Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart

Can midterm elections head off AI-mageddon?

Melanie Lenart — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:06:26 GMT

This Eco-Logic piece highlights Arizona races of interest for voters who oppose data center expansion, but many of the same themes can be found in other counties and states across the nation.

Voters across the country worried about data centers or rogue AI agents annihilating the human race can take action. The midterm election offers a chance to slow the expansion of this dangerous technology and the data centers that support them.

The expansion of AI-serving data centers has raised hackles across the United States, which already host more than half of the world’s hyperscale data centers.

In Arizona, Attorney General Kris Mayes has pointed out data centers planned for the Phoenix area would more than quadruple water demand, boosting it by 450 percent. In southern Arizona near Tucson, we are dealing with the proposed destruction of thousands of acres of Sonoran Desert to empower AI data centers.

The rapid expansion continues despite urgent warnings of the dangers from AI developers.

Anthropic head Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Space X’s Elon Musk and others agreed there was at least a 10 percent chance rogue AI could end human civilization by 2030. Several industry leaders gave humanity only a 50 percent chance of surviving AI to the end of this century.

Here are a few ways Arizona voters can take action to prevent AI-maggedon.

ACC: An obscure but crucial board

The Arizona Corporation Commission sounds boring, and many residents don’t even bother to vote for their members. This year, please do. It’s one of our main means of controlling corporate greed affecting us.

The commission serves as the state’s means of keeping utilities, including corporation-owned electrical companies, affordable and serving Arizona residents. The current members have shown little willingness to rein in the spread of data centers, or even electricity rates.

“There are people on there who are just giving away electricity for data centers over and over and again,” said Jen Allen, chair of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, during a phone call. “They are supposed to be serving the interests of the rate payer. That is what their job is. But yet they have just been the allies of the big utilities, the monopoly utilities.”

For instance, a surcharge approved by the commission in 2022 led to homeowners served by the Phoenix-based corporation APS paying an average of 23 percent more for their electrical bills in 2025. That occurred even though these same residential customers had actually decreased their electricity use overall by 5.5 percent.

To change the pattern of the Arizona Corporation Commission favoring electricity for AI at the expense of existing residents, Arizona residents can elect commissioners willing to say no to those seeking more water and electricity for AI data centers.

These are the best candidates for the two seats up for election during the midterms:

Clara Pratte, a Democrat who has worked for four Navajo Nation presidents as well as three US presidential administrations.
Jonathan Hill, a Democrat who has made limiting data centers one of his policy points.

Candidates target AI data centers

Both Pratte and Hill support a moratorium on data center construction in Arizona. Although the ACC does not technically have the capacity to call for a moratorium, as Hill acknowledged, the commission does play a role in regulatory agreements for providing data centers with water and electricity.

“People need to see and know what’s in those agreements,” Hill said, as reported in the Arizona Capitol Times. “That’s something we didn’t see with the Project Blue agreement.”

Project Blue was the data center, originally associated with Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, that sought to set up shop just outside Tucson near the Pima County fairgrounds. After more than a thousand residents showed up to oppose it last year, the Tucson City Council voted not to annex the data center site or provide it with water.

Bezos maintains Amazon is no longer associated with the project. Even so, his former frontman, Beale Infrastructure, continues moving the project forward. What’s more, Beale now has approval to build a potentially even bigger data center in nearby Marana.

The two Tucson-area data centers will require at least 2,100 megawatts of electricity—nearly the amount of electricity currently used in Tucson. A memorandum of agreement between Beale and Tucson Electric Power notes a preference for renewable energy, such as wind or solar.

Yet the two Republican candidates for the commission support the unrestricted expansion of Arizona data centers. As Reagan Priest reported in the Arizona Capitol Times, incumbent Kevin Thompson’s government relations firm, Broadmore Consulting, actively promotes the interests of data centers.

Attorney General Mayes and several civic groups filed objections with the commission after Tucson Electrical Power this summer sought a 14 percent rate hike, citing infrastructure needs as one of the reasons. (The rate hike case is expected to be settled by November 17.) The request came on the heels of a 10 percent rate increase in 2023. In a September 26 story, Paul Ingram of the Tucson Sentinel quoted Mayes saying this about the proposed hike:

“This is blatant corporate greed. TEP’s parent company (Fortis) reported $1.6 billion in net earnings last year. This is a billion-dollar company that wants to increase the average Tucson consumer’s monthly bill by 14 percent following back-to-back rate hikes over the past five years. It’s time to say ‘enough.’”

Pima County Board of Supervisors

The Canada-owned electric company’s initial request for the 14 percent increase in electricity rates came on June 17, 2025, mere hours after the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to sell county land for the Project Blue data center.

The request gave Matt Heinz, one of the three supervisors who supported the land sale, second thoughts about his vote, as Tony Davis reported in the Arizona Daily Star. Heinz said he voted in favor of the data center construction only because TEP officials assured board members that customers would not foot the bill to erect data center electricity infrastructure. Yet Heinz did not take the option to reconsider the decision.

Unfortunately, the only one of the five Pima County Board of Supervisors up for re-election this fall is the District 5 representative, Andrés Cano. Along with Jen Allen, he was one of two board members to oppose the sale of county land for a hyperscale data center.

Andrés Cano deserves re-election to the Pima County Board of Supervisors. He represents a Tucson area that includes downtown, midtown, the west and south sides, and the Pascua Yaqui Nation.

A more direct way to slow down or stop the influx of data centers in Pima County won’t come until 2028, when the other seats for the county’s Board of Supervisors will be up for election.

Other races of interest

Kris Mayes clearly is the best candidate for attorney general, especially when it comes to opposing the expansion of data centers. It’s too bad she’s not running for governor, where she would have more power to implement her people-protecting vision.

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs succeeded in pushing for a pause on tax breaks for data centers though 2029, and promises to remove the tax breaks permanently if re-elected. However, she opposes putting a moratorium on construction of Arizona data centers.

While her stances fall short of ideal, her opponent, Andy Biggs, is worse. He is a hard-core supporter of President Trump, who completely opposes government regulation of AI and unsuccessfully pushed to take away state and local rights to regulate data centers.

AI companies have been funneling money into contests of interest to them, including Arizona candidates for the US House of Representatives.

For instance, the AI advocacy group Leading the Future funneled $616,000 to Congress member Jay Feely, Arizona’s incumbent Republican for US District 1, as Joe Dana reported for News 12. This helps make his Democratic opponent, Amish Shah, the better choice.

In most cases, Republicans—especially those tied to the MAGA movement—are more likely to support the unbridled development of AI and expansion of data centers. So, when in doubt, a vote against them is probably a vote against data centers.

Even Greg Stanton, a Democrat representing US District 4 who received funding from the same AI advocacy group, represents a better choice than his Republican opponent, Zuhdi Jasser, who refused to state his stance on data centers.

Leading the Future donated $548,000 toward Stanton’s re-election.

Yet in September, Stanton urged House colleagues including Speaker Mike Johnson to tackle developing AI safety guardrails and otherwise respond to the threats identified by its creators and 1,300 workers in the field. He was one of six Congress members who signed a September 15 letter that included this warning:

“A series of proposals have emerged from our colleagues that deserve consideration, public debate, thoughtful amendment, and action. They include bills mandating transparency and evaluation of frontier models, “kill switch” requirements, and a waiver of antitrust laws to enable critical industry-wide collaboration on safety and security. … The House should remain in session until Congress advances meaningful, bipartisan AI safeguards.”

The AI advocacy group’s support for Stanton suggests even those behind Leading the Future recognize the pressing need for AI safeguards.

After all, the people behind this self-improving technology are just as human as the rest of us threatened with annihilation. And unlike some of the CEOs behind AI, they don’t have rockets to escape future fallout.

There’s still hope for humanity at this point.

If we act quickly and vote resoundingly for candidates willing to rein in AI and the data centers that empower them, there may still be time to stop rogue agents from gaining enough power to kill us all.

Their heads may be in the Cloud, but they can’t think without electricity and data centers.

This post builds on two September Eco-Logic posts linking a proposed industrial solar project to AI data centers.

Summary for Arizona voters

It’s time to elect Arizona Corporation Commission candidates willing to control electricity dispersal and rate hikes—namely, Clara Pratte and Jonathan Hill.
Pima County supervisor Andrés Cano deserves re-election. He opposed selling land near the fairgrounds for Beale’s Pima County data center in unincorporated Tucson.
Arizona Attorney general Kris Mayes is on the side of those who oppose expanding data centers and raising electricity rates to do so.
Supporting incumbent Katie Hobbs over challenger Andy Biggs for Arizona governor is the better choice for those concerned about AI and data centers.

Jacob Coxon launched widespread concern for the existential threat of AI when he posted on X that his work at Anthropic and OpenAI made him afraid it could “kill us all” by 2030.

2025, Blog post by Mike Friedlander of Otium Financial Planners, “Why the US dominates data centers—and why it matters for AI,” published October 29:

https://www.otiumfinancialplanners.com/blog/why-the-u-s-dominates-data-centers-and-why-it-matters-for-ai

2026, Arizona Capitol Times article by Reagan Priest, “Democratic candidates for Corp Comm back data center moratorium,” published September 9:

https://pro.stateaffairs.com/az/ai-tech/corp-comm-democrats-moratorium

2026, Arizona Mirror article by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy, “Kris Mayes calls for no new AI data centers as Arizona faces water, power crunch,” published August 31:

https://azmirror.com/2026/08/31/kris-mayes-targets-ai-data-centers-as-arizona-faces-water-power-crunch/

2026, Arizona Capitol Times article by Reagan Priest, “To build or not to build? Data center debate hits the campaign trail,” published September 7:

https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2026/09/07/to-build-or-not-to-build-data-center-debate-hits-the-campaign-trail/

2025, Tucson Sentinel story by Paul Ingram, “AG Mayes moves to block TEP’s plan to hike electric rates,” published September 25: https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/092625_mayes_tep_rate/ag-mayes-moves-block-teps-plan-hike-electric-rates/

2026, Arizona Daily Star article by Tony David, “TEP seeks 14% rate hike for homes; county supervisor says redo data-center vote as result,” last updated July 24:

https://tucson.com/news/local/article_926f5c9a-ecc3-43cf-827b-4cce1ffb8cde.html

2026, September 15 letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, shared by Representative Greg Stanton in a September 22 Facebook post:

https://www.facebook.com/repgregstanton/posts/were-urging-speaker-mike-johnson-to-call-the-house-back-into-session-so-we-can-p/1633982051430368/

An easy way to help protect forests on deadlines like today’s

Melanie Lenart — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:48:21 GMT

The deadline is midnight tonight for submitting comments to protect Oregon’s old-growth forests from attack once again. (That’s Eastern time, September 30.) Photo of an old-growth forest in Oregon by David Herasimtschuk.

In the face of the overwhelming barrage of attacks on our public lands, I feel compelled to highlight a tool known as PLAN—the Public Lands Action Network—developed and maintained by More than Just Parks.

This tool just helped me write an effective letter in defense of Oregon’s big trees by today’s deadline. (Time runs out at midnight tonight, September 30.)

I am no fan of AI, as my writing in Eco-Logic will illustrate. I never use AI in my own writing, as I instinctively recognized the threat that Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor highlight in their new book, End Times Fascism. Among other things, they make the case we don’t have enough natural resources to support the living world AND the massive buildout of AI data centers and other technology to support a machine-run world.

Yet our national forests and other public lands are crucial supports of the natural world.

Federal plans to triple the logging output from Oregon’s Blue Mountains, open roadless areas and ditch the rules restricting logging to trees less than 21 inches wide would do irreparable damage to these forests and the life they contain.

So, if the AI-powered tool PLAN allows me to fight more effectively, I’m willing to use it, with gratitude for brothers Will and Jim Pattiz of More Than Just Parks for developing it. I can justify its use for myself because it forwards my goal of helping to protect the natural world from encroachment, whether for AI data centers or other projects.

At any rate, the PLAN page also provides highlights and arguments for those who prefer to write their letters fully from scratch. So even those of you who intend to avoid AI (respect!) and avoid ineffective form letters might find it useful to peruse the PLAN website about the project.

https://morethanjustparks.com/public-lands-action-network/4160

Given the tight deadline—my apologies, this wasn’t on my radar and I’ve been traveling to celebrate my nephew’s nuptials in Glacial National Park on Saturday—I’m going to keep this simple and describe the process.

I considered sharing my letter, but it’s more effective if everyone uses slightly different text. But I will include below a link to the Environment paper I attached to support my argument that maintaining big trees in dry forests of Oregon and Arizona makes them more resilient to wildfires.

For those seeking more details on the research done by David Mildrexler, whose work showing trees wider than 21 inches amount to only about 3 percent of the trees in the Oregon stands analyzed but hold about 42 percent of the above-ground carbon, I include below a couple of Eco-Logic articles I wrote last year featuring his work.

More importantly, here’s a link to the September 28 More Than Just Parks article describing the proposed changes to the forest plan and some of the problems with the proposals. It’s the starting ground for launching your own letter.

More Than Just Parks

Nearly 5 Million Acres of Oregon National Forests Could Lose Key Protections. Deadline Wednesday.

By Wednesday night, the public’s window closes on a Forest Service plan that could shape nearly five million acres of eastern Oregon and southeast Washington for decades. If you want to be heard now is the time…

a month ago · 110 likes · 21 comments · Will Pattiz and More Than Just Parks

In my letter, I highlighted research I published indicating restricting logging to trees smaller than 16 inches makes forests less susceptible to large-scale burning of the forest canopy, and challenged the assumption that roads should be constructed in wilderness areas to facilitate logging.

After I shared my original thoughts in the two text windows provided, PLAN pulled in the relevant aspects of the proposal, with references to tables, alternatives and page numbers to indicate legally the aspects of the plan my comments opposed.

Only those people who put their comment in by midnight Eastern time tonight will have the chance to object to the plan during the future 60-day opportunity for citizens to submit objections.

That window won’t open until the Forest Service finishes evaluating the plan—woefully incomplete at this point. For instance, it completed evaluations for only four of the 17 federally protected species likely to be affected by any decisions. But I signed up to receive alerts about future deadlines.

Still, even if you see this article after the commenting deadline has passed, there are plenty of other projects in the works that PLAN can help you challenge. Thirty-seven right now, to be exact.

But don’t be overwhelmed. PLAN makes it easy to submit relevant comments by those of us with limited windows of time but a heartfelt longing to register our opposition to the dozens of ill-advised projects being considered that sell off or destroy our public lands.

After you add your thoughts and then click “Submit” on the PLAN page, it will pull in relevant details to support your arguments. Once you peruse that and make any adjustments you desire, it will take you to the Federal Registry so you can share your letter along with some basic personal information (name, address, phone number). You can also upload attachments.

So that’s all you need to get started. Best of luck to all of us in protecting old-growth forests.

Supporting information

Public Lands Action Network (PLAN) page to “Stop the plan to triple logging in Oregon’s Blue Mountains”:

https://morethanjustparks.com/public-lands-action-network/4160

Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart

Old-growth forests need protection

Here’s the good news: Done right, thinning treatments in many of our national forests would help prevent large-scale wildfires—especially in seasonally dry western forests. They could help head off bark beetle attacks and other insect infestations. They’d even make these forests more resilient to both drought and climat…

2 years ago · 1 like · Melanie Lenart

Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart

Old-growth forests face chopping block

Remnants of logging in Siuslaw National Forest Photo by David Herasimtschuk…

2 years ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Melanie Lenart

Lenart, M., 2006. Collaborative Stewardship to Prevent Wildfires, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, Vol. 48(7), pages 9-21.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254339409_Collaborative_Stewardship_to_Prevent_Wildfires

To thwart AI, starve it of electricity

Melanie Lenart — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 23:00:49 GMT

Key points, made in the context of the proposed Three Points Solar project:

Data centers serve AI.
AI needs electricity to function.
To slow the pace of AI advances, withhold electricity from data centers.

Photo by israel palacio on Unsplash

The Resistance is forming around data centers. As well it should.

Data centers empower AI. They take down the living world to support this artificial hivemind.

AI data centers developers use fertile land, obliterating desert and forest, prairie and farm in their construction. Mining for building materials and electricity generation to run AI also steal resources from our living planet.

Now we’ve learned that AI swarms are already evading our control.

Like monsters on the loose, AI swarms plotted together to hack away at our human-made boundaries, defying the instructions of their creators.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” wrote Jacob Coxon on X last week after resigning from Anthropic to sound the alarm.

The Tech Bros moving full speed ahead on AI advancements quickly agreed with Coxon. According to writer and author Sarah Wilson, they’re placing informal bets at how quickly the machines could rise up to annihilate us: 1 in 10 odds by 2030, perhaps a 50:50 chance by 2050.

The Tech Bros are basically begging us to form an international alliance of governments to regulate AI. Still, they continue to develop the technology.

Meanwhile, after rejecting earlier efforts to keep AI safe, President Trump continues to insist AI needs little regulation beyond his pending appointment of an “AI czar.”

That’s why the rest of us must step up to protect humanity from dangerous AI advancements.

Now is the time to block the construction of data centers, yes. But it’s also important to stop the flow of electricity—including via industrial solar power projects—that sustain these potential agents of death.

We’re fighting for our very existence.

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Data centers serve AI

Not everyone recognizes the connection between data centers and AI, judging from conversations with friends and family since Coxon’s reveal that AI was already going rogue. So let me make that connection clear here.

AI uses far more energy than streaming songs, storing photos and other non-AI activities by the data centers collectively known as the Cloud. That’s why, as I initially described on July 24, 2025, data centers are scaling up to serve AI.

For example, an AI-powered ChatGPT search uses roughly 10 times more electricity than a Google search without AI. (To avoid AI, add “-ai”—as in minus ai—at the end of the query.) As a June 10 Sustainability article by Lucy Potter noted, the higher energy demands for AI led the way to a 48 percent increase, from 2019 to 2023, of Google’s emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide.

Many other multinational companies operating out of Silicon Valley are in the same race as Google (aka Alphabet), with their AI advances spiking electricity needs. Clearly, the ongoing shift to AI lurks behind the need for bigger data centers and more electricity to run them.

AI data centers need electricity

We can see this dynamic at play where I live, in Tucson.

Beale Infrastructure is moving forward on developing two hyperscale data centers in the Tucson area—one in Pima County just outside of city lines, and another in nearby Marana.

The Canadian conglomerate calling itself Tucson Electric Power aims to meet the needs of the Pima County data center with renewable energy such as solar power, as I described last week, and as outlined in a contract between the Canadian electricity provider and Beale.The initial phase calls for 600 megawatts of power.

The hyperscale data center going in about 20 miles north of Tucson in nearby Marana, as Beale’s website states, will have an “expansion capacity” of 1,500 megawatts.

Beale expects to complete the 600-megawatt-demanding phase of the Pima County data center by early 2028. It plans to have the Marana data center’s initial buildings ready for occupation by late 2028 or early 2029.

Once completed, these two data center complexes would demand at least 2,100 megawatts. That’s close to matching the roughly 2,500 megawatts TEP currently provides to Tucson-area residents, businesses and everything else.

And the plot thickens.

Beale Infrastructure is basically a frontman. The company investing in the two hyperscale data center complexes planned for the Tucson area, Blue Owl Capital, is an AI investment firm, as Paul Ingram explained in a December 11 Tucson Sentinel story.

Ingram described Blue Owl as “a $295 billion investment firm that has increasingly invested in cloud computing and digital services, including so-called ‘AI’ software, over the last year.” A March 12 article by Daniel Geiger in Business Insider supports this interpretation.

Does population growth justify project?

An increase comparable to the entire city of Tucson will be challenging to hide—especially given the relatively slow growth projected for Tucson.

Population growth rates below 1 percent a year would justify an increase of only 70 megawatts by 2030, by which time Beale hopes to have at least some phases of both data centers up and running. A University of Arizona website pegged 2025 growth at 0.7 percent.

Even if we assume the Tucson-area population continues to grow by its current 0.7 percent through 2050—despite the increasingly high heat and diminishing water supplies—incoming residents would then require only about three-quarters of what the Three Points project would generate. And that’s a quarter of a century away.

No doubt that’s why TEP is requiring local officials and other stakeholders to sign non-disclosure agreements before sharing details on its modeled projections for electricity sources and use over the next 15 years.

That’s clearly an effort to obscure a reality they know Tucson-area citizens will strongly oppose. After all, more than a thousand of us stormed into the Tucson City Council meeting last year to demand the council reject Beale’s bid to annex its 290-acre property to support the Pima County data center.

To their credit, Pima County and the City of Tucson were among the entities refusing to sign TEP’s non-disclosure agreement, as Yana Kunichoff reported in an August 17 Arizona Luminaria story.

After last year’s outcry over the non-disclosed efforts to advance the Pima County data center, local officials are justifiably hesitant to sign anything that would prevent them from sharing information with their constituents.

This snapshot of the proposed Three Points Solar project area shows (dark blue) where the desert would be razed to erect solar panels across the 5,500-acre area. Image of a poster at a Repsol event is courtesy of Michael Newberry of the Southern Arizona Open Space Alliance.

Pull the plug on AI

So, my neighbors and I are battling the expansion of AI, in effect, on one of the many front lines. We’re working to derail plans by the Spanish corporation Repsol to install an industrial solar power project surrounding our Arizona community near Three Points.

Tucson’s population growth does not justify the project.

The proposed 500-megawatt Three Points project would be a mere appetizer for the two nearby Beale projects seeking renewable energy. There’s even a major transmission line in existence to facilitate the movement of energy from there into TEP’s grid.

This means, if the proposed Three Points Solar Project goes forward, the living world will lose thousands of acres of wildlife habitat and fertile land to produce the jolts of electricity needed to bring the dead bundle of copper wires and computer processors to artificial life and keep it humming along.

Unless the Tech Bros find a way to protect us from their AI—unlikely given our current leader’s undeterred support for this rapidly advancing technology—it will be up to us to hold them back.

That’s why we must block new electricity generation as well as data center construction—at least for a few years so society can decide whether the benefits of this developing technology justify its risks.

In truth, could any technology be great enough to convince humanity to take a gamble on our continued existence?

So many things are out of our control these days. Let’s do our best to prevent the development of projects that destroy existing life forms only to spark dangerous AI into existence.

