By Alliance President Terry Gips

The provocative title of the new book by retiring US Sen. Thom Tillis (R, NC) lays out his fraught career and beef with his party:

How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents: The Trouble with Sycophants, Courage Outsourcing, and Partisan Groupthink

The book’s description further amplifies this: “Tillis drags readers inside a Senate that too often behaves like a group of teenagers in a bad parody of a horror movie — heading straight toward the chainsaws instead of a nearby getaway car. Tillis takes us into a world of grifting sycophants and useful idiots in Trump 2.0”.

As the NY Times points out, “he effectively confesses to his complicity in the predicament his party now faces, placing himself in a long line of Republican members of Congress who only break with Mr. Trump once they no longer have a political future or power to thwart his agenda.”

The book exposes the underbelly of DC’s real politik and documents the proverbial how sausage is made with colorful, tell-it-like-it-is assessments:

“While there are many good people currently employed in the West Wing, too many others are cynical, shameless, boot-licking sycophants who shouldn’t be allowed to tour the White House, let alone work there.“

Yes, having worked as a White House aide for President Carter and for two US Representatives, I must confess a certain satisfaction with his analysis. And I was equally delighted by his boldly naming names and attaching harsh labels to some of Trump’s most offensive sycophants, who he labels “MAGATS”.

Highlights include “psychopathic, dog-murdering” former Homeland Security head Kristi Noem and Senior White House Aide Stephen Miller, the “Architect of Most of the Dumbest Proposals”, including the plot for the US to take Greenland. Tillis calls this proposal “amateurish” and “insane.”

Ok, I must also confess that in the upside down, dark world Trump has created, a conservative Republican’s assessment helped me justify my own harsh judgements about the out-of-control people and policies that have harmed our country. And yet, while it feels satisfying, it is also scary.

At this point, you may be wondering how does this article help us overcome uncivil wars. The truth is it doesn’t in the same way that other pieces in this series do in a positive, straightforward manner.

Instead, it focuses on the complex processes of challenging those in power to do the right thing. The result may not satisfy, but lays out the difficult, often conflicting and confounding, aspects of who we are as humans. If we don’t seek to understand and confront this, we’ll likely never achieve our larger goals of coming together.

Pushback Against This Political Book and Why is it Important to Explore?

When I proposed this review, the immediate response I got from our staff was revulsion at the idea Tillis has anything of value to share given his key role in enabling some of the worst policies and appointments of the Trump regime. I argued it’s an important Republican critique of a President and party that remains unbounded by essential guardrails for our democracy and future.

Then I got pushback that Tillis was a Johnny-Come-Lately in his response, which I acknowledged. I still argued that at least he was speaking up and not silent like most other Republicans protecting their own self-interest and political careers.

As I’ve thought about it more, I came up with five reasons why I feel it’s important to explore:

1. Tillis acknowledges the error of his ways, which is essential for every personal transformation, and especially for righting our ship of state

2. He provides a big, yet detailed picture about the daunting challenges we face, which is essential in seeing and such a complex, corrupt and failing system

3. He gives cover to others in his party to also speak out and condemn outrageous and illegal behavior

4. His calls for shifting our political system are a necessary, if not sufficient condition, for achieving our goal of sustainability

5. He provides a living example of someone struggling within the system, which highlights the challenges of changing incentives and human behavior in order to overcome dangerous divisions and discover common ground to address the crises confronting us

I thought I could easily take on his book because I’ve watched this colorful character for years and felt it would be a simple, fun task with my just sharing some of the book’s greatest hits. Little did I realize the complexity of the task and the nuance needed. It’s not a black-and-white case. The hot headlines are certainly there but so are needed critiques of his critiques.

Despite this, I hope you’ll gain important insights into us humans that are essential for us to achieve our badly-needed shift to sustainability, even if the path is not as bright and hopeful as I might have thought. One thing is certain: If we don’t see the self-destructive insanity of our present situation, we’ll all be going down with the ship.

An Overview of the Many Disturbing Takeaways and Questions the Book Raises

How to Lose Friends does beg many questions, like where are the rest of the Republicans and why aren’t they speaking up? Tillis documents the literal assault that takes place on legislators who don’t fall in line, leading to pathetic profiles in cowardice.

That’s just one of the five eye-opening takeaways from the book I’ll share, with perhaps the most relevant one being the threat to the survival of our democracy and planet.

I’ll also share some of the brutal critiques of the book, with perhaps the biggest being why Tillis didn’t speak out sooner. I’ll show that he did but he still was the deciding vote in favor of appointing people like Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem, decisions he now regrets.

And I’ll end with why all of this matters for sustainability and survival. But first, I feel it’s important to have some context about the good, bad and ugly of Tillis and his career.

A Complex Conservative with Nuance

Thomas Roland Tillis is an American businessman and Republican politician who has been the senior US Senator from North Carolina since 2015. From 2007 to 2015, he served in the NC House of Representatives, of which he was speaker from 2011 to 2015. He labels himself as a conservative but in a shifting political landscape, some Republicans now call him a moderate Republican.

“As Sen. Tillis has gained influence in Congress for his willingness to work across the aisle, his record on LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and gun violence has raised concerns among some state Republicans that the senator has strayed from conservative values,” according to PBS.

He is no angel, but Tillis has bucked his party in taking positive, sometimes nearly heroic positions. At the same time, he has supported deeply disturbing, devastating ones as you can see in the accompanying piece I put together. He has shifted positions over time, in many cases becoming more liberal.

For this, Tillis has faced harsh attacks from his own Republicans party in NC, according to PBS. At the 2023 annual Republican convention in NC, delegates voted to censure him for supporting policies they said violate key tenets of the GOP platform.

What did he do wrong in their eyes? He supported the Respect For Marriage Act, which enshrined protections for same-sex and interracial marriages in federal law, which both the state and national GOP platforms opposed.

Five Big Takeaways from the Book

My take on the book’s top highlights:

1. His “Biggest Regret”: Voting to confirm Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense despite his massive misgivings. Tillis opens the first chapter, titled “My Biggest Regret”, by recounting the sad, sordid story of Pete Hegseth. You can read most of it in detail in Harper Collins description about the book.
   
   I found it riveting and a total indictment of our political system and the pressures that are brought to bear on politicians to toe the party line. Tillis raised concerns from the moment Trump announced Hegseth’s appointment and throughout the process, spending massive amounts of personal time investigating the numerous, deeply-disturbing claims against Hegeth, from rape and sexual abuse to drinking on the job and mismanagement.
   
   But it all came down to him being asked to come to the White House Situation Room to meet with VP Vance and others, which began cordially with the Secretary of the Army invoking faith saying, “I truly believe that God has sent Pete Hegseth to be by the president’s side at this very important moment in our history.” This prompted an internal profane reaction from Tillis, who doubted divine approval of Hegseth’s personal conduct.
   
   Then Vance asked for the “personal favor” of a commitment to vote “yes.” However, that was not enough. The President had to call in from Air Force One to apply the screws. There already were veiled threats of a 7-figure ad buy against Tillis in his home state to turn the public against him.
   
   Tillis ultimately yielded to administration pressure to avoid standing alone against the nomination: “My vote would be the one to sink him, and in the first weeks of a new administration, for a president I supported and for whom this meant so much, I just couldn’t do it,” Tillis wrote. Now, he wishes he hadn’t. “Voting to confirm Pete Hegseth is the biggest regret of my career,” he wrote.

2. Another “Big Regret”: Voting to Confirm RFK, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Though he was concerned about Mr. Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccines and public health science, and his lack of experience managing a large bureaucracy, Mr. Tillis again refused to be the deciding vote.
   
   “I had no intention of letting my colleagues outsource their courage to me while they pretended to go along with the questionable nomination President Trump had put forward,” he wrote. He added, “I guess it’s easy to say now, but I’m the one who has to live with that vote and all the havoc Kennedy’s tenure has caused the country as a result.”

3. Many Other Republicans Share His Concerns about Trump in Private, But Not Public – “I know for a fact that there are others like me,” he wrote, “Republicans who agreed to go along with the early demands of the Trump team no matter how ridiculous they were, believing that failing to do so would mean the end of their political career, and who now see that things have gone way too far.”

4. His Break with the President Over the “Big Beautiful Bill,” Leading to His Decision to Retire – In June 2025, Tillis was one of two Republicans who voted to block the President’s sweeping tax cut and domestic policy bill from advancing in the Senate. He voiced concerns about how its deep cuts to Medicaid would harm his constituents.
   
   In response, Trump castigated him on Truth Social, accusing him of grandstanding “in order to get some publicity for himself” and saying he was meeting with candidates to primary Tillis.That was the final straw for Tillis. He told his aides he was going to sleep on whether he’d retire. He fired off a text to Mr. Trump: “Mr. President, now would be a good time to start looking for my replacement.” About 30 minutes later, Trump responded: “I am! DJT.”

5. He Predicts Republicans Will Lose the Midterm Elections – Tillis wrote that Congressional Republicans have had plenty of opportunities to get out of what he calls the “horror movie” they are living in, but have failed to do so at every turn. “We have chosen the proverbial chain saw shed time and time again, kowtowing to the White House’s every demand even when we know the end result is going to be a blood bath.”

Critiques of the Book

Reviewers and columnists (such as in The Charlotte Observer) have leveled a range of critiques against Tillis regarding him and his book:

• There Are Sharp Contradiction Between His Beliefs and Actions – While Tillis writes with fierce hindsight about how unfit figures like Pete Hegseth were, he still chose to vote for them, despite knowing they were unfit. It’s hard to reconcile his self-portrayal as a tough independent with his history of going along with committee and party leadership.

• Why Did Tillis Wait Till His Retirement Was Announced to Drop His Blistering Criticisms? He could have used his leverage in opposing policies while facing voters. Critics argue that his complaints about colleagues “outsourcing their courage” ring hollow given his own history of falling in line with cabinet confirmations

• Why Does He Blame Trump’s Sycophants Instead of Trump? Tillis pulls his punches regarding Trump and directs his harshest attacks — including coining the term “MAGATS” — at Trump’s advisers, aides, and figures like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon, while still maintaining he has no regrets about supporting Trump in 2024 or voting against his 2021 impeachment.
  
  He mostly deflects full blame from Trump, saying, “My beef is not with him, but the idiots he’s got working for him.” He calls the president “an amazing political talent.”

  Share

• Biting and Petty Attacks – The book’s heavy use of personal insults — such as calling Howard Lutnick “nuttier than a squirrel” and referencing Kristi Noem as a “dog murderer” — has been dismissed by detractors as a sensationalized and “infuriating” exercise in political point-scoring rather than a serious blueprint for institutional reform.

• A Desperate Attempt to Rebrand his Political Legacy and Make Money

A Semi-Defense: Tillis Has Challenged Trump in Both Terms

Those are reasonable critiques, but I also think it’s important to know Tillis has confronted Trump during both his first and second terms. As he points out, “Just to set the record straight, I stood up to President Trump on many occasions in his first term“:

• When he “began talking about potentially firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, I was the one who introduced a bill that would keep him from doing so.”

• When he “wanted us all to chant ‘Build a wall,’ I could not join the chorus because that’s not what the experts on the border said they needed — it was more complicated than that. Now we have a secure border and, guess what, the wall is only marginally longer.”

• “And I’ve taken on bullies and bad guys in my party many times on my way up the political ladder.”

In the second term he has challenged the Trump administration in many areas, pointing out:

“There’s nothing conservative about setting up a $1.776 billion fund for scumbags who beat on cops and stormed the Capitol. There’s nothing conservative about spending millions on TV commercials while your ICE thugs gun people down in the streets, or starting investigations of your Fed chair because he won’t fall in line like all the other spineless lowlifes who work for you.”

The Challenges this Book Poses for Sustainability and Survival

Let’s start with this. Tillis says, “I am writing this book to save my party from itself, and to save the president from the temptations and tragedies being set upon him from MAGA extremists like Loomer and Bannon who have no understanding of governance, politics, or simple human decency.” That’s a noble thought.

Throughout the book, he has a ready critique of MAGA, White House Staff and Trump’s cabinet appointees, but it’s shocking he still somehow bears no ill-will towards Trump despite the President’s vicious personal attacks on him.

Despite all his indicting, profanity-laden critiques, Tillis still says about the book, “It’s not meant to tear down a Republican Party that I still believe in, or even President Trump himself, whom I still support.”

Wow! What would it take for Tillis to see the sociopathic narcissistic President he is and not support him? Why can’t he call out Trump after writing a devastating critique of Trump’s henchman? Trump bears no responsibility for his appointments and endorsement of their policies? And how is it that Tillis still believes in the Republican party that has enabled Trump’s power and domination?

