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by Alec MacGillis

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The first time I saw Andrew Rabinowitz, it was in April 2017 at Baltimore District Court, where he was representing a property management company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. That day, the company had three cases against tenants at Dutch Village, one of the many large apartment complexes the Kushner Companies owned in the Baltimore area.

One tenant was a Morgan State University student facing struggles typical of residents in the Kushner complexes. She had given notice that she was moving at the end of March, having tired of the perpetually clogged toilet and the ceiling leak in her closet. But when she paid March rent via the automated system tenants had to use, the money somehow ended up with an adjacent Kushner complex, and the company started eviction proceedings — even though she had already signaled her intent to leave a few weeks later.

A sheriff’s deputy changed the locks on her door when she was out of town, preventing her from moving her things out. She got her keys back, but by then she no longer had access to a moving truck. The company was also after her for April’s rent, despite the fact that it had physically barred her from being able to move before April.

In court, Rabinowitz, a 33-year-old in a jacket and tie, spoke to the judge in a polished, even-keeled tone, in contrast to the student, who grew more agitated as the hearing went on. The judge sided with Rabinowitz, ordering the student to pay $471.23 for part of April’s rent.

When I approached Rabinowitz as he was leaving the courthouse, to ask about the company’s aggressive approach, he looked startled. “What’s the article regarding?” he said. “I’m not inclined to give a statement.”

The next day, he was back in court to defend the company against the student’s criminal complaint over the unfounded eviction. This time, he offered a deal: He agreed to let her stay, rent-free, until the end of May to give her time to move out, as long as she paid for April. Afterward, she asked Rabinowitz if he could make sure that the hot water would be turned back on. “I’m just the attorney,” he demurred. (The hot water stayed off.)

The next time I saw Rabinowitz in court was in February, almost eight years later. Kushner’s father-in-law was back in the White House. But Rabinowitz’s situation had changed. He was no longer demanding payment from beleaguered tenants. Instead, he was defending them.

I had learned of his dramatic career shift when I ran into him once in downtown Baltimore. But I needed to see it to believe it. So I tracked him down one midday at the Landlord and Tenant Branch of the District of Columbia Courts, where he now spends his days. As I spotted him, he was in a hallway speaking to a fretful older man who was seeking assistance. “Give me four minutes. Let me just go check and see if I can serve you,” Rabinowitz said, before ducking into the office of his new employer, Rising for Justice, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction.

A moment later, after attending to the man, Rabinowitz came over to say hello. He still wore a tie, but now had long hair to go along with it. He was looking far less anxious than he had when I approached him back at the Baltimore courthouse. In fact, he was positively glowing.

So much has changed in this country and the world since 2017 — much of it, arguably, not for the better. I wanted to know: What had happened with Rabinowitz?

American culture is rife with glamorous depictions of high-stakes, high-paying Big Law firms, from “L.A. Law” to “Michael Clayton” to “Suits.” But there is a humbler realm more typically glimpsed via highway billboards and subway ads. This is the level at which millions of people encounter the justice system, for better or worse.

And this is the corner through which Rabinowitz entered the profession. He grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, outside Baltimore. His mother was dean of admissions at the University of Maryland School of Nursing; his father was chief of social work at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington. He attended Frostburg State University, in western Maryland. Interested in the law, he spent a couple years as a paralegal before heading to law school at Barry University in Orlando, Florida.

His aspiration was to become a criminal defense attorney, but the job he found after getting his degree was with Barry Glazer, a colorful Baltimore personal injury lawyer known for attention-getting ads. One script went like this: “I am sick and tired of these insurance companies telling you what good neighbors they are and how you’re in such good hands. If your car is totaled and you owe more than it’s worth, they give you the lesser amount and you continue to pay a finance company the difference. Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” Under pressure from the Bar Association, Glazer changed “pee” to “urinate.”

It was an eye-opening experience, the first time Rabinowitz had come into regular contact with people on the lower rungs of the social ladder — people with big problems but unable to afford big firms. He left after a couple years for a small defense practice because he wanted to pursue his original aspiration. This proved disappointing. Criminal law, he found, turned out to be less a stirring quest for justice and more an exercise in squeezing fees out of poor clients in desperate circumstances.

Rabinowitz started looking around again, in 2015, and joined Jeffrey Tapper, whose small firm in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills specialized in representing landlords large and small as they pursued tenants.

At first, Rabinowitz liked the work. Despite his natural introversion, he had come to enjoy being in court, in front of a judge. And in this new job, he was in court a lot — as many as 10 hearings per day.

He prided himself on being able to negotiate settlements, getting landlords to accept less than what they believed they were owed and working out payment plans with tenants. This was what he recalled of the case where I had first met him — that he had been able to work out a deal with the college student to give her an extra month to move out of the Kushner unit.

He even gave some tenants his phone number, urging them to call if they ended up falling behind again, so they could work something out before it landed them back in court. He wasn’t really sure what to think when, one day, he heard a judge say to a tenant, “Step into the hallway with Mr. Rabinowitz. He’s the fairest debt collector in town.”

To many people, “fairest debt collector” sounds about as noble as “kindest executioner.” But the label was apt. A couple of times, he appeared opposite Joe Mack, a tenant’s rights attorney whom he had gone to camp with as a kid. Mack recalled Rabinowitz persuading a judge that Mack’s client had failed to provide enough notice before breaking a lease and thus owed the landlord a sizable sum. Making the loss easier to take, Mack said, was that Rabinowitz had been respectful in the courtroom. “I can imagine,” Mack added, “that some other things he was doing might have been rougher.”

My eventual 2017 article laid bare the harsher reality of many of the cases involving the Kushner complexes. The company pursued one woman for several years for about $3,000, eventually having her wages garnished, even though she had received written permission to break her lease. A second woman ended up in court after moving out from a unit with maggots coming out of the living-room carpet and raw sewage flowing out of the kitchen sink. Yet another was pursued for about $4,000 even though she had written permission to move out of a unit with black mold.

After the article appeared, the Maryland attorney general filed suit against the Kushner company, which in 2022 settled with the state for $3.25 million, though the company did not acknowledge wrongdoing. In March, a group of former tenants won class-action status in their own lawsuit against the company. The company, which denied wrongdoing in the class-action case, did not respond to a request for an interview for this article. Over the years, the company has sold most of the properties ProPublica originally reported on.

Back in 2017, a company executive had responded to questions by saying that it had a “fiduciary obligation” to its investment partners to collect as much revenue as possible from tenants, and that its practices in doing so were “consistent with industry standards.”

Rabinowitz offers a similar defense. The Kushner approach was not noticeably different from other big landlords, he said: “They were all the same.” He had no particular feelings for the company itself, and he had never actually met Kushner or any other executives. “They’re so disconnected from the property,” Rabinowitz told me. “It’s just money for them.” But he was protective of his boss, Tapper, who he felt had treated him fairly. (Tapper died last year.)

Rabinowitz himself had not set foot inside the Kushner complexes. The sorts of poor upkeep described in the article did not figure much in the cases, he said. “I know most people wouldn’t want to live in housing like that,” he said, “but I remember driving past those communities and I don’t remember being like, ‘Those were horrible places.’”

He insists he did not regret his years working for the Kushners and other landlords. There was a system in place, and he had played a part in that system. “I honestly felt that if every attorney could have had the same philosophy and treated people fair and put people in the position to take control of their life,” he said, “then debt collectors wouldn’t be such bad people. They’d be assistants to people paying off their debts.”

Still, the article instilled an unease that only grew with time. He was almost always facing off against people who lacked their own attorney, in a state with laws that were unusually favorable to landlords. “It was like a heavyweight sparring featherweights over and over again,” he said. “That’s just not satisfying.”

His longtime partner started to notice that he was agitated on nights before trials; sometimes he’d even mutter things like “objection!” in his sleep. “She could tell my mind was in court, constantly,” he said. To try and escape the burden, he went whitewater kayaking on weekends.

Around this time, his parents were nearing retirement. Accolades poured in from people they had served over the years, at the nursing schools and the retirement home. One man was wheeled in on his hospital bed to thank Rabinowitz’s father. “When I saw all the people who came out, I realized they had so much impact on so many people’s lives,” Rabinowitz said. He paused. “And I’m just putting money into rich people’s pockets.”

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Maryland suspended evictions in March 2020, and, when the moratorium ended in 2021, it passed a law establishing (and funding) the right to an attorney for any tenant facing eviction.

Rabinowitz saw his chance. He applied for an entry-level opening in the Baltimore County office of Maryland Legal Aid. The organization recognized his experience and urged him to apply to be the supervisor of a staff of 20 in its newly expanded Baltimore City housing office. The job came with a “fairly significant” drop in pay, but he took it.

It wasn’t easy telling Tapper, who had recently offered to make him a partner in the firm before he retired. But Tapper understood. “I went to the enemy, on the one hand,” Rabinowitz said. “On the other hand, he was proud.”

The transition was awkward at first. Rabinowitz and his new colleagues at Legal Aid were occasionally facing off against a former colleague. And he could tell that some of his new colleagues were initially wary. After all, while many lawyers move from public-service roles to private practice, precious few head in the other direction. “People wanted to know if I was for real,” he said.

A few years later, Rabinowitz made his way to Rising for Justice, as director of the organization’s Tenant Justice Program. He now oversees four staff attorneys and a paralegal while supervising about nine law students from Georgetown University and the University of the District of Columbia.

It means a near-daily rail commute from Baltimore. But he likes working in the Washington court, which has such a nonconfrontational vibe that it makes do without bailiffs. The organization’s clients are grateful for the assistance, and he likes that it includes a social-service branch to help people find nonlegal help.

