Therein lies a profound, tragic irony: we have polluted our planet’s boundary layer so heavily with ground-based light that we can no longer even see the cosmic-scale footprint we are carving above it.

With so much panic in media outlets and political rhetoric about declining fertility rates, let’s not forget that our population is still growing. We’re projected to add another 2 billion this century, heading to 10.3 billion. #overpopulation #overconsumption #humansupremacy

Why should we care about the question of whether nature has intrinsic value (or what bears it if it does)? Isn’t it enough to recognize that nature is in trouble? Shouldn’t we be focused on practical solutions instead?

The May report examines 92 projects in unceded Kaska Dena territory and concludes the territory’s regulatory framework functions as an approval machine for mining.

Oops, I did the thing I said I wasn't going to do: I'm launching a second Substack as a space to explore ethicsy/philosophy-ish topics related to birds and intrinsic value of nature. I'm still open to other opportunities, but I needed a new place to publish. philosophisingsforthebirds.substack.com

Cattle ranching, agriculture and gold mining remain by far the biggest threats, finds the study. Global meat production is expected to increase 13%, driven by population growth. Oil, gas and coal are playing an ever bigger role in the destruction of rainforests.

But to be sustainable, we may have to reject a majority of modernity’s tenets and would do well to build on a worldview closer to that of our sustainable ancestors—at least by adopting humility as foundational to our relationship with the community of life.

Once we see why industrial modernity is unsustainable, the most important question becomes: what is a viable exit strategy? On our way out the door of modernity and back toward simplicity, we need to minimize the creation of new problems and re-learn nature’s elegant solutions.

for a good sixty years every right-wing conspiracy crackpot has been raving about the secret new world order plot to reduce the global population and here in the year 2026 every day a new billionaire gets up and goes "the peasants need to make more peasants"

But many of the cycles we now treat as ecological baselines may be post-collapse dynamics—the behavior of systems that still function, but only violently. Variability persists. Life persists. Renewal persists, but no longer at the scale required to stabilize the system.

It was a beautiful day in the Yukon. There is a bit of snow left in my garden and the soil is still cold and some of it is frozen. I did plant my garlic and some onions. The growing season is starting later because of the amount of snow and the cold weather we had.

Protecting and restoring large herbivore populations should therefore be a central focus of savanna ecosystems globally.

Released today: Part 1 in an upcoming video series on agroforestry. Excited to share this project and I hope it inspires!

New summer outlook just dropped. This is the multi-model C3S ensemble forecast for June-August. Hope you like pain and suffering.

If we take the urgent action required in the next few decades to rapidly row back on emissions, it may yet be possible to dodge PETM or early Eocene conditions.😂

Old-growth forests are irreplaceable and need to be conserved. Yet, more than half the tropical forests of the world have already been lost or degraded. Because 70% of tropical forests are secondary, their conservation can contribute substantially to achieving global biodiversity conservation goals.

You can get to a high-warming world without high emissions . That's the part of this week's "RCP 8.5 is implausible" discussion that's getting missed. A short thread on why the relief is premature 🧵

The powerful conclusion to this insightful essay: (1/2)

The global extinction crisis is still accelerating, and modern food systems are the number one driver of biodiversity loss and deforestation. Agriculture alone is contributing to the endangerment of 86% of the species that have so far been classified as at risk of extinction.

By the time overshoot becomes visible, the system that created it is already deeply embedded.

in total, the number of land animals slaughtered in 2024 was 87,896,729,120 — an approximately 1.85% increase over 2023. Meanwhile, in 2024, the global population increased by only 0.87%. This means that the growth rate of animal slaughter is continuing to outpace the rate of population growth.

I make a distinction here between humanity’s future and modernity’s future. Many people conflate the two. As I see it, the brief flash of modernity is incompatible with planetary limits and will necessarily terminate one way or another.

The snowshoe hare likes the sun as much as I do. They are starting to change their color. This is triggered by day light hours. We still have a lot of snow left, they will be easy prey.

Should “rewilding” ever have been attempted in the Oostvaardersplassen? Perhaps it is the wrong question to ask. As David Schwartz remarked in a guarded defense of the project for Rewilding Earth, “It’s hard to ‘rewild’ a polder of land that didn’t even exist until 1968.”

They have written a paper about inflation. But what they have actually described is the thermodynamic endgame of industrial civilization. Growth is ending not as a political choice but as a physical inevitability. The economic signature of that ending is inflation, first gradual, then vertical.

What would motivate today’s self-absorbed, often individualistic upper and middle classes to agree to an 80% reduction in energy and material consumption and embark in solidarity on an unprecedented journey of voluntary simplicity?

