypress, even as rising global temperatures associated with fossil fuel emissions represent yet another threat to the Everglades, a watershed responsible for the drinking water of some 9 million Floridians. Most recently a Texas oil and gas company submitted a permit application to the National Park Service for two new sites within the preserve.
“We think we’ve got a deal here. We don’t know that, but we think,” Houghton said. “We’ll get a number, and that number either will work or it won’t — and I think it will.”
Liquid tar
The Everglades are Florida’s most important freshwater resource. The watershed spans central and south Florida, encompassing the Kissimmee River, Lake Okeechobee, sawgrass prairies to the south, and Florida Bay. It includes several federal- and state-protected lands including the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge, Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, Big Cypress National Preserve, and Everglades National Park. Various efforts over the last century to drain the Everglades, the largest steered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, have made modern Florida possible and left the river of grass drastically altered.
Inside Climate News
The Humble Oil and Refining Company, a predecessor of Exxon Mobil, discovered oil in Southwest Florida in 1943, after the governor and cabinet at the time offered a $50,000 reward to those who first found oil in the state.
Today, Florida is responsible for less than 0.04 percent of the nation’s oil production, according to a report the Conservation Economics Institute, a nonprofit research organization, prepared for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The industry employs fewer than a thousand members of the state’s workforce and accounts for $25.4 million or 0.0002 percent of its gross domestic product. A separate study by the American Petroleum Institute concluded the oil and natural gas industry contributes nearly $22.1 billion to the Florida economy and supports nearly 266,800 jobs.
The vast majority of the state’s oil production occurs in the Panhandle, according to the Conservation Economics report. The two oil fields within Big Cypress, Bear Island and Raccoon Point, together were responsible for 585 barrels a day in 2020, about one-seventh of the state’s daily total. Oil was discovered at Bear Island, which is located partially within the preserve, in 1972, before the preserve was established, and production began a year later. At Raccoon Point, southeast of Bear Island, oil was detected in 1978. Production began in 1981, and the field was expanded in 1992.
Big Cypress was established in 1974. Two years later, the Collier family, for whom Collier County, where a large portion of the preserve is situated, is named, conveyed 76,790 acres to the National Park Service to help create the preserve, with the family maintaining the underground mineral rights. The Colliers can trace their family tree to the early 20th century advertising magnate Barron Gift Collier, at the time the largest landowner in Florida. In 1996, the family conveyed an additional 83,000 acres to the National Park Service to expand Big Cypress. Today, Big Cypress encompasses more than 700,000 acres, including much of the western Everglades.
In 2003, the federal government agreed to purchase the Colliers’ mineral rights for $120 million, but the purchase fell through. At the time, various appraisals valued their mineral rights beneath Big Cypress, the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, and Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge at between $5 million and $475 million.
The oil here is of the heavy-sour variety, with a consistency of liquid tar, according to a website of the Collier Resources Company, which manages the family’s mineral holdings. When refined, the oil is used in auto, aviation and diesel fuels, lube oils, and asphalt. Edward Glab, director of the Global Energy Security Forum in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University, characterized the oil as not high-grade or worth a lot of money. Multiple phone calls to the Collier Resources Company were not returned.
“To me it makes no sense drilling for oil anywhere in the Everglades,” Glab said. “It just doesn’t because the reserves are simply not going to be there to justify that sort of investment.”
“It’s a lot of trouble for something that’s not producing a ton of oil, and it’s not like premium-grade oil. It’s like machinery oil, the kind used for heavy machinery,” said Cypress, chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. “For us, when we see the amount of work that goes into the extraction, the damage that they do, it doesn’t seem worth it.”
Acidizing rather than fracking is more likely to be used in Florida to extract oil because of the state’s geology, which is characterized by porous limestone that harbors underground aquifers, according to the Conservation Economics report. Acidizing involves injecting the oil-bearing rock formations with a mixture of acid, water, and other chemicals, dissolving the formations and allowing the oil to flow more easily to the well. Some 93 percent of the state’s population depends on groundwater for drinking water, far more than any other state in the nation.