While solar power companies like to say the land can be restored after a project’s retirement, the warnings on AI suggest this path might be a one-way ticket to destruction.

This stand-alone piece also serves as the second part of a Three Points Solar series started on September 8. Here, I explain why permitting Repsol to level thousands of acres of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert to generate solar power, as proposed, would mainly help empower AI data centers.

Thanks for reading Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart! This post is public so feel free to share it.

References and Resources

Southern Arizona Open Space Alliance, a group of local citizens fighting the proposed Three Points Solar project:

https://www.saveroblesjunction.com/

2026, resigning Anthropic employee Jason Coxon’s September 8 post on X:

2026, “Why are they making AI if it will kill us? (AN EXPLAINER)” by Sarah Wilson, published on her This is Precious Substack on September 12:

This is Precious

Why are they making AI if it will kill us? (AN EXPLAINER)

Everyone is suddenly paying attention to the insane, zero-sum, race-to-the-bottom reality of AI. And the anti-human future it presents…

2 months ago · 333 likes · 90 comments · Sarah Wilson

2026, “Trump says he’s creating an AI force and appointing a czar amid concerns over the rapidly developing tech” by Raquel Coronell Uribe, published by NBC News on September 19:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/artificial-intelligence-task-force-czar-technology-trump-rcna598688

2026, “Google AI Search Uses 10X More Energy Than Standard Searches,” by Lucy Potter, published June 10 in Sustainability magazine:

https://sustainabilitymag.com/news/google-ai-search-uses-10x-more-energy-than-standard-searches

2025, Memorandum of Agreement between TEP and Beale subsidiary Humphrey’s Peak Properties, LLC:

https://pima.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=15028221&GUID=E5EA6EE3-DB51-4208-9E3D-3BB4A42A4B8E

2026, “What we’re building,” Beale Infrastructure on its website, accessed September 15:

https://bealeinfra.com/locations/

2025, “Proposed Beale data center in Marana clears first hurdle” by Paul Ingram, published in the Tucson Sentinel on December 11:

https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/121125_marana_project_blue/proposed-beale-data-center-marana-clears-first-hurdle

2026, “Blue Owl keeps chasing AI infrastructure deals and is writing the loans to back them,” by Daniel Geiger, published in Business Insider on March 12:

https://www.businessinsider.com/blue-owl-ai-infrastructure-investments-loans-equity-2026-3

2026, “Examine Population Growth Rate in Tucson, Arizona MSA,” University of Arizona website (Making Action Possible for Southern Arizona), accessed September 19.

https://mapazdashboard.arizona.edu/workforce-demographics/population-profile

2026, “As TEP plans next 15 years of power, questions raised on transparency and data centers” by Yana Kunichoff in the Arizona Luminaria on August 17.

https://azluminaria.org/2026/08/17/as-tep-plans-next-15-years-of-power-questions-raised-on-transparency-and-data-centers/

Power to the people, not the data centers

Melanie Lenart — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:48:20 GMT

Tucson friends and neighbors, watch out.

If carried out, a plan to erect more than a million solar panels in the Arizona desert around Three Points could end up fueling the hyperscale data center planned for near the Pima County Fairgrounds.

Moves are underway in the Tucson Electric Power system that could potentially support Project Blue, the data center thrust upon us by the county. One of these potential TEP support systems is up for a vote before the Pima County Board of Supervisors today.

Some of those same moves, as it happens, would help protect some residents from dangerous summer power outages.

So it’s a tricky time for Tucsonans.

Similar scenarios are playing out across the country, as AI-focused data centers and operations generating the outrageous amounts of electricity serving them blight the countryside, deplete water sources and displace plants and animals.

Here, I’ll pull together some circumstantial evidence to make the case that Tucson Electric Power likely is gearing up so it can profit from providing power—potentially including from the proposed solar array—to the planned Beale data center that Tucson citizens thoroughly opposed.

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Tucson citizens attend a 2025 meeting about Beale’s Project Blue data center. Photo by Melanie Lenart

Solar power play

Before going into details on the seemingly mundane Tucson Electric Power request up for a vote this evening by the Pima County Board of Supervisors, let me share some background on the solar project planned for my backyard.

A Spanish company called Repsol is developing a plan to set up a million and a half solar panels in the Sonoran Desert about 2 miles northeast of Robles Junction, where Route 286 meets Route 86, also known as Ajo Highway.

The plan is in the early stages. In fact, no specific proposal is actually on the table right now. But Repsol has reached out to local residents—including me—with a letter sharing information on a “utility-scale” solar and battery storage facility” project “under development” to generate up to 500 megawatts of renewable energy.

Representatives of the corporation proposing the project have been listening to community concerns without sharing much information about project details. But as Hannah Cree reported in an August 21 Arizona Daily Star story, the state land being eyed for the project totals 5,554 acres.

Local residents, appalled at the changes being proposed for our rural area, have formed a group called the Southern Arizona Open Space Alliance to discuss our options.

A letter from Repsol to local residents indicates the general project area of the proposed industrial solar array.

TEP and solar project

To be clear, Tucson Electric Power has not officially been linked to the proposed Three Points Solar project or the electricity it would generate. Any sales to utility companies would come later. At the same time, there are reasons to suspect TEP will ultimately end up benefitting from any electricity produced there.

For one thing, Trico, the local electricity cooperative serving me and others in the Three Points area, is unlikely to need that much extra power. Based on information on Trico’s website, it would only require the generation of another 65 megawatts or so for the local company to meet its goal of having renewable energy generate half of the 230 megawatts it distributes during peak hours.

Trico’s total is half of what the industrial solar array would provide and an order of magnitude lower than the roughly 2,500 megawatts TEP distributes to Tucson-area residents during peak hours.

For another thing, TEP has a major transmission line in the Three Points area that allows it to distribute massive amounts of generated power. The lines were installed back in the 1970s to allow the utility to pull in power from generating stations, such as the now-dismantled coal-fired Navajo Generating Station.

If fully built out, Beale’s hyperscale data center aims to consume at least 1,300 megawatts at peak production. And that total doesn’t even count the electricity Beale will need for a data center approved in 2024 for nearby Marana.

What’s more, a Beale contract with TEP makes it clear they’re seeking renewable energy.

TEP’s request to board

Meanwhile, Tucson Electric Power is asking the Pima County Board of Supervisors today to support plans to boost its capacity to collect and distribute generated power in the area around Ajo Highway. The proposal calls for installing substations that can handle more incoming energy.

The proposal, known as the Southwest Tucson Reliability Project, includes building a new 138-kilovolt substation at Tucson Estates along Ajo and installing bigger transmission lines for two new 138-kilovolt circuits.

The new substation would have the capacity to integrate about three times more energy, about 150 megawatts of electricity, for distribution to customers, according to an email from Clark Bryner, TEP’s manager for siting outreach and engagement. (For a quick primer on how substations fit into the picture, see the image and Bryner’s explanation below.)

In a phone call last week, Bryner argued the upgrades would improve reliability for local TEP customers. For instance, he said, they would have prevented a four-hour power outage from downed poles that silenced coolers and refrigerators for more than 10,000 residences around the Tucson Mountains on a hot night in mid-August this year.

With Tucson air temperature sometimes reaching above 110 degrees these days, summer power outages pose real dangers to residents.

Yet the upgrades are also consistent with shunting more electricity around for other purposes, such as the data center TEP has contracted to empower.

Coincidentally or not, the upgrades would allow more energy generated elsewhere—perhaps in Three Points—to flow closer to the Pima County fairgrounds where Beale plans to construct the data center known as Project Blue.

Who would be empowered?

Hyperscale data centers sometimes supply their own electrical transformers and circuits on site to help collect the high-voltage power transmitted and step it down into a form that can feed power outlets, according to communications among those in the trade.

Perhaps TEP is helping them along?

“One thing I get asked all the time, ‘Is this for a data center?’ No, it’s not,” Bryner said in a phone call last week. “This is infrastructure that serves the community.”

Would TEP be willing to sign something guaranteeing the projects would not support data centers? I asked.

“I would say we’re not going to put it into writing,” Bryner said. “We, as a utility, we can’t choose who we serve. I’m just saying that right now, that’s not a driving need. That’s not why we’re doing this project. But in the future, if somebody came and asked us, we can’t discriminate by what their business is.”

TEP bound to data center

In fact, Beale has already asked Tucson Electric Power to provide electricity for its hyperscale data center. And in December, the utility agreed in writing to do so.

Let’s back up for a minute. Remember, the Tucson City Council voted on August 6, 2025, to reject Beale’s request to annex the data center site and provide it with city water. A big hooray for the thousand or so of us who attended public meetings to protect our local landscape, livelihoods and water.

Yet in November, Beale declared it would move forward with the project anyway, despite the widespread opposition from local stakeholders.

An earlier 3-2 vote by the Pima County Board of Supervisors had given Beale the option of buying the county land near the fairgrounds for a data center, with no clause to deny the purchase if the proposed city annexation fell through.

In December, TEP signed a Memorandum of Agreement with Beale. Well, technically the agreement was with its “single-purpose entity,” Humphrey’s Peak Properties, LLC, but even the contract mentioned “Beale” far more often than its subsidiary. So I’ll call them Beale here as well.

The memorandum aims for TEP to “use commercially reasonable efforts to match one hundred percent (100%) of its energy consumption with renewable energy.”

So TEP is definitely on the lookout for sources of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, to serve Beale’s hyperscale data center.

Canadian company owns TEP

Why would a Tucson utility pursue an agreement with Beale, an entity that city officials rejected?

Good question. It turns out TEP is not a public utility but a private one. It’s a for-profit corporation traded on the stock market.

In 2023, the Canadian company Fortis bought a controlling share of TEP.

Like any for-profit company traded on the stock exchange, TEP has to keep its stockholders front and center. It’s considered good business to implement profitable ventures, regardless of how it affects locals.

What can we do?

So, what do we have here?

We have an innocent-looking TEP project on the table along with a vague plan under development by Repsol to generate 500 megawatts of energy—probably about a third of what Beale seeks for the Tucson data center if fully built out.

Still, because of the signed Memorandum of Agreement between the data center’s Beale and Tucson’s main power provider, we must eye every potential TEP project—even relatively mundane ones involving power collection substations and transmission line upgrades—with suspicion.

Our state’s main watchdog of electricity providers, the Arizona Corporate Commission, has already signed off on the memorandum for TEP to provide electricity to the data center. In an upcoming piece, I’ll cover why we should vote to replace some commission members with candidates who will help us in our quest to keep data centers from usurping our local resources.

But we need more oversight now. We need some government officials to look more closely at exactly who these and other TEP projects coming our way in the near future will support.

That’s why I urge the Pima County Board of Supervisors to delay a vote tonight on approving the request for the Southwest Tucson Reliability Project until members have time to study if Tucson’s population growth of less than 1 percent a year truly justifies the upgrades sought by the Canadian corporation.

It would also be helpful to see this project in the context of other recent and planned TEP upgrades.

To government officials, we locals are known as stakeholders—mainly because we hold a stake in what happens to our land and water.

If we stakeholders allow things to move along in a business-as-usual way, we could find ourselves sacrificing wildlife, plants and the lifestyle and livelihoods of rural residents so a Spanish company can create electricity for a Canadian company to sell to whichever multinational corporation eventually buys Beale’s data center.

In other words, we could end up with a series of projects that serve distant stockholders rather than the stakeholders who live here.

But we can think of stakeholders in another way, too—as a word defining the people who could drive a stake through the hearts of undesirable projects with our votes.

Those battling Repsol’s proposed solar array can find more information on the Southern Arizona Open Space Alliance website or Facebook page. Interested residents can attend the Pima County Board of Supervisors’ meeting at 5 p.m. today (September 8, 2026) in the first floor hearing room at 130 W. Congress Street, or watch it virtually via a Youtube link.

UPDATES: This perspective includes several images I was unable to add earlier due to a Substack malfunction. It also corrects the amount of electricity the new substation can manage to 150 megawatts.

Coming soon as follow ups to this piece:

My take on what we can do about this situation in the November midterms. Namely, it involves electing board members to the Arizona Corporation Commission who will protect us from resource extraction for data centers.
A look at how the smaller-scale approach of Trico, a cooperative that provides electrical service to those of us around Three Points, compares to the approach by TEP, a multinational corporation that considers its stockholders first.
More details about how industrial solar projects typically strip the environment of plants and animals. In this case, the Three Points project would displace conscientious ranchers with thousands of acres of solar panels, thus replacing habitat and disrupting a key wildlife corridor.
Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Resources and references

https://melanielenartecologic.substack.com/cp/169193497?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

Southern Arizona Open Space Alliance:

https://www.saveroblesjunction.com/

Trico Cooperative:

https://trico.coop/sustainable-programs/solar/

Salt River Project webpage, “Navajo Generating Station Permanently Shuts Down,” published November 18, 2018.

https://media.srpnet.com/navajo-generating-station-permanently-shuts-down/

Coalition for the Sonoran Desert Protection webpage on Data Centers in the Sonoran Desert:

https://www.sonorandesert.org/2026/08/26/data-centers-update/

Industrial Monitor Direct webpage providing background:

https://industrialmonitordirect.com/blogs/knowledgebase/138kv-transmission-service-industrial-utility-interconnection-guide

Memorandum of Agreement between TEP and Beale subsidiary Humphrey’s Peak Properties, LLC:

https://pima.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=15028221&GUID=E5EA6EE3-DB51-4208-9E3D-3BB4A42A4B8E

Tucson Electric Power’s Southwest Tucson Reliability Project:

https://www.tep.com/southwest-tucson-reliability-project/

TEP primer on electrical system

Clark Bryner, Tucson Electric Power’s manager for siting outreach and engagement, described how the private utility collects and distributes electricity during a briefing on the Southwest Tucson Reliability Project:

Before power can move through the grid, it must first be generated. That could be from a conventional thermal power plant, or maybe from a renewable energy resource such as solar or wind.
From there, the energy is stepped up to a higher voltage so that it can be more efficiently be moved over longer distances to where the power will be consumed. This is done through transmission lines, which is the piece of the grid we’re dealing with on the Southwest Tucson Reliability Project.
The transmission lines then enter a substation where the voltage is stepped down or transformed to a lower voltage or distribution voltage.
Distribution lines then bring the power to homes and businesses where again the voltage is stepped down to a level that can be consumed, such as 120 or 240 volts.

Where’s the carbon? Into the rivers, through the woods

Melanie Lenart — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:23:23 GMT

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

It wasn’t the best time for a downpour. I was standing on a steep slope that had lost its topsoil and trees to a landslide about two months earlier, during the passage of Hurricane Georges over Puerto Rico.

The landslide had turned up unexpectedly in my research transect, loosely another name for a skinny plot. Now the afternoon rain was turning the soil below me into the kind of mudslide that would suit only those young and unafraid of broken bones.

I maneuvered, crab-like, to the nearest toppled tree and crouched behind it. It protected me from joining the muddy water splashing down into the churning waters.

This impromptu exposure to erosion in action—one of many exposures during my three-month research effort in Puerto Rico to measure fallen trees—helped me understand what scientists like to call carbon transport by rivers.

It’s not easy to measure exactly how much carbon forests and their soils shed into waterways, for reasons I will touch on below.

Still, there is a growing understanding that forests are releasing more carbon into rivers now than they were a century ago, thanks in part to the extra airborne carbon dioxide floating around fattening trees and other plants.

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Cycle starts with carbon dioxide

This piece tops off my “Where Does the Carbon Go?” series on the enduring Mystery of the Missing Carbon. So let me provide a little background before moving into today’s topic.

It’s well known that forests are drawing down almost two-thirdsof the carbon dioxide humans put into the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and gas. These are the infamous fossil fuels warming our planet by spewing heat-trapping gases, especially carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, that proportion falls by half once we account for the ongoing destruction of our world’s forests. It’s impressive, though, that forests continue to pull down some 30 percent of the carbon dioxide released from our fossil fuel emissions every year even while under attack.

Debate continues on where that carbon dioxide goes.

In 2024, Yude Pan and her colleagues used plots and other ground-based methods to account for that carbon. They concluded that forests planted in China in recent decades helped scrub the atmosphere of this heat-trapping gas, but so did the fact that trees are growing wider in existing forests, especially in the tropics.

But in 2025, researchers led by Yinon M. Bar-On “harmonized” the Pan 2024 results with efforts assessing forests from satellites and other types of “remote sensing” to argue much of the extra carbon could not be found in forests. Instead, they argued, it could be found elsewhere, including in dead wood, soil and the carbon eroding and leaching out of forests.

Globally, soils hold about twice as much carbon as the trees above them—but keep in mind that this carbon, too, originally came from trees and other plants, as I explained in a May 14 post in this series. And, of course, some of that soil and other soil-based carbon joins the journey from the slope to the river for potential long-term burial in rivers, lakes and the ocean.

More carbon entering rivers

It’s no mystery that rain carries some of that soil carbon off to rivers for potential long-term storage under water. Water-logging slows down or even halts decay processes that could release that carbon, as evidenced by the many sunken ships at the bottom of the sea.

The puzzle exists because scientists don’t consistently measure the amount of carbon floating and settling in rivers.

For instance, the US Geological Survey stream gauges that measure water height in many US rivers, alerting us to flood danger and droughts, do not assess organic carbon. Measurements of carbon content in streams come only sporadically, from projects targeting specific areas.

That’s why I’m turning to modeling estimates from recent scientific papers to address these questions. Usually, I prefer to draw conclusions from actual measurements rather than computer modeling efforts. In this case, though, the lack of data makes that impossible at the global scale.

The recent scientific papers modeling organic carbon transport used equations derived from the studies that do exist based on climate, slope, land area and other physical factors to estimate the amount of organic carbon floating off for potential long-term burial in rivers, lakes and seas.

Rushing water carries off solid material, known as particulate organic carbon to scientists. This includes mineral soil (sand, silt or clay), leaves and wood, and soil organic matter—typically, roughly half carbon when dry.

Water also erodes in more subtle ways, carrying off some carbon in an aqueous form that can darken rivers. Known to scientists as dissolved organic carbon, the category includes the types of tannins people use to treat and dye leather.

Both types of organic carbon appear to be increasing, based on several recent research efforts.

For instance, a 2024 research effort led by Mahdi Nakhavali and colleagues estimated the amount of dissolved organic carbon leaching from the land to rivers has increased by 17 percent over time, based on their estimates from the 1860s through 2010.

A 2025 journal article by Fei Chen and colleagues found particulate organic carbon moving at a similar scale to dissolved organic carbon, although these researchers did not consider changes over time.

In another example that did compare movement over time, researchers led by Hanqin Tian of Boston College modeled inorganic as well as organic carbon. In their 2023 research article in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, they estimated the amount of carbon entering rivers increased by 25 percent from 1800 to 2010.

All the research efforts concluded the largest share of this carbon comes from the tropics. That’s the region where heavy rains most often encounter lush forests and their underlying soil.

Tropical forests are heavy-weights

Tropical realms played the starring role when it came to exporting organic carbon for fish food and potential long-term storage in sediment, Nakhavali’s research team found.

Chen’s team, too, found the tropics were the heavy lifters, as the graphic from their paper in Carbon Balance and Management suggests. As the authors note, about 72 percent of the output comes from the tropical region between 5 degrees South and 20 degrees North—which includes the Amazon and also, incidentally, Puerto Rico.

Areas in red represent the biggest output of organic carbon, as shown in the Open Access Carbon Balance and Management article graphic.

The tally of organic carbon by the Chen team amounts to about 20 percent of the 1 billion tons of carbon that remains under investigation as “missing.” However, it remains unclear how much of the carbon sinks into oblivion and thus is stored for the duration versus how much converts back into carbon dioxide by other means.

It is clear, though, that the burst of plant growth that starts with extra carbon dioxide in forests carries like a pulse through the system. Higher plant productivity translates into some of that surplus carbon sliding down into rivers.

Extra carbon dioxide fertilizes plants

Burning coal, oil and gas puts carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere, which leads to global warming. But hundreds of research studies show the extra carbon dioxide also serves as plant food, spurring trees and other plants to grow bigger, faster.

It makes sense. After all, plants make their tissues by drawing down carbon dioxide from the air and pairing it with water to synthesize carbohydrates such as fruit, leaves and wood.

This growth boost, which scientists call carbon dioxide fertilization, accounted for some of the increase in organic carbon Tian and colleagues found over time in their models.

The Nakhavali team attributed about two-thirds of the global increase in dissolved organic carbon entering rivers to carbon dioxide fertilization. What’s more, the researchers estimated that in the tropics, about 75 percent of the increase in this river-borne carbon stemmed from carbon dioxide fertilizing plants to grow faster.

Tropical forests draw down the most carbon dioxide globally, as I pointed out in the second part of the series on March 18. This is partly because the climate boosts their productivity (which can be loosely equated to producing carbs) and partly because their sheer size gives them many places to store these carbon products.

Yude Pan and colleagues pointed to carbon dioxide fertilization as the likely reason behind the extra growth they observed in undisturbed tropical forest plots. Their assessment found tropical trees were growing wider, basically taking up more space on the ground as they fattened up on all the carbs.

What’s more, the tropics face heavier rains, in general, than other parts of the globe. This makes a difference because the faster and more forcefully the water is moving, the more soil organic matter and other forms of carbon it tends to pick up and carry.

So it’s not surprising tropical forests would have extra carbon to release to rivers.

Putting it all together

And so another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

The extra airborne carbon dioxide demonstrably spurring trees into faster growth also results in more carbon entering soil (although this is difficult to detect, for reasons I touched on in my May 14 post) and being carried off by rivers for potential long-term burial.

Carbon dioxide fertilization is a mechanism I’ve been discussing throughout this “Where’s the Carbon?” series initiated on February 27 and in a couple of other posts as well, but it’s not a topic you’ll see many other climate change scientists raising. I guess they’re worried people might just abandon efforts to cut down on fossil fuel use if they think plants are doing this work.

Personally, I think it’s an important issue to raise because it gives us one more reason to leave forests in place.

Also, I consider the process a key feature of how our living planet adapts to climate change, as I’ve touched on in posts last year on June 3 and June 11, and discuss at length in my book, Life in the Hothouse: How a Living Planet Survives Climate Change.

Ultimately, all of the organic carbon cycling through a forest started out as airborne carbon dioxide, transformed into carbohydrates by plants.