It’s bewildering to me that Tillis somehow supports and speaks favorably about Trump and his agenda to become a self-styled king pushing an authoritarian agenda a la Putin and Xi. That’s tough for a pragmatic, idealistic humanitarian like me. I just don’t get his logic, and it bodes ill in our attempts to find common ground for co-creating a world of sustainability, health, equity and kindness.

I do hope we can celebrate every person who recognizes the error of their ways and seeks to come clean and speak out, such as former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger. Every time conservative leaders like Tillis and Kinzinger speak out, it creates more space and permission for others to do the same.

It’s also an acknowledgement that there are still things called facts, not “fake news.” The “fake news” narrative perpetrated by Trump since his overstatement about the turnout at his Inauguration, has done such damage, dividing us into a PT (Post Trump) world of objective, verifiable facts and Trump’s MAGA world in which Big Brother tells us his truth, regardless of verity, and followers drink the Kool-Aid.

Such a world does not allow people to come together to find common sense sustainability solutions. Each side becomes an enemy camp, filled with “othering”, judgement and attacks. It sets the stage for uncivil war and, ultimately, planetary destruction. We have to escape this zero sum worldview and come to our senses and sustainability.

By Alliance President Terry Gips

In a world that seemingly has gone mad, there is a steady, profound and inspiring voice for sustainability that has been around for more than nine decades. That rich, resonant baritone voice belongs to a short, slight global giant, Dr. David Suzuki, who I consider one of the world’s top Sustainability Superstars and Canada’s Dean of Sustainability, Science and Sanity.

He looks the part of the Karate Kid’s martial arts master Mr. Miyagi. Indeed, he’s as much the zen master of sustainability with his wizened wisdom coming forth: “How you imagine the world determines how you live in it.” He adds, “If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well…no amount of money will save us.”

On November 15 at 2 pm you’ll have the opportunity to experience this incredibly sweet, brilliant and funny activist scientist and educator, along with his 53-year partner in “good trouble”, Dr. Tara Cullis, an award-winning writer and former Harvard faculty member who has been a key player in environmental movements in the Amazon, Southeast Asia, Japan and British Columbia.

They’ll be performing their riveting, hope-filled play, “What You Won’t Do for Love”, at The O’Shaunessy at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. It provides insights about their remarkable lives, hard fought battles and impact. It will be followed by time to interact with the audience. You can save 20% using code SUSTAINABILITY.

In this piece I want to share why I hope you’ll join me and the Alliance for this unforgettable, not-to-be-missed opportunity to experience stories based on his 90 years of transforming our planet.

From his humble, fraught beginnings, he rose to become a brilliant scientist and globally-known radio and television personality who also co-founded a powerful foundation. You’ll discover some of his greatest victories, key teachings and the historic talk his daughter gave that went around the world.

Nine Decades of Awakening the World

I’ve watched and experienced Suzuki’s genius for more than half a century. I’ve been with him as he has spoken to world leaders and fought racism and climate denialism. He educated an entire nation beginning In 1975, when he helped launch and host the long-running Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio’s Quirks and Quarks.

In 1979, he became familiar to audiences around the world as the beloved host of CBC TV’s wildly popular The Nature of Things, the science show he worked with for 45 years.

He has also shifted scientific and popular thinking through the David Suzuki Foundation and his 55 books (nearly 20 of which are for children), explaining complex topics through his unique blend of humor and fierce urgency. He has been a consistent wake-up call for our planet and people.

In 2010, the National Film Board of Canada and Legacy Lecture Productions produced Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, which won a People’s Choice documentary award at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.

He still continues to write a weekly column, Science Matters.

Suzuki has always been a luminous servant leader, exemplifying our highest values and beguiling us to live in harmony with each other and the planet. “We are part of nature,” he continually reminds us and our fate is inextricably tied to that of nature.

He not only humbly walks the talk, but his relatively tiny stature stands tall, always willing to speak truth to power while showing sustainability solutions and cajoling all of us to co-create a world that works for everyone and all life.

Founding the David Suzuki Foundation

He and Tara Cullis began the Foundation in 1990 with the “mission to protect nature’s diversity and the well-being of all life, now and for the future. Our vision is that we all act every day on the understanding that we are one with nature.”

It’s a national, bilingual non-profit organization headquartered in Vancouver, with offices in Toronto and Montreal. It’s current focuses on three paths to sustainability:

• Climate Solutions – By 2030, in Canada, we’ll cut carbon pollution in half. By 2050, in Canada, we’ll eliminate carbon pollution and use 100 per cent renewable energy.

• Thriving Nature – By 2030, in Canada, we’ll protect and restore the most at-risk ecosystems and species. By 2050, in Canada, we’ll conserve and restore nature so that it supports biodiversity.

• Sustainable Communities – By 2030, in Canada, we’ll thrive while reducing our ecological footprint by a third. By 2050, in Canada, we’ll live within Earth’s finite limits.

Through evidence-based research, education and policy analysis, they work to “conserve and protect the natural environment, and help create a sustainable Canada.” They regularly collaborate with non-profit and community organizations, all levels of government, businesses and individuals.

Humble Beginnings in a Dark Chapter of Canadian History

Suzuki’s life began in the darkness of a Japanese internment camp, when at the age of 6 he and his family, along with 22,000 fellow Canadian citizens of Japanese descent, were forced from their homes and essentially imprisoned for three years. The government seized and sold their homes, fishing boats and businesses at low prices to cover the costs of the camps.

Suzuki was bullied by other young kids there because he couldn’t speak Japanese. As he has said, “When the victims of racism become racist, then racism wins.”

His Rise to Become an Academic Superstar and Highly Honored Leader

Suzuki excelled as a student and earned a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961. He had offers to undertake an illustrious career of research and teaching at places like MIT.

However, he chose another path after witnessing outright racism directed at a Black colleague when he was a fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee. His own self-reflection led him to see his own racism so he chose to return to Canada in a move that his colleagues said was “crazy” and “science suicide.”

He returned to Vancouver and was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001.

Suzuki has received numerous awards, including:

• Companion of the Order of Canada: Canada’s highest civilian honor (2006)

• UNESCO’s Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science (1986)

• The UN Environment Programme Medal (1985)

• The Right Livelihood Award, better known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”

• 30+ Honorary Doctorate Degrees from universities across Canada, the US and Australia

Decades of Impactful Advocacy

Suzuki has long been at the center of Canada’s most prominent environmental policy disputes, as well as numerous global ones. Some of his major policy campaigns, legal battles and systemic targets include (thanks to Google AI):

1. The Right to a Healthy Environment (The Blue Dot Movement launched in 2014) with the goal of enshrining the fundamental right to clean air, fresh water and healthy soil into the Canadian Constitution. The multi-year grassroots campaign successfully influenced the passage of Bill S-5, which modernized the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA), recognizing for the first time that every person in Canada has a right to a healthy environment.

2. Strategic Litigation and Climate Accountability – Suzuki and his foundation have repeatedly used the Canadian court system to challenge federal and provincial policies:

   • La Rose v. Her Majesty the Queen: From 2019 to 2024, the Foundation served as the primary partner backing a climate lawsuit brought by 15 Canadian youth. The lawsuit alleged that the federal government’s continued support of fossil fuel infrastructure violated their Charter rights to life, liberty, and security.

   • David Suzuki Foundation v. Minister of Fisheries and Oceans: Suzuki successfully fought a landmark legal battle under the Species at Risk Act (SARA). The federal court ruled that the government could not rely on non-binding, vague policy guidelines to protect the critical habitat of Resident Killer Whales, forcing stricter legal conservation compliance.

3. International Climate Treaties and Carbon Pricing – Suzuki was an early and aggressive champion of the Kyoto Protocol, pressuring the Canadian government to ratify the accord to establish binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. He has consistently lobbied for aggressive carbon taxation, establishing a “Carbon Manifesto” that demanded a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, an end to government subsidies for the oil and gas sector, and strict federal net-zero emission laws.

4. Indigenous Sovereignty and Land Conservation – Suzuki has aligned much of his policy platform with First Nations, arguing that Indigenous stewardship is vital to ecological preservation. These actions include:

   • The Great Bear Rainforest: Suzuki’s foundation carved out a path for government-to-government negotiations that led to the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement, protecting vast tracts of British Columbia’s coastal temperate rainforest from industrial logging.

   • Resource Extraction Blockades: He has actively supported Indigenous-led policy resistance against major infrastructure projects, including the Site C Dam on the Peace River, Northern Gateway oil tankers, and open-net salmon farming off the Pacific coast.

     Share

5. Transition to Post-Mitigation Localism – Suzuki’s policy perspective underwent a sharp shift. Citing political inertia, the influence of the fossil fuel industry, and global breaches of planetary boundaries, Suzuki openly stated that standard political mitigation strategies had effectively failed to stop climate change. His active policy advocacy has transitioned from lobbying federal governments toward building hyper-local community resilience, disaster preparedness, and independent local infrastructure.

Key Teachings

Suzuki’s wide-ranging mind has touched on so many aspects of sustainability in his 55 books that it’s hard to encapsulate them all. Here are just a few of the key ones:

• The Illusion of Separation: Humans Are Part of Nature, Not Separate From It – He teaches that clean air, water, soil, and biodiversity are non-negotiable biological requirements for survival, not resources to be endlessly exploited.
  
  My sense is we’ve been brainwashed into believing we are not only separate from nature but superior to all other species rather than being in kinship.

• The Four Elements – Suzuki emphasizes that we are made of the earth, air, water and sunlight. Clean air becomes our breath, clean water becomes our blood, and the soil grows the food that builds our cells.
  
  What I love about this is that it personalizes the four elements, making them directly relevant to each of us.

• Natural Laws Outrank Human Economics – He argues that human constructs — such as borders, corporations, financial markets and the demand for infinite economic growth — are artificial. They must bend to the immutable laws of physics, chemistry and biological carrying capacity rather than the other way around.
  
  I was trained as an agricultural and applied economist yet share Suzuki’s critique of traditional economics (which has earned its reputation as “the dismal science”) because it has treated nature as an “externality.”
  
  In Suzuki’s view, “In a world where everything is connected, a healthy environment must always come before a healthy economy because money holds no value on a dead planet.” He bares the fundamental truth that human economies are completely dependent on the living systems of Earth.

• Value of Traditional and Indigenous Knowledge – Suzuki emphasizes that science and traditional Indigenous wisdom must work together. First Nations perspectives offer vital lessons on living in balance with the land and respecting a “sacred balance” of life.
  
  Consequently, Suzuki has been a long-time champion of the rights of First Nations people.

  Transformative Sustainability is a free publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber.

• Cultural and Genetic Diversity – Just as genetic diversity protects biological species from extinction, Suzuki recognizes that cultural and linguistic diversity builds resilience in human societies. He warns against corporate “political monocultures” that homogenize human values and prioritize short-term profit.
  
  He has continually countered the corporatization of the world.

• Action as the Antidote to Despair – Suzuki maintains that environmental anxiety and climate grief must be countered by local engagement, community-led movements, political voting, and storytelling. Doing something active restores hope and agency. [1, 2]
  
  He is a constant voice for hope through action, as reflected in his articles like, Why we can’t lose hope: Dr. David Suzuki speaks out. As he says, “I can certainly see that people in the environmental movement are being disheartened…[but] we’ve all got to do our little bit…Actually doing something invigorates you.”

• The Role of Elders – In his later work through initiatives highlighted by the David Suzuki Foundation, he calls on older generations to use their freedom from career-building pressures to speak the unvarnished truth and protect the future for grandchildren.
  
  As someone who is increasingly an elder, I so admire Suzuki’s energy at 90 and his call for us who have greater freedom in terms of responsibilities to use our talents to make a difference.

One of David and Tara’s Greatest Gifts to the World

I hope this gives you a sense of the extraordinary man David Suzuki is and the gift he is in our world. I’ll conclude with one of his and Tara’s most wonderful gifts to all of us: their daughter Severn Cullis-Suzuki.

At the age of 12, Severn attended the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio. She gave what became an historic 6-minute speech to all the delegates on behalf of the Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO), a group of Canadian children she co-founded with her friends.

All of us were transfixed and inspired, and she received an unstoppable standing ovation. It was certainly one of the most memorable, impactful speeches I’ve ever heard. And her message resonates as much today as 34 years ago.

She challenged world leaders and adults to take responsibility for environmental destruction, famously stating: “If you don’t know how to fix it, please, stop breaking it.”

