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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Prescient agrarian, Wendell Berry, has died
“Wendell Berry, the great agrarian, writer, and voice of conscience, has died. He was age 92, but he seemed immortal. Berry famously wrote his many works with pencil and paper. He had much to tell us both about how we interact with the technology that surrounds us and about the land from which we live.
“In a 1998 interview for All Things Considered, Berry was hesitant to provide advice to young people. But when pressed, Berry said that young people should look for opportunities to ‘stop some place, and stay there. Learn the history of it, and the names of the plants and animals and the neighbors”. His own commitment, most of all, is to place: to finding a home and staying there.
“In a world of AI and data centers and phones in our pockets that demand continual attention, Wendell Berry’s voice remains as important as ever. I feel gratitude for all he gave us.
“In 1964, Berry decided to abandon the city and return to his rural roots. He moved to Henry County, Kentucky — where his forebears had worked the land for more than 150 years — to tend his family farm and to teach.
“By the 1970s, there was widespread discontent among farmers about the impact of agribusiness methods: the monocultures and pesticides, the expansion and debt. In his 1977 The Unsettling of America, he produced the most withering critique of industrial agriculture to spring from a nascent movement for sustainable farming. Elsewhere in the book he concluded, ‘To live at the expense of the source of life is obviously suicidal’.
“He has emerged, through his essays and literary works, as a key spokesperson for agrarianism, a philosophy that celebrates the small farmer’s careful stewardship of the land. Like agrarians before him, Berry invokes Jeffersonian ideals: ‘Cultivators of the Earth are the most valuable citizens’” [click the links for the full articles]
Small diverse farms can be sufficiently productive
“I guess you have heard about Astrid Lindgren. She wrote children’ books, perhaps most famously Pippi Longstocking. Lindgren didn’t only care for children, she also cared for animals and was at times very active in animal welfare issues. So much so that the Swedish law for animal welfare of 1987 was presented at her 80th birthday and named Lex Lindgren.
“Astrid Lindgren is a red flag for proponents of industrial agriculture, in particular animal agriculture. She also wrote four books about the six Bullerby children. In an article in a leading Swedish newspaper three representatives of industrial agriculture recently referred with scorn to organic farming as Bullerby dreams and claimed that organic was a return to a time when people starved.
“Obviously, representatives of organic agriculture responded and my wife, Ann-Helen, took the lead. The result was published in Aftonbladet with the title (in translation) Industrial farming is a story with no happy ending.
“The Swedish agriculture system of the 1930s was diverse and virtually every of the 400,000 farms had a cow or five, grew potatoes, kept laying hens and grew most of the feed to their animals and most of the food for the people. There were basically no tractors or combine harvesters, but there were many horse or oxen driven machines as well as thresher and other stationary machines in the farmsteads.
“Chemical fertilisers were in little use and pesticides even less. Grain yields were considerably lower but the total production of milk was actually much higher than today (despite half the population). Butter was exported and some oil seed cakes were imported, mainly to feed dairy cow.
“Not only were the farms spread out in the country, also dairies, mills, slaughterhouses and other essential infrastructure were. The system was robust and productive and produced sufficient food for the population.” [click the link for the full article]
To prepare for a problem, face it strait on
“Theresa Leisgang spent over ten years traveling and reporting in places where the effects of the climate crisis are already an existential threat to livelihoods. When major media outlets began climate reporting, feel-good podcasts promised to counter climate news fatigue. Theresa became alert: those hopeful stories increasingly lacked a critical assessment.
“Setting out to shed a critical lens on the world, co-authors Theresa and Gerriet Schwen had the opportunity to explore the potential of no-nonsense climate communication.
“The question is not whether collapse will happen or when. As Eva Marlene Hausteiner, a professor of political theory, puts it: ‘The insight into what a dystopian future could realistically look like should trigger a political and social learning process’.
“Perspectives on a possible ecological and also social collapse are still largely absent from the discourse in German-speaking countries. ‘One thing is certain: the post-collapse society will find itself in a world that has little or nothing to do with the one we know today’, wrote German author Johannes Heimrath in 2010.
“In France, an entire ‘collapsologie’ movement is trying to imagine this new world, and there is also a lively debate in the English-speaking world. ‘What if we stop pretending?’ asked bestselling author Jonathan Franzen in 2019, stating: ‘The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we must admit that we cannot prevent it’.” [click the link for the full article]
Stuck in a hell hole? — Stop digging
“Global heating will reach at least 1.8C under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, according to a UN report that warns every fraction of temperature rise intensifies destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion. It said: ‘There are no good outcomes above 1.5C’.
“Human health, water supplies, nature, cities, infrastructure and economies could all be severely damaged. Some losses would be irreversible. The report said the best hope for humanity to limit damage was to adopt an ‘overshoot, peak and decline’ pathway that required immediate and sustained greenhouse gas emissions cuts.
“Said Vishal Prasad, from Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, ‘The International Court of Justice has made it clear — keeping to 1.5C is not a choice, it is a legal obligation’. We are not asking for your goodwill. We are telling you what international law requires of you. End fossil fuel expansion. Your corporate profits cannot be allowed to extinguish our future’.” [click the link for the full article]
El Niño feedback loop intensifying climate heating, and vice versa
“The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. 2027 is set to be the hottest year ever recorded.
“The climate crisis, caused by pollution from fossil fuels, is already supercharging extreme weather and killing people, with the most extreme heatwave ever recorded hitting Europe this summer and leading to at least 35,000 deaths.
“El Niño is a natural climate cycle where wind changes over the Pacific lead to rising ocean temperatures and the transfer of huge amounts of heat to the atmosphere. Recent research shows global heating is now intensifying El Niño cycles, which then in turn intensify the impacts of the climate crisis.