Wastewater from such techniques can contain pollutants and threaten the groundwater, although the Collier family says multiple precautions are taken throughout the drilling process to protect the sensitive environment here, according to the Collier Resources Company website. For instance, to safeguard the aquifers, a series of steel casings and thick layer of cement surround all oil-producing wells. At the well sites a limestone pad is constructed with a berm around it to prevent stormwater runoff from carrying pollutants into the environment. The pads also include a liner to protect the groundwater. The Collier family website also says water sampling has revealed no evidence of groundwater contamination.
But spills have occurred. A spill at Raccoon Point in October 2018, caused by corrosion in a production well, released 2,000 gallons of wastewater mixed with oil. The operator at the time, under lease with the Collier family, said the fluids stayed within a bermed area, and most of the fluids were recovered, according to a Florida Department of Environmental Protection report.
“There’s just so many potential damages that can happen here, and when it’s such a small amount of oil that’s being produced it does not make economic sense,” said Evan E. Hjerpe, executive director of the Conservation Economics Institute and author of the report. “It’s kind of an antiquated or artifact of previous times, and it would benefit the public much greater to move forward without having these potential risks going on.”
“The reason we survived”
For hundreds of years, the Miccosukee people hunted, fished, and held religious ceremonies among the soaring cypress swamps and sweeping sawgrass prairies of Big Cypress. During the First and Second Seminole Wars, in the first half of the 19th century, they were pushed deep within the watery wilderness and found sanctuary on the tree islands scattered here.
Raccoon Point (pictured) together with Bear Island were responsible for 585 barrels of oil a day in 2020, about one-seventh of Florida’s daily total.
National Parks Conservation Association / LightHawk
“We have a mother-child relationship with the Everglades because it helped us survive the removal era as well as the termination era, and so without it we would not exist as a sovereign entity. We would have either been annihilated or removed to the West,” said Curtis Osceola, chief of staff for the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. “Our land is the reason we survived. It is the reason why we’re here, and so we have a duty to the land that once protected us. And so that’s what it is to be Miccosukee, is to serve and protect the lands of our environment.”
Today, most of the 600-member tribe lives on tribal lands within Everglades National Park, although some 100 to 200 Miccosukees, members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and other Native people of Miccosukee and Seminole heritage live in 15 villages within Big Cypress. About eight of the communities, as well as a school, are situated downstream from Raccoon Point, raising concerns that spilled oil could flow in their direction, affecting surface water and the underground aquifer, which some residents have tapped with residential wells. Osceola said back when Big Cypress was established and the Collier family maintained the underground mineral rights, the Miccosukees were left out of the negotiations.
“Part of our culture tells us that the land should rest, and those fluids beneath the land should go undisturbed. That includes natural gas, oil, things like that,” he said. “So the extraction of oil is a very unnatural act.”
Oil drilling within Big Cypress is the latest environmental issue the tribe has taken up. After the federal government sued the state in the 1980s over water pollution in Everglades National Park and the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, the Miccosukees got involved in the issue as defenders of the river of grass. The litigation led to a monumental state cleanup effort, which remains in progress today.
The tribe’s pending deal with the Colliers would halt all future drilling within Big Cypress, although existing production could continue at least for now. The agreement likely would upend a plan for two new sites in Big Cypress that Burnett Oil Co. Inc., an oil and gas company based in Fort Worth, Texas, is pursuing.
In 2017 and 2018, Burnett, under a lease with the Collier family, conducted an off-road seismic survey of 110 square miles of Big Cypress. The survey involved applying vibrating plates to the ground and sending seismic signals deep beneath the surface to map potential oil. To access the remote area, 33-ton vibroseis trucks were used. The hefty vehicles sank into the soft, water-soaked soils, leaving deep ruts, consequential in an ecosystem where the boundary between land and water is blurred and inches of elevation can mean vast differences in habitat. The effort also harmed slow-growing mature dwarf cypress trees. As many as 500 of the trees were cut down to allow the trucks to move through the area, according to a 2023 report by the National Parks Conservation Association.
