Our annual recommendations offer ways to recharge, make the most of the season, and come back ready to fight for progress.
Have the first eight months of this year left you feeling slightly … tapped? You’re not alone! Being exhausted is both okay and natural — and recognizing our individual and collective exhaustion provides an important opportunity to recharge and prepare to fight for the planet (and our sanity) in the months ahead.
With that need to recharge in mind, we’re about to take our annual summer publishing break. We’ll be back with new articles and commentaries starting on Tuesday, Sept. 2.
Although we won’t publish anything else during that time, we’ll be in the office for another week or so preparing materials for September and October. We have a lot of great stories coming your way — sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss any of them.
But we’ll also devote time and energy over the next few weeks toward finding new influences and inspirations, being creative, experiencing nature to its fullest, renewing our community connections, and reflecting on the chaos of 2025 (so far). We hope you have similar opportunities, now or later, to do the same.
Not sure where to start? Here are 18 things you can do over the next couple of weeks to help set the path for a powerful, nature-loving, resilient, and resistant autumn:
1. Breathe. Take a deep, slow breath, followed by a slow, thorough exhale (maybe even a loud sigh). Now repeat, one or two more times, with your eyes closed if that makes you feel comfortable. We’re all feeling stressed, and a moment of deep breathing can help to alleviate some of the pressure. Taking even just 15 seconds to slow down and focus can help us lower our collective blood pressure, sharpen our brains, and settle in for whatever comes next.
2. Protest. Millions of people around the country — and around the world — are marching in the streets to stand up to rising authoritarianism and declining environmental protections. Join them. Make your voice heard. Make connections with your community. Build for the future.
3. Look ahead to your November election. Sure, we just had a big election last November (you’ve probably noticed), and local ballots this November probably won’t contain many dramatic options, but you should never pass up a chance to participate in the electoral process. (The fate of one of my local libraries, for instance, depends on a just-held August election — who expected that?)
4. Look even further ahead to the November 2026 elections. I know, it seems too early to start thinking about the midterms, but they’re closer than you think. Ask if any candidates or community organizers in your area need support. Can you help with voter registration or other efforts? Is there an opportunity for you to run for anything? The midterms have never been so important, so it can’t hurt — in fact, it’s essential — to start planning now.
5. Check your tires. Make sure they’re at the manufacturer’s suggested air pressure. All vehicles, even electric or hybrids, run more efficiently if their tires are properly inflated. Simple stuff like this adds up and can make a big, collective difference, so don’t pass on the routine maintenance of your car — or anything else (including your health).
6. Write to your mayor, town council, or other local leadership to tell them that they’re doing a great job on an environmental issue — or how to do a better job. We often forget that our local leaders can make a difference. A simple “thank you” can make them feel appreciated; a polite or insistent nudge can help them move in the right direction. Volunteering your time or expertise can also help!
7. Find a “new to you” green space. Are there parks, trails, fields, water bodies, outdoor art, or other spaces near you that you haven’t visited yet? Plan a trip! Then share what you discovered with friends.
8. Look at an animal in your neighborhood. Write a poem about what you saw.Anyone can write a poem. You might even find that the act of writing about a local wildlife species awakens you to a new observation about that plant or animal — or about your relationship with that species.
9. Pick up some trash. Maybe you just grab up one piece or garbage at a time, or you could put on some gloves and take a trash bag with you for a longer walk. You might spark an interesting conversation with passers-by.
10. Consider buying an electric vehicle while tax credits are still in place. I wouldn’t run out and replace your vehicle just because these credits will vanish on Sept. 30, but if you need your own transportation and you’re in the market an EV, now might be the time to buy one.
11. Try turning your phone off for a day. We could all use a break from doomscrolling and constantly looking at the little glowing screen. What will you notice around you without your phone distracting you? (Another tip: Try turning off notifications on all but the most essential apps. You’ll get updates when you log into various apps; you don’t need your phone to ping you with every interaction.)
12. Sign up for a library card. Library budgets are being slashed around the country, and book bans are still being discussed — or implemented. Show your support for your local institutions — and learn about the vast array of services your library probably offers beyond traditional books. (Many give out native seeds or lend tools, for example.)
13. Donate to an environmental group. They’re fighting for the planet harder than ever right now. (Might I suggest our publisher?)
14. Read and review an environmental book. Authors depend on online reviews to inspire sales (and spread their ideas to new readers.) Read a recent environmental book (we have a few hundred for you to choose from) and then leave a review on Goodreads or another site, or just share your thoughts with friends. (Side note: Why not start an environmental book club in your area?)
15. Teach a kid or a neighbor to repair something. Let’s break away from our disposable culture. The more people who can fix something — anything — the better!
16. Ask a friend if they need any help. They probably do. And don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it. Build community by being there for each other.
17.Write something for us! We’re always open to op-eds, contributions to our “Save This Species” and “Protect This Place” features, and other expert commentaries. And for the freelance journalists reading this: Prepare to pitch us. We reopen to story ideas on Sept. 3.
18. Examine your fears. Share your courage. Don’t hide your anxieties, or your successes. Share how you’re feeling, what you’re doing, your questions, and your solutions. Many of us feel disconnected right now or worry that we’ll get attacked if we bring up climate change or other threats. Don’t buy into that anxiety. Sharing makes us all stronger, and courage is contagious. Let’s support each other now — and in the heady months to come.
That’s it for now. We’ll see you on Sept. 2. Until then, as always, we hope you’ll stay safe, strong, and connected.
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Are you ready to organize your first event on behalf of the planet? Here are some great ideas and tips on how to make it successful.
You’ve participated in some protests and have a cause which you feel is under-represented and needs support in your community. It might be time to organize your own protest.
Organizing protests is a lot of work: They require forethought, planning, and preparation. But you can do it!
As we’ve discussed in this series, sociologists have proven that the most effective protests build public support through non-violence and peaceful disruption. The peaceful disruption creates a sense of pressure to do something, while embracing the tenets of non-violence communicates that the protest has constructive intentions.
Let’s take a brief look at organizing a convincing, persuasive protest that has a greater chance of being successful.
Create a Team of Organizers for the Protest
Begin by reaching out to like-minded community members, asking if they want to help organize a protest, intentionally building relationships with those who are interested. Actively listen and consider their experience and guidance.
Then seek out local, regional, and national organizations that support your cause and invite them to collaborate with you. Contact them well in advance (weeks, months) to help set the date of the protest event and get their “buy-in” to endorse (and attend) the demonstration. They may have resources (to avoid duplication of efforts), information, and networks you can tap into.
After you meet with these other like-minded organizations, make a detailed plan for the division of labor before and during the event. This is critical for a successful outcome. For example, will you have a first aid crew? Will you have lanyards, badges, T-shirts or hats so participants can easily identify key contacts during the protest?
Meanwhile, start building the event itself. The time, place, and program should be geared to the desired audience, which leads us to the bigger questions.
Define the Strategy
Protest leaders and participants must collectively be able to answer these questions during planning:
What exact goals do you want to achieve in this demonstration?
Are you advocating for, supporting, or protesting a specific issue/cause?
Set the tone of the demonstration. What you want to accomplish depends on how your cause is viewed by the public and media (optics). If your demonstration is too festive it may not seem serious to the public.
What type of protest will best achieve your goal? The most common modes of protest are marches and rallies, sit-ins, walk-outs, vigils, and more complex efforts like encampments and choreographed or theatrical expressions.
Practical Planning for the Event
When and where should you organize this action to make the most effective impact?
Do you need a town/city/local/state permit for this event? (Hint: the answer is probably “yes.” Plan ahead so you have enough time to get this in place.)
Contact the local and/or national media with information and an invitation to cover the event.
Ask: Who has the power to help make your plan happen? This includes donations and funding to pay for signs, travel, accommodations for disabled participants and shirts, hats, lanyards, and other identifying items for participants and organizers.
Seriously consider the location, route and timing of the demonstration: Will a certain holiday or day of the week have the most impact? For example, many groups have “Moral Mondays” or popular “Souls to the Polls” on Sundays during elections. Consider what day and time is best for your cause. Morning? All day? An evening candle vigil?
Do you aim to build a larger coalition to continue working on your issue after this event? Make sure your communication channels are clearly established.
Are you trying to be seen and heard by an elected official or influential figure? If you plan ahead, you can invite interested celebrities, government figures, and other well-known activists to your event. That means having a staging area at the appointed meeting place and time, with microphones, speakers, and lectern.
Educate protest participants in their civil rights: Have you made clear to participants their local, state and federal rights, such as the First Amendment and local/state rules for having a march or protest?