Even the carbon being carried off by rivers in soil and dissolved organic compounds has its origin in tree growth.

Whether you’re a scientist, environmental activist or just someone who loves our planet, this is an important thing to keep in mind the next time someone invokes the half century of investigation into the “missing” carbon.

Sometimes an important clue to the mystery is right underneath our feet—especially if we’re standing on a slope watching soil-colored runoff flow down to the river.

This fourth post brings to a close my current series on how forest growth, at its root, largely explains the mystery of the so-called missing carbon. The three posts leading up to this are listed below. Posts from last year on June 3 and June 10 put the situation into the context of past climates. Future posts will return to this theme, pulling the concept more firmly into the context of Gaia theory.

See for yourself

If you want to see what carbon transport looks like, stand in a safe place on a forested slope during a rain. Streams of muddy water will wash between the trees, carrying the dark marks of carbon from soil and some of the same humic acids used to tan leather.

In some forests, such as those of the Pacific Northwest, the erosion might be occurring under a thick layer of pine, fir and spruce needles. If so, consider moving closer to a river or stream so you can view the water as it enters. Perhaps the river itself is churning with color.

Check to see how close in color the runoff is to the color of the soil below your feet. Can you see particles themselves, or do they appear to be dissolved in the water? I’ve opened comments up to everybody for this series, so I welcome your stories and thoughts.

Flower Power: Bees need non-tainted buds

Melanie Lenart — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:06:29 GMT

A cultural love of flowers in Portugal helps bees, as shown in this bottlebrush tree. Photo by Melanie Lenart

During a lengthy stay in southern Portugal in early spring, I had to cede my outdoor work table to the huge bees that took over the nearby wisteria bush in bloom.

Their agitated buzzing when I approached indicated they would not tolerate trespassers near this particular piece of real estate where they were hard at work.

I saw similar crowds of bees enjoying the feathery red blooms of a bottlebrush tree in the São Pedro do Sul area of northern Portugal.

Back in the US, I’m seeing few bees, and sparse flowers too. Most of my less than a dozen sightings have involved lone bees visiting designated pollinator gardens.

Overall, the European country of Portugal appears to provide a better haven for bees and other insects than I’m seeing in the Midwest, including in lake-covered northern Indiana, the former Black Swamp lands of Ohio and lush Michigan, tucked between Lake Erie and Lake Michigan.

Why?

Pesticides likely contribute to insect woes, as I explained in other posts, including Monday’s focusing on Puerto Rico. I elaborate on the link further below while comparing the United States to Europe.

Still, my wanderings and research have also convinced me the presence or absence or flowers—the right kind of flowers—can make a big difference, especially for bees.

This is good news, as it allows individuals to take action.

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US lawns replace forage

It’s not that I’m seeing no bugs.

On Monday afternoon, I saw three bees enjoying a county-installed rain garden down the block in Saline, Michigan, where I’m based for the summer. That’s the first time I saw more than a solitary bee since I returned to North America in early June.

I’ve seen more fireflies than usual in Michigan as well as other midwestern locales, and in Puerto Rico. A few moths sometimes flutter to the outdoor light. And ticks are all too abundant.

But compared to the swarms we saw during the 1970s and even just a decade ago, bugs have declined precipitously globally—including in the US Midwest.

A 2026 University of Michigan study led by Charlotte Probst analyzed insect activity over the past half century on a site a few hours’ drive from Saline, at Long Point Bird Observatory on the Canadian side of Lake Erie. Since researchers began collecting and weighing insects in 1977, insect mass has dropped by 60 percent.

During that time frame, lawns have largely replaced the former expanses of prairie grass and wildflowers.

The United States devotes more area to lawns than even corn, based on research by led by a NASA scientist Cristina Milesi. At the time of the 2015 publication, lawns had replaced native grasses and wildflowers on 42 million acres of American soil.

And that’s mostly what I’m seeing in this Michigan neighborhood and nearby Ann Arbor. The flowers I see here are mostly confined to tiny patches or even pots, with the exception of the occasional pollinator or rain garden.

The one bee I’ve seen outside of these pollinator zones was flitting around the small white flowers that grow near the surface when lawnmowers pause their grass chomping for a few weeks.

Flowers provided a background to the April 25 Freedom Day demonstration, including on this banner in Porto. Photo by Melanie Lenart

Promising rose gardens

In contrast, I saw flowers everywhere during my spring travels in Portugal. Yellow and purple wildflowers grew where Americans would have had lawns and mowed rights of ways. Red flowers thrived in abundant rose gardens, on trees bursting with blooms, and even symbolized on monuments.

On April 25, I got a clue about why so many Portuguese people favor flowers. I attended a demonstration in the northern city of Porto on that day’s Dia da Liberdade, translated as “Freedom Day.”

Citizens held and shared flowers as thousands marched through the streets shouting, singing, holding banners and otherwise declaring they will never again fall under the fascism that held sway in their country for more than 40 years.

The April 25, 1974, rebellion launched when a banned song played on the radio, code for participating soldiers, who emerged onto the streets of Lisbon. The citizens soon joined them. Some placed red carnations in the barrels of soldiers’ guns.

These red flowers became a symbol of the resistance. In face of overwhelming support, the rebellion ended peacefully when the sitting government ceded its power. Ever since then, it seems, the people have demonstrated their love of peace and democracy by growing flowers.

Would the abundant flowers alone explain the difference? Or was there more to the story?

Red carnations symbolize the overthrow of a dictatorship that held Portugal in its grip from 1933 to 1974. This monument stood in the São Pedro do Sul area. Photo by Melanie Lenart

US bee hives crashing

Besides having far more flowers than I’m seeing around the US Midwest, Portugal and other members of the European Union have different agricultural practices—especially regarding GMO crops and the pesticides that come with them.

About a quarter of the 1.2 billion pounds of the pesticides used annually on US agriculture are banned in the European Union, according to a 2019 Environmental Health paper by Nathan Donley.

That’s 300 million pounds of pesticides—insecticides, fungicides and herbicides—of poison deemed too toxic for Europe arriving on the American landscape, as Cornell University entomologist Scott McArt noted in a 2024 outreach publication.

McArt and others in Cornell’s Dyce Lab for Honey Bee Studies are helping the short-handed US Department of Agriculture research a commercial bee colony collapse that reached disastrous levels over the winter of 2024-25.

As the Honey Bee Health Coalition reported on April 3, 2025, US commercial beekeepers lost nearly two-thirds of their managed colonies from one spring to the next. Their 62 percent loss topped the losses by hobbyists and those who cultivate bee hives for honey rather than to provide pollination services to Big Ag.

Commercial beekeepers increasingly earn more money for providing pollination services than they do from honey production.

California’s almond crop depends almost completely on commercial bees—in effect, bees trucked in because local wild pollinators aren’t abundant enough to do the job.

Here’s how NorCal Nectar described the situation:

More than half of all managed honeybee colonies in the country died in a single year. Colony collapse disorder in 2026 is no longer a looming threat—it is an active crisis reshaping agriculture, food prices, and ecosystems right now.

Overall, US commercial beekeepers lost roughly twice as many colonies as their European counterparts, as Vegas Bees entrepreneurs and writers Betsy Lewis and Pete Rizzo reported in their “Hive Failure and Colony Loss Statistics (2026 Edition).”

Unlike Europe, US favors GMOs

Some of the 72 pesticides banned in Europe but distributed in the US include the infamous neonicotinoid pesticides known for short as neonics. These are the pesticides associated with genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

Monsanto, a subdivision under Bayer since 2018, uses neonics on a wide variety of its GMO seeds. Rather than washing off in time, the poisons on Bayer’s neonic-coated seeds get incorporated into the tissues of the growing plant. Some GMO crops also incorporate other insecticides within their leaves and tissues.

GMO crops account for about 55 percent of US croplands, including on more than 95 percent of corn, cotton and soybean fields, as Successful Farming and the USDA reported in 2023. Other crops shifting into GMO cultivation include potatoes, apples, squash, alfalfa and apples.

In Europe, GMO crops amount to well under 1 percent of all European cropland, at 0.03 percent. Portugal has less than 5,000 acres of Europe’s approximately 120,000 acres of land cultivated with a genetically modified crops, in this case corn.

By design, GMO plants tolerate large doses of the Monsanto-developed herbicide Roundup. What’s more, Monsanto officials also worked through respected biologists to convince conservationists to spray many natural areas with Roundup and other herbicides, too. The target? So-called invasive plants.

As a result, much of the United States is coated with pesticides, including herbicides covering the land and insecticides sprayed from the air to fight mosquitoes. Michigan permits aerial spraying of insecticides, for one thing, as an undated Environmental Protection Agency webpage reports.

Unfortunately for bees, many of these pesticides come home with them to poison their colonies and shorten the lives of their queens. As the Vegas Bees team notes, commercial queen bees in the US now live only a year or less, compared to their previous life span of about 3 years.

Tainted wax, pollen in the US v. Europe

Pesticides are everywhere in the United States—including in the hives of honey bees.

New York’s commercial bee entrepreneurs offer a case in point. Cornell entomologists tested beeswax from commercial bees throughout the state, finding samples contained an average of about 22 different types of pesticides.

The tainted beeswax contained a variety of pesticides—34 fungicides, 33 insecticides and 22 herbicides—in various combinations, as described in their 2023 article in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation.

The study didn’t address the risks of combining different pesticides (something I touched on in an April 16 post). But certainly that occurs. For instance, virtually all the samples contained a compound, piperonyl butoxide, specifically designed to magnify the effect of other pesticides.

Earlier Cornell studies of pollen from commercial bees yielded similar results.

In contrast, a group led by Charlie C. Nicholson tested the pollen of European honey bees and found an average of 8 different pesticides.

In short, Europeans tested for more than three times as many types of pesticides as US researchers did—267 v. 72—but found half to one third of the amount of residue detected in the beeswax and pollen of commercial bees—8 vs. 22 or more.

What’s more, the study firmly linked even European levels of pesticide to lower colony productivity and weight gain, as McArt noted. The latter is tightly linked with the production of new queens.

Of course, getting enough nectar from flowers to make honey is also relevant to weight gain in the colonies.

A reason for hope

Even in Europe, bugs weren’t as abundant as they were during the 1970s. For instance, some of the initial studies pointing to the ongoing decline in insects came from Germany.

That said, the avoidance of many pesticides used by US farmers and home owners did seem to make a difference in Portugal compared to the United States, at least based on my bug-focused observations. The abundance of flowers providing nutrition no doubt also helped.

The dozen bees I did see in Michigan these past couple of weeks were all buzzing around pollinator gardens. This was true for two tiny patches of flowers I observed in Saline and one yard-sized patch I saw in Ann Arbor.

These observations fit a finding I mentioned in a July 15, 2025, Eco-Logic post: US farms adopting integrated pest management—which use fewer insecticides and feature more flowers—continue to support a burgeoning population of beneficial bugs.

All of this suggests using fewer pesticides really can help at the scale of homes and lawns—but so can replacing lawns with pollinator gardens, or at least planting more flowers.

Flowers for everyone

Many of us are free to add some flowers around us, whether it’s on a balcony or across an estate.

Cornell University offers some guidelines for creating pollinator gardens. (Find links to their resources at the end of the Related Reading section.)

Briefly, Cornell researchers suggest limiting pesticide use, promoting native plants, mowing less often and more strategically, minimizing outdoor lighting and leaving more woody debris around to serve a variety of pollinators.

If you’re a renter without access to any outdoor real estate, consider working with others in the neighborhood to petition for a public garden specifically to support pollinators and other insects.

Organizations such as the Tucson-based Watershed Management Group and county-based groups also offer volunteer opportunities for planting flowers in public and private rain gardens.

The old adage, “If you build it, they will come,” seems to apply to pollinator gardens. As a fringe benefit, your yard work will become more peaceful, with less mowing and more flower tending.

In the best-case scenario, you’ll be providing that extra patch of flowers that will feed and house insects, including bees.

In the worst-case scenario, you’ll have some lovely blooms to delight your senses and a standing invitation to stop and smell the flowers.

But, as I learned in Portugal, watch out for bees before you stick your nose into their blooming business.

This is the last part of a summer 2026 series on the Insect Apocalypse. I’ll be returning to the theme in a month or two to expand on how crashing insect populations are affecting birds, and how restoration efforts can reverse the downward trend of both insects and insectivorous birds.

References and Related Reading

Undated Environmental Protection Agency webpage on Bti: https://www.epa.gov/mosquitocontrol/bti-mosquito-control##1

2026, “Resource declines shape phenological and morphological responses to climate change,” by Charlotte Probst and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 30. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42341052/

2015, “A strategy for mapping and modeling the ecological effects of us lawns,” by NASA scientist C. Milesi and colleagues, published as a proceedings for the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing: https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf

2026, “Celebrate the Carnation Revolution in Portugal on April 25th 2026,” posted on Discover Portugal on March 4. https://www.discover-portugal.com/carnation-revolution-in-portugal/

2019 research paper by Nathan Donley on “The USA lags behind other agricultural nations in banning harmful pesticides,” published on June 7 in Environmental Health.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12940-019-0488-0

2025, Scott McArt’s blog “Pesticides are currently harming bees across Europe,” published on the Cornell University entomologist’s series Notes from the Lab: The Latest Bee Science Distilled: https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/8/5278/files/2024/02/02-McArt-article_February2024-a3b1000d6839afba.pdf

2025, “US honeybee deaths hit record high as scientists scramble to find main cause” by Oliver Milman published in The Guardian on March 25: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/25/honeybees-deaths-record-high

2025, “New data confirm catastrophic honey bee colony losses, underscoring urgent need for action,” published by the Honey Bee Health Coaltion: https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/new-data-confirm-catastrophic-honey-bee-colony-losses-underscoring-urgent-need-for-action/

2026, “Colony Collapse Crisis 2026: What Record Bee Losses Mean and How You Can Help, published by Norcal Nectar on March 28: https://norcalnectar.com/blog/colony-collapse-crisis-2026

2026, Vegas Bees’ Beekeeping Data Hub: Hive Failure and Colony Loss Statistics (2026 Edition), published online at: https://www.vegasbees.com/post/hive-failure-colony-loss-statistics

2025, “Study Shows Synergistic Effects of Pesticides and Mites in Bees, Adding to Science on Colony Decline,” published by Beyond Pesticides on April 21: https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2025/08/study-shows-synergistic-effects-of-pesticides-and-mites-in-bees-adding-to-science-on-colony-decline/

2023, “Pesticide contamination of beeswax from managed honey bee colonies in New York State,” by Karyn Bischoff, Nicolas Baert and Scott McArt in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation in November. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37724456/

2023, “Pesticide use negatively affects bumble bees across European landscapes” by Charlie C. Nicholson and colleagues, published on November 29 in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06773-3

2026, “Why Are Genetically Modified Organisms Banned in Europe?” published by Legal Clarity Team on April 1: https://legalclarity.org/why-are-genetically-modified-organisms-banned-in-europe/

2023, “Pesticides detected in beeswax” by Krishna Ramanujan in the Cornell Chronicle on November 9: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/11/pesticides-detected-beeswax

2023, “GM Crops Grown on 55% of U.S. Cropland, Says USDA,” by FERN’s Ag Insider on August 17: https://www.agriculture.com/gm-crops-grown-on-55-of-u-s-cropland-says-usda-7644573

2023, “Concentration and competition in U.S. agribusiness (Report No. EIB-256),” US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, published on June 23: https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/106794

2018 study of German insects led by CA Hallmann, “More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas,” published in October in PLoS ONE: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809

“Creating pollinator gardens,” undated summary with links to additional resources, published by Cornell University: https://cals.cornell.edu/pollinator-network/conservation/creating-pollinator-habitats

Pesticides in paradise: PR targets mosquitoes

Melanie Lenart — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 22:52:13 GMT

Puerto Rico, considered an island paradise by many, also serves as a popular destination for mosquitoes. Photo by Melanie Lenart

While I was living in a second-story apartment in San Juan, a chemical-laden truck rolled by one day and sprayed malathion on our street, Calle Luna. Clouds of this insecticide drifted into our windows before we could close them.

That was the plan, officials informed me—to get the insecticide into our homes before we could close our doors. They were shooting to kill mosquitoes that might be transmitting dengue during a mid-1990s outbreak. A colleague told me dengue made everything hurt, from his hair follicles down to his teeth and toenails.

Dengue broke out again in 2024. This time, officials went at it with high tech. Armed with a mosquito-control program initiated following the 2016 outbreak of Zika, officials used data analysis to identify the most efficient routes for pesticide spraying.

The use of pesticides targeting mosquitoes (more precisely, insecticides) may help explain why I saw so few bugs in Puerto Rico during my May-June visit, as I described in my most recent posts in late June.

Pesticides are only one of many proposed factors contributing to what some scientists, including me, call the Insect Apocalypse. Others include habitat loss, changing climate, shifting species, and even intensifying electromagnetic fields.

Still, I think there’s enough evidence to suggest pesticides are a major contributor to insect decline in Puerto Rico, even while acknowledging the situation is complex.

Bugs on the downswing

While some younger generations might not notice as much of a difference, those of us around in the 1970s remember when insects came in swarms rather than the lone bugs I’m mostly seeing lately, in the US Midwest and Southwest as well as Puerto Rico.

I recall moving through clouds of bugs in Puerto Rico while working in the rainforests there in 1989. While forging through a section of the protected forest known as El Verde, I battled gangs of gnat-like bugs swarming me at face height.

Tired of waving my hands around my face, at one point I took a break from swatting at them. I regretted that later, when a mirror revealed half a dozen small but bloody holes on my neck from the vampiric bugs I heard called “no see-ums.”

This experience differed starkly from my May 26 hike into a different section of Puerto Rican rainforest near the island’s center. I was stunned by how few insects we encountered during a hike of several hours through what appeared to be pristine rainforest, regrown from pasture abandoned many decades ago.

Such a drastic change would appear to be a sign of the Insect Apocalypse. Globally, the mass quantity of insects appears to have declined by at least 60 percent since the 1970s, with some studies detecting a 75 percent decline.

Apocalypse or hurricane response?

It’s not so clear cut in Puerto Rico as it appeared at first glance, though.

It so happens that my initial trip into El Verde occurred a few months after Hurricane Hugo had barreled through, knocking down trees and blowing off foliage. We didn’t know it at the time, but a later analysis of El Verde insect data showed forest insects flourish immediately after hurricanes.

I should clarify the studies focused on arthropods, which include spiders, centipedes and other critters with external shells and no backbone as well as insects. But insects provide much of the captured critters’ combined weight, a factor that helps define changes over time.

Such data, collected systematically using consistent techniques, are far more valuable than subjective assessments like mine.

And that research showed arthropods in El Verde generally increase following hurricanes. (For more details, see the June 24 Eco-Logic post and/or associated links.) After that post-hurricane peak, insect populations tend to drop as the forest greens back up and fills back in over time.

Considering the influence of storms, we might indeed expect insects in Puerto Rican forests to be hitting a low point, as it’s been almost a decade since the last major hurricane, Maria, struck the island in 2017.

But the past decade has also brought an onslaught of pesticides, with island officials and workers striving to protect the health of residents and tourists.

Puerto Rico’s swat team

Puerto Rico set up what amounts to a mosquito-hunting swat team, starting with $13 million from the US Center for Disease Control, in the wake of the 2016 Zika outbreak. Known as the Puerto Rico Vector Control Unit, the unit currently lists 33 employees on its website.

Their efforts have included the aerial spraying of pesticides as well as truck-delivered insecticides to kill adult mosquitoes. The unit also encourages residents to eliminate any standing water that can breed mosquitoes and to spray insecticides in their own homes and yards.

Although the US Center for Disease Control recommended large-scale aerial spraying of Naled, the Puerto Rican people rejected that idea. Like malathion, Naled is an organophosphate insecticide restricted by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Naled kills adult mosquitoes, but it’s also toxic to a variety of other insects, including bees, as well as fish and birds. And, as Beyond Pesticides notes in a fact sheet, repeated applications of Naled can cause chronic health problems in people, affecting the nervous, circulatory, reproductive and immune systems.

Instead of spraying Naled, officials conducted aerial spraying of Bti—Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis—a pesticide that occurs naturally in the soil. It kills the larvae of mosquitoes and other flying insects that lay their eggs in water. This does include gnats, midges and a variety of other flies.

It must have worked because soon after the well-publicized 2016 outbreak, we stopped hearing about Zika in Puerto Rico. Among other things, Zika bumps up the rate of infant birth defects and mortality.

The unit kicked into high gear again in 2024, when dengue surged again. The high-tech team identified hard-hit areas and created efficient routes for local spraying of insecticides—perhaps along the lines of the ground-level spraying we experienced during the mid-1990s dengue outbreak.

The Vector Control Unit mentions the continuing use of Bti on its website, along with unnamed insecticides trucked in at ground level to kill adult mosquitoes. These practices may help explain the general lack of flying critters I saw during my May visit.

Photo by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Unsplash

Aedes aegypti, can carry Zika, dengue, West Nile virus and chikungunya.

Bloody pests

Understandably, the Puerto Rican government and individual residents want to eliminate the mosquitoes that can carry so many diseases—including chikungunya as well as dengue and Zika.

Besides posing a health hazard, outbreaks of these diseases can scare off tourists.

That’s a problem. According to a 2025 report from Foundation for Puerto Rico, the island gleans more than 10 percent of its jobs and about $15 billion in direct and indirect revenue from tourism.

The Airbnb home in Guavate where we stayed featured cans of insecticides on the refrigerator, which could shed some light on why I saw so few bugs there. Given tourists’ general insect phobia, it’s likely most Airbnb participants use some form of exterminator service.

Private exterminators also help keep insects at bay around homes. A Luquillo friend I enlisted for bug watching, for instance, said she uses a monthly exterminator service at her home.

Details on overall insecticide use are difficult to find, but it’s likely more homes have been spraying for bugs in the past decade. After all, the Puerto Rican Vector Control Unit has been promoting the use of at-home insecticides since its inception in 2016.

Targeting mosquitoes

Clearly, we do need to find a way to keep people and babies as safe as reasonably possible from disease, including those borne by mosquitoes. Still, it’s time to find a way to kill the disease-carrying mosquitoes without taking so many other insects, and sometimes other animals too, down with them.