Six years later the landscape has not recovered, the report said. The survey left lasting scars including soil compaction and deep twisting furrows, and almost none of the felled cypress trees has shown signs of regrowth. The National Parks Conservation Association wants the National Park Service to compel Burnett to replant the trees and address the other problems. Burnett did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The two new sites Burnett is proposing would be similar to the one at Raccoon Point, according to the company’s permit application to the National Park Service. The document says the project is designed to minimize environmental impacts and avoid historical, cultural, and archeological resources, including Miccosukee and Seminole areas.
If the National Park Service were to approve Burnett’s plan, that would contradict the Biden administration’s demonstrated commitment to confront climate change, said Christina Reichert, senior attorney in the Florida office of Earthjustice, a nonprofit litigating environmental issues.
“It doesn’t match up to the promises that we’re hearing and the focus that this administration should be having on fighting the climate crisis. This would be creating brand new fossil fuel infrastructure in a time where we need to be transitioning away from that,” she said. “Wetlands are carbon sinks. One of the things they do is absorb carbon from the atmosphere and store it. So it doesn’t make sense to destroy wetlands and then build fossil fuel infrastructure.”
Hjerpe of the Conservation Economics Institute said closing an oil well can be difficult and costly, sometimes making it more advantageous to continue operating the well even when the oil is not of the highest quality. He said it is possible Burnett’s lease agreement with the Collier family mandated exploration plans or focused on increasing new development.
“When you see the path forward, and there’s certainly potential for a buy-out of your minerals and buy-out of your operations, then it completely makes financial sense to make sure that you are heavily invested in the area and that you keep producing and illustrating the value and increasing the value of your operations,” he said.
Climate change associated with fossil fuel emissions is poised to have a big impact on the Everglades. Rising temperatures will increase evaporation, stressing the watershed that already is pressured by explosive population growth and development. The hotter temperatures also will lead to precipitation changes, raising concerns about whether the water management infrastructure here, some of the most complex in the world, is up to future challenges.
The agreement involving the Miccosukees, Colliers, and WildLandscapes International includes three phases. Under the first phase, completed last year, the Collier family sold 11,141 acres, including the mineral rights, to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and South Florida Water Management District. The second phase, focused on the mineral rights beneath Big Cypress, still faces several steps, said Houghton of WildLandscapes International.
“The way the deal is set up we have a floor value, and if the appraisal meets that or above then the Colliers are obligated to sell,” he said. “If the appraisal is below, the Colliers could get out.”
If the agreement moves forward, Congress would appropriate the funding, which could take a few more years. The money would come from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal program that puts earnings from offshore oil and gas leasing toward land conservation. The third phase involves land near Everglades City, a small town outside of Big Cypress.
Cypress, chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, said future plans go further. Eventually the tribe wants to stop all oil drilling within Big Cypress for good.
“Florida is going to need more freshwater, more drinking water, and we don’t have that without the Everglades,” he said. “It matters to everybody in Florida.”
This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
April signaled the beginning of blistering heat for much of Texas. And while the summer heat is uncomfortable for many, it can be deadly for the people incarcerated in Texas’ prison system where temperatures regularly reach triple digits.
With another sweltering summer likely ahead, on April 22 prison rights advocates filed a complaint against Texas Department of Criminal Justice executive director Bryan Collier, arguing that the lack of air conditioning in the majority of Texas prisons amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
The filing came from four nonprofit organizations who are joining a lawsuit originally filed last August by Bernie Tiede, an inmate who suffered a medical crisis after being housed in a Huntsville cell that reached temperatures exceeding 110 degrees. Tiede, a well-known offender whose 1996 murder of a wealthy widow inspired the film “Bernie,” was moved to an air-conditioned cell following a court order but he’s not guaranteed to stay there this year.
Last month’s filing expands the plaintiffs to include every inmate incarcerated in uncooled Texas prisons, which have led to the deaths of dozens of Texas inmates and cost the state millions of dollars as it fights wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits.
