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      Our lives depend on seeds. Trump’s cuts put our vast reserves at risk | Thor Hanson

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      From 1862 until 1923, US senators and members of Congress provided vast numbers of seeds to constituents. At its peak, the congressional seed distribution program delivered over 60m seed packets directly to farmers and market gardeners every year, helping introduce new varieties of everything from wheat and corn to oats, soybeans, flowers and vegetables. A century later, far fewer Americans till the soil for a living, but seeds remain central to our lives.To understand the importance of seeds, try to imagine a morning without them. It would begin naked on a bare mattress, with no cozy sheets or pajamas, and there would be no fluffy towel to wrap up in after your shower. All of those things come from the seeds of the cotton plant. Stumbling wet into the kitchen, you would find no coffee, and no toast or bagel to go with it. There would be no eggs, no bacon, no cereal, no milk. All of those staples come from seeds or from livestock raised on seed crops. And if you thought you might console yourself with a chocolate bar, you can forget it. Cocoa powder, and the cocoa butter that makes it melt in your mouth, are both derived from seeds.Maintaining the seed diversity and abundance we rely on requires constant development of new varieties to combat disease, increase production and adapt to changing conditions. Seed advances are particularly urgent now, as farmers confront the fickle weather of a warming planet while working to meet a projected 50-60% rise in global food demand by 2050. Although elected officials no longer send out seeds through the mail, federal support for these efforts remains vital.In the era of Doge, that support has been flipped on its head.The US Department of Agriculture employs many plant breeders directly and funds many more through grants and partnerships, but the crown jewel of its seed program resides in a bunker-like building in Fort Collins, Colorado. The national seed bank houses more than 2bn carefully preserved specimens in a facility designed to withstand floods, fires, earthquakes, power outages and tornadoes. With over 620,000 varieties from nearly 17,000 different species, it is one of the world’s largest seed collections and a major supplier to the global seed vault in Svalbard, Norway.It is also at risk.While words like “vault” and “bank” imply simply turning the key and walking away, managing a seed collection demands constant activity. Even in cold storage, the specimens steadily degrade and must be tested regularly to make sure they’re still viable. When germination rates drop for any particular sample, those seeds must be planted and grown to maturity – in the right conditions – to produce a fresh supply. That activity takes place at over 20 research stations in locations (and climates) as diverse as North Dakota, Texas, California, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.Known officially as the US National Plant Germplasm System, the seed bank and its network of regional facilities recently lost 10% of their workforce in the Doge firings, including farm managers, research scientists, lab technicians, IT specialists, orchardists and more. Some have since been rehired, at least temporarily, but the program remains in turmoil. Projects interrupted or suspended range from germination trials to seed regeneration, research lending and many longterm breeding programs, weakening the entire enterprise.Plants don’t wait on politics. Any seed varieties lost now will simply be unavailable to improve crops and address challenges in the future. The importance of a robust and diverse seed bank cannot be overstated. To combat the invasive Russian wheat aphid, for example, plant breeders screened over 54,000 wheat and barley samples to find a handful of precious strains with natural resistance.It’s time for Congress to return to the seed business. Without its intervention, backed by the courts, additional firings appear imminent. Undermining the nation’s seed security undermines its food security and embodies the definition of reckless: “utterly unconcerned about consequences”.For those in the seed world, that attitude is hard to fathom. After all, planting a seed is always about what comes next, a conscious act of forethought and optimism. In other words, an act of hope.

      Thor Hanson is a biologist and author whose books include The Triumph of Seeds and Close to Home. More

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      Clean energy spending boosts GOP districts. But lawmakers are keeping quiet as Trump targets incentives