The law students assigned to him were surprised when they learned that their supervisor had once been on the other side. But they said it came in handy, too. “We get very emotional. It’s easy to get frustrated for your clients and wrapped up and involved,” said Savannah Myers, a Georgetown student, “and Drew has the unique perspective to say, ‘OK, well, this is what’s happening on your end, here’s probably what’s happening on the other end and here’s how you can proceed in the best way to help your client within the legal system.’”

One recent day, I watched in court as an older Ethiopian woman faced off against a landlord who was demanding back rent that she owed after having lost her job. The woman, who was using a walker, had an interpreter to assist her but no attorney. She tried to argue that the debt should be lowered because of a broken air conditioner and a problem with vermin in the rental.

After the judge, Sherry Trafford, ordered her to make monthly payments of $2,989 to the landlord, she also gently suggested that she seek out help from Rising for Justice in advance of the next hearing on her case.

“Where are they?” said the woman.

“It’s at the end of this hallway,” said Trafford.

The woman made her way slowly down, and it so happened that the person manning the intake desk at that moment was Andrew Rabinowitz. He welcomed her. “Do you have some court paperwork?” he asked through the interpreter, and then came back with a law student to assist her.

Later, Rabinowitz told me that it was poor housing conditions like the ones the woman was dealing with that were his ultimate goad these days. “That’s what motivates me,” he said. “I want people to have clean housing like mine.” Why had those conditions not registered so much with him back when he was on the other side? “I guess that stuff didn’t really get to me,” he said.

I was struck again by Rabinowitz’s reluctance to judge his earlier self. But there was no obscuring one effect of his new role. “I sleep well,” he said.

Involving more than 800 scientists from more than 400 institutions worldwide, Ocean Census has embarked on ten expeditions and numerous workshops—so far—with a sole aim: discovering new species in the “world’s greatest frontier.”

Last week, the organization announced that it had discovered 866 new species, further advancing our understanding of marine biodiversity. Among the finds is a newly identified guitar shark, which belongs to a distinctive group of animals that share characteristics of both sharks and rays.

Another revelation is the pygmy pipehorse, which was found off the coast of Africa—the first time the genus has been spotted outside of the cool waters of New Zealand. Ocean Census says:

These diminutive pipehorses are masters of camouflage, remaining elusive as they inhabit coral reefs and blend seamlessly into their surroundings. Many members of the family Syngnathidae—which also includes seahorses, seadragons, and pipefish—are classified as Threatened on the IUCN Red List due to habitat destruction, bycatch, and targeted fishing.

While 866 is a remarkable number of discoveries, Ocean Census has its work cut out. “The identification and official registration of a new species can take up to 13-and-a-half years—meaning some species may go extinct before they are even documented,” says a statement.

To address this lag and accelerate identification, the initiative was launched jointly in 2023 by The Nippon Foundation and Nekton with a mission to “close critical knowledge gaps before it’s too late.”

Oceans cover more than 70 percent of our planet’s surface, but these vast bodies of water remain largely unexplored. “Of the estimated one to two million marine species on Earth, only 240,000 are known to science,” Ocean Census says.

Currently on a 35-day expedition to the South Sandwich Islands, the project joins four additional programs, including Schmidt Ocean Institute, to search for new species off the South Atlantic Ocean’s volcanic archipelago. Find more on Ocean Census’s website.

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The first known postcard printed as a souvenir can be traced to Vienna in 1871, followed by commemorative cards for famous events like the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. It wasn’t long before a fashion for picture postcards took the U.S. by storm throughout the first half of the 20th century.

For David Opdyke, the iconic correspondences form the groundwork for an artistic practice examining capitalism, globalization, consumerism, and our fraught and increasingly disconnected relationship with the environment. Occasionally darkly humorous yet steeped in a sense of foreboding, his uncanny scenes suggest what kind of world we might live in if we do nothing to stem the mounting climate crisis.

Opdyke summons idyllic coastlines, national parks, government monuments, wildlife, and civic infrastructure to weave “fractured yet cohesive topographies,” says Cristin Tierney Gallery, which is presenting the artist’s current solo exhibition, Waiting for the Future.

For nearly a decade, Opdyke has invoked the nostalgia of landscape postcards to interrogate the climate emergency within the context of American politics and geographies. “Through these carefully altered compositions, Opdyke merges the past and the future, presenting both urgent and inevitable visions of environmental upheaval,” the gallery says.

The artist often uses antique cards that he purchases on eBay, painting scenes of environmental disasters or discordances between nature and architecture. Alternating between cartoons and life-like portrayals of trees, animals, fires, and structures, his compositions range from single cards to wall-spanning assemblages, his gouache-painted details spreading from frame to frame.

In “Overlook,” for example, giant tentacles destroy bridges, rising sea water threatens cities, and huge fires rage in institutional buildings. A dome encloses a metropolis, a rocket named Mars 2 heads for a new home in the solar system, and an airplane banner advertises “Technology Will Save Us” in a bleak yet not unimaginable reality fueled by techno-utopianism.

In his large-scale “Enough of Nature,” Opdyke transforms natural landscapes into encampment sites for those displaced from their homes, and portions of the overall composition appear to dislodge from the main grid as if floating away.

Caught tenuously between outmoded industrial practices, shifting societal value systems, and a rapidly evolving climate crisis, Opdyke’s pieces point to once-idealized symbols of American progress to stress the dangers of ignoring our own impact on the environment.

Waiting for the Future underscores the precariousness of complacency, a “cautionary tale,” the gallery says, laying bare the fragility of our constructed environment.

The show continues through April 26 in New York City. Find more on the artist’s website.

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by McKenzie Funk

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The for-profit prison company GEO Group has surged in value under President Donald Trump. Investors are betting big on immigration detention. Its stock price doubled after Election Day.

But despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live.

At the 1,575-bed detention center GEO runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, detainees once prepared meals, washed laundry and scrubbed toilets, doing jobs that would otherwise require 85 full-time employees, the company estimated. The state’s minimum wage at the time was $11 an hour. (It’s now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO to enforce it, and in October 2021 a federal jury ruled unanimously in the state’s favor.

This year, GEO and Washington are back in court — for a third time — as the company tries to reverse the earlier decision that sided with the state. GEO has brought in contract cleaners at the Tacoma facility while the case plays out, keeping detainees there from paid work and from having a way to earn commissary money.

The legal battle has national repercussions as the number of ICE detainees around the country rises to its highest level in five years. The vast majority are held in private facilities run by GEO or corporate competitors like CoreCivic. If following state minimum wages becomes the norm, Trump’s immigration crackdown could cost the country even more than it otherwise would — unless private detention centers absorb the cost themselves or decide to cut back on cleaning, which Tacoma detainees have already accused GEO of doing.

GEO frames the lawsuit as a fight over the federal government’s authority to make the laws of the nation. Multiple courts have decided that the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the federal minimum wage, does not apply to detained migrants. At issue in the Tacoma case is the state minimum wage.

“Simply put, we believe the State of Washington has unconstitutionally violated the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution,” GEO wrote in a news release.

The company did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica. ICE and CoreCivic declined to comment.

GEO’s latest legal salvo came last month.

A three-judge panel at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had recently affirmed lower courts’ rulings. GEO had to pay state minimum wage at the Tacoma facility. The company was also ordered to hand over $17 million in back wages, plus $6 million for “unjust enrichment.” The combined penalties amounted to less than 1 percent of GEO’s total revenues in 2024.

Rather than pay up, GEO petitioned on Feb. 6 for a rehearing by the full 9th Circuit. In the news release, it vowed to “vigorously pursue all available appeals.”

It isn’t that GEO lacks the ability to pay, the company has made clear in legal filings. Its gross profit from its Tacoma facility, today called the Northwest ICE Processing Center, was about $20 million a year when Washington filed its lawsuit. The company told a judge in 2021 it could “pay the Judgments twenty times over.”

The real issue is the precedent the Tacoma case could set. GEO, which manages 16 ICE detention facilities across the country, faces similar lawsuits in California and Colorado. The California case, also before the 9th Circuit, is on hold pending the outcome of Washington’s. Colorado’s is winding its way through a lower court.

GEO is expected to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court, if needed.

If eventually forced to pay state minimum wages across the country, the company could decide to pay detainees more or else hire outside employees at all its locations – either of which would potentially eat into its profits, stock price and dividends.

The company also could try to renegotiate its long-term contracts with ICE for a higher rate of reimbursement, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, an expert in incarceration, noted in an article for the Brennan Center for Justice.

Or GEO could respond to higher labor costs another way. After the jury decision against it in 2021, the company paused Tacoma’s Voluntary Work Program, as it is known, rather than pay detainees there minimum wage. Some could no longer afford phone calls to family members. (For such detainees, the program had never been entirely voluntary. “I need the money desperately,” one testified. “I have no choice.”)

The facility also “got really gross” after the sudden stoppage, a Mexican detainee told the Associated Press at the time. “Nobody cleaned anything.”

GEO brought in contract cleaners eventually.

Mike Faulk, a spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general’s office, said testimony in the minimum-wage issue highlights the problem with housing detainees in private prisons: profit motive. Not only did GEO pay $1 a day for cleaning in Tacoma, it budgeted less than $1 per meal that each detainee ate, one kitchen worker testified. “So the grade of food is abysmal,” Faulk said of the detainee’s testimony. “He routinely picked out grasshoppers/insects from the food.”

For its part, GEO argues that Washington wants to unfairly — and hypocritically — hold the Tacoma facility to a standard that even state facilities don’t have to meet. The company has noted that a carveout in Washington law exempts state prisons from minimum-wage requirements, allowing the state to pay prisoners no more than $40 a week. The federal government, taking GEO’s side, has made the same point in “friend of the court” briefs under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. So did a dissenting judge in the recent 9th Circuit decision.

