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      in US Politics

      Hawaii observatory to be evicted amid federal cuts as volcano shoots 700ft lava

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      As Hawaii’s most active volcano shot out fountains of lava on Thursday, some of them reaching as high as 700ft, scientists from the US Geological Survey have been posting regular updates on the scale and pace of the eruptions.But those same scientists, along with their volcano-monitoring equipment, may soon be evicted from their office because of Elon Musk’s federal government cost-cutting, the Honolulu Civil Beat reported.The Geological Survey office in Hilo, Hawaii, has appeared on an internal list of federal offices whose leases are due to be cancelled on 30 September, as part of an effort by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” to terminate leases for hundreds of federal offices this year, the Associated Press reported.View image in fullscreen“It remains unclear exactly how that lease cancellation will affect the observatory’s research and public services,” the Honolulu Civil Beat reported.The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory did not immediately respond to requests for comment.A spokesperson for the US Geological Survey said in a statement that the process of “streamlining government operations” was “ongoing, and we will provide updates as more information becomes available”.“We are actively working with General Services Administration to ensure that every facility and asset is utilized effectively, and where necessary, identifying alternative solutions that strengthen our mission,” the spokesperson said.For the past hundred years, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory has been tasked with monitoring the islands’ geologic activity, for the purposes of both scientific research and public safety warnings. Today, according to the observatory’s website, a team of more than 30 people monitors data collected 24 hours a day in order to provide local residents updates on what’s currently happening, and what might be coming next.View image in fullscreenAs Kilauea began continuously releasing lava from its summit caldera inside Hawaii Volcanoes national park on Wednesday morning after a weeklong pause, the observatory’s scientists posted frequent updates, noting health hazards and that the molten rock was contained within the park and wasn’t threatening residential areas.The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory is one of five volcano observatories run by the US Geological Survey across the western US. The American Institute of Physicists, a non-profit that advocates for science and scientists, posted on its website that “one of the sites of the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which houses equipment to monitor possible eruptions”, was also slated for possible closure.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Black farmers face setbacks over Trump budget cuts: ‘We are in survival mode’

