This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

A miner haunts the East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. It’s not the spirit of an interred workman, but Andrena regularis, also known as the regular miner bee. It’s black and tan and fuzzy, sometimes sporting patches of yellow as it collects pollen. The critter is at once peculiar to humans and highly regular in the natural world: We might expect it to form huge colonies like honey bees, but in fact it’s among the 90 percent of bee species that are solitary. Instead of building bustling nests in trees, it digs tunnels into the ground, hence the moniker. 

Scientists at nearby Cornell University have discovered that this seemingly sterilized habitat — lots of tombstones and cropped lawn — doesn’t just support this wonderful insect. It hosts one of the biggest and oldest known communities of ground-nesting bees anywhere in the world. 

Great for the miner bee, to be sure. But the findings also add to a growing body of evidence that cemeteries, of all places, provide essential habitats for all kinds of wildlife, from insects to mammals. Bees are already under significant threat due to habitat loss and insecticide use, so thoughtfully managing these final resting places can protect the pollinators we need to fertilize crops amid rising temperatures and increasingly chaotic weather. “It’s exciting to see that things like this are being discovered, where you find biodiversity in unexpected places,” said Christopher Grinter, collection manager of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It’s kind of this key, or this ‘aha,’ moment, where it’s like: ‘Wait, not only is this happening without us noticing, we should now encourage and foster this biodiversity.’”

It’s not your fault, but you might have the wrong idea about bees. We’re taught that bees live in colonies with a queen and lots of workers that produce honey. These are such essential flower-visiting pollinators that farmers rent hives to work their crops.

As honey bees swarm farms, though, their less visible colleagues are also hard at work. The vast majority of them are solitary, making their homes underground or in natural cavities like trees. The regular miner bee, for instance, digs cavities under the East Lawn Cemetery, where it lays eggs that hatch into larvae and emerge as adults the following spring. Those adults go on to become critical pollinators for local plants, including New York’s apple trees, a highly valuable crop. 

Weirdly enough, a cemetery might tick many of the boxes for a ground-dwelling buzzer in the market for a home. If this is a good spot for humans to bury their dead, it’s also a good spot for the regular miner bee: “places that don’t flood, and places that are easy to dig and don’t collapse when you dig them,” said Jordan Kueneman, a community ecologist at Cornell University and co-author of a new paper describing the findings. “So we think the bees in this area are drawn towards some of those same characteristics.”

But if a lawn mower grazed your house, wouldn’t you think about moving? Well, this might not be too big of a deal for the regular miner bee. In fact, by cutting the grass close, groundskeepers could be doing the insects a favor. “They do like to often have the ground exposed,” Kueneman said. “That helps the ground warm up quicker, allows them to become more active more quickly in the day. It allows them to get in and out of their nests easily.”

The researchers discovered that this population of miner bees is absolutely booming. By collecting individuals and scaling that count up across the grounds, they estimate that the East Lawn Cemetery hosts between 3 million and 8 million bees, including species other than the miner. “It was an extraordinary size, and a lot of that has to do with extraordinary density,” Kueneman said. “In some locations, we were measuring thousands of individuals emerging in a square meter.” (Still, Kueneman added, gardening crews could help the bees out even more by mowing earlier in the morning, before the insects emerge for the day.)

The researchers could also determine that this is a healthy population because of how many females were flying around. Male regular miner bees are smaller than they are, so when a mother lays eggs, she has to put fewer resources into making male offspring. If a population has a healthy proportion of females, then, it suggests that it’s thriving, and indeed that’s what the scientists found in the cemetery.

Enter the miner bee’s mortal enemy, Nomada imbricata, a variety of cuckoo bee. Just as cuckoo birds lay their eggs in other species’ nests, this opportunist invades the miner bee’s burrows and lays its eggs. This saves it the trouble of digging its own home, and its offspring hatch with plenty of food. “The parasitic bee develops and often has these large mandibles that they use to devour everything in their path, including the host bee,” Kueneman said. “They’ll sometimes decapitate them.” Not great for the miner bee, obviously, but the cuckoo’s presence at the cemetery provides more evidence that it has a healthy population to parasitize.

The bees are not alone in their success in this unlikely habitat. Other scientists are finding that many species across the tree of life — bats, migrating geese, owls, coyotes, rare types of plants — are using cemeteries as refuges in an increasingly urbanized world. “It has a lot of the things you want,” said Seth Magle, senior director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “It’s got trees, it’s got grass, it’s potentially got prey species for you, and resources. And then it largely lacks a couple of things you don’t like about parks, which are probably people and dogs.” Also absent from cemeteries are speeding cars, which in the United States hit hundreds of millions of birds and large animals, not to mention untold numbers of insects, each year.

While cemeteries already shelter hoards of regular miner bees and other species, groundskeepers can do even more to support wildlife. Reducing the use of rodenticides protects birds of prey, which die when they consume poisoned rats and mice. Adding native plants provides food and shelter for native pollinators, which go on to help humans adapt to a changing climate. These species fertilize greenery across a city, for instance, significantly reducing urban temperatures, and help farmers to propagate their crops. “In order to have flowers, in order to have a beautiful ecosystem, or any biodiversity, we have to have pollinators that are fueling the reproduction of those plants,” Grinter said.

While cities have been historically cast as destroyers of biodiversity, conservationists now take a more nuanced view, Magle said. Yes, clearing forests to build metropolises is terrible for nature. But there are also ways to foster the natural world deep within cities. As places for the dead, ironically enough, cemeteries can teem with the living. “What would it look like to create a world where we continue to urbanize,” Magle said, “but we do it in a way that leaves the space for some of these species?”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

Feature image credit: Madeleine Maguire/Unsplash

TriplePundit]]> Tina Casey https://triplepundit.com/?p=70711 2026-04-23T18:11:56Z 2026-04-22T22:04:15Z

Adding fuel to the fire is rising public awareness — and anger — over the wealth gap and the concentration of money and control in the tech sector. Ordinary households are grappling with high electricity rates and potential job loss while big tech companies make billions from AI growth.

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The race to build new data centers to fuel the boom in artificial intelligence is on. Even as tech giants and developers wield considerable political and financial firepower to get new data centers built as quickly as possible, U.S. communities aren’t so sure they want these massive facilities near them. Local organizers across the country are winning some significant victories despite the uneven matchup.

More data more problems, communities say

The first server rooms appeared in the 1940s at the dawn of the computer era, but we’ve come a long way since then. More than 4,000 data centers are now in operation or under active development in the United States. While some are relatively small facilities dedicated to particular businesses, artificial intelligence (AI) computing requires massive “hyperscale” data centers, and an equivalent amount of energy.

The energy consumption of U.S. data centers has more than doubled since OpenAI launched ChatCPT and is expected to more than triple from 2021 to 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. U.S. data centers used roughly 134 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2022, more than three times the annual usage of New York City. This figure is expected to reach a stunning 426 TWh by 2030.

As more data centers are built to meet the growing demand for computing power, people across the United States are raising the alarm about what this actually means in their communities.

Because the large new loads are often subsidized by local ratepayers, data centers are a driving cause of rising electricity rates. A recent analysis by Bloomberg found that wholesale electricity costs increased by up to 267 percent over the past five years in areas with data centers. Using on-site gas generators can lighten the impact on grid-connected ratepayers, but at the cost of local air quality.

Additionally, the heat projected from data centers has been identified as a significant contributor to the “heat island” effect in surrounding communities. A difference of just one or two degrees Fahrenheit can lead to increased air conditioning costs for nearby ratepayers.

Communities and advocacy organizations have also raised alarms over the use of increasingly stressed water resources for data center cooling. Beyond using an average 300,000 gallons of water a day, cooling systems contribute to data center noise, a matter of growing concern for locals. In addition to audible noise in the form of “a constant hum,” “a high-pitched whine” or even “a relentless roar,” professionals in the field have noted concerns over infrasound. Though inaudible to the human ear, exposure to high-intensity infrasound has been linked to measurable impacts on human health, including heart health.

While most of today’s data centers are located near cities, developers are increasingly eyeing rural areas, bringing the disquiet about the community-level impacts of the AI boom into new territory. Pew calculates that 67 percent of the 1,500 new data centers in the U.S. pipeline will be located in rural areas, where they’ll be competing against farmland for electricity and water as well as the land itself.

Organize, organize, organize: Communities push back on new data center construction, from city council meetings to the ballot box

With no specific federal regulations governing data centers and state regulations moving ahead slowly, local organizers are taking the lead in making people aware of proposed projects and encouraging them to ask questions and make their voices heard.

The city of Monterey Park, California, for example, held public meetings on a proposed data center earlier this year. The hearings were small and outreach was limited to adjacent residents. A positive determination was in sight until one attendee asked the local organization San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action to investigate.

The organization, which formed in 2020 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, mounted a multi-lingual awareness-raising effort about the data center and its potential impact on electricity rates and public health. The campaign included door-to-door contacts, fliers, phone calls and a petition. Organizers also purchased the domain “No Data Center MPK” to help boost turnout for public meetings and support letter-writing campaigns.

Hundreds of residents packed the next three city council meetings. They won a 45-day temporary ban on new data centers, and then a ballot measure for a permanent ban. The developer withdrew its application after the third meeting in March.

Communities are also wielding the power of the vote. In Festus City, Missouri, for example, all four incoming council members successfully campaigned on a platform opposing a new data center. They replaced four incumbents who voted to support the venture.

Lawmakers elsewhere are listening. In March, the economic development watchdog organization Good Jobs First counted at least 12 states and local legislatures considering temporary data center bans in this year’s legislative session. The mix of jurisdictions illustrates how the pressure on lawmakers is cutting across party lines, with Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Colorado recently joining the list alongside Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Other elected officials are considering taking executive action, and measures are under consideration in multiple cities and counties. “It’s a signal that the political system is starting to acknowledge the obvious: hyperscale data centers are huge, fast-moving, and highly subsidized, and states often lack basic economic and environmental guardrails to protect residents and ratepayers,” Good Jobs First summarized.