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      Billions of dollars in clean energy spending and jobs have overwhelmingly flowed to parts of the US represented by Republican lawmakers. But these members of Congress are still largely reticent to break with Donald Trump’s demands to kill off key incentives for renewables, even as their districts bask in the rewards.The president has called for the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act – a sweeping bill passed by Democrats that has helped turbocharge investments in wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electric vehicle manufacturing in the US – calling it a “giant scam”. Trump froze funding allocated under the act and has vowed to claw back grants aimed at reducing planet-heating pollution.Republicans who now control Congress have to decide if they will eliminate the IRA’s grants and, more crucially, the tax credits that have spurred a boom in clean energy activity in their own districts. A total of 78% of this spending has gone to Republican-held suburban and rural districts across the US, according to data from Atlas Public Policy.Of the 20 congressional districts that have attracted the most clean energy manufacturing investment since the IRA passed in 2022, 18 are represented by Republicans, according to Atlas. The top three districts, in North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada, represented by Richard Hudson, Earl Carter and Mark Amodei, respectively, have collectively seen nearly $30bn in new investments since the legislation.Despite this, none of the 18 Republican representatives contacted by the Guardian would comment on whether they agree with Trump that clean energy incentives should be scrapped.“Members aren’t necessarily looking for opportunities to disagree with the White House at the moment,” said Heather Reams, the president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a center-right group that advocates in favor of clean energy.The Atlas data set is the newest in a series of reports showing the IRA benefitted Republican-led districts the most. And the largest individual pools of money from the bill also went to projects in red communities, according to a separate data set shared with the Guardian by an anonymous source at the Department of Energy (DoE).The top grant from the IRA, worth $500m, went to a General Motors plant in Lansing, Michigan – represented by Republican Tom Barrett – the DoE data shows. And though the biggest loan of $15bn went to California’s Pacific Gas and Electric Company utility to expand clean power and modernize infrastructure, the second and third largest went to battery plants in Glendale, Kentucky, and Kokomo, Indiana, represented by conservatives Brett Guthrie and Victoria Spartz, respectively. Hageman, Guthrie and Spartz did not respond to requests for comment.Some Republicans have publicly lauded the tax credits’ impacts on their districts even as they have attacked the IRA. The ultraconservative Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, praised the IRA-funded expansion of solar manufacturing in her district but called the bill itself “dangerous”, winning her scrutiny from Joe Biden in 2023. Her district saw more investment than all but 14 others, the Atlas data shows.In a sign of private nervousness among conservatives about a repeal of the tax credits, though, a group of 21 Republican lawmakers, including Carter and Amodei, signed a letter to colleagues warning that axing the IRA risks planned projects and would escalate energy bills. Some conservatives made similar calls during a January hearing in the House ways and means committee.But these voices have gotten quieter in recent weeks, with some Republicans who privately supported the letter refusing to sign it for strategic reasons, and some letter signatories saying the IRA tax credits should not necessarily be a major priority.Ongoing budget concerns have made it especially difficult for conservatives to defend the credits. Republicans’ fiscal year 2025 proposal authorized $4.5tn in tax cuts through 2034 and called on committees to partially offset the cost with $2tn in spending reductions. A full repeal of the IRA’s green energy tax credits would slash about $850bn in spending the Tax Foundation thinktank recently found.“They’re trying to kind of balance finding the money so that they’re not adding to the federal debt, while also trying to protect these beneficial and popular tax credits and provisions,” said Dana Nuccitelli, the research coordinator at the non-partisan advocacy group Citizens’ Climate Lobby. “It’s not easy.”Reams, of the Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions thinktank, said that as the realities of lost jobs and increasing energy costs become clear, Trump may change his mind about the need to repeal the credits. “There’s what Donald Trump says – remember, he hated EVs, but he just bought a Tesla – and what he does,” she said. “You’ve got to not take it all so literally and bide some time to get a sense of what really is going on.”Still, there are already signs that Trump’s hostile stance towards renewables – he has halted approvals of wind and solar projects on federal land and waters – – is starting to dampen clean energy activity in the US.Approximately $8bn in clean energy manufacturing activity has been canceled so far this year, Atlas has calculated, with a separate analysis by Climate Power finding that 50,000 jobs have been lost or are threatened.A full repeal of the IRA would hike energy bills for households and imperil a further 1.5m jobs in the US, according to yet another recent report, by Energy Innovation. “Many of those jobs will be at risk if the IRA is repealed,” Jim Farley, the chief executive of Ford, warned recently about the company’s plans to expand its electric vehicle factories.“The Trump administration aims to restore US manufacturing jobs, but cutting existing federal energy incentives could really undermine that goal,” said Tom Taylor, a senior policy analyst at Atlas.It’s a message some climate advocates have been bringing to Republican lawmakers in recent weeks in an attempt to save the tax credits. Citizens’ Climate Lobby, for instance, this month lobbied 47 Republicans on Capitol Hill calling on them to protect the tax credits, and is now asking its members to call their Republican representatives, focusing not on their climate benefits but on their potential to spur economic growth.“Everybody loves manufacturing jobs,” Nuccitelli said.In their lobbying, Citizens Climate Lobby is also highlighting the low price of building clean power, the need for abundant energy amid forecasted spikes in energy from the artificial intelligence boom, and the fact that repealing the incentives could cause household electricity bills to increase by about 10% over the next decade.Despite the lack of public support for the tax credits from GOP lawmakers, the organization said they enjoy significant support on Capitol Hill, with some GOP lawmakers calling to protect them in private meetings and personal phone calls with other congressional colleagues.Only two Democratic-led districts were on the list provided by the Atlas Public Policy. One was Arizona’s Raúl Grijalva, who was a strong advocate for the IRA’s green incentives before he died this month.“The Inflation Reduction Act is a vital investment in the future stability of the planet,” his office wrote in a statement to the Guardian before his passing. “As a self-proclaimed business genius, Trump should easily be able to understand the high financial and humanitarian costs of increasing climate catastrophes.” More