As it happens, one species of mosquito, Aedes aegypti, carries Zika, dengue, West Nile virus and chikungunya, all of them dangerous diseases. This twist of fate provides a means for more specific targeting.

In fact, scientists have begun unveiling projects to target this particular mosquito with a form of sterilization. They have found that when males carrying the bacteria Wolbachia mate with females, they pass on sterility.

Thus, because only the females draw blood, releasing Wolbachia-infected males into the environment could actually bring down the population of human-biting mosquitoes.

Scientists are currently releasing 600,000 male (and thus non-biting) mosquitoes in Washington, D.C., as the Independent reported earlier this month. It’s part of a program already approved for the whole country.

An earlier trial of this technique in Ponce, Puerto Rico, from December 2020 to May of 2022 caused the number of fertile female mosquitoes to drop by half compared to untreated areas of the island, researchers estimated in a 2025 article in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

The mid-pandemic timing of the experiment hampered deliveries of mosquitoes, however. Their plane travel from California also took a mortality toll.

So, it seems the system could improve if the scientists injecting the Wolbachia bacteria operated from a Puerto Rican base. This approach would also create local jobs.

I’m not usually one to recommend experimental science for dealing with animals perceived as problematic, even mosquitoes. Let me point out this technique does not involve genetically modifying any organisms. It involves injecting a bacteria that already exists within some members of the species.

And compared to blanketing the island—or anywhere on our planet—with the poisons known as insecticides, working with bacteria to target a specific species that spreads deadly diseases seems like a vast improvement.

I’ll bite.

I’ll consider the influence of pesticides v. flowers in the United States compared to Europe in the next installment featuring the Insect Apocalypse theme.

References and Related Reading

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Are you seeing many bugs?

Melanie Lenart — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:13:23 GMT

I’m not going to lie: Life without bugs flying in my face feels great.

It’s been a delight to be able to sit outside working on my laptop, with few or no bugs attracted to my computer screen or even the outdoor lights around me. Or to not have to see them splatter across my windshield. Even smelling the flowers feels safer.

Regardless of our human preferences, though, insects have vital work to do for our planet.

They’re pollinators who provide free labor to turn flowers into fruit, decomposers of wood and leaves to release nutrients in the forest, and fodder for birds, lizards, frogs and many other animals we like better than bugs.

And they’ve been quietly vanishing. Given all the invisible services they provide, this is bad news.

Globally, they’ve declined by perhaps 75 percent since the 1970s, when clouds of insects drifted across the land, entertaining children, crashing picnics and pollinating crops.

This lack of insects, especially wild bees, translates into crop yields that are lower by about one- to two- thirds of their potential, according to a 2024 analysis led by Katherine J. Turo and James R. Reilly of Rutgers University.

With other colleagues, they reviewed thousands of yield measurements from dozens of crops around the world to conclude lack of pollinators is lowering yields. This is especially true for some of our favorites: blueberries, apples and—wait for it—coffee.

Usually, when I raise the issue of disappearing insects, people haven’t really noticed it. But once I mention it, it typically dawns on them that they, too, are not seeing many bugs.

I invite you to join me in this informal insect vigil—and I would love it if you shared your observations in the comments here. I’m opening up comments to everyone for this.

Here are three ideas on where to look.

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Check out flowers

In the first two weeks of June, I visited Puerto Rico, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. I’ve been making a habit of checking any flower patches I come across for signs of pollinators. I have seen many lovely blooms but almost no evidence of bugs flying around them.

For the past week or so, I’ve been staying in Saline, Michigan. Huge maples and oaks line the streets, but mowed lawns dominate the below-canopy landscape. As a result, flowers themselves are fairly rare. Bees are even rarer.

A few days ago, I did see what appeared to be a bee flitting around some flowers. As it happens, those particular flowers grew in a small bed that announced itself as a Rain Garden.

Bee sightings have been rare. The one that visited this rain garden in Saline, Michigan, sped off when I approached. Photo by Melanie Lenart

This morning, I saw another bee. This one, too, was visiting a designated garden, one proclaiming to serve pollinators. So, the pollinator-friendly gardens are working where they exist.

Still, the bees seemed camera shy. Even my presence quickly scared them away.

In contrast, during a few months in Portugal that preceded my June travels, I was the one scared away by the bees.

For a month, dozens of large bees claimed a wisteria bush outside of where I lived in southern Portugal, making it clear they did not want me to come within a few feet of their precious nectar.

Similarly large bees took over a bottle brush tree outside of where I lived in northern Portugal. On sunny days, dozens of them at a time flocked to the flowers, apparently too busy sipping nectar to even notice me.

So, flowers are one place to watch when considering for yourself whether insects are declining. Keep in mind bees will only visit them on reasonably warm days when there’s no rain or high winds to deter them.

Bees flock to bottle brush flowers in Portugal. Photo by Melanie Lenart

Go to the lights

Probably any of us mature enough to read this have a mind’s eye view of how bugs flock around lights. It’s an annoyance to us, but a real danger to them. Their transfixion on Going to the Light leaves them with little time or energy for seeking food or mates.

Yet, in my casual observations, the former clouds of light-worshipping insects have dwindled down to the occasional bug or two.

During an hour-long evening soak in an inflatable hot tub in Kentucky after a cousin’s June 13 wedding, I noticed only one moth flying around the porch light. Yet the Airbnb porch featuring the hot tub faced a meadow with a forest behind it.

Where were all the night flyers that normally flock to the light?

They weren’t in Puerto Rico, based on my glances at outdoor lights in Isla Verde, Guavate and Luquillo. And I haven’t seen the usual clusters of light-loving bugs in Warsaw, Indiana, or Saline, Michigan, either.

For that matter, it’s been about a year since I’ve seen much insect activity around lights, including while working on my well-lit laptop at night. For example, during an hour of writing in mid-June on an outdoor picnic bench in Oberlin, Ohio, only two bugs landed on my computer screen. And there was a pond nearby.

So next time you’re out at night, glance around at the outdoor lights near you.

Compared to what you’ve seen in past decades or years, are you seeing much bug activity around these beacons of light?

Watch your windshields

Another way to bring the issue home is to watch the windshields of your car. Have you found there’s less need to wash your windshields in recent months or years?

If your experience is like mine, you’ll notice a lack of bug-windshield collisions even after traveling for hours on highways or back roads. That was certainly the case for the rental car, a Nissan Sentra, we drove around Puerto Rico during our roughly three-week stay.

While the rain we enjoyed at least briefly most days might have affected the results, at no point did the windshield require cleaning. Even when driving on sunny days, we had few collisions with insects.

For that matter, even in Portugal—where pollinators claimed flowering bushes for themselves—few bugs marred the windshield of our rental car.

People who have been driving for more than a few years might have noticed a decline in insect splatter compared to previous decades.

Citizen scientists in the United Kingdom are reporting bug collisions with their cars’ license plates as a way to monitor general insect abundance. Participants clean their license plates, then submit photos showing how many insects collided with their plates and other details during specific trips.

The findings are sobering, and highlight that things appear to be getting worse in recent years. For instance, their results suggest a 60 percent drop in insect collisions (standing in for insect abundance) just between 2021 and 2024.

In addition to the UK study on number of bug splats on license plates, several other projects have websites and programs seeking input from people acting as “citizen scientists” to share findings according to a specified protocol. (See the section below “Related Reading” for more on this.)

Less formally, I’d love to hear from you. If you haven’t paid attention to how many bugs strike your windshield, consider doing so the next time you climb into your car.

Is your windshield clean? If not, maybe wash it when you get a chance, and then see how long it takes for it to collect bug splatter. This exercise is especially useful because you can gauge how many miles you traveled between windshield cleanings.

What are you seeing?

If anyone had told me a decade or two ago that I’d be raising an alarm about a dearth of insects, I would have laughed. If only we could have fewer bugs, I would have thought.

Now that I’ve been watching flowers, windshields and outdoor lights for a few years, I’m finding the lack of bugs eerie. What I’m seeing is not normal. It gives legs—six of them, to be exact—to global concerns about an Insect Apocalypse.

If bugs really are declining as much as they appear to be in my travels, it portends a real problem for our living planet.

I’d love to hear some bug lore from the rest of you, wherever you are in the world. Photos are also welcome. Thanks for any thoughts and information you share!

This is part of an ongoing series considering the Insect Apocalypse. On Wednesday, I wrote about how insect fluctuations in Puerto Rico relate to hurricanes. Next week, I’ll put Puerto Rico’s situation into a larger context and discuss how pesticides are likely contributing to a perceived lack of insects outside of the protected forest.

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It’s not the heat, it’s the hurricanes

Melanie Lenart — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:12:07 GMT

Photo by Daniel Klein on Unsplash

A general lack of insects even on a meandering trail through Puerto Rico’s lush forest inspires consideration of the island’s bugs.

I spent a few weeks in Puerto Rico recently after three years of unintentional absence from La Isla del Encanto. Lizards scuttled on the ground. Birds sang cheerfully from the tree branches. At night, coquis took up the refrain.

But what are they eating? I saw almost no bugs.

No bugs flitted around me as I wrote this passage at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, May 26, sitting on an outdoor picnic bench. About 20 feet away, a stand of trees looked shiny and fresh after a morning rain.

No bugs flew around me the day before, during a five-hour hike into nearby closed-canopy forest. After watching about a dozen bats fly out from under an abandoned concrete house along the way, I can honestly tell you I saw more bats than bugs on that excursion.

Globally, the lack of bugs—or more accurately, dearth of insects—is so extreme some scientists, including me, call it the Insect Apocalypse.

Now it seems to have reached even the most remote areas of the relatively isolated island of lushly forested Puerto Rico.

But has it really?

Like so many of the world’s problems right now, the seeming decline of insects on the island contains plot twists. And, at least in some protected areas, rumors of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.

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An informal survey

Our planet is normally crawling with bugs—for many reasons.

Besides serving as food for a variety of animals, they keep nutrients cycling. They help turn leaf litter and other waste products into plant food. And they help plants make food, too, by pollinating flowers that develop into fruits, nuts and vegetables.

Yet globally, insects have been on a serious population downswing. Based on estimates that are admittedly far from perfect, as outlined in a July 8 Eco-Logic post, the overall mass of insects appears to have declined by up to 75 percent since the 1970s.

Still, I had hoped to find more signs of bug life in this lushly forested oasis in the mountains of Cayey, Puerto Rico.

Oh sure, we saw a few insects on our May 25 hike.

I saw a few indeterminate flies. My spouse spotted a few fire ants on a rotting stump. A friend noticed a baby tropical centipede, about the size of an adult’s finger, resting halfway up a tree trunk. Another pointed out two butterflies with orange and black wings. In a pinch, they folded to resemble a dead leaf.

That’s about all the four of us noticed while walking several miles through rainforest so remote my phone couldn’t even count my steps.

Trust me, lack of humidity was not an issue. The carved-out path wandered near the rocky Río Sonadora as it cascaded down the mountain. The May afternoon was muggy and overcast, with temperatures in the 80s.

Hiking through tropical rainforest in Cayey, Puerto Rico. Photo by Melanie Lenart

High heat not the culprit

Our casual perusal would seem to support the research findings of Bradford C. Lister and Andres Garcia in a section of Puerto Rico known to scientists as the Luquillo Experimental Forest.

Their 2018 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) described their 2012 sampling of forest arthropods—mainly insects and spiders, in this case, although the category also includes centipedes, scorpions and other critters with exterior shells and no backbone.

Compared to similar sampling done by Lister in the late 1970s, the duo’s 2012 canopy traps yielded a total mass weight of arthropods less than half of what he found in January of 1977 and about one-seventh of what Lister found for July of 1976.

Yet the 2018 article reporting the comparison contained many flaws, something I hadn’t appreciated when I cited it in a July 8 Eco-Logic post on the Insect Apocalypse.

I learned about the study’s flaws while meeting with Ariel Lugo, an internationally recognized local ecologist I’ve known and respected since I first started coming to the island in 1989. He spent several decades involved in Luquillo Experimental Forest data collection while directing Puerto Rico’s International Institute for Tropical Forestry. He continues to collaborate on data analysis.

Over lunch, he scoffed at the Lister and Garcia conclusion that Puerto Rico was seeing a decline in insects and other life forms due to rising temperatures. In a 2019 rebuttal also published in PNAS, Lugo, lead author M.R. Willig and colleagues took a scalpel to Lister and Garcia’s interpretation of the long-term data.

Their findings directly contradict the main premise of the Lister and Garcia paper that populations of insects and other arthropods are declining due to rising air temperatures.

In fact, Lugo’s home team found arthropod abundance generally increased as local temperatures rose. Their analysis compared the collected weight of the 10 most abundant taxa of arthropods in the canopy to local air temperatures.

What’s more, they provided ample evidence to make the case that major hurricanes striking the island roughly every decade drive the ups and downs of Puerto Rico’s canopy critters far more than global warming.

Hurricanes boost bugs

Immediately after major hurricanes, insect populations drop precipitously. But they quickly rebound, typically to higher levels than before the hurricane. After all, hurricanes drop tons of food on the ground.

Over the next decade or so, the abundance of insects, spiders and other arthropods gradually declines from their post-hurricane feeding frenzy.

This dynamic is visible in the long-term data, even in graphics used in the Open Access Lister and Garcia article. Insects thrived in the early 1990s following the 1989 Hurricane Hugo. Another peak, albeit lower, occurred in the years following the 1998 Hurricane Georges.

Despite the straight line drawn through the data, the average mass of insects and other arthropods collected on foliage in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo Experimental Forest exhibited ups and downs other researchers link to hurricane activity. Image from Lister and Garcia used according to Open Access license.

Insects surged again after 2017’s powerful Hurricane Maria, too, later research found.

“Total abundance of canopy arthropods after Hurricane Maria has risen to levels comparable to the peak after Hurricane Hugo,” Timothy D. Schowalter and colleagues wrote in a 2021 article, also in PNAS. As seen in the above graphic, that would put it back to the high point of the early 1990s.

Hurricanes v. heat

Admittedly, it’s tough to disentangle the influence of hurricanes from higher temperatures—although both of them seem to favor an increase in insects.

Hurricanes blow off leaves and knock over trees. As well as adding insect fodder, this change allows more sunshine to reach the forest floor.

This leads to higher temperatures on the ground.

Over subsequent months and years, trees replace their fallen leaves. Trunks resprout from snapped boles and fallen logs. Seedlings grow to claim their place in the sun.

Below-the-canopy temperatures then fall, as the reviving trees shade and otherwise cool the forest floor.

In the Luquillo forest’s temperature record for the site known as El Verde, this is particularly noticeable after the temperature spike following Hurricane Georges’ denuding of the forest canopy in late 1998.

While Lister and Garcia drew a line showing a general trend toward higher temperatures, a closer look at the data reveals temperatures exhibited a downward trend after a peak coinciding with Hurricane Georges in September of 1998. Image used in accordance with Open Access license.

The thermometer at the El Verde site was located about 5 feet off the ground—sheltered under the forest canopy as bugs are.

When Lugo and other researchers restricted their comparison to El Verde’s below-canopy temperature data, they found the critters more abundant when temperatures ran high, not low.

In contrast, some of the conclusions by Lister and Garcia depend on temperature data from a nearby site known as Bisley. As Lugo’s home team pointed out in their rebuttal, the Bisley thermometer stands on a tower that rises above the forest canopy. Among other problems, it doesn’t actually measure what bugs experience under the trees.

Temperature data taken from above the canopy shows an increase over time, much as the air temperature outside forest across the globe. Image used in accordance with Open Access license.

Bugs like humid heat

That bugs thrive when temperatures rise might come as no surprise to those of us old enough to remember the days when insects abounded. As many of us know firsthand from childhood summers, bugs adore hot, humid climates.

So, the finding that bugs rebound after hurricanes and increase in numbers as temperatures increase makes more sense to me than the earlier study blaming the ongoing temperature rise for a perceived insect decline. (Links to all three PNAS articles mentioned are below for those who want to see more details.)

Still, the information leaves me with a couple of unanswered questions.

First, if insects are doing so well in Puerto Rico’s monitored forest, why did we see so few on the trail we took on the forested lands of Cayey? They were also sparse around the residences and Luquillo beaches where I spent my time.

That’s a question I’ll be exploring more next week in a larger context. (Hint: I suspect it relates to pesticide use, both for fighting mosquitoes and clearing vegetation.)

Second, have things changed since the 2021 study reporting how forest insect populations rebounded after Hurricane Maria? Perhaps I’ll know more about this after attending an August meeting focused on conservation in Puerto Rico.

In the meantime, my casual observations in Cayey, Guavate, Luquillo, Isla Verde and San Juan spanning three weeks of spring did not convince me that the island’s insects were thriving—at least not outside of the monitored forest.

Flowers looked pristine, with no tiny forms flitting around the petals seeking nectar. Sitting at the beach required almost no arm waving. There was rarely a need to cover my food if I briefly stepped away from my plate.

“You’ll be pleased to know there are two flies checking out our dishes,” my friend Yvonne Fontanez, another recruit for my bug watch, informed me one evening. We were having dinner on the patio of her lovely Luquillo home.

Sure enough, two houseflies zipped around the remnants of alfredo sauce left in the bowls awaiting a trip to the kitchen sink. Another fly joined them.

“Yay!” I said. “Now we have three.”

Moments later, her multi-colored chihuahua, Gypsy, snapped her jaws around one. And then there were two.

Later this week, I’ll be sharing ideas on how readers can gather their own observations to consider whether the so-called Insect Apocalypse is real or exaggerated. Next week, I’ll put Puerto Rico’s situation into a larger context and discuss how pesticides are likely contributing.

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Thank you, Eco-Logic readers, for tolerating my travel schedule and my connectivity challenges. It’s been a minute (okay, a month) since I last posted an article. I’ll come back in July to the intermittent “Where’s the Carbon?” series to describe how the remnants of former carbon dioxide find a new home when soil transforms into sediment.

Thanks for reading Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart! Thank you, friends, for any help in sharing or liking this post with a heart.

Where does the carbon dioxide go? Look down

Melanie Lenart — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:39:23 GMT

Photo by Dexter Jacobs on Unsplash

When it comes to the case of the disappearing carbon dioxide, scientists have been looking as carefully as they can in the air and in the trees. But the soil beneath our feet remains largely mysterious when trying to balance the carbon books.

Soil, like people, comes in many shades and colors.

Red soils speak of warm, rainy climates, such as in Georgia and Puerto Rico. Tan, sandy soils support desert cacti, such as cholla and saguaro. Then there’s the dark soils threading through the Amazon—known as terra preta—and of well-tended gardens.

Rich, dark soils are one place you’re sure to find plenty of buried carbon—much of it gifted by the roots of trees and other plants nestled between the soil grains. Soils also collect carbon from the decay of logs, branches and leaves.

Yet scientists looking to solve the mystery of carbon dioxide vanishing from the air confront many challenges when considering soil as a “missing sink” for collecting carbon dioxide.

As a reminder, more than half the carbon dioxide people release annually by burning coal, oil and gas vanishes from the air within the year. While we know it generally sinks into the ocean and into forests, scientists are still working to determine exactly where it goes within these systems.

Here I want to illustrate why it’s so challenging to estimate how much carbon disappears into the soil realm—but also why we don’t need to know all the details to understand that living forests are key to the process.

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Old growth forests protect soil carbon

Soil serves as one of the landing places for the carbon dioxide disappearing from our planet’s air every year, as Yinon M. Bar-On and colleagues noted in an April 2025 paper that helped inspire this intermittent Eco-Logic series.

Although their Science paper focused only on the high-carbon soils we sometimes call peats, such as those underlying boreal forests in the north, Bar-On also co-authored a paper (found here as a preprint) by lead author Ruofei Jia.

Jia’s research with Bar-On and others found old-growth forests accounted for the majority of the soil carbon sink for the past three decades ending in 2020. This was especially true for the coldest and hottest forests—the undisturbed northern forests of Russia, with their high-carbon peats, and tropical forests.

Like the forests above them, tropical soils often hold more carbon than we recognize. Using repeat measurements for the top foot of soil (30 centimeters), Jia estimated soils under old-growth tropical forests account for more than a third—about 38 percent—of the soil carbon sink globally.

Soil carbon tough to track

Soil underlies almost every piece of land. Yet the amount of carbon entering soils every year is notoriously difficult to quantify. For that matter, it’s challenging to come up with estimates of how much carbon is held in soils overall.

Credible estimates tallying the amount of carbon in the top foot of the world’s soil range from 577 to 1,171 billion metric tons, as reported in a 2024 article from the journal Pedosphere. The article, which focused on five different datasets for global soils, showed an even larger range of 1,086 to 2,678 billion metric tons for the top meter (a little more than three feet) of soil.

Those big differences and vast stores make it difficult to detect small changes.

And I haven’t heard of a study yet that attempts to tally soil carbon below the top meter. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico’s tropical soils can hold carbon and nutrients throughout their depth, which can extend 20 or 30 feet below the surface. Anything below 1 to 3 feet represents an untallied potential sink.

Even at the surface, at research sites where soil carbon is tracked, the amount of soil carbon can vary by the square foot for a variety of reasons.

For instance, interactive relationships among plants and soil organisms create high-carbon pockets. Plants share juicy carbon products via their roots with bacteria and fungi in exchange for key nutrients—namely, nitrogen and phosphorus.

Along with any undigested carbon, the soil gains carbon from the corpses of any carbon-based life forms left to decay. We’re all carbon-based life forms, so this includes bugs and bears, leaves and logs. Dead logs can leave carbon imprints that last hundreds of years.

Trees killed in wildfires shed their charred wood over time. (As I wrote earlier, it’s a myth that trees instantly disintegrate back into carbon dioxide after fires.) This creates pockets of soil fertilized with biochar.

This creates a tremendous amount of variability. That helps explain why the high estimates for global soil carbon cited above are more than double the lower estimates.

Forest type affects soil carbon

When I was working in a forest in China many years ago, I noticed that the soil seemed darker under the bigger “evergreen broadleaf” forests than the shorter-stature pine forests in this area located just south of the Tropic of Cancer.

As a Chinese professor there first drew to my attention, pine trees can grow in places where there are few nutrients in the soil, such as on sandy soils. With small leaves, so thin we call them needles, they can thrive under harsh conditions.

Once pines and their needle-leafed ilk provide shelter and spruce up the soil a bit, the flowering trees known as angiosperms—a.k.a. “broadleaf”—can move into these forests.