The plaintiffs ask that an Austin federal judge declare the state’s prison policy unconstitutional and require that prisons be kept under 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Texas jails are already required to keep facilities cooler than 85 degrees, and federal prisons in Texas have a 76 degree maximum.
Between June and August last year, the average temperature was 85.3 degrees — the second hottest on record behind 2011. And this year does not look to be much cooler. The most recent winter season ranked warmest on record for the contiguous U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Scientists have found that climate change has resulted in more severe and longer lasting heat waves. In the last decade, Texas has experienced over 1,000 days of record-breaking heat, compared to a normal decade.
In the hot summer months, those concrete and metal cells can reach over 130 degrees, formerly incarcerated Texans said during an April 22 press conference. Legal representatives hope to prove those conditions are unconstitutional.
“What is truly infuriating is the failure to acknowledge that everyone in the system — all 130,000 prisoners — are at direct risk of being impacted by something that has a simple solution that has been around since the 1930s, and that is air conditioning,” attorney Jeff Edwards told reporters. Edwards was the lead attorney in a 2014 prison rights case that cited the nearly two dozen Texas prison inmates who died from heat stroke over the previous two decades. That case culminated in a settlement, where TDCJ agreed to install air conditioning at the Wallace Pack Unit near College Station.
About two thirds of the inmates housed across TDCJ’s facilities live in areas without air conditioning. Advocates and inmates’ families have long fought to cool prisons in a state where summer temperatures routinely exceed triple digits and pose dangerous conditions to inmates and correctional officers.
Although the state has not reported a heat-related death since 2012, researchers and inmates’ families dispute those statistics. A 2022 study found that 14 prison deaths per year were associated with heat. Last year, a Texas Tribune analysis found that at least 41 people had died in uncooled prisons during the state’s record-breaking heat wave.
Health problems that have been linked to excessive heat include renal diseases, cardiovascular mortality, respiratory illnesses and suicides, Julie Skarha, a epidemiology researcher at Brown University who authored the 2022 study, told reporters on Monday.
Skarha said while death certificates may not list heat strokes — a condition when the body can no longer control its temperature — as the official cause of death, her research indicates that many prisoners have died from heat-related causes.
“Heat deaths haven’t magically stopped,” the lawsuit states. “TDCJ has simply stopped reporting or admitting them after the multiple wrongful death lawsuits and national news coverage.”
TDCJ spokesperson Amanda Hernandez declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying the agency does not comment on pending litigation. But she emphasized that the department has been adding more air conditioning units since 2018.
“Each year we’ve been working to add cool beds, and we’ll continue to do so,” she said.
She also pointed to the departments’ “enhanced heating protocols” which are activated from April to October and include providing ice water to inmates and allowing them to purchase fans and cooling towels from the commissary.
Lawyers argue that these mitigation tactics are insufficient to combat the state’s sweltering temperatures. To survive the heat, incarcerated people report having to flood their toilets or sinks and lie down in the water on the cell floor to try to cool their bodies, the lawsuit states.
“This isn’t an unpredictable event,” said attorney Erica Grossman, who is one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. “It gets hot every summer, and much like every other building in Texas — including buildings that have animals — we cool the building.”
TDCJ staff who work in the facilities are similarly impacted by the heat, said Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law and LBJ School. The excessive heat invades all aspects of life in prisons: Staff must do physical work in heavy uniforms in the heat; the heat results in more violence among those incarcerated; and it leads to more use of force against prisoners, she said.
The TDCJ states on their heat mitigation protocols that staff are “encouraged to increase their water intake” during the hot summer month and are allowed to wear cooling towels and dri-fit compression shirts.
New research Skarha has conducted found that the number of assaults that occur in prisons without air conditioning increased as much as five times during summer months compared to that number in climate-controlled facilities.