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      Tesla investors brace for global sales data amid consumer backlash over Elon Musk

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      Tesla investors are bracing for evidence of declining global demand this week as the electric carmaker battles headwinds including a consumer backlash against its chief executive, Elon Musk.On 2 April, the US company will release data for first-quarter deliveries – a proxy for sales – that is expected to show a dip on the same period last year. The figures follow global protests on Saturday against Musk and Tesla, targeting the carmaker’s showrooms.Analysts have been lowering their forecasts amid evidence that Musk’s senior role in the Trump administration has damaged the Tesla brand.Dan Ives, managing director at the US financial firm Wedbush Securities and a self-avowed Tesla “core bull”, forecast deliveries to come in at between 355,000 and 360,000, a fall of 7% on the same period last year and down from initial predictions across Wall Street of 400,000.View image in fullscreenIves, who recently warned investors that Tesla was facing a “brand tornado crisis moment”, said 30% of the anticipated decline was due to brand damage associated with Musk and his involvement in the so-called department of government efficiency (Doge). The advisory body has targeted federal agencies with cost-cutting policies and redundancies.Other issues affecting Tesla’s figures during the first three months of the year include consumers waiting for an update to the top-selling Model Y. The US is Tesla’s biggest market.In a note to investors last week, Ives said that while “much of this softness is related to customers waiting for Model Y refreshes along with a lower-cost new model set to be launched by the summer … the anti-Musk and brand issues are clearly at play”.Matthias Schmidt, a Berlin-based electric car analyst, said Musk was “hitting his liberal consumer demographic exactly where it hurts”.“He has become the core toxic issue behind the disintegration of the brand and should step-aside before it explodes like one of his rockets,” added Schmidt, who is expecting first-quarter deliveries in western Europe to come in at just under 70,000 for the first time since the end of 2022.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenAmong Tesla owners, the Democrat owner group has fallen from 40% during the Biden administration to 29% now, with the Republican group averaging about 30% since 2021, according to market research firm Strategic Vision.Last week, Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on cars from overseas, with Tesla also expecting to be affected despite making its cars for the US market in America. The company imports some parts for its US-made cars. Last week, Musk wrote on X, his social media platform, that Tesla is “not unscathed” by tariffs. He added: “The tariff impact on Tesla is still significant.”The tariffs threaten to plunge the global auto industry into “pure chaos”, according to Ives. “Every auto maker in the world will have to raise prices in some form selling into the US and the supply chain logistics of this tariff announcement heard around the world is hard to even put our arms around at this moment,” he said in a note to investors last week.However, on Saturday, Trump said he “couldn’t care less” if carmakers raise prices in response to the tariffs on foreign-made vehicles. Indeed, the US president told NBC News that he hoped foreign carmakers raise prices as it means “people are gonna buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” More