“Extreme [weather] around the world has driven up food prices, not just the food we import, but also what we grow at home. After five heatwaves and widespread drought, British arable farmers are now facing the worst harvest on record in 2026.
” The latest update said El Niño would intensify into a very strong event with big impacts, including floods, drought, and extreme heat continuing well into 2027.” [click the link for the full article]
Stifle the bottom of the food chain — where does that leave us at the top?
“New research suggests that the microscopic bacterium, Prochlorococcus, which forms the foundation of the marine food web and helps regulate the planet’s climate, will decline sharply as seas heat up.
“A study in the journal Nature Microbiology found Prochlorococcus populations could shrink by as much as half in tropical oceans over the next 75 years if surface waters exceed about 82 degrees Fahrenheit. ‘These are keystone species — very important ones’, said François Ribalet at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography and the study’s lead author.
“Prochlorococcus inhabit up to 75% of Earth’s sunlit surface waters and produce about one-fifth of the planet’s oxygen through photosynthesis. More crucially, Ribalet said, they convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into food at the base of the marine ecosystem.
“Paul Berube, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies Prochlorococcus but was not involved in the work, said ‘They’re at the very base of the food web, and they feed everything else — the fish eat the things that eat the phytoplankton and we eat the fish. That’s going to have big consequences’.” [click the link for the full article]
Shrink the industrial economy by eco-localism, not tariffs
“Followers of the Small Is Beautiful school of environmentalism often critique globalization and advocate localism. Trump tariffs seem purpose-made to promote American domestic manufacturing. Am I thrilled? Let’s unpack the goals and tactics of both eco-localism and the Trump tariffs and see where there’s congruence, and where there’s contradiction.
“Globalization of trade leads to a world in which everything is for sale, all resources are depleted, pollution is everywhere, labor is exploited to the maximum degree, and everything is owned by a tiny number of super-rich. Eco-localists see trade as a mixed benefit whose unintended negative impacts must be carefully managed.
“The scope of globalization that’s happened in the last few decades is unequaled in human history. Corporations and banks delivered the technology and capital; trade agreements like NAFTA and trade partnerships like the EU contributed the legal framework; and fossil fuels provided abundant, concentrated, storable energy for manufacturing and transport.
“The result is an integrated global market in which a single product, such as a smartphone, may incorporate design elements from skilled workers in the US, raw materials from twenty countries, and assembly by poorly paid workers in China, Vietnam, or India. The intended benefit is that billions of people get to use a technology. The unintended side effects are that a few people become unimaginably rich while nature is poisoned and people’s mental, physical, and social health deteriorates.
“Eco-localists argue that globalization is authoritarian by nature: increasingly, multinational corporations rule the world. Individuals and communities are powerless by comparison. The goals of the Trump tariffs are somewhat unclear. Donald Trump himself has a longstanding fascination with tariffs, which he sees as coercive tools for achieving various international ends, not all of them economic. If the Trump tariff goal is a world dominated by America, it’s an America that is itself dominated by super-wealthy elites, an America that is no longer a fully functioning democracy.
“Eco-localists tend to see tariffs as a tool of last resort, one that often has nasty unintended consequences. Many eco-localists advocate deliberately shrinking the industrial economy to reduce its impact on nature. Shrinking the US economy is not Trump explicit goal, but it is an almost certain result of his tariff policies. Rather than reining in trade for the purpose of reducing pollution and exploitation of workers, Trump and his team seem to be intent on accelerating environmental degradation and increasing economic inequality.
“Indeed, this is the moment when eco-localism is most desperately needed. While there is no likelihood of their national adoption in the US anytime soon, they are perhaps most applicable and effective at the community scale.” [click the link for the full article]
EPA proposal would weaken Clean Water Act further
“The Trump administration last Friday took another step toward stripping federal protections from millions of acres of wetlands, which help filter drinking water for many communities and provide critical habitat for birds, fish and other wildlife.
“The proposed rule would significantly narrow the definition of ‘waters of the United States’, or WOTUS. In the majority opinion in a Supreme Court decision in 2023, Sackett v. E.P.A., Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the Clean Water Act allowed the agency to regulate only wetlands that abutted a ‘relatively permanent” body of water’.
“But Justice Alito did not explicitly define a ‘relatively permanent’ body of water. In November, the Trump administration defined a ‘relatively permanent’ body of water as one that flowed either every day or during the ‘wet season’. The proposal on Friday would define it instead as one that flowed every day.
“That change may sound highly technical, but it could have far-reaching consequences, potentially stripping federal protections from 94% of U.S. wetlands. The public will have only 30 days to comment once the rule is published in the Federal Register.” [click the links for the full articles]
China’s shift from oil to coal — net drop in CO2 emissions?
“After the United States and Israeli bombing of Iran prompted the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, China responded by slashing its oil imports. But because China had built massive stockpiles of crude, the big question was whether the country was simply drawing down its reserves or actually using less oil.
“New government data now reveals that China’s oil consumption dropped by 9% from April through June, with use in the transportation sector plummeting by 16%. That decline helped overshadow an uptick in coal consumption to push carbon dioxide emissions down by 1% from the same period last year. The trend helped hold China’s CO2 pollution slightly below its 2024 peak.
“If the trend can hold, it could reshape global energy dynamics. China is the world’s second-largest oil consumer, behind the United States, and its largest importer. But growth in the country’s oil consumption has slowed in recent years. Already, oil use for transportation has peaked and begun to decline, driven by the rise of electric vehicles.” [click the link for the full article]
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