The expansion of two vast Pacific marine parks near Chile have been suspended for six weeks, leaving protections for around 337,000 square kilometers (130,000 square miles) of ocean in limbo. Former President Gabriel Boric signed a decree creating marine parks Juan Fernández II and Nazca-Desventuradas II on March 10, his last day in office. Together the parks would protect roughly 10% of the nation’s exclusive economic zone. However, the subsequent president José Antonio Kast, suspended the decree on his first day in office as part of a broader review of environmental measures. The suspension has created unease among local communities and conservation groups. “We are concerned, obviously, with how long this is taking,” Max Bello, an ocean policy expert at the Blue Marine Foundation, a global conservation nonprofit, told Mongabay in an audio message. “We know that there are pressures, particularly from fishing interests, specifically the highly illegal and unsustainable semi-industrial swordfish fisheries … who have not agreed with the expansion.” The decree grants the highest levels of marine protection, permitting only scientific research and tourism, Bello told Mongabay. It prohibits all extractive activities, including any type of fishing. Artisanal fishing is permitted in the multiple-use coastal marine area directly surrounding the Juan Fernández archipelago.    Bello said there are concerns that the protections for Juan Fernández II and Nazca-Desventuradas II could be weakened. “That would be truly dangerous, regrettable and concerning.” Chile’s Environment Ministry told the Blue Marine Foundation that the suspension is part of a routine review and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Eastern Africa's Turkana Rift is both a hotbed for fossil discoveries of our earliest ancestors and a literal hotbed of volcanic activity caused by shifting tectonic plates. Now researchers have found that Earth's underlying crust in the region has been significantly thinned, presaging Africa's eventual breakup—and with that finding, the researchers offer a new perspective on how Turkana's world-famous fossil record of human evolution came to be. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

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Amid the chaos of the war with Iran, Americans have already seen gas prices rise. Soon, we are likely to see the price of food rise, too, as farmers face rising fuel and fertilizer prices. As Congress considers the 2026 Farm Bill, all Americans are recognizing that farming’s reach doesn’t stop at edge of the field.

We have been here before: During Russia’s war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic, disruptions in labor and shipping, along with increased costs of equipment and fertilizers, caused food prices to soar. Consumers famously paid the price: $10 for a carton of eggs, $8 for a gallon of milk. Small and midsize farmers suffered, too, facing a sudden spike in bankruptcy.

Our food security does not have to be so vulnerable to global disruptions. We can address this through legislation and policy fixes that encourage stronger regional markets and support a more diverse group of farmers. And we should.

“Rather than meet the challenge of rising food and fuel costs by consolidating farms, the Iran crisis is the latest reminder that we need a better system.”

Decades of American farm policies have focused on increasing scale and production by creating larger, streamlined farm operations. However, research suggests that this consolidation across both farm productionand grocery retailershas also made our food system fragile, leading to volatile prices, bankruptcies, and shortages. When everything is working well, this system accepts these problems to produce record harvests of starches, oils, meat, and ethanol at low consumer prices.

However, this food system is staggeringly inefficient for most growers and eaters: small farmers are cut out of global supply chains when they try to bring their foods to local markets; contracts with institutional buyers like schools favor large processorsover local growers; subsidized fuel and underpaid work artificially defer the cost of long-distance shipping; and, despite record yields, people routinely go hungry, while rural areas lose good employment opportunities.

Working within this system, farmers have no way to pivot during crises, which has forced them to destroy food at harvest time. This is not what an efficient, effective food system looks like. The problem is decades old, but it is exacerbated by our current moment of political and ecological instability.

Rather than meet the challenge of rising food and fuel costs by consolidating farms, the Iran crisis is the latest reminder that we need a better system, one that supports flexible, diversified farms, builds local wealth, and supports regional supply chains.

Shock Resistance

Policies like H.R. 4782, a law embedded within the 2026 Farm Bill, offers one way to break out of this cycle. The provision creates opportunities for smaller farms to get their foods to local markets and, ultimately, diversify the distributors who grow, process, ship, and sell our food.

Research suggests that diversifying these markets doesn’t just create more opportunities for biologicaland economic diversityin rural communities. It also helps to protect all Americans against the shocks of food and climate insecurity.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has already successfully experimented with a way to get more local food to people. During the pandemic, it invested in local foods and distributors.

The Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program provided funding for food banks and community-serving institutions to purchase fresh food directly from small- and mid-scale local farms, which typically are shut out of that purchasing because larger, consolidated supply chains can sell food at a lower cost.

While such programs earned bipartisan, widespread public support, the USDA under President Donald Trump cancelled the last planned batch of funding as part of a series of federal spending reductions. This unexpected withdrawal of federal support undermines the very farmers who could anchor a vibrant rural economy while easing American dependence on long, fragile supply chains.

The 2026 Farm Bill—with the H.R. 4782 provision specifically—offers a chance to revive these investments. Through policies like this, we can redirect government food-buying toward local farms and regional food distributors, including schools and food banks. By guaranteeing a portion of spending on local food purchasing, institutions like schools and food banks will be able to support small and local farmers in their own communities.

But even if a farm bill can’t make its way through our current Congress, lawmakers should look for other ways to write this program into law.

Like other local entrepreneurial work, local food systems give a great return on investment, as much as two-to-one, because they keep money circulating in the community. That’s especially important now, because the current system isn’t only fragile to global shocks: It’s in desperate need of a new generation who can meet the demands of a changing world.

Cultivating Farmers

The average farmer-producer is 58 years old. On farms across the country, farmers continue to age while their children leave agriculture for more stable sectors. To manage ever-larger farms, farmers must either employ migrant workers, newly vulnerable to immigration and customs policing since 2025, or they must use polluting agricultural chemicals and expensive technology to manage bigger farms with fewer people.