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      For the last several weeks, Jocelyn Germany has been asking herself “is it safe for us to exist” as Black farmers?, since US Department of Agriculture cuts have put her work in jeopardy.Germany is the farmer advocate of Farm School NYC (FSNYC), an urban agriculture education center focused on food sovereignty and social, economic and racial justice. About 85% of Farm School NYC’s funding comes from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).The center was in the process of launching a New York City-wide pilot initiative focused on food justice, crop management and urban farming advocacy. But National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) $300,000 community food projects grant that would have funded it was terminated, effective immediately. Forced to scramble, FSNYC scaled down the programming and adopted a sliding scale for tuition.The cuts affected other plans, including public courses on food stewardship. Funding that would have allowed the center to distribute mini grants and grow community capacity has also been paused. FSNYC recently discussed cutting some of its own employee benefits to free up resources for the now affected programming. “Our main goal is to keep Farm School in operation,” Germany said.The impact of USDA cuts has rippled through farming and agriculture communities, which are mobilizing to stanch the damage. Farm School NYC is part of the Black Farmer Fund, a consortium of Bipoc-led/owned farms and entities that work on agricultural policy and strengthening local food systems throughout the north-east. The group was founded to share resources in an already difficult funding environment; rather than compete with each other, they collaborate on joint fundraising and programming.Now, they share an estimated $1.2m gap due to defunding. For Farm School NYC and Black Farmers United – New York State (BFU-NYS), the USDA’s termination or freezing of National Institute of Food and Agriculture grants and Natural Resources Conservation Service contracts put programs and salaries at risk.“We are in survival mode,” Germany said. Over the past year, Farm School NYC began taking baby steps to transition some of its funding away from government dollars, but “the sudden defunding was not the way we wanted to do it”, added Germany.Made up of growers, advocates and food educators, BFU-NYS just became an independent organization after being a fiscally sponsored project under Farm School NYC. It lost a five-year, $660,000 contract with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service agency. The contract was to fund three annual statewide “Bridging Land, Agriculture, and Communities” conferences, with the inaugural one planned for April.About a week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Black Farmers United got an email explaining that because their work fell under diversity, equity and inclusion programming, the USDA would end their contract. This year’s conference was canceled, but BFU-NYS plans to host one in 2026 with or without government funding. The organization is seeking private donors to make that happen.The abrupt withdrawal of funding has left the organization holding the bag for an event that was just around the corner – and all its costs. “We have done the background work, got participating partners, submitted deposits and signed contracts,” said Dr Kuturie Rouse, BFU-NYS’s executive director of development.The organization is now unable to reimburse full-time staff for extra time spent coordinating the conference or recoup the cost of supplies. On top of that, BFU-NYS must pay vendors and other collaborators despite no longer having the USDA money or this year’s conference itself. “The organization is already at a loss,” Rouse said.BFU-NYS also lost its Green Futures program. The program helps young adults battle food insecurity, establish community gardens and pursue agriculture as a career. Last year, it launched a pilot program with a South Bronx middle school where students grew watermelon, callaloo, lettuce and other fruits and vegetables. The students then gave that food to their school cafeteria to feed the student body. BFU-NHYS now hopes to partner with other local schools to continue and grow the initiative.Aside from the loss of money and programming, Rouse said that the mental health of BFU-NYS staff had taken a hit. After the inauguration, staff were bombarded with racist emails and social media comments. “It was hate mail just because of our name and who we support and sponsor.” He clarified that while “Black” is on the organization’s name and it focuses on communities of color, it is a nondiscriminatory organization that “work[s] with any and everyone”.And, at this extremely critical and stressful time, mental health support from another ecosystem partner will not happen. The Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust (NEFOC) supports climate stewardship and regenerative farming. It also serves as an incubator for several regional land projects. Christine Hutchinson, a founding board member of the land trust, shared that a $200,000 collaborative program focused on farmers’ mental health from Maine to Delaware was now on hold indefinitely. NEFOC is one of several organizations that contributed to it. “People are really rocked,” Hutchinson said.It’s been difficult for Monti Lawson, the founder of the Catalyst Collaborative Farm, to see so much funding halted because he encouraged many farmers and other partners to take advantage of these USDA programs. The farm, which invites queer and Bipoc people to the land to farm and organize, offers many free, donation-based or sliding-scale events – all possible due to previous funding. “For government and even philanthropy, QTBipoc was a very sexy word,” Lawson said.Lawson has been connecting with past funders and community members. “In this particular moment, there are so many people who are reaching out, trying to be comforted, trying to be connected to others,” Lawson said.The land trust’s Hutchinson pointed out that the impact of defunding will vary. “A larger farm in a different place has access to resources that our farmers just don’t have access to,” Hutchinson said. Farmers from Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust are already starting with lower levels of federal support, and their capacity to replace those funds will probably be much lower. Meanwhile, farming organizations are trying to document what is happening as funding evaporates. The Hudson Valley Young Farmers Coalition, of which Lawson is a part, is collecting New York-based farmer testimonials to track the impact of cuts. The National Young Farmers Coalition is doing the same across the country.On the ground, though, the Black Farming Fund members and other agricultural organizations are trying to secure funding and their futures. In mid-February, Farm School NYC launched an emergency fundraiser to meet its severe funding gap, support its scholarship fund, launch revamped courses and pay farmer facilitators. Thus far, it has raised $750.The precarity of federal funding has the consortium’s members looking elsewhere for funding. Farm School NYC has been assembling advocacy toolkits and helping facilitate contact with legislators. BFU-NYS recently launched a mobilization strategy that includes prioritizes funding from state and local government. Rouse noted that one of the non-profit’s biggest supporters is New York State representative Khaleel Anderson, who chairs the state’s food and farming nutrition policy taskforce. Through Anderson’s support, BFU-NYS has had its own line item in the New York state budget for the past three years. Right now, Anderson is pushing for Black Farmers United to get increased support. BFU also wants to tap into New York City council discretionary dollars to fund local initiatives such as its Green Futures program and social responsibility grants from businesses that remain committed to diversity and inclusion.Some advocates believe that now is the time for those with power and privilege to march on the streets and that QTBipoc, immigrant and food justice communities – often on the frontlines – should take a step back.One of the first things longtime food justice advocate Karen Washington did was put out a call on her LinkedIn, asking her network to donate to cover the funding gap. Washington is co-founder of Rise & Root Farm in Orange county, New York.“There are foundations, hedge funds, venture capital groups, and Wall Street executives who can write a check in an instant without losing a cent.” In an interview, she asked: “Where are the people that voted for this? Where is the outrage?” More

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      in US Politics

      What does Maga-land look like? Let me show you America’s unbeautiful suburban sprawl | Alexander Hurst