Prison rights advocates say the state could easily fund air conditioning units across its prisons but has simply been unwilling to do so. During the last legislative session — when the state recorded a record surplus — the House proposed spending $545 million to install air-conditioning in most of the prison facilities lacking it. But the final budget did not include any money dedicated to air conditioning.
The House also passed a bill requiring prisons to be kept between 65 and 85 degrees, which is required already in jails and most federal facilities. But the bill failed in the more conservative Senate.
“We have the resources. We just seem to not have the compassion to do it,” Rep. Carl Sherman, D-DeSoto, said during the press conference. Sherman was one of the authors of the bill that would have regulated prison temperatures.
The Legislature did allocate approximately $85 million for “additional deferred maintenance projects,” in Texas prisons, and TDCJ is using that money to pay for air conditioning units. Hernandez estimated that those dollars will provide air conditioning for an estimated 10,000 inmates.
Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Biologists have observed a Sumatran male orangutan using the sap and chewed leaves of a medicinal plant to treat an open wound on his face.
While there has been previous evidence of self-medication behaviors in animals, it is the first known incident of an animal in the wild treating a wound with a “biologically active substance,” a press release from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior said.
“During daily observations of the orangutans, we noticed that a male named Rakus had sustained a facial wound, most likely during a fight with a neighboring male,” said biologist Isabelle Laumer, the study’s lead author, in the press release.
The orangutan ate and applied sap numerous times from a climbing plant that had pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory properties. He also used the plant mesh to cover the entire gash on his face.
“Thus, medical wound treatment may have arisen in a common ancestor shared by humans and orangutans,” the press release said. “While sick and avoidance behavior can be regularly observed in non-human animals, self-medication in the form of ingestion of specific plant parts is widespread in animals but exhibited at low frequencies. The closest relatives to humans, the great apes, are known to ingest specific plants to treat parasite infection and to rub plant material on their skin to treat sore muscles.”
The study was conducted in Indonesia’s Suaq Balimbing protected rainforest, home to roughly 150 Sumatran orangutans, a critically endangered species.
Rakus carefully tore leaves from the Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria) or liana plant three days following his injury. He chewed the leaves and applied their juice repeatedly to the wound for several minutes, then covered the cut with the munched up leaves.
“This and related liana species that can be found in tropical forests of Southeast Asia are known for their analgesic and antipyretic effects and are used in traditional medicine to treat various diseases, such as malaria. Analyses of plant chemical compounds show the presence of furanoditerpenoids and protoberberine alkaloids, which are known to have antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antioxidant, and other biological activities of relevance to wound healing,” Laumer said in the press release.
The wound did not show signs of being infected after the injury and had closed after five days.
“Interestingly, Rakus also rested more than usual when being wounded. Sleep positively affects wound healing as growth hormone release, protein synthesis and cell division are increased during sleep,” Laumer added.
Rakus is believed to have been roughly 32 years old when he applied the wound treatment, reported NPR.
“The behavior of Rakus appeared to be intentional as he selectively treated his facial wound on his right flange, and no other body parts, with the plant juice. The behavior was also repeated several times, not only with the plant juice but also later with more solid plant material until the wound was fully covered. The entire process took a considerable amount of time,” Laumer said in the press release.
Senior author of the study Caroline Schuppli, an orangutan researcher, evolutionary biologist and conservationist, said it was possible that Suaq orangutans using the medicinal plant to treat their wounds came about “through individual innovation.”
“Orangutans at the site rarely eat the plant. However, individuals may accidentally touch their wounds while feeding on this plant and thus unintentionally apply the plant’s juice to their wounds. As Fibraurea tinctoria has potent analgesic effects, individuals may feel an immediate pain release, causing them to repeat the behavior several times,” Schuppli said.
Left: Pictures of Fibraurea tinctoria leaves. Right: Rakus feeding on Fibraurea tinctoria leaves (photo taken on the day after applying the plant mesh to the wound). Saidi Agam / Suaq Project
Because the wound treatment behavior had not been seen before, using Fibraurea tinctoria for this purpose may not have been previously used by Suaq orangutans. As with all the area’s adult males, Rakus’ birthplace is unknown, but he was not born there.