Public pushback isn’t the only thing slowing down data center development, as it turns out big tech is as susceptible to basic logistics as the rest of us. More than half of all data center projects in the U.S. pipeline have been delayed simply due to a shortage of electrical equipment, with some reporting up to five years’ wait time, according to an April analysis by Bloomberg.

Building the legal case against the most polluting data centers

Some organizations are also deploying environmental law to rein in bad actors. In Mississippi, for example, last week the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) announced a lawsuit against the Elon Musk AI venture xAI and its subsidiary, MZX Tech, charging “unlawful operation of dozens of unpermitted methane gas turbines” at the firm’s Colossus 2 data center in Southhaven.

“The company’s failure to get a permit for its power plant — which is located near homes, schools and churches — creates added health risks for families in North Mississippi and Memphis and is a clear violation of the Clean Air Act,” NAACP’s filing reads. The site already hosts 27 turbines, and an additional 41 turbines are planned for another facility at that location.

The Clean Air Act may be ineffective while U.S. President Donald Trump is in office, but another case in Oregon indicates AI firms are not immune to pollution lawsuits. In a first-of-its-kind filing submitted in March, Amazon agreed to pay $20.4 million in damages to remediate nitrate pollution linked to its Morrow County data center. Amazon denies wrongdoing, but if the settlement is approved, the company will cover the cost of new private wells and improvements to the public water system.

A rising tide of uneasiness and a tsunami of cash

The sudden intrusion of AI into everyday life is another factor contributing to the rising opposition against data centers. Polling indicates a general uneasiness about AI, including concerns over the replacement of human workers. In a 2025 survey from the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University, only 18 percent of respondents said they are “more excited than concerned about AI in daily life.”

Recent polls are more of the same. “A March NBC News survey found 57 percent of registered voters believe the risks of AI outweigh the benefits, and a Quinnipiac University poll reported that 55 percent expect AI would do more harm than good in their daily lives,” CNBC reported last week.

Adding fuel to the fire is rising public awareness — and anger — over the wealth gap and the concentration of money and control in the tech sector. Ordinary households are grappling with high electricity rates and potential job loss while big tech companies make billions from AI growth.

In response to public resistance, legacy tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google owner Alphabet, along with newcomers like Anthropic and OpenAI, have ramped up their lobbying efforts to remove regulatory obstacles from their path to AI dominance.

In one particularly concerning development, OpenAI lobbied on behalf of Illinois legislation that would limit the liability of AI labs for causing “serious societal harms,” including mass deaths and financial crises. In another, Elon Musk venture xAI sued the state of Colorado to block new legislation aimed at protecting consumers from discriminatory behavior by AI systems used in fields like education, employment and housing.

The reputational baggage carried by tech billionaires like Musk and Peter Thiel, co-founder of the data mining firm Palantir, do little to help the sector’s public popularity. Though Thiel is less in the public eye, both men are known as champions of far-right extremism, and both supported President Trump’s first and second campaigns for office, financially and otherwise. Both are also contributing to state-level campaigns in support of Republican candidates for the 2026 midterm elections, providing the public with additional insights into their tech-centered ideology.

Are we headed for a big tech reckoning?

“The AI boom is fueling a literal and metaphorical power grab by tech billionaires — and forcing a reckoning,” the progressive news organization Mother Jones summarized earlier this month.

The first rumbles of that reckoning have already come for data center proposals in some jurisdictions, where voters and organizers have been quick to make their voices heard. Now that AI and data centers are front and center in the midterm election cycle, voters will have another, more powerful opportunity to take the case for community control of proposed projects into their local legislatures and the halls of Congress.

Image credits: İsmail Enes Ayhan/Unsplash, Yngve Hellström/Wikimedia Commons, Robert Scoble/Wikimedia Commons, Chad Davis/Flickr, BeyondDC/Flickr

TriplePundit]]> Abdullahi Jimoh https://triplepundit.com/?p=70640 2026-04-20T20:02:07Z 2026-04-20T13:00:00Z

The Green Panthers visit schools across Nigeria to reveal the far-reaching impacts of human destruction. They hope to inspire the country's youth to do things differently.

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On a January afternoon at Yerwa Government Girls’ School in Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s Borno State, 26-year-old climate educator Aliyu Ibrahim steps into a room of high-school students.

The topic he came to speak about — how climate change and conflict are reshaping Nigerian life — is one Ibrahim knows personally. He grew up in Izge, a village in Borno State near the epicenter of northeast Nigeria’s bloody recent history of armed insurgency. The village was attacked by Boko Haram in 2014, leading to 105 deaths, but the immediate and tragic loss of life isn’t the only way conflict changed Ibrahim’s community. He also saw what the violence did to the environment and the ways local people have lived for generations.

“As a teenager, what stayed with me wasn’t just the sound of firearms, but the silence that followed: abandoned farmlands, dwindling means of livelihoods, drying Lake Chad for fishermen, mounting poverty, and consequently, young people left with shattered hope,” Ibrahim says.

Those experiences inspired Ibrahim and his friends to start the Green Panthers club in 2019. Hoping to reveal the far-reaching impacts of human destruction, the club mobilized volunteers across the region to teach young people about their environment and inform them on how human activities drive climate change and violence damages the resources upon which communities depend.

They teach in English and local languages, mostly Hausa and Kanuri, using visual aids like images and videos of dry farmland, flooded neighborhoods and receding rivers to make the evidence plainly clear. Research has shown that visual aids help strengthen memory retention by anchoring information to concrete, memorable images.

The Green Panthers use free periods in the region’s schools for trainings once a month. When conflict makes it too dangerous for volunteers to travel, they meet by Zoom. “I believe young people are the future,” Ibrahim says. “We need to start with them.”

Reaching young people on the front lines

Students in Borno State sit at the intersection of climate change and conflict. As insurgents carry out their violent campaigns, they damage and pollute natural resources and force farmers from their land — leaving behind hunger and livelihood crises in local communities already feeling the effects of the changing climate.

“The state is one of the major geopolitical zones in northern Nigeria, facing intense [impacts from] global warming like drought and abnormal heat, which is causing death, damaging farmland and displacing people,” says Mayokun Iyaomolere from the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Study at Obafemi Awolowo University.

Historically, Borno State produced more than 420,000 tons of wheat from its fertile farmland each year, enough to cover almost a third of the nation’s annual consumption. Today, more than 70 percent of the state’s roughly 6 million residents still depend on local agriculture, either directly or indirectly, according to a 2025 study led by Nigerian researchers and published in the International Journal of Agricultural Economics.

But the farming and fishing communities in the region are greatly affected by drought, flooding and other impacts tied to climate change, worsened by insurgency that claimed over 38,000 lives between 2011 and 2023 and displaced millions. Production of staple crops like wheat and millet fell by 80 percent in the years following the emergence of Boko Haram in 2009 and has yet to fully recover. Meanwhile, desertification driven by climate change means the Sahara desert is creeping into northeast Nigeria at a rate of nearly a half a mile every year, reshaping farming communities in Borno and Yobe States and making it harder for people to grow enough food and earn a living.

Against this backdrop, educating young people about what is happening in the region, what’s causing it, and what they can do about it is both a means of survival and an act of resistance.

Ibrahim acknowledges the Green Panthers can’t solve the climate crises in the region on their own. But he believes that imparting climate literacy in classrooms is a starting point to radicalize the situation in the future, arming young people with valuable information so they can take action in their communities and hold those in power accountable.

“Hopefully our initiative will produce more young climate advocates,” he says optimistically.

Students put climate literacy into practice in Nigeria’s Borno State

At the Yerwa Girls’ school, Mabel Natal Ahmad learned about climate change and how to take action through upcycling and tree-planting.

The 17-year-old now makes bowls and spoons from papier-mâché using paper scraps, a technique she learned from the lessons. “We were demonstrated how we can upcycle our discarded papers and sweet candy nylons,” Ahmad says. At home, she shared the lessons learned with her parents and siblings, and now her parents use their discarded beverage cans in their flower nursery.

The lessons helped another student, Fatima Muhammed, 15, conquer her fear of public speaking and feel more confident talking to friends and family about climate change and other issues she cares about. “I would like to be a climate advocate like Aliyu after my education,” she says with a smile.

Beyond Borno, the Green Panthers club has engaged over 200 communities in Adamawa and Yobe states. Together, they’ve planted over 4,000 trees and trained more than 500 teenagers as environmental advocates. Co-founder Ibrahim wants to do even more, but funding limitations and ongoing conflict in the region make it difficult.

“I wish I could reach the neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger, but insecurity is restricting this intention, and often short-term funding makes it hard to sustain afforestation beyond one-off activities,” he says. “Land ownership and usage disputes also complicate where and how trees can be planted and protected.”

Most of the club’s activities are supported by government agencies like Borno State’s Ministry of Environment along with individual donors, says Bashir Muhammed, a Green Panthers volunteer.

Even if limited, students educating their friends and relatives shows the compounding impact of the club, and Ibrahim plans to keep expanding as fast as he can. “We’re currently developing information education communication materials that can communicate climate vocabulary into local languages,” he says.

TriplePundit]]> Katie Surma, Inside Climate News https://triplepundit.com/?p=70652 2026-04-23T06:27:34Z 2026-04-16T17:55:04Z

In the copper-rich mountains of southeastern Ecuador, Shuar people are combining ancestral knowledge and modern science to protect their forest from a Canadian mining giant.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

By the time Olger Kitiar reached the ridge, his shirt was wet with sweat, clinging to his back. Built with the solid frame of a linebacker, he moved through the rainforest with a quick, even rhythm that defied the steep, slick climb. 

Then he froze.

“Stop,” he hissed in Spanish, his hand snapping up.

Jhostin Antún, a few steps behind, halted mid-stride. To an outsider, the trail ahead looked like any other patch of churned Amazonian mud — slick, brown and dense enough to swallow a boot. But Olger’s eyes, trained by a lifetime in the Shuar territory of Maikiuants, saw it instantly. He squatted down, pointing to a deep, four-toed indentation. The track was fresh. And massive.

“Jaguar,” he whispered, a grin spreading across his face.

The print belonged to a cat bigger than the female they’d recorded on a camera trap in October, one month earlier. The men photographed the imprint carefully, not as a memento, but for legal evidence. 