She voiced fears about ozone depletion, polluted air, cancer-ridden fish in her hometown of Vancouver and mass species extinction. She also criticized the greed of wealthy nations and urged leaders to redirect money spent on war toward solving poverty and environmental crises. Oh, if we had only responded and acted.

But her most famous line was, “You grown-ups say you love us, but I challenge you: please, make your actions reflect your words.”

That’s some legacy, Tara and David.

By Alliance President Terry Gips

I’m often touched, inspired and internally transformed by a person’s story overcoming challenges or rising up to go beyond. They not only make my day but give me hope for humanity.

What happens when I’m touched by another…and another…and another? Somehow, I feel like I’m in the presence of God, angels and possibility. THIS is the world I want to live in. These are the ways I want to be. So, I want to share four short stories that uplifted me and point towards simple steps we can all take to help overcome uncivil wars that plague us. But first, a slight diversion.

How Three Strikes and Funerals Affect Me

Along the path of my week of four inspiring stories, I had two two insights. One is the polar opposite and the other is about death. I promise, the second isn’t bad so please read on.

The polar opposite is when someone says or does something mean or disturbing, or I get hit with some type of failure or bad news. It’s not easy to recover from the blow. Then, if I get whacked by a second, it really throws me. But if there’s a third, I’m devastated. I lose hope and sink faster than a rock into the depths of despondency. The world goes dark and my normally hopeful disposition disappears.

I know the only way out of that hole is to disentangle the overwhelming threesome so I have three discrete challenges. Just doing that allows me to breathe again. It doesn’t solve the problem of what I’m facing and feeling, but it allows me to return empathy to myself, give myself a hug and begin engaging both my left and right brains in unleashing their potent powers to face each of them separately.

They may be big and loom larger than life, but I know I’ve faced bigger ones and believe there’s always a solution or an acceptance of a harsh truth that I must face for each. And I somehow recover to live another day, even return to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s admonition of seeing the world with “radical amazement.”

The second is about funerals. I know it may seem odd but I love going to funerals. What’s wrong with me you ask? What do you get out of one of the saddest of human events? Inspiration. And connection.

Yes, funerals are my opportunity to get to know the stories, secrets, struggles and successes that people have had. In every funeral I discover insights about how to live better. The person may no longer be on this plane, but they become part of me, a forever reminder of new possibilities for seeing and being. And I finally feel like I know them on a new level. Ironically, in death they do not part but become an even deeper relation.

The only thing I regret about the entire experience is that I could not know all of that about them when they were alive, for them to be celebrated and acknowledged, and for me to know them on a deeper level and to explore the secrets to their way of living.

So, with that context, on to the stories that I hope will touch and transform you as they do me.

Lessons for Us All from the Fallen Firefighters Memorial

One of my favorite and saddest events every year is attending the Fallen Firefighters Memorial as my sons and their MN Boychoir sing the National Anthem at the start. I’ll say that when I was young I always wanted to be a firefighter and slide down the pole to rush off to save people’s lives and put out fires.

So, it’s always deeply moving to go to the south end of the MN State Capitol Grounds to attend this event at the touching metal structure featuring a firefighter climbing a ladder to save a life, yet surrounded by bars representing every firefighter who sacrificed their life doing so. I’m crying as I write this. There are heroes and sheroes who do that every day, willing to rush in to save us, while they risk giving up their own.

Here’s the catch. They don’t ask if we’re Democrats, Republicans or Independents, if we’re rich or poor, White, Black, Brown or Whatever Color of the Rainbow, good or bad. They put their life on the line EVERY time for us. This begs the question: Why can’t we do that with each other? Why can’t we overcome our uncivil wars and simply serve, be kind and co-create the world we so seek?

Even though I know the cadence of the flow, each year takes me to a new, higher level of connection. This year I cried profusely three times.

The first was after the large private pre-ceremony took place in front of the monument on the lawn side of the Capitol as families who’ve lost a firefighter form a large circle where a flag is placed to remember every firefighter who’s ever been lost. They will never be forgotten.

A silent procession begins as the families silently file in to take their seats – the spouse, children, grandparents and other relatives, followed by firefighters of all sizes, shapes, ages and colors from around the state with their beloved Dalmatians to mourn their colleagues. It is truly heartbreaking to feel such loss and grief.

The second was when the Color Guard came in accompanied by bagpipers. We all know that sound with its drone that instantly calls forth an eternal loss. For me, on this 25th Anniversary of 9/11, it instantly takes me to the World Trade Center as firefighters rushed up more than a hundred flights of stairs to save lives, forever memorialized by Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising. I cry every time I hear it.

And the third was when my son Aaron and his MN Boychoir came in to sing, passing by the massive American flag high above us and strung between two outstretched ladder trucks. I thought about each boy and the gift of their voice for the bereaved families and the impact this solemn ceremony has on them as a reminder about serving and sacrificing. Their pure, sweet voices rose to new heights with every word of our National Anthem, framed by the flag to the left, the monument to the right and the magnificent Capitol arching above. THIS is our country. THIS is who we truly are.

Can we learn to be united not only in our grief but in our life?

An Unplanned Dinner to Remember

After returning from having an engaging, hopeful all-afternoon Alliance for Sustainability table at the DFL Environmental Action Fair in Roseville, I asked my sons if they’d like to play some Frisbee. We had a fabulous time until it was hard to see the disc as the sun set. I then began to BBQ our vegan dinner.

One of my sons asked if he could invite a friend over for dinner who I had never gotten to spend time with. I said yes and thus began an extraordinary evening.

There was an immediate bonding over delicious vegan food they had never tried before. They won my heart by liking my tempeh and proceeded to win a forever dinner invite when they loved my vegan brats, not dogs and burgers, Asian salad, various types of Kim Chi, fermented pickles and ice cream. That was followed by a wide-ranging, deep and timeless conversation that turns out went on for hours. We laughed and were uplifted by things we had never heard before.

But what touched me the most was hearing the story of my son’s friend as they navigated the challenges of being forced to follow a tough, judgmental faith, only to be saved from Confirmation being cancelled by Covid. Yes, saved by Covid’s shutdown from being required to be confirmed into a faith in which they did not believe but were forced to follow.

All of that was amidst their own undiagnosed struggles with mental health, for which they received no support from anyone. It took their lonely day-to-day battles and self-discovery to recognize their mental illness and finally find a therapist and medication. Fortunately, it worked and they were transformed.

It was a poignant, painful reminder that all of us need help and we can all step back from judgement and seek to support one another on the long, often hard, arduous and twisted journey to well-being. My son Noah addresses this in his debut album, Lost (by NoahG on all streaming platforms).

Share

We’re all enduring troubling trauma, from personal losses to those with injustice, climate and democracy. We all need to be seen, heard and healed. And the great news is each of us can do that for another by letting go of judgement and simply smiling, listening and supporting.

I Heard It on the Radio – Pacers Making a Difference at the Twin Cities Marathon

My third experience was when I was driving back from dropping my son at St. Louis Park High School and MPR did a story about “pacers” at the Twin Cities Marathon.

To be honest, I’ve never felt a desire to do a full marathon as I don’t feel it’s the healthiest thing for a body, though I did once do the Bay-to-Breakers 10k in San Francisco with the rest of my cousin’s wedding party. It was funny because by the time our wave finally stepped up to the start line near the end of the 40,000 runners, the first runners had already crossed the finish line.

So, when I lived in Minneapolis near the TC Marathon route, I did go out early in the morning to cheer on the wheelchair racers, followed by the elites and finally my friends. But little did I know about “pacers”, those experienced marathoners who run alongside people who may be running it for the first time or have a personal goal of 4:15 or just hopes of finishing the race.

I was deeply moved hearing MPR’s interviews with these pacers who run alongside people on the grueling 26-mile course just to support them in achieving their goal. The pacers’ constant refrain was how much more meaningful it is to help someone in overcoming their challenges and accomplishing their goals than simply achieving a great time for themselves. That selflessness and desire to support another in fulfilling a life-long dream is so inspiring for me. We get more by helping others than just helping ourselves. We can be bigger and have more meaning. THAT’s truly hopeful.

Yes, each of us can help another cross the finish line in life. And I loved hearing that the pacers loved then meeting the runner’s family at the end and experiencing a deep bond. A big world of strangers suddenly is much smaller and more intimate, without regard to all the divisions we too often succumb to.

A Surprising, Long-Awaited Meeting on the Bike Path – The Gift of Connection and Inspiration

My final story is a chance meeting on my daily bike path. I pass by and greet her nearly every day — rain, snow, sleet or shine – as I bike alongside my nearly 15-year-old Teddy the Terrier mix shelter dog on our two-mile ride along the beautiful Cedar Lake Trail commuter bike path between Minneapolis and Minnetonka. She’s a devoted, always positive and friendly white-haired walker. But I’m usually in too much of a rush to get back for my next meeting than to stop and connect.

Today was different. Teddy stopped to do his business just as we were approaching the woman. We said our normal warm greetings but she walked over to us. At first it was small talk. She is 81-year old Norma Heuer and I’m Terry and Teddy, TnT. Yes, it is a cool day and she even saw frost on her senior care facility’s roof-top. Yes, she was enduring some challenges with one of her knees following a double knee replacement six months ago.

The conversation went to a new level as she shared that she sleeps with her window open and seeks to use only minimal heat in the winter and forgoes air conditioning in the summer (except one hot, steamy day this year!). How I asked? “I use a big fan. In fact, Xcel Energy said I used the fourth least energy of my 120 neighbors.”

I was blown away. Here I am, the big enviro, hearing about how this hardy, self-described “farm girl” uses far less energy than I can even imagine. But it was time to go deeper still.

Norma gave me the thumb nail story of her life. It unveiled a majestic, brilliant being who has made a profound difference in our world. It turns out she is a retired nurse, who began her work in surgery. She soon was asked to teach all the other surgical nurses, then all the staff at Regions Hospital. Soon it became the State of Minnesota, the country and the world. She traveled the world teaching about healthcare in developing countries and helping to set up their entire healthcare systems.

She was asked by our government and the UN to help China. She recounted how she had to review a new Chinese hospital in preparation for the flood of foreigners for the Beijing Olympics. She felt it was totally substandard. Norma was faced with the tough question of whether she should lie and say it was fine or tell them the painful truth. She chose the latter. The Chinese government responded by building an entire new hospital based on her instructions.

But a problem remained. They had fabulous, new state-of-the-art equipment but had no one who was knowledgeable to operate it. Fortunately, she had trained an entire hospital in Hong Kong so they brought their staff to do the training in Beijing.

She then retired but when Covid came along the State of Minnesota begged her to return to help. She said she would but she no longer had her nursing license. They said they’d fix it. And they did. She proceeded to help our state survive the Covid crisis and was paid $6k a week to do it.

Who knows who I might meet on my next ride…if I just stop for a moment.

The Every Day Sheroes and Heroes in Our Midst

Yes, we are facing deep darkness and the threats continue to multiply beyond belief. But we must never forget there is light. As poet Maya Angelou said, there are every day sheroes and heroes amongst us. Maybe we can begin to see them. There are extraordinary people in each of our lives that are making a difference by being fully human. That’s what gives me hope. If we can only slow down and see.

Just maybe, they might remind us to hang in there and help us overcome our worst days and uncivil wars.

By Angela Diana, Alliance Intern from Cornell University ‘28

In 28 states there’s still time to register to vote, with registration deadlines looming in many states. If you haven’t registered yet, you can check Ballotpedia to find out when your registration deadline is.

Once you’re registered, make sure to have a plan to vote!

Get Informed about the Issues

The Alliance encourages everyone to get informed about what candidates up for election on November 3rd stand for and to exercise your right to vote. The Alliance is strictly nonpartisan and does not endorse individual candidates but we encourage you to examine candidate voting records and positions on environmental and sustainability issues so you can make your own informed decisions.

You can start with a neutral source, Ballotpedia, a digital encyclopedia of American politics and elections, useful for finding candidates running to represent you in Congress or the US Senate. Ballotpedia is firmly committed to neutrality in their content. The League of Women Voters (LWV) is another helpful nonpartisan source of information on candidates in your area.

Share

The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) website provides a national and state-by-state overview of candidates’ historical voting record on environmental and conservation issues.

Encourage Environmentalists to Vote

54% of Americans say they’re concerned about the climate crisis, but far too few voters actually end up voting.

11.2 million registered environmentalists failed to vote — enough that they could have changed the outcome of the election.

If that number upsets you, you can do something about it. Join the Environmental Voter Project’s virtual phone bank program to get non-voting environmentalists to turn up at the polls.