Provide your participants with solid information about legal limitations that exist in the protest area such as digital safety and the right to film in case authorities confiscate your phone.
Define Clear Goals for the Event
Setting your goal clearly is tantamount to success, because it’s the prime determinant of the form and function it will take for optimal outcomes. Common goals for demonstrations include:
Advocacy: To urge legislators or the public to look favorably on a bill, adopt a particular idea or policy or service, or pay attention to the needs of a particular group of people.
Support: To express agreement or solidarity with a person or group, with an idea or policy, or with a particular issue.
Counter-demonstration: To respond to a demonstration or other public event already scheduled by another public figure or organization.
Public Relations: To advertise or put in a good light an event, issue, organization, segment of the population, etc.
Action: To achieve a specific substantive purpose, effect the prevention of, or change, a particular public project, entity, or policy. An event, for example, could include meeting with city, state and federal elected representatives.
What Extra Training Do You Need?
For example, many organizers take classes in de-escalation, which can help during tense or mob situations.
It All Starts With You
Stay cool, calm, and protest peacefully during the summer, and throughout the year.
And we want to hear from you. What questions do you have about protesting? What advice would you share? Send your comments, suggestions, questions, or even brief essays to [email protected].
Emily Donovan wants to “make the polluters pay” for what they’ve done to her North Carolina community, and others around the country.
Emily Donovan has a mission: “Make the polluters pay.”
The mother of twins took on the role of activist when she started fighting for her North Carolina community in 2017. Her main target: PFAS “forever chemicals,” which do not degrade and at even low levels have been linked to a wide range of human health risks, including fertility issues, immune interactions, cancer, liver damage, thyroid disease, asthma, and more.
A recent report from the nonprofit Waterkeeper Alliance found that 98% of waterways in the United States contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as PFAS. One of the country’s most polluted rivers, according to the report, sits at the heart of Donovan’s own Cape Fear community in North Carolina.
After the first news of this contamination broke in 2017, Donovan and other local activists came together around a kitchen table and founded Clean Cape Fear, a community action group focused on fighting the polluters of the Cape Fear River and holding elected officials accountable to restore and protect the region.
Since those early days, Donovan has made numerous strides against PFAS, most notably in leading the dialogue that led the EPA, under the Biden administration, to issue the first nationwide regulations for PFAS in drinking water in April 2024. For this work, the United Nations named Donovan a defender of human rights, recognizing her unwavering commitment to fighting PFAS contamination on a national level.
Now, under President Trump, the EPA has rescinded those regulations that took so much work to set in place.
“I am sad, and I am frustrated,” says Donovan. “But after the announcement came out, I’m settled and resolved. That sadness has settled into anger, which is a very good fuel for motivation. Stupidest thing they could have done is to make people angry.”
Trump Aids Polluters
On April 10, 2024, the EPA set out legally enforceable limits — called “maximum contaminant levels” — for six PFAS chemicals in drinking water: PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, PFNA, GenX (HFPO-DA), and PFBS. Under these rules, PFOA and PFOS were limited to 4 parts per trillion (ppt); PFNA, PFHxS, and GenX were limited to 10 ppt, and PFBS was regulated under the federal “hazard index,” meaning it does not have a fixed parts-per-trillion number but is considered to add risk to human health if it’s in drinking water. Public water systems had until 2029 to fully meet these federal requirements, as PFAS regulations often differ from state to state.
What was considered a historic move is now being dismantled with breathtaking speed. The regulations instituted by the Biden administration were withdrawn by the Trump administration on its second day in power.
The EPA’s most recent change rescinded regulations covering four of the six common PFAS contaminants while keeping regulatory compliance for PFOA and PFOS, both of which have been retired from commercial use.
Regulations on GenX — the chemical that polluted Cape Fear — were quietly canceled under this change.
Several nonprofits, including the NRDC and Earthjustice, have filed lawsuits challenging the new federal PFAS drinking water standards and the hazardous substance designations, arguing they violate the Safe Drinking Water Act, a safety standard set in 1974. Earthjustice represents Cape Fear residents in both cases.
“I believe this is an illegal move,” says Donovan.
Earthjustice and NRDC recently issued a press release pointing out the “anti-backsliding” provision in the Safe Drinking Water Act, which should have prevented the EPA from weakening existing standards. Despite this provision, NRDC claims that the recent rollback in PFAS regulations is doing just that: weakening federal standards that were already set in place.
Donovan says the recent deregulation has created confusion on the local level about who should pay for decontamination costs. She argues that the companies that polluted the waterways should be the ones paying for the cleanup, not the local municipalities.
“If the EPA is going to acknowledge the law,” Donovan says, “then what they’re doing right now is really stalling and confusing communities and making it more difficult for utilities to make a good decision, because they’re creating this unnecessary uncertainty.”
She also notes that this distraction takes attention off of new PFAS chemicals, such as PFPrA, that are showing up at extremely high levels in the area’s water source — threatening residents’ health and already costing them money.
“The water bills keep going up for a problem that we didn’t create,” says Donovan. “This is expensive, and it should not be the burden of the utilities. It should be the burden of the polluters, and should be stopped at the source. But we’re not seeing this administration address those concerns.”
Instead of a unifying fight alongside utility companies, Donovan finds clean water activists at odds with them.
“We’re not seeing the water utility associations address those concerns either. We see them standing opposite us with the chemical industry on lobbying day,” she says.
Origins of an Activist
In 2017, the Wilmington Star-News broke the news that the Fayetteville Chemours factory was manufacturing GenX and had been polluting the Cape Fear River for decades. Donovan says that residents later discovered that the company was also inadvertently producing it as an industrial byproduct, discharging GenX into their wastewater stream, which ran into the river.
“No one in America was saying anything about GenX,” says Donovan, “so everyone was upset and terrified, and then Chemours came to town, and it was a closed-door meeting. It was very obvious that they were controlling — controlling the narrative, controlling the information.”
According to Donovan, tests showed high amounts of GenX found in the finished water, which is the final product in the water treatment process, from the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority. So she submitted a water sample from her children’s elementary school in Brunswick, North Carolina, which sits right between the Chemours plant and the Cape Fear region, an hour each way. Results showed that the elementary school in Brunswick had the highest PFAS levels out of all the areas tested.
At times when she could feel alone or overwhelmed by the scope of the situation, Donovan draws on advice she received from clean water advocates Erin Brockovich and Mark Ruffalo: “No one is coming to save you. You have to save yourself.”
She remains determined, though, and uses her background in communications and political science to effectively reach people regarding their rights as citizens.
Her friend Jessica Cannon, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, calls her “the activist of activists.”
Cannon praises Donovan’s strong moral compass as the driving force in all she does for her family and community. She notes that Donovan draws from her work as a youth group coordinator and communications manager for a progressive church as part of her mandate “to protect God’s green Earth.” Donovan’s strong faith is apparent to all who meet her, even in email, with her signature featuring a scripture urging people to love one another.
Still, Donovan remains tenacious when coming up against giant chemical corporations. “When people tell her no,” says Cannon, “it’s like waving a red flag in front of her.”
Even though their work has resulted in new research studies and regulations, Donovan says it hasn’t been easy. “Everything that we have achieved, we feel like we’ve had to fight for it every step of the way,” she says. “We’re not looking for credit, but we want it to be documented that we had to fight for it because we want other communities to know no one’s coming to give you this. We had to fight every step of the way to get access to this stuff.”
While this fight against chemical companies is long and arduous, Donovan notes that it’s important to consider that states and local communities still have time to course-correct.
“I want to make that distinction very clear,” she says. “States still have the power to issue permits that control PFAS releases. If they choose not to do it, they’re benefiting and aiding the polluters by forcing communities to clean up PFAS pollution in the tap water that shouldn’t be there from the start.”
Local Contamination, Worldwide Impact
Water has always played an essential role at Cape Fear, which served as a significant port during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II.
Today, it serves as a living nursery for young sea life and a foundation for the area’s tourism, which includes beaches, seafood restaurants, an aquarium, and water-based activities. The 191-mile-long Cape Fear River carries significant water from North Carolina rivers into the Atlantic Ocean. Its waters, now brown due to heavy pollution over the years from nearby industries, flow into the largest river basin in the state, which supplies drinking water to residents in the neighboring town of Wilmington.
We don’t know where those chemicals that started in North Carolina travel once released into the Atlantic Ocean, but studies have found PFAS even in the blood of polar bears in the Arctic.
Donovan asks what industry is near polar bears.