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      In 1941 Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who reported from Germany in the lead-up to the second world war, wrote an essay for Harper’s about the personality types most likely to be attracted to Nazism, headlined “Who Goes Nazi?” “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t – whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi,” Thompson wrote.Talia Lavin, a US writer, recently gave Thompson’s idea an update on Substack with an essay of her own: “Who Goes Maga?”The essay has since been taken down (I’m not sure why), but in it Lavin reimagined Thompson’s original dinner party setting, with various archetypes in attendance, offering in one or two paragraphs a brief but empathetic explanation for why each person has or has not “gone Maga”.Eventually arriving at Mr I, an academic and a frequent traveller to France with family money, Lavin wrote: “Nonetheless, he will never go Maga and would spend his days in exile even if he got cut off from the family purse … because … he is a true devotee of beauty.” He finds in Maga “a hatred of things that are beautiful and strange, as all the things he loves are. Power holds no attraction for him, only beauty.”Of course, power often tries to use aesthetics, and its own definition of beauty, to further its own purposes. Fascists and authoritarians are deeply aware of the ability of art to propagate ideas or oppose them. From architecture to rallies, Hitler and Mussolini favoured a type of massiveness, an imposing nature and uniformity to evoke a sense of the imperial eternal. Soviet aesthetics – though meant to be futurist rather than focused on a glorified past – also fell back on the idea of massiveness and uniformity to subjugate the individual and elevate the state. And, of course, all three authoritarian regimes repressed art, artists and aesthetics that were dissident.Trumpism, too, has an aesthetic. Allow me to pretentiously, subjectively, declare it not beautiful. The aesthetic of Trumpism is sprawl – which had already infected the United States long before the Maga movement metastasised.Last September I drove nearly 2,000 miles in the US with a French friend, Guillaume, zigzagging our way from DC to New Orleans and tracing, in part, the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville. (“It might be our last opportunity to observe democracy in America,” I had said to him.) Through his non-American eyes, I saw even more poignantly the ways the physical manifestation of Hannah Arendt’s “atomisation” are scarred into the suburban and rural US landscape itself.Like fish in water, I wonder if Americans are even aware of how they swim in it. The hours-long stretches of chain stores in single-storey, flat-topped buildings. The cluster of gas stations, with functionally and aesthetically similar convenience stores selling rows and rows of sugary food and drinks. The big box chain stores, some of them matryoshka dolls that house other chains within – rectangular islands of stuff surrounded by parking lots leading to other little islands of fast food, also surrounded by parking lots, filled with rows and rows of the most enormous pickup trucks imaginable.And then, just as it starts to dwindle, another on-ramp/off-ramp, and the whole shebang starts all over again, until you’ve cycled through all of the possible chain permutations and you begin to repeat. Wherever there is grass, it will be impeccably mowed.No matter where you are in America’s 3.8m sq miles, with its 340 million inhabitants, the sprawl will have followed the same driving logic as the chains it hosts – an utterly nondescript, completely indistinguishable look, feel and experience. Somehow, there is always still traffic on these six-lane roads, a trailing line of enormous vehicles that require parking lots that spill out like muffin tops, and with double-wide parking spaces. Everything about sprawl slumps outwards, like warmed jelly that can no longer hold its shape. There is no height except for the height of the signs advertising the chains; those rise several storeys into the sky, enough to be visible from the highway.View image in fullscreenSomewhere along the line, the American Dream became to live alone, surrounded by all of this, rather than living in connection with other people.In somewhat cryptic lines, the poet Keats put forward a nexus that goes beyond the subjective nature of what we, individually, find aesthetically pleasing. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” he wrote. He was hardly the only one to interrogate the two at the same time. Plato and Plotinus sought to link beauty to an equally ineffable truth that lingered somewhere beyond our material reality; Kant, too, placed beauty beyond taste, as a disinterested thing that radiated outward. In theology, Saint Augustine and Hans Urs Von Balthasar draw the two back to the same divine origin, as critical components to any human attempt to understand the transcendent.And if that’s all too mystical for you, the British theoretical physicist Tom McLeish argues: “As indications of the road forward rather than destinations achieved, beautiful experiments and theoretical ideas can, and even must, be celebrated, their aesthetic appeal unashamedly enjoyed.”I would add a third vector to the one between beauty and truth: art, which in his 1934 book, Art As Experience, John Dewey sees as something that is inherent in the everyday experience of life rather than something necessarily pushed into museums. As long as that living is authentic. “Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality,” writes Dewey.Perhaps there is something authentic to suburban sprawl when experienced as spectator and anthropologist. But as everyday life, sprawl is deadening, ugly, fake. Devoid of art, beauty and truth alike. The United States has long bought into the idea that freedom is endless expansion. But slouching across land simply because it is there uplifts neither the land nor the people on it. In this instance in particular, abundance did a disservice to the US by drawing it into an absence of experience. What surprise that a moribund ideology would take root in physical spaces that radiate the peculiar desolation of too much?Given the number of artists, photographers, cinematographers and architects who have been willing to serve nefarious political movements, it would be simplistic for me to claim that artists are somehow immune to them. But art is an attempt to capture – and convey – something true about the world, and the human emotional experience of it. When the rational world has committed itself to a path that leads to destruction, perhaps those dedicated to beauty can, with what Keats called a “negative capability” to perceive truth, bring us back to both.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe correspondent More