By Alliance Intern Eleanor Hulan

There is a certain inharmonious resonance to art you see in hospitals. It doesn’t make you feel better. Some in-patient clinics will include pieces in rooms, typically generic and mass-produced. Sometimes, bed-bound, you stare at the same piece for hours and feel like parts of yourself are being lost in the process.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s art has the opposite effect. It is a rebellion against sterility and achromatism and the constraints disease and illness places upon oneself. He builds an entire nonlinear narrative from objects, natural materials and sound, and the closer you look the more you can discover.

The healing power of art and resonant sound is something I have come to believe strongly in, and Maravilla’s sculptures are the very embodiment of this ideal. The specific piece Disease Thrower #5 contains references to his struggle with colon cancer and his mother’s with breast cancer.

The Disease Thrower series as a whole features what he calls “healing machines,” and he uses this piece and others like it to heal himself and others. It is living art in every sense of the term, and I can feel the flow of life as I study #5, even through a computer screen. Maravilla says that he learned to heal himself through the creation of art, and has now turned his attention toward healing others.

The additional component to Maravilla’s work is his immigration journey. As an intersection of both his art and his mutual aid action, he hosts healing workshops for undocumented immigrants who have undergone almost unimaginable amounts of trauma. These workshops include sound baths, which he was introduced to while undergoing radiation treatment. He uses gongs, conch shells, and salvaged materials to create an atmosphere of sound enveloping a group of people seeking healing.

Maravilla came to the US in the 1980s as an unaccompanied 8 year old, an asylum seeker from the civil war in El Salvador. In an interview conducted with MoMA, Maravilla explained that “trauma and disease are interwoven” and “suggests a direct connection between his experiences as a migrant and his cancer.”

This is an often overlooked element of both physical and mental health for immigrants. A 2024 study of asylum seekers who immigrated to the US found that 94% experienced psychological stress, 47% cardiovascular disease, and 50% somatic pain. Researchers would like to conduct more analyses, but it is difficult since undocumented immigrants are less likely to seek out medical care. Especially in 2026, it is not difficult to see why.

Share

In addition to the Disease Thrower series, I also recommend watching this short 2025 documentary with the artist, where you can hear the sounds associated with his art and watch as he retraces his immigration path, collecting materials associated with his experience as he goes.

In Maravilla’s words,

Making these elaborate Disease Throwers is not just about telling a story from my past, but it’s also about how this healing ritual can continue in the future, long after I’m gone.

By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr

The past few weeks have been heavier than heavy. I have felt their weight pushing on my chest as I try to take some long breaths.

I could not force myself to watch videos of the flash flooding in Nepal, even as I feel the need (and desire) to bear witness. I cannot read about the real-time effects climate change is having on the world’s oceans as they break temperature records.

World-wide we are breaking all kinds of records, but not necessarily the ones we might want to. Nepal’s deadliest disaster on record unfolded at the tail end of a record-breaking heat week. The summer that produced it broke temperature records worldwide — the hottest US summer on record, a tie for hottest month ever measured on Earth, new highs for ocean temperatures.

This month an Anthropic researcher publicly resigned, estimating better than a 10% chance that AI causes human extinction within the next decade, while the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned that AI is reshaping nuclear and biological risk faster than governance can keep up.

That’s a lot to process, even for the most literate, news-obsessed and pragmatic among us. And when faced with a virtual wall of bad news day after day after day, our psyches sometimes take what may at first glance seem like the easy way out: we freeze.

Freezing isn’t necessarily bad, as we will see, but what comes after is critical. We can develop practices to shake off our traumas, both large and small. Doing so individually and collectively brings healing.

Some of Us May Freeze for a Bit – Failure or Wisdom?

Author Sarah Wilson describes one of humanity’s responses to overwhelming overwhelm beautifully:

It’s an evolutionary response to shut down and go numb like this. When we can’t fight or flee from a horrible threat, we lie down and play dead – we freeze.

A deer will do it as a last-ditch survival trick when being chased by a tiger. Playing dead might fool their predator into being a bit casual in their final lunge, giving the deer an opportunity to suddenly jerk back to life and escape.

Abuse victims do it as a form of self-protection; anxiety sufferers do it in the face of too many decisions and existential overwhelm. And I reckon it’s what we do to survive when we find ourselves living a life that is so removed from the miraculous. Which is useful to reflect on; it certainly makes me more compassionate about things when I do.

There’s more wisdom in freezing that might be immediately apparent. The body chemically blunts pain perception, conserves energy, and possibly lowers the odds of further aggression, while allowing the brain a moment to process what’s happening.

All useful, all protective — and all, by design, meant to pass. Dr. Peter Levine’s famous story of watching an impala escape a cheetah, shake vigorously for several minutes, and then graze calmly is a perfect example.

Levine developed a complex and nuanced theory around why humans don’t shake off trauma as easily as that impala.

Finishing the Shake – Somatic Experiencing

It would be nice for someone carrying around a fair amount of trauma from adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) like me, to be able to shake like an impala and be free. For humans, social conditioning and lack of safety interrupt the discharge — we rarely let ourselves finish the shake.

Un-freezing ourselves takes time and patience. Peter Levine developed a useful framework for coming out of a trauma response like freezing called Somatic Experiencing (SE). SE provides a way for us to release trauma from our body intentionally and gradually.

SE therapy helps people release damaging, pent-up emotions in their body by using various mind-body techniques. The core concepts of SE include some which may not be familiar to many of us:

• body awareness, which helps people recognize tension spots in the body as well as conjure calming thoughts

• pendulation, which guides people from a relaxed state to emotions similar to their traumatic experiences and then back to a relaxed state

• titration, which guides people through a traumatic memory while noting any accompanying physical sensations and addressing them in real time

• resourcing, which helps people recall resources in their lives that promote feelings of calm and safety, such as special people and places.

Note: SE therapy usually requires a trained therapist, and may not be covered by insurance. This therapy may be useful for those of us with serious, life-impairing trauma.

But the concepts can be modified to address our ongoing everyday trauma too. I have been working on body awareness (Peter Gill’s idea of focusing in The Way of Curiosity). I’ve also been developing my own careful, DIY versions of pendulation and resourcing. Because I’m a novice, I don’t feel comfortable sharing instructions – a simple google search yields exercises. My practice has been instrumental in my healing.

Thomas Hübl’s Attunement – Somatic Experiencing in Community

Levine’s SE is meant to encourage individual healing by processing and completing a survival response. Thomas Hübl scales that same logic to work done in community.

Hübl speaks about the “relational field” in his book Attuned, which the idea that trauma isn’t only stored in individual bodies but transmitted and held collectively, across relationships, families (ancestral trauma), and cultures (collective trauma). His idea of “attunement” is essentially the same non-forcing, embodied, resourced attention that SE engenders, but practiced between people and within groups.

Share

Which is where awe comes in. Research on awe shows it does something remarkably similar to attunement — shrinking the sense of self and expanding our felt connection to others, almost as if it’s the doorway into the very relational field Hübl describes.

Daily Moments of Awe

As we’ve said before, awe heals us mentally and physically. When we get good at inviting awe we’ll retrain our neural pathways to seek goodness, thereby changing our minds, bodies, communities and world. Practice is the key.

Preparing ourselves to notice awe is straightforward, according to Summer Allen of Psyche:

• If possible, limit distractions. Complete the task that has been nagging you. Turn off notifications on your phone (or leave it in another room or at home). Ask your partner, roommate and/or children for some space.

• Treat your awe experience like a contemplative exercise. Begin with some deep breathing, and pay attention to the sound and feeling of your breath as you inhale and exhale.

• Turn your attention outward and be open to inspiration. Notice what catches your mind. Do some of your senses seem heightened? Do you feel goosebumps? Do you feel more curious? Delighted?

• Don’t worry if you’re not feeling awe. Awe is different for everyone, and some days you might just not be feeling it.

Awe is easy to find once we begin to look for it. In a recent study, people were asked to take a weekly 15-minute “awe walk” for eight weeks, according to Time. The instructions were remarkably simple: Look at the world with fresh eyes, pay attention to the details around you, and engage your senses. People could walk in cities, suburbs, or the countryside. The point wasn’t the route but the mindset.

When Things Become Too Big, Focus on the Small

I’ve created a personal course of study which includes a slow re-read of Gill and Hübl, several books by Levine, a new exploratory somatic stretching practice, journaling, art and last, but never least, daily doses of awe and the gratitude that tends to follow close behind. Consider this an invitation to create your own version of this practice.

One of the wonderful things about this chosen course of study, apart from much less time doom-scrolling, is the resulting smaller sense of self – not diminished, but unburdened from having to hold the entire weight of Nepal and AI extinction risk and record heat on my two small sore shoulders.

Becoming more aware of the messages my own body is sharing with me, sometimes through uncomfortable emotions like fear, worry and overwhelm, grounds me in a physical way that information gathering and thinking never will. When I sense my chest is constricted I can open myself to that sensation with curiosity and gratitude, and simply listen. The anxiety doesn’t evaporate, but it is acknowledged and welcomed.

And this opening up also gives me space to heal with others, sharing both grief and connection, because a nervous system that isn’t clenched has room left over for others.

By Alliance President Terry Gips

We’re celebrating World Vegetarian Day Oct 1 and Gandhi’s birthday Oct 2 by sharing some of the highlights from author and climate activist Bill McKibben’s provocative New Yorker piece, along with some of our own thoughts.

McKibben begins: “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., eats it every day, but more Americans, faced with rising prices and another climate warning, might want something else for dinner.”

We’ve all heard the constant heavy promotions for meat, especially since the 1992 National Live Stock and Meat Board’s advertising campaign “Beef: It’s What for Dinner.” For years, the slogan seemed to work and beef sales skyrocketed. However, as time has gone on a series of setbacks – from medical research linking beef consumption with heart disease, cancer and strokes to the disclosure of climate impacts – have led to decreases in consumption.

The downward trend was continuing until McKibben points out “our nation’s chief health officer, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., put a fatty cut of beef near the top of the newly revised, inverted food pyramid, and told an interviewer that he usually eats beef twice daily; his preferred cut is a grass-fed strip steak.”

McKibben continues, “Indeed, he said, a ‘large number’ of the President’s Cabinet is on a ‘meat and ferments’ diet, meaning that they take their prime rib with some sauerkraut on the side. Sean O’Mara, the physician who has reportedly been advising several of these leaders on their diets, explained to the Times that eating this way eliminates the need to wipe after defecating, and that on such a diet bowel movements become ‘nearly orgasmic.’”

What?! Is this lunacy? Any doctor will tell you that high meat diets without a significant amount of fiber from vegetables will leave you constipated, so it’s hard to imagine what’s so “orgasmic” about that.

But setting such bizarre claims aside, this may in fact be a golden opportunity to reconsider our dietary choices. McKibben points out that, “There seems at least a chance that this moment might also be the high-water mark for cut-up cattle. In the same way that, around the world, internal-combustion cars are suddenly, and rapidly, giving way to electric vehicles, it’s possible that a combination of technological, economic, ecological, and cultural factors might be lining up to challenge the hold of beef.”

If he’s right, I agree with him that this would be “a big deal: beef cattle use something like sixty per cent of the planet’s agricultural land, even while they provide just two per cent of its calories.”

One prime driver is “affordability,” that term which our President claims doesn’t exist. McKibben argues:

Right now, the cost of beef is soaring, with hamburger meat nearing seven dollars a pound nationally and exceeding that in many places. Part of that rise may be due to demand from legions of bro-sphere podcasters chugging down beef smoothies. (Erewhon offered one made with raw milk and “powdered” beef organs, for just nineteen dollars.)

I will give RFK Jr. credit for succeeding in boosting America’s unneeded and unhealthy preoccupation with forcing as much protein into their bodies as possible, as if they’re being fattened up just like the cattle they eat.

Share

As an agricultural and applied economist, I appreciate McKibben’s argument that one of the factors driving up the cost is drought, especially in Great Plains states. This has limited grazing and depleted forage grasses, forcing ranchers to do early slaughter, and ultimately, reducing supply and driving up prices. In fact, McKibben shares that, “As of January, the country’s total cattle herd was smaller than it had been since 1951, three years before the birth of Burger King.”

Another key factor in the high prices are input costs for farmers, especially from diesel fuel, which hit a new record high of $6.52/gallon, driven in part by the Gulf of Hormuz blockade. McKibben points out there are other drivers as well, such as, “the screwworm fly, a flesh-eating parasite that likes to lay its eggs in the open wounds of warm-blooded animals, so that the larvae can feed off living tissue.”