She also expresses concern about a 2022 study that found PFAS “have now exceeded the planetary boundary, which means there’s no space left on Earth where there’s no PFAS contamination.”
As a result, Donovan adds, we’re “dealing with almost an existential crisis for humanity related to this contamination because these are chemicals that do not degrade naturally; they live forever.”
The Weight of Forever
Donovan has noticed in pictures she took with her family at the beach, unsuspecting children playing in the background in the seafoam, which looks like mounds of white shaving cream. A recent study, though, has shown that high concentrations of PFAS are found in the seafoam on these beaches.
“There’s always this under the surface, a level of parental anxiety that we’re somehow more vulnerable now,” Donovan says. “So, it’s making peace and living with the tension of always wondering if that sneeze is innocent or if that sneeze is a signal to something more dire.”
Eight years after the discovery of PFAS contamination in Cape Fear, Donovan says concerns about clean water add an extra layer of uncertainty as a mother. Even everyday activities, like showering, feel troubling.
“I worry about eating local seafood because I know the waters that it’s caught in,” she says. “I will drive out of my way to go to the area that has the cleanest tap water when I get takeout, or if we eat out. And I know that’s a privilege.”
Donovan also takes contamination into account when planning time together as a family. “There are certain beaches we just don’t visit locally. We’ve learned which beaches are probably less polluted than others, and those are the ones that we’ll go have fun at. I wanted to plant a backyard garden, and we’ve chosen not to, because I don’t want to grow contaminated produce.” Earlier this year a study found that produce grown in home gardens near the North Carolina Chemours plant contained dangerous levels of PFAS.
Decisions that she might not have thought of before now carry extra weight as she considers her family’s health. “There’s just certain things that I would like to do that I can’t do right now or that I’m choosing not to do because we were overexposed for so long. I want to give our bodies a chance to rest and heal.”
Donovan has always been hyper-focused on her local efforts for clean water. She worked with schools in Brunswick and the neighboring New Hanover counties to install reverse osmosis filling stations to bring clean drinking water to 49 local public schools, providing students with the option to drink clean, unpolluted water.
For some, a project of this size could be overwhelming, but not for Donovan. Cannon calls her “a force of nature.”
A Long Fight
Donovan has testified before Congress twice. The first time, she was given 48 hours’ notice to testify before the Energy and Commerce Committee.
“It was terrifying,” she says.
The second time was in 2019, before Congress’s Subcommittee on the Environment of the Committee on Oversight and Reform. Donovan pressed legislators about the 25 PFAS toxicants in the Cape Fear River and the need for corporate accountability and action. She brought a community letter signed by 1,000 Wilmington/Fayetteville residents asking Congress to take action.
Donovan testified that more than 50 different PFAS chemicals had been documented in the area’s air, soil, and water and that the Food and Drug Administration had found GenX and other PFAS chemicals on produce at a local farmer’s market.
Donovan also told Congress that residents in her area have three times the national average of C8, also known as PFOA, found in their blood, despite the fact that the compound was phased out many years ago.
Donovan testified that Cape Fear residents also have a very specific “cocktail” of PFAS chemicals found in their blood that has not been seen anywhere else in the country but was found in 99% of the blood samples taken from residents. She also related stories about friends, family, and neighbors in her community facing various cancers and then asked for PFAS to be listed as hazardous substances so the community could enact the EPA’s Superfund law, which would allow the research, containment, and cleanup of the toxicants without a cost burden on residents.
“We shouldn’t have to be forced to sue Chemours to get them to pay for the damages they have done,” Donovan said in her testimony.
During her second testimony, community members from Fayetteville, Wilmington, and Parkersburg, West Virginia, where PFAS was originally discovered, stood by her side. Residents whose health had been severely and forever affected by PFAS were physical proof of what these invisible chemicals could do.
After her first testimony, Donovan recalled a big bipartisan effort to understand PFAS and the situation at hand. The second time around, though, she remembers a partisan shift in how things should be resolved, and it became obvious “who was protecting industry and who was protecting communities.”
In 2023, Donovan took her advocacy global and sought support from the United Nations Human Rights Council. Working with the University of Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic, she contacted the UN to “leverage their soft power” in calling out Chemours for human rights violations. Working with the UN opened doors in the U.S. government to start a dialogue about actions and regulations that needed to take place. As a result, nine “special rapporteurs” — independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council — joined together for a public statement in response to show that human rights violations happen in the Global North, as well as how the Global North responds to these violations. As a result of the dialogue, the first-ever nationwide regulations for PFAS in drinking water issued in April 2024 were a historic win for activists.
In what could feel like an uphill climb at times, Donovan admires the community of people like her who are fighting for clean drinking water. She often quotes fellow clean water activist Andrea Amico, who says, “We are as persistent as PFAS.”
The EPA has seen many changes with the new administration, with the Office of Research and Development suffering perhaps the deepest cuts. Donovan calls this department the “lifeblood” of PFAS work, noting that it discovered lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, and is currently helping with water contamination efforts from the Los Angeles wildfires. She explains that the office performs targeted analysis, searching for things still unknown in water, which takes a lot of skill and money to perform. The findings are reported in a federal database and are available to the public and state officials.
The Biden administration passed a number of laws to provide funding for addressing PFAS in the drinking water of low-income and rural communities. Recent reports indicate that the Trump administration is actively trying to weaken or dismantle the EPA.
Donovan fears that this will result in the entire structure’s access to funding being eliminated, with restricted access to funding nationwide for upgrading treatment centers to meet new drinking water requirements. As of April 2025, Fayetteville, North Carolina, no longer receives federal grant money for clean drinking water. Now, it’s left to the community to figure out how to pay for the costly treatments to filter their polluted drinking water.
Despite such obstacles, Donovan says she remains determined to keep fighting. She talks about the need to channel her rage at what’s going on in the world into fuel for change.
“That’s what I chose,” said Donovan. “To focus on making a better world by turning that anger into something productive and positive.”
The author is a named plaintiff in the federal PFAS multidistrict litigation against 3M.
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Assigning human qualities to animals is dangerous for them — and for us.
This February news sites around the world shared footage of a rarely seen black seadevil anglerfish who took the internet by storm. The bizarre deep-sea animals, who have a bioluminescent “fishing lure” used to draw prey toward their fang-like teeth, normally live in complete darkness at depths of up to 4,900 feet below sea level. When this one was spotted near the Canary Islands, people quickly started speculating about why and how the creature had made such an extreme vertical ascent. Some got sentimental and poetic about the fish’s experience, making remarks about how the fish finally got to see other lights — the sun — besides its own before its demise.
Beyond the bizarre phenomenon, the way people reacted to and interpreted the fish’s unusual behavior is worth unpacking, because what seemed like an effort to empathize with the fish turned instead into something more troubling: anthropomorphism, a fancy term for attributing human characteristics to nonhuman entities.
The case of the black seadevil anglerfish illustrates the problem. The species’ name is a poetic allusion to notions of demons and fishermen — two very human concepts we impose on a fish that knows neither. Their natural habitat is the twilight zone of the deep ocean, where sunlight doesn’t reach. Creatures inhabiting this zone have developed fascinating ways to adapt to extreme conditions: high pressures, frigid temperatures, and never-ending darkness.
The wayward seadevil had no reason to swim so close to the surface as long as it was doing fine in its habitat, except that it probably wasn’t. Some experts speculated that it might have eaten a smaller fish with a gas-filled swim bladder (which could force the seadevil to go upward uncontrollably), while others thought it was either sick, stressed, injured, or escaping a predator.
Those expert theories are plausible, so why did so many of us instead romanticize the fish’s unusual behavior? People got so emotional over the fish’s fate that they made poems, comics, and even artworks that proposed the fish wished to see the sun, wanted to be understood, or was on a sort of philosophical journey to find something bigger than its own life.
While that speaks volume about our capacity to try to sympathize with other beings, it raises important questions: Is it true? Is it accurate? And more importantly, is it necessary? This was my genuine concern when scrolling through all the comments and contents regarding the black seadevil.
Don’t get me wrong: I was an animal lover before I became a science journalist, so I always have a soft spot for animals. Still, I know that anthropomorphizing a fish found far from its home range is not a good idea. “That fish was probably dying” was my first thought when I saw the footage.
Instead of anthropomorphizing, we should instead try to understand animals based on how they experience the world with their own senses. Empathy should be the goal. Instead of making assumptions like, “If it were me, I would have felt uncomfortable too,” we should try asking a different question: “I wonder how it feels for them?”
