Water seems deceptively simple and is easy to take for granted. It has no color, taste or smell and is one of the most plentiful chemical compounds on Earth. Recycled endlessly through the biosphere in its various forms, it is fundamental to keeping our planet’s operating system intact, and has done so for millions of years.
Water is life. Earth’s oceans are where life likely originated, and freshwater is essential for plants and animals to persist and thrive. It is basic to all human development. But as our 21st-century world gallops ahead, we are vastly manipulating the water cycle at an unprecedented rate and scale to meet the ever-growing needs of an exploding population.
By 2030, we will have built enough dams to alter 93% of the world’s rivers. Estimates vary, but we already use around 90% of the planet’s freshwater to grow our food. More than half of us now live in cities, but by 2050 a projected 68% of the world’s nearly 8 billion people will reside in urban areas. That metropolitan lifestyle will require astronomical amounts of water — extracted, treated, and piped over large distances. Humanity also prevents much rainwater from easily infiltrating underground, reducing aquifers, as we pave over immense areas with impermeable concrete and asphalt.
But these easily visible changes are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Researchers are shining new light on sweeping human alterations to Earth’s water cycle, many playing out in processes largely unseen. In the Anthropocene — the unofficial name for the current human-influenced unit of geologic time — we are already pushing one of Earth’s most fundamental and foundational systems, the hydrological cycle, toward the breaking point.
Trouble is, we don’t yet know when this threshold may be reached, or what the precise consequences will be. Scientists are resolutely seeking answers.
Water flows past Copenhagen in Denmark. As Earth’s urban areas expand, so do population pressures on the freshwater supply and the water cycle. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Water cycle basics
The hydrological cycle is powered by the sun and flows through eternal inhalations and exhalations of water in different states, as it is exchanged between the atmosphere and the planet. Liquid water from oceans, lakes and rivers rises via evaporation into the sky, to form water vapor, an important greenhouse gas that, like carbon dioxide, helps insulate the planet to maintain that “just right” temperature to maintain life as we know it.
Atmospheric water vapor then changes to liquid, falling to earth as precipitation. It then flows as runoff again across the landscape, and what doesn’t go back into waterbodies, settles into soils, to be taken up by plants and released via transpiration as vapor skyward. A large amount of freshwater is also locked in glaciers and icecaps.
Within this cycle, there are constant complex interactions between what scientists call blue and green water. Blue water includes rivers, lakes, reservoirs and renewable groundwater stores. Green water is defined as terrestrial precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture.
Partitioning of rainwater into green and blue water flows. Image by Geertsma et al. (2009)/Baseline Review for the Pilot Programme in Kenya. Green Water Credits Report 8, ISRIC–World Soil Information, Wageningen.
A fully functioning hydrological cycle, with balanced supplies and flows of blue and green water, is essential to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, human food availability and production, and our energy security.
It also regulates Earth’s weather and influences climate. Atmospheric temperature, for example, is dependent on evaporation and condensation. That’s because as water evaporates, it absorbs energy and cools the local environment, and as it condenses, it releases energy and warms the world. Throughout the Holocene geological epoch, a relatively stable water cycle helped maintain balanced temperatures and conditions able to support civilization.
However, in the Anthropocene, human activity has impacted the water cycle, the climate and ecosystems. For one, as more human-produced CO2 and methane build up in the atmosphere, more solar energy is held by the planet, causing global warming. And the hotter the air, the greater the quantity of water vapor the atmosphere can hold. That’s bad news because water vapor is itself a powerful greenhouse gas, greatly increasing the warming.
As our anthropogenic manipulation of the water cycle escalates on a global scale, we urgently need a holistic way to monitor these modifications and understand their impacts. Yet, the topic has not received the urgent scientific attention it requires. “To the best of our knowledge, there is no study comprehensively investigating whether human modifications of the water cycle have led, could be leading, or will lead to planetary‐scale regime shifts in the Earth system,” researchers noted in a 2020 paper on the role of the water cycle in maintaining fundamental Earth functioning.
One key concern of scientists: If severe hydrological shifts occur in too many regions, or in key regions that greatly influence the water cycle or water availability (such as the Amazon), then that could provoke shifts in other regions, in a global chain reaction, says study co-author Dieter Gerten, working group leader and Earth modeling coordinator at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“Conceptually we know that there must be a limit for how much we can disturb the [hydrological] system before we start feeling serious impacts on the Earth system and then, by extension, to humanity,” says one of the paper’s other co-authors, Miina Porkka, a postdoctoral researcher at the Water and Development Group at Aalto University in Finland.
International researchers under the auspices of the Stockholm Resilience Centre have been hammering away at answering these questions. They had to start with the basics. One big problem to date has been scientists’ lack of a metric for quantifying serious water cycle alterations. How do we even measure changes to the water cycle?