But to liken state prisons to a privately run immigration facility is an “apples and oranges” comparison, the 9th Circuit decided. Washington doesn’t let private companies run its state prisons. And the migrants in Tacoma are detained under civil charges, not as convicted criminals.

As judges have noted, GEO’s contract with ICE states that the prison company must follow “all applicable federal, state, and local laws and standards,” including “labor laws and codes.” It also holds that GEO must pay detainees at least $1 a day for the Voluntary Work Program. The federal government “made a deliberate choice to dictate to GEO the minimum rate,” the 9th Circuit wrote in its most recent decision, but “it also made a deliberate choice not to dictate to GEO a maximum rate.”

Conditions in Tacoma are worsening as the number of detainees rises, according to Maru Mora Villalpando, founder of the activist group La Resistencia. The group is in regular contact with people inside the detention center.

Meal service, Mora Villalpando said, is faltering: “Dinner used to be at 5. Then 6. Now it’s 9.”

Cleaning is faltering, too, she said. Without detainee labor, the outside cleaners have to do it all.

“But these people,” Mora Villalpando said, “can’t keep up.”

The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that a sufficiently clever “demon” could predict the entire future given a complete knowledge of the present. His thought experiment marked the height of optimism about what physicists might forecast. Since then, reality has repeatedly humbled their ambitions to…

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From seeds to the world’s smallest organisms, the inspiration for Shiyuan Xu’s porcelain sculptures (previously) originates in biology. Fascinated by the patterns, shapes, and structures of a wide variety of creatures, the artist creates intricate interpretations of cells, the essential building blocks of all life forms.

Working meticulously with porcelain Paperclay—a mix of clay and cellulose fibers—and glaze, Xu sculpts webbed, amorphous forms that appear amoeba-like, as if expanding and contracting. She is deeply influenced by the work of Scottish mathematical biologist D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948), whose seminal book On Growth and Form traces the scale and shapes of living things.

A “diagram of forces” is how Thompson described the form of a specimen. For Xu, this dynamic evaluation shapes how she translates micro life forms into her work. “It is about movement, time, and space,” she says. “It records the way they move and grow; the way they react to the surrounding environment by interacting, altering, evolving and adapting to generate infinite new forms.”

Xu views the history of porcelain as deeply intertwined with her own memories and identity, and she often employs a classic Chinese ceramic color palette in her pieces. The irregular structures and ombre colors reference the artist’s personal experiences. She says:

Being an outsider in America for the past decade, my experience offers me a new perspective to reflect my own cultural heritage… The repetitive and labor-intensive process serves as a therapeutic response to the challenges of my experience in navigating dual cultures. My pieces are in many ways like living organisms, a metaphor for the evolving nature of life itself, and my own journey and roots.

If you’re in London, you will be able to see Xu’s work in an exhibition dedicated to Chinese contemporary studio craft at the V&A, which opens October 28 and runs through September 28, 2026. Her work will also be included in a handful of forthcoming juried exhibitions in Portugal, Italy, and Missouri. Find more on her website.

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Nearly half a million images were submitted to this year’s Sony World Photography Awards, organized by the World Photography Organisation, marking another highly competitive, awe-inspiring selection of moments captured across the globe. Now in its 18th year, more than 419,000 contributions rolled in from more than 200 countries.

The photos shown here are all entries in the Open competition, which invites amateur image-makers from around the world to submit their best compositions. Additional contest streams, for which many of these images are also considered, highlight the work of professionals, students, specific regions, women, and youth.

From dramatic landscapes to cultural customs to one-of-a-kind travel experiences, the winning and shortlisted photos capture beautiful and diverse ecosystems, locations, and traditions. The contest “celebrates the ability of an individual photograph to capture and distill a singular moment, and to evoke a broader narrative,” says a statement.

The overall winner of the Open Photographer of the Year will be announced on April 16 in London, where the 2025 exhibition opens at Somerset House and runs from April 17 to May 5. Explore all of the top shots on the awards’ website.

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In January 2025, wildfires driven by hurricane-force winds ripped through Los Angeles County. Over a frightening 48 hours, embers soared for miles, destroying thousands of homes and killing 29 people. Preliminary estimates named these fires as the costliest in American history.

The twin forces of hotter, drier summers and decades of blanket fire suppression and fuel accumulation have combined to create unprecedented fire danger in the Western United States. Many landscapes have become far more overgrown than ever before, multiplying the wildfire risks.  

But in Washington, a strategic approach spearheaded by the Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, has focused on restoring forests to their historic balance, fostering community fire resilience, and upping firefighting resources. Launched in 2017, the state’s 20-year forest health strategic plan saves forests and homes while creating jobs and revenue along the way.

Fire, whether from lightning strikes or controlled burns by Indigenous cultures, is crucial to the health of many Western American landscapes. Many old-growth trees depend on fire to clear overgrowth that competes for soil nutrients, and some native trees and plants even have seeds that can only germinate once burned. But decades of complete fire-suppression policy, combined with human activity like indiscriminate logging, have created overgrown forests. 

“In the past, forest fires kept the landscape in a much more open condition, with fewer trees and less woody fuel,” said Derek Churchill, a DNR forest health scientist. “But what we have now is thousands of trees per acre that don’t belong there because we disrupted the ecosystem by suppressing all fire.” 

To combat this danger, the DNR starts with forest restoration. “That means building upon the progress this agency has made in wildfire prevention and response by boosting our prevention efforts, expanding our prescribed burn programs, and ramping up forest health treatments here in western Washington,” Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove said last month in a speech shortly after being sworn into office.

The DNR uses forest science and fire risk modeling to assess which communities and forests are at greatest risk. Working with state and federal agencies and local communities, it prioritizes restoration treatments like thinning and prescribed fire and preemptively creating fire breaks and barriers in those areas. The program, funded by a 2021 state bill that earmarked $125 million per biennium for wildfire mitigation, also supports job creation efforts like training programs for wildland firefighters. 

Partnerships help. Wildfires don’t respect property lines, but in many states, wildfire mitigation efforts are limited to state-owned lands, creating a huge barrier. “Wildfire is an existential emergency,” said Trevor McConchie, assistant division manager for federal lands at DNR. “So it doesn’t matter if it’s state, private, or federal land — we need to address it everywhere.” 

McConchie helped launch the state’s extensive collaboration with private landowners, tribes, and the federal government (which owns almost 29 percent of Washington’s land). This coordinated effort fosters what DNR terms an “all lands, all hands” approach: Washington currently has the nation’s largest federal forest management partnership. 

Since 2017, the state has treated almost 900,000 acres of forest. And its strategy is getting results: In the 2021 Schneider Springs fire, many trees in the areas previously treated with thinning and prescribed fire survived, while trees in the adjacent untreated forest died from the higher fire intensity. During the 2024 wildfire season, Oregon had roughly 2,000 wildfires start, while Washington had 1,400. But while a total of 1.9 million acres burned in Oregon (the most in the state’s history), the damage in Washington was limited to a comparatively small 310,000 acres. 

The DNR’s strategy also focuses on community resilience to reduce wildfire risks to homes and humans. It emphasizes proactively creating fire breaks and access roads around communities at highest fire risk while supporting local groups with home hardening efforts and community fire awareness.

Kelly Finnell, a Spokane County homeowner, credits the DNR’s community resilience program with saving her family’s home. The Finnells made “firewise” updates, like clearing trees and brush, to their property based on the DNR’s recommendations. Then, the 2023 Gray Fire hit, forcing them to evacuate for five days. “We watched on our front door camera and saw the fire come up toward our house three different times,” she said in a video interview. “It saved our house … the program works.”

The state also increased its corps of full-time firefighters from 40 to 160, and increased the number of air firefighting resources it had access to in 2024 to 40. Other technologies, like drones and predictive fire risk modeling, augment the state’s firefighting resources. Seemingly simple changes also made a big difference — for example, allowing firefighters to request air support directly, and shifting to a wholly-owned leasing model for aircraft rather than sharing them with other states. 

Based on its risk modeling, the DNR can, to some degree, predict where fires are most likely to start and has begun pre-positioning firefighting resources in the most critical areas. “Our wildland firefighting teams have transformed wildfire response in this state, turning Washington into a national leader in the process,” Upthegrove said.

The revenue from the forest treatments helps support the restoration work. At Vaagen Brothers Mill, up to 25 percent of the wood the sawmill processes each year comes from the DNR’s forest projects. “We like purchasing timber from forest restoration projects because the economic benefits stay here in the state,” said Kurtis Vaagan, fourth-generation mill owner. “The money we pay for the wood funds state initiatives and services, and the projects provide jobs for local loggers and sawmill families.” 

Up to 30 percent of the DNR’s forest treatment projects generate enough revenue to fully cover the project’s costs. Any remaining revenue is earmarked for state initiatives. The DNR is also working to create other markets for the byproducts — wood from the state’s forest restoration projects has made its way into homes, schools, and commercial buildings. The recent Portland airport renovation was partly built with lumber from Washington’s forest thinnings. 

While wildfire continues to be a catastrophic threat, Washington’s approach shows that proactive, science-based strategies can be deeply effective. But Upthegrove remains cautious. “Every year, wildfire seasons stretch longer,” he said. “This is an all-of-Washington crisis that requires renewed resolve and revitalized commitment. This is about saving lives and homes.”

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Administered by Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources manages more than 5.6 million acres of state-owned forest, range, commercial, agricultural, conservation, and aquatic lands. Of these, more than half are held in trust to produce income to support public schools and other essential services. State trust lands managed by DNR provide other public benefits, including outdoor recreation, habitat for native fish and wildlife, and watersheds for clean water.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Washington State pioneered an ‘all hands, all lands’ wildfire prevention strategy on Mar 4, 2025.