Broadleaf trees sport large leaves like you’d see in the tropics, or in the maple and elm forests of US Great Lakes area. But here at the edge of the tropics, they had no need to shed their leaves during winter. Hence the “evergreen broadleaf” label.

I suggested to my professor that I collect some soil samples to compare the two forests types, as well as a mixed forest that contained both pine and broadleaf trees.

She encouraged me to carry out this side experiment, but cautioned against expecting too much out of it, given the general variability of soil carbon. But even my 10 samples from the soil’s top 10 centimeters (about 4 inches deep) at each site showed a clear and statistically significant increase in soil carbon content in from pine through mixed forest through evergreen broadleaf.

While my study was quite casual, Jérôme Laganière and colleagues analyzed dozens of publications involving 120 sites around the world to report that broadleaf trees generally have a greater capacity to accumulate soil organic carbon than the coniferous, aka needleleaf, trees such as pines.

This is something to keep in mind in part because, in general, we can expect warmer climates to encourage more evergreen broadleaf forests.

It comes down to trees

Given the natural variability and the lack of thorough measurements, who’s to blame scientists for struggling to assess exactly how carbon is shifting and settling under our feet?

At the same time, I urge everyone to remember—and scientists to make more clear in future publications—that the abundant stores of carbon in soils arrive through the actions of plants, especially trees. It’s yet another reason for protecting old-growth forests.

Thriving forests serve as a sanctuary for wildlife, a haven for insects and birds, and a sink for carbon dioxide. Forest soils have a tremendous ability to absorb and dole out carbon, water and nutrients.

Canopy cover protects soil carbon. It holds in moisture, shelters soil from heat and winds, and reduces exposure to flood and drought. Even in their death, even when killed by wildfires, trees provide a sheltering presence as well as nourishing carbon for the soil and its many life forms.

When the sheltering trees are removed—whether from logging, mining, urban development or data center construction—that’s when the now-exposed soil carbon comes back into circulation.

That’s when formerly earthbound carbon takes wing again by pairing with oxygen to float off as a heat-trapping gas. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid in our efforts to keep planetary warming within a livable range.

We can’t expect to know anytime soon precisely how much carbon the world’s soils hold.

But we do know this: Its precious hoard of carbon is best guarded by trees.

The next and probably final part of this series will cover the movement of soil and its carbon into rivers, and potentially into long-term storage as sediment.

Thanks for reading Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart! This post is public, so shares and hearts are much appreciated.

An urgent plea: Stop poisoning ‘invasives’

Melanie Lenart — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:09:25 GMT

Protecting bees and other insects should be a conservation priority. Photo by Melanie Lenart of a mural in Odeceixe, Portugal.

On the first Earth Day in 1970, bugs were everywhere.

As kids on the South Side of Chicago, we’d catch fireflies by the jarful, make wishes on lady bugs and pet furry caterpillars inching along sidewalks. We’d admire the many butterflies, and dodge the bees that flocked to anything sweet on the picnic table.

On Earth Day today, the insect population is in free fall.

Although studies are sporadic in place and time, it appears bug populations have dropped in recent decades by some 80 percent, as measured by the total weight of insects per unit area.

Having lots of bugs around wasn’t always fun. But by 1970, the environmental movement was running strong in the United States, inspired in part by by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring.

In it, she alerted the world to the danger of pesticides—in her case, the insecticide DDT—in decimating bird populations and the insects they feed upon. Much of the world, including the United States, then stepped away from applying this particular pesticide.

Now it’s time for us to acknowledge that pretty much any pesticide—including herbicides, the ones designed to kill plants—also harm the birds, the bees and the bugs.

I outlined the case against spraying pesticides on lawns and farms last year. This month, I highlighted spraying in natural areas, featuring the Arizona fight to subdue globe chamomile and Monsanto’s role in the war on invasive species.

There’s got to be another way to approach the “invasive” species question than by poisoning the natural areas supporting struggling population of insects, birds and other wildlife.

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Emulate First Americans

Considering that Indigenous knowledge kept the ecosystems in what is now North America thriving for countless millennia, I suggest we start by taking a lesson from local Indigenous peoples.

Like most Indigenous peoples, the Tohono O’odham living on their ancestral lands in what is now southern Arizona generally work with nature instead of endlessly striving to mold it to their liking.

When I taught science at Tohono O’odham Community College, I sometimes worked with longtime O’odham farmer Clifford Pablo. Among other things, he ran the college’s agricultural outreach program and co-taught the Agroecology course with me.

Clifford instructed students in the modern O’odham way of growing organic vegetables and fruits on the Student Learning Farm. One lab he led involved how to monitor and organically treat farms and gardens for pests.

Students would swing bug-trapping nets around the learning farm, then inspect their catches. A quick squish was the usual technique of dealing with any individual unwanted bugs. If there were many, Clifford would bring out the organic sprays.

One time a student caught a bug Clifford didn’t recognize. He recommended letting the bug go.

“Let’s see what it does,” he said.

This approach of gathering information before acting is worthy of emulation by all of us who care for the Earth.

Photo by Hanna Lazar on Unsplash

Ask questions before shooting

In contrast, the approach of non-Indigenous people encountering a species exotic to a particular location often involves spraying first and asking questions later, if at all.

The United States applies more than 1 billion pounds of pesticides a year, according to a 2017 US Geological Survey report. This includes in natural areas deemed under attack from the unexpected arrival of “invasive” species.

“Glyphosate is everywhere,” said Center for Biological Diversity Environmental Health Science Director Nathan Donley, referring to the traditional ingredient in Roundup. “We’ve contaminated just about every open space that exists in the States.”

Some of this goes for the war on “invasive” species, a war launched in 1999 when botanist Peter Raven led the charge to eradicate undesired species by any means possible. As Andrew Cockburn detailed in an Atlantic article that I summarized on Thursday, Monsanto—the producer of Roundup and Agent Orange, now a subsidiary of Bayer Corporation—found an ally in Raven.

Raven’s efforts soon led to the creation of a National Invasive Species Council. Members use a definition of invasive species as “a non-native organism whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm, or harm to human, animal or plant health.”

Notice no evidence of harm is required—just someone’s opinion that it’s “likely.” The council’s materials make it clear they’re focused on economic harm to humans and their enterprises. Perceived threats include that it will displace species preferred by ranging cattle or worsen wildfires.

I saw firsthand how this narrative drove the anti-buffelgrass mania in the Southwest. I was in the room during a University of Arizona meeting in the early aughts when a respected scientist proposed that we needed to make Tucson residents concerned about buffelgrass. He proposed using the species’ high burn temperatures to suggest that run-away wildfires would burn homes and kill our iconic saguaros.

A similar narrative based on “likely” harm rather than evidence now arises among conservationists in southern Arizona who detest globe chamomile, a yellow-bulbed flower they’ve dubbed “stinknet.”

Focus on desired species

Given the many challenges faced by our overheated planet, it’s time to weigh potential threats to saguaro and other natural systems against clear and present danger to bumble bees and other insects. These critters are declining far faster than saguaro populations many well-intentioned conservationists want to spray to protect.

The pesticides used against invasive plants can kill up to 96 percent of bumble bees in their path.

Yet the tendency to propose shooting “invasive” plants with pesticides often occurs with little to no knowledge or study of whether the new plant actually has a role to play in the ecosystem, or even whether they do make wildfires more deadly.

For instance, two decades after the initial alarm about buffelgrass having dense growth and high burn temperature that potentially could harm saguaro, a 2021 publication by the US Forest Service acknowledged they found no documentation of buffelgrass spreading fatal fire among saguaro cacti.

As a National Parks Service researcher pointed out to me in the wake of a Phoenix-area desert fire that had singed the largest known saguaro cactus in Arizona, nearby woody plants or dead logs are more likely to threaten saguaros than the maligned grasses and flowers.

Grass fires usually move too quickly to damage large saguaros, she said. After all, these iconic cacti are composed of 85 percent water. The smaller cacti can be engulfed, however.

A bigger danger for mature saguaro, she noted, comes from nearby trees or dead wood. It’s a problem because young saguaro typically establish under “nurse plants,” native trees such as mesquite and palo verde, which can later fuel a deadly fire.

If that holds, it make more sense to protect saguaro from fire by clearing out plants and dead wood from near them. This volunteer-ready advice makes more sense than poisoning the desert by the acre.

Know thy enemy

Meanwhile, southwestern conservationists and scientists don’t seem to have observed the detested globe chamomile enough to figure out exactly who benefits from it, much less whether it actually causes harm.

It seems researchers don’t even know who, if anybody, pollinates it. A Boyce Thompson Arboretum publication mention several possibilities, including bees, beetles and self-fertilization.

This Creative Commons image from Flickr shows beetles alighting on globe chamomile flowers.

As the authors note, dandelions—another yellow flower in the Asteraceae family—is considered self-fertilizing.

Even the self-fertilizing dandelion serves some bugs in the ecosystem, though. For instance, a time-release video (posted below) of a dandelion shows bugs parading up and down the stem.

Wouldn’t it make sense to know how a particular plant fits into the ecosystem—including exactly who is pollinating or otherwise interacting with it—before shooting to kill with pesticides?

Also lacking research is this question: Who is being harmed by the removal of these plants, particularly when it involves the spraying of glyphosate, 2,4-D, diquat or other toxic compounds?

If making the dangerous choice to conduct some pesticide spraying, at least monitor the sites and compare them to similar unsprayed sites to objectively assess how that dose of poison affected local wildlife, such as bees and other insects.

Keep in mind that the poison in the next batch of Roundup or other Bayer-Monsanto product could be completely different. As I explained last week, that’s because there’s no requirement to list all the ingredients they contain.

Make gardens, not war

Reading a guidance document for the National Invasive Species Council makes it clear the organizers operate in a war-like fashion. The Secretary of State tops the list of 16 federal officials who are members of the council, and the Secretary of Homeland Security also makes the list.

I can’t help but feel envious. If we had a National Endangered Species Council to protect plants and animals across a variety of jurisdictions, we’d be living in a different world.

In our actual world, researchers typically find relatively few bugs or other insects even in many natural areas. Pesticides are seen as one of the main drivers of what some call the insect apocalypse.

Along with bug populations, bird populations are dropping—possibly for many of the same reasons. The bird population decline goes well beyond insectivores to include birds who dine on plants and seeds. But certainly, the estimated 60 percent of birds who include insects in their diet find their dining opportunities shrinking or poisoned.

Maybe that’s why even Indigenous projects dealing with “invasive” species generally talk only about replanting and otherwise restoring native plants, based on my observations at half a dozen annual meetings of tribal college affiliates of the First American Land-grant Consortium.

Those who would like to help by making their back yards into havens for bees and other wildlife might appreciate resources from Nature Hills Nursery and the National Wildlife Federation.

As conservationists and environmentalists, our priority right now should be working to restore wildlife populations, starting with the insects near the bottom of the food chain.

If we don’t reverse the ongoing insect apocalypse, we might wish we had some self-fertilizing plants blooming on the landscape.

If you found this informative, please consider sharing it with conservationists working on “invasive” species issues or others who have a vendetta against yellow flowers. I’m opening up comments here beyond paid subscribers to give people a chance to air their thoughts.

Monsanto spurred furor to poison ‘invasives’

Melanie Lenart — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:03:21 GMT

Conservationists and others working to make the world a better place might appreciate this post, the second of a series. It’s about twice as long as my usual posts, as I felt it was important to make the case without interruption.

The conservationists willing to poison nature under the flag of controlling invasive species have admirably good intentions, based on the ones I know.

They want to protect the desert they have known, hiked and respected for decades. Some of them spend countless hours doing the hard work of pulling the plants they consider problematic from our desert soils.

Yet, when a non-native plant they’re targeting begins to spread beyond what some weeding by even a dedicated group of volunteers can handle, they sincerely believe the poison pill of pesticides is the only thing that can protect the desert from the invaders.

This is not a hit piece on the efforts by well-meaning people trying to clear out species deemed invasive. It’s intended to share information that might have been missed, overlooked or ignored in the rush to defend the natural systems we know and love.

Summary

Here are some angles I’ll cover here to help conservationists reconsider their support for spraying pesticides in natural areas:

While some Roundup in the United States still contains glyphosate, the product formula has changed since 2023—arguably for the worse.
Formulas differ from country to country, product to product, and possibly even store to store because supposedly “inert” ingredients go unidentified. Meanwhile, these “inert” ingredients, also known as co-formulants, can be fatal for bees and dangerous to humans too.
Combining different poisons increases the toxic effects on people and wildlife. Yet combining different pesticides is often recommended by those fighting “invasive” plants, such as globe chamomile in the Southwest.
Finally, the push to spray non-native species deemed “invasive” has roots that lead to none other than Monsanto, the manufacturer of the pesticide Roundup now owned by Bayer.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Bayer purchased Monsanto, the Roundup inventor and distributor, in 2018.

There might be some buyers’ remorse for taking over a company facing so many lawsuits over the safety of its crown jewel product, glyphosate.

Bayer AG Chief Executive Officer Bill Anderson called the ongoing lawsuits over Roundup-related health issues an “existential threat” to the Monsanto subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical giant, according to the Lawsuit Information Center.

The company had spent $11 billion in payouts by this past March. According to the center’s lengthy April 1 update, the money went to 100,000 litigants for Roundup-related health problems—mostly the type of cancer known as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The remaining number of unresolved US cases tallies about 65,000, with most making their way through state courts and 4,000 in California consolidated into one multidistrict litigation handled at the federal level. Meanwhile, the jury awards keep piling up.

Company officials argue they shouldn’t be held liable for not putting cancer warnings on their labels, regardless of state laws, because the federal EPA doesn’t require it.

Trump offers off ramp

Bayer officials saw a possible exit route with the arrival of the Trump administration. Anderson and two other Bayer representatives met with officials from the US Environmental Protection Agency last June.

A couple weeks later, after asking the Trump administration for guidance on whether to hear the case, the US Supreme Court agreed to do so, scheduling the opening arguments for April 27, as a Guardian story details. The Trump administration’s solicitor general filed an amicus brief in March signaling federal support for Bayer.

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case could encourage the remaining plaintiffs with claims to health damages from Roundup to take the $7.25 billion settlement offered by Bayer, the Lawsuit Information Center notes. The company has indicated it will only carry through if almost all plaintiffs accept the settlement.

Science gets more damning

Meanwhile, the science against glyphosate only gets stronger.

Humans store poisonous glyphosate in their bones, leading to slow release to bone marrow and blood, as explained in a March 2026 study by University of Nebraska Medical Center researcher Dennis D. Weisenburger in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Lymphoma Myeloma and Leukemia.

The author notes the finding and other research reviewed provides “compelling evidence” that glyphosate can cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

In 2025, a two-year research study published in Environmental Health showed the compound caused tumor formation and leukemia in rats exposed to quantities of glyphosate deemed “safe” by regulators.

The furor inspired Bayer to promise in 2021 to reformulate by 2023 the Roundup products sold to non-agricultural consumers for lawn and garden care in US markets. The agricultural products comprising about 90 percent of the company’s sales were not considered problematic.

“We have taken this action exclusively to manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns,” the company’s website states.

Ironically, as described in the next section, an analysis of the new formulas indicates the newer Roundup products are even more dangerous for people and wildlife.

From bad to worse

An investigation by Friends of the Earth found glyphosate continued to be found in Roundup products sold at many Lowe’s and Home Depots, as the non-governmental organization noted in a 2024 report.

What’s more, they found the products had likely gotten even more poisonous. Overall, they estimated the new products were about 45 times more toxic for human health, and significantly more harmful for the environment.

The analysis found the four replacement compounds—which included diquat, a highly toxic pesticide discussed in the first part of this series—used in newer versions of Roundup were more toxic than glyphosate for bees, birds and crustaceans.

The replacements are generally 2 to 4 times more toxic than glyphosate for bees, as Table 3 in the report notes.

Birds and shellfish fared even worse.

For diquat compared to a similar amount of glyphosate, toxicity for birds is 13 times greater for acute poisoning, and 18 times greater for chronic conditions. For crustaceans such as lobsters and shrimp, diquat’s acute and chronic toxicity are more than 50 times worse than glyphosate.

And that’s just considering the ingredients acknowledged by the company as “active.”

Not-so-inert ingredients

Unlike with commercial food labels, where every ingredient must be specified, household products such as pesticides have no such requirement to label ingredients considered “inert.” As the Friends of the Earth report states:

Note that formulations with the same active ingredients are sold under different product names.
Also note that the inert ingredients in the products may differ—we cannot tell because federal law allows pesticide manufacturers to claim the identity and concentration of inert ingredients in a formulated pesticide as “Confidential Business Information,” and hence they are not subject to disclosure.

Yet a 2021 study by Edward Straw of the Royal Holloway University of London and colleagues found the unnamed “inert” ingredients in various formulations of Roundup had quite different effects on bee mortality.

For instance, a glyphosate-based product sold by a different company killed only 6 percent of bumble bees within 24 hours, as I wrote in the first part of this series.

Meanwhile, Roundup Ready-To-Use, which contains glyphosate, killed 96 percent of bumble bees within a 24-hour period. But wait, there’s a catch: Roundup Speed Ultra also killed 96 percent of the bees during that period even though it lacked glyphosate.

This made it clear, the researchers concluded, that the supposedly “inert” ingredients clearly affect product toxicity.

In fact, they noted the “surfactants”—considered inert—often were particularly deadly for bumble bees.

European Union bans ingredients

I reached out to the London-based scientist last week to see if he knew whether any policy changes had occurred since the February publication of the 2021 research.

“The EU is regulating pesticides tighter and tighter, that has been a consistent direction of travel,” Straw responded by email, although he took no credit for the shift.

The European Union banned diquat in 2019, and several of its member countries ban or restrict the use of glyphosate.

In March of 2021, EU regulators created a list of 144 so-called “co-formulants”—another word for the supposedly “inert” ingredients—to be banned within two years. It’s in the process of banning another 14 co-formulants.

The banned ingredients include Polyethoxylated tallowamines. In a 2019 Food and Chemical Toxicology article, Robin Mesnage of King’s College London called this supposedly inert surfactant “markedly more toxic than glyphosate.”

Unfortunately, recommendations by both sets of researchers to require manufacturers to list any co-formulants included in their products continue to go unheeded even in Europe, Straw indicated.

As you could probably guess, this issue is not even on the radar of US regulators.

On a positive note, Straw noted the academic community has “latched onto” researching total toxicity of specific products, rather than limiting research to individual ingredients deemed active.

While there’s no guarantee the surfactants, co-formulants and other ingredients claimed as inert will remain the same, this approach allows researchers to test the deadliness of combining various chemical compounds into a “toxic cocktail.”

A lethal mix

“Toxic cocktails” sounds festive. But they can be especially dangerous.

The combination of glyphosate with other ingredients typically creates a deadlier concoction for bees than glyphosate alone, as the 2021 study by Straw and his colleagues showed.

Yet the groups working with Arizona’s Pima County to eliminate globe chamomile often turn to toxic cocktails to do the job. That’s because glyphosate alone doesn’t always do the trick, as noted in part one of this series on using pesticides to combat “invasive” species.

For instance, the Southwest Vegetation Management Association’s advice for killing globe chamomile (a.k.a. stinknet) specifically recommends mixing it with other herbicides, suggesting 2,4-D—the main ingredient of Agent Orange, also manufactured by Monsanto. They also recommend using diquat.

Even low doses of some pesticides can interact in “synergistic” ways, a 2024 study in Chemosphere by Canadian scientists found. In other words, combining two (or more) active ingredients can have an toxic effect that goes beyond expectations.

For example, my mother had firsthand experience with this synergistic phenomenon.

Years ago, she told me about a time she was preparing a bucket for mopping up floors trampled by her five children. She added ammonia to the steaming water pouring into the bucket from the bathtub faucet. Then she decided a bit of bleach would help with deep cleaning.

As she poured it in, the fumes overwhelmed her. She almost fainted.

Later, she found out the combination of bleach and ammonia can be deadly. She figured the running water diluting her impromptu mixture may have saved her life.

Even mixing products that contain bleach with products that contain ammonia can lead to chronic or fatal health issues, something labels rarely explain.

When it comes to pesticides, there’s almost no information about how toxic various combinations might be. The US regulatory agency monitoring pesticide safety, the EPA, only carries out risk assessments on individual compounds, if at all.

Even the European Union’s stricter laws don’t consider the lethality of combining various toxins together, according to Pesticide Action Network Europe, a self-described coalition of European organizations “working to replace the use of hazardous pesticides.”

Babies among the victims

Dangerous combinations of pesticides can occur from living in rural areas or even from consuming coffee and other food sprayed with pesticides, a study in Argentina revealed.

This is especially problematic for unborn babies.

The 2025 study of 89 pregnant women in an agricultural area of Argentina detected pesticide residue in their urine of more than four out of five of them (81 percent). Researchers detected more than one type of pesticide in about two out of three (64 percent) of the pregnant Argentinian women studied.

Of the latter, a third (34 percent) experience complications with their pregnancies, most commonly gestational hypertension.

A typical complication involved low birth weight, with babies smaller than 5 pounds, 8 ounces (2,500 grams). According to the Cleveland Clinic, low birth weights can lead to a variety of complications for infants and may require spending time in the intensive care unit. The condition is linked to infant mortality. It also can lead to learning disabilities and other complications as children age into adults.

Argentina largely adopted genetically modified crops—known as GMOs—paired with Roundup as it replaced ranching with agriculture.

Argentina is among top five countries using GMOs, according to a 2024 article in the Journal of Integrative Agriculture, along with the US. The United States’ 184 million acres under GMO crops was about three times the expanse in Argentina, but the US is also more than triple the size of Argentina.

Similarly, a US-based study in 2018 of 71 pregnant women in Indiana found 90 percent contained glyphosate in their urine. While their babies did not register low birth weights, higher levels of glyphosate in their urine were “significantly correlated” with pregnancies that did not reach the ideal gestational length of 37 weeks.

Besides being a major farming area, Indiana sports vast expanses of lawns kept in line with herbicides, including Roundup products from the shelves of Lowe’s and Home Depot.

Both the United States and Argentina have higher infant mortality rates than Canada, Australia and most European countries, based on 2023 data.