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      in Elections

      Trump Administration Aims to Eliminate E.P.A.’s Scientific Research Arm

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      The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, according to documents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.The strategy is part of large-scale layoffs, known as a “reduction in force,” being planned by the Trump administration, which is intent on shrinking the federal work force. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has said he wants to eliminate 65 percent of the agency’s budget. That would be a drastic reduction — one that experts said could hamper clean water and wastewater improvements, air quality monitoring, the cleanup of toxic industrial sites, and other parts of the agency’s mission.The E.P.A.’s plan, which was presented to White House officials on Friday for review, calls for dissolving the agency’s largest department, the Office of Research and Development, and purging up to 75 percent of the people who work there.The remaining staff members would be placed elsewhere within the E.P.A. “to provide increased oversight and align with administration priorities,” according to the language shared with The New York Times by staff members who work for Democrats on the House science committee.Molly Vaseliou, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in a statement that the agency “is taking exciting steps as we enter the next phase of organizational improvements” and stressed that changes had not been finalized.“We are committed to enhancing our ability to deliver clean air, water and land for all Americans,” she said, adding, “While no decisions have been made yet, we are actively listening to employees at all levels to gather ideas on how to increase efficiency and ensure the E.P.A. is as up to date and effective as ever.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Why I quit my homestead dream just as farmer tradwives became mainstream