After shuffling the cards in a standard 52-card deck, Alex Mullen, a three-time world memory champion, can memorize their order in under 20 seconds. As he flips though the cards, he takes a mental walk through a house. At each point in his journey — the mailbox, front door, staircase and so on — he attaches a card. To recall the cards, he relives the trip. This technique, called “method of loci”…

Source

Avocados are entrenched in American cuisine. The rich, creamy fruit, swaddled in a coarse skin, is often smashed into guacamole, slathered on toast, or minced into salads.

The nation’s demand for Persea americana has surged by 600 percent since 1998. Most of the avocados consumed in the U.S., and many of those eaten elsewhere in the world, are a single variety grown in Michoacán, a state in west-central Mexico with an immensely profitable export industry worth at least $2 billion annually. But this “green gold rush” has come at a steep climatic cost, as vast tracts of protected land are razed for orchards. 

“We are losing the forest,” said Alejandro Méndez López, who has been the secretary of environment in Michoacán since 2022. Every year, up to 24,700 acres are illegally cleared for avocado production. “The main contribution of Michoacán for climate change is land-use change. So I think the whole world should be concerned.”

The state government hopes to mitigate that through a certification program that ensures packinghouses that ship the fruit to international markets are buying sustainably grown avocados. The effort, called Pro-Forest Avocado certification, launched last fall, and uses satellites to monitor orchards for signs of clear-cutting. Ultimately, the aim is to do away with deals between processors and producers that aren’t adhering to Mexico’s sweeping anti-deforestation law. 

That hasn’t gone over well with everyone in a business that has grown so profitable that it’s attracted interest from drug cartels and civilian militias.

Méndez López helped create this program and is its public face. He has spent the past month meeting with angry avocado growers throughout Michoacán, always in a car outfitted with bulletproof windows and accompanied by police. Despite his attempts to ease their concerns, he says many leave no less irate. Their problem isn’t so much with him, but what his presence represents: the government’s rollout of a program that is voluntary for packinghouses but leaves growers fearing they have little choice but to comply. 

“They were very angry. I was telling them that this certification is not compulsory, but many of them believe that this is a hidden way to tax them,” he said. Given the powerful role cartels play in the avocado business, his efforts to address the industry’s ecological and climatic impact has created no small risk to his safety. Some growers have started anonymously boycotting packinghouses that join, denouncing them as “traitors.” “I don’t want to be killed,” he said. “I’m a bit afraid, because right now we are touching their economic interests.” 

Climate activists and analysts say the program could replicate the market changes seen with other ethical labeling efforts like fair trade coffee and dolphin-free tuna. Locals are more skeptical, and worry that the industry’s history of corruption will undermine progress. And there’s always the question of it receiving the support needed to succeed. But Méndez López believes this is a legitimate solution to a grave issue. Even threats of violence won’t deter the work.

“We have very few resources,” he said. “They can come to my office and put a gun to my head, but they won’t be able to shut down a satellite.”  

Nearly a third of the avocados consumed worldwide — more than 2 million metric tons annually — are grown in Michoacán’s “Avocado Belt.” Fertile volcanic soils, elevated terrain, and warm, subtropical microclimates with ample rainfall make it the only region in the world with large-scale production year-round. 

Michoacán started moving toward the center of the global avocado trade in 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement opened the U.S. to imports from south of the border. By 2007, it was the only Mexican state authorized to send avocados throughout the U.S. This provided consumers with year-round access to the fruit, which further drove demand. Since 2019 alone, avocado exports to the United States have surged 48 percent. (Some 90 percent are the market-dominating Hass variety.)

That explosive growth has brought opportunity to economically disadvantaged areas. Juan Gabriel Pedraza, an Indigenous Purépecha farmer in the town of Sicuicho, told Grist that his people plant orchards even as they strive to protect the forests. He raises roughly 720 avocado trees alongside the pines. The crop “has brought life” to his community, which was once “extremely, extremely poor.” 

“We are like guardians of the forest, because if the forest disappears, then it’s going to affect everything else,” he said in Spanish. “We are always careful with keeping the forest healthy. It’s a duty of ours.”

Over the years, enormous avocado export profits have led to an escalation of violence that has surged alongside demand. Local cartels have bribed agricultural officials and police and extorted or kidnapped growers to maintain a stronghold in the lucrative business, while civilian militias have fought for control of their communities. Avocados are now Michoacán’s, and one of Mexico’s, biggest agricultural exports. This booming industry has triggered widespread violation of a federal law banning clear-cutting without government approval. About 95 percent of the deforestation in Mexico happens illegally. 

The problem has since expanded to neighboring Jalisco, the only other Mexican state authorized to ship avocados to the U.S. Some 40,000 to 70,000 acres across the two states were cleared between 1983 and 2023 to grow the fruit destined for American supermarkets, according to a Climate Rights International report. It also found that major U.S. supermarket chains, including Costco, Target, and Walmart, bought from packinghouses whose supply chains included orchards on recently deforested land. 

“More and more, these forests were disappearing and being transformed into avocado orchards,” said Antonio González-Rodríguez, a forest conservation scientist at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Michoacán’s capital city of Morelia. 

In 2022, his team estimated that another 100,000 hectares of orchards could be established in Michoacán by 2050 — an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan — of which more than two-thirds would lead to forest loss. That includes protected reserves home to endangered species like the eastern Monarch butterfly. Such a loss would represent “more than 10 percent of the remaining forest,” said González-Rodríguez. 

That comes with a staggering planetary cost. Chopping down forests eliminates vital carbon sinks and diminishes an ecosystem’s ability to store carbon. Meanwhile, warming threatens to reduce the amount of land highly suited to avocado cultivation by up to 41 percent worldwide within 25 years. 

Clear-cutting also contributes to water scarcity by increasing soil erosion and disrupting natural filtration processes, throwing off the water cycle. Over the course of one decade, deforestation can have the same impact on a community’s access to clean drinking water as a 9 percent decrease in rainfall. This is increasingly an issue as Mexico faces a severe supply crisis.

It doesn’t help that avocado trees need a lot of water and are only getting thirstier as the world warms. Water demand for the crop in Uruapan, Michoacán’s second largest city, rose nearly 24 percent from 2012 to 2017, with orchards drawing 120 percent of the amount allocated to agriculture, creating shortages. Last year, droughts prompted some growers to illegally siphon it from lakes or basins into unlicensed irrigation ponds. 

“The expansion of the avocado industry is creating a conflict over water,” González-Rodríguez said. “It’s going to become one of the more serious problems, socially and politically.” 

Voluntary certification programs that rely on public interest in fair and sustainable practices have reshaped consumer purchasing of everything from coffee to tuna. But assessing their impact can be difficult, said Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director of the Center for Biological Diversity. 

One fundamental flaw many of these efforts share is a reliance on self-reporting, with little accountability and inadequate follow-up. Those that operate independently of the government often lack regulatory oversight, while others attempt to cover so many products, or so large a geographic area, that they rarely disrupt large industries or markets, she said. Crops associated with widespread deforestation, such as the Cavendish banana, often end up bogged down in too many certification schemes, with multiple retailers requesting several iterations of “sustainable” labels. At worst, these efforts provide little more than greenwashing, and typically at a high cost to producers.

Michoacán’s Pro-Forest program sidesteps many of those issues by focusing on a single product grown in a specific region and sold primarily to one international market. Its labeling scheme was created by a forest conservation nonprofit working in collaboration with the state government, researchers at local universities, and environmental organizations. It could soon end up boosted by Mexico’s federal government, which on January 30 announced the forthcoming launch of a national program to eliminate deforestation and water exploitation for agricultural exports. A week later, Michoacán Governor Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla issued anti-deforestation certificates to six packing plants and two orchards that together supply roughly 31 percent of the state’s avocados sold to the U.S. 

Orchards qualify for the scheme if they’ve had no deforestation since 2018, no forest fires since 2012, and do not operate on protected land. Government subsidies cover enrollment costs for packinghouses, while growers are charged about $40 for every 2.5 acres for certification. Growers must also pay for the conservation of a forest area to make up for the water consumption of their avocado cultivation. In a “plus” version of the program, companies commit to prioritizing buying from locally certified orchards. (No incentive for this tier exists just yet). 

So far, about 10 percent of the state’s packinghouses that send avocados to the U.S. have signed on. That means they’ve agreed to be informed which orchards are complying with the guidelines — and to cease working with those that do not. Packinghouses that continue buying from orchards in violation of the anti-deforestation guidelines lose the ability to certify their avocados as sustainably sourced.

But no one is promising to buy avocados only from orchards bearing the state’s official seal of approval, because there simply aren’t enough of them. As it stands, 937 out of the state’s 53,105 orchards have signed up, a number that changes almost daily, Heriberto Padilla Ibarra told Grist. Ibarra leads Guardian Forestal, the nonprofit overseeing the program’s remote sensing efforts.  

The scant participation may reflect the fact that local producers must pay for certification that packinghouses receive for free. It could also be because growers like Icpac Escalera have little faith in government initiatives. Escalera runs his family’s organic avocado orchard in the town of Acuitzio del Canje. Although he considers the labeling a valiant effort, he says the 2018 date barring deforestation “is not enough.” He also doubts the state has sufficient resources to enforce it, and is worried that it will further disenfranchise smaller producers “without political clout.” 

“The political situation hasn’t really helped anything in terms of making sure that deforestation is being properly handled,” Escalera said in Spanish. “Many politicians have avocado fields. It’s a well-known secret. There are not enough incentives for the smaller producers to maintain the forest, and because of that, the forests are disappearing.” 