Maikiuants, perched high in Ecuador’s southeastern Amazon highlands near the Peruvian border, sits atop copper-rich ground now claimed by Solaris Resources, a Canadian mining company seeking to gash an open-pit mine into these mountains. If extraction moves forward, the forest Jhostin and Olger were walking through — home to endangered species, waterfalls, medicinal plants, generations of Indigenous knowledge and undiscovered beings — could be permanently altered. 

The jaguar’s presence here holds weight as a matter of law. In Ecuador, endangered species — and nature more broadly — have legal rights. The government must clear a far higher bar than under conventional laws before approving projects like large-scale mining. 

Jhostin and Olger are paraecologists, people who document life in their homelands using generations of ecological expertise and scientific methods. They work with Ecoforensic, a nonprofit that trains paraecologists — paramedics for ecosystems — to document how ecosystems function and how they are harmed. Ecoforensic works in places in Ecuador like Maikiuants: biodiverse regions where scientific data is thin or nonexistent.

The data paraecologists collect, such as species inventories and water samples, is then translated into evidence that carries weight in courts. Increasingly, it’s winning cases.

In 2023, in Ecuador’s Intag Valley, community paraecologists helped halt a proposed mega copper mine by documenting threats to endangered species that the company’s environmental studies had failed to account for. The ruling hinged on Ecuador’s “rights of nature” laws, enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2008.

Those laws rewrote the legal status of ecosystems, transforming them from property or objects — like a car or a microwave — into living subjects with rights to exist, regenerate and maintain their vital cycles. Since then, courts have repeatedly applied those rights, siding with forests, rivers, marine ecosystems and wild animals, and thwarting large-scale extractive activities that judges found would harm them irreversibly. 

But like any right, nature’s rights are not absolute. 

Ecuador, among the world’s most biologically diverse countries, also holds enormous reserves of oil, copper, gold and other minerals. Global markets want them. Multinational companies are itching to dig. And a cash-strapped government is eager to sell. The legal battles are intensifying. 

Ecoforensic is helping to prove that the rights of nature can go toe to toe with those forces. The work now underway in Maikiuants may be its most consequential effort yet. 

For Jhostin, Olger and the rest of Maikiuants’ 480 residents, the outcome is existential. Protecting their territory, Jhostin explained, is inseparable from protecting their own lives — they are nature protecting nature. If the forest is destroyed, so are the people who live within it.

Their people did not migrate to this region. They are from here. Every generation before them was born on this land, a continuity that Jhostin, 21, says his grandparents impressed upon him as a responsibility. His elders’ message was simple and unambiguous: This place must be defended. 

Now, that duty rests with him.

That’s why the two paraecologists step carefully around the jaguar’s tracks and continue climbing toward a camera trap tucked deep inside their forest. The device has been silently recording for weeks and they are eager to see what it captured. 

Thousands of mining concessions

Days earlier, a white pickup truck had wound down the Amazonian mountainside above Maikiuants, its wiper blades squeaking as they swept away the rain. 

Inside, British ecologist Mika Peck tapped the brakes, peering through the windshield as dense fog closed in. His wife, Inde Kaur Hundal, squeezed the bar above her seat, bracing against a pothole the size of a bathtub. The co-founders of Ecoforensic were on their way to deliver good news: The organization will establish a permanent research station in Maikiuants.

It had been two years since they first sat down with residents there to talk about Ecoforensic. They had met in a wooden community center featuring a mural of a Shuar warrior spearing a colonist. For over an hour, the community had grilled the couple. They wanted to know what Ecoforensic would do with the data paraecologists produced — and whether Peck and Hundal were just more outsiders there to extract knowledge, then disappear with it. 

Most of all, they wanted to know how Ecoforensic could help protect their territory. 

The Ecuadorian government had been carving up Shuar territory into mining concessions since the 1990s, but the threat had been confined to maps and paperwork until 2019. That was when Solaris Resources acquired the Warintza Project. Since then, the company’s mineral exploration subsidiary has been a constant presence, scouring the region for copper and gold while attempting to win over a handful of nearby Shuar communities that would be displaced or otherwise impacted, their ancestral mountains blown up.

Maikiuants was a wall of resistance. But communities facing extractive giants fight an almost impossible battle, with financial, political and legal power stacked against them. In Ecuador’s Amazon, that’s been the story of oil for decades. Now, mining is the new frontier. 

Ecuador’s rights of nature laws offer communities a fresh and powerful legal foothold, but winning court cases requires rigorous ecological proof. That was the gap Ecoforensic was built to fill, Peck told Maikiuants’ residents during that first meeting.

Peck and Hundal were inspired by a landmark 2021 rights of nature ruling by Ecuador’s highest court, a case that defined how nature’s rights in Ecuador could be enforced. The decision centered on Los Cedros, a protected cloud forest. 

The government granted a Canadian company a mining concession in 2016 covering more than half of the forest, despite its protected status. Local residents and scientists challenged the decision using decades of ecological research.

Some of that evidence came from Peck’s own work. Through a paraecologist project he launched in 2005, local researchers documented critically endangered brown-headed spider monkeys in the region. That effort formed part of a broader scientific record showing that more than 240 near-threatened, vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered species lived in Los Cedros — many absent from the company’s environmental impact studies used to justify its operations.

That body of evidence proved decisive. In siding with the forest, the court found that mining would threaten Los Cedros’ biological integrity and disrupt evolutionary processes unfolding over billions of years.

Peck, typically stoic, cried with joy when he learned that Los Cedros had prevailed in late 2021. Then he, Hundal and their Ecuadorian colleagues went to work. 

Los Cedros had benefited from a dedicated scientific research station. But vast swaths of Ecuador are, scientifically speaking, a black box — and they are also threatened by mining. 

Peck did the math: The Ecuadorian government had granted nearly 8,000 mining concessions as of 2021. Roughly 30 percent of those overlapped with protected areas, and 20 percent overlapped with Indigenous territories. The most impacted are the Shuar. 

The need to proactively document Maikiuants’ ecosystems, Peck told the community in their 2023 meeting, was “urgent.” 

“When the threats come”

On their first morning back in Maikiuants in late November, Peck and Hundal woke to the faint scent of woodsmoke in the cool air. Outside their tent, green peaks rose skyward, shrouded with forest and clouds, making the village feel held by the landscape itself. 

Today, Peck’s work centers on the web of relationships that bind this place together — water and soil, fish and forest, and the people who depend on them. But early in his career, he was trained to see the world in fragments. He studied aquatic systems in isolation, looking at “safe” levels of contaminants in water, an approach that mirrors how conventional environmental law regulates pollution. 

But the more time he spent measuring thresholds, the more uneasy he became with the premise itself. The idea that ecosystems could absorb endless damage as long as it stayed below a regulatory line struck him as a fundamental misunderstanding of how living systems work. Nature is all about relationships.

Peck, with close-cropped graying hair and a sinewy frame, tries to live that way too. Colleagues describe him as a rare mix of intellectual rigor and emotional intelligence — someone who listens as carefully as he measures. He instinctively looks to the communities embedded in the ecosystems he studies, a perspective that runs against conservation’s prevailing top-down approach. Real change, he believes, emerges from the grassroots. 

Ecuador’s rights of nature laws took shape in much the same way, emerging from Indigenous communities who brought their legal traditions to the state and demanded recognition.

Now, a barefoot Peck, one pant leg slightly rolled up, stepped again to the front of the community center, where about 45 Shuar sat in a semi-circle. This time, the mood was light. Peck was no longer an outsider, but a trusted scientific ally. 

The first order of business was brainstorming. What should the research station look like? Where should it be built? And what are residents concerned about?

They broke into small groups, scrawling ideas with magic markers across long sheets of paper. Ángel Nantip, 63, a muscular community elder with a direct and unflinching gaze, spoke first. Nantip remembers when mining engineers and the Ecuadorian military first arrived in the 1990s to prospect for metals. They told him nothing bad would happen to the territory or the spiritual beings that live within it, he said. Only later did he learn how destructive the planned open-pit mine would be — and that it would sever the relationships among communities. 

Before anything else, Nantip told the group, the community needed a way to protect its environmental defenders.

“We need an alert system when the threats come,” he said, his angular face tightening. 

Peck wasn’t surprised when others raised the same concern. Each week, an average of three environmental defenders — people who peacefully protect ecosystems — are killed around the world, a number widely believed to be an undercount given the remote and politically repressed places where many of them work. The sector most closely linked to that violence: mining. Maikiuants was not immune.

Since Solaris arrived, the largely tranquil region had grown tense, driven by what leaders describe as a “divide and conquer” tactic. Mining companies secure the backing of certain communities or leaders with financial incentives, often filling gaps left by the state — access to schools, health clinics or basic infrastructure. Maikiuants’ school, for instance, has one teacher for about 45 students spanning all grade levels. Two nearby Shuar communities and an umbrella Shuar organization entered into various cooperation agreements with Solaris, the contents of which are confidential. 

“As independent and legally recognized communities, we have the right to seek a better quality of life for the people of our community, where our children can study, our elderly can work, and we can have access to widespread healthcare that we have never had before,” the pro-mining communities said in a court filing about their relationship with Solaris. A spokesperson for those communities did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Though the project has advanced without the consent of all impacted Indigenous groups, Solaris has likewise framed it as community-driven. 

“At Solaris Resources, we believe that sustainable mining is not just an economic endeavour; it is a journey that must include the insights and values of every stakeholder involved, especially our indigenous populations,” said company president and CEO Matthew Rowlinson in a written statement on Solaris’ website. “Their lived experiences and deep connection to the land are vital to shaping responsible mining practices.”

Solaris did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, nor did it respond to a list of questions about the project, including its impact on local communities. 

On the ground, the divisions sown by the company’s presence are stark. It’s turned neighboring villages into adversaries, with pro- and anti-mining communities’ disputes with one another spilling into court battles, military deployments and threats. 

In 2022, members of the two pro-mining communities filed a criminal complaint against three Maikiuants residents, including Nancy Antún, a leader of the Maikiuants women, alleging they planned an attack on a mining camp in the region. All three fiercely denied the allegation. Antún said people from pro-mining communities have themselves made multiple threats against her, including that they will burn her house down while her children are inside. 