Instead of promoting this dangerous consolidation, agricultural policies could encourage more people to get into farming. Researchers have shown that new and beginning farmers are pushed out of agriculture because they lack access to credit, land, and reliable markets. By guaranteeing a supply chain, programs like H.R. 4782 help more people, including those without inherited land or who come from non-farming backgrounds, to enter the agricultural workforce.

One program won’t remake our entire food system. But “local” is a great place to start. But because so much power is vested at the state rather than federal level, this bill could also uplift the next generation of farmers by giving priority to beginning, diversified, and regenerative farms that make enduring investments in land and community. After all, diversified markets will require diversified farmers to bring them to fruition.

These investments are expensive. But so is our current system. We all pay the price of these agricultural priorities when we experience the public costs in environmental pollution or public health. By some estimates, contemporary global agriculture’s toll, in terms of degraded land, water, air, and unpaid wages, is a $13 trillion costwe all bear.

This expensive system has not reliably provided affordable or plentiful food, because it is easily disrupted by rising fuel costs, war, and labor shortages.

It’s time for a new, re-localized, more flexible system, one that cultivates farmers, not just food. Local supply chains can sustain and build more resilient communities. By creating policies that make it easier for small, diversified producers to thrive, Congress has a chance to improve our national security and support rural communities in one fell swoop.

The post Op-ed: Facing Global Disruptions, Congress Should Invest in Local Food appeared first on Civil Eats.

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The war launched by the United States and Israel on Iran has caused an unprecedented disruption in global energy markets, bottlenecking 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. We don’t yet know exactly what this means for the fight against climate change. But, thanks to two new reports released this week, we now have the clearest picture yet of the path the world was on before the conflict sent the price of oil soaring — and it was a path where the fossil fuels threatened by the war were less central than ever to meeting growing global energy needs.

The world is entering an “age of electricity,” according to the reports, which come from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental organization that publishes the world’s most authoritative analyses on the global energy sector, and the think tank Ember. That’s because core economic activities that traditionally involve burning oil and gas — driving cars, heating buildings, and even running industrial processes like steelmaking — are increasingly powered by electricity instead. And, most importantly for the climate fight, an ever-larger share of that electricity is coming from renewable sources.

The two new analyses confirmed that 2025 was a banner year for renewable energy. Solar power was the single biggest source used to meet humanity’s growing appetite for electricity. New power generation from the broader suite of carbon-free sources — including wind, nuclear, and hydropower — actually exceeded the overall rise in electricity demand, meaning renewables began to displace fossil fuel sources. If this trend sticks, it would mean that the so-called energy transition meant to shepherd humanity out of the climate crisis is no longer theoretical.

“This was a year when the economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily — and still all that demand growth was met with renewables,” said Daan Walter, a lead researcher at Ember.

In 2025, renewables edged out coal in global electricity generation for the first time in more than a century. This progress was fueled by China and India, the world’s two most populous countries that together comprise 42 percent of global fossil power generation. The nations both saw electricity generated by fossil fuels fall in the same year for the first time this century. Like other countries around the world, China and India have been rapidly building out solar, wind, and battery infrastructure. (The cost of batteries fell 45 percent in 2025, an even steeper decline than the 20 percent drop in costs that analysts tracked in 2024.)

There’s another sign that 2025 marked a turning point in the energy transition, according to the Ember report: Unlike in past years, the plateau in fossil fuel use was not tied to a recession. Global economic growth last year was normal, which indicates that renewable energy is driving a structural trend away from fossil fuels when it comes to generating electricity.

But that doesn’t mean that oil, gas, and coal use are nearing extinction. When it comes to the broader energy economy, rather than just electricity generation, the IEA’s report finds that renewables still aren’t displacing fossil fuels fast enough to force a sustained decline in the world’s use of greenhouse-gas-emitting energy. (This is because not all energy — for instance that which currently powers jets, cargo ships, and many motor vehicles — is generated from electricity.)

As a result of complications like these, global carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high last year, rising 0.4 percent from 2024 levels. The pace of the increase, however, is declining as renewables rise. For years, emissions declines were driven by developed countries like the United States and European Union member states. Last year, however, emissions from advanced economies grew faster than emissions from developing countries for the first time since the 1990s, according to the IEA.

The trend reversal was driven by the U.S., where coal demand rose 10 percent last year. Rising natural gas prices prompted power producers to switch back to coal, which had been displaced by fracked natural gas in recent years. Plus, electricity use rose thanks to a harsh winter across much of the eastern part of the country, as well as the rollout of industrial-scale power customers like the data centers needed for new artificial intelligence applications.

But trends in the opposite direction in developing countries played a role, too. In Indonesia, for example, electric cars now comprise more than 15 percent of new car sales — a larger share than in the United States and up from virtually 0 percent in the early 2020s. Many customers are “leapfrogging” gasoline-powered cars altogether and purchasing an EV as their first vehicle.

“The energy transition was conceived as something that is led by the developed world, and the developing world kind of hobbles after at a slower pace,” said Walter. “We’re now seeing ‘leapfrogging’ across the world where actually developing economies are going faster in many ways than developed economies.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ‘age of electricity’ is here. No one knows what comes next. on Apr 23, 2026.