All the while, global demand for avocados continues to soar. Production in other top exporters like Colombia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic is booming, and breeders are developing new varieties. Even as avocados could overtake pineapples and mangos to become the world’s most traded tropical fruit as early as this year, regulators are stepping in to minimize their environmental and climatic impacts.

The European Union is set to begin implementing “deforestation-free” product regulations in December. The United States took strides in that direction one year ago when several senators urged the Biden administration to address the role the country takes in driving the crisis as a primary market for avocados. Ken Salazar, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, announced that avocados grown in illegally cleared orchards should be blocked from the market, before the administration released a policy framework on how to begin doing so for all agricultural imports in December.

President Donald Trump has yet to address the topic, but given his administration’s hostility toward climate action, he isn’t likely to do much about the issue for that reason. But the impending threat of tariffs on Mexico imply the administration may be interested in doing something about it, if for no reason than to limit overall imports from the country, said James Sayre, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis. “In a way, the Trump administration could end up acting on the deforestation issue,” he said. 

Despite the controversial reputation of product labeling, Méndez López remains optimistic about Michoacán’s certification initiative. He hopes to see Mexico and its biggest avocado market federally mandate the need for such schemes. “It would be wonderful if the U.S. had a compulsory [requirement] for the imports of avocado to be deforestation-free. That would be perfect. But, we didn’t get so far [with the Biden administration]. And I don’t know if this new administration will do that,” he said. 

For Julio Santoyo Guerrero, an environmental activist in the Michoacán municipality of Madero, the program, while “barely a lifeline” is at least a measure that warns people of the dire ethical and environmental costs linked to every avocado they consume. 

“Our biggest cancer is corruption … I believe that the cause that originated the expansion of avocados, the market demand, will be the same thing that can stop it,” said Guerrero in Spanish. “If the market continues to function without regulation, our forests will continue to be destroyed.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America’s avocado obsession is destroying Mexico’s forests. Is there a fix? on Feb 28, 2025.

For all its plant and animal life aboveground, the Amazon rainforest’s soils are surprisingly poor in nutrients necessary for growing food. Thousands of years ago, the region’s Indigenous peoples solved this problem by creating “terra preta” from table scraps and charcoal and tucking it away in the hostile soil.

Today, that ancient bit of ingenuity is a powerful climate solution. As biomass like trees and crops grow, they sequester carbon in their leaves and branches. Heat that biomass up without fully consuming it and it turns to nearly pure carbon known as biochar, which farmers soak in compost or fertilizer to “charge” it with nutrients, then add to their soils. That simultaneously improves crop yields and better retains water, all while locking carbon away from the atmosphere. Rising demand from farmers and big business is expected to push the global market for biochar from $600 million two years ago to $3 billion this year. 

The nagging question, though, is exactly how long that carbon stays in the soil. A new study adds to a growing body of evidence that scientists have been underestimating the staying power of biochar, meaning the technology is actually an even more powerful way to store carbon than previously thought. “I’m talking about over 90 percent very easily surviving multi-thousands of years,” said Hamed Sanei, a professor of organic carbon geochemistry at Denmark’s Aarhus University and lead author of the paper published in the journal Biochar. The research suggests that biochar is much more resilient than currently calculated by researchers. “The current model that we’re talking about is saying 30 percent of almost all biochar that’s being produced will be gone in 100 years.”

Nailing down exactly how long biochar can hold onto carbon is crucial for the carbon-removal credit industry, where companies like Microsoft and Google fund projects to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. These credits reached 8 million metric tons of carbon in 2024, a 78 percent jump from the prior year. So scientists have been running experiments monitoring how microbes degrade biochar over a few years in soil, then extrapolating that over longer time scales. Doing that sort of modeling, the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other research groups have reckoned that after a century, between 63 and 82 percent of the biochar will stay in the ground.

The critical clue for Sanei was a naturally occurring material called inertinite, a stable form of organic carbon in Earth’s crust, formed when wildfires char forests and the burned vegetation fossilizes. Biochar is just the result of humans replicating that process: If the biomass is exposed to sufficiently high temperatures — over 1,000 degrees F is ideal — the carbon should transform into a material that soil microbes struggle to digest, which is how the charred plants in inertinite were able to last long enough to fossilize. Much as humans eat food off dishes instead of eating the dishes themselves, bacteria and fungi choose to eat organic matter like leaves over biochar. “It’s kind of like if you have a nice piece of cake and they bring it to us on a plate, we’re going to eat the cake,” Sanei said. “If we are very hungry, we eat it much faster. But still, we’re not going to eat the plate.”

Much as inertinite survived over vast stretches of geologic time, biochar should be able to last for millennia, Sanei and his coauthors calculate. The fact that scientists are finding intact biochar in the Amazon’s ancient terra preta suggests that it’s happening. “Biochar is already a compelling solution,” said Thomas A. Trabold, a sustainability scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology and CEO of Cinterest, a company developing biochar technology. “This data just suggests that the benefits are even greater than we already assumed.” 

Not all biochar is created equal, though. For one, woody biomass turns to better biochar because it has a higher carbon content than leafy material or grass. And the higher the temperatures used in the manufacturing process, the better chance that carbon will stay in the soil. The local climate matters, too, as warmer soils lead to more microbial activity that can degrade biochar.

Still, by carefully controlling the production of biochar, companies can produce a material that they know contains a given amount of carbon. This becomes a carbon removal credit, which companies buy to show they’re investing in removing carbon from the atmosphere (even if they’re not doing all they can to reduce their own emissions). Most carbon removal credits have a standard time frame of 100 years, according to Erica Dorr, who leads the climate team at Riverse, a carbon crediting platform in France. But if scientists are now talking about biochar lasting for thousands of years instead of centuries, that makes it more appealing for corporations buying credits, Dorr said. 

“It wasn’t very interesting to issue a 500-year or 1,000-year biochar removal credit, because the model would tell us that there’s not much remaining after that long,” Dorr said. “Now, the new research is really unlocking this 1,000-year argument.”

That would put biochar on par with other carbon removal techniques like direct air capture, in which giant machines suck carbon out of the air and pump it underground. But direct air capture remains expensive, and the technology is nowhere near widespread enough to put a meaningful dent in carbon emissions. Biochar, on the other hand, is a proven technique that’s been used for thousands of years, capable of improving agriculture and, according to this new research, locking carbon away for millennia. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This ancient bit of ingenuity keeps carbon trapped for thousands of years on Mar 3, 2025.

A nine-meter-tall passageway made of eight individual arches enticed visitors into ENESS’s latest installation (previously). Last month at Quoz Arts Fest 2025 in Dubai, Forest Dancer comprised a monumental entry and an immersive exhibition of illuminated inflatable forms inside a contemporary building.

With mushroom-like proportions, pixellated patterns, and a slew of changing hues, ENESS’s work encompasses a central character surrounded by psychedelic trees, mountains, insects, and boulder-like bean bags.

“As artists, we work in many contexts—inside galleries and museums, in (the) public realm and even creating small art pieces for the home,” said ENESS founder Nimrod Weis. “This approach of ‘art is everywhere’ means that we responded to the inspiring architecture by creating an artwork that is at once a conversation with the built form and an installation in its own right.”

This year’s festival was curated around the theme of an Arabic proverb meaning “a hut holds a thousand friends,” inspiring creative responses that center on bringing people of all ages together and promoting interactivity.

A statement says, “The entire exhibition, spanning over 600 square meters, is an ode to the power and importance of creativity in the face of online obsession, geopolitical upheaval, and the rise of dark forces taking us far from the soulfulness of art, human connection, and gentle contemplation,” says a statement.

Find more on ENESS’s website.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article A Monumental Immersive Installation by ENESS Prompts Joy and Togetherness appeared first on Colossal.

On the loosely woven surface of jute burlap, Brooklyn-based artist Jennifer J. Lee paints photorealistic scenes that explore the saturation of images in contemporary experience. The fabric’s gridded structure conjures associations with pixellated screens, playing with the relationship between digital and analog representations of everyday objects.

Recent paintings, nearly a dozen of which were on view in the artist’s solo exhibition at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, highlight a personal glimpse of nostalgia, a fascination with the act of looking, and seemingly banal imagery transfigured into symbolic references and objects.

Lee’s paintings starkly contrast the instant gratification of scrolling through endless images, challenging the speed at which we consume information. She describes her process as a form of “waking meditation and sustained observation,” translating digital pixels into hand-painted brushstrokes and stretching fabric to simulate screens.

The artist’s technical ability to translate finite details onto a relatively rugged surface speaks to the time and attention required to produce a single painting. Small in scale, her pieces reveal surprising interactions between the objects’ surfaces and the woven jute.

Denim, for example, sports its own signature weave, which in works like “Acid Jeans” seems to somehow exist in both harmony and opposition with the burlap. Portraying a smooth object in “Security Mirror” presents the challenge of making glass appear polished while nodding to the graininess we associate with CCTV footage. And a bunch of footprints in sand suggest another kind of graininess altogether, the shadows and subtle colors of which seem to vibrate or flicker thanks to the low-thread-count jute weave.

Lee’s recent paintings harken back to Y2K, an era on the cusp of immense technological and social change as personal computers, mobile phones, and the internet became more widely available, spawning the social media platforms we still use today—albeit profoundly changed since they first emerged.

Find more on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Loosely Woven Burlap Mimics Digital Pixels in Jennifer J. Lee’s Photorealistic Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

Engulfed in their own finery, the subjects of Volker Hermes’ portraits epitomize a bygone era. From the Italian High Renaissance to French Rococo, his digital reinterpretations playfully hide the faces of wealthy and aristocratic sitters.