The Trump Administration’s plan to combat the rise in beef prices has actually backfired. His calling for imports of cheap Argentinian beef has enraged cattlemen across the country because it’s completely devastated their already limited margins.

McKibben really goes into the belly of the beast by sharing about the corruption in the beef industry:

The President, who likes his steak well done and slathered in ketchup, met with a Brazilian beef magnate named Joesley Batista, who in the past had admitted to making large payments to public officials and was briefly jailed.

As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recount in their recent book, Regime Change, Batista met with the President after a US-based subsidiary of his company donated five million dollars to Trump’s second Inauguration…Now, just days after the European Union suspended imports of Brazilian beef for failing to meet its safety standards on antibiotics, Trump has announced that large quantities of it will be permitted to enter the United States, in hopes of lowering prices before the midterm elections.

…And they probably won’t drive the price down very much — NPR quoted a University of Tennessee professor of livestock economics who said, of a possible reduction, “I don’t think it’s going to be $1.50” less. “We might see a quarter to 35 cents.”

It will be interesting to see if McKibben is correct that just like the war in Iran caused gas prices to rise and created an opening for EV sales to rise, whether “this confluence of events might give alternatives to beef a moment of opportunity.”

What do you think? Have you cut back on your beef consumption? Let us know.

Either way, I hope you’ll consider a Meatless Monday or eliminating meat from your diet and even join me as an organic vegan. Trust me, the water’s fine over here and the food is not only delicious but will allow you to live a healthier, more vibrant life for a lot longer.

By Angela Diana, Alliance Intern from Cornell University ‘28

In the US, we have very strict property and trespassing laws, and that’s not a bad thing. But it’s important for people to have public places to go outside of their homes and workplaces. We’re losing too many human-made spaces: shopping malls give way to Amazon Prime, restaurants become drive-throughs, libraries reduce hours or close at alarming rates due to lack of funding.

The one place you can go when every other door closes is the natural world. The trees will always be open for walking through, at all hours, on weekends and holidays.

Railroads, logging companies, and mining tycoons have been trying to get at our protected wild spaces since protections were put in place. But despite the attempted attacks, the actions of conservationists have kept them mostly safe.

Share

Trump’s USDA has announced a plan to rescind Roadless Rule protections on 45 million acres of National Forests. Roadless areas are where Americans hike, climb, bike, paddle, ski, hunt, and explore — and rolling back the Rule would allow new roads and large-scale logging in some of our most wild backcountry areas, shares the Outdoor Alliance.

This move would affect more than 7 million acres of critical habitat for endangered species and pose a catastrophic threat to 88 federally protected animals and plants across the country, including grizzly bears, Canada lynx, wolverines, spotted owls, and native fish, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. It would also harm more than 300 other protected species that live in roadless areas but don’t have designated safeguards for their habitat.

Subscribe now

The USDA has opened a final comment period, ending October 6. Join the Alliance in submitting a comment for the USDA using Outdoor Alliance’s form to voice your support for maintaining the Roadless Rule as is.

We’re also signing Sierra Club’s petition to help protect our wildest forests from Trump.

By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr

Ariana Brown’s spoken word poem Dear White Girls in My Spanish Class recounts a searing memory of white high school students trivializing Spanish class. Brown connects this moment to the colonialist roots of Mexico and racism endured by Spanish-speaking Mexican-Americans like her grandmother.

I am descended from slaves. I want to know where I come from,
but I can only trace my history in one direction—so I am here,
in yet another Spanish class, desperately reaching
for a language I hope will choose me back someday.

Being both Black and Mexican, Brown’s open about the racism she’s encountered – her first instance was being called the n-word as a five-year-old.

Share

Her blunt exploration of race emphasizes the painful history of Black and Mexican people in the US, while also sending a message of empowerment. Her viral performances on YouTube as a slam poet also focus on gender, blackness, class, and spirituality, according to HipLATINA.

Dear White Girls in my Spanish Class
By Ariana Brown

I see you—
stumbling so hard you laugh through entire sentences
because my ancestors are a punchline
& everything that comes out your mouth is funny.

Funny. Guess I’m used to being a joke—a brown body splayed
& smoldering at the corner of your lip.

I just wanna know, when you hold the sacred sounds
on your tongue, do you feel less holy?
Why are you here?

I bet you thought this class would be easy,
since Spanish is what poor brown people speak, right?
Not something you actually have to try to understand, not fancy or sophisticated,
not like French—the language you love over-pronouncing
as if compensating for your basic American whiteness—
you are not special.

You are the reason my grandmother feared her children
would speak with accents. So afraid, she buried her first language
in the space between blood & bone,
since your grandparents wouldn’t let her make a home outside her body.
Did your ancestors protect you from pain
by withholding what they knew of a country before this one?

Let me be clear. Spanish was given to my people
at the end of a sword, forced in our throats gory,
sharpened under the colonizer’s constant eye.
Each rolled r is a red wet fingerprint pointing me back
to this. Spanish is not my native tongue. English isn’t either.

The languages I speak are bursting with blood,
but they are all I have. I own only my hot mouth, speeding
against assimilation’s clock & a colonial legacy
you won’t even try to pronounce.

So I’ll ask again—why are you here?
Do you think my grandmother’s accent a sickness—
one so volatile you call yourself ‘gringa’ at every chance,
so I won’t make fun of you, when you make fun
of the way my language sounds to you?

Don’t you know I had to fight for this?
For every scrap of culture I could get my hands on,
even if its lineage is as European as yours?

My father, a Black American man, is descended from slaves.
I am descended from slaves. I want to know where I come from,
but I can only trace my history in one direction—so I am here,
in yet another Spanish class, desperately reaching
for a language I hope will choose me back someday.

What is it like to be a tourist in the halls of my silence?
To not be expected to speak better than you do?
To visit Mexico & to not care that people mistake you
for being from somewhere else? How does it feel—
to take a foreign language, for fun?
To owe your history nothing?

Subscribe now

BIO

The Acentos Review shares, “Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from the Southside of San Antonio, TX, with a BA in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin. She is a 2014 collegiate national poetry slam champion and a survivor of the Poetry MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Ariana does not believe in Latinidad or nationhood as a concept or useful organizing tool; she finds refuge and community among Afro-Indigenous and Afrocaribbean folks. Ariana is lowkey a curandera and highkey the youngest abuela you will ever meet.” Follow her work at arianabrown.com.

By Angela Diana, Alliance Intern from Cornell University ‘28

On September 3, we had a table at the Eco Experience Building of the Minnesota State Fair. As an organization, the Alliance for Sustainability tries to practice what we preach, and that means we want sustainable sourcing in everything we use, including the table covering.

When I was given the assignment for finding one, I was warned it would be Mission Impossible. The Alliance had been debating various types of table covering options for years to embody as much sustainability as possible with reasonable costs.

Exploring Sustainability Options in Table Coverings

So here goes Mission Impossible. Wouldn’t it be nice to just go to your favorite big box store and be done with the whole process in ten minutes? I wish sustainability was that simple. I hope our journey can help you understand some of the considerations for making any kind of purchase and optimize as many aspects as possible – potentially saving you money and time.

There’s no question that it’s extremely difficult to find a reasonably priced, professional-looking, ready-made sustainable table covering. Let’s start with the fabric.

Organic Cotton – Originally, we wanted to use organic cotton to both support organic farmers and educate people about the importance of buying organic. We also liked its look and feel, even though it has a tendency to wrinkle and requires significant amounts of water to grow and process. Unfortunately, organic cotton is expensive, and getting the amount we wanted for a table covering would be around $500, which is more than the $250 we hoped to spend. And that doesn’t even include the cost to incorporate our logo. Our Communications Coordinator Amy Durr said she’d be willing to construct a patch if we could get a color logo printed on fabric.

Recycled Cotton – We could not find any pre-made 100% recycled cotton tablecloths, although we did find there are “sustainably made cotton tablecloths” with 50% upcycled materials at quite reasonable prices. The challenge is 50% is made from conventional, highly-pesticided cotton and we don’t know what’s in the “upcycled material.” And we could not find the colors we sought.

Organic Linen – We explored possibilities for organic linen, which is made from flax. It uses far less water and looks even better than cotton, but is even more expensive and wrinklier.

Organic Bamboo – We could not find any organic bamboo table coverings. The options for organic bamboo woven fabric were limited in the colors and weights we wanted, even though the price for the fabric was quite reasonable. Plus, we would have been required to cut and sew fabric in addition to putting on our logo.

Recycled Polyester – Recycled polyester is better for the planet than conventional virgin polyester, but it is not a truly sustainable or zero-impact material. It uses 30% to 59% less energy than virgin polyester and cuts greenhouse gas emissions significantly, while diverting plastic waste (primarily single-use plastic bottles) away from landfills and oceans, giving that plastic a second life. It also decreases the immediate demand for new petroleum and fossil-derived raw materials.

At the same time, there are drawbacks. Recycled polyester can shed more microfibers during washing than virgin polyester and turning bottles into fabric removes it from a closed-loop bottle recycling system. Also, it’s not biodegradable and takes hundreds of years to break down in a landfill.

Given these pros and cons, our feeling is it should only be considered an option for things that will remain in use for a very long time, which this tablecloth would be. Fortunately, there are numerous companies offering recycled polyester table coverings that offer full service with the colors and incorporation of a logo at reasonable prices with short turn-around times.

Share

In addition to the fabric choice, there are questions that have to be answered about whether the dyes used are toxic or environmentally friendly. Furthermore, ideally we’d be able to find out about treatment of labor and health and safety concerns in manufacturing.

Our Choice

The answer for us ended up being a ready-made recycled polyester table covering. None of us loved the choice, but feel it was the best option considering the available information and products. The choice actually worked well and was easy to manage, giving us a wonderful look.

We hope there will be better options in the future that will fully embrace some combination of organic or reused and openly address a host of issues around labor and environmental impacts.

My Experience

I was asked to join this project following three years of exploration by the staff. I quickly understood why they labeled it Mission Impossible.

I felt like the exploration encapsulated the primary struggle of practicing sustainability in purchasing a particular product. Often, the choices are not so clear and even confusing.

The world is made for mass-production. Consumers are more and more distanced from where items are sourced. There are brands who seek to pay their workers a living wage and use sustainable practices in their own businesses. However, complex supply chains can make it difficult to know about the labor and environmental impacts from far away suppliers.

Ideally, all companies would need to have full disclosure of the practices being used throughout their supply chain. There are independent third-party certifiers (such as Fair Trade) that seek to provide such assurances, but it often gets difficult to truly know for sure in some countries. It also would be helpful if our government actually passed regulatory requirements, as they do when it comes to some drugs and meat production.

Making a sustainable choice for something as simple as a table covering can quickly spiral into weeks of research. In our Sustainability Tips, we try to share both the considerations and a range of products that we feel optimize as many parameters of sustainability as possible.

I hope this story can make it easier for you to make decisions and not succumb to the mainstream push for cheap, mass-produced items without regard for their sustainability impacts. You can do it for yourself, but it helps to have a village. Together, we can build a better world.

By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr

On September 26, bi-partisan Save Public Lands will deliver their petition to Congress. Sign it to tell elected officials that public lands are a top five voting issue.

Americans have had enough with the sell offs, land giveaways and backroom deals. We’ve all got whiplash from the sheer number of attacks on public lands that Trump is trying to ram through. One of them is happening in the Alliance’s backyard.

Boundary Waters Mining Ban Overturned

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness draws more than 150,000 visitors a year, making it the most visited wilderness area in the US. Crucially, for 20 years, 225,000 acres of Superior National Forest near the BWCA Wilderness were off limits to mining.

Trump pushed Congress to end that, and the Senate passed the resolution by one vote, 50-49. This opened the door for Twin Metals (owned by the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta) to pursue copper-nickel mining 12 miles from the wilderness.

Gov. Walz signed a state executive order on August 18 banning nonferrous mining in the area. However, that executive order can be turned over by a new governor in January, thus underscoring the need for federal protection.

Sadly, the Attacks Are Here, There and Everywhere

Nearly every day, the news is bursting with stories about more wilderness areas, National Monuments and National Parks that the Trump Administration is trying to destroy.

An analysis by the Center for American Progress details how the Trump administration has moved to strip protections from more than 86 million acres of public land during his second term, focusing on resource extraction, commercial development, and privatization. Here are some specific examples:

Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments further cut – In Trump’s first administration reductions were made. Now, he’s signed proclamations stripping protections from nearly 3 million acres, about 91% of Bears Ears and 90% of Grand Staircase-Escalante. Mining claims were staked on the land within days.