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      Our homesteading experiment began before tradwives, before Donald Trump, before Covid-19. It was the summer of 2015 when we were all sure no one would vote for a former reality TV star. I was 25 years old and desperate for a security blanket, working a sales job and looking for excuses not to return to college.My husband, Patrick, and I had talked about farming since our first date. We wanted goats. At his 2-acre property in a quiet suburb of Portland, Maine, we kept a few chickens and a scrawny vegetable garden.One morning, Patrick texted me: “I found the place. You’re going to love it. It’s uber cute.”Ninety-three acres in midcoast Maine, with an abandoned farmhouse and huge barn. Overgrown fields, alders encroaching across a pool of fetid swamp water to scratch against the door, no floor in the kitchen, and a single pipe gravity-feeding spring water from the mountain side. A three-hole outhouse was the extent of the plumbing.It was perfect.View image in fullscreen“What’s your end goal, man?” asked Patrick’s old college roommate. “What are you imagining in five years? Her barefoot and pregnant in the garden?”It was 2015 and you could still buy a piece of rural heaven for less than a small fortune – if you were willing to put in some sweat equity. We put a deposit down on some goats and signed our mortgage.Back-to-the-land wasn’t a political statement then. Sure, your urban friends would think you’d lost it, but not in an anti-vax, don’t-tread-on-me way. I had no desire to be barefoot, nor pregnant. But we were still in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, and building a life together from scratch had its romantic draw.I told myself I was sucking the marrow out of life, as Henry David Thoreau had once done. I even wore a T-shirt that said “Resistance is Fertile”. I thought of homesteading as an overtly political – even rebellious – act.Homesteading was in my blood. My mother had gone back-to-the-land with her first husband in the early 1970s, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, hippie icons who taught a generation to “live simply and sanely in a troubled world” with their book, Living the Good Life (1954). Scott Nearing was an outspoken pacifist, communist and protester. He and his wife, Helen, ate raw foods, tended their own land and railed against capitalism long before there were TikTok trends on the subject.Before my mother moved to Maine, she went to her grandparents to share the news of her move. They had grown up on a hardscrabble Missouri farm during the dust bowl. They had moved to town for a reliable job and to give their deaf daughter, my grandmother, the opportunity to study.When my mother told Daddy Kays, as she knew him, about her plans to go rural, he was horrified. Why do you want to do that? he asked. Why would anyone choose to go back to subsistence living? Why did my mother insist on denying what my great grandfather saw as progress?My mother left her homestead in the late 1980s. She moved to town to provide a better education for her young daughters, to seek more stable employment, and to leave a Sisyphean list of chores. By this time, many homesteaders were joining her in shifting back to a less isolated existence.The few who remained largely credited not a deeper sense of political motivation, but a strong community. Where homesteaders had gathered in groups, they seemed to remain. The Nearings had cultivated a following of interns and volunteers who showed up each year and had gradually settled around their homestead in Harborside, Maine. To this day, that area remains a haven for self-sufficient living.It could never be said that Patrick and I did things halfway. For two years, we showered outside in the negative temperatures and biting winds of a Maine winter. We preserved our harvests, bottle fed baby goats, raised pigs and chickens and geese and sheep. Patrick rebuilt our entire home from the studs. Fields were cleared and hayed to feed our animals. All of our equipment came from barters, trades and Craigslist. For what we couldn’t find a good deal on, we made do. Our lives revolved around the movement of firewood, without which we would freeze in winter.View image in fullscreenI wrote a book on our lifestyle – So You Want to Be a Modern Homesteader? – and shared our journey on social media. Through this outreach we connected with others making a similar leap, a community that was tiny and fringe before the interest in rural living sparked during the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns. We greeted each other, in person and online, with the excitement of people into some shared niche hobby. We troubleshot problems, speculated on livestock choices and traded sourdough starters.Even before terms such as “tradwife” became popular, I noticed remarkable consistency in our homesteading friends. When a couple would show up at our farm to buy a goat or lamb, they’d bundle out of their unblemished Volvos with a snot-nosed toddler swaddled in one car seat in the back, the other car seat occupied by a sleeping infant. The mother would have kind, slightly confused eyes and an instant attraction to animals. The men were bearded, in lumberjack plaid.It got to the point I would joke that I could not tell my friends’ husbands apart, so uniform was their charcoal facial hair. The men always knew what they were doing: brimming with the self confidence of someone who recently read Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, possessed of at least one scheme to provide for his family while living off the land.After five years, our routine was set. The farmhouse had electricity and running water. We’d cleared the fields and put in a farm pond. Every spring we welcomed a new batch of goat kids and lambs that we sold, we milked our goats and sheared our sheep. We turned over our land sustainably using pigs, and we collected dozens upon dozens of eggs every day from the chickens, ducks and geese.View image in fullscreenWe were also very tired. We fell into bed every night exhausted, and woke up and did it again. There was little time for hobbies outside of running the farm, and less for intimacy. There was no time for travel – even going down the coast to see our parents had to be planned and limited to a few hours out of the day. When we did have time to sit together, we bickered about chores and finances strained by hungry animals. The addition of an indoor shower did little to remove the grime that stuck in our emotions.Faced with exhaustion and burnout, for a few years we tried to downsize, to reverse out of our headlong rush into self-sufficiency. To make time for occasional date nights and rest, we tried to sell a few animals here and there, but the chores still piled up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen in late 2019, Patrick’s son died unexpectedly. In the onslaught of grief, we had to manage feeding dozens of animals and moving firewood in for the winter. Have you ever had to make sure that a funeral would be over in time for evening chores?Soon after, Covid arrived. Within the online homesteading community, jokes made the rounds about how well positioned for a pandemic we were: we did not need supply chains or contact with the outside world to thrive. And yet there is a difference between choosing to stay at home on the farm and having to, particularly when the farm is wrapped in a thick cloak of sorrow.By the end of the first year of the pandemic, we were ready to get off the farm. And then our entire flock of more than a hundred birds succumbed to bird flu, which at the time was a new avian disaster. Our abundant flock of friends and entertainers disappeared overnight, culled in the wake of a burgeoning pandemic.Community can save a homestead from failing under this kind of stress. But as we tended to our tragedies, the community around us had shifted.People had started making careers out of being influencers and content creators. The homesteading world was no less full of social media personalities than the rest of the internet. And when Covid lockdowns hit in 2020, anyone who was online talking about self-sufficiency had an opportunity. Those of us who had shared our homesteading journeys since we first shot up on Instagram’s algorithm in 2013 were getting phone calls from places including the New York Times asking us about our lifestyle. Our follower counts had exploded. We – the fringes, the freaks – were the popular kids now.Leaning in to the popularity of from-scratch living was a recipe for success. Hannah Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm, once home to rough-and-ready farm life and now curated to a perfect prairie-wife aesthetic, has 10 million followers. All of my other contacts who leaned into the buzz around self-sufficiency in 2020-2021 now have hundreds of thousands of followers.Unfortunately for my pocketbook, I was wrapped up in several blankets worth of troubles at that time, forgetting to reply to emails and sometimes forgetting to just get out of bed.Not all of my friends went full “tradwife”. Some simply began to prothetize more about organic methods, no till gardens, and permaculture practices. They DIYed themselves crazy. How many of them had outside help to manage a menagerie of animals and a list of home improvement projects? Far more than ever mentioned help.Thoreau had brought his laundry into town for his mother. Now, today’s homestead influencers have perfected promoting a from scratch lifestyle while utilizing invisible helping hands at every turn.A less welcoming community grew around these very online homesteaders. When a follower would realize my political views swung left, they’d pepper my pictures with comments about how they’d thought they liked me until they found out I was a radical lefty. Several new homesteading festivals have sprung up around the country, including the popular Homesteaders of America Conference, which draws almost 10,000 homesteaders annually and welcomes speakers such as Joel Salatin, an outspoken libertarian linked to possible roles in the Trump administration and Nick Freitas, a far-right state delegate from Virginia who has referred to the Affordable Care Act as a “cancer”.View image in fullscreenFor those reasons, the embrace of traditional living gave me pause. In between the grief and the daily grind, my community – online and in real life – was becoming more hostile. There were subjects that could not be talked about, loud unfollows when opinions became known, and a lifestyle that had been fun and alternative was warped by ugly exclusion.It felt as if a curtain had been pulled back from my lifestyle choice. I had enjoyed the connection to my food and the land through sustainable living, but I had never thought of my lifestyle as a step backwards in time. I had laughed at the idea I might someday be barefoot and pregnant in the garden. But, with a never ending list of homestead to-dos, I was as tied to the wood stove and the milking routine as an 1800s woman before me.The happiest “homesteaders” I know continue to thrive in semi-urban environments, with neighbors who stop by to check on the ducks if they want a break from the farm. Most of them are minimally online, disengaged from the performative fetishization of the lifestyle. They keep one foot in the garden, and one on the pavement of society.Today, Patrick and I keep a few goats and a garden in the backyard. We have the ability to leave the farm now and then for a trip, and we’re in the process of moving closer to family and culture. We are taking steps to ensure that our hard work is preserved, working with a land conservation group to keep the property in farmland long after we are gone.We have no aspirations towards self-sufficiency, but a desire to experience varied aspects of life while remaining connected to our food sources. I now have a set of skills I can draw on if I find myself in the kind of calamitous situation that sections of the homesteader community are prepping for. I feel a deep appreciation for the labor of food production. I’ve also learned to embrace the freedom of progress. Today, I run, I read, I write, I take the time to walk in nature and sit and converse with my husband.Today, I am able to slow down and live. More