This fundamental framework is the central theme of Ed Yong’s book An Immense World. Through its pages Yong tries to explain the philosophical concept of Umwelt, which posits that animals experience the world differently from us because they rely on different and often enhanced senses to navigate their surroundings.
In other words, sensory stimuli that might feel normal to us — like bright lights or loud sounds — might be overwhelming to other animals.
That is why it’s so problematic when we try to understand animals’ experience by generalizing our own sensory experiences; it risks overlooking or mischaracterizing the distressing signs the animals may be displaying.
There are other reasons, too. Research has suggested that the popularity of Pixar Animation’s Finding Nemo movie may have spurred overfishing of reefs. Other researchers have cited how North American raccoons were imported to Japan as pets due to the popularity of the 1977 cartoon series Rascal Raccoon, which anthropomorphized the animals as harmless, cute and humorous — none of which is true, at least from the raccoons’ point of view. As a result of this pet craze, raccoons became an invasive species in Japan and damaged crops and fruits, as well as preying on native species. Researchers believe that it was partly due to the cartoon’s misrepresentation of raccoons’ nature as wild animals that caused the human-raccoon conflict in the first place.
Anthropomorphizing certain species creates another problem: It establishes a narrative suggesting that other species we care less about aren’t worth protecting — or in some cases, even need to be exterminated. This was the case with the imperial parrot, the flagship species of the Caribbean Island of Dominica. It got so much attention that Dominicans started to disregard the conservation efforts of its sister species, the red-necked parrot. What’s more, the red-necked parrot was portrayed as an antithesis to the imperial parrot — and researchers were concerned that such narrative could even lead to the culling of the parrot’s population.
Yet another drawback of anthropomorphizing one species over another is that we can forego conservation efforts for species that don’t necessarily win our heart for their cute demeanor.
In many cases we don’t even realize it when we anthropomorphize animals. For example, we interpret the upturned mouths of snakes, dolphins, and chimpanzees as smiling expressions, with dangerous consequences.
While some of this is harmless, it can also lead to subtle consequences that endanger both animals and humans. For example, tourists in destinations like Ubud, Bali, feed monkeys because they appear cute and remind them of human babies. As a result, the monkeys no longer fear humans. Problems arise when these monkeys turn aggressive and start, as one magazine recently wrote, “stealing” tourists’ personal belongings. (Even the way the news is written screams anthropomorphism because it assumes that a monkey understands the concept of “stealing.”)
Our motives are usually good, and understandable. Anthropomorphism helps us make sense of nonhuman behavior that might otherwise seem scary or confusing. In some cases it may even make us care about living beings we would otherwise ignore or even harm. But we should resist the temptation, because it creates more risks than benefits.
Promoting empathy toward animals, on the other hand, retains all the potential benefits of anthropomorphism without the dangers.
One way to cultivate empathy is to consider how animals would normally behave if they were in their natural state. For instance, if a wild dolphin or orca swims dozens of miles each day, imagine how it must feel for them to be confined in a pool — no matter how big the pool looks to us.
It’s of course very hard to understand animals’ experience when we don’t even know what the world looks like to them and how they perceive it. While biologists work to find this out, the least we can do is to resist the temptation to impose our own senses and feelings on life forms that are profoundly different from us. By avoiding the trap of anthropomorphism, we can make room for empathy built on the recognition that we really do not know what they’re going through.
As for the black seadevil, the anglerfish lived and eventually perished on its own terms, not ours — and that should be enough.
Do we really want to push our climate to the brink because of a technology that offers convenience?
Everywhere we look, AI is treated like an inevitability.
AI companies like ChatGPT and Open AI are expanding rapidly, and many Americans rely on AI assistants such as Alexa and Siri in their day-to-day lives. For some college students, not relying on AI can feel like a disadvantage.
Critics might be soothed by the idea that AI can be put to good use — such as in data modeling to better predict our changing climate, an idea that’s generated a lot of enthusiasm. But using AI to tackle climate change is like bombing a country in the name of peace.
AI is a driver of climate change, not a solution. According to the United Nations Environment Program, rapidly proliferating AI data centers “use massive amounts of electricity, spurring the emission of planet-warming greenhouse gases,” as well as consuming enormous quantities of water and minerals.
ChatGPT, the popular AI software, is hardly worth the climate impact. One analyst, Sophie McLean, writing for Earth.org, explains, “For a simple conversation of 20-50 questions [to Chat GPT], the water consumed is equivalent to a 500ml bottle.” Spread across “billions of users,” that’s a “substantial” footprint.
AI is spreading so fast, we’ve hardly had an opportunity to consider its impact. Even the world’s most popular search engine, Google, started using AI by default. Each time you do a simple search, Google uses generative AI to offer an “AI overview” before listing its results.
Moreover, AI services like ChatGPT gobble up and regurgitate the work of humans. If plagiarism weren’t bad enough, they’re notorious for generating misinformation in fields such as medicine and computer programming.
Even for simple queries like searching for citations, AI programs often make up references that don’t exist. Experts are worried the technology’s propensity to “hallucinate” is so severe, it will never achieve high levels of accuracy.
Setting aside the prospect of massive job losses from AI and the troubling realization that AI models lie and proliferate misinformation, do we really want to push our climate to the brink because of a technology that offers convenience? AI is a technology foisted upon a society that doesn’t need it, and that faces very real harm because of it.
What’s needed at minimum is strict regulation, not only to protect information and jobs, but also people and the planet.
But as soon as he took office, President Donald Trump began dismantling the few, very modest government checks on AI. And the GOP’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” included, alongside massive tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, a ban on states being able to regulate AI. (That provision was scrapped, but it may well return in another form.)
We need to demand better. Technology analysts Paul Scharre and Vivek Chilukuri argue for “a principles-based approach to regulation, instead of fixed technical standards that could be outdated before the ink dries.” They also suggest an independent regulatory agency dedicated to this powerful technology.
In the meantime, we as individuals should avoid using programs like ChatGPT. Not only does it diminish our own capabilities — researchers at MIT recently found that an over-reliance on programs such as ChatGPT significantly lowers brain activity — but because it actively fuels climate change.
Think of AI avoidance as mental exercise in the same way you might choose to walk instead of drive for physical well being.
Consider turning off Google’s AI Overviews. The tech company doesn’t make it easy for most people to figure out how to do it — and of course, it offers an AI overview that may or may not be accurate when you search for how to turn it off. After some digging, I found a human-generated answer that actually works.
If we want a safer world, protected from the dumbing down and waste associated with AI, we have to begin programming ourselves and our world to make choices that center human wellbeing.
To plant a tree is to affirm one’s faith in the future, while at the same time reckoning with the sadness inherent in the comparative brevity of a human lifespan.
Five years ago, my partner and I bought a house surrounded by open fields. Since then, as a kind of small-scale reforestation project designed to bring the forest closer, we’ve planted several dozen new trees, all native species, with a bias toward the slightly more southern and drought-tolerant varieties likely to do well in the face of rising temperatures.
It’s an enduring pleasure to watch these new beings develop their root systems, gain strength, and begin to take on height and girth. Like characters in a slowly unfolding narrative, each is beginning to take on a distinct personality. Some are robust, growing fast and proud; others are slower, patiently marshalling their resources and biding their time. A few have even begun to take on a certain stateliness, precursor to the mantle of grace and dignity they will inherit as they age.
To plant a tree is to affirm one’s faith in the future, while at the same time reckoning with the sadness inherent in the comparative brevity of a human lifespan. It is to humbly acknowledge one’s place in the cycles of natural life across the unimaginable vastness of geologic time.
As a novelist and avid reader, I’ve long been interested in literary portrayals of trees. Somewhere around my eighth birthday my parents started reading The Hobbit and all three books of The Lord of the Rings to my siblings and me, a journey that took us the better part of a year.
Tolkien’s epic quest narratives echo the dire circumstances in Europe in the interwar period, though the miasma of evil has its origin not in Nazi Germany or fascist Italy but in the realm of Mordor, from whence it rises like an inexorable black tide to overwhelm all the goodness in the world. Light is always there in the background, however, occasionally bleeding through that oppressive darkness to infuse the narrative with glimmers of hope.
Tolkien’s forests, similarly — where many of his most dramatic and evocative chapters take place — are gripping embodiments of this urgent wrestling match between darkness and light. The Old Forest, just beyond the borders of the bucolic Shire, is host not only to terrifying ring-wraiths but to uncanny and sometimes ravenously hostile ancient trees — and things get even worse in Mirkwood. But amid these forests of terror and danger there are also glades of joyous poetry and light, such as the alluring waystation of Rivendell and magical Lothlórien, where the cathedral-like spaces between the trees are filled with dappled golden light and the celestial music of elves.