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      ‘Protect our future’: Alaskan Indigenous town fights ‘destructive’ uranium mine project

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      For generations, the people of Elim have subsisted off the forests and waters of north-west Alaska: hunting caribou and bearded seals in the late winter, gathering bird eggs and wild greens from the tundra in early spring, and fishing the salmon run in the late summer.The Iñupiat community of 350 people lives on one of the state’s most productive and biodiverse fisheries, an inlet of the Bering Sea called the Norton Sound. They refer to their land as Munaaquestevut, or “the one who cares for us”.“We depend on the land to put food on the table, to keep our tribe healthy. We have a subsistence economy with a cash overlay,” said Emily Murray, a resident of Elim and vice-president of Norton Bay Watershed Council, a non-profit tribal organization focused on regional water quality.“We’ve been doing this for generations upon generations.”Now, an intensifying global competition for critical minerals and the priorities of a new administration threaten to put their land, their fishery and their lives at risk, members of the community say.This summer, the Canadian mining company Panther Minerals is set to start exploration for a uranium mine at the headwaters of the Tubuktulik river, adjacent to Elim’s land. David Hedderly-Smith, a consultant to Panther and the owner of mining claims for the property, has said the site could become the “uranium capital of America”.The people of Elim have opposed the mine since last May, when Panther Minerals announced its intention to apply for exploration permits. In interviews, they said they feared for their health, and spoke of the cancer and contamination that followed uranium mining on Navajo land in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.View image in fullscreen“If [the river] becomes contaminated, it will have an impact on the whole Bering Sea. That’s the way I see it,” said Johnny Jemewouk, a resident of Elim.Last summer, Elim successfully pressured the Bureau of Land Management, which manages a small portion of the claim, to deny Panther Minerals’ exploration permit on the land. In December, a regional tribal consortium passed a resolution “categorically” opposing the mine.However, Alaska’s department of natural resources (DNR), which manages most of the land, has so far refused Elim’s requests for a consultation – and brushed aside over a hundred comments from the community over plans for the mine. In October, they granted Panther Minerals a four-year exploration permit, which will allow the company to start drilling wells and taking uranium core samples this June.Elim has appealed against the permit. But with time running out, the community has gone one step further, protesting against the mine using the largest international forum available to them: the Iditarod, Alaska’s grueling annual sled dog race, which passes through their village on its way to Nome.As musher Jesse Holmes approached Elim’s checkpoint and the 1,008th mile of the race, more than 70 students and community members waited for him in the Arctic night. They held signs saying “Protect our future”, and “Keep the uranium in the ground.”It was their chance to tell the world what their way of life means to them.“I want to protect our future,” said Paige Keith, an eighth-grader from Elim. “If they go through with this, it’s going to affect our animals and our water. I want to help try to stop the mine.”‘A race for resources’As global competition for critical minerals intensifies, the Trump administration is eyeing Alaska.An executive order issued on Trump’s first day in office calls on the US to “fully avail itself of Alaska’s vast lands and resources”. The order was applauded by the state’s mining industry.The order reversed a number of Biden-era protections for Alaskan land, opening oil and gas drilling in the Arctic national wildlife refuge and ending restrictions on logging.Several of these reversals put the administration at cross purposes with the Native communities that subsist off Alaska’s land. For example, one of them enables plans for a mining access road in Alaska’s Brooks Range, which a tribal network has called “one of the biggest and most destructive” projects in the state’s history.“We’re in an age of green transition. We’re looking for other forms of energy. And, with the new administration, there is this push to mine domestically,” said Jasmine Jemewouk, an activist from Elim.“It’s a race for resources and they’re looking at Alaska.”The coming years are likely to see continued conflicts between Alaska’s powerful mining industry and Native communities – especially as the US seeks to onshore its critical mineral supply chain. And while Panther Minerals’ exploration permit is up to the state of Alaska, and not the federal government, advocates and community members said the Trump administration may further embolden Alaska’s DNR to brush aside Elim’s concerns. Alaska’s governor, Mike Dunleavy, has welcomed Trump’s executive orders, saying: “Happy days are here again.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The current administration in Alaska is very industrial extraction driven,” said Hal Shepherd, an attorney and water rights advocate based in Homer, Alaska. “Trump and Dunleavy basically are partners in developing Alaska.”