A private road through Yosemite – The Department of the Interior is reportedly pressing the Park Service to hand a Nevada developer an easement through the park so it can build a road connecting its property, just outside Yosemite’s boundary, to a road inside.

Roadless Rule on the chopping block – The USDA moved to end protections on tens of millions of acres of national forest, the Tongass included, clearing the way for logging roads.

The Senators Listened Once – Public Pressure Worked

In June 2025, Republican Sen. Mike Lee tried to force the sale of up to 3 million acres of public land through the “Big Beautiful Bill.” People called their senators. A lot of them. Lee pulled the sell-off before the final vote.

We later learned the Department of the Interior staff had fed him data and signed off on his talking points the day before he introduced it, while Secretary Burgum was telling reporters the plan “wasn’t part of the president’s agenda.” They didn’t stop wanting our land. They just got quieter about it.

Share

They may be quieter, but we won’t be.

One Day, One Thing

There’s a name for the Trump Administration’s strategy: flooding the zone. Throw enough chaos at people that no single outrage sticks long enough for anyone to answer for it. It only works if we let it wear us down. So choose this one action and take it today.

Join the Alliance in helping gather one million signatures by signing Save Public Lands’ petition. Tell DC lawmakers that Americans love and value their public lands and we want them protected. Period.

Extra Credit: Stay Up to Date

League of Conservation Voters: Attacks on Public Lands and Waters
Center for American Progress: Unprotecting American Lands
Harvard Law School: National Monuments Regulatory Tracker
Conservation Lands Foundation: Get Involved
Save Public Lands is on Instagram, alongside partners Save the Boundary Waters, Outdoor Alliance, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and the Wilderness Society.

By Sofia Pavlenko, Alliance Intern from Rutgers University ‘25

My parents immigrated to this country in 1998 in search of opportunity and a better way of life. They fled the Soviet regime with the clothes on their backs and a small suitcase. Based on their experiences, I was raised to give back to those who need it most whenever I have the chance.

I adopted this mindset. As a child my sister and I donated half of our piggy banks. As we became teens we consistently donated clothing, food and personal items. Then, as a Rutgers student, I saw how food insecurity and poverty impacted my peers and New Brunswick residents. It made me wonder, how can I take initiative and help?

Embracing the values of my family, I began to organize my community and mobilize my peers and colleagues to take action on pressing local issues. I held both a clothing and food drive, to directly impact those struggling.

Facing Our Consumption Addiction, What Fuels It and What We Can Do About It

Many of us are overwhelmed by our consumption addiction. We may feel it and even see it, but it’s hard to take in just how much stuff we have. Nobody has actually counted a whole American house, but when UCLA anthropologists inventoried 32 middle-class homes, one family’s living room and two bedrooms alone held 2,260 visible objects, before opening a single drawer.

I was surprised by this number. With the ease of consumption being reduced to a click of a button, our society is hooked on buying without consequence. It feels like overconsumption has reached an all-time high.

Social media has acted as a catalyst for the increase in ‘micro-trends‘, a short-lived trend where clothing is quickly mass-produced, sold and phased out by another trend. A vicious cycle is created by purchasing garments, wearing them only once or twice and then discarding them. The Alliance has been writing about this troubling trend, especially with fast fashion, led by companies like SHEIN.

This stark increase in harmful “take-make-waste” cycles needs to be addressed. Fortunately, there are sustainability solutions that can be introduced into our cultural consumption. We can reject the present system, and instead focus on a circular economy. While there are many mini circular economies, they all share a common theme: items are bought mindfully (considering impacts on labor, health and the environment), used for a longer time, reused, donated responsibly, repaired, repurposed and ideally recycled or composted.

Some Incredibly Helpful Existing Rutgers Programs Meeting People’s Needs

I was curious about how I could transform my own ‘take-make-waste’ approach to embrace circularity and positively impact my community. As a Rutgers student, I looked at what programs are already in place to meet the needs of students and New Brunswick residents.

Rutgers has a variety of excellent support systems, food pantries and clothing drives run by the Office of Climate Action and RU Thrifty, an organization which educates the community about the dangers of fast fashion by creating pop-up thrift stores. Additionally, Rutgers provides a free Career Closet, offering business clothing free of charge for students in need of professional clothing for interviews, job fairs and other events. Among many more organizations, I knew that Rutgers had a social network designed to help others.

Two Urgent Unmet Needs I Chose to Address: Clothing and Food Drives

I’ve long been concerned about the challenges faced by people in war torn countries. This is heightened by the stories I’ve heard from my relatives in Ukraine, for whom having adequate winter clothing is a struggle given the lack of heating.

Consequently, I decided to take initiative in the Fall of 2022 and create a winter clothing drive to help people in Ukraine. I relied on word of mouth and set up a donation box at my former sorority’s home, where peers and fellow students donated clothing items. I collected two massive boxes of clothing. I then shipped the clothing to Ukraine, where my relatives distributed the collected items. Even though I wasn’t solving the larger issue of war and poverty, it was meaningful to take action.

I then wanted to do something for my local community as I knew food shelves were running low on supplies. I organized a food drive through my tennis club and was able to donate nearly a hundred cans to local food pantries around Thanksgiving! Taking time to help others during a busy holiday season gave me a new reason to look forward to holidays.

Share

As all good things go, there were definitely some bumps in the road. I ran into issues with organizing college students in the midst of final exams, collecting responses, adequately communicating with other organizations who may have helped and actually collecting enough items to create a measurable impact.

I was able to mitigate some of these challenges by leaning on my community for support, reaching out to people experienced in driving initiatives. While some ideas never left the drawing board, they still served as an inspiration to me and my team.

Every Thing Can Make a Difference and Fill Your Cup

While at first I wished I could do more, I know that “anything helps” is a true fact. When someone has nothing, a winter coat or a warm meal can seem like everything. That’s why I’m going to keep donating clothing, blankets, towels and food at least once a month.

Subscribe now

Giving back not only feels good, but drives like these help people in need save money while creating more awareness about overconsumption and connecting us with our communities. Seeing direct impacts fills my cup and those of others. Take the initiative and help your community today!

By Alliance Intern Eleanor Hulan

“The fundamental urge behind labor organizing, the idea that workers have a right to be equitably paid for the work they do, to be treated with dignity, and to believe their efforts might better their own prospects and the lives of those dear to them, has always been legitimate and just.” — Philip Dray, 2011

Laborers in the classic sense, the ones that fill the pages of There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America by Philip Dray, are often invoked by both American political parties. Praised for things like hard work, embodying upward mobility, and being the rhetorical heart and soul of America, their welfare is often just political noise, given this country has no labor party and progress on workers rights have largely stagnated.

I purchased There is Power in a Union from the Tenement Museum in New York, which also happens to be a recommendation I’d like to share, if you ever find yourself in NYC. The museum bookstore was one of the best I’ve seen, and also reminded me of the need to read American histories more, especially those from and about traditionally underrepresented people and groups.

First a warning: this is a long book. It will not be a one session read for most people. It is extremely captivating writing, well-researched but more accessible than strictly academic. Every chapter has personal stories of specific people, then situates these stories within movements, labor eras and politics.

It opens with a chronicling of labor movements in the textile industries in the early and mid 19th century in Massachusetts, which were almost exclusively led by women. These manufacturing jobs were entangled with women's education and liberation; many of the workers wrote and edited for local labor journals, and were able to find more opportunities for education than in the agricultural areas they moved from.

Many of the issues, as Dray moves from the textile plants to iron forges to mines to railroads to the auto industry, are intersectional. He writes of these labor eras in conjunction with political movements like abolitionism, suffrage and civil rights, both because they cannot be untangled and also because labor leaders were often outspoken in these areas. Frederick Douglass, for example, headed the Colored National Labor Union in the late 19th century.

The first 60 years or so he chronicles were striking for their optimism. Workers did not yet have many protections but in spite and because of this, their aims were less limited than now. They envisioned, in articles and in collectivist groups and in rallies, a world without exploitation.

We have not achieved this. For example, North Carolina outright bans collective bargaining agreements with employers, a practice that was deemed in violation of international labor standards by the UN.We have not achieved this. For example, North Carolina outright bans collective bargaining agreements with employers, a practice that was deemed in violation of international labor standards by the UN.

Towards the end of the book, Dray writes:

“It is doubtful most people would describe themselves as optimistic about the present state of organized labor. The labor movement described in this book, a cause that ‘uniquely embodied a vision, a generosity of spirit and the political courage to rescue society from selfishness, exploitation, and organized violence’, now belongs to history.”

This is true. But reading about the courageous, intelligent and passionate organizers who made the labor movement what it is both revived my admiration of Americans of the past and gave me some hope for a new kind of union. Trade unionism was legalized in the US mostly because of judiciary recognition of the political power ordinary workers, when organized, were beginning to wield. It may take new forms, but we can still wield that power.

A short version of this review is included in What We’re Reading When We Need to Remember Why We Do Our Work

By the Alliance Newsletter Team

Now that the beach reads are behind us, a few of us at the Alliance got to talking about the books that have most deeply shaped how we see the world and how we live in it. Today, on National Read a Book Day, we’d like to share seven of them with you. Together, we feel they’ll give you some sense of the world we hope to co-create.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

By Robin Wall Kimmerer

I found this book tucked inside the pages of another I adore by Ross Gay, with no warning that it would quietly take my whole worldview apart and reassemble it into something new.

Braiding Sweetgrass gave me words for the vague notions of reciprocity that were trying to find a mooring in my brain, taught me how (and why) to honor other-than-human beings and opened a path to becoming indigenous to my place without overstepping. That’s a wish I’ve harbored since my suburban childhood.

Kimmerer names the ache so many of us live with: “species loneliness,” defined as “a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship.” Reading that passage felt like being handed a diagnosis I didn’t know I needed. And then, like braiding three strands of sweetgrass into one, she shows you how healing actually works: indigenous wisdom, science and the quiet, direct teachings of plants.

Now I understand my compulsion to lie under the hardy hibiscus in my yard, staring up into its fascinating branches and smelling its unbloomed scent. If you’ve ever felt this particular loneliness, if you’ve ever had the sense that you’ve lost the language for belonging to the earth, here’s the book that gives it back to you.
– Contributed by Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr

The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability

By Paul Hawken

Business sustainability used to be an oxymoron. But no longer, in large part due to The Ecology of Commerce. When written in 1993, people felt business could never be environmentally responsible.

However, it illuminated a path forward, arguing we had no future unless business could fundamentally shift to sustainability. The book was a “spear in my chest”, said Interface CEO Ray Anderson, who consequently turned around the world’s largest commercial floor covering manufacturer from being a major polluter to a successful sustainability model.

This landmark book by long-time environmental leader, eco-entrepreneur, brilliant author and visionary Paul Hawken helped shift business thinking as he pointed out that everyday consumer items contained toxic chemicals. Hawken not only nailed how damaging our commerce was, but his beautiful prose called for a different business future based on nature. He explained there is no waste in nature, as each organism ultimately provides the life source for the next.

That concept was core to the Natural Step, the scientifically-based Swedish approach to sustainability he helped introduce to North America in this book. Better yet, Hawken went on to practice what he preached by becoming the Chair of the Natural Step in the US and invited me to become one of the first instructors, a move that helped shift me and the Alliance from a focus on agriculture to overall sustainability, including in business.

Thanks to this book, the Natural Step remains a core part of the Alliance, from our Akepa Youth & School Program to our business trainings and consulting.
– Contributed by Alliance President Terry Gips

The Hundred Dresses

By Eleanor Estes

The Hundred Dresses is my favorite book of all time. It was written in the 1940s for children, but it’s a timeless classic. A seemingly harmless schoolyard game gradually moves into youth bullying — perpetrated by children who don’t initially understand that they’re doing anything wrong. We’re never given the explicit perspective of the victim, Wanda, in her own narrative voice. Instead, we’re constantly encouraged to guess what she’s thinking and feeling.

We learn the complex idea that you must take responsibility for the consequences of your hurtful actions, regardless of your intentions. While most of us have already learned that, it’s a potent reminder and a portrayal of the need for empathy. The narration is done with all the innocence and brutal honesty you would expect from the second-grade characters.

It underscores the complexity of bullying as there is no clear line between differences – such as backgrounds and income levels – and crossing the line to mean behavior. It’s an anti-bullying book that dissects the entire underlying mindset that feeds into bullying.