Industrial society is living from a mental parallel universe cognitively abstracted from reality. The result is culturally paralytic and potentially catastrophic. On the one hand, overshoot in the real world is destroying the regenerative capacity of the ecosphere and threatens to take us down.

Chernobyl is likely to remain off-limits for generations — too dangerous for people, yet full of life. “For those of us in conservation and ecology, it’s kind of a wonder.” “This land was once heavily used — agriculture, cities, infrastructure. But nature has effectively performed a factory reset.”

Our climate solutions have failed to meaningfully reduce emissions – and they never will. The only way humanity can meaningfully reduce emissions is via drastic reductions in activity, which means reversing economic ‘growth’.

Emissions from production in the tar sands, primarily in northern Alberta, has been growing steadily. They rose from 33 MtCO2eq in 2005 to 92 MtCO2eq in 2024.

The maps illustrate where the proposed all-season road will cut straight through the Bathurst caribou’s core migration area, passing very close to the herd’s calving grounds and effectively bisecting their current range. Three diamond mines already operate in areas known to be preferred by the herd.

Habitat loss and degradation account for the largest threat to birds. Society’s need for more agricultural land and timber, along with urbanization of former natural lands to support growing human populations principally explain why 61% of all bird species have declining populations as of 2025.

The results, published in Nature Communications, show genetic signs of isolation in several populations, where elephant herds have been cut off from each other due to a history of hunting, as well as growing human populations and their needs for agriculture and infrastructural developments.

As a species we are exceeding the planet’s regenerative capacity by about 75 percent. If we could replace all fossil fuels with alternative energy—but with the same number of people and the same aggregate consumption—we would still be in overshoot

The enemy is not “us” but rather the peculiar economic system we stumbled into 10,000 years ago. Understanding how hunter-gatherer economies functioned as social systems has direct relevance for today’s environmental and social policies.

look it’s very simple: private jets are bad (wasteful, grotesque, destroying the earth) but space colonization is good (wasteful, grotesque, destroying the earth, makes me feel warm and fuzzy in a way I refuse to examine)

March 2026 Globally,according to Copernicus,had a temperature anomaly of +0.53C above the 1991/2020 norm (+1.48C vs. pre-industrial) and was the 4th warmest March on record behind 2024 (+0.73C),2025 (+0.65C) and 2016 (+0.63C).

According to the Government of Alberta, there are an estimated 466,000 oil and gas wells in the province. More than half of those are no longer producing, some of which have been properly plugged, while others are in a state of temporary suspension

Our findings emphasize that preventing the loss of intact biomes, ecosystems, and species assemblages is the most critical strategy while acknowledging the urgency of extinction prevention and the need for restoration.

These disruptions may impact the long-term survival of bird populations — making the future uncertain for hundreds of species across North America. Indeed, the total North American bird population has lost a staggering 2.9 billion birds since 1970 — a 29% decline.

Like any technological product manufactured by industrial processes from raw materials extracted from the earth, solar panels have an ecological footprint that negatively impacts the more-than-human world.

"The planet’s life support systems are already under strain and, without rapid shifts in how we use energy, land, and food, billions of people will face increasing instability. Our study shows these limits are unfolding right now.”

The old of civilization is always falling apart even as it newly grows. Additional decay forced by climate change need only grow by 0.1%/year to lead to civilization collapse by 2070, sooner for higher rates. We will collapse slowly then all at once. egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...

Yukon Territory, Canada had the coldest March since at least 1950, easily exceeding 2007 and 1964. There is no significant long term trend in March average temps. Data from ERA5 reanalysis courtesy @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social. #ytwx #Canada #Climate @jkanadisk.bsky.social @evaholland.bsky.social

March 2026 temperatures in the Arctic varied dramatically. Much of Arctic North America was very cold. Coldest March on record (since 1950) forYukon Territory, Canada. Northwest Territories 2nd coldest & Nunavut 3rd coldest. ERA5 reanalysis courtesy @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social. #Arctic #Climate 1/2

Collapse is often framed in abstract terms: GDP curves, debt ratios, sea‑level projections in 2100. Food refuses abstraction. When the system that feeds you becomes unreliable, you feel it in your stomach before you see it in a graph.

In a news release last week, the First Nation says those rights include the right to exist and thrive throughout its natural range; the right to ecological protection; the right to be free from destructive industrial activity; and the right to representation and legal protection.

Evolution can happen anywhere with genetic variation and selection pressures — from our cities to our pesticide-laden crop fields to our antibiotic-laden bodies. How much protected area should we set aside to witness how evolution will unfold when (to the extent possible) we keep our hands off?

Whitehorse -8.4 C. It was a cold month.