“Orangutan males disperse from their natal area during or after puberty over long distances to either establish a new home range in another area or are moving between other’s home ranges,” Schuppli explained in the press release. “Therefore, it is possible that the behavior is shown by more individuals in his natal population outside the Suaq research area.”
The active application of a biologically active substance for wound management by a great ape species brings new insight into self-medication in humans’ closest relatives, as well as wound medication’s evolutionary origins in general.
“The treatment of human wounds was most likely first mentioned in a medical manuscript that dates back to 2200 BC, which included cleaning, plastering, and bandaging of wounds with certain wound care substances,” Schuppli said. “As forms of active wound treatment are not just human, but can also be found in both African and Asian great apes, it is possible that there exists a common underlying mechanism for the recognition and application of substances with medical or functional properties to wounds and that our last common ancestor already showed similar forms of ointment behavior.”
Considered one of the World’s Top 25 Most Endangered Primate Species, there are only approximately 14,000 individual Sumatran orangutans left, according to the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme.
A centuries-old town emerged in the Philippines recently when a long drought dried up a dam.
Southeast Asia has been experiencing deadly extreme heat, causing school closures, work-from-home orders and withered crops.
The ruins of the town of Pantabangan in Nueva Ecija province have given local residents in the rice-growing region another income source from tourists coming to see the historic sight.
“When I heard about the sunken church of old Pantabangan town resurfacing, I got excited and wanted to see it,” said Aurea Delos Santos, a retired nurse in her early 60s, as Reuters reported.
Taking tourists to and from the island has boosted some locals’ earnings significantly.
“Back then, I was only earning 200 pesos ($3.50) from fishing, but when the tourists arrived, I’m earning 1,500 to 1,800 per day,” said Nelson Dellera, a local fisherman, as reported by Reuters.
The dam — constructed after the town was relocated during the 1970s to make way for a reservoir — is now the primary water and irrigation source for Nueva Ecija and other provinces in the area, the local government said, as The Guardian reported.
Water levels at the dam have fallen 85.3 feet already this year, revealing the foundations of the nearly 300-year-old town and portions of a church. The current level at Pantabangan dam is 23 feet lower than last year.
Marlon Paladin — a supervising engineer with the country’s National Irrigation Administration — told AFP that parts of the town started resurfacing in March following several months with “almost no rain.”
Pantabangan has reappeared five other times since the reservoir was created, but this was the longest Paladin had seen at one time.
The Philippines is one of the countries most at risk from climate change impacts, as its warm and dry season can bring drought and extreme sea surface temperatures, while the wet season can result in huge storms, including Super Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the country in 2013 and is known as one of the strongest ever recorded.
“The general impact of climate change on the Philippines is warmer temperatures. The heat that we are experiencing, it could steadily increase in the coming days,” Benison Estareja, a meteorologist with the state’s Pagasa weather bureau, told BBC News.
Even the Jesus Good Shepherd School in the city of Imus, south of Manila — which has an air conditioner in every classroom, a rarity — sent students home last week, reported The New York Times.
“It is hard for the students and teachers alike to concentrate, because the air-con is struggling, too,” said Ana Marie Macarimbang, one of the school’s fifth-grade teachers who has been teaching for almost two decades. “We are in a tropical country, yes, but the heat now is more intense than I can remember.”
Global heating due to human-caused climate change is contributing to extreme weather all over the planet, including more deadly and frequent floods, heat waves, wildfires and supercharged storms.
The Biden administration announced plans to expand two national monuments in California: the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument.
The move, announced on May 2, will add protections to nearly 120,000 acres of land in the state. The expansion contributes to President Joe Biden’s target of conserving and restoring at least 30% of lands and waters in the U.S. by 2030 under the America the Beautiful Initiative.
The expansion of the monuments will preserve areas of cultural and ecological importance.
“These expansions will increase access to nature, boost our outdoor economy, and honor areas of significance to Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples as we continue to safeguard our public lands for all Americans and for generations to come,” Vice President Kamala Harris shared in a statement.