The Hundred Dresses is the most effective fictional book I’ve read for teaching empathy for all ages. It does it through simple language and a poignant story that’s short enough to read over and over.
– Contributed by Alliance Intern Angela Diana

The Sabbath

By Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

My name is Terry and I once was a 24/7 Jewish environmentalist trying to save the world. But a curious thing happened one day that got me to stop and take a day off every week – a day for resting, renewal, appreciating all of Creation and being with myself, family and friends while celebrating freedom from slavery of all kinds – a veritable model of sustainability.

I was speaking at a Jewish environmental conference in Colorado and needed a break. I left the auditorium only to discover a long table of books with a woman standing behind it. I felt sort of smart-alecky so I asked her, “Is there one book on this table that if I read it, my life would be transformed? Oh, and it has to be short.” She smiled and without hesitation said “Yes” as she walked over and picked up a book and handed it to me: The Sabbath by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

I sat down and read the entire book. Indeed, it fundamentally transformed my life. I got the hidden value of stopping work, taking a break, and observing a Sabbath. I have been observing it ever since and feel it’s been the greatest gift in my life. As this mystical Orthodox yet social justice Rabbi who marched in Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote way back in 1951:

“To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligation, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money — is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for human progress than the Sabbath?”

– Contributed by Alliance President Terry Gips

Share

There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America

By Philip Dray

Laborers in the classic sense, the ones that fill the pages of There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America by Philip Dray, are often invoked by both American political parties. Praised for things like hard work, embodying upward mobility, and being the rhetorical heart and soul of America, their welfare is often just political noise, given this country has no labor party and progress on workers rights have largely stagnated.

I purchased There is Power in a Union from the Tenement Museum in New York, whose history reminded me of the need to read American histories to understand the plight of traditionally underrepresented people.

A warning: this is a long book. It will not be a one session read for most people. It is extremely captivating writing, well-researched but more accessible than strictly academic. Every chapter has personal stories of specific people, then situates these stories within movements, labor eras and politics.

Its opening highlights a surprising fact I wasn’t aware of: women almost exclusively led the labor movements in the textile industries in early- and mid-19th century Massachusetts. These manufacturing jobs were entangled with women’s education and liberation. In fact, many of the women wrote and edited for local labor journals. They were able to find more opportunities for education than in the agricultural areas they moved from.

The book then delves into nearly every societal institution – from iron forges and mines to railroads and the auto industry – highlighting the contentious battles that labor has fought and won to assure fundamental rights for workers that many of us take for granted today.
– Contributed by Alliance Intern Eleanor Hulan

Read a longer version of this review here

This One Wild and Precious Life: The Path Back to Connection in a Fractured World

By Sarah Wilson

I had no idea who Sarah Wilson was when I picked up This One Wild and Precious Life – I was drawn in purely by the title’s nod to Mary Oliver’s famous question. Then came her first gut-punch: “Ironically, in such inverted times, it’s our disconnection that actually unites – or connects – us.” I began reading faster.

Wilson names the thing so many of us don’t want to say out loud: our “evolutionary response [is] to shut down and go numb” when faced with a “horrible threat.” One of her solutions, one we at the Alliance return to again and again, is kindness, and she makes it startlingly practical.

Ask someone, she suggests, “How is the state of your heart, in this breath?” Ten words that transform an ordinary moment with a friend into an opportunity for honest sharing, deep listening and meaningful connection.

I’ve started asking it myself, and my relationships are becoming more restorative. Oliver asked what we plan to do with our one wild and precious life. Wilson’s answer, quietly and urgently, is: come back to each other. We can begin together, right now.
– Contributed by Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr

The Year of Magical Thinking

By Joan Didion

Joan Didon’s beautiful interpretation of human grieving and coping with loss found me during a tumultuous time in my life. While I was not coping with traditional grief, I was experiencing the loss of my childhood, and a transition to a life with new responsibilities and expectations.

Looking for a way to name the feelings I was feeling led me to Didion’s work. We discovered the complexities associated with grief’s unpredictable timeline together through The Year of Magical Thinking.

Grief is not ‘one size fits all’, and can be felt in an abundance of ways. We look back at times of grief and wonder why we acted a certain way, but the permanent space grief occupies leaves a vacuum of instability, making ‘reasonable’ responses almost impossible. Through her memoir, we see how Didion copes with her husband’s death, using bent logic to cope with the trauma and create sense within a senseless void.

Subscribe now

It is not a simple path from sad to better, as illustrated in Didion’s writing – we see how her mental state ranges from shock to obsessive to delusional, all ways the human psyche copes with the idea of permanent loss, a seemingly inconceivable idea. Didion’s journey through grief reminds us of how loss is not one emotion, but an alteration of our beliefs, and an acceptance of an irreversible change.

Ultimately, Didion reminds us that the journey of grief can change an individual, but the true resilience is moving forward without letting the grief permanently consume you. Didion’s writing gave me permission to grieve and understand permanent loss through a lens of actual human emotion, rather than the cold and analytical explanations generically given to anyone struggling.
– Contributed by Alliance Intern Sofia Pavlenko

By Imani Holmer, Former Alliance Intern from UC Berkeley ‘25

Kindness positively impacts every facet of our lives. Studies show that kindness in relationships can lower stress, decrease the risk of chronic diseases, promote better immune functioning, encourage better lifestyle choices, and improve both sleep and mental health.

Columbia U assistant professor of psychology Dr. Kelli Harding delves into this topic in a Q&A with Columbia Psychiatry. Harding discovered the role kindness plays in health outcomes, finding that kind relationships enable people to navigate life knowing they have support in their endeavors.

She believes emotional physical health issues often require emotion-based solutions. As a medical doctor, she learned that “medical care, while critical, only accounts for 10-20% of our overall health status,” which inspired her to write The Rabbit Effect. The title is based on 1978 research in which researchers mistakenly found that despite receiving the exact same diets, rabbits that had been affectionately cared for had significantly better health outcomes than those who hadn’t. Kindness kept them healthy, and the same applies to us.

Amidst a loneliness epidemic, our health is at higher risk than ever. According to the US Department of Health, lack of social connection can lead to 29% increased risk of heart disease, 32% increased risk of stroke, and 60% increased risk of premature death. More than medicines, exercise, or diet, the treatment we need most is kindness.

Research shows that kindness counteracts negative health outcomes caused by stress and actively promotes positive outcomes. In contrast to stress, kindness is “associated with a 50% reduced risk of early mortality,” according to an article published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine (AJLM). Kindness decreases “proinflammatory genes that are upregulated in response to stress…providing a consistent explanation for the decrease in mortality.”

Share

“An important reinforcement mechanism that living beings have is the pleasurable feeling that comes from doing and seeing kindness,” according to the AJLM. “Studies have demonstrated that internal reward systems are activated by seeing or experiencing kindness, yielding a pleasurable experience…whereas loneliness (social isolation) is a painful and distressing experience. As organisms, particularly humans, seek pleasure and avoid pain, the activation of reward systems reinforces the behavior to connect and help one another.”

These cycles of kindness, if long-lasting, also have the potential to mitigate deep-seated sources of stress. One of Harding’s goals in publishing her book is to implement positive psychology more broadly as a solution, particularly in reversing the effects of trauma. “Trauma is widespread and has profound implications for our physical health if not addressed,” says Harding. It’s difficult to immediately fix long-term problems in people’s lives, but we can encourage forgiveness, community, and self-kindness to counteract them.

Kindness isn’t a perfect panacea, but it comes pretty close. Harding concludes, “Kindness is incredible because it costs nothing and benefits the doer, receiver, and anyone watching.” Kindness always counts, whether the action is big or small.

By Alliance Intern Eleanor Hulan

This time last month, I walked the 15 minutes to work and got there with my eyes streaming, nausea threatening to fell me, and a sense of despair unhelped by staring out a floor to ceiling window all day. July 16, the Air Quality Index in MN reached hazardous levels due to fire and smoke particulate in counties across the state, including the Tribal Nations of Mille Lacs, Leech Lake, Red Lake, and White Earth.

That day, levels here were the second worst in the world. We’ve also been facing heat waves all summer that at times made it feel like a Herculean task to accomplish errands and get to work.

And this is in Minnesota, one of the so-called climate-haven states. Places like Australia have been contending with weather like this for decades. Australians, like the US, Canada, much of South America, and everywhere else with a history of colonialism, have also been contending with their history of the exploitation and displacement of natives for decades.

Where the Air Goes Orange, So Does the Music

A few Australians in particular, the members of Midnight Oil, have a prolific body of work dating back to 1977 revolving around both issues, as well as causes like disarmament and disaster relief. I can see why, because when you go outside and the air is orange and it feels like the world is ending, you can think of little else.

Climate issues affect the island country disproportionately because of its coastline and geography, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders even more so.

In 1987, the song Beds are Burning from the aptly named Diesel and Dust album was released. I first heard it when I was a young teen, just beginning to develop my own music tastes, and it resonated deeply.

The vocal style was a little foreign (I later came to love it) and I didn’t watch the music video until years later, but it hit me that: Oh these are artists who believe in something. The song was evocative and shocking and forceful and it made me want to wake up.

Share

When I did eventually watch the music video, it added to my understanding. It features Aboriginal communities in Australia, which the band visited and would continue to return to throughout their career. It’s a condemnation of the colonialist forces that caused native Australians to live with less, but also a celebration of the power and love in their communities.

Forty Years Later, the Rent Is Still Unpaid

One of the most provocative aspects is the song’s invocation of now, the emphasis of the immediacy of the problem. They say “The time has come… to pay the rent, to pay our share” To the bandmembers, that time had come by 1987, and before. So it’s alarming that, more than 40 years later, we still have not done so. The people and companies most responsible are assuredly not paying the rent.

To me, even through the doom, it also has a hopeful bent. The land showcased in the music video has elements of beauty and the other part of the chorus “when our Earth is turning” inspires awe. It makes me think, yes these electromagnetic forces of the cosmos are acting on us in ways we still don’t fully understand, and that is incredible. We have to do something with the life that has been offered to us, not sleep through it.

The other inspiring piece of the puzzle is Midnight Oil’s advocacy work. Throughout their career, they advocated for environmental and aboriginal causes and raised money for aboriginal institutions and disaster relief. They scheduled release dates around events like UN Climate Change Conferences and Armistice Day. A band member – Peter Garrett was eventually elected as Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts.

Give it a listen (or another one, if you’ve heard it before), and watch the video. It’s one of the great protest anthems of our time.

Beds are Burning
By Midnight Oil

Out where the river broke
The bloodwood and the desert oak
Holden wrecks and boilin’ diesels
Steam in forty-five degrees

The time has come
To say fair’s fair
To pay the rent
To pay our share
The time has come
A fact’s a fact
It belongs to them
Let’s give it back

How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How do we sleep while our beds are burning?
How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How do we sleep while our beds are burning?

The time has come to say fair’s fair
To pay the rent now, to pay our share

Four wheels scare the cockatoos
From Kintore, east to Yuendemu
The Western Desert lives and breathes
In forty-five degrees

The time has come
To say fair’s fair
To pay the rent
To pay our share
The time has come
A fact’s a fact
It belongs to them
Let’s give it back

How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How do we sleep while our beds are burning?
How can we dance when our earth is turning?
How do we sleep while our beds are burning?

By Angela Diana, Alliance Intern from Cornell University ‘28

Sadly, you can’t see your own face in the algae-filled waters of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool right now, but it does hold a clear mirror to the President’s and federal government’s failure to honestly communicate with the American people.

While Trump doubles down on his dishonest and misleading statements about the renovation of the Reflecting Pool, many Americans are losing even more trust about our government. The Trump administration’s inability to tell the truth about what should have been a routine renovation is just one glaring reason why his poll numbers have slumped to new low.

It reveals deeper issues within his approach to governance, showing an inability to solve larger current issues, such as the Iran War and the burgeoning climate crisis. It can also serve as an important lesson on what NOT to do when trying to build trust to enact badly-needed changes in the world. By telling the truth, we CAN co-create a world of sustainability, health, equity and kindness.

The Façade of Perfection and Glaring Lies Meant to Deceive

The Reflecting Pool is a potent metaphor for the remaking of America with a façade of perfection – usually gold, but in this case blue. This is part of a larger plan to imprint Trump’s name and likeness on anything and everything for his legacy.

Trump seeks to deflect and deceive as opposed to addressing the real world challenges most Americans face every day – just paying their bills, having health insurance and enough food to eat.

The story of the pool reflects a microcosm of the much larger issues about trust in government. As part of his plan to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of our country, Trump sought to rush renovations to the “dirty, disgusting” Reflecting Pool before the Fourth of July. He wanted to repaint it “American flag blue.” Consequently, he gave a no-bid contract to a home pool installer who was a donor with no experience with such a project.