Another prominent Shuar leader said she received a death threat from a Solaris executive — an allegation the company denies. Amidst the turmoil, the government deployed military forces to protect the concession, including on Maikiuants’ territory, which Ecuador’s Constitution recognizes as self-governing. In response, community guards detained several soldiers and now face criminal charges. 

Similar disputes elsewhere in Ecuador have escalated into violence. In recent years, Indigenous leaders who opposed extractive projects — including A’i Cofán leader Eduardo Mendúa and Shuar leader José Isidro Tendetza Antún, a relative of multiple Maikiuants residents — have been killed, cases that rights groups say underscore the risks faced by environmental defenders in the region. 

Back in the community center, as the morning meeting ended, the path forward was clear — and fraught. In Maikiuants, building the evidence needed to defend the forest carries risks. There would be no separating the science from the struggle. 

The monkey’s axe

In many ways, Ecoforensic shouldered the work the Ecuadorian government was meant to do: protect its people, uphold the constitution and ensure companies followed the law. Instead, successive administrations deployed the military to suppress protests over pollution, shielded foreign firms from liability for massive toxic dumping and weakened civil society’s ability to resist. 

Under President Daniel Noboa, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, those pressures intensified. In recent months, his administration froze the bank accounts of prominent Indigenous leaders and environmentalists — including one belonging to a lawyer for Maikiuants — while dismantling the environment ministry and imposing sweeping restrictions on nongovernmental organizations.

The crackdown has made coalitions essential. Communities, lawyers and scientists are banding together as they push back against Noboa’s drive to accelerate mining and oil extraction.

Now, as the afternoon meeting got underway, Peck invited an aquatic ecologist to the front of the room: Edwin Zárate, a lanky, soft-spoken biology professor at the University of Azuay in Cuenca. In Maikiuants, Zárate was quietly helping to build the scientific record of how the territory works as a living system — supporting paraecologists, establishing an agro-ecology program and setting up a meteorological station to track the climate in real time.

Peck moved through the room, handing out spiral-bound packets thick with color photographs — frogs no larger than a thumb, fish flecked with purple and green, each image paired with a short description.

“These are the species paraecologists have documented so far,” Peck said, as pages rustled open. “And they’re discovering more.”

“Every time we do new studies, we find new species,” Zárate added. Some, he said, were unknown to science — like the one paraecologists had recently found, a frog with skin as dark as night, speckled with iridescent blue dots, like a tiny galaxy.

Maikiuants, Zárate explained, sits in the rugged transition zone where the high Andes meets the tropical lowlands. It is a landscape defined by ancient upheaval: millions of years ago, colliding tectonic plates forced the Pacific seabed upwards. Each ridge and fold created its own microclimate, isolating species in narrow ecological niches. Here, extinction can come suddenly. Destroy a single slope, he said, and an entire evolutionary lineage can disappear with it.

That fragility has legal implications. Ecuador’s Constitution gives special protection to species with unique evolutionary paths — those that exist nowhere else on Earth, representing a “one-of-a-kind” branch on the tree of life.

“Some species are more important for rights of nature cases than others,” Peck said. “Those at risk of extinction are very important — and species that exist only here.” 

He turned next to keystone species, animals whose influence ripples through entire ecosystems. Jaguars, for instance, regulate prey populations, shape plant growth and feed scavengers through their kills. When keystone species disappear, food webs unravel. “The future of other species depends on them,” Peck said.

“The condor is another,” Zárate added. With wingspans stretching up to 12 feet, Andean condors are among the largest flying birds in the world. They are critically endangered in Ecuador, with fewer than 150 remaining, largely due to poaching and agricultural expansion. As scavengers, they play a vital role in disease control. A rapidly emerging threat: habitat loss from mining.

The information in the packets, Peck and Zárate explained, could give the landscape a voice, grounding nature’s constitutional rights in ecological data. 

Using a small projector powered by a cable threaded through a gap in the wall, Peck cast a diagram of Ecuador’s rights-of-nature framework onto a poster affixed backward to the wall as a makeshift screen. The government’s duty to prevent species extinction appeared on an infographic, circled in red, adjacent to other constitutional guarantees.

Peck pointed to the protections for biocultural heritage — the inseparable ties between communities and the plants and animals they live with. That was something science alone couldn’t document.

“We need your stories,” he told the room. “Which species matter most to you? Why?”

The room erupted into conversation. Lead paraecologist Claudio Ankuash Nantip, who goes by Pinchu, pointed to a photograph of a capuchin monkey.

“When people die, they don’t disappear,” he said. “They return as animals.”

Those who lived badly might come back as creatures of fear. Others return as protectors.

“Like the monkey,” he said.

Nearly a century ago, Pinchu said, a demon terrorized the community with an axe, killing people. It was the monkey who defeated it, burying the axe deep inside a mountain. 

Elders once saw the species often. Now it is almost gone. Paraecologists have so far been unable to document it.

“Now,” Pinchu said, “the company wants to dig the axe up.” 

Dreams of a father

The next morning, Peck, Hundal and Zárate pulled on knee-high rubber boots and tried to keep pace with a group of Shuar heading into the forest to scout sites for the research station. The group was led by Jorge Antún, 60, a lifelong resident of Maikiuants and the father of paraecologist Jhostin Antún. 

Compact and powerfully built from decades in the forest, Jorge moved easily along the trail. His long-sleeved beige shirt, visibly stained with mud and sweat in the warm, humid air, clung to his torso as he climbed.

Minutes in, he stepped off the path. Reaching into the vines, he plucked a leaf and held it up. 

“This is good medicine for insects that burrow into your skin,” he said, explaining how the leaves are cooked into a paste and applied to the body.

Every few steps, the forest offered another lesson. Berries used as dish soap. Plants that calm sunburn. Ants whose bites burn like fire.

“The forest,” Jorge said, his eyes bright, “is our own storage unit for food and medicine.”

That is not how mining firms see it. 

Companies’ environmental impact studies — required before permits are granted — are meant to assess a project’s social, cultural and ecological risks. In practice, lawyers say, Indigenous ecological knowledge is hardly ever included. Also absent are mentions of communities’ spiritual relationships to the land, like Maikiuants’ waterfalls, which residents view as sacred temples of spiritual renewal where their futures are revealed.

Companies’ science can also fall short. Ecoforensic’s review of Solaris Resources’ environmental impact assessment identified what it called “critical deficiencies,” including the omission of 91 at-risk or endangered species and scant attention to fish — an especially glaring oversight in an industry notorious for contaminating waterways. Mining has left a global legacy of heavy-metal pollution, acidic runoff and depleted aquifers.

The assessment also had mistakes, such as its failure to include the vulnerable-to-extinction giant anteater and bush dog. Paraecologists had already documented both species on Maikiuants’ lands.

More broadly, the document never analyzed whether the project could violate Ecuador’s rights-of-nature laws. That requires evaluating impacts on ecosystem functions (the work ecosystems do to keep themselves alive, like a tree converting sunlight into oxygen and wetlands filtering dirty water); on life cycles (think of a frog’s journey from egg to tadpole to adult); and on evolutionary processes (the long-term change of life over millions of years as it adapts for survival).

Now, as Peck followed Jorge down the trail toward his home, it was hard for the ecologist to imagine company contractors producing the kind of patient, place-based knowledge needed to truly understand an ecosystem. The thought lingered as he ducked through the low doorway of the Antún family’s traditional hut.

Inside, the oval structure was meticulously kept: a swept dirt floor, a long wooden table with benches, a smoldering fire at its center. Pots, pans and a rifle hung from the walls. On a bench, two relatives, one in a dark T-shirt with her hair pulled into a loose bun and the other in a sage-green blouse, shelled peanuts into a large container while another lifted a squirming child from a colorful activity seat and brought the baby to her breast.

Jorge’s wife, Ilda Chias Nakaim Antún, handed out glasses of fresh pineapple juice and steaming plates of yucca and plantains, alongside hard-boiled eggs served with chili-flecked salt. But for the salt, everything came from the land around them.

Over the meal, Jorge spoke quietly about ideas for sustainable businesses: fish farming, fruit cultivation, even a local variety of vanilla. 

“We want alternatives to mining,” he said. “We can be an example for others.”

His family is firmly opposed to the mine. His daughter Marcia Antún, the young mother, worried about air and water contamination. 

“The company could force us to leave,” she said. 

As the conversation turned back to economic possibilities, they discussed precedents. A cocoa project tied to paraecologists’ work on the brown-headed spider monkey helped farmers triple their incomes by pairing market access with forest protection. Other communities turned to ecotourism. In West Papua, Indonesia, where Peck helped develop paraecology initiatives, one of the first paraecologists went on to earn a Ph.D. and now leads the Binatang Research Center, Papua New Guinea’s leading conservation research institute.

In each case, the model produced something durable: livelihoods tied to ongoing scientific work, not extraction.

Reliable internet, now possible through satellite services, could open paths to e-commerce. The University of Azuay’s business school might help with planning. Jorge also imagined sharing the Shuar’s medicinal knowledge with the world, on their own terms.

“I have dreams for my family,” he said. “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to fulfill them because of the company.”

Time was not on their side. Solaris Resources’ final operational approval was expected within months.

Sustaining life 

Later that day, lead paraecologist Pinchu, who told the story of the monkey’s axe, set out on a narrow trail climbing out of Maikiuants, his 10-year-old son Kirup and Zárate following close behind. The forest tightened around them, the canopy draping over the path like a botanical cloak that choked out the midday sun, the air warm and faintly sweet with the scent of ripening fruit. They walked in silence until Pinchu signaled for everyone to stop.

A five-foot-long snake, no thicker than a golf ball, lay stretched across the path, its dark body blending into leaves like a shard of obsidian.

“It’s sleeping,” Pinchu whispered. 

He picked up a fallen branch and shook it above the snake. Unhurried, the animal stirred, slid off the trail and vanished into the undergrowth.

Farther on, the forest began to open. Sunlight pierced the canopy in narrow shafts, and then, suddenly, the trail opened into a hidden alcove. A waterfall spilled over a jagged ledge of dark rock, unraveling in thin silver strands into a lagoon below. Thick vines draped overhead like green tresses.