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A new study warns climate change could increase the global area susceptible to wildfires in the future, putting many more species at risk than today. Previous research has shown that climate change is increasing the risk of wildfires as precipitation patterns change and vegetation becomes drier in parts of the world. Researchers have now projected how the length of fire seasons and the extent of burned area might change in the future under four scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions. Using these forecasts, they also assessed the future impact of wildfire for 9,592 species of animals, plants and fungi, currently reported on the IUCN Red List as threatened by wildfire. Under the moderate-emissions scenario, where current greenhouse gas emission trends continue, the researchers found that by 2100, the extent of burned areas globally could increase by 9.3%, and that nearly 84% of fire-threatened species will be exposed to higher risk of wildfires. Xiaoye Yang, study lead author from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, told Mongabay by email that “there are clear spatial disparities in future wildfire risk to biodiversity.” Regions such as South America and Oceania are expected to face especially elevated risks of burning, Yang said. Fires in high-latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere are also projected to increase rapidly in the future, although they’ve historically been rare in these regions, he added. The study found that the top 1% of species most affected by wildfires (96 species) are found in South America, South Asia, southern Australia and New Zealand. These…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Asian elephants are adapting to rapidly changing landscapes by diversifying their diets — a sign of resilience, but also a warning about the pressures reshaping their habitats, according to a recent study from Malaysia. Researchers collected feces from wild Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) across two distinct landscapes in Peninsular Malaysia: one with primary and secondary forests fragmented by recent large-scale logging and a hydropower dam development, and a second landscape transformed into oil palm plantations between the 1980s and 2000s, with a narrow remaining strip of forest. Elephant dung contains remnants of the plants the animals have consumed, so the researchers used DNA sequencing to reconstruct the elephants’ diets in the two landscapes. The analysis revealed that elephants in the logging-dominated landscape eat a wide variety of available plant resources across diverse habitats like grasslands, secondary forests and regenerating vegetation. According to the researchers, the findings suggest that when disturbances in forests reduce the availability of their preferred plants, elephants could be meeting their nutritional requirements by expanding their diets to include a broader selection of plants available across diverse habitats beyond formal reserve boundaries.   By contrast, elephants in the oil palm-dominated landscape ate a much more predictable, narrower range of plant groups, dominated by the cultivated oil palm crops. The researchers say it’s likely that elephants in palm oil habitats have adapted to the predictable availability of crops like African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis). This might expose them to conflict with people. “Our findings highlight that elephants are…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Indigenous land defenders are being killed and criminalized at alarming rates, AI systems scrape traditional knowledge without consent, while Indigenous women face escalating rates of violence — crises that Indigenous leaders confronted this week at the United Nations, where they warned that the fight for health and sovereignty now extends from traditional territories into digital spaces.

Those warnings came during the 25th session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, where the overarching theme “Ensuring Indigenous Peoples’ Health in the context of conflict” resonated with participants from around the world. In 2023 alone, 31 percent of human rights defenders killed worldwide were Indigenous or working on Indigenous rights, despite making up only five percent of the global population.

“There is a crisis Indigenous people are currently experiencing, and it’s because many Indigenous peoples are killed, many are under arrest, many live in hiding. This is because Indigenous peoples land and territory are often not protected enough,” said Albert K. Barume, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, in an introductory statement at Wednesday’s session.

As the largest gathering of Indigenous voices in the world, the forum provides a critical platform for communities to tackle systemic inequities together. Claire Charters, who is from Ngāti Whakaue, and is an expert in Indigenous global affairs who regularly presents at the forum, said the power of UNPFII lies in this shared experience.

“That is a very empowering thing,” Charters said. “Because it supports the movement as a whole.”

Claire Charters, who is from Ngāti Whakaue, at UNPFII. Tristan Ahtone / Grist

For Indigenous nations worldwide, the fight for health and rights is inextricably tied to the land. Yet, communities without legally recognized land tenure are left vulnerable to extractive industries and state-sponsored violence. As a result, Indigenous land defenders are facing a growing crisis of criminalization, with human rights groups warning that legal systems are increasingly being weaponized to suppress resistance on ancestral lands.

“The violence against Indigenous peoples happens so often,” said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who is Mbororo and the former chair of the forum, in a statement in Wednesday’s session. “It’s happening every single day.”

According to the Global Terrorism Index, the Sahel region in north-central Africa has seen the rapid expansion of militant jihadist groups, particularly focusing on the pastoral sector – a key source for the well-being of the Indigenous peoples of the region. “Access to the land, access to water is becoming a big challenge in the daily lives of women and men, and of course children’s lives are being lost on top of that,” Ibrahim said.

Fatal violence against land defenders and Indigenous leaders is a global issue. While Latin America remains one of the most dangerous regions for fatal violence against defenders, the suppression of Indigenous voices is a pressing issue in the US and Canada as well.

“Canada is prioritizing rapid resource development,” said Judy Wilson, who is Secwépemc and an elder and knowledge keeper for the British Columbia Native Women’s Association. “The legislation directly threatens our Indigenous sovereignty, environmental protection, safety and specifically increases the risks associated with man camps and missing, murdered Indigenous women and girls.”

Across North America, Indigenous nations have documented the widespread use of detention, surveillance, and strategic lawsuits to silence Indigenous leaders opposing projects like pipelines and logging. In 2022, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recently called for urgent action in land rights cases for Western Shoshone, Native Hawaiian, Gwich’in, and Anishinaabe peoples.

Advocates at the UN say the criminalization of Indigenous land defense is often linked to disputes over natural resources, where governments and corporations seek access to land without consent. Amnesty International has found that those abuses are rarely investigated, contributing to a cycle of impunity that leaves defenders vulnerable.

Indigenous leaders and advocates are calling for stronger protections, warning that the suppression of Indigenous voices undermines human rights and environmental efforts globally. In an interim report to the General Assembly, Barume, the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, warned that States must stop treating Indigenous lands as mere commodities and recognize the sacred, foundational nature of their tenure.

“Indigenous Peoples’ land rights are inherent and do not originate from State authority or recognition,” Barume wrote in the report. “They arise from Indigenous Peoples’ long-standing and ancestral ownership, use and occupation of their lands as distinct nations, prior to colonization or the establishment of State boundaries.”

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, or AI, data sovereignty has also become a critical battleground for Indigenous leaders worldwide. As these systems expand, long-standing patterns of exploitation are being replicated in the digital realm.

A new study presented at the forum by Ibrahim outlined the double-edged sword of the AI boom for the world’s estimated 476 to 500 million Indigenous people.