The San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, near Los Angeles, will increase by 105,919 acres, adding to an existing 346,177 acres. The area includes habitat for the endangered California condor as well as California spotted owl and Nelson’s bighorn sheep, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Because of increased visits to the park, the administration also announced plans to increase park staff, improve accessibility and reduce pollution, among other investment projects for the national monument.
In northern California, the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument will expand by 13,696 acres, adding to an existing 330,000 acres. As part of this expansion, the ridgeline in the expansion area will be renamed from Walker Ridge to Molok Loyuk, or Condor Ridge. This sacred and ecologically important ridgeline includes rare wetlands, and the lands in the expansion area include nearly 500 native California plant species. The expansion area is also home to wildlife such as tule elk, mountain lions, bald eagles and golden eagles, according to a news release from The White House.
“These expansions honor Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples by protecting sacred ancestral places and their historically important features, while conserving our public lands, protecting scientific features, including critical wildlife habitat and migration corridors, safeguarding clean water, and supporting local economies,” The White House said in a statement.
As The Associated Press reported, critics have argued the expansions would limit resources for agriculture and other uses outside of conservation.
According to The White House statement, these expansions will not impact the state’s or private land owners’ property rights, and any lands under state or private ownership within the expansion areas are not included in the monuments.
The two expansion projects bring the total of national monument expansions under the Biden administration to seven. The administration has also conserved over 41 million acres of U.S. lands and waters so far.
Aluminum is a crucial raw ingredient in the fight against climate change. But to ensure the transition off fossil fuels is a clean one, the industry needs a serious makeover. A new federally funded “green smelter” could help make that happen.
Making this remarkably versatile metal requires a huge — and near-constant — supply of electricity. Much of it is generated by burning fossil fuels, which is one reason aluminum manufacturers are responsible for about 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. That’s more than twice the amount all of Australia spews annually.
Cleaning things up poses a huge challenge, one the Department of Energy, or DOE, wants to help solve. In March, the agency announced $6 billion in funding for “industrial demonstration” projects that showcase promising strategies for reducing the climate impact of heavy industry. The need is particularly acute, because heavy industrial processes like aluminum production generate nearly one-third of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The beneficiaries of the government’s cleanup effort include Century Aluminum Company, which could receive up to half a billion dollars to build the nation’s first new aluminum smelter in 45 years. The facility, dubbed the Green Aluminum Smelter, could double the amount of virgin, or primary, aluminum the country produces while emitting 75 percent less CO2 than older smelters, thanks to increased efficiency and the use of renewable electricity. The grant, which is awaiting finalization, is a “huge vote of confidence and a shot in the arm” for the industry, said Annie Sartor, the aluminum campaign director at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit focused on industrial decarbonization.
That could boost a sector on life support. Although the United States once led the world in producing the lightweight and durable metal, most of the country’s aluminum smelters have shuttered since the 1980s due to rising energy costs, falling prices, and a broader trend of American firms sending manufacturing overseas. Production, which peaked in 1980 at 4.65 million metric tons per year, has declined by more than 80 percent since then, according to the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of environmental organizations and labor groups. That puts the U.S. in a tricky position as demand surges: A report released last year by researchers at Dartmouth and Princeton universities found that the country’s wind and solar industries alone could require nearly 8 million metric tons of the material annually by 2035. That’s nearly double the amount of primary and recycled aluminum the country produced in 2022.
And that’s to say nothing of the aluminum required for EVs, power transmission lines, and countless other applications, from cookware to cell phones. Even recycling the stuff requires virgin material, which is mixed into all those melted cans and car parts and other scrap to produce quality metal.
While there’s little question the U.S. will need a lot more aluminum, how it is made is increasingly important. Production starts with converting bauxite, an aluminum-rich ore, into a purified powder called alumina. That material is then smelted to produce the metal. All that mining and processing creates ecological destruction, generates toxic waste, and releases a cocktail of pollutants. It can also help warm the planet: Carbon emissions occur throughout the process, but more than 60 percent of them come from generating the electricity used in smelting. A large operation can require enough juice to power millions of homes.