Kirup grasped one of the vines and slid smoothly down to the lagoon, diving in. Zárate and Pinchu followed, wading toward a small island carpeted in soft green moss. There, Pinchu pulled out a container of tobacco leaves steeped in water. Among the Shuar, the mixture isn’t smoked but inhaled as a tea — a practice Pinchu said brings calm and sharpens his connection to the forest, helping him listen and feel more deeply.

Waterfalls hold deep spiritual significance for the Shuar. When life’s challenges arise, they follow protocols refined over generations, preparing carefully before visiting, communing with and leaving these places. 

Only recently has Western science begun to affirm what many Indigenous communities have long understood. Time spent in nature has been shown to lower stress hormones, reduce inflammation, strengthen immune response and sharpen focus.

Yet the places where such scientific findings carry the greatest authority are often those most disconnected from the natural world — and whose consumption is driving the destruction of ecosystems like this one. 

The copper beneath these mountains would likely be shipped to the United States and other wealthy countries, feeding the expansion of military hardware, energy transitions and infrastructure behind the artificial-intelligence boom, such as data centers. 

A conventional data center can require up to 15,000 tons of copper. Facilities built to power AI systems can demand more than three times that amount, driving prices to record highs.

Those artificial worlds feel impossibly distant here, where now, a dripping wet Zárate emerged from the lagoon. This marked the 12th trip he’d made to Maikiuants, each one reinforcing for him the importance of scientists stepping out of walled offices and learning from other knowledge systems.

“We have to be more holistic,” he said. 

The industrialized world, Pinchu added, has “a different way of viewing nature — only thinking about money.”

He dreams of a future in which his people can evolve and develop without losing the essence of who they are.

“We have ways of living that are also valuable,” he said. “Our ancestral knowledge is valuable, and it’s not about money — it’s about sustaining life.” 

Love and hope

With the fresh jaguar tracks documented, Jhostin Antún and Olger Kitiar quickened their pace toward the camera trap, anticipation building with every step. They were high in the mountains now, far above the waterfall where Pinchu had taken Zárate.

The camera was fastened to a tree washed in sunlight — a deliberate choice, since it ran on solar power. When Olger reached for it, pure delight sparked in his eyes.

“I love this,” he said. “I love seeing all the animals — sometimes there are things we haven’t seen in real life.”

He began transferring the data to his phone using Bluetooth, a 10-minute process that felt far longer. To pass the time, they scrolled through older recordings: pig-like peccaries rooting through the undergrowth, a spectacled bear lumbering past, turkeys, a species they call wild dogs, perdiz birds — and a jaguar, caught once, briefly, slipping through the frame. 

This camera was one of two they maintained on their territory. The other required an eight-hour hike each way and an overnight stay in the forest.

“It’s still as exciting as it was in the beginning,” Olger said. “We’re learning more and more and discovering new species.” 

Jhostin had been part of the team that discovered an unknown frog, soon to be named the Maikiuants frog.

His work, he said, was both fun and deeply serious. Gesturing with his hands, he described the rhythms of daily life — planting, harvesting, eating what the forest provides. Agriculture, for his community, is not a commercial activity but a way of sustaining the body and spirit. 

“Ecoforensic gives me hope that this way of life can still be protected,” Jhostin said. 

He wants children someday, and he wants them to live in the forest without fear, free of contamination. Without territory, he said, you cannot teach children who they are. You cannot teach them the forest.

He wants a future of buen vivir — living well, living in balance. His father, Jorge, taught him the forest by walking through it, by explaining what each plant and river meant. His grandfather did the same, offering guidance not through lectures but through nature itself. That, Jhostin said, is where wisdom comes from.

And that is what he is trying to protect.

Olger signaled that the data had finished loading. The footage showed a lone tinamou, a chicken-like bird. 

Their task finished, the two paraecologists walked back to the village — crossing a gushing, pristine river on the way, its banks alive with hundreds of iridescent blue butterflies rising and falling in slow waves. 

On a narrow bank of stones and sediment in the middle of the river, where the water divided and came together again farther down, Jorge Antún sat quietly, taking in the sweep of forest and sky. Jhostin spotted his father and smiled. He and Olger crouched at the river’s edge, splashing the cool water over their faces before cupping their hands to drink, the current threading around them as it always had.

TriplePundit]]> Andrew Kaminsky https://triplepundit.com/?p=70625 2026-04-14T15:57:04Z 2026-04-13T13:00:00Z

A Canadian mining giant is using a $20 billion lawsuit to pressure Panama into reopening a controversial copper mine. The case exposes how international investment agreements can undermine democracy, and why experts are calling for fairer investment frameworks worldwide.

TriplePundit]]>

This article is part of our series on responsible mining solutions. The push for clean energy is fueled by a growing demand for minerals, but conventional mining has a track record of harmful social and environmental impacts. Rethinking international investment agreements is another potential solution to that problem.

Public outrage and mass protests shut down Central America’s largest copper mine two years ago. In 2025, the Panamanian government was coerced back to the negotiating table by a $20 billion lawsuit from the mining company, First Quantum Minerals, despite the fact that the project’s contract was ruled unconstitutional in 2017, and again in 2023.

This type of lawsuit from a foreign company against a government is called an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), and it plays out in international arbitration court. First Quantum Minerals’ case against Panama is a prime example of how ISDS provisions in international trade agreements can limit a country’s sovereignty and leave them vulnerable to exploitation.

The risk of international lawsuits has countries backing out of trade agreements with ISDS provisions, while international law experts suggest alternative methods to ensure that foreign investment works for all parties. Some worry this could turn mining companies, and the economic benefits they bring, away. But most studies find that the presence of ISDS provisions has little impact on foreign direct investment, anyway.

What’s happening in Panama?

To oversimplify a very complex topic, ISDS is a type of protection for foreign investors. If they feel the government of a country they are investing in does something that may reduce their returns, they can sue that government in international arbitration court. (We have an in-depth explanation of ISDS, how it’s used, and why countries are backing out in our previous coverage here.)

Even if the foreign investment project breaks domestic laws, harms communities or destroys the environment, governments that try to remedy or prevent those issues with changes in legislation can face lawsuits in the billions. That’s how Panama wound up staring down the barrel of a $20 billion lawsuit.

“The [Panama] mine was allowed to start with an unconstitutional contract. If that doesn’t tell you this is a risky project as an investor, I don’t know what does,” said Jamie Kneen, national program co-lead at MiningWatch Canada. “But ISDS helps investors override that kind of concern. It essentially de-risks otherwise extremely risky investments.”

The Cobre Panama mine, run by Canadian-based First Quantum Minerals, is the largest copper mine in Central America. Operating from 2019 to 2023, it accounted for about 5 percent of Panama’s GDP.

Despite being declared unconstitutional in 2017, it wasn’t until mass protests five years later that the Supreme Court ruled the mine must be shut down. A few months later, First Quantum launched an ISDS case against Panama. Now that Panama is entertaining contract renegotiation in light of the case, First Quantum paused the lawsuit. The mine seems set to resume some operations, but Panama will make a decision on whether to fully reopen the mine this summer.

“The company and a number of its investors and suppliers are threatening to sue the pants off of Panama to make up for lost profits or to pressure the government into ignoring its people and restarting the mine,” said Jen Moore, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

This raises questions about the benefits of ISDS for governments. Critics of ISDS argue that disputes can be resolved in other ways and host countries don’t need ISDS to attract investment.

Does ISDS actually attract investment?

Proponents of ISDS claim that having these provisions in trade agreements entices foreign investment by providing a safety net for investors against government maltreatment.

“ISDS provisions boost investor confidence by offering legal protection against expropriation or discriminatory acts,” said Attorney Davy Karkason, founder of Transnational Matters International Law Firm. “My foreign direct investment clientele rely on these provisions for risk mitigation.”

But the data on the influence of ISDS provisions on foreign direct investment does not paint a clear picture.

A 2022 study by the United States International Trade Commission found that binding ISDS provisions result in an increase of foreign investment by 22 percent, but it concedes that evidence in the literature continues to be mixed with little consensus.

Meanwhile, a 2020 meta-study on investor protections in international investment agreements found that the effect on foreign investment was, “so small as to be considered zero.”

“Even if there is a marginal correlation in some cases, the costs of ISDS — financially, legally and politically — are significant and woefully underappreciated,” said Lisa Sachs, director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.

Politically, ISDS can cause “regulatory chill,” where governments avoid enacting environmental, social or tax laws for fear of costly ISDS lawsuits.

“Most of the time, mining executives’ decisions are made based on the nature of the resource, the legal and regulatory frameworks, and the certainties around development,” explained Kneen of Mining Watch Canada. “ISDS coverage comes out as kind of a bonus point, but not a crucial decision making factor.”

Based on the Panama situation, I ran a rudimentary analysis to see what changed in foreign direct investments when other countries removed ISDS clauses from trade agreements. Here are three of those cases.

Ecuador

In 2017, Ecuador terminated 16 trade agreements after their government determined ISDS provisions were not attracting investment.

In the following five years, Ecuador received $1 billion per year in foreign direct investment, compared to $830 million annually in the five years prior, according to data from Macrotrends. While many factors affect foreign investment, the termination of ISDS-laden agreements did not appear to deter it.

ISDS clauses may have helped attract investment initially when they were first introduced in 1993, but once investment was established in Ecuador, the removal of ISDS clauses did not deter additional investment.

South Africa

South Africa let several ISDS treaties expire in the early 2010s and replaced them with its own national program called the Protection of Investment Act in 2018. The act still provides some investor protection, but now cases are heard within South Africa’s own legal system, not international arbitration in Washington.

In the five years preceding 2012, when South Africa started to distance itself from ISDS, its average annual foreign direct investment inflows were $6.4 billion, according to data from Macrotrends. From 2012 to 2016, foreign direct investment averaged $4.5 billion per year.

Since South Africa enacted its national investor protection act in 2018, foreign direct investment averaged $5.1 billion annually. (This omits $41 billion of foreign investment in 2021, which was largely the result of corporate restructuring.)

