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Dear Sustainability Action News Digest Subscriber,
Thank you for welcoming the Sustainability Action News Digest into your inbox each week. You may remember when this publication was simply called Sustainability Announcements, of which the very first one, back on 12 December 2007, was barely more than a listings sheet (see below).
Since then, thanks to your readership, it has grown into the weekly Sustainability News Digest you know today — an essential, deeply curated briefing on the rapidly changing ecological landscape. We adopted the “News Digest” name officially in July 2025. And if there’s one thing we hear from our subscribers repeatedly, it’s this: There’s nowhere else to get this kind of ecological news all in one place.
“News you can use. Facts to act on.”
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Each week we dig into climate science, energy transitions, food systems, democracy, public policy — and always, local relevance. We search for the signal in all the noise. Much of the news is sobering, yes. But we also highlight the inspiring: community resilience, regenerative practices, and real solutions gaining ground.
This takes many hours of extensive news gathering each week. It’s time invested so that you can stay informed and engaged without having to doom-scroll. And it’s entirely supported by people like you who value trusted ecological journalism. As we look toward 2026, we ask for your help to keep the News Digest going strong. Any amount you can contribute will make a real difference.
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Michael Almon
Editor
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Ecosystem restoration: more important than “green energy”
“Climate Change is generally presented as a problem with one cause — carbon emissions — and one solution: a ‘green energy transition’. But this narrative is far too narrow. Many well-meaning people take part in disseminating this misleading narrative, [which] is so dominant that most people are unaware of anything else.
“Carbon emissions are certainly significant. I’m not calling that into doubt. However, carbon emissions are only part of the story. The ‘other leg’ is land use — ‘land disturbance’, land cover changes’, ‘land conversion’, ‘land alteration’. These land cover changes (LCC) include agriculture, deforestation and afforestation, desertification, and urbanization.
“Major conversions like cutting down trees or draining wetlands or plowing under grasslands for farms influence the atmosphere and water cycles both locally and at a wider scale.
“In relation to the land’s water regimen, biotic regulation takes the form of the biotic pump of atmospheric moisture, a mechanism that operates in regions where forests are present. The biotic pump ensures a controlled inflow of atmospheric moisture onto land. By maintaining optimal atmospheric moisture levels, forests can regulate precipitation, triggering rain at the right time, in the right place, and in the quantity needed.
“The study of how ecology affects weather and climate is not a new field, just an under-rated one. Why don’t we hear much about ‘the other leg’? Because the techno-industrial system can take carbon emissions into account without fundamentally changing business-as-usual.
“Not so with land use. Implementing significant changes like reducing the footprint of agriculture, ceasing deforestation, restoring vegetation at mass scale, massive de-paving projects, etc. would greatly reduce opportunities for ‘growth’.”
Collapse — goodbye techno-modernity, hello ecological conservation
“When I use the word collapse, I am not predicting the end of civilization, but describing what many of us already experience: political, economic, ecological, and cultural systems that structured modern life are breaking down under the weight of their own contradictions.
“Economic arrangements built on infinite growth collide with ecological limits. Climate patterns destabilize, biological diversity declines, and water becomes increasingly scarce. Democratic institutions lose legitimacy as policy is shaped more by concentrated power than by public will. Healthcare systems profit from illness rather than supporting wellbeing. Food systems deplete soil, farmers, and eaters. Communities fragment, and our capacity for collective action weakens.
“Beneath all this sits the story of inevitable progress, humans as separate from nature, technology as savior, and control as security. In response, two familiar narratives surface. One retreats into isolation and suspicion. The other clings to the belief that innovation will preserve the status quo.
“I keep noticing that people often divide into two broad camps. One camp focuses on concentrated power — levers for climate, finance, and technology in the hands of elites. The other focuses on the ground up bioregional organizing, regenerative agriculture, mutual aid, and community self-determination.
“I felt pulled toward bioregional practitioners, yet I also sensed a mismatch between the scale of their work and the scale of the crises unfolding.
“Indigenous teachings and ecological science remind us that decay and renewal are inseparable, that fire prepares soil for new growth, and that dissolution is part of life’s metabolism. Collapse becomes a threshold rather than an ending. What capacities do we need to cross this threshold together? What stories are dissolving, and what might take their place?”