“It gets complicated,” says Gerten, who has been involved in the research to bring a global perspective to local water management since 2009, as conducted under the Planetary Boundaries Framework; Gerten is also a professor of global change climatology and hydrology at Humboldt University of Berlin.
The Toktogul reservoir in Kyrgyzstan. The Anthropocene is producing wholesale manipulations to Earth’s water cycle. For example, by 2030, more than 90% of the world’s rivers will likely be altered by dams. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Measuring change: Blue water
The Planetary Boundaries Framework defines a safe operating space for humanity as represented by nine natural global processes that, if severely destabilized, could disrupt Earth’s operating system and threaten life and civilization. The freshwater planetary boundary presents one such threshold, and scientists are working to define a global limit to anthropogenic water cycle modifications.
Initially, in 2009, river flow was used to try and measure the boundary threshold, Gerten explains, because blue water in all its forms was seen to integrate the three largest anthropogenic manipulations of the water cycle: human impacts on precipitation patterns, modifications of soil moisture by land use and land cover; and water withdrawals for human use.
This research used a simple calculation of the global sum of the average annual surface water flow in rivers, with an assumed 30% of that accessible water needing to be protected. This “freshwater use” boundary was set at 4,000 cubic kilometers (960 cubic miles) per year of blue water consumption. This is at the lower limit of a 4,000-6,000 km3 (960-1,440 mi3) annual range designated as a danger zone that takes us “too close to the risk of blue and green water-induced thresholds that could have deleterious or even catastrophic impacts on the Earth System,” researchers wrote in a 2020 paper that evaluated the water planetary boundary.
The Padysha-Ata River in Kyrgyzstan. Blue water includes rivers as well as lakes, reservoirs, and renewable groundwater stores. Image by Petro Kotzé.
With only an estimated 2,600 km3 (624 mi3) of water withdrawn annually at the time of the study, scientists concluded we were still in the safe zone. However, “That [conclusion] was immediately criticized,” Gerten says, in part because scientists were already seeing ample regional water-related problems. Another criticism argued that the measure of blue water alone did not reflect all types of human interference with the water cycle and Earth system.
Gerten later led work that proposed quantifying the boundary by assessing the amount of streamflow needed to maintain environmental flow requirements in all river basins on Earth. This approach had the advantage of recognizing regionally transgressed limits and thereby deduced a global value.
According to this newer calculation, the freshwater use planetary boundary should be set much lower, at about 2,800 km3 (672 mi3), Gerten says, which means humanity is already much closer to the danger zone than previously thought. “Water is more limited on Planet Earth than we think,” Gerten cautions.
The nine planetary boundaries, counterclockwise from top: climate change, biosphere integrity (functional and genetic), land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, and release of novel chemicals. In 2022, scientists announced the transgression of both the freshwater and novel entities boundaries. Image courtesy of J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. (2015) via Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Redefining the freshwater boundary: Green water
Over time, a consortium of researchers was formed to deeply scrutinize the freshwater boundary. This resulted in follow-up work in 2019 and 2020 proposing that the freshwater boundary be divided into sub-boundaries related to major stores of freshwater: namely atmospheric water, frozen water, groundwater, soil moisture, and surface water.
Since then, scientists simplified their approach further. “Even though we are talking about very complex matters,” Porkka says, the boundary definition, to be useful as a metric, needed to stay “relatively simple.”
The most recent and sweeping reassessment of the freshwater planetary boundary was published in 2022. “Our suggestion is to … change the name from ‘freshwater use planetary boundary’ to ‘freshwater change planetary boundary,’” says study lead author Lan Wang-Erlandsson from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. “Then, to have two components,” she adds, “One for green water, and one for blue water.”
“Water has so many functions in the Earth system, and many of them happen invisibly via green water,” Gerten explains. “We don’t see it and we don’t feel it. That’s why [green water] has been neglected over decades. The focus has been on river flows and groundwater because we can see it, feel it, use it, and touch it. But [as a result] a big share of the water cycle has been overlooked.”
The Tsitsikamma forests in South Africa’s Garden Route region. The water taken up by plants and released via transpiration as vapor skyward is an integral part of the water cycle. Image by Petro Kotzé.
The newly accepted metric for tracking green water: The soil moisture in the root zone of plants, or more technically: “the percentage of ice-free land area on which root-zone soil moisture anomalies exit the local bounds of baseline variability in any month of the year.”
This new proxy is appealing because it is directly influenced by human pressures with change over time measurable. In turn, soil moisture directly impacts a range of large-scale ecological, climatic, biogeochemical and hydrological dynamics.
Using this novel green water boundary transgression criteria, scientists detected a major hydrological departure from the baseline set during the Holocene. And the evidence for such a departure is overwhelming: Researchers found “unprecedented areas [of Earth] with root-zone soil moisture anomalies,” indicating an exit from the so-called “safe zone.”