Again, many factors affect these investments. After cancelling ISDS treaties, South Africa’s foreign direct investments dropped at first, then climbed back up after enacting the national protection program.

India

After facing multiple billion-dollar ISDS cases in the 2000s, India terminated over 50 trade agreements in 2016 and 2017. In the five years preceding the 2016 changes, India saw $33.5 billion in annual foreign direct investment inflows, according to data from Macrotrends. In the five years following, that increased to $48.3 billion.

In two of these three cases, removing ISDS clauses was not followed by reduced investment. In one country, it was. This inconclusivity is in line with what larger academic studies find. Whether ISDS attracts investment or not is up for debate, but the financial and political costs that countries face from the ISDS system likely outweigh any boost to foreign investment.

How to make foreign investment work for all parties

“Instead of relying on ISDS, we need more balanced and mutually beneficial investment frameworks — ones that support sustainable development and fair dispute resolution,” said Sachs of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.

The International Institute of Sustainable Development recently released a report that provides recommendations on how to improve foreign investment agreements. It includes rewriting or ending old agreements that prioritize investor protections and refinding and processing minerals domestically.

Processing and refining minerals domestically adds more suppliers to the market and derisks concentrated global supply chains from external shocks and geopolitical market manipulation, said Isabelle Ramdoo, director of the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development.

“Keep in mind that if you remove ISDS, investors still have recourse. They have national courts and regional courts that can play that role,” said Suzy Nikièma, an author of the report and director of sustainable development at the International Institute of Sustainable Development.

In fact, many international law experts say that domestic courts should be the place to settle investor-state disputes, while others worry that domestic legal systems may not be equipped to handle them.

“Domestic courts, particularly in developing countries, have the reputation of being inefficient, weak or problematic,” Nikièma said. “But ISDS is not better. If you decide to prioritize domestic courts, you could put in the effort to improve them and make sure they can handle this type of dispute properly.”

It should be a requirement to at least start a case in domestic courts before elevating a dispute to other regional or international courts, she added.

“A final element is to bring more inclusivity in the system for local communities,” Nikièma said. “A sort of compliance mechanism is needed for communities to raise concerns about project impacts and to have a collaborative approach with the investor or state to adjust and comply with investment obligations.”

Feature image credit: AnyGang/Wikimedia Commons

TriplePundit]]> Adesewa Olofinko https://triplepundit.com/?p=70609 2026-04-14T15:57:27Z 2026-04-10T13:00:00Z

Women make up about 27 percent of Africa’s online gig workforce. They're part of a generation redefining what work looks like across continent.

TriplePundit]]>

This story originally appeared on Global Voices.

At 9:00 a.m. in Lagos, Nigeria, when traffic starts easing from its daily rush-hour gridlock, Vivian opens her laptop.

Her commute is just twelve steps from her bedroom to the adjoining room that doubles as her office. Inside, a large desk anchors the space, paired with an ergonomic chair, a gaming computer, a wide monitor and two compact laptops.

She does not clock in, and there is no supervisor waiting behind a glass partition. Instead, there is a dashboard with Slack notifications from a U.S.-based startup she supports as an operations manager, a ClickUp dashboard waiting for updates from Singapore, a Trello board with tasks that must be cleared before California wakes up, and an app tracking how long she stays “active.”

Vivian’s workday will stretch across time zones. She will answer emails for a company whose headquarters she has never seen and negotiate electricity outages with a 3.5 kWh inverter with batteries loaded behind her door. By evening, she will have earned in dollars what amounts to a dozen times Nigeria’s minimum wage.

Vivian is part of a generation redefining what work looks like across Africa — independent, connected and unmistakably global.

At 6 a.m., before the humidity settles over Ghana’s capital of Accra, Diana Akumkadoa starts her car and opens her ride-hailing app. She steps into a job that still surprises people. Even though ride-hailing has become a familiar part of life in many African cities, women behind the wheel remain rare globally. Diana describes the brief pause when riders realize their driver is a woman. Then the ride begins, and the surprise usually turns into conversation.

By mid-morning, she has already spent hours navigating traffic that surges and stalls without warning. On some days, she drives 14 hours. On others, cancellations stack up, and she closes the app and goes home.

“It gives me a chance to be independent,” says Diana. “But it comes with its own risks. If something happens to you, you are on your own.”

For Diana, flexibility means she can structure her hours around her child’s school schedule. It also means absorbing the costs of fuel, maintenance, and platform commissions, which can reach 30 percent per trip. However, she says driving allows her to “earn on her own terms” while navigating the demands of life in a fast-growing city.

Gig work in Africa

Online gig work began gaining real traction around 2015 due to widespread smartphone adoption across Africa. The transformation accelerated dramatically from 2020 onward, when the COVID-19 pandemic further pushed millions toward digital gig work.

Estimates from the World Bank suggest that more than 21 million Africans now earn part- or full-time income through gig work, with growth rates of roughly 11 percent each year, outpacing most other regions. The global industry is valued at US$556.7 billion as of 2024, and projected to triple to US$1.8 trillion by 2032.

Cities like Lagos, Accra, and Nairobi, Kenya, have become regional hubs for both in-person gig work, such as delivery, logistics, and transport, and borderless digital labor, including design, marketing, coding, and virtual operations, for companies around the world. In Nigeria, 35 percent of young people are engaged in freelance work in some capacity.

Africa’s workforce is remarkably young, with many of its platform workers under the age of 30. Women make up an increasingly visible part of this shift, accounting for about 27 percent of the continent’s online gig workforce.

Cindy Sally’s path to gig work

In Accra’s City Galleria Mall, Cindy Sally leads a finance team for a U.S.-based firm operating partly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her “office” is a rented desk at a co-working hub, where she pays 200 Ghanaian cedi (about US$18.50) per day. Her colleagues exist mostly as rectangles on a screen.

Unlike Diana, Cindy Sally earns in foreign currency. Her workday begins late morning to accommodate U.S. time zones and often stretches into the evening.

Her path to global gig work began after leaving a demanding role at a local firm in Ghana, where she says the pace, economic uncertainty, and heavy workload made the job unsustainable.

She then turned to freelance platforms and began building a client base abroad through Upwork. That shift would eventually allow her to earn in dollars while living in Accra.

Online gig work has grown continuously across Africa’s digital workforce. As global companies grow more comfortable hiring remotely, a new generation of African professionals is collaborating with teams thousands of miles away while remaining firmly based at home.

The price of going global

Gig platforms make global work possible, but they also take their share.

On sites like Upwork, freelancers can lose 10 to 15 percent of their earnings in platform fees, according to Faith Abiodun Uwaifo, a Nigerian virtual assistant who transitioned into remote work after five years in journalism.

She manages projects for clients spread across the United States, Canada, Thailand and the United Kingdom. Like many freelancers, her workday runs from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Nigeria, aligned with clients based in Pacific Standard Time.

Moving money across borders also introduces another layer of deductions. Even the tools required to stay competitive, like high-speed internet, cloud services, and digital productivity platforms, represent a constant cost. She recalls upgrading from a 3G hotspot to a 5G router just to keep her jobs: “Some clients won’t even consider you if your connection isn’t strong.”

Despite those challenges, she describes the experience as transformative. Working with clients across continents, she says, has reshaped how she thinks about work itself.

Faith describes the psychological strain of platform work, such as the silence after submitting proposals, the weight of negative reviews, and the awareness that some clients associate Nigerian IP addresses with fraud.

“Sometimes you feel like you’re fighting stereotypes before you even start the job,” she says.

To cushion against uncertainty, she runs a small food-processing business on the side, a diversification strategy common among gig workers who understand that digital income can fluctuate abruptly.

Women, work and the borderless future

Africa’s population has grown from 283 million in 1960 to more than 1.5 billion today, and is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050. Every year, an estimated 10 million young people enter the labor market, far more than the available traditional jobs.

For decades, economic opportunity was often tied to migration. Today, millions of Africans are plugging directly into global commerce from their homes and building careers that span continents.

For women in particular, gig work offers entry without permission. It gives flexibility and access to global markets that once seemed out of reach.

This reporting project was supported by Africa No Filter.

TriplePundit]]> Tina Casey https://triplepundit.com/?p=70645 2026-04-09T20:13:19Z 2026-04-09T20:13:07Z

The Trump administration’s support for the notorious herbicide glyphosate shocked voters attracted to Make America Healthy Again messaging during the 2024 election. That anger could ripple into midterms.

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The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement finds itself at a crossroads. Despite campaigning for United States President Donald Trump and earning his vigorous seal of approval, MAHA’s purported mission to free health care from “corporate control” conflicts directly with the president’s mission to support corporate profits, as recently underscored by an Executive Order involving the notorious herbicide glyphosate amid ongoing litigation. 

When corporate profits beat public health

Glyphosate is a ubiquitous herbicide commonly known as the primary ingredient in Roundup brand products manufactured by the global pharmaceutical corporation Bayer. 

When Bayer acquired the agrochemical company Monsanto and its Roundup brand in 2018, evidence already pointed to human health risks associated with direct exposure to glyphosate on farms and during yard work. Those studies were followed by more convincing evidence in the years to come, with the cancer non-Hodgkin lymphoma being a particular area of concern among farmworkers and others exposed to the herbicide regularly.

Last year, the mounting evidence led to a landmark decision against Bayer by a jury in Georgia. The plaintiff — John Barnes, who used Roundup at his home and workplace for decades before developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma — alleged that Bayer was aware of the health risks but failed to warn consumers. 

The jury ordered Bayer to pay him more than $2 billion in “the largest single-plaintiff verdict in Georgia history,” the business publication Exec Edge reports. 

The history-making verdict against a powerful corporation was widely cheered by the MAHA movement, which had identified glyphosate as a chief target for action against the chemical industry. 

The verdict was further validated in December when the decades-old research that initially determined glyphosate was safe to use was retracted by the journal that published it, after Monsanto’s influence on the results came to light during litigation. Last month, a newly published review of the literature further described “consistent, coherent and compelling evidence” that glyphosate and related chemicals are a cause of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Barnes’ case in Georgia is one of thousands as people seek relief from Bayer after falling ill. “Between 2023 and 2025, plaintiffs have won nearly $5 billion in verdicts, though some were later reduced by judges,” Exec Edge reported last week. “As of January 2026, approximately 65,000 Roundup lawsuits remain pending, with new cases still being filed. The company has reportedly set aside $16 billion to settle the remaining cases.” 