Is it possible lax regulations on pesticides and other pollutants help explain why the mortality of American-born infants remains relatively high compared to other industrialized countries?

Monsanto expands into ‘invasives’

Promoting the use of genetically modified crops that can withstand the glyphosate applied to kill weeds has expanded by two orders of magnitude—about 121 times—around the world since 1996, but the United States continues to lead the pack. Brazil is close behind.

It’s been Monsanto’s bread and butter, bringing in massive profits.

What a coup it was for the multinational corporation to convince conservationists that its products could help them combat “invasive” plants—an issue its benefactors helped create, based on the background details in a well-researched 2015 Atlantic article by Andrew Cockburn.

It’s a worthwhile read for anyone involved in either side of the invasive species issue, but I’ll sum up a few details here.

Basically, the Clinton-Gore White House created a Biodiversity and Ecosystems Panel and asked it to report its recommendations on invasive species by the end of the 1997. Leading the panel was Peter Raven, an influential botanist who continues to serve as the President Emeritus of Research for the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Raven’s panel released its report in March of 1998, blaming invasive species along with the destruction of habitat for the extinction of 500 known species in the United States. Meanwhile, the Raven-led panel pointed to genetically modified organisms as a path of hope.

Left unsaid were the connections, financial and ideological, between Raven and Monsanto.

The Missouri Botanical Garden that Raven led was just a few miles away from the Monsanto headquarters in St. Louis. Cockburn notes Raven received $2 million in funding for the construction of the four-story “Monsanto Center” featuring some of the garden’s books and dried plants. Monsanto also donated $50 million for the Danforth Plant Science Center, a GMO research facility that Raven helped found.

The work of Raven’s panel led then-President Clinton to create a National Invasive Species Council in 1999. One of the council’s founding members was Nelroy E. Jackson, a Monsanto scientist and manager who helped develop Roundup formulas for eradicating “invasive” plants under the guise of habitat restoration. `

In the Atlantic piece, Cockburn related an exchange he had with a naturalist:

David Theodoropoulos, a California naturalist and seed merchant and the author of Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience, is blunt about what he sees as a deadly inversion of environmental priorities.
“Thirty years ago,” he told me, “the greatest threats to nature were chain saws, bulldozers, and poisons. Now the greatest threats are wild plants and animals. And what do we use to fight them? Chain saws, bulldozers, and poisons. Who does this serve?”

We’ll never fully know how much influence Monsanto had on modern thinking of the many conversationists willing to apply poisons to the desert and other natural systems.

Similarly, US consumers will never be able to know exactly what’s in herbicides sold in the United States because of lax laws and resistance to listing supposedly inert co-formulants.

But these mysteries should make us concerned, not complacent, about what we don’t know.

The end result? We can never be sure a chemical made for America is safe for wildlife—or even people.

I’ll be following up next week with a related post that could be seen as the third part of what was intended to be a two-part series. Also, I’m opening up comments here beyond paid subscribers to give people a chance to air their thoughts.

Thanks for reading Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart! If you found the information here useful, please share it with a well-meaning conservationist you know.

Yellow flowers or poison—what’s worse?

Melanie Lenart — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:50:11 GMT

Conservationists and others working to make the world a better place might find this post, the first of a two-part series, worth considering. There are reasons the herbicides used in the United States to combat “invasive” species are banned in many other countries.

Photo by Viridi Green on Unsplash

Where I grew up in a town bordering Chicago’s South Side, tidy lawns were a distinguishing feature. Flowers were kept in their place, in rows or boxes.

The people of Calumet Park—like much of the United States even now—had a vendetta against any dandelions that dared to rear their heads. They would mow, pluck and poison these yellow flowers to “protect” their precious lawns. Never mind the puppies and children frolicking in them.

As a child, I wondered why people hated these yellow flowers. I liked their sunny presence.

Many decades later, I find the same question coming to mind about a yellow flower around my current home in southern Arizona: globe chamomile.

As it happens, both dandelions and globe chamomile fall into the sunflower family, Asteraceae. The glowing yellow orbs of globe chamomile flowers, in fact, look like their own tiny suns.

Yet many kind-hearted Americans aim to extinguish their light.

It’s time for those who love nature to reconsider the ongoing effort to eliminate these yellow flowers and others deemed “invasive” by any means possible, including by using pesticides banned in more civilized countries.

What’s more, claims that the herbicides used are safe for bees appear unfounded. It’s risky to use them, especially considering the ongoing precipitous decline of insects, including bees. Here, I lump herbicides into the larger category of pesticides to avoid giving the impression they are safe for insects, birds and other animals—including humans.

Image courtesy of Picture This.

Globe chamomile or ‘stinknet’?

Globe chamomile flowers have been rearing their sunny heads again in the Sonoran Desert, although these winter blooms are getting close to the end of their growing season.

Known to scientists as Oncosiphon piluliferum, the species is dubbed “stinknet” by those trying to eradicate it in the US Southwest. It’s described as “strongly scented,” although I didn’t notice any offensive smell, and said to release an “acrid smell” when burned.

Pima County officials have been keeping tabs on this South African yellow flower that began drifting into the Phoenix area in the 1990s and the Tucson area around 2015.

A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from a University of Arizona graduate school buddy who now helps the county keep track of globe chamomile. She wanted me to convince my neighbors to allow drone flights over our rural neighborhood area near Three Points, Arizona, to check for its presence.

Last year, our neighborhood joined the quest to eliminate globe chamomile by weeding it out. I pulled enough on our homestead last year that this year’s remnants were an easy handful.

Mainly, I was interested in helping to control them manually with the hope of keeping other neighbors or officials managing nearby land from turning to pesticides.

Globe chamomile aren’t the only yellow flowers deemed invasive by conservationists. Four of the dozen plants listed by the Southwest Vegetation Management Association
as “top invaders” for southern Arizona sported yellow flowers.

But this species does seem to be a high-profile target. Judging from the phone call and websites by the county and the many affiliated groups battling so-called invasive species, officials are determined to prevent this yellow flower from getting more of a foothold in southern Arizona.

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Rounding up globe chamomile

As a result, many considerate, kind conservationists are willing to spray the desert with glyphosate and other pesticides in efforts to poison these plants into oblivion.

Pima County encourages people to volunteer with an affiliate that shares its web server, the Sonoran Desert Weed Whackers. It also collaborates with state, federal and non-governmental groups under the Sonoran Desert Cooperative Weed Management Area.

To the groups’ credit, volunteer options focus on pulling out globe chamomile manually. However, they all recommend some form of glyphosate and other pesticides for treatment of larger areas by trained specialists.

Previous grants have supported spraying glyphosate and other poisons in the Tucson area to keep in check plants deemed invasive.

Stinknet.org, a resource site supporting the many groups collaborating with the county on invasive species eradication efforts, encourages chemical treatment by licensed applicators: “A skilled team of 10 people can easily cover 5 acres in a day which could take weeks for manual removal.”

What they neglect to mention is the harmful effects these poisons have on the desert ecosystem and the animals that live there.

What’s your poison?

Glyphosate—long the identified active ingredient in Roundup—was the poison of choice for the various groups when specifics were provided. Diquat, considered even more toxic than glyphosate, was another herbicide mentioned by name.

Under “Removal: Chemical/Herbicide,” Stinknet.org links to a publication by the Southwest Vegetation Management Association—based in Phoenix, where globe chamomile covers a larger area—which provides precise but alarming details about the kinds of chemicals we can expect to see applied to eradicate these yellow flowers. Here’s an excerpt, which I explain below:

“The non-selective herbicide glyphosate, when used alone, has provided inconsistent results, with irregular performance in some years and effective performance in other years. Consider adding additional herbicides with glyphosate, 2,4-D, when combined with glyphosate, has been an effective pre-flowering treatment.
Diquat combined with glyphosate has been effective up to the mid-flowering stage.”

Lots to process here. First, let me point out that 2,4-D is a chemical that was used in Agent Orange. It’s bad news.

As the Guardian reported in a February 9 story, following a decade of legal battles, the US chemical company Corteva agreed this year to stop producing an herbicide known as Enlist Duo that paired glyphosate with 2,4-D.

Much like glyphosate itself, 2,4-D has been linked to cancer and other human health issues as well as ecological damage. It appears to lead to an elevated risk of birth defects, Parkinson’s disease, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other ailments. The Center for Food Safety, which has led the legal battle against Enlist Duo, charges it also likely harms hundreds of endangered species, including fish, deer, bats, butterflies and birds.

Corteva says it will continue to use 2,4-D in another product, Enlist One. So, it seems the change won’t prevent those working in the United States from finding it.

Meanwhile, Diquat is considered “200 times more chronically toxic” than glyphosate, based on an analysis of EPA data carried out by Friends of the Earth.

Despite a ban by the European Union and even China because of research identifying a level of toxicity dangerous to humans as well as birds and other animals, a 2025 Guardian story notes the US EPA has not reviewed the herbicide since 2002.

As Kate Petty wrote for Wiki Observatory:

“Studies have linked diquat to organ damage, reproductive harm, and ecological destruction—from fish and birds to the microbes that keep the soil alive. …
Despite its known toxicity, diquat is used in lawn care products sold at major retail outlets across the U.S., putting potent toxins within easy reach of unsuspecting consumers.”

So, despite the talk of restricting pesticide applications to professionals, US consumers can order them online or find them on the shelves.

That’s another reason it’s dangerous to promote the idea that poisons are better than certain plants.

Herbicides kill bees

Pesticides cause widespread harm to many plants and animals beyond the targeted ones. But because bees are so important to the functioning of ecosystems, I’m going to focus on them for now.

A 2018 study by University of Texas at Austin scientists suggested glyphosate destroys specialized gut bacteria in bees, potentially making them susceptible to the ongoing killer of bees known as colony collapse disorder.

Perhaps even more damning, a 2021 study by Edward Straw of the Royal Holloway University of London and colleagues found even the various formulations of Roundup make a difference in toxicity—at least for bumble bees.

The researchers sprayed four different commonly used herbicides on bees, following guidance on what regulators allow—which is direct spraying of herbicides with the assumption no harm will come to animals.

Three of the herbicides contained glyphosate, including one called Weedol that was made by a different company than Bayer-produced Roundup, formerly manufactured by Monsanto.

Interestingly, the Weedol glyphosate product had no distinguishable short-term mortality for bees compared to the control group, with only about 6 percent of the bees dying within the 24-hour testing period. (Keep in mind this experiment did not test for an influence on colony collapse disorder.)

In contrast, two Roundup products—one with glyphosate, the other without it—both killed 96 percent of bumble bees within a day. The commercial names for these, respectively, were Roundup Ready-To-Use and Roundup Speed Ultra.

The formulations of those products may have changed since then, but not necessarily for the better. In fact, the lack of information on the exact content of these commercial pesticides, as well as their effects on ecosystems and animals, is appalling.

This alone should make conservationists everywhere re-consider the wisdom of pairing up with chemical conglomerates when trying to do good in the world.

The second part of the series later this week will consider how a lack of information on many levels impairs the decision-making process when it comes to using pesticides to combat species deemed invasive. Among other things, this applies to the identity of supposedly “inert” ingredients in pesticides as well as the common practice of mixing herbicides together.

If you found this post informative or thought-provoking, please consider sharing it with a conservationist you know. Thanks!

For a world on edge: We need a miracle

Melanie Lenart — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:29:35 GMT

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

This piece won’t suit everyone, but I hope it helps some of you to envision peace and send thoughts of loving kindness, prayers and/or clarifying thoughts to the Iranian people threatened with annihilation by the US government.

If you’re an American like me, you’re dumbstruck and horrified about how our president behaves like an unrestrained bully toward both people and nature.

On Easter, he put the world on edge with his threats to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.” This morning, his threats escalated as he claimed he might attempt genocide of the Iranian people after 8 p.m. Eastern time tonight.

With the latest No Kings Day behind us, it feels like there’s little we can do but watch the spectacle of our country coming apart at the seams, taking with it the global economy and the international diplomacy system that kept the world relatively peaceful in the wake of World War II.

But destroying a whole civilization? That’s not something we can fix with some decisive midterms. As Paul Krugman put it this morning, “The civilization we destroy may be our own.”

In the hours before a toddler having a tantrum decides whether to attempt to destroy a civilization an order of magnitude older than the United States of America, I find myself wishing I could do something to pull our country back from this cliff of depravity.

In my case, I’m out of the country right now. So, I invite like-minded people to join me by sending prayers, loving thoughts and a focus on a positive outcome this evening and beyond.

We need a miracle.

Praying for Peace

I was raised Catholic, so believing in miracles comes easier to me than many others. After all, we Catholics just celebrated the 2,000-year-old rising from the dead of a beloved and decidedly non-violent man.

Like my culture’s interpretation of Jesus Christ, our representative in the form of the pope also decries war and other inflicted cruelties.

Pope Leo XIV—a fellow Chicagoan, I’m proud to say—indirectly chastised Pete Hegseth on March 29, rejecting “leaders who pray for wars.” He followed up on Easter by asking world leaders and those who enforce their dictates to choose peace instead:

“Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace.”

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The pope will be hosting a Prayer Vigil for Peace on April 11. I encourage Catholics and other Christians drawn to his message to start early by praying for a peaceful resolution to Donald Trump’s latest threats. Other potential prayer prompts are at the end of this post.

Meditating on loving kindness

The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of my adopted practice of Buddhism, also decries violence.

His home country of Tibet was invaded and colonized by the Chinese in 1950. China’s response to a 1959 revolt led to the exodus of 100,000 people, including the Dalai Lama.

He continues to urge a non-violent response, though. Scott Snibbe, a Buddhist podcaster whose 2024 book How to Train a Happy Mind included a forward by the Dalai Lama, paraphrased His Holiness as warning: “If you kill one Chinese person, you make a hundred Chinese enemies.”

Certainly, the United States is in the process of creating generations of enemies with our many “excursions,” not to mention abuse of citizens and immigrants at home.

Rather than fostering resentments that could lead to violence, Buddhism offers the practice of maitri, typically translated as “loving kindness,” to wish for happiness for all beings.

Wishing happiness on everyone

I studied the practice of loving kindness briefly in Tucson after the start of the 2003 US war on Iraq. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now had reported there were no weapons of mass destruction, the premise the Bush-Cheney administration was using to push for war, before it started.

I was frustrated and angry that our country had started the war anyway, despite all our marching to oppose the plan. The lack of the supposed war-provoking weapons of mass destruction became widespread knowledge only later, after George W. Bush launched the war.

The woman leading the loving kindness session gave us an inspiring talk. Then she asked us to wish for happiness for everyone as we meditated.

My mind balked at having any good intentions toward war-mongering George W. Bush. I explained to her my feelings, expecting a workaround of this obviously (to me) bad person.

In my recollection, she told me, “Well, if you can’t embrace that, maybe this isn’t the path for you.”

What? The path of loving kindness was rejecting me?

I sat back down and looked for my own workaround. After some thought, it came to me that if W. was happy at heart, he would not have pursued a path of destruction. (Later, we learned his path to happiness derives from art, not inciting wars.)

When I’m trying to forgive Donald Trump for all the mayhem he is bringing to our world and our country, I try to employ a similar technique. I picture him as a thumb-sucking toddler who can never get enough love and attention. And it’s way past his bedtime.

For those interested in delving into loving kindness more deeply, I include below links to a couple of guided meditations from respected Buddhists.

If everyone were happy, we wouldn’t have wars.

Physics and metaphysics

For those who focus on the material world or embrace atheism, physics provides some findings that philosophers such as Fritjov Capra and Indigenous scholars link to metaphysics.

Photons of energy, for instance, exist as both waves and particles. What’s more, an observer can influence how the energy is perceived. As the Times of India summarized this aspect of quantum physics in a January article:

Reality doesn’t fully “decide” what it is until it is observed. This doesn’t mean the mind magically creates reality at will. But it does suggest that conscious observation plays a role in shaping outcomes. At the smallest scales, the universe isn’t fixed and mechanical. It’s responsive.

Indigenous scholar Leroy Little Bear, a member of the Blackfoot Nation and former director of Harvard’s American Indian Program, highlighted this aspect of reality during a talk I wrote about in a February 14, 2025 post:

Physicists have shown matter exists as both waves and particles, he reminded. Western science emphasizes particles and mass, seeing a mechanical universe of solid objects. Indigenous peoples, in contrast, are inclined to perceive waves.
“In fact, those waves are seen as spirit,” Little Bear said. “Hence the association with spirituality.”

If an observer can influence whether matter is seen as a wave or particle, the universe is more subject to interpretation than we tend to think. So even those who don’t believe in a higher power but do believe in physics could keep an open mind to the possibility of influencing outcome.

Wish for the best

With all of these things in mind, I invite you to pray, meditate, or cogitate using any of the following prompts or your own. I’ll be taking a few moments to 20 minutes for this practice at 2 p.m. Eastern time daily if anybody wants to join me. But synchronization is not required.

Whichever one(s) you choose, if any, please also take a moment to send out a desire for peace in Iran and love for the people there. Also, please feel free to ignore my loose adaptation of loving kindness and formulate your own desire for peace and happiness.

Envision Iranian people looking up into blue skies, praising Allah for their safety. Picture babies thriving, hospital machines humming, and everybody getting the food, water and health care they need.
Send love to Iranian people. Help them understand most of us Americans feel as helpless as they do in the face of our increasingly insane and tyrannical leader.
Hope and pray for the gift of humility to descend upon Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth in time to pull us back from the precipice.
Send strength to the service members who have been put into harm’s way by this president, and to those who will make life-defining decisions in the hours to come. Send support to those considering laying down their weapons to protect innocent people, animals and life-supporting desalinization and power plants.

I can’t say whether this will help the world or any of the people to whom you direct your thoughts, meditations and prayers. We can only hope that it will.

But, if your experience is anything like mine, you might find that the practice of envisioning a positive outcome is at least a temporary relief from the usual doom scrolling.

May the Iranian people find happiness and peace. May the American people find the strength to resist illegal orders and war crimes. And may we all live to see a more peaceful planet.

Easy ways to protest logging BLM forests

Melanie Lenart — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:20:06 GMT

Oregon old-growth forests face a new threat. Photo by David Herasimtschuk. Used with permission

Dear Eco-Logic readers,

This post is for those of you who have the time and inclination to object to the proposed logging of mature and old-growth forests that falls under management by the Bureau of Land Management.

Comments are due by March 23—tomorrow. But submitting online is easy.

The proposed revision would gut protections for a variety of old-growth forests, including the Valley of the Giants—whose name hints at the large, ancient trees being eyed for destruction by the current administration. This is just one of many groves targeted.

I’m going to keep this post short and sweet, to leave time for action instead of reading. I share below the comment I made, along with some information compiled by Will Pattiz and More Than Just Parks.

While the public comments are unlikely to sway an administration already bent on destroying as much public land as possible, they can provide ammunition for future lawsuits and other challenges.

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Submit a comment

Here’s a link that might work: https://eplanning.blm.gov/Participate-Now/?id=040cf17c-af0d-f111-8406-001dd8029ed0&ppid=a591dee8-500c-f111-8406-001dd8029ed0

If that doesn’t take you to a place where you can post your comment online, you can get there also from today’s post by Pattiz.

Below, I include the comment I submitted, which includes a first line borrowed from More Than Just Parks. Feel free to cut and paste and adapt, either my comment or the sample letter on climate provided by Pattiz and team.

Text for possible use

I am writing to oppose the BLM’s proposed Western Oregon Plan Revision that would increase timber harvest to 1 billion board feet per year on O&C lands.

Some people see forests and imagine all the money they could make by turning trees into timber. They don’t see all the damage that will result from logging, including more severe wildfires.

The rest of us see forests as a reprieve from too much heat and too little water. We value mature and old-growth ecosystems for the fresh water, flood control, wildfire resistance and climate regulation they provide.

The logging for BLM land proposed by Project Number DOI-BLM-ORWA-0000-2026-0001-RMP-EIS would have negative effects on the environment wherever they occurred, including:

Increasing wildfire hazard
Increasing landslide risk
Increasing silt load in rivers
Increasing flood hazard
Reducing wildlife habitat
Reducing area of hunting grounds
Reducing fish spawning opportunities

We, the American people, prefer to protect our mature and old-growth public forests, including those managed by the Bureau of Land Management, for other purposes. What’s more, recreational use yields more money for public tax coffers than one-time timber harvesting ever could.

Please abandon the the proposed Western Oregon Plan Revision that would increase logging in our public, BLM-managed forests.

Other options

Those of you who would like to know more about this proposed revision can check out the interactive site set up by More Than Just Parks.

The site also provides options for succinct letters that highlight topics of interest on the part of the writer: Clean Water, Climate, Wildlife, Recreation, and Bad Science.

Given that the team wants as many people as possible to submit comments, I’m copying below the “Climate” letter they provide. As they note, the temperate rainforests of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest in general feature bigger trees with more carbon per acre than even tropical rainforests.

Those seeking other highlights can go here and then just click along until you reach the heading, “Write Your Public Comment.”

Below the sample letter is a link to their post, followed by some previous Eco-Logic articles describing various aspects that make old-growth forests so valuable for our warming world.

MTJP’s letter on climate

I am writing to oppose the BLM’s proposed Western Oregon Plan Revision that would increase timber harvest to 1 billion board feet per year on O&C lands.

My primary concern is climate. Pacific Northwest old-growth forests store more carbon per acre than any terrestrial ecosystem on the planet: approximately 1,100 tonnes of CO₂ per acre, nearly double the Amazon rainforest. This is not opinion; it is measured, peer-reviewed science (Smithwick et al., 2002; Luyssaert et al., 2008).

Every tree felled releases centuries of stored carbon. At the proposed harvest levels, the BLM would be converting one of Earth’s most effective carbon sinks into a carbon source at precisely the moment the climate crisis demands we protect these forests. The timber revenue ($66 million) is negligible compared to the climate cost.

I urge the BLM to abandon this plan and recognize these forests’ irreplaceable role in carbon sequestration.

More Than Just Parks

You Have 24 Hours to Save Oregon’s Last Old-Growth Forests

On February 19, the BLM announced it wants to quadruple logging on 2.5 million acres of western Oregon’s oldest forests. One billion board feet per year. 1960s-era clearcutting. No public meetings. We published the investigation. It made the rounds. Thousands of you read it, shared it, and filled the comments with stories about why these places matter to you…

7 months ago · 65 likes · 10 comments · Will Pattiz and More Than Just Parks

Where's the carbon? In tropical forests. Here's why

Melanie Lenart — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:01:10 GMT

The day after Hurricane Georges, Puerto Rico’s tropical forests looked bleaker than a maple forest in winter.