Tolkien struck a resonant metaphorical chord when he introduced his readers to the Ents, sentient tree-beings of Fangorn forest, who are far older and wiser than any other creature in Middle Earth. As children my siblings and I couldn’t get enough of Treebeard, whose wise and funny aphorisms communicated not only the great wisdom of trees, but also an exhilaratingly defamiliarized perspective on time:
“Sheep get like shepherds, and shepherds like sheep, it is said; but slowly, and neither have long in the world.”
Our enchantment with Tolkien’s wise old trees was undoubtedly rooted in the author’s portrayal of them, which edged into the realm of the sublime:
“Treebeard lifted two great vessels and stood them on the table. They seemed to be filled with water; but he held his hands over them, and immediately they began to glow, one with a golden and the other with a rich, green light; and the blending of the two lights lit the bay, as if the sun of summer was shining through a roof of young leaves. Looking back, the hobbits saw that the trees in the court had also begun to glow, faintly at first, but steadily quickening, until every leaf was edged with light: some green, some gold, some red as copper; while the tree-trunks looked like pillars moulded out of luminous stone.”
Tolkien demonstrated once and for all that that along with other remarkable aspects of human life — love, heroism, death, the mysteries of the soul — our ancient association with trees is a worthy subject for literature.
Trees figure prominently in more recent novels, of course, perhaps most famously in Richard Powers’ 2018 masterpiece, The Overstory, whose presiding consciousness is actually a tree, or trees writ large.
Powers’ uniquely positioned high-omniscient narrator gives him the freedom to range backwards and forwards across great expanses of time. Three decades can go by in a single paragraph; a long-ago moment can be experienced with vivid intimacy, and we often know the fate of a character well before it comes to pass:
“At that click, a teenage Mimi lifted from her own nine-year-old shoulders to gaze up at the arhats from high up and years away. Out of the gazing teen rose another, even older woman. Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost line.”
One of the characters in The Overstory recalls reading a science fiction story about the arrival on Earth of a species of tiny, super-fast aliens. The aliens live on an accelerated timescale compared to that of humans, their movements so quick that they’re only perceptible as a faint buzzing in a person’s ears. Meanwhile, human movement is so slow that the aliens assume they’re inanimate meat statues, which they decide to harvest as food for their long homeward journey.
This dark little tale, of course, can be seen as analogous to our relationship with trees. We live on an entirely different timescale than the ancient, slow-growing beings with whom we share this planet, and we may therefore be missing something essential about them.
Trees play a key role in my new novel, The Afterlife Project, set partly in an old-growth forest of the deep future, in which trees provide nourishment, solace, and even life-giving companionship for a marooned scientist. One of the great pleasures of writing the book came from the hundreds of hours I spent in my local forest, giving my imagination free rein to dream up a fictional forest of the future.
Trees and forests are worthy subjects for human literature because they are an essential aspect of human lives. They provided the setting for our evolution as a species, and continue to be critical to the sustenance of both our bodies and spirits.
Most people know that healthy forests are key allies in taking on the grave environmental crisis we currently face. Recently, we’ve also learned that they’re helpful in improving our individual health. Being in a forest just feels good. Japan, recognizing this, has created an extensive nationwide network of forest-therapy trails, introducing the rest of the world to the concept of “forest bathing.” Clinical studies have provided insight into this phenomenon, finding that time spent walking or sitting among living trees may reduce stress, lower blood pressure, strengthen immunities, and improve our overall mental and physiological well-being.
A forest is a welcoming haven in any season. It has its own air conditioning system for one thing. On hot and muggy days near my home in Vermont the forest stays much cooler than out under the sun, and in winter, trees offer protection from the frigid winds that lash fallen snow across the open fields and roads, while the leafless canopy allows the sun to slant in, casting long shadows across the snow-blanketed understory and stage-lighting an evocative topography of snow-draped conifers and lichen-covered hardwood trunks.
And of course forests provide direct physical benefits for humans as well, as we know from lived experience here in Vermont: burned in our fireplaces and woodstoves, it heats us through the long winters; sustainably logged, it makes beautiful furniture and the very beams over our heads; tapped and boiled from our sugar maples, it brings forth one of the most deliciously sweet flavors known to humankind.
Trees are a living combination of the four elements revered in most ancient human systems of belief: earth and water by way of the mycorrhizal network that allows the tree to draw moisture and mineral nutrients from the soil, fire in the form of photosynthesis to harness the burning energy of the sun, and air in the way the wind bends but doesn’t break a tree’s trunk and branches, reinforcing its remarkably strong and flexible cellular structure.
It’s not surprising that groves and glades have long been considered sacred. As John Fowles wrote in his book-length essay, The Tree:
“We know that the very first holy places in Neolithic times … were artificial groves made of felled, transported and re-erected tree trunks; and that their roofs must have seemed to their makers less roofs than artificial leaf-canopies.”
A true forest is a sacred space built not by humans but by nature itself. Walking through one, any receptive person can experience the intrinsic holiness of the physical world. Toward the end of his life, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote:
“A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.”
Trees, it seems, may be messengers of a sort: stately, long-lived healers whose presence in our surroundings reminds us of our connection to the ineffable, while at the same time offering a way out of the environmental and spiritual degradation we’ve subjected ourselves to in our long, self-imposed exile from the heart of nature.
A young hophornbeam tree, planted (and photo by) Tim Weed. Used with permission.
And it seems that humanity may finally be getting the message. My social media feeds are filled with the accounts of tree-worshippers and rewilding organizations like “@bigtreehunter” and “@americanforests” and “@trees_boston.” Granted, this could just be the algorithms at work — I love trees and forests and am attuned to others who feel the same — but I’m also seeing tree-related stories in the news media with more and more frequency.
For me, this resurgence of interest in these ancient beings is cause for celebration and for hope: celebration that despite the damage we’ve done to our planetary ecology trees remain among us, and we among them; hope that the beauty, mystery, and wisdom they embody will continue to exist for many new generations of humanity to care for and enjoy.
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A two-year effort by hundreds of science and conservation experts from 158 countries reveals the latest shark conservation statistics, while providing insight into the process to protect large groups of species.
In conservation reporting and advocacy, including mine, you’ll often see articles or experts cite statistics and figures that discuss the global state of groups of species like sharks, primates, orchids, or corals over years or decades.
Have you ever wondered, “how do scientists know that?”
A recent report from the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Shark Specialist Group offers some insight — not just on the global status of sharks (TL:DR — it’s bad) but on how researchers and conservationists come to understand how well other large groups of related but widely distributed species are faring in the modern world.
The report, “The global status of sharks, rays, and chimaeras,” is a staggering work of conservation science. It synthesizes everything we know about the current conservation status of over 1,000 species of these amazing animals, organized at both the global scale and by country and region. It took 353 shark science and conservation experts from 158 countries — all volunteers — nearly two years to write. It’s also a case where the “behind the scenes” story of how it was made tells us much about the current state of the field.
So What Did They Find?
The latest shark conservation statistics are striking.
“We knew that worldwide, 37% of all species are threatened with extinction, but one of the things that came up writing this report was the number of species threatened at the country level,” says Rima Jabado, the chair of the IUCN SSC Shark Specialist Group and the lead author of the report. For some countries it was up to 70% of all local species.
The report also revealed how much we don’t know: We just don’t have the kind of reliable data needed to track population trends for far too many species of concern in far too many countries, so the real figures may be even worse.
Additionally, those numbers are for the aggregate group of sharks and their relatives. Jabado stressed that rays are more threatened than sharks, and chimeras lack a lot of data.
The report also found that the biggest threat to sharks and their relatives — by far — comes from unsustainable fishing practices. But the team cautions that this does not just refer to shark finning, despite that being the most common threat that many shark enthusiasts have heard of.
“An emerging thing we’re seeing is that the shark meat trade is growing,” says Alexandra Morata, the program officer for the SSG. “It’s not just fins, and we should care about sharks and their conservation, not just because of fins.”
On top of the threats, the report also found that as of the end of 2023 science has identified 1,266 species of sharks, rays, and chimeras, with more than one-quarter of those species described since the start of the 21st century. This taxonomy research is vital to underpin conservation efforts — after all, we can’t understand how threatened a species is or how to protect it if we don’t know that it even exists.
These might seem like some pretty clear assessments. But getting to these conclusions presented some challenges — and required a clear vision and a lot of hard work and sacrifice.