A second criteria, Earth Systems Resilience, was also instituted. Researchers evaluated the state of regional climate systems (ranging from monsoons to land carbon sinks and large biomes) to see which have seen enhanced changes in their process rates, resulting in ripple effects that could destabilize the Earth system, Wang-Erlandsson explains.
Lake Sary-Chelek, part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, in Kyrgyzstan. The hydrological cycle represents an eternal exchange of water in different states between the atmosphere and the planet’s surface, and it maintains the biosphere as we know it. Within this cycle, there is constant interaction between blue and green water. Image by Petro Kotzé.
A transgressed freshwater change boundary
Unfortunately, examples of compromised Earth System Resilience transgressions are rife across the planet.
Take the Amazon Rainforest, for instance. It is now understood that carbon uptake likely peaked there in the 1990s, with a sequestration decline since then driven by escalating climate change and fires, along with global demand for agricultural commodities, which spurred extensive Amazon forest clearing, bringing major land-use change. More recently, African tropical forests have passed their carbon uptake peak.
When these vast biomes and natural systems are put under extreme multiple stressors, the effects can self-amplify and lead to greater, more rapid, rates of change, Wang-Erlandsson says: In South America, this combination of stressors, particularly deforestation and climate change, is inducing intensifying drought, which is now leading to cascading perturbations in living systems. Scientists now think the rainforest biome, stable for thousands of years, is reaching a tipping point, and could quickly transition to seasonal forest, or even a degraded savanna. This shift could lead to the transformation of the South American monsoon system, and a permanent state of reduced rainfall and impoverished biodiversity.
But what starts in the Amazon won’t likely stay there: The rainforest’s destruction will release massive amounts of carbon, intensifying climate change, potentially leading to climate and ecological tipping points in other biomes.
Agricultural development in Uzbekistan. Global land-use change, including large-scale deforestation and irrigation, is contributing to major alterations in the water cycle, leading to a destabilized climate and major global environmental and sociopolitical disruptions. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Another concerning example (although debated) of an Earth system shift is the suggestion of a weakening carbon fertilization process, in which higher atmospheric carbon concentrations result in speeded-up photosynthesis as plants try to improve water efficiency in the face of drought. It is thought that this effect is happening already, brought on by limitations in nutrient and soil moisture availability.
In drylands, climate change and ecosystem degradation are triggering vicious cycles of infiltration capacity loss — a decrease in soil moisture and moisture recycling, resulting in increasing desertification and biodiversity loss. In polar permafrost regions, soil moisture saturation could accelerate thawing, generating dangerous methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas far more powerful than carbon dioxide.
Alarmed by the water cycle’s departure from the Holocene baseline, and noting “worrying” signs of low Earth System Resilience, researchers early in 2022 declared the green water boundary to be “considerably transgressed.” The situation, they said, will likely worsen before any reversals in the trend will be observed. “Green water modifications are now causing rising Earth system risks at a scale that modern civilizations might not have ever faced,” the study states.
We don’t yet know what the planetary-scale impacts will ultimately be, but, Porkka says, we have an idea of how impacts could be felt in different parts of the world.
An irrigation canal runs past apricot orchards in the Batken region of Kyrgyzstan. We have vastly manipulated Earth’s water cycle to suit humanity’s needs. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Disastrous extreme weather events
Regional extreme events, including floods and mega droughts, are already occurring, Porkka notes. Examples are to be found on every continent.
On Africa’s southeast coast, as just one example: the World Weather Attribution (WWA) network of scientists has found that human-induced climate change has increased the likelihood and intensity of heavy rainfall associated with tropical cyclones. The group based their findings on an analysis of tropical storms Ana and Batisrai, which battered parts of Madagascar, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe in early 2022. Both cyclonic systems brought devastating floods that caused severe humanitarian impacts, including many deaths and injuries and large-scale damage to infrastructure. These sorts of extreme weather events put great pressure on socioeconomic and political institutions, and could easily destabilize struggling developing nations.
Of the top 10 climate disasters, those causing the largest human losses during that period were droughts (650,000 deaths), storms (577,232), floods (58,700), and extreme temperature (55,736 deaths). In economic terms, the top 10 events included storms (costing $521 billion) and floods ($115 billion).
Clouds above a dusty road in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The hydrological cycle is powered by the sun and is an eternal exchange of water between the atmosphere and the planet. As climate change escalates, so do extreme weather events such as droughts and intense storms. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Porkka points out, however, that freshwater system destabilization impacts can be more subtle than extreme events. Widespread irrigation of croplands, for example, can increase evaporation to such a high degree that even distant precipitation patterns are altered. Part of the problem is that we do not know if consequences like these are negative or positive.
“[W]e know that we’re changing the [hydrological] system in fundamental ways and, once we do, we don’t really know how the impacts accumulate,” says Porkka.
