Former federal employees devastated by president’s mass firings: ‘We’re at risk of losing our public lands to the billionaire agenda’
Approximately 2,300 people have been terminated from the agencies that manage the 35m acres (14m hectares) of federal public lands in the US.
These are our lands. They encompass national parks and forests, wilderness and marine protected areas, scenic rivers. They are home to campgrounds, river accesses, hiking trails and myriad other sites and facilities that more than 500 million people visit each year.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
02/22/2025 - 10:00
02/22/2025 - 08:00
Research group says discovery could lead to new type of environmentally friendly farming
A biological mechanism that makes plant roots more attractive to soil microbes has been discovered by scientists in the UK. The breakthrough – by researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, Norfolk – opens the door to the creation of crops requiring reduced amounts of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers, they say.
“We can now think of developing a new type of environmentally friendly farming with crops that require less artificial fertiliser,” said Dr Myriam Charpentier, whose group carried out the research.
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02/22/2025 - 02:00
Fast fashion and drinks cans among technological-age matter most likely to endure as fossils, say scientists
As an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy. But two scientists exploring which items from our technological civilisation are most likely to survive for many millions of years as fossils have reached an ironic but instructive conclusion: fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature.
“Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.”
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02/22/2025 - 02:00
The PM and his ministers are supporting illiberal laws that hard-right authoritarians could apply with zeal
If the Trump project implodes, it might take with it the extreme and far-right European parties to which it is umbilically connected. Like all such parties, the hard-right Reform UK poses as patriotic while grovelling to foreign interests, and this could be its undoing.
But we cannot bank on it. The UK government must do all it can to prevent the disaster that has befallen several other European nations. If it fails to meet people’s needs and keeps echoing far-right talking points, we could go the same way as Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Finland, Sweden and Austria.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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02/21/2025 - 17:08
In Buriticupu, about 1,200 people risk losing their homes, and residents have seen the problem escalate in 30 years
Authorities in a city in the Brazilian Amazon have declared a state of emergency after huge sinkholes opened up, threatening hundreds of homes.
Several buildings in Buriticupu, in Maranhão state, have already been destroyed, and about 1,200 people of a population of 55,000 risk losing their homes into a widening abyss.
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02/21/2025 - 12:52
Scientists outline the urgency to better identify the significant damage sand extraction across the world heaps upon marine biodiversity.
02/21/2025 - 09:00
As Ningaloo reef bleaches and an election looms, we must hold to account those who stand in the way of our safety – the small cohort profiting from fossil fuels, and the politicians who protect them
Late last spring, I was part of an expedition to Scott Reef, a magnificent coral atoll nearly 300 kilometres off the Kimberley coast. And while it was a privilege to be in such a remote and wonderful place, watching rare and endemic sea life drifting past, the moment I tipped from the boat in my mask and fins, I knew something was wrong.
The water was too hot. Not tropical warm, but uncomfortably hot.
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02/21/2025 - 09:00
The future of Tasmanian salmon farms has become a political issue centred on whether they can coexist with the endangered Maugean skate
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Anthony Albanese is caught in a pincer movement over a pre-election pledge that he will protect salmon farming in Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour, with conservationists and industry leaders both urging him to rethink the commitment.
The future of salmon farming in the harbour on the state’s west coast has become a sharp political issue centred on whether it can coexist with the endangered Maugean skate, an endemic ray-like species that has survived since the age of the dinosaurs.
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02/21/2025 - 09:00
Exclusive: Ged Kearney, Kate Thwaites, Josh Burns, Jerome Laxale, Sally Sitou, Alicia Payne, Josh Wilson and Renee Coffey will get extra door-knocking, phone banking and push ads
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Labor’s grassroots environmental action network is mobilising behind pro-nature MPs it wants in federal parliament to push the party to adopt a more ambitious green agenda.
Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) will support a select group of eight Labor “climate and environmental champions” at the federal election, actively promoting their green credentials to voters and helping with door-knocking and other grassroots campaigning.
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02/21/2025 - 09:00
Concerns are mounting that depleting already thinned ranks will only hamper extreme weather response efforts
Federal agencies that play crucial roles in administering conservation, recreation and resource development across roughly than 640m acres of the nation’s public lands were thrust into a state of chaos this week after the Trump administration fired thousands of federal workers, leaving key operational gaps in its wake.
The agencies are also on the frontline of mitigating the escalating effects from the climate crisis and concerns are mounting that the depletion of already thinned ranks will only hamper efforts to respond and recover from extreme weather events.
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