How Did Leaders Get So Many People in So Many Different Places to Work Together for So Long?
Part of the answer was a clear vision for a useful product.
“People felt there was a lot of value in having a report with information at the country level when you want policymakers to read something about their own country and take action,” says Jabado. “We wanted a one-stop shop where you can find any information that you want about sharks, rays, and chimaeras at the country level, written in a way that anyone could understand it.”
The IUCN has a known track record of producing useful, actionable products like this — while some other conservation organizations have a reputation for shouting into the void without getting much done. It can be easier to get people to contribute when they know the end product has a clear chance of making a real difference.
Another part of the answer is a sense of shared mission of the organization and a shared love of sharks and their conservation.
“People believe in the mission of the Shark Specialist Group, they love to contribute to [its] work, and they love to get together to do that,” says Nick Dulvy, a marine ecologist at Simon Fraser University and the former co-chair of the specialist group. “Funders don’t want to work with a fractious, divided, territorial scientific community. The growth of the shark conservation science community has been, in part, by its collegiality and willingness to cooperate and put considerable amounts of volunteer time into attending Red List workshops.”
How Do You Co-Write a Report With So Many People?
The SSG is one of the largest of the Species Survival Commission’s specialist groups, and it’s organized into global regions, each with their own regional vice chair or chairs.
“We communicated with our regional vice chairs a lot, and they helped to herd scientists in their respective regions,” says Morata. “We also hosted a series of regional in-person workshops that allowed local experts to meet and contribute, and then a small additional workshop just for overall report editors. By the time the report got to about 2,000 pages, I was basically living on chocolate and coffee.”
In cases where an in-person workshop wasn’t an option, the answer was long Zoom calls, often at inconvenient times for someone.
“We needed to get the Caribbean people together for six hours,” says Jabado, who is based in Dubai. “But day for them meant night for me here. It was the middle of the night in some cases, but I accepted it. Everybody sacrificed eventually along the way.”
Getting so many people from all over the world to contribute to a cohesive product that is still useful at the country level also required some flexibility with formatting — essentially letting each regional team write their sections in a way most useful to them.
“We gave them headings, and we wanted things structured overall, but we allowed it to flow however they thought would work best,” says Jabado. “They know their countries best.”
Another challenge was language. Although the report is in English, that’s not the first language for many of the contributors. Morata and Jabado spent a great deal of time carefully rephrasing text and going back and forth with contributors, taking care to make sure that what was written reflected what the authors were really trying to say.
Some Advice
For conservation science colleagues trying to engage in a similar large project, Jabado has some hard-won advice to share.
“Engage with as many people as you can, be open to suggestions, and be patient,” she says. “This will take longer than you plan, and in some cases you’ll have people finishing their chapters…and waiting [two years] for it to be published because 100 other countries haven’t finished their chapters yet.”
Overall, despite logistical complications in writing such a large report, the team says they are thrilled with the output.
“We wanted to translate all the science into something a bit more tangible and accessible,” says Jabado. “And in a lot of countries, a lot of people are already using it to engage with their government.”
That means the report is already helping sharks and their relatives “on the ground.” Scientists, meanwhile, have clear marching orders: Fill in those data gaps the report revealed.
And of course, all this work sets the stage for the next big update — although the team may take a couple of years off before they do this again.
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The emerging science of social biomimicry still places too much value on human constructs. There are ways around that.
You may have heard about biomimicry, a technological and social movement predicated on the idea of designing systems inspired by biological processes. The theory is that natural systems, over millions of years of evolution and adaptation, must have optimized certain processes — and that humans can adapt these processes into our own systems. Innovations discovered through the study of biology and ecology have already contributed to important advancements for our species, from artificial spider silk to biological systems for data storage.
While much of the conversation around biomimicry focuses on technological applications, several environmental thinkers in recent years have called for social and economic systems to take inspiration from nature. For example, reciprocal, gift, and ecological economics are based on the principle of symbiosis, where unrelated species perform mutually beneficial services for one another. By developing economic structures modeled after mutual collaboration between two or more species, proponents argue, we can establish kinder and more equitable social relations, where goods and services are shared between individuals based on convivial exchange — an economy of flowers and pollinators over an economy of lions and gazelles.
Social biomimicry has transformative potential, just as technological biomimicry has helped to inject new ideas into the realms of engineering, robotics, and materials.
The field, however, lacks some of the critical assessment and rigor necessary to optimize these novel ideas. To achieve truly transformative potential, social biomimicry must evolve.
Personally, I have developed an understanding of the practice of biomimicry through my graduate research with perennial wheat, a newly domesticated species. This research is part of an effort to design crops that emulate the biology of prairie plants, particularly their deep roots that improve soil and water quality. As I reviewed the history of this work, it became apparent that a big reason for the success of this research was the extensive trial and error necessary to integrate ecological inspiration into human systems. Recent breakthroughs were only possible due to a deep commitment to experimentalism and caution when scaling these new technologies.
As I have become more involved with biomimicry within the context of social systems, I believe the field could benefit from some of those qualities as it evolves.
Scholarship Through Analogy
The foundational idea driving thinking within social biomimicry comes from the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that natural systems have evolved in concert with the planet to be self-regulating and self-perpetuating, continually pursuing the optimal arrangement of organisms for mutual prosperity. The Gaia hypothesis is symbiosis on steroids, the totality of all biological kingdoms singing in a magnificent chorus of life.
While we are becoming increasingly knowledgeable about how collaboration underlies many ecosystem functions, some proponents, philosophers, and commentators overemphasize or even deify such processes, which can cloud our understanding of the forces that power ecosystems. This leads us to center a subset of culturally idolized processes as opposed to soberly assessing constituent parts and processes governing ecosystems.
Many calls for social biomimicry start at the position that nature is inherently worthy of emulation, and that anything deemed natural must be a valuable model for designing social systems. This view places nature on a reverential pedestal where ecology becomes a “sacred scripture” of sorts — a screen onto which we project existing values and desires. Those who value community and sharing can point to more cooperative relationships in the natural world, like the bee and the flower, as a justification for their preferences. Conversely, those who prefer a society of cutthroat competition can point to the elk clashing horns over a mate. Nature nurtures just as much as it brutalizes. Both worldviews can draw justifications for their preferences from biology and ecology.
By relying on these analyses in promoting biomimicry, we are using nature, a system with no consciousness, as a source of ethical guidance. Morality is not what we glean from studying ecology.
The processes that ecosystems have spent eons refining are where the real utility lies.
In seeking these material benefits, social biomimicry must pursue a program of empirical experimentation. As it stands, a lot of the rhetoric around social biomimicry operates in the realm of analogy. A natural system is described and related to a human social dynamic, with the author gesturing as to how humans could emulate the ecological phenomenon being observed.
Take alternate bearing in trees as an example. Oaks or pecans will coordinate a surge of nuts to overwhelm herbivore populations, like squirrels or raccoons, resulting in more saplings becoming established. It’s a great lesson in the power of collaboration to defeat an adversary.
Most biomimicry literature would wax poetic on how we can apply similar strategies in our societies. But all this amounts to is a parable, with limited information on the actual design of novel systems. To evolve the field, empirical analysis of and experimentation with the material parallels between natural and human systems is necessary.
A good example can be found in the book Honeybee Democracy, where biologist Thomas Seeley shows how beehives operate a deeply democratic system of decision-making when choosing where to locate a hive. Scout bees rigorously collect information and present proposed sites to the group, which are then debated through the famous waggle dance until a consensus is established. Once a new site is chosen, the bees dedicate themselves to this decision, even if they argued strenuously against it. As opposed to the system of adversarial democracy employed in many governments today, this method of consensus and unity seems like a refreshing alternative.
However, Seeley writes, the applicability of the lessons we learn from the honeybee depends on biological context, which subsequently affects how they are applied to human systems. Bees have an intense cognitive disposition towards unity. Within the hive, human traits like tribalism are absent, not due to ideological dedication but genetic codification. For organizing units of thousands to millions of individual humans, such a unified front with a complete lack of dissent is incredibly difficult to achieve. Bees have a neurology that predisposes them to prioritize unwavering cooperation, a trait that is absent in human psychology.
As Seeley illustrates, this model of consensus decision-making has been shown to work for small groups of people that have a sense of unity among them, such as a faculty meeting or activist group. These situations partially replicate the conditions that allow this form of governance to function in the hive.
But he also cautions that upon changing the scale in which we attempt to import the Honeybee Democracy framework into human decision-making, the model breaks down and the lessons are less workable. This meticulous analysis of how a process plays out in nature, in this case by comparing bee and human psychology, can inform its translatability to human contexts.