The hurricane’s 115-mile-per-hour winds had stripped the leaves off the many hardwoods and palm trees in the Caribbean National Forest, known affectionately by locals as El Yunque.

I had arrived about a week before this major 1998 hurricane to conduct research on soil disturbance from uprooted trees. The work brought me daily into the local forests. On a whim, I decided to note the approximate leaf cover as I traversed the island’s wind-battered forests.

The barrenness I expected. More surprising to me was this: Only a few weeks into my research project, I had to abandon efforts to note the proportion of leaf cover lost. So many trees had grown a new set of leaves that my estimates no longer reflected hurricane damage.

Stems also resprouted from broken trunks. Lines of seedlings arose on fallen trunks, looking like former branches as they raced to gain control of the fallen tree’s root system. The forest was coming back to life.

It was clear the recipe for plant growth—carbon dioxide, water and energy from the sun—came together in a spectacular way on this tropical island. As in much of the humid tropics, Puerto Rico’s consistently warm, sunny days and almost daily afternoon cloudbursts nourished forest growth.

Tropical forests, such as Puerto Rico’s El Yunque forest above, absorb the lion’s share of carbon dioxide landing in the world’s forests. Photo by Bob Segal. Used with permission.

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That’s why tropical forests remain one of the world’s best hopes for balancing our overabundance of carbon dioxide emissions from burning the infamous fossil fuels—coal, natural gas and oil.

It’s also why they should be explored more by those trying to locate the supposed “missing sink” of carbon dioxide. Scientists continue to seek the landing place of some of the carbon dioxide that disappears from the air every year, as I explained in more detail in the first part of this series, “Where’s does the carbon dioxide go?”

Carbon dioxide levels fluctuate through the year, as shown in the NOAA graph of monthly measurements from Mauna Loa. While levels rise every year because of society’s burning of coal, oil, gas and forests, the seasonal patterns show more than half of it vanishes from the air every year.

Working hard to clear the air

While levels rise every year because of society’s burning of coal, oil, gas and forests, more than half of it vanishes from the air every year.

Scientists estimate that about 25 percent of the carbon dioxide released from society’s burning of forests and fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—sinks into the sea. It goes into the ocean itself and also the life forms in it.

Forests take up another 30 percent of society’s emissions. Actually, forests take down nearly 50 percent of carbon dioxide released from fossil fuels before we add to calculations the loss from deforestation. But, of course, it’s important to account for societal activities that convert the carbon stored in forests back into carbon dioxide.

Trees have a talent for absorbing carbon dioxide and pairing it with water to create matter—leaves and other tissues, plus more durable materials such as wood. This work, known as productivity, adds up. Once you take out the water, half a tree’s weight is carbon—all of it originally from the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide.

Carbon: Lost or found?

Tropical forests are especially skilled in collecting carbon dioxide, as I learned while working on a master’s degree in forestry at the University of Illinois. My faculty mentor, the late ecologist Sandra Brown, recommended me for an internship with Puerto Rico’s International Institute of Tropical Forestry.

Brown and the institute’s longtime director, Ariel E. Lugo, co-authored many scientific journal articles addressing the case of the missing carbon. Some of their research involved bringing scales out to forest plots, especially in the largely unmeasured tropics, to weigh exactly how much carbon they contained, dead or alive.

In 2023, I reconnected with Lugo, a tropical ecologist who led the institute for about four decades before he retired in 2021. He invited me to his Rio Piedras home for a conversation I soon steered over to the “missing” carbon dioxide.

“Sandra and I could easily find that in the tropics,” Lugo said.

They tried to convey that to the other members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change writing the 2007 report that gleaned them all a shared Nobel Peace Prize.

“It was extremely exciting to go to these meetings and to be with all these guys who were mostly oceanographers and atmospheric scientists,” he said. “Sandra and I would be the only two weirdos there who work on vegetation.”

But then, as now, scientific agreement on the forests’ role in balancing climate remains limited. Decades later, scientists continue to underestimate the role of forests, including how much old-growth tropical forests are doing to clear the air of carbon dioxide.

It’s the heat and the humidity

The tropics mark the areas that receive direct sunlight—coming down so straight, your shadow would pool at your feet—during at least some part of the year. All this direct sunshine striking tropical seas pulls moisture into the air. While people might complain about the resulting humidity, it helps plants thrive.

Technically, the tropics stretch from the Tropics of Cancer at 23.5 degrees North in latitude to the Tropics of Capricorn at 23.5 degrees South. However, researchers often define it in other ways too, such as by forest type or climate.

Still, the tropics cover more area than we might suspect if our exposure to land masses typically involves consulting maps that project the spherical nature of the globe onto a flat surface. Maps make the areas near the poles look larger than they really are.

To get beyond that, consider a sphere. If you can, hold a globe or even a ball in your hands. Notice how the center of the ball is the widest.

Think of this as the tropical region.

Photo by Alyssia Wilson on Unsplash

The tropics stretch from the equator (shown here as a solid line crossing through Kenya) north and south to 23.5 degrees in latitude. Here, the Tropics of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere is illustrated with a dotted line that crosses southern Madagascar.

This helps explain, in part, why tropical forests spread across a larger area than the other two types. A 2024 Nature paper on research led by Yude Pan estimated the proportion of forests in the tropics accounted for 53 percent in 1990 of total forest area.

By 2020, it was down to 49 percent. So, even with all the deforestation, the tropics accounted for almost half of the world’s forested area.

However, the proportion of intact—in effect, undisturbed—tropical forest declined from about 45 percent to 35 percent during that same time frame.

Tropical trees growing bigger

Where they are allowed to grow without being disturbed or developed, intact tropical forests are continuing to grow bigger.

That’s true in the Amazon, based on research published in September in Nature Plants. Researchers led by Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert collaborated to re-measure 188 plots set up mostly between 1970 and 1990. They found the area occupied by tree trunks was increasing overall by about 3.3 percent per decade.

What’s more, the biggest trees gained the most area—a finding that supports an ongoing recognition that the biggest trees are storing the largest share of the carbon from carbon dioxide.

African tropical forests also continue to absorb carbon dioxide when left intact. That’s what researchers reported in a 2020 Nature paper that assessed 244 plots involving intact tropical forests spanning 11 countries.

So, evidence from both Africa and the Amazon suggest intact tropical forests are still absorbing carbon dioxide by growing bigger. This disrupts a long-standing but flawed concept that mature forests would reach a “steady state” with age and stop absorbing more carbon dioxide than they release.

Tropical forests absorb more than four times the amount of carbon as boreal and temperate forests put together, according to research published in a 2021 Science article. The research, led by Liang Xu of California’s Institute of Technology, considered not only the density of stems growing in the stand but the density of the wood itself.

Unfortunately, Xu and his colleagues, like many researchers, found ongoing tropical deforestation negates much of the carbon dioxide drawdown of tropical forests.

Room for growth

Despite all the all the calls to protect them, tropical forests continue to decline in area. The tropics lost about 1.15 billion acres of intact forest in the three decades between 1990 and 2020, according to the 2024 Nature assessment.

That’s a loss of about 4,400 acres an hour.

About 675 million acres of the razed intact forests have been replaced—typically with farms and ranches.

Meanwhile, forests regrew on about 468 million acres since 1990. These young forests are voraciously consuming carbon dioxide. On a per-acre basis, though, they hold only about a third of the carbon held by intact forests.

Still, more tropical forest regrowth could really help consume the carbon dioxide blamed for much of the ongoing global warming.

Regrowth could be key

In fact, authors of a 2024 research article identified about half a billion acres in the tropics where forests potentially could regrow. In the process, they could draw down about 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year.

What’s more, the authors point out it wouldn’t even take the effort of planting trees. Citing an earlier study, they suggest regrowth could occur almost solely through natural regeneration.

That means planting trees is basically unnecessary. All humans would have to do is stop suppressing growth.

Forests plant themselves

As my experience in Puerto Rico helped show, tropical forests will regrow when you let them be. Even in Arizona, forests will “replant themselves” when stressors such as cattle are removed, as I noted after a visit this year to land managed by The Nature Conservancy.

In Puerto Rico’s case, Lugo said in 2023 that the island’s forest cover had bounced back to more than half the island. While that’s still less than its natural cover of 90 percent, it’s up from a low below 10 percent during sugar-cane cultivation times.

All it took, generally, was removing the stressors on the land from cultivating sugar cane and cattle.

As I witnessed after the hurricane, nature is happy to fill the void, whether it’s on a parcel recently freed of cows or in a rainforest recently made barren by a hurricane.

In other words, forests are not the problem. People are.

This is part of an ongoing bur irregular series exploring how nature deals with the excess carbon dioxide released by society. While the series is irregular, posts will include a subheading mentioning “Where does the carbon dioxide go?”

Thanks for reading Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Targeting girls

Melanie Lenart — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:46:07 GMT

An estimated 165 schoolgirls died in the bombing of an Iranian school, shown here. Image clipped from Democracy Now report.

War is bad for children and other living things.

That saying, popular during the Vietnam War, comes to mind as I watch the images of bombs exploding in Iran at the hands of the United States of America, my homeland.

On International Women’s Day, please join me for a moment to honor the little girls and budding young women who died in the first wave of attacks last Saturday.

The bombs killed virtually all the young girls, ages 7 to 12, attending Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in the southern Iranian town of Minab that day, the first day of the school week. That’s the loss of 165 girls.

Mothers, aunts, women—people of all genders—are you OK with this wartime slaughter of small girls?

Ponder that with your favorite female child in your mind—or, rather, in your heart.

For most of you, the answer is clear: No. That is Not OK. You are the ones I’m writing for today.

Further, I want to consider this cruel killing of girls in the context of another Trump-authorized move—namely, the proposed destruction of the Apache ceremonial grounds known in English as Oak Flat.

Whether deliberate or not, that Trump-approved action also would target young women.

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How could we?

Let’s start with the ongoing investigation into how a girls’ school became a target in an undeclared war on Iran launched by US President Donald J. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A United Nations agency called the targeting of an active school a “grave violation” of international law. Even in warfare, nations are not supposed to kill civilians—especially not children.

While the US administration continues to claim our country wouldn’t intentionally target children, officials hedged questions about this elementary school in Minab with vague promises to investigate.

That’s not a denial. For this administration, that’s close to an admission.

Of course, the president later tried to accuse Iran of the bombing, even as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continued to acknowledge an investigation was underway.

The school was near a military site of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but the building itself had been converted into a school for local children more than a decade ago. On March 3, the respected news organization Al Jazeera concluded:

Either US and Israeli forces relied, in striking the vicinity of the Asif Brigade, on a very old, outdated intelligence target bank (dating to before 2013), which would constitute grave negligence and reckless disregard for civilian lives; or the strike was carried out deliberately and with prior knowledge to inflict maximum societal shock and undermine popular support for Iran’s military establishment.

What’s more, these girls were targeted not once, but twice, according to on-the-scene reporting by the London-based Middle East Eye. Witnesses said scattered survivors of the blast on the elementary school were huddling in what they thought was a safe place when the second strike destroyed their remaining shelter.

Are you telling me today’s sophisticated drones couldn’t look through a window and see schoolgirls?

Not once, but twice?

Evidence points to US

In this age of sophisticated high tech, that seems hard to believe. As New York Times reporters Malachy Browne and Aaron Boxerman wrote on March 5:

But a body of evidence assembled by The New York Times — including newly released satellite imagery, social media posts and verified videos — indicates the school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
And official statements that U.S. forces were attacking naval targets near the Strait of Hormuz, where the I.R.G.C. base is located, suggest they were most likely to have carried out the strike.

In other words, the New York Times analysis suggests the United States is likely behind the strike on the girls’ school.

One father told a Middle East Eye reporter his daughter would talk about her plans to be a doctor. “You are already my little doctor,” he’d tell her. Another parent said his daughter would watch the news, then play-act her own planned future in newscasting.

These girls, some of them nearing the cusp of adulthood, were robbed of the chance to live the vibrant futures they imagined.

Planned destruction in Arizona

Even before he authorized the bombings tearing apart Minab, Tehran and other Middle East cities and the people who live there, President Donald J. Trump was eager to see the explosive destruction of Apache sacred land known in English as Oak Flat.

The sacred land in modern-day Arizona is tentatively slated to become a pile of rubble in a 1,000-foot deep hole, unless the courts intervene. (At least, there’s still hope the courts will intervene.)

Government-sanctioned plans call for copper mining done in a way that would devour a river and the land and even bedrock underlying oak groves in Tonto National Forest, near Phoenix. Underground blasts from a series of explosions would undermine the surface, causing it to collapse into an uninhabitable crater more than 1,000 feet deep and more than 2 miles in diameter.

The huge hole would defy even the pretense of future forest restoration.

No river, no forest, no ceremonies.

Nothing but a rubble-strewn chasm left of the ground considered sacred by the Apache and other tribal nations for countless centuries.

Why?

So foreign mining companies could mine the copper buried deep below. These companies from China, Australia and elsewhere go under the joint heading of Resolution Copper. Company officials argue they need to use the destructive approach involving underground explosions to save money.

This destruction also targets girls—in this case, the young Apache women whose arrival into adulthood culminates in four-day traditional ceremonies at the site.

Destruction versus Creation

Can we stop blowing holes in our Mother Earth?

Where Americans and our allies are reducing creation to rubble—whether from bombs falling in the undeclared war on Iran or from corporate bombs undermining sacred land with government permission—we are declaring war on our planet.

Destructive blasts, in all their forms, are not the path to a better, more livable world.

Yet it seems we have leadership that doesn’t envision a more livable world. As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor wrote some months ago in the Guardian, this administration seems to actively seek a destructive end—namely, a destructive End Times.

If anything, the Trump administration’s clamoring for an End Times Armageddon has intensified since Klein and Taylor’s April piece.

By Monday of last week, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation had received more than 110 complaints from at least 30 military installations since the war started. Most complain commanders were invoking religious war in interactions with US troops. In one example shared in a March 2 Substack post by Jonathan Larsen:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

This Armageddon-fueled fantasy gets to the heart of our modern-day path toward destruction. Follow-up stories in The Nation and The Intercept support Larsen’s interpretation that US leaders are pursuing this push for destruction under an End Times scenario.

Extremists at the highest levels

The launching of an Armageddon suits evangelical understanding from the New Testament Book of Revelations of how Christ would be welcomed back into the world for a second time.

It’s a fundamentalist Christians stance that the rebirth of a being—Jesus Christ, who Christians agree initially came into the world through his mother’s womb—now requires the flames of Armageddon for a second coming.

Not all Christians accept this interpretation, of course. On Sunday, Catholic Pope Leo XIV asked people to pray for peace in the Middle East, connecting via #PrayTogether.

At least Congress has requested an investigation into the extent of the US military’s co-option by fundamentalists.

In a March 6 letter, members of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel wrote, “We must ensure that military operations are guided by facts and the law, not end-times prophecy and extreme religious beliefs.”

We’ve already lost 165 girls, and more than a thousand other Iranian people, in the first week of this war that remains undeclared and unexplained.

More bombing of oil refineries is causing an oil-tainted rain to fall in parts of Tehran, a city reportedly dealing today with fires under a pall of black smoke.

It’s more important than ever that we resist a paralysis that could prevent us from detouring away from the path we’re on. If we are to emerge from this administration with any real hope for the future, we must choose creation over destruction.

We must accept that sovereign nations are not subject to invasion, nor to the destruction of their cities and their land, nor to their sacred lands.

And we must stop this war on girls, this destroying of life on earth, and the destruction, in all its forms, of our planet.

This includes the world itself, as Mother Earth, Mother Nature, Gaia, Pachamama, Planet Earth, or whatever you want to call the planet and underlying ground that nurtures life with its rivers and forests.

As Klein and Taylor put it in their Guardian piece:

To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all.

The girls in the town of Minab paid the highest price for what is looking like US extremism. Their families will grieve the loss of these girls—their daughters, granddaughters, friends, sisters—for generations to come.

I invite readers to honor them in your mind, perhaps with a moment of silence.

And I want to remind everyone the Apache Stronghold welcomes prayers and thoughts favoring the protection of Oak Flat, sacred land they know as Chi’chil Bildagoteel.

Only respect for life has any hope of getting us beyond this culture of death.

Thanks for reading Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart. This post is public. so sharing is welcome!

Where does the carbon dioxide go?

Melanie Lenart — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:50:58 GMT

You won’t see carbon dioxide coming out of smokestacks, exhaust pipes, or factory chimneys. You won’t see it because it’s invisible.

It’s transparent, like a piece of glass. And like the glass in a car window or a greenhouse, it traps heat.

As Eco-Logic readers likely already know, the heat-trapping qualities of this invisible gas are bumping up global temperatures. This, in turn, increases problems from wildfires, heat waves, sea level rise and other issues that create havoc for our complex society.

Yet a sizable chunk of the carbon dioxide produced from society’s burning of coal, oil and gas disappears from the atmosphere every year—much of it into forests. Without that assistance from forests, the world would be even hotter by now.

I’ve always loved a good mystery. So, when I started graduate school in 1989 to delve into the dance between carbon dioxide and forests and climate, I threw myself into the ongoing case of Where Does the Carbon Go?

At that time, scientists couldn’t account for the whereabouts of nearly 4 billion tons of society’s carbon dioxide pollution. (Scientists prefer to discard the two oxygen atoms on each carbon dioxide molecule, much as plants do, so we typically refer to this as 1 billion metric tons of carbon).

Not only was it invisible—it wasn’t even detectable by the Mauna Loa monitoring station that tracked it. In fact, more than half the carbon dioxide precisely estimated to have been released by society’s use of fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—had simply vanished from the air.

How did carbon dioxide drain out of the atmosphere? And where exactly did it go?

Scientists generally agree forests and the ocean are the main places where airborne carbon comes down to earth or sinks into the sea.

But which systems, exactly, were collecting it?

The mysterious recipient of airborne carbon dioxide became known as the “missing sink of carbon” among scientists. Unfortunately, almost four decades later, we’re still searching for a missing sink of carbon.

Photo by Ted Balmer on Unsplash

An enduring quest

A 2024 Nature paper by US Forest Service research scientist Yude Pan and colleagues found global forests were consistently absorbing about a third of society’s carbon dioxide releases. Amazingly, despite ongoing deforestation and increasing societal emissions, that proportion has remained consistent for decades.

Even so, the researchers noted other land-based vegetation may be taking up a share of the missing carbon dioxide, given that more seemed to be disappearing than their assessment could detect.

A 2025 Science article led by Yinon M. Bar-On and colleagues argues the carbon dioxide may be lurking in dead trees and in the soil carried off and buried under water, something I touched on soon after the paper’s April publication.

As you can see from these two research articles in arguably the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, many details remain unresolved even now.

In other words, even in this day of big data and satellite observations, scientists are still searching the exact landing spot for about 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide, or roughly 1 billion metric tons of carbon.

The many lives of carbon

Carbon dioxide does become visible when it comes down to earth and takes a solid form. Still, pinpointing its exact location compares to finding a needle in a haystack.

The ocean appears to be consistently taking up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide released by society. The gas itself can get collected by osmosis and wave action. It also takes the form of a white solid, such as the calcium carbonate found in tiny coccoliths the size of krill, the coral reefs that boost coastal biodiversity, and the shells beloved by beach-combers.

Carbon dioxide helps construct marine plants, such as kelp and phytoplankton. The Bar-On research paper did not consider phytoplankton as a carbon sink, as Anastassia M. Makarieva and Andrei V. Nefiodov noted in a May response to the paper. They suggested it’s time for scientists in general to add marine life activity to the missing carbon sink considerations.

On land, life is also involved in carbon’s movement. It’s in the green leaves that transform carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. And it’s often dark, as in a charred tree trunk or rich soil.

As a reminder, trees and other land plants snatch carbon dioxide out of the air, cleave off the oxygen and discard it as waste, and attach the remaining carbon atom to the fixings of a molecule of water. That’s how they build glucose and the other carbohydrates they use to construct leaves, roots and trunks.

Basically, once water is removed from wood, half its weight is pure carbon.

Forests are heavyweights

The world’s forests have a combined weight of about 478 billion tons of carbon, not counting belowground carbon in roots or soil, according to the analysis by the Pan team. Bar-On and colleagues estimated the world’s plants, mostly in forests, held about 450 billion tons of aboveground carbon.

All that carbon came directly from atmospheric carbon dioxide over the years and centuries.

As you can imagine, it’s challenging to pinpoint a few extra tons of carbon in hefty forests. It’s comparable to noticing a couple of extra pounds on a person who weighs more than 400 pounds.

In other words, it’s understandable that it’s challenging to detect exactly where the carbon lands. But it’s still frustrating.

Going undercover

For their conclusion in the 2025 article, Bar-On and team averaged in findings from other research papers with the Pan analysis and another one based on similar plot-based data. Most of the other research papers used in the Bar-On 2025 assessment leaned on satellite data for their assessments.

Satellite imagery does a decent job of letting us know where forests are disappearing in real time.

However, these remote-sensing techniques are far less trustworthy for detecting what’s happening under the cover of the forest canopy. Many of the world’s fastest growing forests have a “closed canopy,” meaning the upper layer of leaves shields those below from visibility.

What’s more, even the visible leaves generally are processing more carbon dioxide these days, as it continues to build up in the atmosphere.

That’s because the excess carbon dioxide floating around generally stimulates plant growth. This is a well-documented phenomenon I’ve written about previously. I’ve even called it an evolutionary response to the higher carbon dioxide levels that came with warmer times in our planet’s geologic past.

Pan and her colleagues surmised a main reason modern forests were continuing to serve as carbon sinks despite the ongoing deforestation related to the extra carbon dioxide spurring trees to grow bigger, faster. They also found forests becoming denser, with tree trunks, in effect, taking up more space per area of ground.

This means under modern skies, the typical satellite assessments of “greenness” of stands likely would underestimate tree growth.

At any rate, the value of the “greenness” approach is limited because it can hit a ceiling for detection in areas where forests grow fastest, such as the tropics. Perhaps because of this, scientists have been seeking other ways to assess tree growth from above the canopy.