Bayer continues to push to end the wave of litigation. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the company’s case arguing that federal pesticide labeling laws shield it from pending lawsuits. In February, Bayer agreed to pay $7.25 billion to settle tens of thousands of its outstanding suits in a move reportedly driven by the upcoming Supreme Court case. 

In a call announcing the settlement, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson called the agreement complimentary to the case, adding that offering some compensation to plaintiffs alongside a win in the Supreme Court is “the tightest possible form of containment” for future litigation, The New York Times reports. 

At the same time, Bayer is campaigning for policies across the U.S. that opponents say will shield pesticide companies from liability for failing to warn the public about the health risks associated with its products, including the most recent draft of the federal farm bill. Bills backed by the company passed in North Dakota and Georgia last year, and lawmakers are debating a third bill in Kansas. A similar pesticides rider was dropped from a spending bill in Maine in December after campaigning from local representatives and MAHA. 

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear Bayer’s case later this month. If the company can’t contain the lawsuits, it may stop selling Roundup altogether, Anderson previously told reporters. 

But all this news didn’t seem to reach supposed MAHA ally Donald Trump. In February, President Trump issued an executive order “protecting the health and safety of Americans,” but not by taking action to reduce glyphosate hazards. Instead, the order increases those risks by protecting corporations from liability and providing federal resources that support domestic herbicide producers and the domestic phosphorus mining industry. Last month, the Department of Justice followed up by filing a brief with the Supreme Court in support of Bayer’s argument in its upcoming case.  

Making MAHA angry again

Adding insult to injury, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy swiftly moved to forestall criticism among the MAHA rank and file. In a lengthy February social media post, he touted the executive order as improving national security, blamed glyphosate on the agricultural system Trump inherited, and insisted it is a positive step toward reform … eventually. “President Trump has opened the door to this debate and backed meaningful change — not only in policy, but in the national conversation about health and agriculture,” Kennedy concluded.

That’s quite a turnaround for the former trial lawyer. Kennedy had long roots as a trusted name in the battle against glyphosate, having worked for the plaintiffs in a groundbreaking glyphosate case that resulted in a $298 million jury verdict against Monsanto in 2018.

While Kennedy’s messaging resonated among some MAHA activists, the rank-and-file were not buying it. In particular, the executive order drew the wrath of the prominent glyphosate-focused, MAHA-affiliated Moms Across America Movement. “WE DO NOT CONSENT TO BEING POISONED,” the organization told its Facebook followers in February.

“This is not ‘national security.’ True national security is healthy families, thriving children, and a future free from chronic disease,” the organization continued, providing a link to an online petition calling on the president to phase out glyphosate among other demands, including an end to vaccine mandates.

What went wrong?

The glyphosate betrayal may have shocked voters who were attracted to Trump by MAHA messaging during the 2024 election. But months before Election Day, signs were already emerging that the MAHA segment of the wellness movement was serving Republican political interests, not genuine public health goals.

The MAHA message is credited with rallying Independent and Democratic voters to re-elect President Trump in 2024, despite his catastrophic record on left-leaning issues during his first term. However, MAHA is not a politically neutral movement: MAHA PAC is the name of a right-wing political action committee formerly known as American Values super PAC. MAHA PAC describes itself as “the political arm of the Make America Healthy Again movement, dedicated to electing candidates who will fight for a healthier America.”

“We exist to elect Republicans to the House and Senate who will champion the MAHA agenda in 2026 and beyond,” it adds.

The nonprofit MAHA Action also launched in 2024 with an affiliation to then-candidate Kennedy, but it devoted funds in support of Trump’s MAHA programs after the election. Despite Trump’s support for glyphosate production and use, MAHA Action continues to describe its mission as “driving advocacy and activism for the Make America Healthy Again movement to revitalize a healthier America, liberated from corporate control.”

Both organizations are focusing their attention on winning the midterm elections. Their success depends on whether MAHA activists can convince bipartisan wellness voters that Republican candidates are serving their interests, and President Trump’s executive order on phosphorus and glyphosate herbicides is just the latest in a series of actions that raise hurdles for that argument.

Last summer, The New Yorker took note of proposed rollbacks in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines for pesticides among other examples of corporate support over public benefit. In December, MAHA activists launched a petition to urge the president to fire EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, arguing he prioritizes chemical corporations over the well-being of families and children. 

A new poll of self-identified MAHA supporters commissioned by the news organization Politico indicates that anger within the wellness movement could ripple into the midterm elections. Trump is not on the ballot, but Congress is. “Some congressional Republicans have moved to protect pesticide makers from legal liability in the farm bill, further angering MAHA,” Politico reports. Half of the MAHA supporters polled said limiting pesticide use is a core value of the movement. 

During a campaign rally in 2016, Trump famously said that he “wouldn’t lose any voters” if he stood in the middle of a bustling city street — 5^th Avenue in New York — and shot someone. That statement has met the test of time until now. Coupled with the unspooling scandal of the Jeffrey Epstein files and the catastrophic decision to launch a war against Iran, could the glyphosate order prove to be the final straw? 

Featured image credit: Jammer Gene/Adobe Stock

TriplePundit]]> Farai Shawn Matiashe https://triplepundit.com/?p=70574 2026-03-31T19:41:12Z 2026-04-06T13:00:00Z

Grandmothers are the custodians of culture in Zimbabwe. For generations, people sought advice from grandmothers across the country. Now, they're training in talk therapy to offer free mental healthcare on public benches.

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Content warning: This story includes accounts of suicidal thoughts and domestic abuse.

A young mother sat crying during a counseling session with Elizabeth Mudzenge in Kuwadzana, a populous suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. Seated upright on a wooden bench outside of the local clinic, 66-year-old Mudzenge tried not to get emotional, instead listening to her client’s struggles and offering guidance through a problem-solving therapy process called “opening the mind.”

Mudzenge is one of the many local grandmothers who are part of Friendship Bench Zimbabwe, an NGO providing free mental healthcare to communities across the country.

“Trained grandmothers guide clients to define their problems, set achievable goals and identify practical action steps,” said Thandiwe Mashunye, head of programs at Friendship Bench Zimbabwe. They offer brief, structured talk therapy on simple wooden benches placed at clinics and in community spaces. Sessions typically last 15 to 45 minutes and continue over several weeks.

Still seated on the bench, Mudzenge gave her client a tissue to wipe her tears. The young mother, whose name is omitted for privacy, endured abuse from her husband and had purchased poison to end her life. “I asked her who would care for her children when she dies,” Mudzenge told TriplePundit. “She told me she had not thought about her children. She started crying. I left her for a few minutes to cry.”

During this counseling session, Mudzenge asked if she had reached out to her husband’s relatives for help. By the time the client came back to the bench after reaching out to a family member, her thoughts of suicide had gone away.

“I was so happy,” Mudzenge said of the young woman’s experience. It’s an example of Friendship Bench’s “opening the mind” method in practice.

Psychiatrist Dixon Chibanda started the Friendship Bench in 2006 by training local women, now popularly known as grandmothers, in evidence-based problem-solving therapy. Today they play an important role in providing mental health in a country experiencing an economic crisis and high levels of unemployment and substance abuse amid an acute shortage of psychiatrists. Fewer than 20 psychiatrists serve Zimbabwe’s 15 million residents.

People in Zimbabwe consider grandmothers the custodians of culture and respect them highly. For generations, many people sought help and advice from grandmothers around the country. That existing social role is why Friendship Bench focused on training women who are 50 years old and above.

“They are respected elderly women embedded in local communities, often recruited through primary health facilities and community leadership structures,” Mashunye said. “Grandmothers are rich in wisdom, lived experience, respected members, widely trusted, have time to volunteer and are seen as non-judgmental confidantes. Their cultural knowledge reduces stigma and improves acceptability.”

Mudzenge has been a community health worker for the past 40 years and joined the program a decade ago to broaden her knowledge in mental health. After five days of training, she did a one-month internship at the council-owned Kuwadzana Polyclinic.

“I have always had an interest in mental health, but I did not have the skills and knowledge. When the opportunity came, I grabbed it,” she said, seated at one of several wooden benches at the Friendship Bench Zimbabwe offices in Harare. “We sit on a bench with my clients who have anxiety or depression. I call them my grandchildren.”

The grandmothers handle cases involving emotional and relationship issues, trauma and violence-related stress, substance use, behavioral health problems, physical distress and other mental health conditions.

Zimbabwe also has one of the highest suicide rates in Africa, according to the World Health Organization, and the grandmothers address the topic often.

Annamore Mupfungidza, another grandmother who joined the program in 2016 and lives in Kuwadzana, worked with several people who wanted to commit suicide. The 57-year-old grandmother of five said most of her clients are young women who are physically and emotionally abused by their husbands.

“I see my client as my grandchild,” said Mupfungidza, who is also stationed at the Kuwadzana Polyclinic. “Women do not share their problems. I encourage them to always talk about it.”

The grandmothers are taught to recognize the severity of a client’s situation through a screening tool that flags conditions beyond their training, like psychosis, severe substance use or acute suicide risk, Mashunye said. They refer these cases to professional mental health nurses, psychologists, or psychiatrists within the public health system.

Friendship Bench Zimbabwe says it has reached more than 1 million people over the past 20 years, 69 percent of whom are women.

The initiative works in partnership with the Ministry of Health, University of Zimbabwe and World Health Organization on mental health programs. It receives funding from international philanthropic organizations and donors, but it still faces financial limitations.

Mudzenge said she is supposed to follow up when clients miss their appointments but cannot do so because of resource constraints, and some of the organization’s activities outside of counseling have been cut. “We used to have resources to support some clients in establishing businesses, but these days resources are a challenge,” she said.

Mashunye, Friendship Bench’s head of programs, agrees. “There is a lack of sustained funding and logistics for continued training, supervision, and data systems as the model scales nationally and internationally,” she said.