“Our current governor is pretty much a typical Republican. If it ain’t nailed down, sell it,” said Robert Keith, president of the native village of Elim.Alaska’s DNR did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Lack of consultationIn interviews with local media, Hedderly-Smith, the project’s consultant, has said the people of Elim have “been misled and they’re spreading mistruths”, regarding the dangers of the uranium mine.Robert Birmingham, Panther Minerals’ president, did not respond to queries regarding Elim’s health concerns, saying the company had yet to finalize its mining plans and could not comment.“We are positive about the uranium opportunity in Alaska, as it has been underexplored,” he wrote, and said the company would “continue outreach and the conversation with the Elim community” once its plans were finalized.Hedderly-Smith has also said the company would “like to be friends” with Elim if it develops the mine. But while Birmingham said the company had made an attempt to contact Elim in early 2024, Keith, the president of Elim, said that Panther Minerals had never come to their village or attempted to contact the community since they first applied for the permit.For Elim, the plans for the mine raise a history of state and federal failures to safeguard native communities from the harms of mining. In 2008, the community successfully rallied against another Canadian company, Triex Minerals, which had started to explore for uranium near their village. While organizing their opposition, the students of Elim researched the effects of uranium mining elsewhere in the US.They taught the community about the example of the Navajo, and the cancer risks and health problems that came after they allowed uranium mines on their land.Should a mine be built in Elim, Panther Minerals has said it would probably use in situ leaching to extract uranium – a technique said to be less disruptive than conventional methods to mine the material, including those used on Navajo land. Shepherd and the community, however, have said that the project’s proposed use of groundwater threatens to contaminate the fishery and ecosystem.Keith said the community had a reason to be cautious about government promises. Closer to home, he gave the example of Moses Point, a fishing village next to Elim which hosted a military airfield during the second world war. The military had buried or left a lot of material at the site, he said, including thousands of drums of high-octane fuel.“Most of those people where the concentrations of drums were, including my mother – the majority of them survived or died of cancer,” he said. “So we’re kind of sensitive.”Jasmine Jemewouk, the activist, added: “What they’re not realizing is that the community bears the burden. Whatever they leave behind, whatever is contaminated in the process … We’re not being consulted at all.”Her grandfather, Johnny Jemewouk, agreed. He said the time to act is now.“People, the way I see it here, they don’t realize what the future holds for them once they start getting sick. Either they start getting sick, or the food they can’t eat, or the water they can’t play in,” he said.“When that starts taking effect, they’ll want to say, ‘let’s do something.’ But that’s too late.” More

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      In California, Confusion Abounds Over Status of 2 National Monuments

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      A week after the White House indicated it would eliminate two national monuments in California, many remain unsure whether President Trump has actually revoked the lands’ protected status.Mr. Trump announced last Friday that he would rescind a proclamation signed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. a week before he left office that established the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments, which encompassed more than 848,000 acres of desert and mountainous land.The White House then released a fact sheet that included a bullet point stating that Mr. Trump would be “terminating proclamations” declaring monuments that safeguarded “vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production.”The New York Times confirmed last Saturday that Mr. Trump had indeed rescinded that proclamation. But later that day, the bullet point listing termination of national monuments disappeared from the White House fact sheet.A post on X sent by a verified White House account last week still included the terminations of national monuments, and has not been edited or removed as of Saturday morning.The White House declined to answer questions about the discrepancy.“We were obviously very disappointed to see that fact sheet go up and then confused to see it come back down,” Mark Green, the executive director of CalWild, a nonprofit in California that advocates for wild spaces on public lands. “There’s very little clarity about what’s going on, and there’s such a lack of transparency with this administration that it’s just really hard to know what’s happening.”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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      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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      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