While many riddles remain, scientists now feel they have a reliable metric for accurately tracking transgressions of the freshwater change boundary. “The prime question was what the key variables are, and I think that is relatively solid now with soil moisture [green water] and river flows [blue water],” Gerten says. “The next questions are, where exactly to put the boundaries, and what happens if they are transgressed?”
Based on these findings, researchers are calling for urgent action: “The current global trends and trajectories of increasing water use, deforestation, land degradation, soil erosion, atmospheric pollution, and climate change need to be promptly halted and reversed to increase the chances of remaining in [Earth’s] safe operating space.”
That’s a tall order, and no matter humanity’s actions, we don’t know how things will play out. “Water is so fundamental and elemental, and at the same time, so varied,” Gerten says, and there is no silver bullet for solving our hydrological problems.
South Africa’s Orange River tumbles over Augrabies Falls. Water is one of the most plentiful chemical compounds on Earth and is recycled endlessly through the biosphere in different forms. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Banner image: Farmers tending to their agricultural land in Uzbekistan. Image by Petro Kotzé.
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Wang-Erlandsson, L., Tobian, A., van der Ent, R. J., Fetzer, I., te Wierik, S., Porkka, M., … Rockström, J. (2022). A planetary boundary for green water. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. doi:10.1038/s43017-022-00287-8
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Editor’s note: A big backlash to new “renewables” is mounting across the country. With states, corporations, utilities and the federal government setting aggressive “renewable” energy goals, as well as big tax incentives such as the Inflation Reduction Act, wind and solar developers have been pushing projects that are igniting fierce battles over the environment, property rights, loss of farmland, climate change, aesthetics, the merits of renewable power and a host of other concerns.
With states, corporations, utilities and the federal government setting aggressive renewable energy goals, as well as big tax incentives such as in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, wind and solar developers have been pushing projects that are igniting fierce battles over property rights, loss of farmland, climate change, aesthetics, the merits of renewable power and a host of other concerns.
“My guess is that we’re going to need a lot of “renewables” built on public lands further west, just because we’re seeing so much opposition growing up, especially sort of the middle of the country that’s already very dense on wind,” said Rich Powell, CEO of Clear Path, a nonprofit policy group working to curb carbon emissions, during a panel discussion on the state of the electric grid since the deadly 2021 winter storm Uri.
What is happening in these backlash battles is a lot of what is called misinformation that is skewed by political polarization. Community resistance to these projects sends a clear message to the powers that be that there are legitimate concerns that run across party lines about “renewables” energy. The issue concerning “renewables” shouldn’t be a left or right discussion but one that looks forward at the cost environmentally and economically instead.
“A week after enacting one of the state’s strictest ordinances governing commercial wind energy production, Washington County Supervisors directed staff not to accept any applications for turbine development until after the code can be amended with provisions governing debris cleanup for the generators.”
Will local control be lost? State climate bill likely to usurp authority over siting of clean energy infrastructure
Coalition broadens attack on offshore wind with pledge to scrap second declared zone
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
A backlash lawsuit is challenging how the state of Michigan plans to approve large renewable energy projects, just weeks before a new law is set to go into effect.
About 80 townships and counties are suing the Public Service Commission, the state’s energy regulating body, over how it plans to grant siting permissions to renewable projects. The suit, filed November 8, could shape how and where solar, wind, and battery storage are developed — and it muddies the process for projects to be approved in the meantime.
Last year, Michigan’s Democrat-controlled Legislature passed a bundle of ambitious climate policies, including changes to the application process for large renewable projects. One of those laws, Public Act 233, allows the state to greenlight utility-scale renewables — like solar arrays of at least 50 megawatts — that in the past could have been slowed or blocked by local governments. The bill passed on promises that it would help meet clean energy goals and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by providing developers with additional paths forward.
Renewable energy advocates had high hopes that it would mark a turning point for Michigan, which has a deep history of local control. In crafting PA 233, lawmakers followed the example of states like Illinois that in recent years have worked to streamline permitting and curtail local governments’ power to restrict renewables.
“I think there was a huge amount of relief on the part of landowners, who have had options agreements and contracts to participate in wind and solar projects, but have been blocked from getting lease payments, essentially, by backlash from local governments,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Eisenson has argued for regulators to clarify Michigan’s law to ensure projects are protected from local restrictions. According to the Sabin Center, by the end of 2023, at least 22 clean energy projects had been stalled throughout the state by local governments (though some have since moved forward) and at least seven townships had placed severe restrictions on developing industrial solar in areas zoned for agricultural use.
Critics of the law, meanwhile, allege that it wrests control away from the people who live in these areas, and the local governments that know what’s best for their communities.
Legal challenges to Michigan’s new climate laws weren’t exactly unexpected; an effort to repeal the siting law entirely failed earlier this year, because organizers didn’t collect enough signatures to put it to a vote. But this latest appeal in Michigan has gained national attention, with the climate news site Heatmap News writing that it may be “the most important legal challenge for the “renewables” industry in America.”