Hidden Portraits: Old Masters Reimagined, a new book forthcoming this month, gathers a quintessential selection of Hermes’ works into one volume. Highlighting the artist’s wry commentary on luxury, social status, and fame, the selection delves into the history of portraiture through a humorous lens.

Hermes expands upon the ornate silk gowns, brocade, and lace ruffs that characterized elite fashion through the centuries (previously). An enormous bow cocoons a woman in “Hidden Wright of Derby,” for example, elaborating on a portrait of a wealthy woman painted by Joseph Wright of Derby, now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

In striking profile, strings of pearls and a green, helmet-like hood envelop Bianca Maria Sforza, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, in “Hidden de Predis,” the 15th-century inspiration for which can be viewed at the National Gallery of Art.

Explore more of Hermes’ work on his website, and snag a copy of Hidden Portraits on Bookshop.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article In ‘Hidden Portraits,’ Volker Hermes Reimagines Historical Figures in Overwhelming Frippery appeared first on Colossal.

Delicately peeled skin and supple folds appear where we’d least expect them in José Manuel Castro López’s stone sculptures (previously). From small boulders of granite and quartz found near his home in A Coruña, Spain, the artist carves and polishes delicate wrinkles that suggest fabric or the malleability of smashed, wet clay. For example, “Recorte de Piel,” or “Skin Peeling,” resembles an angular slice of potato skin carefully pulled away.

A few works shown here are part of López’s exhibition at Cadogan Solo in Milan, which continues through October 31. Keep an eye on his Instagram for updates.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Peels and Folds Soften José Manuel Castro López’s Fleshy Stone Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.

It wasn’t until I mustered the courage to check her Instagram that reality hit: Ayşenur was murdered by the Israeli regime and U.S. complicity. One of the last things she posted was a picture she took in Ramallah, Palestine, the same city my family is from, of a poster showing a Native American man with his fist held high, with her caption reading, “Long live international solidarity.” As the tears streamed down my face, I became overwhelmed with emotions I didn’t even have names for.

The post Ayşenur’s Legacy: The Tragic Loss of an Activist, a Friend, and a Fighter for International Solidarity appeared first on South Seattle Emerald.

The latest annual impact report from the Global Foodbanking Network — a nonprofit that works with regional food banks in more than 50 countries to fight hunger — found that its member organizations provided 1.7 billion meals to more than 40 million people in 2023. According to the nonprofit, this redistribution of food, much of which was recovered from farms or wholesale produce markets, mitigated an estimated 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

These numbers reflect an ongoing, high demand for food banks. Last year, the Global Foodbanking Network, or GFN, served almost as many people as it did in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sent food insecurity soaring. In order to respond to this pressing need in their communities, many of GFN’s member organizations have invested in agricultural recovery, working to rescue food from farmers before it gets thrown out. 

Their efforts show how food banks can serve the dual purpose of addressing hunger and protecting the environment. By intercepting perfectly good, edible food before it winds up in the landfill, food banks help mitigate harmful greenhouse gas emissions created by food loss and waste.

“There is always food that is unnecessarily wasted,” said Emily Broad Leib, the founding director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, who has worked with GFN before but was not involved in the recent study. All that unnecessary waste means “there is ongoing need for scaling up food banks and food-recovery operations,” Broad Leib added.

A recent analysis from the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that 13 percent of food was lost while it was making its way from producers to retailers in 2022. Subsequently, 19 percent was wasted by retailers, restaurants, and households. The world’s households alone let 1 billion meals go to waste each day. The scope of food wasted around the world has been shockingly high for years: In 2011, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations released a study that suggested roughly one-third of food produced globally is never eaten. 

Food waste at this scale comes with massive planetary impacts. When food goes uneaten, all of the emissions associated with growing, transporting, and processing it are rendered unnecessary. Furthermore, when food rots in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that is roughly 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that 58 percent of methane emissions from U.S. landfills come from food waste. Globally, food loss and waste have been estimated to be responsible for 8 percent to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing them is essential for achieving climate targets. 

Food banks can play a special role in that reduction by rescuing more food before it’s lost and redirecting it to people in need. 

“Our members have been building out their redistribution capacity,” said Lisa Moon, the president and CEO of GFN. “I think that was our first challenge in the face of this rising need: How do we as an organization capture more supply?”

In order to do this, food banks within GFN member organizations have been coordinating more closely with farmers to redirect surplus food from landfills. GFN defines surplus food as food from commercial streams that was grown for human consumption but that, for some reason or another, cannot be sold. So-called “ugly” produce — misshapen food that never makes it to the grocery store because of its looks — falls into this category.

Some of this redirection actually looks like cutting out food banks as the middleman. Moon gives the example of a food bank that receives a call from a farmer with excess green beans. Instead of traveling to the farm to pick them up, traveling back to the food bank’s distribution hub, storing the green beans, and having folks wait for the next distribution day to collect them, the food bank in question might simply reach out to beneficiaries in the area (think: soup kitchens) to inform them of how many green beans are available and where so they can pick them up. GFN refers to this as “virtual food banking” because of how members are using tech platforms to match farmers with beneficiaries, rather than physically moving the produce themselves.

The result of this emphasis on agricultural recovery is that fruit and vegetables now make up the largest portion — 40 percent — of food redistributed by GFN members by volume. Moon says the organization is “just only scratching the surface” of possibilities for recovering fresh produce. 

In order to calculate that 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent was mitigated by these efforts, GFN utilized the Food Loss and Waste Protocol developed by the World Resources Institute. This framework takes a number of things into account, including where recovered food would have ended up had it not been intercepted from the waste stream. These waste destinations can be landfills but also include animal feed, compost, and anaerobic digesters (a waste management technology that converts organic waste into biogas — but that can come with its own emissions problems). Moon acknowledged that GFN does not know in every case what would happen to the surplus food if it were not rescued by a food bank — but pointed out that most of the places where the network operates do not have a robust circular economy for food.

Broad Leib, the Harvard Law food policy expert, described GFN’s estimate of carbon dioxide equivalent mitigated as “a good proxy for impact.” While other waste destinations are possible, “we also know that the large majority of wasted food globally goes to landfill,” she said. “I think their estimate is likely not far off from actual emissions avoided.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How food banks prevented 1.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions last year on Aug 14, 2024.

•LATEST UPDATE HERE•

Bear with the story as it explores these new uh, developments. All will make sense in time, but Sette is every bit as confused as you likely are :)

-Ashley

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Discuss the comic on Discord or Reddit

The post Puzzled appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.

When Covid-19 sent people home in early 2020, the computer scientist Tom Zahavy rediscovered chess. He had played as a kid and had recently read Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, a memoir of the grandmaster’s 1997 matches against IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. He watched chess videos on YouTube and The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. Despite his renewed interest, Zahavy wasn’t looking for ways...

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This weekend’s read is a fascinating deep dive into the social isolation of America’s economic classes.

The post Weekend Reads | Examining Social Segregation by Class appeared first on South Seattle Emerald.

As tech luminaries like Elon Musk issue solemn warnings about artificial intelligence’s threat of “civilizational destruction,” the U.S. military is using it for a decidedly more mundane purpose: understanding its sprawling $816.7 billion budget and figuring out its own policies.

Thanks to its bloat and political wrangling, the annual Department of Defense budget legislation includes hundreds of revisions and limitations telling the Pentagon what it can and cannot do. To make sense of all those provisions, the Pentagon created an AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER. 

“In my comptroller role, I am, of course, the most excited about applying GAMECHANGER to gain better visibility and understanding across our various budget exhibits,” said Gregory Little, the deputy comptroller of the Pentagon, shortly after the program’s creation last year. 

“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate.”

“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert on the defense budget. “It’s kind of similar to the problem with the budget as a whole: They don’t make tough decisions, they just layer on more policies, more weapons systems, more spending. Between the Pentagon and Congress, they’re not really getting rid of old stuff, they’re just adding more.”

House Republicans reportedly aim to pass their defense budget later this week. They had planned to vote on an $826 billion proposal last week before the far-right Freedom Caucus blocked the proposal, demanding cuts to non-defense spending.

“The fact that the Pentagon developed an AI program to navigate its own policies should be a stark wake-up call for lawmakers who throw more money at the department than it even asks for nearly every year,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information. “It’s unsurprising, though: The DOD couldn’t adequately account for 61 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets in the most recent audit, and those are physical!”

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

Military brass use GAMECHANGER to help them navigate what the Defense Department itself points to as an absurd amount of “tedious” policies. The program contains over 15,000 policy documents governing how the Pentagon operates, according to its GitHub entry.

“Did you know that if you read all the Department of Defense’s policies, it would be the equivalent of reading through ‘War and Peace’ more than 100 times?” a press release about GAMECHANGER from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military’s spy wing, says. “For most people, policy is a tedious and [elusive] concept, making the idea of understanding and synthesizing tens of thousands of policy requirements a daunting task. But in the midst of the chaos that is the policy world, one DIA officer and a team at the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security saw an opportunity.” 

The press release went on to decry the Pentagon’s “mountain of policies and requirements.” 

As unusual as it is for the military to publicly air its contempt for its own sprawling bureaucracy, members of Congress have been similarly harsh. In its portrayal of U.S. military policy — which it also had a hand in creating — the Senate Armed Services Committee called rules governing the department “byzantine” and “labyrinthine.”

“The committee notes that the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center developed an artificial intelligence-enabled tool, GAMECHANGER, to make sense of the byzantine and labyrinthine ecosystem of Department guidance,” the committee said in a report for National Defense Authorization Act — the law that appropriates cash for the Pentagon budget — for fiscal year 2023. (Amid the critique of the Pentagon’s bloated bureaucracy, the NDAA would later become law, authorizing $802.4 billion in funding for the defense budget.)