Attendees at UNPFII. Carrie Johnson / Grist

While she said AI offers powerful tools for Indigenous peoples, Ibrahim warns of a looming era of “digital extractivism.” Generative AI systems frequently scrape Indigenous medicinal knowledge, traditional stories, and cultural motifs from the internet without consent, leading to the commodification and appropriation of their heritage. Furthermore, due to the underrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in the data sets used to train AI models, algorithmic biases can result in systems that fail to accurately recognize Indigenous identities or languages, ultimately amplifying structural discrimination.

To combat digital exploitation, a growing global movement is pushing for strict “Indigenous data sovereignty” to replace the Western “open data” paradigm that often fails to protect collective rights. Ibrahim’s report highlights several successful frameworks where Indigenous communities are already implementing this digital sovereignty. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, the report praises the development of te reo Māori speech recognition tools created by Te Hiku Media. This initiative demonstrates how communities can build vast linguistic corpora while ensuring their cultural and linguistic data remains firmly under Māori control.

On an international scale, Ibrahim’s report recommends the adoption of the CARE Principles — Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics — which establish a framework for the ethical management of A.I technologies and ensure Indigenous communities retain ultimate decision-making authority over their data. Similarly, the report cites the OCAP principles—Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession—developed by the First Nations of Canada as a robust model that establishes a community’s absolute right to own its data and control how it is collected, accessed, and physically stored.

The Kāhui Raraunga Charitable Trust is taking digital sovereignty into its own hands. Te Kāhui Raraunga Data Program Manager, Roimata Timutimu, said having Indigenous people in control of their own data is vital to ensuring better outcomes for service delivery, which Māori are implementing through the Māori Data Governance Model. The Model is intended to assist all agencies to undertake Māori data governance in a way that is values-led, centered on Māori needs and priorities, and informed by research.

Māori data sovereignty expert Dr. Karaitiana Taiuru says artificial intelligence can offer opportunities for Māori, but only if it is grounded in Māori customs and Indigenous governance. In a panel discussion about Māori Data Sovereignty, he emphasized that data is not just a product but is deeply connected to identity and lineage.

“All data is whakapapa [lineage],” Taiuru said. “It still has that spiritual connection.”

Displacement, climate change, and the fallout of extractive industries have an even more acute impact on Indigenous women. In North America, this reality is starkly visible in the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls—a situation driven by the exact intersecting vulnerabilities being debated at the UN this week.

To combat this global crisis, Wednesday’s session featured a dedicated review of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination, or CEDAW, against Women’s 2022 Recommendation No. 39, which stands as the only form of international law specifically dedicated to protecting the rights of Indigenous women and girls.

Despite that landmark status, Indigenous women at the UN repeatedly highlighted the lack of implementation and ongoing threats they face. “The international trauma and on-going trauma is compounded each day, with more losses in our families and in our communities,” said Judy Wilson from the British Columbia Native Women’s Association. “This needs to change.”

Beyond physical violence, the recommendation outlines how systemic barriers restrict access to fundamental rights. In education, for example, Indigenous girls face major hurdles to school enrolment and completion, compounded by a lack of culturally appropriate, Indigenous-controlled educational facilities. To dismantle these barriers, CEDAW is urging states to provide targeted scholarships, expand financial aid, strengthen Indigenous-led education systems, and actively combat discriminatory stereotypes that continue to limit Indigenous girls’ educational opportunities globally.

However, Claire Charters notes that while discrimination against women isn’t a new phenomenon among Indigenous communities, dissecting the root causes of that discrimination remains a crucial and complex debate. “One focus or one question that often comes up is the extent to which Indigenous people discriminate against particularly our own women, and the extent to which that might be driven by colonization” Charters said.

As one of the final speakers of the morning session, Em-Hayley Kūkūtai Walker, who is Ngāti Tiipa and an artist, reflected on the disparities Māori women face in Aotearoa New Zealand. As of 2025, Māori women make up 63 percent of the total female prison population, 49 percent of Māori women experience and/or sexual intimate partner violence and are a further three times more likely to experience intimate partner violence as opposed to non-Māori.

In her statement on Wednesday, she encouraged UN mechanisms to push Aotearoa New Zealand to ensure the rights of Indigenous women and girls are protected. “Hear the cry of my people,” she said. “Our women, children and ancestors, who wish for our tapu [sacredness] and mana [authority] to be upheld.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous land defenders are being killed, AI is scraping their knowledge on Apr 23, 2026.

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Scientists in Sweden have taken an important step toward fighting potato late blight, a plant disease that once triggered a historic famine in Ireland and now threatens to spread globally due to climate change. A new study reports the synthesis of a peptide that specifically attacks Phytophthora infestans (P. infestans) to protect potato and tomato crops—without harm to other plants. The work was carried out by researchers at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in collaboration with research partners in Italy, India and Australia.

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Modern medicine has played a significant role in improving the length and quality of our lives. While many treatments may seem like miracles, they are the result of a lengthy, rigorous research process. Drug discovery is a particularly time-consuming and costly activity that is fraught with complex challenges and labor-intensive bouts of trial and error.

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This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.

Wildfires are burning across more than 27,000 acres in south Georgia, according to the Georgia Forestry Association. Governor Brian Kemp has declared a state of emergency in 91 counties.

One fire, the Brantley Highway 82 fire, began Monday night and has since prompted evacuation orders. On Tuesday morning, that fire covered a few hundred acres and was 75 percent contained. But it rapidly spread and intensified later in the day and overnight. By Wednesday morning, it had reached 5,000 acres and was just 10 percent contained, according to Western Fire Chiefs Association, which tracks fires around the country. Local officials say 54 homes have been destroyed.

