This is the correct answer.

There isn't alot of scholarship or critical thinking about the politics of restoration, and this is unfortunate. A new paper finds that UN designated "restoration flagships" are disproportionately located in undemocratic contexts, as are the largest restoration pledges (doi.org/10.1162/GLEP...).

To chime in as a Minneapolitan: whistles made a huge difference (and still do, ICE is still kidnapping people here, just at a slower pace). But what really helped was the pre-existing neighborhood groups from the summer of 2020, so get yourself whistle kits and start talking to your neighbors *now*

People are dunking on Zotero for some reason?

Another in the long series of unintended consequences of poorly thought out tree planting initiatives.

This is not a good look for the "independent" standards board. Industries should not write their own regulations.

I have resigned from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol's Independent Standards Board. The Protocol is openly violating its own rules and has effectively delegated forest carbon accounting standards to a secret, industry-led working group. ghgpolicy.org/s/2026-06-08...

Great coverage of some of our recent research in Mongabay. We found that some programs seem to increase tree cover, and some don't. Great template for improving things! Unfortunately, the programs that aren't working are big and the one that works well is small. india.mongabay.com/2026/06/why-...

I think some of this is based on a misreading/compression of the fall of German research universities and the rise of American ones. In the fantasy, lots of German academics fled the nazis and moved to the US to build great universities here.

Land back and collaboration for the future. I'm super proud to be part of the group of people who made this happen, even if my own role was essentially to clap from the sidelines and watch my colleagues work this out: twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/...

Its always puzzling to me that well-off people in areas with widespread mosquito born illnesses don't see window screens as totally essential. I get that poor people might not be able to afford them.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to measure, report, and verify it, does the carbon still accumulate in the forest floor?

Think of CO₂ removal like a time machine. How far back does planting 100 million trees take us? One mature tree takes up ~25 kg of CO₂/year, so 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That's a time machine that takes us back ~33 minutes in a year. Nature will not save us from fossil fuel CO₂.

NYT: "no one has ever thought of teaching ranching at university" Every ag school: um, would you like to meet our cows NYT: "No, not like that. More romantic. More dilletante. Ugh, we're not /farmers/."

Apparently what Ivy League colleges don't do is have students work real jobs while studying, something that the vast majority of college students in this country, including nearly all at the state flagship I work at, do.

I've lost it now: but someone on here said the solution to the AI problem in academic publishing is simple: editors just have to insist that all articles are handwritten in blue books under exam conditions. And I thought that perfectly skewered two forms of 'it's here to stay, adapt' commentary.

My view is that if only 20% of your students in an extremely selective university demonstrate the "extraordinary distinction" needed to earn an A, you probably aren't a very good teacher. This of course fits quite well with Harvard's reputation. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/o...

A surprise for me on sabbatical in Europe was faculty discussing their votes in the election for the university's rector. I've only ever voted for an essentially powerless university senate.

This is a great thread!

Let's divert funding from basic research to subsidizing tech companies.

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

We are advertising a new postdoc in Socioecological Outcomes and Monitoring of Restoration in Dryland Ecosystems based at Penn State & supervised by the amazing @idad.bsky.social. psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

This reminds me of my grandmother who always thought it was important that I learn how to "use" computers because the "future was going to be the computer age," but didn't seem to understand that by the 1990s, computers, much like today's Gen-AI, were designed to be really easy to use.

I had the very good fortune to have a campus job and then a summer internship my freshman year in college doing what I thought I wanted to do for a career, and I learned that it was not what I wanted to do (but these experiences helped me find the career I'm in now).

Many places in the US are experiencing a severe housing shortage, and there is a prominent group of people blaming this on regulatory permitting, including environmental laws.

re. Canvas outage, University communications tells students to look for communication from faculty about what to do. But as a faculty, I was told that I should only communicate with students via Canvas and I literally do not have another way of reaching them.

My dad told me to read this article about the end of a Pennsylvania dairy farm, and he was right. I was amazed to learn that in the 1970s, the US had 700,000 dairy farms, and it now has... 25,000. I've observed this massive consolidation from multiple vantage points. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/u...

US federal land management is clearly undergoing a period of major transition.

Abundance bros interest in stripping local control over infrastructure development seems to be on a collision course with the rapidly rising bipartisan concern about data centers.

Grant proposals written with the help of AI are less innovative, but more likely to be funded at NIH (but not at NSF). arxiv.org/abs/2601.15485

I picked up a bottle of olive oil at Costco and scanned the QR to read about its origin, and I'm reading about how they are contributing to sustainability by destroying desert "wastelands" in Tunisia and replacing them with intensively irrigated agroforestry, and I'm just frustrated.

When people talk about self-censorship, they often focus on campus events or classroom discussions. But self-censorship of research is different and more impt. Big difference btw "I don't want to offend others" to "I don't want to speak truth to power" www.chronicle.com/article/near...

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

When I went to visit my undergrad professors several years after graduation to discuss applying to PhD programs I got 2 pieces of advice. The first professor told me that I should only do a PhD if studying very intensively for several years was the most fun thing I could imagine doing with my life.

The libertarian kid I was friends with when I was a freshman in college was one of the founders of Palantir and then a key architect of OpenAI. Nice kid but I always found his political ideas incoherent and a bit disturbing... seems like I was right?

I have two serious concern about this new commentary in Nature on the lessons that can be learned from China's "Great Green Wall." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Hampshire College is closing but the New Yorker has a long article about a new college in Ohio that trains people to be Catholic theologian HVAC technicians. I'm not sure what to make of this.

Sitting here crying while after getting WhatsApped the photo on the right, so let me tell you a little story about how we got here from the photo on the left and why repatriation research matters!

"the colleges that dominate the headlines are not the colleges that most Americans attend their core mission: to serve students from all backgrounds, at a price families can actually afford, prepare graduates for real careers and meaningful lives." www.geneseo.edu/enrollment-m...

Our research shows that over long time periods, poorer people in the US have a greater preference for environmental protection over economic growth. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So what is this? Pure greenwashing? No, actually. The liberal language that gets echoed by the right, like the Abundance rhetoric here, is chosen because *even liberals use these tropes to justify continued fossil fuel production*. 5/n

I went to the Mall of America on Saturday, it was packed - a great place for kids, with lots of activities on a day with pretty miserable weather (sleet). There were all kinds of people there enjoying a day out with their families. It felt as safe and wholesome and American as can be.

Yes AND its still the main place where that research is happening.

This seems to simply be awful.

Re declining bsky userbase, I got on here because it was supposed to be the replacement for academic twitter, and at this point its pretty clear to me that linkedin is the replacement for academic twitter.

Today I learned that if you type "US passport renewal" into Google search, the first website you see is basically a fraudulent private site advertising the service of helping you renew your passport when the process is simple and fast when done directly through the government (2nd site you see).

I spend a lot of time on here bemoaning the widespread use of AI, but my outrage does tend to overshadow that actually a lot of my students do not use it and are very vocal about wanting to throw themselves off a cliff rather than engage with that slop, and it shows in their authentic writing.

So, it took 3 to 4000 ICE agents and $180,000,000 to arrest 2400, most of whom were the easy of the easiest. Thats $75000 per arrest. What a waste.