Though announced in February of last year, GAMECHANGER has received scant media attention. The military’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a subdivision of the U.S. Air Force created in 2018, developed the program. Upon its completion, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center transferred ownership of it to the office of the Defense Department comptroller, which handles budgetary and fiscal matters for the Pentagon. 

Shortly after its release, GAMECHANGER was already used by over 6,000 Defense Department users conducting over 100,000 queries, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency. 

Described as a natural language processing application — a broad term in computer science generally referring the use of machine learning to allow computers to interpret human speech and writing — GAMECHANGER is just one of a vast suite of AI programs bankrolled by the Pentagon in recent months. 

The Pentagon is currently funding 686 such AI projects, according to the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit that frequently conducts research into the government. The figure does not include the Department of Defense’s classified efforts.

Before it was formally released, GAMECHANGER was granted an award by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency for civil servants.

“GAMECHANGER is an ironic name: They’re patting themselves on the back for, in the best case, figuring out what they’ve said in the past, which is pretty modest,” said Hartung, the Quincy Institute defense budget expert. “It’s more a problem of how they make policy and not a problem of how to surf through it.”

The post Pentagon’s Budget Is So Bloated That It Needs an AI Program to Navigate It appeared first on The Intercept.

An interview with Kristie Coulter, author of Exit Interview. by Sam Machkovech

Many of Amazon’s worst workplace elements have been chronicled for years, from drivers pissing into bottles when they’re unable to take a bathroom break to flagrant anti-union activity.

But there’s a different, more nuanced story of the megacorp’s chaos and male fragility, now available in Exit Interview, a memoir from a 12-year Amazon vet who got sober, ran screaming, and put together a darkly hilarious tale of her experiences there. We caught up with author and Seattleite Kristi Coulter for an Exit Interview interview.

How did you deal with reliving these incredibly high-pressure stories?

It's almost hard for me still not to think, like, "What are people from Amazon going to think about this book? Am I putting the company in a light that's going to make people angry?" But a lot of that I worked through when I was writing. It took me 18 months to even feel like I had the self-esteem to write the book, because every time I would work on it, I’d think, “Oh, you're a worm. You sucked at your job.” It was Amazon's voice. I worked through so much of that in the writing process that at this point I just think, a-yuuup.

You’re blasé about it?

It’s more like: Early on, I thought of the book as a trauma memoir, and that mindset made the writing pretty unfun, not as strong. At some point I realized, this is more of a coming-of-age story, even though I was 36 when I started at Amazon. This is a hero's journey. I rescued myself. I still, you know, cover a lot of traumatic material—Amazon is a traumatic place to work, and it damaged me. Deeply. But it's very hard to look back on 12 years of your life and say, “Oh, I could have left at any time, and I didn't.” By the time I got to the end, I was like, “You went through the classic journey and came out the other end okay.” I do wish I'd had all those processing skills at the beginning of writing. But I had been gone from Amazon less than two years.

So you wanted to write a memoir while the memory was fresh?

I was still working there, my first book was about to come out, and I was thinking about what I might want to do next. I was like, “I guess I could write about Amazon? I wonder if anybody would be interested?” I was so deep inside Amazon that, even knowing how curious people were about the company, the idea that they'd want to read a memoir about it did not occur to me. I mentioned it to my agent, like, [shrugs shoulders], and she said, “Yes, please write that book.” And I was like, "Really? I don't know if I have anything to say."

Why did you feel that way?

It's funny—I was extremely aware of, like, you can't work at Amazon and not realize that half the world hates you. You personally. Especially living in Seattle, you know, I would dread people saying to me, “Everyone has to earn a living somehow.” Like I was unemployable otherwise. [Laughs] But it was more than that. When you're at Amazon, you're so unimportant. And invisible. Even knowing I’d outlasted all but like 98% of people [as a 12-year veteran] and I'd had all these huge jobs there, by the end, I still mostly thought, “You failed.” Working through the book made me realize: I failed some, I succeeded a lot.

Now that the book is out, how do you feel about Amazon actually reading it?

I’ve gotten so many notes from people I’ve never met who’ve worked at Amazon all over, in like Minneapolis or Munich. People at Amazon, especially women, are dying to read this book. I remember joking with my publisher early on: if we only sell a copy to everyone who works at Amazon, we’d make a profit.

For a lot of Amazon stuff, I wasn’t revealing anything that’s not publicly available already. That was really important to me because I wanted this to be a personal book. I had friends who were like, “I bet there’ll be Congressional hearings after your book.” I don’t see what they’d be about! It’s not that book.

Right, this isn’t a bullet-point collection of world-rollicking allegations. Your stories range from unsurprising to eww. It’s more a detailed chronicling of assholes all the way down.

Yeah, there’s a lot of them. I will say, most of the people that I worked with, I actually like quite a bit. They’re smart, creative, sometimes stoic [laughs]. But Amazon rewards a certain coldness and aggression. It also puts people under such psychotic pressure that it brings out the worst. I have a feeling there are people that I had bad experiences with that, under different circumstances, I would think, “They’re not so bad.”

You make the case that there’s something universal here—that Amazon’s problems are human problems.

Amazon is an unusually brutal place to work, but a lot of it is about people under pressure. Even the guy who at one point directly tells me I’m “stupid” and yells at me, I was like, even he was under pressure. Then I think about the super-senior executives—I see on social media, “fat-cat execs don’t do anything.” At Amazon, at least, those guys work their asses off. It’s heart-attack-at-50 kind of work. I don’t know why, like, they’re all worth $20-30 million, but they kill themselves. So I figured, even this guy above me is getting it from Jeff Bezos, and it’s a fountain, you know. A shit fountain, I guess.

Also, I wanted to write about ambition in women through myself. I’m very ambitious—I always have been. When we hear that women are ambitious, we have certain associations, so I thought, well, let’s look at that. Does it mean I was cutthroat? Probably sometimes. Is there something wrong with it? Maybe. Does it mean I put up with shit I wouldn’t have otherwise? Yeah! I wanted to write about ambition as a human emotion that women have, just like men. Writing the book forced me to get more comfortable with the idea that ambition is... I was gonna say that it’s a fine thing, that it can be a good quality. But also, it doesn’t matter if it’s a good quality or not! I have it! I have the quality of ambition. I always have.

The Amazon you describe doesn’t make space for that kind of ambition, even when you’re told you can’t progress further at the company unless you “change the world.”

That was my lowest moment, at a point when my career was going great. For this VP to sit there and say, “Just change the world”? Promotions at Amazon are chaotic for everyone. The criteria are all over the place, but there’s a specific, tactical, mapped version for a lot of people there. Men all around me had been promoted, and as far as I knew they were all good at their jobs, but there aren’t that many chances to change the world. At Amazon, like any company, you’re doing your TPS reports and your granular things. I asked this man, “Well, what would I do? What results would you want to see?” The most specific he would get was, “wheelbarrows of money.” [Laughs] I was just like, I can’t believe this. I’m at the peak of my career. I am running major businesses. And this person who I’ve known for years and is a fan of mine, he won’t have a serious conversation. That is crazy-making.

Your last memoir, Nothing Good Will Come of This, focuses more on your sobriety journey. This one links your drinking more closely to the Amazon pressure cooker.

That book is a prismatic look at my drinking and sobriety through a bunch of different lenses. It does talk about being in tech, but I didn’t want to rewrite the same thing. I’ll just say, I don't think Amazon made me. I already had whatever you needed to become an alcoholic. But Amazon definitely is a place where there's a ton of drinking. Like just a crazy amount.

Trauma-specific therapy, too, from the sound of your book?

Oh yeah, I remember my psychiatrist being like, "Oh, Amazon, They support me. I have people who've been there for six months, they're in my office, and I'm just like, 'Get out.'" [Laughs] I’ve heard a lot of people say “After I left, I had to go into trauma therapy.” It just damages people’s health so much.

I was a drinker for half my career there and sober for the other half. I proved it could be done. But it's funny that when I finally quit drinking, my biggest wish was not, “Will I be happy again,” but “Maybe I'll be better at my job”! [Laughs] I wasn’t especially well-suited for this job, but it was also just a nightmare and I thought, [sobriety] will take care of it. Within six months I realized, yeah, it was not the drinking.

What about your story have you noticed surprises people?

The chaos. There is this belief that Amazon is this well-oiled machine that is coming to take over the planet. But so many parts of Amazon are like kids putting on a show in the barn. I remember when Amazon Publishing started, people in the industry predicted we were going to steamroll them. But there were only 13 of us. Our entire company’s calendar was a literal whiteboard. We were calculating royalties in Excel manually. It was frantic.

There’s lots about duct tape and panic being Amazon’s primary binding agents—but your example also gets to how cheap the company seems.

[Laughs] You hear about tech giants like Google with their own dry cleaners and hairdressers and all that stuff. People think Amazon is like that. Amazon is austere. My monitor died once, and I had to go pick up a new one. They couldn’t bring it to my building. I had to carry it four blocks!

I’m sorry, the company that runs Amazon Prime couldn’t deliver your big, boxed monitor?

Right? In my role, that was expensive time for me to waste. Here I am walking through Belltown with a fucking box, I don’t think it even had a handle, and I hadn’t expected it so I had other stuff with me. And all around, there’s zero amenities. You get a hundred dollars off the website a year, and there’s a code that you have to find and they don’t remind you. You have to remember to go get it every year. After a couple years, I just forgot it existed.

Some of the anecdotes in this book are wild, like your colleague spending days insisting that a store’s “broccoli rabe” dish be renamed “broccoli rape,” despite your outcries.