“I will be very honest with you and say it’s a miracle that there have not been any lives lost,” said Brantley County Manager Joey Cason in a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

Brantley County and several area churches have set up shelter sites for displaced residents and begun collecting donations for firefighters and people who’ve lost their homes. The Pinelands Road fire in Clinch County, near the Florida border, began over the weekend and has since spread over 16,000 acres. It is just 10 percent contained.

Both counties are heavily forested and sit on the edges of the vast Okefenokee swamp, Clinch to the west and Brantley to the northeast.

Fires are burning in northern Florida, too, which is experiencing similar drought conditions. Officials in both states were monitoring more than 100 fires as of Wednesday, though many were small and quickly contained.

While it’s common for fires to start in Georgia forests due to lightning strikes, stray cigarettes, sparks from backyard fires, and a number of other causes, thanks to forest management and plenty of rain, most don’t normally burn very far. Officials say this year is different. Rainfall and water levels are far below normal across Georgia, increasing fire risk. Conditions like this are becoming more likely in many places as climate change worsens the intensity and duration of droughts.

“Under drought conditions, we have that much less water available either in the water table or in our swamps, ditches, drains, lakes,” said State Forester Johnny Sabo. “So the wildfires can spread more rapidly.”

A large swath of South Georgia is in an “exceptional drought,” the driest category under the federal drought monitoring system. Much of the rest of the state is in “extreme drought,” the next most severe designation. Many Georgia forests also still have downed trees from Hurricane Helene, providing more potential fuel for large fires, said Erin Lincoln, director of the Center for Forest Business at the University of Georgia.

“This is a serious and evolving situation,” said Tim Lowrimore, president and CEO of the Georgia Forestry Association, in a statement on the group’s Facebook page. “We urge all Georgians to remain vigilant. Preventing additional fires right now is critical as responders work to manage this emergency.”

Hazy, smoky air has reached as far north as Atlanta, in the middle of the state, downgrading the air quality there to moderate, meaning it could be risky to some people. In Macon and Columbus, unhealthy air quality levels have been reported.

The state has issued a burn ban for south and central Georgia, asking people not to light any fires outdoors. “Our number one cause of wildfires in the state are humans, unfortunately — people being careless,” Sabo said. It’s critical that Georgians heed those warnings, he continued.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s driving the catastrophic wildfires in Georgia on Apr 22, 2026.

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Too much stress can make even a rock crack. But before rocks reach their breaking point, they "sigh" a chemical warning by releasing nuclides, a type of atom defined by the number of neutrons as well as protons in the nucleus. Scientists have studied these naturally occurring geochemical emissions for more than half a century, but struggled to link nuclide release to the timing of rock breakage. Now, an international team of scientists from universities in China (led by Xin Luo at Hong Kong University and Yifeng Chen at Wuhan University) and the United States (led by Michael Manga at the University of California, Berkeley) has cracked that mystery, by creating a model to connect nuclide signal fluctuations to progressive changes in rock structure that lead to critical failure.

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Chicken eggs are already used to harvest helpful proteins called antibodies to protect humans from viruses such as influenza. Now, a breakthrough at the University of Missouri could one day lead to chickens that produce other useful medical proteins in their eggs.

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This story was originally published by News From The States.

Jacob Fischler
News From The States

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defended the Trump administration’s approach to energy production Monday, April 20, as Democrats on a U.S. House Appropriations panel accused the department of kowtowing to oil and gas interests at the expense of renewable energy.

Burgum said President Donald Trump’s administration aimed to ease regulatory burdens on oil and gas producers, and said former President Joe Biden sought to shut out those industries in a misguided attempt to boost renewable energy sources.

Burgum indicated at several points that what Democrats called a pro-oil-and-gas bias was a correction to Biden’s “over-rotation” toward wind and solar.

“The last administration said ‘all of the above’ and then there were a set of rules that were completely punitive against the stuff that we needed to actually, you know, have baseload power in this country,” he said about Biden’s oil and gas policy. “It was just too early. It was too premature to say we’re going to shut all that down and we’re going to transition.”

But Democrats on the House Appropriations Interior-Environment Subcommittee said the Interior Department under Burgum was doing exactly the opposite: subsidizing fossil fuels while discouraging solar and wind power.

“Shortly after taking office, the White House moved quickly to halt offshore wind development and took steps to rein in solar and wind projects,” Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, said. “Why? Why are we kneecapping industries that create jobs, expand our energy supply and help address the climate crisis? Because this administration’s energy policy is based on political grievance, ideological hostility and, of course, propping up big oil and gas.”

California Democrat Josh Harder called for an overhaul of permitting regulations to enable faster construction of renewable energy infrastructure. Some of that responsibility fell to Congress, he said, but he complained that Trump was making it even harder for wind and solar projects to get off the ground.

“There is, again, one standard for one type of energy and another standard for another type,” he said. “I hear the complaints about previous administrations putting their thumb on the scale. What I see now is secretary-level approval required for one type of project, but not for another. And again, I don’t think that’s sustainable or good policy.”

Burgum responded that the administration was pro-hydro power and pro-nuclear, but was wary of “weather-dependent, intermittent” solar and wind power because those sources can be more expensive for ratepayers.

Cutbacks in parks, Bureau of Indian Education

The topic of the hearing was Trump’s $16 billion budget request for the Interior Department for the next fiscal year. The request would keep the department’s funding roughly even with the current fiscal year, which was a nearly 12 percent cut from fiscal 2025.

Democrats voiced their disapproval of that new baseline, including a $757 million cut to National Park Service operations.

“The department is on a dangerous course,” Pingree said. “This budget would only make the damage worse, and as the ranking member of the subcommittee, I will do everything in my power to oppose these reckless cuts and fight the administration’s destructive policies.”

Members of both parties raised questions about proposed cuts to the Bureau of Indian Education budget after the Department of Education offloaded part of its responsibility in that area to Interior.

The BIE would receive about $437 million less under the proposed budget, a roughly 32 percent cut.