“We’re talking about truly eye-watering amounts of electricity,” said Rebecca Dell, an industrial decarbonization expert with the nonprofit ClimateWorks Foundation. If the industry hopes to reduce its carbon footprint, “the first, most important thing to do is to use clean electricity.”
Such efforts are underway throughout the world. Although China, the world’s largest producer of primary aluminum, relies upon coal-fired power plants to generate much of the electricity needed to hold that title, others are proving that clean energy can deliver dramatic emissions reductions. Smelters in Norway and Quebec, Canada, release far fewer greenhouse gases because they use hydropower, while those in Iceland tap the nation’s abundant geothermal resources.
Aluminum sows, or bars, each weighing about 1,400 pounds, sit stacked on the grounds of Century Aluminum Company’s plant in Hawesville, Kentucky. Luke Sharrett /For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Century Aluminum, a global producer that’s been around since 1995, already operates a low-carbon smelter in Iceland that’s capable of churning out over 300,000 tons of aluminum each year. The company hopes the DOE funding will allow it to bolster its presence in the U.S., where it operates two smaller smelters in Kentucky and another in South Carolina, while significantly expanding its production of low-carbon aluminum. It hasn’t said exactly how much of the metal its proposed smelter will be able to produce, but based on the expectation that it will roughly double the nation’s virgin production, Sartor suspects the goal is to churn out “just under” a million tons of the metal annually. (The U.S. produced 750,000 tons of virgin aluminum in 2023.) Neither Century Aluminum nor the DOE have said when the smelter might begin operations.
While many details are uncertain, including the smelter’s production capacity and the construction timetable, one thing is clear: The new plant will be expensive. Sartor said Century Aluminum will need all of the money DOE is offering and much more.
“Building a new, large-scale, modern aluminum facility is far more than just twice that amount,” Sartor said. According to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, aluminum smelters outside of China can cost up to $4 billion per million tons of annual production.
Beyond building the infrastructure needed to produce aluminum lies the question of how to produce the clean electricity needed to power it. According to the DOE, Century Aluminum’s preferred site is in Kentucky, a state with lackluster clean energy credentials. In 2020, the Bluegrass State had a paltry 30.1 megawatts of solar generating capacity and no wind energy production whatsoever. Sartor says she expects a plant of this size to require “somewhere in the neighborhood of a gigawatt” of power. That’s enough to serve 800,000 U.S. homes for a year. “The only way that will happen is if gargantuan amounts of clean energy get built in Kentucky,” Sartor said. “There’s no other way around this.”
A representative for Century Aluminum told Grist the company is “excited to move this transformational project forward,” but declined to answer other questions or say how it plans to secure the carbon-free energy required. The DOE wouldn’t speak to the challenges that may arise procuring clean energy, citing ongoing award negotiations.
That said, the site hasn’t been finalized, and locations within the Ohio and Mississippi River basins are also reportedlyunder consideration. Dell believes that brings an interesting political dimension to the project because Century Aluminum expects the smelter to create more than 1,000 full-time union jobs and another 5,500 construction jobs.
“That’s a very attractive economic development opportunity for a state like Kentucky — or maybe for its neighbors,” Dell said. Century Aluminum, Dell said, is effectively putting Kentucky and nearby states — many of which haven’t exactly embraced renewables — on notice that “there’s a huge opportunity on the table if you guys can figure out a way to develop the electricity that’s needed.”
If Century Aluminum succeeds in finding the clean energy it needs, it could help catalyze changes in other industrial sectors such as steelmaking. Dell notes that in most of the “high value added markets” for steel, like the automotive sector, the primary competition is aluminum.
“Both of these industries are constantly trying to convince the car companies, ‘use our metal, not their metal,’” Dell said. “Having more clean aluminum out there will certainly act as an encouragement to the steel industry to clean up their act.”