Problems immediately arose when the work was finished, including a massive green algae bloom and huge tears in the pool coating itself. Ironically, one might struggle with the word “tears” because it could refer to crying “tears” about the state of our country.

With no evidence, the President claimed this damage was due to vandalism by left-wing activists. According to PBS News, he “has blamed people of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool by using a ‘box cutter or a knife’ to make a 300-foot slit on the bottom of the pool and dumping ‘fertilizer in the water’ to produce algae.” On June 23, six people were charged.

Since then, witnesses have come forward, but none saw the alleged vandals with knives, weapons, or huge bags of fertilizer. There is still no photographic or video evidence of any act.

Trump’s long-time loyalist, former Fox News anchor, and pick for US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro was tasked with prosecuting these alleged vandals. However, she recently dropped all the cases after reviewing the facts. She decided there simply wasn’t evidence to prosecute.

President Trump was furious with Pirro and publicly berated her, threatening her removal. Ultimately, he conceded on Truth Social that there was “some contractor error” during the process. However, he notably did not take back his accusations towards the vandals, even after Ms. Pirro did.

The Reflecting Pool Isn’t an Isolated Incident – There’s a Pattern

There is a trend within the administration. As an experienced Twitter and Truth Social user, Trump continually uses social media to say things that are provably wrong. Even in reference to the renovation itself, he has posted inaccurate cost estimates.

In the past, presidents used communication with the public in a way that played a positive role in helping to guide and bring them together, even though at times the President was intentionally lying or misleading. One famous example is President Roosevelt and his fireside chats. “They eventually became a source of hope and security for all Americans. The chats were influential in reformulating the American worldview from one of despair to one of hope during a time of multiple crises,” says Britannica.

But is that how we feel now? Increasingly, we’re feeling a lack of trust in our leaders, who too often seek to divide us. It’s pretty much impossible to make any headway against greater threats like climate change, pollution and the rapid depletion of natural resources unless we create some kind of consensus.

Public trust in the presidency and the government as a whole is being eroded by Trump’s firehose of daily lies, intentional miscommunication and over-focus on completely insignificant things – from the paving over of Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden and the Reflecting Pool renovations to his Ballroom, Triumphal Arch and attempt at renaming of the Kennedy Center.

Share

He clearly seeks to mislead the public by claiming everything is the best ever while lying about truly consequential things like the Strait of Hormuz, which he constantly claims is open. How can we have trust and any sense of unity as a nation amidst false statements about the dangers of wind turbines, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and serious domestic and global challenges?

Disturbing Actions Add Fuel to the Fire of Lies

On top of the lies are a barrage of deeply troubling actions on everything from DEI and renewable energy to targeted legal prosecutions of any opponent and fundamental changes to science-based health policy and funding.

For example, during the president’s first term, he eliminated the pandemic warning service in 2018 — barely one year before the COVID pandemic began. More recently, Trump’s head of the CDC stopped monitoring several parasites and viruses including cyclospora, which is rapidly becoming a public health crisis. Decisions like these are not based on common sense, much less science.

This does not bode well for our future. There is no good outcome from starting a war in the Middle East, particularly with only optimistic assumptions and no plan for military support from other countries. Instead, Trump is focusing on DC construction projects to cement his legacy, while dragging us into a seemingly unresolvable war with Iran.

The result is that gas, grocery and other consumer prices are spiking from the war and tariffs. At the same time, our American servicemembers are exposed to deadly attacks, and our weapon stockpiles are dangerously depleted, as China focuses on attacking Taiwan.

America is not its landmarks or its fancy houses. It is its people, and extraordinary land and ecosystems. It is these that are experiencing the brunt of Trump’s policies and dishonesty. Too many are suffering from poverty and desperately need the social services the government could provide with this money. And our environment is threatened as never before.

Two-thirds of Americans are unhappy with the renovations and he is equally under water with his popularity and failure to address affordability, which he had campaigned on (a term he now claims is made up). Again, instead of listening to the voters who want him to stop and start focusing on what really matters, he seeks scapegoats whenever possible, such as claiming a few scattered vandals are responsible for a flawed plan for the Reflecting Pool.

As a young person, how is it that we can have any trust in a leader and government that acts against our best interests? Is he actually Making America Great Again?

We Can Co-Create a New Path Forward

It’s important to have leaders who listen to us and care about our struggles. If you’re here, reading articles about sustainability and our future, it’s because you’re someone who wants to improve and protect the world we share.

The way President Trump handled the Reflecting Pool renovation can serve as an important lesson to those of us trying to create real change in the world. Being able to team up and work together effectively is necessary for any group trying to address such a big issue as the climate crisis. Individual sustainable choices are essential, but these alone are not enough when the global economy and so many systems within it are dependent on polluting plastics and fossil fuels.

It’s difficult to organize collective solutions to the massive challenges we face. But in every case, we have to start with the truth. We need to honestly confront what we’re facing and engage the American people in coming together to develop transformative policies and actions.

Can we co-create a reflecting pool – and world – that embodies our values and vision for sustainability, health, equity and kindness?

By Alliance President Terry Gips

Want a frozen treat that’s “so refreshing” and “the perfect bite for a hot summer day” with a “creamy, but slightly icy” texture — “somewhere in between sorbet and ice cream?” Try watermelon ice cream as recommended by Kitchn editorial assistant Celia Funderburk.

OK, you’re wondering why we’re featuring watermelon ice cream as a Sustainability Tip? You’re not alone. Our entire Newsletter Team at the Alliance for Sustainability agreed. So, this is both my attempt to first explain why this DOES matter and has EVERYTHING to do with sustainability, followed by the recipe to see if you agree with me.

Reason #1 Summer is a Time to Take a Break from Our Rat Race

It’s summer. Let’s escape the intense heaviness of the state of our country and world. This is normally the time for a vacation or some kind of break before the every day busy of school and work.

In countries like France, everything shuts down in August. Don’t we get a break, too? Way too many Americans never take the little paid vacation time they have. We tend to be a nation of workaholics, whether by choice or force.

I’d argue that taking a break is essential to sustainability. I used to work 24/7 as an environmentalist trying to save the world. Then I discovered the Sabbath, taking just one day to stop working and be free to be….with myself, family, friends, animals and Creation. It’s made a world of difference in all aspects of my life. So, my fellow readers, we get a break as well!

Reason #2 Preparing and Enjoying Delicious, Nutritious Food is Core to Sustainability

Eating food is one of the most impactful activities we all do every day. Addressing what we put in our body and where and how it’s sourced is so essential because so many of us have lost touch with it and yet it impacts people and our planet in profound ways.

Most of us need help both understanding the connections and then shifting to healthier choices aligned with our values.

Plus, most people are buying more and more prepared food because they have little time or connection to what they eat. We’re missing the relationship to one of the most sacred gifts we are given, just gobbling it down as we run out the door. There’s little connection, in the same way we live our lives with our phones.

There’s a reason the Slow Food movement is growing as an increasing number of people seek a connection to the food they eat and the farmers who grew it.

The idea of us reconnecting with each other, farmers and food and how it’s produced is a core element of sustainability and was at the heart of the founding of the International Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture 43 years ago. It’s in our DNA. There’s a reason we call it agri-culture.

Reason #3 It’s an Inexpensive DIY Dream Without Synthetic Ingredients and Added Sugar

Yes, you and your kids can easily make this with no artificial ingredients or added sugar that can be as good or better than store bought. In a world where “we do it all for you,” this is something that everyone can participate in and enjoy. And you can express your own creativity by adding other ingredients if you like.

Reason #4 Time Out to Enjoy Food

We’re not the French or Spanish who close shops down as they enjoy a two-hour lunch, filled with delicious food and connection. I’ve been there, done that and loved it.

Yet, we can still sit down and enjoy our food as we support a shift to sustainability, health, equity and kindness. While it’s great to have nutritious organic regenerative vegan food with zero-waste, how we prepare and enjoy that food is a key part of the culture of relationship, connection and time that’s also part of the world we’re trying to co-create.

Let me get personal and ask: Are you finding you are increasingly time crunched so that more and more of your “meals” are grab and go, take out/delivery, fast food and eating out?

If all of that food were organic regenerative with zero waste packaging would that be enough?

Do you struggle with taking the time to prepare healthy nutritious food?

If you answered yes to one or more of those questions, would you like a simple summer solution for one step you can take that’s on most people’s list of priority treats during these hot, humid Dog Days of Summer? Ice cream. Not just any ice cream, but delicious, nutritious 2-ingredient ice cream you can quickly make yourself if you just have a freezer: Watermelon Ice Cream.

Share

Here’s the Recipe for Watermelon Ice Cream

As Celia Funderburk points out in her article, The Best Way to Eat Watermelon This Summer Requires Just 1 Extra Ingredient, “Nothing says summertime quite like watermelon. I always loved when my mom would buy one and slice it up for us when I was growing up. But now that I’m the one who has to do all the prep, buying a huge watermelon at the grocery store has limited appeal to me.”

“Once I’m done chopping up just half of it, my fridge is full, and I know I won’t be able to eat the entire other half before it gets mushy. So when I saw this two-ingredient watermelon ice cream recipe on TikTok, I was intrigued. Not only would it keep the other half of the watermelon fresh, but it would also deliver a delicious, refreshing dessert. I had to try it myself.”

“Cut a whole watermelon in half and scoop out a circle in the middle of one half of it. Cover this half with plastic wrap and place it in the freezer for at least 24 hours. Save the other half to use for something else.”

“Once the watermelon is frozen, pour a small amount of milk into the hollow part. (I used coconut milk, but other recipes used heavy whipping cream.) Slowly scrape the sides and bottom of the circle in the watermelon with a spoon. As you scrape, mix the milk with the frozen watermelon. As the milk begins to combine with the watermelon and freeze, slowly add in a bit more milk.”

“Continue this process until you have your desired amount of ice cream. Scoop it into a small bowl and enjoy immediately or chill in the freezer so it can set longer.”

“Watermelon isn’t the most flavorful ingredient, so whichever milk you choose will likely be the dominant flavor. I opted for coconut milk because I saw comments that the coconut flavor complemented the dessert better than heavy cream. I would definitely choose coconut if I were to make this again.”

Subscribe now

“Pour the milk or cream in slowly. I added too much coconut milk in the hole at first and quickly learned I needed to pour some out. When you use too much force to scrape the frozen watermelon, it’s easy to lose your grip and make a mess. I would play it safe and add the liquid in slowly and incrementally.”

Voila. That’s it. Simple, easy and healthy.

Want to make it healthier and more earth friendly? Use an organic watermelon.

I hope you enjoy and let us know if you agree with me!

By Sofia Pavlenko, Alliance Intern from Rutgers University ‘25

The iconic Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments need our help!

The Trump administration is attacking the protected acres of these crucial national monuments in order to create more space for drilling and other environmentally harmful activities.

At the behest of industries such as coal and hardrock mining and politicians like Senator Mike Lee of Utah, President Trump signed proclamations to slash the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears monuments acreage about one million acres each, splitting those two monuments up into five smaller ones.

Share

Help keep our public lands safe and protected! Join the Alliance in sending EarthJustice’s letter to your members of congress in our shared efforts to defend our public lands!

By Imani Holmer, Alliance Intern from U California Berkeley ‘25

Most of us never think of the environmental impacts from chewing gum, but chewing gum is actually the second most common form of litter after cigarette butts. In fact, 80-90% of gum is not disposed of properly into trash cans, and approximately 92% of Britain’s urban paving stones have gum on them.

Not only is it rarely disposed of properly, but gum is also most commonly made with synthetic plastics, including a petroleum-based polymer often used to make tires and adhesives. As a plastic product, it takes hundreds of years to decompose and is not biodegradable. So, any gum not disposed of in trash cans puts long-lasting synthetic plastics into our environment and water systems, accumulating to 250,000 tons of gum waste per year.

Share

Gum also puts some animals and birds within our environment at risk. Any unfortunate animals who mistake gum for food can build up toxins or choke on it when it blocks their digestive systems. Products used in gum like xylitol can be fatal to dogs, with most sticks of gum containing enough xylitol to severely harm small dogs.

Of course, there is also concern about the health effects from the sugar in some chewing gum, as well as some people experiencing jaw pain.

Subscribe now

Remain conscious about where you dispose of your gum, or, if you can, stop buying gum entirely or swap to a biodegradable alternative. More plastics with 500-year life spans is the last thing we need if we want to protect our environment, so the next time you choose to chew, chew consciously!