At the same time, broader socioeconomic challenges like unemployment, poverty, and post-traumatic stress are driving demand beyond the initiative’s available capacity, Mashunye said.

The limited resources available for mental health places growing pressure on community-delivered care options like Friendship Bench Zimbabwe. But stories like Mudzenge’s show the model can work, and other countries are catching on.

The Friendship Bench was replicated in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Botswana and the United States.

In 2024, HelpAge USA, an international nonprofit that champions the welfare of older people in more than 80 countries, launched the program in Washington, D.C. It is now available at 14 locations, including schools, senior wellness centers, recreation centers, library branches, social services organizations and a church. To date, more than 20 U.S. grandmothers trained by the team from Friendship Bench Zimbabwe have organized over 500 sessions there.

TriplePundit]]> Johnny Sturgeon, Inside Climate News https://triplepundit.com/?p=70591 2026-04-02T16:43:14Z 2026-04-03T13:00:00Z

A doubling of fish biomass along Asia’s longest river shows hope for large-scale conservation efforts and a lifeline for the endangered finless porpoise.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Flowing almost 4,000 miles from the Tibetan Plateau to the East China Sea, the Yangtze is China’s “Mother River.” From the emerald-green rice paddies of Hunan to the industrial hubs of Wuhan and Shanghai, the river basin generates 40 percent of the nation’s economic output. Yet, 70 years of rapid development had, until recently, wreaked havoc on its delicate marine ecosystem.

Fish biomass in the Yangtze has now more than doubled while endangered species are making a return, according to research released in February in Science. These early signs of recovery follow an unprecedented decade-long commercial fishing ban introduced in 2021. The findings suggest similar bold policies could catalyze ecological recovery in other large-scale rivers like the Mekong or the Amazon.

“I am always impressed by the resilience of nature when given space and time to recover,” said Steven Cooke, a fisheries professor at Carleton University and study co-author. “There have been other ‘restoration’ projects on rivers in the past but none have included a total fishing ban. That is unique.”

The Yangtze River Protection Law implemented a 10-year ban, running the length of the river, until 2030. It followed decades of biodiversity loss and the disappearance of 135 freshwater species — including the iconic Yangtze River dolphin and Chinese paddlefish.

Assessing fish stocks before and after the ban, an international team of researchers compared biomass and diversity across 57 sections of the river. They found a 209 percent increase in overall fish biomass and a 13 percent increase in species richness.

Larger fish — those longer than 7.5 inches — appear to have benefited the most, with their numbers increasing at the highest rates. This included species like the valuable black Amur bream — well-stocked apex predators are a critical indicator of a healthy food web. Migratory species like the slender tongue sole also appeared to be rebounding, finally able to reach critical habitats without being intercepted by nets.

For endangered species like the Yangtze sturgeon and Chinese sucker, the ban brought immediate stock improvements. However, researchers were most excited by the Yangtze finless porpoise. The culturally significant marine mammal saw its population jump from 445 to 595.

“The improvements of conditions include both habitat and food for the iconic Yangtze finless porpoise,” said lead author and fisheries researcher Fangyuan Xiong. With more free space and prey, this mascot of environmental conservation and subject of ancient Chinese poetry appears to be benefiting most from the first-of-its-kind ban.

While the rise is primarily linked to reduced fishing mortality, other pressures have eased. Researchers highlighted improved water quality and a significant reduction in underwater noise from boat propellers.

However, despite the positive data, the report was clear that the long-term detrimental impacts of river fragmentation — caused by sizable dams like the Gezhouba and Three Gorges — will remain challenging for migratory species. Similarly, microplastics that flow freely into the river from highly populated areas present continued threats to biodiversity.

The success also came at a human cost. The ban required recalling 111,000 fishing boats and resettling 231,000 fishermen who had long depended upon the Yangtze for life.

“The biggest take home is let’s do a better job of managing our freshwater rivers so we never have to consider full fishing bans as the medicine,” said Cooke. “Although this seems to have been effective here, the collateral damage to fishing communities is immense.”

Now entering its sixth year, the ban is not a permanent fix nor a cure to all ecological issues. Yet the doubling of biomass is a historic milestone.

“This is not comparable to any other conservation measure because it is the first basin-wide initiative on a large river,” said Sébastien Brosse, from the Center for Research on Biodiversity and the Environment in Toulouse. “Strong political decisions in favor of the environment have a marked and rapid benefit for biodiversity and ecosystem health.”

Nineteen years since the first seasonal fishing ban was implemented to protect spawning fish in the Yangtze, the extension through 2030 remains a bold strategy to restore one of the Earth’s most significant waterways, the study’s authors concluded.

Feature image credit: Yux Xiang/Unsplash

TriplePundit]]> Tina Casey https://triplepundit.com/?p=70598 2026-04-02T18:20:33Z 2026-04-02T18:20:30Z

No Kings has organized millions, but protest marches are only part of a grassroots movement. The 1980s organization ACT UP New York offers a powerful example of how to follow marches with the sustained pressure and direct action needed to truly influence change.

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The No Kings movement has organized millions of people across the United States to take to the streets in protest of federal government overreach under President Donald Trump. The question is what comes next. Protest marches are only part of a grassroots movement for change. Personal forms of direct action are also needed, and the 1980s organization ACT UP New York is applying those methods once again to focus attention on the hidden levers of power that control access to health care.

Government failure breeds grassroots action

The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, was formed in New York City in 1987 out of anger and desperation. AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) was first observed in 1980, hitting New York City particularly hard. Previously healthy people suddenly fell ill and died of rare cancers and infections with no discernable cause. Over the following years, grassroots community groups formed in New York City to raise awareness, gather funds, and provide services to those affected.

But public health officials were slow to respond. AIDS was not named as a condition until 1982, and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was not identified as the cause until two years later. Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan reinforced the moral stigma surrounding AIDS as a gay disease, undeserving of federal attention. He refused to acknowledge the AIDS crisis by name until 1985 when the cumulative death toll from AIDS had already surpassed 12,000 in the United States.

By 1987, New York City accounted for almost a third of all U.S. AIDS cases, registering thousands of deaths a year, a COVID-level crisis that still lacked an appropriate response. That year, ACT UP launched with a march on Wall Street to protest the high cost of AIDS treatment. At the time, the U.S. median individual income was around $18,000, but AZT, the only approved AIDS drug, cost $10,000 a year.

The group followed up with a series of personal actions, focusing on the role of financial institutions in blocking access to treatment. In 1988, an “ad hoc group” of more than a thousand ACT UP members occupied and shut down the Maryland headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to demand more investment in AIDS treatment research. A year later, just seven members created outsized attention by chaining themselves to the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange to protest the high price of AZT.

ACT UP takes on tech giants

Membership in ACT UP dwindled over the years as treatment and prevention improved, but HIV continues to circulate disproportionately among minority populations in the United States. In 2016, members of ACT UP joined with the organization Rise and Resist to protest Trump’s racist rhetoric and meetings with anti-LGBTQ hate groups during his first term. Now, the two groups are once again cooperating, this time targeting powerful leaders in the tech sector for their role in destroying federal healthcare resources.

At the start of last year, billionaire and high-profile Trump supporter Elon Musk was put in charge of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Staffed by young tech workers with no public policy experience, the newly established agency (named after a memecoin backed by Musk) set about eliminating what they called “wasteful” government spending.

As a result, the Trump administration canceled funding for almost 200 HIV studies and slashed $1.5 billion for AIDS-related programs administered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Globally, it cut funding for the longstanding President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and fully dismantled USAID.

In response, last week ACT UP marked its 39th year with a rally at the New York City AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village under the theme: “Money for AIDS and Healthcare, Not for ICE and Warfare.” Even as it guts life-saving programs, the Trump administration has pledged $40 billion to convert warehouses across the U.S. into industrial detention centers for immigrants and is requesting another $200 billion for the war in Iran. The loss of USAID alone, which had an annual budget of $40 billion, is projected to cause more than 9 million deaths worldwide by 2030.

Hundreds of rally-goers marched in protest from the AIDS Memorial to the New York offices of Palantir, a data mining company owned by another Trump-supporting tech mogul, Peter Thiel. Among other U.S. government contracts, last year Palantir won a $30 million deal to develop an AI-enabled surveillance program for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

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Dozens of ACT UP demonstrators laid themselves on the busy street for a “die-in” in front of Palantir’s office to focus attention on the company’s connection to ICE atrocities, including the denial of health care to detainees.

“The Trump administration is spending more money on war than they are on health care. They’re spending more money on ICE than they are on AIDS care …We think those priorities are way out of line with American priorities,” said event organizer and ACT UP founding member Eric Sawyer, as cited by Gay City News.

“Speakers emphasized the continued need for in-person activism, even as HIV treatment has improved,” noted GCN reporter Dashiell Allen. “Organizers said the protest is part of an ongoing effort to influence voters ahead of upcoming elections and push for policies supporting health care and social programs.”

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Health care is a top concern for Americans

Trump and his Republican allies are not listening to that message, and they probably never will. However, health care has already resonated among voters as Trump’s public approval continues its slide to historic lows. In a new Gallup poll, voters cited health care as their top concern, over the economy, crime, illegal immigration and other major issues.

Voters have also become sensitized to the disruptive influence of tech firms, including social media addiction and artificial intelligence. In particular, the AI boom — where both Musk and Thiel are stakeholders — has raised concerns over worker displacement and anxiety on the job. Data centers are also routinely blamed for pushing up the cost of electricity for ordinary ratepayers, and communities have begun organizing against new data center proposals.

The bloom has come off the tech rose in other ways, too. President Trump swept to victory in 2024 with the support of young men entranced by the online world of masculine aspiration, with Musk wielding his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) as a powerful megaphone while top podcaster Joe Rogan lent crucial online support through his mainly younger, male and Republican audience.

Now Rogan has publicly regretted his endorsement, and Musk has left the reputation of his Tesla brand in tatters.

The time is ripe for a new social movement that reclaims the normal workings of democratic governance for the benefit of ordinary people. No Kings has roused the numbers, and now direct action groups like ACT UP and Rise and Resist are adding a crucial example of personal action.

Image credits: Michael Fleshman/Flickr, MACMILLAN/Wikimedia Commons

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