“While your agency begins to manage these new programs, I would strongly recommend — I’m sure you will — carrying out thorough tribal consultations to ensure that there are no funding award delays or program disruptions that would potentially harm,” full Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole told Burgum.

Cole, an Oklahoma Republican and enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, is the first Native American to lead the Appropriations Committee.

Full committee ranking Democrat Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who is also the top Democrat on the subcommittee that oversees Education Department funding, said she was concerned about the shift.

“I worry about transferring the programs from Education,” she said. “Quite honestly, (BIE) doesn’t have a great track record, and I don’t know whether or not the funding that goes along with those programs is going to come over.”

Burgum said 16 full-time staffers in four Education Department programs would transfer to the BIE, along with all the funding for the programs.

Local issues

Members also raised a host of specific concerns.

Minnesota Democrat Betty McCollum criticized the U.S. Senate vote last week to undo restrictions on mining in the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota.

Rep. Jake Ellzey, a Texas Republican, focused much of his time on poor conditions at Maryland’s Fort Washington, a unit of the National Park Service a short drive from Washington, D.C.

Ellzey pointed to photos of buildings in need of repair and noted that a longtime park ranger retired last year and her role has not been filled, leaving only two rangers across almost 350 acres.

And subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, joked that the Bureau of Land Management’s $144 million wild horses and burros program was his top priority.

“If you can solve that problem, I don’t care what happens to the rest of the budget,” Simpson said. “We’ve been trying to deal with that for so long that it’s crazy.”

The post Interior’s Burgum accused of ‘kneecapping’ wind and solar power in favor of oil, gas appeared first on ICT.

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A new study published in Earth's Future introduces the eLTER Framework of Standard Observations (eLTER SO)—a structured, harmonized system designed to support consistent long-term environmental observation across Europe. The paper, "Achieving harmonized and integrated long-term environmental observation of essential ecosystem variables - The eLTER Framework of Standard Observations," explains how the eLTER Research Infrastructure (eLTER RI) is improving the comparability and coordination of environmental data across diverse ecosystems and research fields.

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For more than 100,000 years, the Methana volcano in Greece appeared dormant. No lava, no explosions, no ash clouds. It appeared extinct, like many other volcanoes today. An international research team led by ETH Zurich has reconstructed a detailed, long-term history of the Methana volcano. Their work is published in the journal Science Advances, and their conclusion is striking: While Methana appeared silent at the surface, enormous amounts of magma were steadily accumulating deep within its magma chambers.

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As conflict intensifies in the Middle East, energy markets swing wildly and the cost of living keeps climbing, a pressing question is emerging for anyone who is tied in to the fluctuating energy and food markets: how do we build resilience?

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New research shows that variation in mating behaviors, parental care and differences in ornamentation of the sexes in bird species is driven by demographics rather than vice versa. An international team of researchers from the UK, China, Germany and Hungary looked at 261 species of birds from 69 avian families, running statistical models to investigate the relationship between demographics, adult sex ratio (ASR), breeding behaviors and parental cooperation. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Researchers at University of Toronto's Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry have made a key discovery about how certain bacterial strains produce a set of economically valuable chemicals—opening the door to new, more sustainable production methods. The finding, published in Nature Microbiology, shows how a family of molecules used in everything from cleaning products to cosmetics to nutritional supplements could be made via bacterial fermentation instead of from palm oil, as they are today.

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To ensure a robust domestic supply chain in the U.S., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists are using bacterial proteins to separate the rare-earth elements that are ubiquitous in magnets, batteries, and electronics. These proteins, called lanmodulin, evolved in bacteria that use rare-earth elements to power their metabolism. But to scale up and advance biomining technology, researchers need a faster way to find and design better proteins.

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Early in 2026, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s office denied that he had a phone call with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, about easing proposed trade restrictions on Brazil’s endangered national tree. The denial to Mongabay came during reporting for a story published in February about Brazil’s efforts to seek the highest trade protections for Brazilwood (Paubrasilia echinata) — safeguards that were diluted during a global summit of representatives to CITES, a wildlife trade treaty signed by 184 countries and the European Union. Now, following a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Mongabay, Lula’s office confirmed that he had, in fact, been in communication with Macron just before a key vote on the proposal at the CITES conference, held five months ago in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The conversations between Lula and Macron were “regarding the negotiations then underway” as part of CITES deliberations, according to Brazil’s Special Advisory Office of the President of the Republic. The office responded to Mongabay’s FOIA request on April 6. It did not specify what was discussed and did not state if the talks happened over a phone call, text or other means. The FOIA response marks the first official confirmation that the two leaders were in communications at CITES over the issue. Native to the country’s Atlantic Forest and a national symbol, Brazilwood is coveted in the music industry to make high-quality violin bows, which sell for as high as 7,000 euros ($8,200) apiece. The demand has led the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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The meat and dairy industry accounts for 57% of total global food production emissions and at least 16.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. But the vast majority of environmental claims from the animal agricultural industry are misleading "greenwashing" that relies on vague promises or projections, according to a study published in PLOS Climate by Maya Bach and Jennifer Jacquet from the University of Miami, United States, and colleagues.

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A major international study involving researchers from The University of Manchester has found that rising global demand for beef is a key force behind deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. The research shows how consumer demand in countries around the world is directly linked to land clearing in Brazil, often through complex supply chains that are difficult to regulate. By combining economic and environmental analysis, the study reveals why current efforts to curb deforestation are struggling to keep pace with global demand. The findings are published in the journal Competition & Change.

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Sandra Hale Schulman and Jourdan Bennett-Begaye
ICT

Cheers of “Yéégo, Justin! Yéégo!” erupted and the Navajo Nation flag waved at a hometown watch party as Navajo Chef Justin Pioche hustled to beat the timer on the Food Network’s first-ever Indigenous-themed “Chopped” competition, “Indigenous Inspiration.”