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      in US Politics

      US weather forecasts save lives and money. Trump’s cuts put us all at risk

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      Across the United States, from rural communities to coastal cities, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) is an integral part of our daily lives, safeguarding communities and fostering economic vitality.Whether it is tracking the path of hurricanes, managing our nation’s fisheries, providing critical information to air traffic controllers and airlines, or helping farmers plan for weather extremes, Noaa’s science, services and products have a significant impact on every American.Having served as the deputy administrator of Noaa and before that its general counsel, I have witnessed first-hand the indispensable role this agency plays. The Trump administration’s proposed draconian, reckless and, in many cases, unlawful budget and personnel cuts to the agency should alarm us all.These cuts will do little to achieve their stated goal of reducing the size and cost of government. They instead jeopardize the safety, economic prosperity and overall wellbeing of our nation.I should add that the administration’s assault on science is not limited to my former agency. Government-wide cuts are sparking outrage and demonstrations across the country.Each year, Noaa’s National Weather Service (NWS) issues more than 1.5m forecasts and 50,000 weather warnings. By providing critical lead time ahead of hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and severe storms, Noaa’s forecasts save billions of dollars in economic losses annually and thousands of lives.Noaa’s continuing efforts to improve the accuracy of hurricane track forecasts have reduced the area of uncertainty for coastal evacuations, helping local governments, businesses and families avoid unnecessary costs. A recent study estimated that improvements in forecasting have resulted in an annual per-hurricane cost reduction of $5bn.In the aviation industry, Noaa forecasts and data-monitoring systems help ensure safe and efficient operations. Accurate weather information is essential for planning flight routes, avoiding severe weather and ensuring safe takeoffs and landings. Noaa also tracks weather in space, including solar flares and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt or interfere with technologies essential to safe air travel: satellite communications, GPS navigation and aircraft communication systems.The importance of Noaa’s work extends beyond public safety and economic savings to a range of private-sector applications. Private weather providers such as AccuWeather and the Weather Channel depend on Noaa’s open data to offer localized forecasts, while insurance companies use it to assess risk and set policy rates.The US commercial seafood industry supports roughly 1.7m jobs and generates more than $300bn annually in total sales. Noaa’s fisheries management, research and inspection programs are critical to sustaining these jobs, preserving ecosystems, ensuring robust seafood supplies, and guaranteeing that safe seafood is sold throughout the United States.Additionally, saltwater recreational fishing is a significant economic driver in coastal communities, supporting tens of thousands of jobs and contributing billions annually to local economies. All of this is reliant on well-managed fisheries and healthy marine habitats.Moreover, Noaa marine sanctuaries protect critical habitats, support biodiversity and provide opportunities for research, education and tourism, contributing billions of dollars to local economies. For instance, the Florida Keys national marine sanctuary, one of 18 in the US, is estimated to contribute $4bn annually to Florida’s economy and supports 43,000 jobs.Farmers and ranchers depend on Noaa’s seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasts to make decisions about planting, harvesting, irrigation and risk management. A single drought or flood forecast can mean the difference between profitable harvests and financial ruin.Similarly, the US Department of Transportation reports that more than $5.4tn of commerce crosses US ports annually. Noaa’s nautical charts, tide tables and navigation services are essential for keeping these ports and waterways running safely and efficiently, thereby supporting global trade and local jobs.Furthermore, urban planners and emergency managers at all levels rely on Noaa’s climate data and long-range forecasts and projections to design roads, bridges and flood defenses capable of withstanding rising sea levels and stronger storms. By ensuring that infrastructure investments are based on accurate, up-to-date data, billions of dollars in future repair and disaster costs can be avoided.From safeguarding families in the path of severe storms to supporting the economic health of fishing towns and agricultural communities, Noaa’s programs are indispensable. Efforts by the Trump administration to hobble the agency through budget and wholesale staff reductions are not only misguided but also dangerous. If President Trump and his administration are serious about making America great, they will recognize that funding Noaa is an investment that saves lives, guides critical industries, strengthens our economy and reinforces our nation’s global leadership in innovation and science.

