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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
We must eliminate PFAS — AI data centers will increase them
“Pfas companies are launching a ‘tidal wave’ of forever chemicals production to meet demand from the AI industry. Despite alarm over the chemicals, which have been linked to cancer, a survey of the 10 biggest manufacturers found most had plans to increase production.
“Pfas play a role in semiconductor production and next-generation datacentre cooling systems. But opponents warn that increased production risks undermining nascent moves to restrict Pfas in Europe, the UK and parts of the US.
“Japan-headquarted Daikin said it was launching a ‘datacentre hub’ to meet demand, and promised to ‘expand sales of existing fluorine products and introduce new products’. The French multinational Arkema was expanding its refrigerant offering. The US Pfas producer Chemours was expanding to meet demand from ‘advanced datacenter and AI innovative liquid cooling solutions’.” [click the link for the full article]
AI executives’ legal liability for endangering humanity
“Amid all the talk of the need for government regulation of AI, there has been too little discussion of the simplest route: criminal liability. The basic story is that the AI companies are being irresponsible in dealing with a product they know to be dangerous. The people who run these companies need to know that they face possible criminal prosecution and jail time.
“No one would expect President Trump’s personal lawyer and Attorney General Todd Blanche to take criminal or civil actions against AI. But the law does not begin and end with Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
“To take some hypothetical cases — suppose an AI system manages to hack into a city’s traffic control system, leading to a number of car crashes, causing serious injuries and death. To take another case — suppose AI falsifies clinical trial data, leading a drug to be approved even though the trials show it to be ineffective or dangerous.
“[In an actual case] CNN reported on September 18 of a recent incident in which a U.S. Special Operations Command analyst used a large language model to generate an intelligence report that indicated ‘a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program’.
“The mistaken report from AI led the Navy to put helicopters in the air to board the Chinese cargo ship. Fortunately, the information was checked, and the helicopters were called back before there was an actual confrontation, but this was luck. Sooner or later we will see a mistake that is not caught.
“We all know — the AI boys more than anyone — that AI is potentially very dangerous. Remember, they are choosing to endanger the property and lives of others for personal profit. If they opt to push full speed ahead, without necessary safeguards, they have to be prepared to face the consequences.” [click the links for the full articles]
Computing birth rates accurately to help reduce consumption
“Declining birth rates have sparked fears of a fertility ‘crisis’ and population ‘collapse’. The fears generate reactionary pronatalist policies aimed at boosting birth rates. But it’s fallacious to argue falling birth rates spell disaster. On the contrary, global population growth is continuing, projected to exceed 10 billion by the 2080s, driving more consumption, and unleashing disastrous ecological and social consequences.
“So why all the panic about declining birth rates? Lack of demographic literacy together with deeply rooted pronatalism has helped the spread of misinformation and misunderstanding. Leading demographers argue that policymakers should not rely on ‘total fertility rate’ (TFR) but rather use the ‘completed cohort fertility’ (CCF).
“CCF is the measure of the total number of children people have in their lifetime, on average. In the US, it has hovered around 1.9-2.0 since 1990, declining only slightly.” [click the link for the full article]
Klamath River tributary preserved for salmon survivability
“Four dams are now down on the Upper Klamath River in northern California in the largest river restoration project in U.S. history. But a rarely mentioned cold-water creek is essential to restoring health to what was once the third-largest salmon run on the West Coast of North America.
“Blue Creek is located just 25 km (16 mi) from the mouth of the Lower Klamath at the Pacific Ocean. Critically, it’s the first cold-water refuge for migrating salmon that enables the fish to cool down, survive, and move farther upriver to spawn. The dams and logging have damaged this important watershed for decades.
“The Yurok, California’s largest Indigenous tribe, lost ownership of Blue Creek to westward U.S. expansion in the late 1800s. In 2002, a timber company, negotiating with the Yurok, agreed to sell back the 19,000-hectare (47,100-acre) watershed to the tribe.
“It took Western Rivers Conservancy, an Oregon-based NGO, nearly two decades to raise the $60 million needed to buy the watershed. In a historic transition, Blue Creek returns this spring to the Yurok for conservation in its entirety. The tribe considers the watershed a sacred place.” [click the link for the full article]
Urban hegemony undermining their countryside life support
“Our farm is in the Winooski River valley in Vermont, perched on the lip of an old riverbed, on piles of sediment dumped here when the glacial meltwaters, and the ancient river, receded.
“We are learning just how much this three-acre plot of land can give — fiber, food, beauty, and in the woods and meadows behind us, space for our rambles, as necessary as bread and bone. It gives us a structure for our lives, and what it means to live as a human being inside a greater community of life.
“Ecological succession is the process through which biological communities evolve over time, passing through the stages of initiation and disturbance before reaching a steady state. The early years of a garden are when our tomatoes, squashes, and beans spilled from the vines before the arrival of pests and diseases that we have had to manage ever since,
“A half a century ago, in our parents’ lifetime, almost half of Americans had vegetable gardens, producing much of the food they ate at home. We need a million of these farmers. We cannot count on Monsanto. We will have to do it ourselves, saving our seed and raising animals who will renew themselves, generation after generation.