The lawsuit is challenging the Public Service Commission’s plans to implement the renewable siting law, not the law itself. And as other states consider permitting reform — and whether to keep big “renewable” projects under local or state control — such legal actions could be easier than trying to repeal an entire law, Eisenson said: “There are more options.”
This latest legal challenge was filed after the Public Service Commission announced how the new law for approving project sites would work — a process that involved months of public engagement by the commission in an effort to clarify the rules, including what, exactly, local governments need to have on the books to get the first say on a proposed project.
The lawsuit says the commission’s regulators didn’t follow the proper rulemaking procedures to issue such requirements, and that they undermined the local control that’s baked into PA 233. In particular, the suit challenges the commission’s definition of a “compatible renewable energy ordinance” — a local law that complies with specific state guidelines. PA 233 stipulates that renewable project developers first apply locally as long as the government has a compatible ordinance. If that local ordinance is more restrictive than state law, developers can instead apply directly to the state for approval.
That left some big questions.
Sarah Mills, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan who researches how renewable energy impacts rural communities, said while parts of PA 233 are clear — such as the sections on setbacks, fencing, height, and sound — others are murky.
“There’s a whole bunch of things that are traditionally regulated for renewable energy projects that are not mentioned in the law,” she said, like whether local governments can require trees and bushes or ground cover.
The Public Service Commission claims that for a local ordinance to be compatible, it can’t include restrictions on things not included in the law. The plaintiffs behind the appeal disagree.
“That’s not the state of the law, and frankly, it rewrites the legislation, because it doesn’t say that,” said Michael Homier, an attorney with the firm Foster Swift Collins & Smith, who is representing the plaintiffs.
What it comes down to, Homier said, is the scope of the commission’s authority: While he acknowledges regulators can still weigh in on applications, the suit challenges the commission’s broader interpretation of how the law should work.
A commission spokesperson said they couldn’t comment.
Under the commission’s order, only the local government that is zoning a renewable project needs to be considered when granting an approval. But the lawsuit argues that when more than one jurisdiction is affected — like when a county overlaps with a township — both entities should be included in the decision-making.
Mills points out this would affect how much money would flow to local communities from these projects. The state’s law says communities where large projects are located would receive $2,000 per megawatt, along with any required legal fees, which the developer would pay.
“If the affected local unit of government isn’t only the zoning jurisdiction, then the developer would need to pay $2,000 to the county and to the township. So it would be $4,000 per megawatt,” Mills said, in which case “developers are going to have to pay more money.”
Those represented in the appeal are a minority of local jurisdictions; Michigan has 83 counties and more than 1,200 townships. Many are to the south and around the agricultural region in the east colloquially called “The Thumb,” though a few are farther north.
Watchdog groups that track efforts to oppose renewable energy projects say legal challenges are part of coordinated opposition to such development.
“The lawsuit is an extension of ongoing efforts by anti-renewables interests to thwart clean energy in Michigan, and seeks to open the door to poison-pill local rules that effectively prohibit renewables development,” said researcher Jonathan Kim of the Energy and Policy Institute in an email.
In Michigan, debates over large-scale clean energy projects have been acrimonious, and have had consequences for elected officials. Douglass Township, with a population of a little over 2,200, held a recall election in 2022 — part of a wave of unrest in Montcalm County driven by opposition to renewables. “So our community was totally behind us working on ordinances that would protect them from industrialized wind and solar energy,” said Cindy Shick, who won the race for township supervisor as part of the recall.
The state’s recent siting law drastically diminished the local control they had crafted, according to Shick, and the commission’s order eroded it even further, which is why the township joined the lawsuit.
Reasons for opposing utility-scale renewable projects vary widely, from concerns about a loss of agricultural land to the effects such developments would have on the environment. Other critics point out that companies too often fail to consult tribal nations and ignore Indigenous rights when pursuing projects.
Still, others in support of more development say it’s a boon to communities and people looking to make money by leasing their land. Clyde Taylor, 84, is a farmer who grows hay in Isabella Township in central Michigan. The township is among those suing, though Taylor hasn’t looked into the lawsuit.
He’s allowing a company to build a solar array on around two dozen acres of his land. While he has “mixed feelings” about the state’s new siting law, he generally supports it.
“We have to have laws on the books to make this thing fly,” he said, referring to renewable energy adoption. “And they’ve made it fair enough,” with solar projects under 50 megawatts staying in local control.
Ultimately, the local governments involved in the lawsuit are asking the Court of Appeals to cancel at least part of the commission’s order. The law is set to go into effect on November 29. If the appeal is successful at halting the Public Service Commission from implementing the order, it’s unclear how PA 233 would work as the suit moves through the court, a process that could take more than a year.