      Terry Garcia served as the assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and as deputy administrator of Noaa. He also served as its general counsel More

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      in US Politics

      Trump officials to reconsider whether greenhouse gases cause harm amid climate rollbacks

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      Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.The so-called endangerment finding, which followed a supreme court ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases, provides the underpinning for all rules aimed at cutting the pollution that scientists have unequivocally found is worsening the climate crisis.Despite the enormous and growing body of evidence of devastation caused by rising emissions, including trillions of dollars in economic costs, Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and dismissed those concerned by its worsening impacts as “climate lunatics”.Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency would reconsider the endangerment finding due to concerns that it had spawned “an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas”.Zeldin wrote that Wednesday was the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history” and that “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age”.Environmentalists reacted with horror to the announcement and vowed to defend the overwhelming findings of science and the US’s ability to address the climate crisis through the courts, which regularly struck down Trump’s rollbacks in his first term. “The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet,” said Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.“Come hell or high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives. This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”In all, the EPA issued 31 announcements within just a few hours that take aim at almost every major environmental rule designed to protect Americans’ clean air and water, as well as a livable climate.The barrage included a move to overturn a Biden-era plan to slash pollution spewing from coal-fired power plants, which itself was a reduced version of an Obama administration initiative that was struck down by the supreme court.The EPA will also revisit pollution standards for cars and trucks, which Zeldin said had imposed a “crushing regulatory regime” upon auto companies that are now shifting towards electric vehicles, consider weakening rules limiting sooty air pollution that’s linked to an array of health problems, potentially axe requirements that power plants not befoul waterways or dump their toxic waste and will consider further narrowing how it implements the Clean Water Act in general.The stunning broadside of actions against pollution rules could, if upheld by the courts, reshape Americans’ environment in ways not seen since major legislation was passed in the 1970s to end an era of smoggy skies and burning rivers that became the norm following American industrialization.Pollutants from power plants, highways and industry cause a range of heart, lung and other health problems, with greenhouse gases among this pollution driving up the global temperature and fueling catastrophic heatwaves, floods, storms and other impacts.“Zeldin’s EPA is dragging America back to the days before the Clean Air Act, when people were dying from pollution,” said Dominique Browning, director of the Moms Clean Air Force. “This is unacceptable. And shameful. We will oppose with all our hearts to protect our children from this cruel, monstrous action.”The EPA’s moves come shortly after its decision to shutter all its offices that deal with addressing the disproportionate burden of pollution faced by poor people and minorities in the US, amid a mass firing of agency staff. Zeldin has also instructed that $20bn in grants to help address the climate crisis be halted, citing potential fraud. Democrats have questioned whether these moves are legal.Former EPA staff have reacted with shock to the upending of the agency.“Today marks the most disastrous day in EPA history,” said Gina McCarthy, who was EPA administrator under Obama. “Rolling these rules back is not just a disgrace, it’s a threat to all of us. The agency has fully abdicated its mission to protect Americans’ health and wellbeing.”The Trump administration has promised additional environmental rollbacks in the coming weeks. The Energy Dominance Council that the president established last month is looking to eliminate a vast array of regulations in an effort to boost the fossil fuel industry, the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told the oil and gas conference CeraWeek in Houston on Wednesday. “We will come up with the ways that we can cut red tape,” he said. “We can easily get rid of 20-30% of our regulations.”Additional reporting by Dharna Noor More