By the time it was all over, Pioche had claimed the crown as the “Chopped” champion after a friendly but fierce competition with three other Indigenous chefs – Mariah Gladstone, Blackfeet and Cherokee; Ray Naranjo, Santa Clara Pueblo; and Jessica Walks First, Menominee.

“It was all about harmony, and we had the same agenda: promoting Native foods, Native business and all the above,” Pioche told ICT as the episode aired for the first time on April 21, 2026.

Navajo Chef Justin Pioche and his family hosted a watch party with plenty of goodies for the Four Corners community in Farmington, New Mexico, to watch the Food Network’s Indigenous episode “Chopped” on April 21, 2026. Justine Pioche, Navajo, was one of four Indigenous chefs competing and won. Credit: Jourdan Bennett-Begaye/ICT

More than 100 people turned out in Farmington, New Mexico, for the party, which featured hand fans, stickers, gold necklaces, party horns and other hand-outs with Pioche’s image. Every big screen in the restaurant and on the patio played “Chopped.”

The entire restaurant erupted into applause, screams and woos after the Food Network announced the “Chopped” champion was the Navajo Nation’s very own. The room shook with excitement and joy. Hands and phones flew up to capture the moment.

Pioche smiled and walked around the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant high-fiving and hugging family, friends, community members, and fellow “Chopped” lovers, while his sister and sous chef, Tia Pioche, captured her brother and the restaurant’s energy on her phone for social media.

Like all viewers, it was Pioche’s first time watching the pre-taped episode. Pioche runs the family catering and private dining business, Pioche Food Group, from Fruitland, New Mexico, with his sister and mom, Janice Pioche.

“It was pretty fun,” he said after his win was announced. “I really enjoyed seeing everyone else’s reaction. It was really exciting.”

The “Indigenous Inspiration” episode included the four Native competitors and two prominent Native American chefs among the three-judge panel of experts, with “Sioux Chef” Sean Sherman and Prairie Band Potawatomi Chef Pyet DeSpain joining Chef Eric Adjepong, who is Ghanian, at the judges’ table.

Mystery baskets revealed

The three-round competition featured a host of Indigenous foods in “mystery” baskets to be used for appetizers, entrees and desserts. The baskets included familiar Indigenous ingredients such as bison, whitefish, pemmican, sumac berries, pawpaw pulp, as well as some wild cards, such as sweet corn ice cream bars shaped like ears of corn.

For the first time ever, all four chefs competing on the Food Network’s “Chopped” program were Indigenous. They are, from left, Justin Pioche, Navajo; Mariah Gladstone, Blackfeet/Cherokee; Ray Naranjo, Santa Clara Pueblo; and Jessica Walks First, Menominee. Pioche was ultimately named “Chopped” champion on the episode, which aired April 21, 2026. Credit: Courtesy of Food Network

The celebrity chefs were quick to note the special nature of the episode.

“Tonight isn’t just about competition — it’s about visibility,” said Chef Pyet, as she is known, on social media. “To see Indigenous chefs, ingredients, and foodways highlighted on a platform like Food Network means something deeper. It’s a step toward honoring the original people of this land and recognizing the richness and diversity of the cuisines that shape America.”

She continued, “Grateful for every chef who showed up, every story shared, and every person behind the scenes who helped bring this to life. May this be one of many.”

Host Ted Allen acknowledged the significance at the beginning of the show.

“For this special competition, we are honored to have four chefs whose culinary points of view are so deeply aligned with their Indigenous communities and cultures,” he said. “We are very excited to be inspired by what you create on the plate.”

Round one: Appetizers

The three-course competition started with appetizers, with the mystery basket containing whitefish, sumac, pawpaw pulp and small fry breads called kahsherohni.

The chefs got to work, whipping up on the spot dishes using techniques and adapted menus from their regions. Pioche made sauteed whitefish with pawpaw salsa and even went an extra step — which may have contributed to his win — saying, “I have some sumac boiling right now, so I’ll make a little tea for you guys. A little treat.”

Chef Justin Pioche, Navajo, opens the “mystery” basket of Indigenous foods for the appetizer round on the first-ever “Chopped” Indigenous episode, which aired April 21, 2026, as host Ted Allen looks on. Pioche would go on to win the competition.
Credit: Courtesy of Food Network

Sherman took notice.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Seems like Justin’s clearly showing a lot of expertise behind that ingredient.”

Pioche also provided some important Indigenous health information as he continued, drawing attention to the avoidance of processed sugars and flour.

“I’m going to finish the tea with a little bit of agave, because it’s lower on the glycemic index,” he said on the program. “European ingredients that were introduced to us in the Americas, like dairy, wheat flour and cane sugar just don’t sit well. [Sumac tea] is something that’s healing for my people. Whenever we have an upset stomach, that’s what we drink.

The “mystery” basket for the first-round appetizers on the Food Network’s “Indigenous Inspiration” episode of “Chopped” included, clockwise from left, sumac, kahsherohni (a type of frybread), pawpaw pulp and whitefish.
Credit: Courtesy of Food Network

Gladstone had an issue with the kahsherohni, noting its roots in colonizations.

“Frybread comes from a time when we were dependent on government ration boxes,” she said. “We created frybread with those things so we didn’t have to face starvation. But frybread isn’t exactly super healthy. I just don’t incorporate it a lot.”

She used the bread, however, to form an open-faced sandwich with sumac, whitefish, pawpaw sauce with raspberries and quick-pickled onions.

The two chefs from arid New Mexico, Naranjo and Pioche, wrestled a bit with the whitefish, which is not something they generally cook with.

Naranjo made a sumac-dusted, white fish tostada with a pawpaw aioli, saying, “The story that I like with my food is that when you eat food from the Southwest and Mexican cultures, it’s also Indigenous and often overlooked.”