Empiricism in Social Biomimicry
When mimicking nature, I have found that factors such as scale, sector, geography, and culture influence how a natural process is operationalized into human systems.
For example, gift economies rooted in symbiosis work well for food or clothing, as these are goods where sharing and reciprocity are culturally familiar and logistically feasible to execute within local communities. If I have excess produce from my garden, I can distribute cucumbers or strawberries to neighbors and friends. Then, come spring, my foraging friends will return the favor with fresh morels. Reciprocity functions well in tight-knit social networks and within certain domains of consumption.
On the other hand, this model would fail in areas like healthcare, where there are a small number of highly skilled individuals with decades of education providing specialized services using expensive equipment. It’s intensive on both an individual and system-wide level, and it’s unlikely that I would have anything I could give to my doctor that would come close to covering the resources they expended on me. Modern healthcare simply cannot function through a symbiosis-like exchange of resources, as there is no organismal relationship that has achieved mutual benefit with such a heavy resource imbalance between participants. The difference in resource and energy investment between producer and consumer will change whether symbiosis is possible across different sectors of the economy.
This analytical approach to adapting social innovations from the natural world, I would argue, would greatly improve proposals originating within social biomimicry. In my own work, I found some of the following questions to be powerful tools for exploration: What are the behaviors participant organisms exhibit, and could these be reasonably replicated by humans given what we know about our psychology and social dynamics? What levels of investment in energy, nutrients, or labor do each organism put into and get out of their relationships? Do similar proportions in investment exist within a segment of our economy where such a relationship could be recreated? What aspects of the natural system could be quantified in a manner that parallels human systems?
Instead of simply pointing to various ecological interactions and saying, “We should emulate that,” we should be analyzing these systems and their potential human analogues systematically. For example, we could design political or organizational models that adapt over time based on mechanisms learned from studying evolution. Or we could build new economic systems that have a diversity of forms and functions fashioned after the types of heterogeneity present in wild populations.
A great example of this more empirical form of biomimicry in action is the Kalundborg Ecopark in Denmark, an industrial park modeled off of the cycling of resources that underlies ecosystems. A core aspect of ecosystem functioning is every scrap of sunlight, water, and nutrients left after the death and decay of one organism is consumed by another. Resources flow circularly through a web of creatures. This is antithetical to modern methods of industrial production, which produce prodigious volumes of waste as the result of linear production chains. The Ecopark was designed to emulate this cycling of resources by basing the production lines of unrelated companies on one another’s waste streams. The designers studied natural processes, identified spaces in human systems where reorganizing processes along ecological lines proved advantageous and experimented to ensure that it worked well as an alternative.
It’s not perfect, but broadly the Ecopark has been able to drastically cut down on material and energy waste for participant firms, serving as a powerful example of what is possible when we study nature with a critical eye.
Social biomimicry should conduct experiments exploring how these ideas may work in human contexts. Concepts should be introduced on a small scale and slowly grown out, with ample measurement to determine whether our needs are being fulfilled by the model. As new systems grow, we can adapt them to the needs of the situation.
Fundamentally, our attention should remain on studying and translating processes from the natural world into the human world. Values, doctrines, and ideology are inexorably human and are areas that should remain the domain of people.
From a collection set in a landfill to an author’s cultural exploration of a critically endangered species, these books celebrate Earth and mourn its destruction.
“I cannot keep you safe.”
This recurring line in Primeval, Mai Der Vang’s powerful new poetry collection, doesn’t just echo through her book. Similar themes appear through many of this year’s new environmental poetry books. They reflect the fear and frustration we all share about what’s happening to the natural world we love so much.
But love itself is another constant in these books: Love of the Earth, appreciation for wild things and places, and a call to defend it all.
Of course, some of these wild species and places have already been lost, leaving holes in our world and our hearts. That grief also comes out in these poets’ voices.
That’s the collective promise of environmental poetry: It’s a chance to celebrate nature, embrace its magic, mourn what we’ve lost, and remind us to do better.
Here are my reviews of eight powerful new environmental poetry collections published this year. I’ve also included one magazine issue and a new compendium of work by Mary Oliver, the late champion of verse about nature.
This barely scratches the surface of the wide range of environmental poetry books published so far this year, so expect more reviews in the months ahead.
As always, the title of each book links to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to find most of these volumes through your local library or bookseller.
From the publisher: In a climate changed future, Canada is thought to be a promised land. But in southern Ontario, the promise and the land are exhausted: industrialization has led to widespread destruction, desertification and food insecurity. So when Utopic Robotics promises growth and presents a community with a swarm of automated beetles that will revitalize the land and rebuild utopia, community members rally behind the corporation and its message of hope. But technological solutions often come with secret risks.
Our review: An intense, thought-provoking poetry collection from the future, depicting a 22nd-century world ravaged by climate change, industrialization, Cronenberg-style implants, AI robots, pollution, and other threats. Smith has the byline on the cover, but the book’s unique conceit is that it’s a posthumous collection of poems by a writer who lived through this chaos while seeking love, peace, and family amidst the machinations of a dangerous corporation called Utopic Robotics. It’s high-concept science fiction, but it all feels painfully relevant to today. Easily one of my favorite books of the year. (I enjoyed the electronic review copy so much I bought it in hard copy.)
From the publisher:…a deeply immersive, poetic exploration of life working at a landfill in Portland, Oregon.
Our review: One of the poems in this collection is titled “We are daily witness to the world’s wastes.” That sums it up: This is a powerful, revelatory, occasionally infuriating, often disturbing book about what we discard: things, nature, and people. It’s not an easy book. It shines a light on systems most of us would prefer to ignore. We look away at our own peril. Not to be missed.
From the publisher: In this ode to the earth and all its living creatures, French Djiboutian poet, novelist, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi sounds the alarm about our imperiled planet… Waberi, a nomad at heart, takes us on a whirlwind tour across North America, Africa, and Europe, daring us to love the earth “beyond all rational thought” and to “turn into earth, both literally and figuratively,” as we “turn from vanity, fears, and other pointless rustling.”
Our review: A short but moving book, full of perspectives we don’t often see, like the casual reference to people rushing out to pour buckets of water on beached whales suffering under the heat of the African sun.
From the publisher: With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam… Primordial examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland?
Our review: An ode to the rarely seen, critically endangered saola — but so much more. Vang uses the pain and grief from this disappearing species to discuss colonialism, the refugee-immigrant experience (especially as it relates to the Hmong people and her own identity), the Vietnam war, racism, trauma, motherhood, and so much more. The result is a brilliant, haunting poetry collection steeped in conservation issues that also delivers insight into the human experience.
From the publisher: There has been a welcome surge of nature writing in recent years. Yet this has raised questions as to whose voices are privileged and heard in a space predominantly occupied by Western European traditions and authors…. [Nature Matters] presents brand-new commissions alongside formative works from the past fifty years that invite us to reconsider nature poetry from global-majority perspectives. Image-rich and formally diverse, the poems explore fundamental and ecological themes including climate crisis and the Anthropocene; urban nature, solitude and alienation; protest and radical empathy; Indigenous wisdom and alternative histories.
Our review: An explosion of voices and rich perspectives. This book is going to send me down the rabbit hole to track down more works by dozens of the collected authors.
From the publisher: Honest, poignant, and relatable, Climate is a journey in embracing change both internally and externally. It guides us through all the weather we may face, from the stormy heartbreak to the foggy mental space to the sunny other side…
Our review: This intense, emotional poetry collection isn’t (no matter what the title suggests) about climate change, but it does take its cues from the broader climate: the weather, the seasons, the cultural connections that pull us together and push us apart. It’s about love, loss, the way the rain makes us feel, and the sun (or lack thereof) in our hearts. I wouldn’t call this an environmental book, except the natural world is intrinsically part of the human experience, and Hanson dives into that without restraint.