That kind of thing happened pretty often. In my first book, there’s a part where I was the one woman on a panel hosted by Amazon for interns, and a woman asks us, “What’s it like to be here as a woman?” I gave a very diplomatic perspective, and then all the men on the panel jumped in to say that I was wrong. They were like, “This is a great company for women!” I was like I literally am the only one who could answer that. That was for me.

Is the male fragility in this book representative of the company as a whole?

I think so. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, and many of the men I worked with are perfectly lovely. But especially in leadership, there’s a certain type of man who is very fragile—though this isn’t Amazon specific. These men where what gets to them is the idea that they might not be egalitarian. They can’t see that it’s not about them personally. It’s about systems. There are some guys at Amazon who, If you tell them, “It’s strange that most consumer purchases are controlled by women and yet there are no women in senior [leadership],” they think you’re attacking them personally. They’ll say, it’s important to understand that women often have other priorities in life, or women are too smart to want these jobs. They can’t just sit honestly and ask, what can we do to change it?

Hard to do that at a company where Jeff Bezos promotes internal stories written by men about what it’s like at Amazon to be a woman.

This guy at Amazon had written a blog post on LinkedIn in response to Jodi Kantor’s big New York Times piece about staffers crying at their desks and all that. First, he says, “I’ve been here 18 months, so I know a few things.” I was like, ohhh, I’m looking at him like an old sailor, saying, “Come on, landlubber.” He goes on about what a great company Amazon was for women. It landed on an internal email list, and I decided to reply, gently and diplomatically: “That wasn’t appropriate for you to speak to. You’re not a woman. You don’t—you can’t know what it’s like.”

So when Jeff Bezos emailed the whole company, he included a link to that guy’s post. That’s an endorsement. Jeff fucking Bezos sent that to a million people. We had a chance, while so many articles about gender were coming up, Jeff had a chance to suggest things to look at, at the very least about women, let alone other systems of privilege even I benefit from. Instead, he said, “Look at this glad-handing jackass’s blog post, I love it.” That’s when the concept of loyalty fell away for me fast.

Who at Amazon would you want most to read this book?

[Laughs] I mean, [current CEO] Andy Jassy should read the book. I know at one point when he was running AWS, he bought a copy of Brene Brown's book on shame for much of AWS’s staff, hundreds of copies. And I was like, "What?" That is the healthiest thing I've ever heard of anybody at Amazon doing, actually wanting to have a culture that was shame-free. But I also know AWS was overwhelmingly male, and I know women who had really lousy experiences there. I want him to read it. 

Part of me hopes that the guy who called me stupid reads it, but I don't think he'll give a shit. Maybe he’ll think, "I called a hundred people stupid. What's wrong with her?" Do I want Jeff Bezos to read the book? I don't know. That’s kind of terrifying. I hope his ex-wife MacKenzie [Scott] reads it. She seems pretty cool.

Kristi Coulter will discuss Exit Interview with Claire Dederer at Third Place Books, Seward Park, on Monday, September 11 at 7 pm.

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

About 22 million Americans live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and as the housing crisis continues to worsen in places like Arizona, California, and New York, that number could go up.

But for some, mobile homes conjure up an image of rusting metal units in weed-choked lots, an unfair stereotype that has real consequences — advocates argue that mobile homes are not only a housing fix but could also help with the climate crisis.

According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, mobile homes are a good solution with a bad reputation. 

It’s unfair, he said, because the residents of mobile homes are often hampered by restrictive zoning laws that make it hard to upgrade maintenance and care of the structures. These zoning laws also have put communities at risk for climate-related disasters, which explains why so many mobile home parks are in floodplains.

“It’s not the home itself that often makes mobile homes vulnerable,” said Rumbach. “It’s actually the fact that we sort of stuck the poor away in these places that makes them vulnerable.” 

A report by the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy organization, echoes Rumbach’s research. The report found that mobile homes have consistently been an affordable and underutilized solution that meets the housing needs of low- and moderate-income people.

Newer models can also be a low-carbon solution as these prefabricated homes, which are built in large pieces for easy assembly, can include things like heat pumps and solar panels, in contrast to older models that relied on propane or natural gas. Older models can also be eligible for retrofits to make them more energy efficient and climate-friendly. 

“They’re a pretty terrific solution,” said Rumbach. “Unfortunately, by law, in many places in the country [mobile homes] are not allowed to be placed anymore because there is such a cultural stigma.”

The Eastern Coachella Valley in California is one place where mobile home parks and residents have been consistently overlooked by public officials. People in the majority Latino area grapple with getting access to necessities like electricity and clean water. Arsenic was found in the water supply and is a persistent issue.

But despite that, there is also an incredible sense of community among the residents of informal mobile home parks in the area, according to Jovana Morales-Tilgren, a housing policy coordinator at Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, a California nonprofit focusing on underserved rural communities. 

The parks were originally built for migrant farmworkers and today they operate without a permit, which means federal agencies and local governments don’t have official recognition that they exist. So if there’s a disaster, that makes it harder to get federal relief, and if there is a municipal upgrade, it doesn’t happen in those communities.

“They do have a lot more issues than regular mobile home parks,” said Morales-Tilgren. “Many of them don’t have weatherization, insulation. Many were built more than 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so they do have a lot of issues.” 

Mobile homes can be roughly categorized into two sections: older homes that predate the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rules in 1976, and newer, prefabricated homes that often are greener, more efficient, and better functioning than some traditional homes. 

When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California last month, residents in the unpermitted mobile home parks were trapped, because a power outage meant that residents had to sleep in their cars to get access to air conditioning. 

“[Mobile homes] are not equipped to handle those extreme weather events,” said Morales-Tilgren. 

This is especially an issue because a large portion of people that live in the area are low-income people of color who are undocumented, according to Morales-Tilgren. Consequently, people lack access to resources needed to recover from large flooding events like the kind that Hilary brought.

Another key issue: Mobile home parks, both permitted and unpermitted, are reliant on their own infrastructure. In other types of housing, such as apartments or single family homes, a municipality is usually in charge of providing electricity, water, sewage, and tree maintenance. But in mobile home parks, residents are reliant on owners to provide those services.

In addition, once extreme weather happens, residents are often caught in the grip of the confusing bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While mobile home parks can vary wildly, the main distinction that the agency makes is whether or not people own or rent the land underneath the home. 

A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers found that there are numerous barriers to accessing resources, such as money from FEMA, for vulnerable populations in the wake of a flood-related disaster. Affordable housing units were affected more, and often the number of units did not bounce back to pre-disaster levels.

Additionally, mobile home residents are often at risk of being evicted in the aftermath of disasters that might displace them from their homes. This can fuel housing instability because mobile homes tend to be located in climate-vulnerable areas like floodplains, according to Rumbach. 

“Around the country, you see a disproportionate amount of mobile homes located in hazardous areas,” said Rumbach. “The demand is being driven by a segment of the housing market that’s looking for lower costs. And as a result, you see a lot of manufactured housing being placed into relatively climate-vulnerable places, because that land tends to be a little bit less valuable.”

On the other side of the country, though, mobile home owners in Ithaca, New York, have been the beneficiaries of a pilot project aimed at retrofitting mobile homes in the area to be more climate-friendly. 

This first-of-its-kind project is giving owners funding for heat pumps to replace the polluting natural gas or propane furnaces needed to heat mobile homes. The program also provides money to cover the cost of insulation needed to keep the heating and cooling provided by electric appliances in the home and reduce electric bills. 

Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Finger Lakes, a nonprofit focused on climate solutions in upstate New York, says that while their program, which is ongoing, has so far been successful in helping people access funding, they still are limited in their reach. The program would need more money as well as guidance from state and federal authorities to be able to meet the needs of everyone who applied.

Nicholson said that currently, the program is trying to help people transition off of natural gas, which is available cheaply despite its destructive climate impacts. This often puts the onus on consumers to be able to invest in climate-friendly technology, if no additional funding is available.

Cost is a vital aspect of upgrading mobile homes: “It affects how people make decisions,” said Nicholson. “Whether or not they’re going to stay on gas and stick to another cheap gas furnace.” 

Stigma surrounding mobile home parks is a huge reason for issues regarding resource allocation and zoning issues. Additionally, some of the most pressing issues come from a common problem for almost all mobile home residents: They’re just not considered. 

In Ithaca, that means many transmission lines that service mobile home parks are capped at a certain wattage that is far below what it would take to electrify them, which provides challenges for Nicholson. 

“There are no incentives set up by the state or the feds to help to pay a mobile home park owner to upgrade the electrical capacity of his park,” said Nicholson. “We’re way behind schedule for electrification.”

Back in California, in the Eastern Coachella Valley, this means that not only did Tropical Storm Hilary flood mobile home parks but that the roads were closed — further isolating residents. In this case, as in others such as in Texas in 2021, large-scale efforts to avoid the impacts of a disaster such as a hurricane or a cold snap do not consider mobile home residents and owners. 

This is a problem, according to Zachary Lamb, a professor at the college of environmental design at the University of California, Berkeley, because not being considered makes it difficult to be resilient to climate change. 

“Mobile home parks are disproportionately located in parts of landscapes that are vulnerable to climate risks,” said Lamb. “So they’re disproportionately located in floodplains. They’re disproportionately located in places that are exposed to extreme heat. …They’re also disproportionately located in places that are close to other environmental harms.” 

Despite those vulnerabilities, past research shows that in areas where marginalized communities live, people can and do come together to solve issues collaboratively. This makes one of the most misunderstood forms of housing a good place to invest in, according to Lamb.

“Making investments in climate resilience, that is such a no-brainer,” said Lamb. “In terms of both improving the infrastructure quality, and also in terms of giving residents more agency and more control over their communities.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mobile homes could be a climate solution. So why don’t they get more respect? on Sep 8, 2023.