Editor’s note: “Birds and Offshore Wind: Developing the Offshore Wind that Birds Need”. – 2025 National Audubon Society
With up to a million birds currently being killed each year directly(which does not include indirect causes from mining and manufacturing) by wind turbines in the US, why would an organization dedicated to protecting birds say such a thing? Add on the fact that Wind facilities also require relatively large areas of land and sea. Facility development fragments and otherwise alters habitat in ways that make it unsuitable for species that have historically been present.
Report: “Conflicts of Interest” – Environmental Organizations(Audubon among them) Take Offshore Wind Industry Money
“These offshore projects, which could decimate hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, will be built by some of the largest international oil and gas companies in the world,” the group said. “Our findings take on suspended belief when one considers Ørsted’s involvement with the New Jersey Audubon Society.” The Danish company is the official sponsor of the New Jersey Audubon Society’s fundraiser, the World Series of Birding where funds are raised to support bird conservation.
Sixteen shorebird species have been reclassified to higher threat categories as the global population of migratory shorebirds across the world saw a substantial decline, according to the latest update to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Conservation partnership BirdLife International, which helps examine the status of the world’s birds for the IUCN Red List, reassessed around half of the 254 species of shorebirds the organization currently monitors, for 2024, according to Ian Burfield, BirdLife International’s global science coordinator.
The reassessment was prompted by a study published last year that showed steep declines in many shorebird species in North America, Burfield told Mongabay via email.
“[B]ut as it only covered part of their global populations, we had to source equivalent data from elsewhere … to produce a global picture, before applying the IUCN Red List criteria to reassess their status,” Burfield said. “Most species did not need recategorizing, but of those that did, virtually all have deteriorated.”
After the latest reassessment, seven of the 16 shorebird species were categorized as “near threatened” and nine are now “vulnerable” to extinction as they experienced global population declines of 20-40% over three generations.
BirdLife International said in a statement that migratory birds are especially at risk as they follow specific migration flyways or routes and stop along the way to rest and feed at certain sites that now face threats like habitat loss and climate change impacts.
“While many of these shorebirds remain numerous and are still commonly encountered along their flyways, new analyses of data from long-term monitoring schemes reveal that the global populations of some species have declined by more than a third in recent decades,” Burfield said in the statement.
Among those that have now been moved into a higher “threatened” category of vulnerable are the gray plover(Pluvialis squatarola)and the curlew sandpiper (Calidris ferruginea), both of which breed in various parts of the Arctic and migrate globally during their nonbreeding seasons. They both face threats from habitat loss and degradation, hunting, and climate change impacts.
The Hudsonian godwit (Limosa haemastica), a large shorebird that breeds in northern Canada and Alaska and migrates to South America during its nonbreeding months, is also now considered vulnerable. The IUCN notes in its assessment of the species that the bird’s population is seeing a “significant decline … most severely noted in numbers recorded at migratory sites in North America.”
BirdLife International said in its statement that protecting shorebirds is also important for the coastal communities that depend on the same habitats as the birds.
‘The perilous declines of migratory birds are a sign that the integrity of flyways is deteriorating,” Burfield said. “Losing the network of habitats that migratory birds depend on to rest and feed during their long journeys could have severe consequences for the millions of people that rely on these sites, as well as the birds.’’
Kristine Sabillo is a wire reporter for Mongabay. She has been a multimedia journalist for more than a decade and has produced political, science and environment content for the online, print, television and radio newsrooms of leading media organizations in the Philippines. Feedback: Use this form to send a message to this author. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the article page.
Community Land & Water Coalition (CLWC) on Friday Feb. 14, 2025, filed a demand for a cease and desist after confirming that Eric Pontiff, doing business under the name of Standish Investment Group, LLC, started the work before the legal appeal period expired.
The group’s cease and desist request states:
The Work is destroying the ancestral lands and heritage of the Wampanoag Tribes including destroying potential burial sites, graves, and homesites without an archeological study, without Free Prior Informed Consent and in violation of Article 32 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, the laws of Massachusetts and the Zoning Bylaw.
Photos Above: February 14, 2025, tree clearing has started to cut down ancient trees on sacred Wampanoag Lands at 71 Hedges Pond Road, Cedarville, Plymouth MA.
One of the last remaining hills in the Town, sacred site of the Wampanoag People
The proposed mining site is 33-acres of forested land at 71 Hedges Pond Road. It is one of the last hills not leveled by decades of sand and gravel mining in the Town. The plans show massive excavation that will start at the top of the 150-foot hill and mine about 90 feet deep across the site.
In January 2025, following a recommendation by Plymouth’s Planning Board, the Town’s Director of Inspectional Services issued zoning and building permits to level the 150 foot hill, allegedly preparing the site for a “commercial complex” of large buildings. Over 1,000 letters were sent to the Town demanding that the Director require a special permit under the Town’s Zoning Bylaw. The Town ignored the letters.