“Cities cannot feed themselves, thus people who live in cities will be forever detached from the problems that come with extracting the resources they depend on and producing the food they eat. There can be only so many backyard chickens or kitchen gardens.
“The countryside cannot be made a sacrifice zone for the city, with industrial feedlots confining animals twenty-four seven, polluting the air and water, and killing the life of soils. The countryside has a car dependency problem it has not even begun to address. But the future of our life on earth will depend on the countryside also being ‘the solution’, as Gandhi saw village life.” [click the link for the full article]
Non-drivers need convenient mobility too
“A third of people living in the United States are non-drivers — disabled people who cannot drive, people who can’t afford a vehicle or gas, have suspended licenses or lack documentation to get a license, people who are too young to drive, choose not to drive, or who have aged out of driving.
“For people who can grab their keys and go, transportation often isn’t a major concern. But for those of us who can’t drive or can’t afford to, transportation is something we think about daily.
“Week Without Driving brings attention to the needs of non-drivers. Instead of driving yourself, try to figure out another way to get where you need to go for all or some trips. Walk, roll, take the bus, ride a bike or a scooter.” [click the link for the full article]
Border wall injunction stops Big Bend region’s ecological destruction
“U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone on Friday ordered the immediate stop of all construction of border barriers in the Big Bend region of west Texas. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Friends of the Ruidosa Church, and Big Bend river guide Billy Miller are suing the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection over the border wall plans.
“Judge Cardone stated that she was granting the plaintiff’s request for an injunction, stopping border wall construction for the entire Big Bend Sector within one mile of the Rio Grande and within the state and national parks. The construction pause is in effect until a decision is made on the case.
“A key issue in the lawsuit is whether or not the U.S. Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector, which encompasses a 517-mile stretch of the border, is an area of ‘high illegal entry’ — something DHS has asserted in several federal waivers fast tracking the project. That designation allowed the federal government to bypass dozens of environmental and cultural resource protection laws.” [click the link for the full article]
Social relationships are most important in a catastrophe
“Anything that builds resilient social relations is a step towards having agency in a catastrophe. Solidarity prepping is different from individualistic prepping in that it focuses on social relations. And this is not just a bunch of anarchists saying that. A general in the Swedish military said exactly the same thing: in a catastrophe, the most important thing is social relations.
“I have to make some changes. I want to know who needs what and who can do what in a crisis. There’s an old lady living a few floors above you and it’s 38 degrees Celsius, maybe she can’t walk to the store. Figure out what she needs, where she is fine saying, ‘Hey, would you go shopping for me?’ Intensifying relations this way is not easy for activists who come from event activism — big demos, big actions — but it’s the absolute core of prepping together.
“Beyond that, anything that increases community autonomy, whether around food or energy, is a good step towards that future. Struggles for communalization of energy or food sovereignty have been going on for a long time.
“My argument is to look at the moment of catastrophe, which we’ve traditionally ignored as political movements: you call FEMA, you call the cops, and then you resume your political work once normality is restored. And I’m saying no. Catastrophe is going to be the new normality. We have to understand catastrophe as a political space with pitfalls, stakes, allies, enemies, levers.
“So we’re up against capitalism’s expansionary compulsion, pushing us deeper into ecological overshoot. As Naomi Klein says, fascism is a protection racket for capital. How do we fight capital in a way that’s effective? Where would you even go? Goldman Sachs? The White House? And if you were there, do you control global capitalism? No. There’s no switch-off point for capitalism.
“That leads to the next possibility: slowly building alternative modes of living in the cracks left by capitalism. That was all well and good as long as we had infinite time. We rely on time being infinite to make sense of our defeats. You’re defeated today, but you know you’re gonna win tomorrow.
“But once you start looking at ecological collapse, the timeline changes. Things are going to get worse very quickly. So we don’t have the time and leisure to build these alternative spaces. We’ve been running that strategy for decades, since the late 60s. If somebody suggests a strategy we’ve been pushing for decades, I’m gonna say, well, maybe it hasn’t worked.” [click the link for the full article]
Glaciers, Europe’s “water towers” disappearing fast
“Switzerland’s glaciers lost more than 5% of their ice in 2026, marking another year of rapid decline. Glaciers around the world have been shrinking at increasingly rapid rates, a phenomenon scientists link directly to global warming.
“Matthias Huss leads Switzerland’s glacier monitoring network. For years, his research has documented rapid ice loss, with the decline peaking in 2022, when Switzerland recorded a record 6% loss in a single year. At the end of this year’s long, hot summer, Huss returned to some of the glaciers to find much of the ice gone.
“Why is this important? Because these huge ice fields are often called Europe’s water towers. They store winter snow and release it gently as it melts over the spring and summer. That snowmelt fills Europe’s key waterways, like the Rhine and the Danube. The water is key to Europe’s food supply, and its transportation chains.” [click the link for the full article]
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