Rewilding a stream at unconventional scale
“On the banks of Mitchell Creek stand four men in hard hats and rain gear, marveling at the sight before them: a riotous jumble of criss-crossed, piled-up logs, over, under and through which the stream gurgles and courses. They are collaborators on an ambitious habitat restoration project that saw 43 acres of Rayonier’s trees tipped over and placed strategically in and around the river’s east fork.
“It is truly a staggering quantity of wood as Pete Barber, the project’s lead, will gleefully admit. ‘We want to do 30% [of the watershed] or more, and it’s all based off of the [Intensively Managed Watersheds] study that showed that if you only do a small amount, you’re going to see a small response’, says Barber. ‘It’s not just placing a couple pieces of wood and saying that reach is treated. It’s hitting it hard and placing a lot of wood and reconnecting the flood plains. It’s that big picture treatment where you’ll see a response that lasts.’
“For years, loggers and agencies alike made a point of getting slash and debris out of channels, on the basis of improving stream flow, minding aesthetics and easing both human transport and fish passage. In reality, fish need the exact opposite, as research began to confirm in the 1980s and 90s.”
Dam removal for safety, habitat restoration, cost savings
“With more than 550,000 dams in the United States, free-flowing rivers are an endangered species. We’ve dammed, diked, and diverted almost every major river in the country, straightening curves, pinching off floodplains, and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals. But this has come at a great cost.
“Freshwater biodiversity is among the most threatened on the planet. Dams have played a big role in that demise. In North America, nearly 40% of fish are imperiled, and 61 species have blinked out since 1900.
“The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which built many of the country’s mammoth dams and reengineered its rivers, had a motto: “Our rivers: total use for greater wealth.” Millions of Americans cashed in on the boom, often without giving it a thought. Woody Guthrie captured the sentiment of those years in his 1941 song ‘Grand Coulee Dam’, which refers to the Columbia River as a ‘wild and wasted stream’. The folksinger, spurred by a government paycheck for his efforts, penned 26 songs espousing the virtues of the Columbia River’s dams.
“For most Indigenous people, dams didn’t bring enrichment or progress; it was one more theft from the enduring process of colonization. Dams have swallowed creation sites, burial grounds, gathering places, fishing holes, homelands, and human history.
“A growing dam removal movement has led to some 2,200 dams being blasted and backhoed from U.S. rivers—most of them in the past 25 years. It’s an extraordinary turn of events for a dam-loving country. The dam removal movement didn’t happen spontaneously. It was fought for by tribes, conservationists, fishers, and eventually broad, somewhat unlikely coalitions. It was also aided by environmental laws that protect clean water and endangered species, and by scientific studies of dam removal.”
Jim Crow consciousness — humans as separate, unique, and superior
“Dualist beliefs can impede efforts to move past modernity — which I believe must end whether we wish it or not. The first question one might ask is: ‘Am I a dualist?’ A crude test involves answering the following questions:
- Is matter real (not a creation of mind), obeying physics independent of consciousness?
- Is mind/consciousness its own phenomenon, not a product of known matter and physics?
“Here’s how I would label the results: Y/N is materialist (like me: mind is matter); N/Y is idealist (mind is everything); Y/Y is dualist (mind and matter are separately real), and N/N is too bizarre for me to confront. Perhaps this series will result in greater clarity.
“We start with a full-throated expression of awe and wonder for the world we inhabit. What a universe, huh? On cosmic scales, it’s got stars, galaxies, dust clouds, stellar nurseries (nebulae), dense star clusters, neutron stars, black holes . . . At the small end, the universe is full of photons (light), neutrinos, quarks. . . But the previous sentence perpetrates a huge misunderstanding by focusing on the nouns: the particles. The truly astounding bit is the set of interactions: the relationships.
“But I’m getting ahead of myself, here. For the purposes of this introduction, I simply intend to express wonderment at the stage upon which our lives are set. What luck that our universe allows a seemingly infinite number of such amazing spectacles! We don’t understand why there even is a universe, and never will — except in story. Why there is something rather than nothing is not answerable by science. So what? It is the way it is.
“In the second part of our journey to dump dualism, we peek at the ancient worldview of animism. Rather than being a religion, animism is a mindset that had common purchase around the globe prior to modern times. Not only is it important to appreciate how we used to be when the planet’s ecological relationships were more ‘normal’, but it offers a worthy alternative to dualism that has much overlap with an astrophysical perspective.
“Animism is contrasted with the prevalent scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being. This ladder-ranking schema places humans awkwardly straddling the domain of superior angels/gods, and that of ‘lower’ animals and plants. Note that this is an implicitly dualist framing.