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      in US Politics

      US exits fund that compensates poorer countries for global heating

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      The Trump administration has withdrawn the US from a global agreement under which the developed nations most responsible for the climate crisis pledged to partly compensate developing countries for irreversible harms caused by global heating.The loss and damage fund was agreed at the Cop28 UN climate summit in late 2023 – a hard-won victory after years of diplomatic and grassroots advocacy by developing nations that bear the brunt of the climate crisis despite having contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions. The fund signalled a commitment by developed, polluting countries to provide financial support for some of the irreversible economic and noneconomic losses from sea level rise, desertification, drought and floods already happening.The US has a long record of delay tactics and obstructionism, and had so far pledged only $17.5m (£13.5m) to the loss and damage fund, which became operational on 1 January this year. Now the US, the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, will no longer participate in the initiative.“On behalf of the United States Department of the Treasury, I write to inform you that the United States is withdrawing from the board for the fund for responding to loss and damage, effective immediately,” said Rebecca Lawlor, the deputy director at the US Office of Climate and Environment, in a letter to the fund.The decision to abandon the loss and damage fund was condemned by climate advocates from the global north and south.“The US decision to step away from this commitment at such a crucial moment sends the wrong message to the global community and to those in dire need of assistance,” said Mohamed Adow, a climate policy analyst and director of the thinktank Power Shift Africa. “We urge the United States to reconsider its position in the interest of the planet and future generations … this regrettable decision risks undermining collective progress and erodes the trust necessary for effective international cooperation.”Rachel Rose Jackson, a research director at Corporate Accountability, said: “Let’s be clear – the US has never been a climate champion. Yet the Trump administration’s anti-climate action agenda – including its withdrawal from the loss and damage fund board – is a wrecking ball made of dynamite. It’s dangerous, it’s malicious and it will destroy lives.“We cannot allow the Trump administration, and the greedy corporations pulling the strings, to get away with destroying the planet. It’s time for the United States to pay up its climate debt and do its fair share of climate action.”Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African Group of Negotiators, a coalition of African nations participating in UN climate negotiations, said: “This decision, made by the nation with the largest historical responsibility for climate change, jeopardises vital support for vulnerable countries facing irreversible climate impacts.”Trump has already pulled out of the 2015 Paris climate accords – for the second time after the US was reinstated under Joe Biden – claiming the international agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and preventing climate catastrophe ripped off the US.“I’m immediately withdrawing from the unfair, one-sided Paris climate accord rip-off,” he said, signing the executive order on his first day in office. “The United States will not sabotage our own industries while China pollutes with impunity.”China currently ranks as the top greenhouse gas emitter but is also the global leader in the manufacture and deployment of renewable energy. The US is the largest historical emitter and, while emissions have fallen alongside reductions in coal, it has become the world’s largest oil and gas producer by a huge margin in recent years.Record-breaking ocean and atmospheric temperatures have caused chaos around the world and across the US, including devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and deadly flooding across Florida and southern Appalachia. Meanwhile, several of Trump’s policies, including his pledge to “drill, baby drill”, dismantle federal agencies, and impose tariffs that threaten a trade war, risk derailing the burgeoning US renewables sector.The loss and damage fund is a work in progress. As of late January, 27 countries had pledged a combined total of $741m – the equivalent of about 0.2% of the irreversible losses developing countries are facing from global heating every year.The US withdrawal appears to be another rejection of global diplomacy and the reality of the climate crisis.Harjeet Singh, a climate activist and founding director of the Delhi-based Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, said: “The decision by the Trump administration exemplifies a longstanding pattern of obstruction by the US government in securing necessary finance for addressing climate impacts, [and] undermines global efforts to deliver climate justice.“As the largest historical emitter, the United States bears a significant share of the blame for the climate adversities affecting vulnerable populations worldwide. We must hold them accountable and ensure they contribute their fair share towards global climate reparations.” More