The hill and forested land is in an area known as the “Ancient Indian Plantation” and are the ancestral lands of the state’s Native American Wampanoag People.
“We oppose this project and the development of this area on Hedges Pond Road,” said Melissa Ferretti, Chairwoman of the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe based in Plymouth, which was called Patuxet by Indigenous People. “This location is an integral part of our original reservation lands known to us as the “Great Lot.” This project threatens to irreversibly damage our ancestral homelands, the heart of our existence and heritage here in Plymouth. The Great Lot holds immense cultural and historic significance for our community and any development would not only harm the land but also disrupt our deep-rooted connection to it. Honoring the sacredness of these grounds is fundamental to our community and culture,” Ferretti stated. In November 2024, Governor Healy issued an Executive Order granting the Tribe state recognition, a major accomplishment.
Speaking at the February 11, 2025 Select Board meeting,Indigenous youth urged the Town to, “At least consider and possibly even invite people from her tribe and other neighboring sister tribes to have discussions about these matters and include them in them.”
At the Select Board meeting Miciah Stasis from the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe said, “Our people have been here for thousands of years and our ancestors lay beneath those lands that you are trying to sand mine… If this was anybody else’s grandmother or grandparents that are being dug up right now, there would be an issue.”
“Plymouth officials and the business interests that make up the Plymouth Foundation promote the Town as “America’s Hometown.” They market the Native American and Pilgrim story to the world’s tourists. They profit from the Thanksgiving story but are letting this project destroy that very history without even an archeological or environmental impact study,” said Meg Sheehan, attorney for the petitioners filing the appeal.
The community neighborhood Cedarville Village Steering Committee in a December finding unanimously rejected the “unified complex” plan calling it vague. By claiming a development is a “unified complex,” a sand and gravel company can seek to evade the more stringent special permitting process and proceed without a public hearing.
The February 14, 2025 appeal requires the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) to hold a public hearing on whether to uphold the permits. The hearing will be scheduled in several weeks and is open to the public. In a potential conflict of interest, two members of the ZBA are Directors of the Plymouth Foundation, which received the sand mining permit from the Town.
On another mining project, on March 3, 2025, the Zoning Board of Appeals will hold the second day of a public hearing on a proposal by PA Landers, a regional sand and gravel mining operator, to expand its 100 acre mine and level a hill visible from Route 3 North. This is adjacent to 71 Hedges Pond Road, the subject of the February 14, 2025, legal appeal. The hearing is in the Great Hall, 2nd Floor, 26 Court St., Plymouth, 7 pm.
On Sunday, February 16, 2025 at 7 p.m. the local group CLWC is holding its second public forum on sand and gravel mining in Plymouth.
A state-wide campaign, Stop the Desecration, seeks to raise awareness about the destruction of Native American archeological sites without proper legal reviews.
Once upon a timeless . . . the non-human Light-Beings of the Sun cast their rays like life-giving nets upon the waters and the lands of the Earth . . . and all beings stirred awake to do the day’s work (and play) . . . until the nighttimeless when all beings rested and then the stars would guide their dreams . . .
(“Buddha Resisting The Demons Of Mara”)
In the actual living-experience, there is no “happily ever after” because there is constant work and maintenance to do. While work and maintenance can sometimes be enjoyable, they aren’t end-of-rainbow-pot-of-gold ideal. Yet many people cling to the idea of such gold, of ‘making it big.’ And many cling to infantile delusions of a constant comfort zone.
Zen saying: Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
In general, i’ve noticed that many people have an aversion to talking about or dealing with extremely difficult situations of which for this essay i’ll call such extremities, The Monster. The difficulty is understandable because The Monster is unpleasant and pokes at one’s trauma buttons.
The Merchants of Veneer refers to those who go to extremes to cover-up The Monster. The Monster is genocide, ecocide, deliberately induced fear and terror, violence and greed, all of which i consider as horrid manifestations of what Steven Newcomb refers to as “the domination system,” and what many know of as colonialism, predatory capitalism, totalitarianism, fascism, ad nauseam.
MONSTER: from Latin monstrum — inauspicious portent or sign, abnormal shape, “a derivative of monere ‘to remind, bring to (one’s) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach.’”
Teachers and elders “advise, warn, instruct” peers and younger generations with ways to avoid monsters; forewarned is forearmed, and weaponry is not a necessity.
Also, one can figure out stuff on one’s own because typically there are signs or warnings before The Monster does dastardly deeds. I think of those signs and warnings as a pattern of mercy built into the universe.
When not heeded, however, and instead allowed to run amok, monstrums (abnormal shapes and signs) can take on a form — anything from falling down and hurting one’s self, to an addiction, to a river-polluting corporation, a brainwashing media, a flagrantly offensive military force, so-called green/renewables saving the world, AI, genocide, ecocide, and more.