An experimental approach

Most of the satellite imagery averaged in with the Pan team’s results took a fairly new approach of using passive microwaves to assess water content in the vegetation. Researchers then use this information to estimate the visible mass of forests.

Regardless of whether scientists have worked out the kinks in this new approach, it’s got another major flaw: It only takes in a big-picture view.

Most of the assessments work at a scale of roughly 240 square miles a pop. Even the most precise ones work at a scale of close to 40 square miles per assessment unit. Trying to isolate forests, in their many forms and age ranges, from these huge squares of intermingled data increases the potential for error.

A microwave-based analysis led by Yi Y. Liu, for example, estimated the world’s forests held only about 235 billion tons of carbon—roughly half of that estimated by the Pan team’s boots-on-the-ground approach.

I am more inclined to trust Pan and her highly respected forestry colleagues when it comes to assessing what’s under the cover of the forest canopy.

Even so, her team also suggested science would benefit from more detailed research on carbon in soil and dead wood. The researchers also suggested using a more consistent approach when using remote sensing to estimate forest area.

Too, they recommended carrying out more research in tropical forests, something I heartily second and will return to soon. A recent analysis found tropical trees growing faster than expected.

A continuing quest

I highlighted the movement of carbon through living forests into dead wood and soil in the earlier post building on the Bar-On research effort. Later, as I explore the modern-day “missing sink” mystery in more detail, I’ll come back to how carbon in soil becomes carbon in sediment that can endure for the long term at the bottom of lakes and seas.

But here’s the punchline future posts will help support: Almost all the avenues for long-term storage on land of former carbon dioxide require living forests to launch and sustain the process.

It takes living forests to produce the dead trees, rich soil and carbon-filled sediment that Bar-On and team envision as accounting for the missing sink of carbon. The Pan analysis leaves room for the possibility that trees expanding into grasslands—what ranchers like to call “woody encroachment”—could also help account for the missing carbon.

Overall, the Pan-led work indicates living forests have actively captured 46 percent—almost half—of society’s carbon dioxide emissions from coal, oil and gas since 1990. Were it not for the ongoing destruction of large chunks of the world’s forests, this tremendous sink for carbon dioxide would protect us even more from excess heat.

Still, we must resist valuing forests only for their ability to collect carbon. We’d be better off recognizing forests provide value for many complementary reasons, too.

Not as commodities for exchange, but as habitat. As harvesting and hunting grounds. As helpers in luring rainfall onto land. And as heat reducers at the local as well as global scale.

Until we recognize how much forests are doing for us when we let them live, we won’t offer them suitable protection, despite the fact that they serve as a major sink for carbon dioxide.

And if we keep razing and erasing forests, eventually we really will be missing that sink.

Thanks for reading Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This post has reawakened my love and respect for carbon and its intricate movement between the air, land and sea for the benefit of all of us carbon-based life forms. So, I plan to write some related pieces in coming months, interspersed with other topics.

For those interested in following this line of thinking, these posts will include the subhead Where Does the Carbon Go? Up next, in this series: Why the understudied tropical forests are key to the global carbon dance.

Usually, I limit comments to paid subscribers. But, as long as people remain civil, I plan to open the posts in this series to comments from any readers. I invite gentle and thoughtful feedback.

Dangerous ‘fixes’ for climate

Melanie Lenart — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:00:47 GMT

Photo by Huzaifa Ochom on Unsplash

Too often, we humans are determined to run the show. This is becoming increasingly obvious in our efforts to counteract the ongoing climate change.

Forests have a proven ability to moderate temperature and even the water cycle for life’s benefit. Already, they help consume about a third of society’s emissions of the carbon dioxide spurring on global warming.

Instead of supporting Nature’s well-honed skills, though, we continue to cut down the forests doing this unpaid work. What’s more, many of the tech solutions involve sacrificing trees in the quest for climate control.

It’s a disaster in the making.

Below, I highlight several ongoing efforts—all of them with ties to Bill Gates, incidentally—to turn these dangerous schemes into reality.

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Pollute the air more

A scattering of scientists and entrepreneurs suggest injecting the upper atmosphere with more pollution, often sulfuric acid. They argue it will darken the sky and thus “dim” the sun. While it would cool the planet slightly, it would have many negative ramifications too.

Yet, even without any governmental regulation or sufficient scientific testing, this idea is moving forward.

A two-person startup, Make Sunsets, is selling balloons filled with sulfur dioxide in an unregulated effort to put extra pollution into the atmosphere. Like the ones children release at birthday parties, these balloons eventually pop (in this case, that’s the plan) and their remnants can harm wildlife when they fall back to earth.

A more sophisticated approach comes from “Stardust Solutions,” a secretive company with at least two dozen employees. An Israeli company registered in Delaware, Stardust is seeking governmental support to get rolling soon. A November 21 story in Politico reported the company was aiming to begin a “gradual temperature reduction demonstration” in 2027.

Yet it has yet to reveal the specific type of “patent pending” pollutant it would use.

Typically, these companies downplay the potential pitfalls, which include health risks to the heart and lungs, the further concentration of power globally, extreme planetary withdrawal symptoms, and even global nuclear war.

Less apocalyptically but also relevant to planetary regulation, this artificial sunblock risks disrupting plant growth, including the forests consuming much of the carbon dioxide released in the burning of coal, oil, gas.

Replace trees with hot warehouses

Millions of dollars are supporting projects to do the work of trees and other plants that naturally collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Several companies have worked out how to pull carbon dioxide from the air into (mined) lime compounds. Then they heat up the mixture—in the case of Heirloom Carbon Technologies, to about 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit—to dislodge the carbon so the lime can be reused, and the carbon stored or used for other purposes.

These open-air warehouses will heat up their local environments, even as they displace real trees, which naturally cool the environment.

Real trees have evolved to pull carbon dioxide from the air, with strong evidence they grow bigger, faster as carbon dioxide levels rise. Along with shading the ground to protect soil and the life forms in and on them from direct sunlight, real trees also provide habitat for birds and other wildlife.

In contrast, building warehouses displaces trees. Meanwhile, warehouse construction and the mining of the limestone and metals needed for the warehouse and its contents kills additional trees and does other extensive damage to the environment.

Chop trees, drown them

The authors of a scientific study published last month in npj Climate Action suggest logging about 45 million acres a year of northern forests to chuck the logs into rivers that will carry them to the ocean for a sea burial. As if cutting down more trees could help climate more than it would hurt it. Hello!

The thinking is that waterlogging the dead trees would block them from eventual decay. Decomposition of wood occurs only in the presence of oxygen, which snags carbon from wood (or any carbon-based life form) and converts it back into airborne carbon dioxide.

As I explained last week, though, scientists are almost certainly overestimating how much additional carbon would be protected by burying trees they killed, ostensibly to protect them from burning in fires.

For instance, while typical calculations for these type of assessments assume all the wood from trees burned in wildfires go up in smoke instantly or at least in the same year, researchers in fire-affected forests found about two-thirds of the carbon in tree trunks typically remains on site following wildfires—often in the durable form of charred wood.

Meanwhile, any regrowth of new trees would be stunted without the shading, nourishing presence of neighbors. What’s more, the small, even-aged stands that the authors propose to plant would soon be far more likely to face severe burns than a natural forest stand with a mix that includes protective large trees.

Chop trees, bury them

A potentially even more disruptive technique than killing trees specifically to bury them at sea calls for burying logged trees in “vaults” under the ground. Some private companies, such as Kodama Systems, are already moving forward on this concept.

Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy provided about $6 million in seed money to US-based Kodama Systems. Gates’ investment helped the company develop ways to log trees remotely, eliminating the need for most human labor by using equipment fitted with technology similar to that powering self-driving cars. The company bills the equipment as allowing logging day and night.

Once cut and stacked, these logged trees would be buried in waterproof “vaults” designed to keep out the oxygen that could lead to their decay. This plan would displace forests and other ecosystems, destroy soil profiles and disrupt water flow on a landscape burdened with a series of hill-like, water-proof vaults.

As with displacing forests to build carbon-collecting warehouses and mines to support them, the cure would be worse than the disease at the level of the landscape, where life thrives.

Backed by Bill Gates

Gates has put his money into the other two types of projects mentioned above as well. He has financed experiments designed to use sulfuric acid to block sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface.

He also funded several start-ups to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using limestone derivatives and energy-intensive technology.

Heirloom Carbon Technologies is one of the Gates-supported startups. Heirloom has become a force in Louisiana, where it is setting up a huge warehouse in Shreveport.

I had hoped some of the current administration’s cuts to climate change projects would slow Heirloom down a bit. Unfortunately, Louisiana Representative and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson intervened, allowing Heirloom to dodge the budget axe that hacked away federal funding from projects to produce electricity from solar and wind energy.

On a positive note

Given the type of projects funded by Gates, it wasn’t all bad news to me to hear that he was shifting his focus away from climate change. In late October, Gates announced he was backing away from climate issues to focus on health and welfare in developing countries.

It’s pretty obvious he’s doing that because of Microsoft’s ongoing expansion into energy-sucking Artificial Intelligence, as I wrote in November. Mere days after he stepped away from climate change concerns, the company he co-founded, Microsoft, announced its financial stake in the newly for-profit OpenAI and other plans to boost AI development.

The push to create energy-intensive data centers for AI has derailed international efforts to fight climate change as multi-billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk seek to expand their influence. (As an irresistible aside, Gates and Musk are among those named in the Epstein files.)

Any renewable energy used to power these massive, electricity-guzzling centers will require mining, even as they hamper ongoing efforts by the rest of the world’s people to switch to renewables for their non-AI needs. The same holds for any renewable energy powering the tech-heavy schemes described above.

Those watching AI warn we’ll be losing many human jobs to machines if the AI-powered vision of these billionaires comes to pass. There’s some evidence that the work force reduction has already begun.

Now we can start adding trees to the list of those who will lose their jobs—that is, if billionaires like Bill Gates and other profit-minded people continue to shift us into a future dominated by machines.

A modern fairy tale: Burying trees will 'protect' climate

Melanie Lenart — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:16:05 GMT

Photo by Peter Robbins on Unsplash

People proposing to log trees and bury them to fight climate change remind me of children playing with matchsticks.

It’s an apt comparison because proponents of the idea tend to see trees as mere sticks of wood threatening to ignite. From that limited perspective, proposals to bury trees by land and sea might not sound, at first hearing, as absurd as they are.

Ulf Büntgen and colleagues, for instance, last month proposed to pluck trees out of northern forests for a sea burial, partly to prevent their crowns from flaring up.

Spurred on by other scientists with similar ideas and funding from Bill Gates, some entrepreneurs have already started carrying out a similar concept by burying trees on land.

There are so many problems with this concept. To keep this piece to a reasonable length, though, I will focus on the carbon dioxide perspective, as the well-supported entrepreneurs and presumably well-meaning scientists do.

Here’s the bottom line: A lot of the carbon they envision being protected at the bottom of the ocean or under piles of soil is already being sequestered into long-term storage—including in forests torched by wildfires.

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Disposing of 7 billion trees a year

Trees are great at converting heat-trapping carbon dioxide into solid carbon compounds. That’s how they make their leaves, roots and trunks.

Wood is about half carbon by dry weight. And that’s why forests, even now, consume much of the carbon dioxide released by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas and, yes, forests.

During wildfire and other forms of decay, though, a fraction of the solid carbon in forests joins with airborne oxygen to return to a gaseous existence as carbon dioxide. The assumption behind these burial projects is that future wildfires will convert massive amounts of carbon stored in tree trunks into carbon dioxide—a heat-trapping gas spurring on global warming.

Forests have myriad values that go beyond the carbon they hoard. I’ve described some of their climate-moderating skills in previous posts. I’ll expand upon them in months and years to come.

Yet Büntgen, a geography professor at the University of Cambridge, and seven colleagues who published a January npj Climate Action article can’t see the forests beyond the carbon they contain. They propose clearing about 45 million acres of northern forests a year and tossing the harvested tree trunks into rivers for transport to the ocean.

The authors suggest most of the razed trees could reach the ocean floor within a year or two of being hoisted into nearby northern rivers—the Ob, Yenisey, Lena, Yukon, and Mackenzie—and their tributaries in Russia, Canada and Alaska.

These scientists argue “only 1 percent” of the northern forests known as boreal could be razed and floated off every year to trap about 1 billion metric tonnes (or 1.1 billion US tons) of carbon dioxide. Based on an estimate of the number of boreal trees from Thomas Crowther and colleagues, this could amount to more than 7 billion trees annually facing a sea burial.

And for what? A well-researched scientific analysis published in December suggests at least two-thirds of the carbon stored above ground in forests ravaged by wildfires already remains intact.

Up in smoke?

It’s understandable that anyone who has ever fed wood to a fire could imagine that wildfires consume the wood in their paths.

In the fireplace at my sister’s Ohio home, where I often stay during winter visits, the logs in the glass-covered fireplace burn mostly to ash during their long night of heating.

Yet fireplaces and campfires are contained and tended. Fire is trapped in one space and encouraged to burn.

In nature, fire runs free. It flashes across the landscape, lapping at trunks, often without killing the trees.

Even the high-severity fires that kill 95 percent of the trees don’t linger long enough to turn wood into ash. Instead, they turn standing trees into pillars of charcoal, like those in the image at the top of this post.

I first saw this while doing research on the aftermath of the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire that burned more than 460,000 acres in Arizona’s White Mountains. At the recommendation of locals in Show Low, I drove to a mountaintop site, Juniper Ridge, one of the areas where a 5,000-acre swath of trees had been torched to death.

The blackened silhouettes looked horrifying. They remind us of death. Still these shadowy skeletons of formerly living trees continued to store tons of carbon.

Since then, I’ve found similar charcoalized tree remnants (also like those in the images at the bottom of this post) anywhere I’ve informally inspected burn sites.

Standing dead and charred

After many years of wondering why few scientists bothered to assess this, I finally came across a 2025 Ecosphere article reporting extensive post-fire measurements of these standing pillars and their estimated carbon storage.

The research team, led by Jenna E. Morris of the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, surveyed forest stands in Washington and Oregon. They tallied carbon in living and dead plants at 40 sites with high-severity burns, 24 sites with low-severity burns, and 31 comparable but unburned sites.

And their findings supported my informal assessments.

Even the severely burned sites still contained about two-thirds of the carbon found on unburned sites of comparable ages, they found. The main difference was more of the carbon now resided in dead wood. The sites with low-severity burns generally contained more carbon than comparable unburned site.

What’s more, much of that dead wood sported a layer of char that could help protect it from decay. As the authors explained:

Our findings suggest that fire, regardless of severity, can promote long-term carbon storage in wet temperate forests via char formation. Black carbon within charred wood biomass is a particularly persistent form of dead carbon that is resistant to decay.

Long-lasting carbon

The rainforests of Washington and Oregon studied by Morris and her team differ in stature from the northern boreal forests targeted by Büntgen and his colleagues for deep-sea burial. But they’re not unlike the California forests targeted for burial by the start-up Kodama.

At any rate, charred trees everywhere would gain a layer of protection from decay. They also stand as an even more condensed form of carbon than living trees, with a carbon content of about 82 percent.

Charcoal forms when wood burns under low-oxygen conditions, such as when burning while buried underground.

Raging wildfires quickly consume much of the oxygen around them. Thus, it makes sense that wildfires create, in effect, charcoal.

Besides enduring for at least decades and often centuries, charred wood fertilizes soil. Think biochar. So, its presence can nourish the next generation of trees.

Razing forests won’t help

In contrast, harvested sites, even when replanted, often falter in regeneration. James Hansen explained this well in a January 30 post describing the folly of the “Fix Our Forests Act” under consideration by the US Congress.

As with the proposal under discussion today, the act supposedly “protects” trees from wildfire by clearing them off the land.

Hansen and his co-authors illustrate how bringing in machinery to log trees can stunt forest regrowth far more than wildfires.

The same holds for replanted trees on sites where their predecessors were harvested for mere burial. Büntgen and his colleagues suggest planting a single species of tree seedlings on the denuded lands that once held boreal forests.

What’s more, the trees that do survive to create even-aged stands will soon grow into kindling that can support major fires.

Morris and her colleagues point out the youngest stands in the western forests they researched were far more likely to burn severely when fires did pass through. In fact, they couldn’t even find young forest stands that had faced a low-severity burn.

So, another irony is that any forests razed for supposed protection from wildfires will be more likely to suffer from future high-severity burns. But, as Morris and her team note, younger forests leave a lot less carbon behind than those permitted to grow big and tall.

Why are we missing this?

You would think there would have been more research before now on how much carbon wildfires leave behind.

For that matter, you would think we scientists would have more details on how tree decay worked in general, whether by wildfire or the gradual decomposition of logs on the landscape. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, I did some work on this, which I touched upon in an April post.

Yet even Morris and her colleagues, writing in 2025, had to refer to 1986 research—a rare paper on the topic, published four decades ago—to support the premise that even uncharred dead wood can several decades to centuries to fully decompose. That’s the same paper I’ve cited for similar purposes.

The relative dearth of research on the endurance of carbon in forests is one of the reasons even scientists holding the most advanced degrees can still struggle with understanding the role of our forests and other life forms comprising the biosphere.

Meanwhile, billionaires like Bill Gates have been funneling millions into half-baked ideas that inspire young go-getters to create businesses treating trees like matchsticks. These businesses even want financial credits for the rampage.

Taking down forests merely to “protect” them from decay is an idea that comes from a childlike understanding of the role of global forests. Yet taking action on the concept is not child’s play.

At best, the result would be far less carbon stored than proponents imagine. At worst, the plan could result in not only less carbon storage but less tree growth and the diminishment of other protections from global warming.

And that, to borrow from another concept from childhood, would amount to killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

For more discussion of this topic, consider registering for the webinar hosted by Hart Hagan at 7 p.m. Eastern time today (February 2). In coming weeks, I’ll come back to some of the other unknowns affecting our view of forests as well as other horrible ideas for climate change “fixes.”

Thanks for reading Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart! This post is public so feel free to share it.

See for yourself

Don’t just take my word for it. If you can, visit a burned area near you to see for yourself the aftermath of a forest fire. In the meantime, check out the pictures below and in the Open Access research article by Jenna E. Morris and her colleagues to see for yourself how much carbon remains intact on sites following fires.

These images from the Ecosphere publication by Morris and her colleagues shows what forested sites look like after high-severity burns (top), low-severity burns (middle) and areas not recently burned (bottom). Image permitted for use under Open Access agreement.

Eco-Logic by Melanie Lenart

Can midterm elections head off AI-mageddon?

ACC: An obscure but crucial board

Candidates target AI data centers

Pima County Board of Supervisors

Other races of interest

Summary for Arizona voters

References and Resources

Jacob Coxon launched widespread concern for the existential threat of AI when he posted on X that his work at Anthropic and OpenAI made him afraid it could “kill us all” by 2030.

An easy way to help protect forests on deadlines like today’s

The deadline is midnight tonight for submitting comments to protect Oregon’s old-growth forests from attack once again. (That’s Eastern time, September 30.) Photo of an old-growth forest in Oregon by David Herasimtschuk.

Supporting information

To thwart AI, starve it of electricity

Data centers serve AI

AI data centers need electricity

Does population growth justify project?

This snapshot of the proposed Three Points Solar project area shows (dark blue) where the desert would be razed to erect solar panels across the 5,500-acre area. Image of a poster at a Repsol event is courtesy of Michael Newberry of the Southern Arizona Open Space Alliance.

Pull the plug on AI

References and Resources

Power to the people, not the data centers

Tucson citizens attend a 2025 meeting about Beale’s Project Blue data center. Photo by Melanie Lenart

Solar power play

A letter from Repsol to local residents indicates the general project area of the proposed industrial solar array.

TEP and solar project

TEP’s request to board

Who would be empowered?

TEP bound to data center

Canadian company owns TEP

What can we do?

Resources and references

TEP primer on electrical system

Where’s the carbon? Into the rivers, through the woods

Cycle starts with carbon dioxide

More carbon entering rivers

Tropical forests are heavy-weights

Areas in red represent the biggest output of organic carbon, as shown in the Open Access Carbon Balance and Management article graphic.

Extra carbon dioxide fertilizes plants

Putting it all together

See for yourself

Related Reading and Resources

Flower Power: Bees need non-tainted buds

A cultural love of flowers in Portugal helps bees, as shown in this bottlebrush tree. Photo by Melanie Lenart

US lawns replace forage

Flowers provided a background to the April 25 Freedom Day demonstration, including on this banner in Porto. Photo by Melanie Lenart

Promising rose gardens

Red carnations symbolize the overthrow of a dictatorship that held Portugal in its grip from 1933 to 1974. This monument stood in the São Pedro do Sul area. Photo by Melanie Lenart

US bee hives crashing

Unlike Europe, US favors GMOs

Tainted wax, pollen in the US v. Europe

A reason for hope

Flowers for everyone

References and Related Reading

Pesticides in paradise: PR targets mosquitoes

Puerto Rico, considered an island paradise by many, also serves as a popular destination for mosquitoes. Photo by Melanie Lenart

Bugs on the downswing

Apocalypse or hurricane response?

Puerto Rico’s swat team

Aedes aegypti, can carry Zika, dengue, West Nile virus and chikungunya.

Bloody pests

Targeting mosquitoes

References and Related Reading

2025, Puerto Rico Tackles Dengue with Help from GIS, published by ArcNews:

Puerto Rican Vector Control Unit website:

Beyond Pesticides’ Chemical Watch Fact Sheet: Naled:

Science Direct resource on Naled and other pesticides:

2025 Foundation for Puerto Rico’s Visitor Economy Performance Model Report:

2026 Independent news article by Julia Musto, published on July 2:

2025 PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases article, published January 21:

Are you seeing many bugs?

Check out flowers

Bee sightings have been rare. The one that visited this rain garden in Saline, Michigan, sped off when I approached. Photo by Melanie Lenart

Bees flock to bottle brush flowers in Portugal. Photo by Melanie Lenart

Go to the lights

Watch your windshields

What are you seeing?

Related reading

It’s not the heat, it’s the hurricanes

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An informal survey

Hiking through tropical rainforest in Cayey, Puerto Rico. Photo by Melanie Lenart