Series Editor: David Lehman; Guest Editor: Terence Winch
Our review: No need to include a publisher’s description this time — the title says it all. As you might guess, this is a wide-ranging anthology, covering a variety of tones, formats, and styles. It’s not strictly an environmental collection, but some elements of nature appear in many if not most of the poems. Sometimes it’s just a brief, poetic mention of magic or grief. Others reflect these crisis-filled times more directly, like “Climate Anxiety” by Patricia Davis-Muffett. The collection feels a bit more Western than Nature Matters (it does focus on American poetry, after all), but every poem lives up to its “best of” designation. (Available Sept. 2, 2025)
Our review: A new compendium of three previously published Mary Oliver books (two volumes of poetry and a third of mostly prose). As you might expect, that makes this triple-worthy of your attention. I’ve read a lot of Oliver over the years, but not these three volumes. I’m grateful for the opportunity to enjoy them back-to-back-to-back. (Available Sept. 9, 2025)
From the publisher: Framed as a letter in response to a loved one’s pain, this series of ethereal vignettes takes readers on a journey from seemingly inescapable isolation and despair, through grief and rage, toward the hope of community and connection. Drawing on her faith as well as the tradition of climate justice, Saito reminds readers that if we’re going to challenge fossil fuel capitalism, we must first imagine what lies beyond it: The beauty and joy of a healed world.
Our review: Intense, lovely, and dreamlike, this collection of poems in comics form embraces the pain of fire, flood, and capitalism-driven climate change. More importantly, it crystalizes our collective strife into a call for justice. The book’s 17 poems are presented in a series of painted images, mostly four panels to a page. In addition to the emotional text, the poems use the visuals to set or continue the mood and narrative. Some sequences go on for several pages without a single word — poetry by way of image and imagination. It’s a powerful experience that deserves our attention while it attempts to heal our souls.
From the publisher: In this issue, birds are enemies and omens, friends and gods, devoured and devouring. The endless diversity of birds is one of the great marvels of our world. Migration patterns, flight mechanics, song, life cycle, and more — it’s a diverse pool to draw from, with deeper potential with the addition of speculative layers.
Our review: Something different to end these reviews: The bird-themed issue of this online magazine published by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Seventeen authors (and one translator) bring an amazing diversity of tone and structure to these poems, with haunting results. Also check out the April 2025 issue, themed around plants.
That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations, including a few more poetry collections, in the “Revelator Reads” archives.
And let us know what you’re reading: drop us a line at [email protected]
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The war created systems that enabled trafficking in tigers and other animals. We can finally address that legacy and help both people and wildlife.
War’s impact often ripples far beyond the battlefield — setting off a chain of consequences that shape landscapes, cultures, and economies in ways no one could predict. As we mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, we must recognize that its aftershocks are still playing out in some of the most unexpected ways.
In Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War unleashed just such an effect, influencing the illegal tiger trade that today spans Vietnam, Malaysia, and beyond. What began as wartime survival and cultural resilience has, over time, fed a cross-border black market in tiger parts — one that these countries are now working to dismantle.
Against that vast backdrop of lost lives, shattered communities, and devastated landscapes, focusing on something like the illegal tiger trade might seem oddly narrow, even trivial. And yet, that narrow focus reveals a surprising truth: what many might assume is a free-standing wildlife trafficking problem is intricately woven into the broader social, economic, and cultural histories of Vietnam and Malaysia.
I’ve been working on issues related to trafficking of big cats for the past decade. To address it effectively requires engaging with this deep complexity — the legacy of war, the persistence of tradition, and the realities of economic survival — rather than viewing it as a straightforward market problem.
With this shared history as a foundation, Vietnam and Malaysia are uniquely positioned to lead a regional conservation resurgence.
A War That Disrupted More Than Just Borders
The Vietnam War — or, as it’s known in Vietnam, the Resistance War Against America — left behind a staggering ecological toll. Aerial bombing, napalm, and chemical defoliants like Agent Orange destroyed up to 30% of Vietnam’s forests, wiping out critical habitat for species like the Indochinese tiger.
That ecological crisis, of course, came alongside a human one. With medicines in short supply, many Vietnamese communities returned to traditional remedies made from herbs and animal products — an enthusiastic and proud revival of a Vietnamese national medicine, blending ancient remedies with some modern medicines.
But by the 1990s, things had shifted. As Vietnam’s economy took off, so did spending power. Expensive wildlife remedies, long associated with vitality and strength, were suddenly affordable to more people. A cultural practice born of need became a consumer trend.
Vietnam’s Tigers Vanish — and Attention Turns South
Vietnam’s wild tiger population had all but vanished by the early 2000s.
That scarcity didn’t curb demand though — it just redirected it across the South Asian Sea. Malaysia, with more intact forest and a surviving population of Malayan tigers, became an attractive source for traders.
The route between Vietnam and Malaysia wasn’t new. After the war, Malaysia took in hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees. Over time, that humanitarian corridor turned into something else: labor migration. By the 2000s, Vietnamese workers were filling jobs in Malaysia’s fast-growing palm oil, timber, and manufacturing sectors — many of them in or near tiger habitats.
This migration wasn’t about wildlife. But as is often the case, when workers stumbled upon animals, some saw a way to pad their income — a shift that, over time and with the help of certain Malaysian traders, poachers, and facilitators, evolved into specialized roles within the illegal trade. What began as a small-scale activity evolved into something more organized — not just in tiger products, but also in other high-value forest goods, such as agarwood.
Vietnamese harvesting teams, already operating abroad for agarwood in Thailand and Laos, often became the backbone of these expanding networks.The infrastructure was already there: shared language, established routes, and an expanding black market.
Quang Binh became one of the main provinces for teams of poachers travelling overseas. Hammered by wartime bombing and recurring natural disasters, many residents developed bushcraft survival skills during the war and passed these on to the next generation. Some later used those same skills to participate in forest harvesting and poaching activities abroad, including in Malaysia. Their story is one of economic need intersecting with global demand.
The consequences for Malaysia’s wildlife were devastating. As demand surged, so did pressure on the Malayan tiger. Poaching, compounded by habitat loss, drove the population into freefall. By 2021 fewer than 200 Malayan tigers remained — placing the species on the brink of extinction.
Turning History Into Leadership
Neither Malaysia nor Vietnam created the demand for tiger parts alone — and neither country can end the trade on its own. But both have taken real steps toward conservation.
Malaysia strengthened its wildlife laws in 2010, mobilized over 1,000 community rangers, and formed the National Malayan Tiger Task Force (MyTTF) in 2021, chaired by the prime minister. This raised the urgency for actions to save the critically endangered species. Vietnam also introduced tougher penalties in 2019 and remains a committed party to international wildlife agreements like CITES (The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species).
And just this year, the two nations signed a comprehensive strategic partnership — a sweeping agreement that, among other priorities, names security and defense cooperation as shared goals. It’s a sign that the era of isolated efforts may be coming to an end.
Lessons From the Past
This shared history offers three key takeaways.
First: War changes ecosystems — and societies. The destruction of Vietnam’s forests and healthcare systems didn’t just hurt tigers in the short term; it also shifted how people related to nature, medicine, and survival.
Second: cultural practices aren’t static. What began as traditional healing became a luxury trend. Conservation efforts must address both cultural roots and economic shifts.
And finally: solutions must cross borders. The tiger trade is transnational, and so are the forces driving it — from poverty to prestige to migration. Conservation must be transnational too.
A New Chapter for Tigers
Vietnam and Malaysia’s intertwined past and emerging interdependence can now become a foundation for something new. But seizing this moment means going beyond policy statements.
Neither country can do this alone; they need each other. The comprehensive strategic partnership offers a new foundation for dismantling the Malaysia-Vietnam tiger trafficking problem.
Accomplishing this requires cross-border information sharing and joint counter-trafficking strategies that target key points along the supply chain — both of which the strategic partnership should now enable. Vietnam and Malaysia can now prioritize closing opportunities for the illegal movement of people, wildlife products, and finances that sustain the problem, and coordinating investigations against key roles in the trade.
The private financial and transportation sectors have levers to pull here. For example, investigating and freezing assets of individuals financing and profiting from tiger trafficking, enhancing screening, and checking procedures in the transport sector.
Governments and NGOs can also harness rural development schemes and vocational training programs, combined with engagement to shift community acceptance away from the illegal wildlife trade. Successful community-based programs in Vietnam, India, and Indonesia have shown how combining clear communication of risks with targeted assistance can steer would-be poachers toward safer, legal livelihoods, but need funding and scale from national governments.
Conservation isn’t just about saving tigers. It’s about supporting people — especially those in the shadow of poverty and conflict. As we mark both 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War and International Tiger Day, the chance to turn a difficult legacy into a powerful model for ecological recovery is a real one.
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As a novelist and avid reader, I’ve long been interested in literary portrayals of trees. Somewhere around my eighth birthday my parents started reading The Hobbit and all three books of The Lord of the Rings to my siblings and me, a journey that took us the better part of a year.
Trees and forests are worthy subjects for human literature because they are an essential aspect of human lives. They provided the setting for our evolution as a species, and continue to be critical to the sustenance of both our bodies and spirits.