Many of the modern monsters appear as the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. Whether a fancy-car-driving televangelist, a clown pedophile, or a corporation that holds charity events with one hand while destroying natural habitats and cultures with the other — the concept is the same.
Many signs in the world continue to go unheeded, and so: many monsters need to be dealt with.
The deeper root of “monster” is men- “to think, mind, spirit, memory, sage, seer,” indicating that, as mentioned above, one has the ability to ward off monsters, to think ahead, to care for the mind and spirit of all beings.
But our Mother Earth knows that The Monster is running amok and, as Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied… / And everybody knows that it’s now or never” . . . Yet the big question then is: Why do so many choose to ignore?
Enter the Merchants of Veneer and their willing and ignorant minions. Those Merchants are masters of the slick surface level, from the looks real faux wooden cabinet to the media spectacle previews condoning and cheering on the War on Iraq and the Global War Of Terror, while conversely, not tainting the shine by not showing the genocide in Gaza. The Merchants of Veneer shine the shit-show to delusory perfection, and so slickly that masses of people go along with the bumpy ride by ordering an environmentally friendly seat belt rather than finding ways of smoothing the rode.
The Merchants of Veneer are the Public Relations division for The Monster. The PR includes the corporate media, global banking systems, consumerism, enforced religions, revisionist history and cherry-picked educational systems, and governments in bed with corporations aka fascism.
When telling people some tidbit i know, some of the history of America and Turtle Island, i’ve often heard people say to the effect, ‘It’s terrible what was done to the Natives.’ Yes, but then when i add that it’s still going on and cite a specific issue, they may shake their head in disgust, but don’t seem to find it as terrible NOW. ‘Why?’ I’ve asked the air, ‘Why do they avoid and turn away?’
And the answer i get is the impetus for this essay . . . Not wanting to face The Monster, not wanting to make sacrifices with one’s comfort zone which is actually a comfort zone built on the discomforts of others, those who do the work and maintenance with no chance of a pot of gold rather lucky if they get a next meal.
“Every program of exploitation has an ideology bolted on to legitimate it to the world — but also to those benefitting: very few people want to look in the mirror and see a monster staring back.”
~ Matt Kennard, from his book The Racket: A Rogue Reporter Vs The American Empire.
Wake-up Call
The Buddha’s typical subtly serene smile is not one of “happily ever after. My interpretation from experience is that, in part, that serene smile has to do with maintaining one’s inner state of consciousness whether during good times or when facing The Monster.
Many years ago i had a transformative meditation experience, but the details escape me so i’ll attempt to convey the gist: One time meditating i began to see horrible, scary stuff, like scenes of a war. At first i thought: Is this my mind? What i have done? But then i realized i was simply supposed to watch, to witness, be brave enough to witness without flinching or running away, maintain my composure – subtly serene Buddha smile optional – and to allow space for whatever feelings that arose. This inner experience helped me learn to face The Monster, rather than turn a blind eye.
As the story of Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha tells:
Before becoming a Buddha, he saw Four Sights or Signs: aging, disease, death, and devotion to finding the cause of suffering, devotion to participating in the world rather than escaping from it.
And after he became enlightened he began to do the work of dealing with monstrums: “to remind, bring to (one’s) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach” in an effort to help others to avoid or deal with The Monster.
(“his hands in the dharmachakra mudra gesture of teaching”)
As the story goes, before Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, the demon Mara tried to seduce him with beautiful women, then attacked him with monsters, then questioned the validity of his enlightenment.
“Then Siddhartha reached out his right hand to touch the earth, and the earth itself spoke: ‘I bear you witness!’ Mara disappeared. And as the morning star rose in the sky, Siddhartha Gautama realized enlightenment and became a Buddha.”
Each of us has the ability to touch Earth, not only with hands, but with the feet and heart and mind, and actions.
Each of us has the ability to be touched — how much better a mood i have when my day begins with seeing and hearing geese flying overhead.
Since the word “Buddha” means “awakened, to awaken to the natural law,” the Buddha-nature is not of any one individual rather a way of seeing, of being, of living in accord with Sun and Stars and all sentient beings here with Mother Earth. This Buddha-nature is beyond any box of religion and beyond any specific label of spirituality.
We as a species, as well as all species, are faced with a dual dilemma: stopping The Monster that is already in action, already running amok yet pretending with a slick veneer that everything is under control and things will get better soon. And warding off The Monster that is clamoring to get in on the destructive, sucking the life out of life action.
Instead of overreacting to The Monster and counteracting with violence, fear or greed, the experience of witnessing allows for the possibility of one’s inner nature and/or Earth guiding the next step.
Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is a writer and small press publisher; he travels a holistic mystic Kaballah-rooted pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island. Mankh meditates, gardens, enjoys music and good humor.