Sherman chimed in, saying, “I really love that you’re utilizing some of the Mexican styling here because Mexican food is more Indigenous than it is European.”

Walks First made a pan-seared sumac and garlic white fish with pawpaw maple glaze, but was chopped from the first round, leaving the stage in tears but proud to have been there.

“You know, being right here, today, all of us, we have families that look up to us, communities that look up to us,” she said. “It’s a big step for every one of us, and for my grandchildren and child to see that it is okay to chase their dreams.”

Round Two: Bring on the bison

The chefs got creative with the basket of ingredients for the main course, which included bison steaks, anaheim chiles, lima beans and that oddball corn ice cream.

Gladstone made bison steak strips on top of ice-cream fritters, with a creamy chile sauce. Pioche made a chile rub for the ribeyes, with charred lima beans and sweet corn grits.

Chef Naranjo was chopped because his sweet corn ice cream got lost in a bean/corn mush he made as a side dish to the bison.

He took it in stride.

“I don’t see that as a loss at all,” he said. “I see that as an important way to show what we’re all about. So, hey, it’s a good thing.”

Round Three: A sweet finish

Chefs Pioche and Gladstone squared off the final round by making a dessert with the basket of pemmican, Saskatoon berries, sweet potatoes, and stone-milled whole wheat flour. The judges noted the inclusion of flour.

“It’s going to be interesting, because … both of these chefs don’t typically use wheat flour; it is not indigenous to the Americas,” Chef Pyet said. “But this particular wheat flour is coming from Ramona Farms,  an heirloom brand of wheat that a particular tribe has been saving and growing. So it’s got a lot of cultural meaning to them.”

Justin Pioche, Navajo, watches the Food Network’s Indigenous episode of “Chopped” at a watch party in Farmington, New Mexico, on April 21, 2026, where he was one of the four Indigenous chefs competing. Pioche won. Credit: Jourdan Bennett-Begaye/ICT

Pioche made a bread pudding with candied pemmican and cognac cream.

“The pemmican in Lakota  is a dehydrated bison, a big part of our food sources,” he said. “We would pound that out with a little bit of berries and fat.”

Gladstone made a sweet potato muffin with a pemmican and berry sauce, with maple candy walnuts. She adapted a recipe she has included in her cookbook for children.

“We call them saba berries back on Blackfeet Reservation, and the meat and the berries, we make soup out of it. It’s ceremony food for us,” she said.

”I feel like this is a dish to show people that Native foods, like Native people, are not living in the past,” she said. “We’re here. We’re doing something amazing every day in the 21st century.”

Pioche’s pemmican bread pudding caught the judge’s attention, after a misfiring spray bottle became an artful presentation on the plates.

The judges on the “Indigenous Inspiration” episode of the Food Network’s “Chopped” show are, from left, Chef Eric Adjepong, of Ghanian descent; Prairie Band Potawatomi Chef Pyet DeSpain; and “Sioux Chef” Sean Sherman. The episode – the first to focus on Indigenous chefs and foods – aired April 21, 2026. Credit: Courtesy of Food Network

 “I love whimsicalness. For me this was like a celebration of textures,” DeSpain said.

“There are so many different little crunchy bits, but yet softness from the bread pudding. I love the way it’s cooked. It still has a sponginess to it,“ noted Sherman.

“I love the knife skills as well, man, on the sweet potato. Perfect uniform cubes, they’re all candied, perfectly,” added Adjepong.

In the end Gladstone was chopped because of the appetizer round, with judges saying the frybread was too thick and overwhelming. That left Pioche as the “Chopped” champion, and he humbly grinned as it was announced.

“It feels really good,” he said. “I feel really ecstatic and I can’t believe that I really pulled through.

I had some really tough competition.”

He told Allen his family should share the credit.

“It would mean a lot to me because my family has always been behind me,” he said. “My sister is my sous chef and co-owner. My mom is our manager. They deserve as much bragging rights as I do because they’re the ones who live in the area.”

‘So proud of my boy’

Pioche’s mother and sister watched proudly from the crowd at the watch party in Farmington. His mother said she was grateful to the fans and community members who came out to support her son.

“My mind is ready to explode. So happy. So proud of my boy,” she said while smiling and fighting through happy tears. “It’s been so exciting, just waiting  … Finally Tuesday, April 21, came. I’m so ecstatic … My mind and my heart are overflowing.”

Justin Pioche, Navajo, hugs his sister and sous chef, Tia Pioche, after winning Food Network’s Indigenous episode of “Chopped” on April 21, 2026 in Farmington, New Mexico. Credit: Jourdan Bennett-Begaye/ICT

His sister, Tia, was just as proud.

“The excitement of the whole restaurant, it really brought tears to my eyes because he’s such a special person,” Tia Pioche said. “Nobody else deserves it but him. It’s why I’m so proud and choked up a little bit. The adrenaline is still in me. We’re so happy and proud of him and being able to share this with everybody was so cool.”

Justin said he’ll likely invest the $10,000 prize money into Pioche Food Group since they are busy and are getting busier. They’ll need new equipment.

The post ‘Chopped’ crowns Navajo Chef Justin Pioche as Indigenous champion appeared first on ICT.

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Microplastics can be found everywhere in nature—from drinking water to clouds in the atmosphere—but scientists have yet to fully uncover how severely they impact the environment or the precise factors driving their buildup. A new study published by researchers at Penn State offers a fresh view of how microplastics traverse and influence watersheds, such as rivers and streams, across Pennsylvania and the world at large.

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New analytical methods developed at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions have increased our understanding of how bacteria manage DNA. The methods have enabled researchers to uncover how the sequence, physical shape and flexibility of DNA guide the activity of an enzyme called DNA gyrase, which previously got all the credit for managing DNA. The work uncovers that certain attributes of DNA are major players in this game. The study, which appears in Nature Communications, has implications for antibiotic design.

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