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Editor’s note: “There is an ambitious plan to ‘protect’ Northern California’s Plumas National Forest from wildfires. Their plans were aimed at making communities safer and forest stands more ‘resilient’ to drought, insects, and other climate-driven disturbances. Community protection was the first priority, forest resilience the second. The urgency of imminent wildfire caused the Plumas Forest officials to pare down the environmental analyses required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Instead of conducting full environmental impact statements, with scrutiny of cumulative impacts and years-long public comment periods, officials used less rigorous environmental assessments. Work on at least 70,000 acres was fast-tracked under emergency declarations, which eliminate public objections. NEPA processes that would normally take as long as seven years took an average of about 20 months. Forest Service officials have held few public meetings and refused to provide basic details of the project with reporters.” ...

Court Support for Sentencing: Uphold Land Defenders! https://www.yintahaccess.com/ We are coming up to the final court date for Sleydo’, Shay and Corey. Sentencing for their criminal contempt charges will be October 15-17, 2025 in Smithers, BC. Since winning the Abuse of Process application brought against the RCMP and proving they violated their Charter Rights, Judge Tammen stated it will be considered during their sentencing. Over the three days we anticipate that the Crown and Defence will make court arguments for their positions and then a decision will be made. ...

Editor’s: Trapped in a Tank: The Hidden Cruelty of the Tropical Fish Trade The Exotic Pet Trade Harms Animals and Humans. The European Union Is Studying a Potential Solution By Spoorthy Raman / Mongabay Although a superpower, the U.S. is under constant invasion — we’re not talking humans here but meek-looking plants and animals that have caused ecological havoc. Take, for instance, the tiny, nocturnal coqui frogs ( Eleutherodactylus coqui) in Hawai‘i that arrived from Puerto Rico in the 1980s and are now terrorizing the islanders with their deafening “ ko-kee” calls that can be as loud as a motorcycle engine. With numbers in Hawai‘i now surpassing those in Puerto Rico, the frogs have scrubbed the forest floor and treetops of vital pollinating insects, toppled property prices in prime real estate markets, and are hurting tourism. ...

Editor’s note: “Protest alone, disconnected from more substantive action, is akin to screaming in the wind. Protest is not resistance. Protest, whether conscious to it or not, often reinforces the belief that the system is fundamentally sound, and that with reform it can resolve the issue that sparked the protest. We must confront the truth: our system of governance is fundamentally flawed. It is corrupt, hierarchical, unfair, and thoroughly infiltrated by corporate power and special interests.” ...

Editor’s note: This is a difficult concept to understand. The reason is because we have been taught the opposite all our lives. Taxes don’t fund spending. The spending must be done first so that taxes can be paid. So it is not tax and spend, it is spend and tax. Our taxes don’t fund anything. That is why nobody asks how are we going to fund the military. Money is a government issued tax credit. Its value is derived from the violence that may be necessary to collect the tax. The government creates money by giving it to people for goods and/or services(guns or butter). Which then gives those people the ability to pay the tax. People accept the money out of fear of that violence. The tax collector has to be paid or promised to be paid before they perpetuate that violence(police). The money must be created first so that people can pay their taxes with it. It is spent into existence. Taxes create the necessity for money. A “deficit” just keeps score of how much extra money the government paid to people but was not collected as taxes. Much like beyond a certain point, how much money you have is just keeping score. The government cannot run out of its own money. Just like a baseball game has no limit on the score. What a government spends(creates) its money for are political decisions which are only constrained by the physical “resources” of the living planet. ...

Editor’s note: “President Donald Trump has been pushing the U.S. to barrel ahead on deep-sea mining. The country plans to permit mining in international waters under an obscure U.S. law from 1980 called the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act(DSHMRA), which predates the Law of the Sea treaty. Congress wrote the law to serve as an ‘interim legal regime’ — a temporary way to grant mining licenses until the United Nations-affiliated regime took shape. ...

Editor’s note: “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead. Several Chelemeras look out on the nursery before submerging themselves in the lagoon. After inclement weather, they return to the mangrove shelters to repair them. Image by Caitlin Cooper for Mongabay. Keila Vazquez walks through a higher-elevation area in Progreso, Yucatán. Las Chelemeras are currently working to level the topography of the area so that freshwater can reach the mangroves naturally. Image by Caitlin Cooper for Mongabay. By Astrid Arellano / Mongabay ...

Editor’s note: Want to try lab-grown salmon? The US just approved it. Who needs wild salmon. By Colin Todhunter / COUNTERCURRENTS Sainsbury’s is one of the ‘big six’ supermarkets in the UK. In 2019, it released its Future of Food report. It is not merely a misguided attempt at forecasting future trends and habits; it reads more like a manifesto for corporate control and technocratic tyranny disguised as ‘progress’. This document epitomises everything wrong with the industrial food system’s vision for our future. It represents a dystopian roadmap to a world where our most fundamental connection to nature and culture — our food — is hijacked by corporate interests and mediated through a maze of unnecessary and potentially harmful technologies. ...

Editor’s note: The folly of controlling the rivers. “What will those who come after us think of us? Will they envy us that we saw butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?” - Derrick Jensen Or will they despise us because we built dams which kill butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats? China Starts Construction on World’s Largest Hydropower Dam Brazil & China move ahead on 3,000-km railway crossing the Amazon ...

Editor’s note: Indonesia’s capital relocation mirrors the move of the country’s former colonisers By Hans Nicholas Jong / Mongabay JAKARTA — Indonesia’s national human rights commission has found a slew of legal and rights violations in a government-backed project to establish large-scale plantations in the eastern region of Papua. The so-called food estate project, categorized by the government as being of strategic national importance, or PSN, aims to clear 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of land in Merauke district, two-thirds of it for sugarcane plantations and the rest for rice fields — an area 45 times the size of Jakarta. ...