“This perceived separation from the earthly domain took root in agricultural practices, whereby cultures began to aggressively manipulate and control ‘lower’ life. An animist is the opposite of a human supremacist. To an animist, the imagined/asserted hierarchy is nonsense that needn’t be entertained.
“Animists view the entire universe as an expression of Life, animated by spirits. Even entities that we deem to be ‘inanimate’ acquire person-hood, like oceans, rivers, mountains, and rocks. In a very real sense, this blurring of the animate/inanimate distinction is backed up by physics.
“Outside of our mental models, it’s all one giant interconnected phenomenon that blithely ignores our notional partitions, allowing for all sorts of marvelous emergence. The sun is part of you, as a necessary ‘component’.
“You are, in fact, a confederacy of single cells operating in cooperative alliance toward a shared goal. On a larger scale, you are a confederacy of organs that support each other in a systemic operation. At another scale, you are an organism whose species interacts with a greater ecology.”
Persistent lithium-ion battery debris from Moss Landing fire
“When fire broke out at the world’s largest battery energy storage facility in January 2025, its thick smoke blanketed surrounding wetlands, farms and nearby communities on the central California coast. Two days later, officials announced that the air quality met federal safety standards. But the initial all-clear decision missed something important — heavy metal fallout on the ground.
“These batteries often contain metals that are toxic to humans and wildlife. Vistra’s battery energy storage facility at Moss Landing released soot and charred fragments of burned batteries that landed for miles around. In a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, my colleagues and I were able to show what was in the battery fire’s debris and what happened to the heavy metals.
“In the type of batteries at the Moss Landing facility, the cathode was rich in three metals: nickel, manganese and cobalt. These batteries are prone to thermal runaway, [and] burning batteries can eject metal particles like confetti. The batteries’ metal fragments, often too tiny to see with the naked eye, didn’t disappear. They continue to be remobilized in the environment today.”
Autobesity
“Cars are steadily becoming longer, wider and heavier. Consumers clearly like them — a lot. Big cars are seen as practical, safe and stylish, and sales are growing. So, why are some cities determined to clamp down on them?
“Paris is renowned for many things [including] its truly appalling traffic. Over the past 20 years, the city authorities have been trying to tackle the problem, by introducing low-traffic and low-emission zones, by promoting public transport and cycling — and most recently by clamping down on big cars.
“In October 2024 on-street parking charges for visiting ‘heavy’ vehicles were trebled following a public vote. The larger it is, the more it pollutes,” said the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. A few months later, the town hall claimed the number of very heavy cars parking on the city streets had fallen by two-thirds.
“Cities elsewhere are taking note, including in the UK. The Labour-controlled authority said, ‘These heavier vehicles typically produce more emissions, cause greater wear and tear on roads, and critically pose a significantly higher risk in the event of a road traffic collision’.”
Concerns of cost, climate, water spurs data center opposition
“A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis.
“At the current rate of growth, datacenters could add up to 44m tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to putting an extra 10m cars on to the road and exacerbating a climate crisis. The growth of datacenters to service AI — with electricity consumption set to nearly triple over the next decade, equivalent to powering 190m new homes — is the focus of ire for voters.
“The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition.”
Nuke cheerleaders throng. No one’s asked the citizenry. KCC demurs
“A company with a vision of installing small nuclear reactors 1 mile underground plans to put its first reactors in Kansas, Texas, and Utah. Parsons, Kansas, will be the site of a California startup’s first ever 1-mile-deep nuclear reactor — with support from county commissioners, both Republican Kansas U.S. senators, and Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s administration.
“Deep Fission is an advanced nuclear company founded in 2023 that promises to place small nuclear reactors at the bottom of 30-inch wide, mile-deep boreholes. The Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC) said it doesn’t have enough information yet to know the full extent of its jurisdiction over Deep Fission’s project. For example, it remains to be seen whether the company will fall under laws that apply to electric utilities.
“Deep Fission CEO Liz Muller said the design is safe.
“Deep Fission’s letter of intent with the industrial park ultimately envisions a full-scale commercial project. This would mean installing more nuclear reactors over the years, since Deep Fission designs its reactors to generate power for two to seven years.
“Republican Senator Roger Marshall said, ‘It’s exciting to see cutting-edge innovation and high-quality energy investment come to Kansas’.”
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