These familiar sunlit hues fostered a politics of relatability, inviting belonging, and with it, a sense of responsibility for the planet.

An environmental consciousness began to crystallize. As historian Robert Poole notes in “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth,” the Space Age flipped from a narrative of outward conquest to one of inward rediscovery. The first Earth Day was held in 1970, and the popular metaphor “Spaceship Earth” shifted from describing a technical vessel managed by engineers to describing a living, vulnerable biosphere requiring stewardship. Planetary survival became a mass political demand.

If color once taught us to see and value our planet, it now records how we are altering it.

“Black Marble,” a global composite image of the darkened Earth at night in 2012, revealed a web of golden yellow — electric constellations of urbanization and light pollution. More recently, a Nature analysis detected climate-driven trends in color across roughly 40% of the global surface ocean, observing that low-latitude waters are shifting from deep blue toward green as surface ecosystems reorganize. NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud ocean Ecosystem) mission captures this complexity with hyperspectral precision, reading the ocean’s spectral fingerprint to identify exactly which plankton populations could be driving the shift.

Similarly, from Alpine glaciers to the Greenland Ice Sheet, snow can flush red when snow algae bloom, and because those blooms darken the surface and reduce reflectivity, they can amplify melt, rendering a warming cryosphere newly legible. 

Color is not just how Earth shows itself; it can be diagnostic, even a narrative of change, inviting human response through visible nuance. It is a measurement and a mirror of our agency.

The planetary becomes political through color. The hues through which Earth appears in public decide what we notice and act upon. For us to become a planetary society, the colors through which Earth senses and is sensed need to be aligned. It is time to compose a planetary palette.

Colors Make History

Color has long organized politics in the open. The French tricolor cockade turned loyalty into something you could wear in the street. The suffragette palette of purple, white and green made support for women’s right to vote instantly legible across Britain and beyond. The Pan-African colors of red, black and green and the Aboriginal black, red and yellow flag in Australia condensed claims to land and self-determination into vivid emblems.

In Thailand, rival movements quite literally became “red shirts” and “yellow shirts,” with chroma standing in for competing sovereignties. Iran’s Green Movement used a single hue to signal reformist solidarity, just as Ukraine’s Orange Revolution did earlier with orange as a banner of contested legitimacy. These anecdotes are not about taste. They show how colors have repeatedly given politics a public body, allocating attention, rallying coalitions and making claims visible at a glance.

Historian Michael Rossi’s “The Republic of Color” shows how, at the turn of the 20th century, color science and its regulation reorganized modern life: Industrial dyes, standardized color languages and new instruments did not simply tint goods. They reshaped labor, markets and perception, turning the organization of color into a form of managing attention, desire and trust. The institutionalization of standards and techniques for collective perception bestowed color with political force.

Our planetary age echoes the industrial one in that regard. Where the earlier era effectively forged a republic of color for factories and mass media, the planetary age calls for a politics of planetary color.

Choices about how Earth’s processes are rendered — through hue, lightness, contrast, naming and disclosure — organize public perception and coordination, deciding what counts as common evidence and how we act together with Earth. Rossi’s larger point applies: Color infrastructures do not merely decorate an era, they constitute it. If the planetary is to be held in common, it must be legible in color.

Political theory has language for this. French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible” names how regimes allocate what is perceptible and sayable before any statute is written. Like metrology’s units, calendars’ time zones, cartography’s projections and interface defaults, planetary color is a pre-legal order: a background regime that organizes what appears actionable before any law speaks.

The politics of planetary color therefore operates where aesthetic order becomes epistemic order. It is an arrangement of seeing and sensing that quietly conditions what can be argued, trusted and coordinated as our shared world.

Planetary Colors

Some planetary colors are physical, spectral and stubborn. Neptune’s saturated blue is methane subtracting red. The aurora’s iconic green is oxygen’s 557.7-nanometer emission. These are not metaphors but signifiers for materials; naming them as such helps ratify the processes that produce them. “Neptune Blue” or “Aurora Green” could easily link colors to our cosmic existence.

Other planetary colors are (re)made by cameras, algorithms and conventions. “True color” Earth images are engineered reconstructions. NASA’s “Blue Marble 2002” was stitched from months of satellite observations into a seamless “true color” mosaic, underscoring that many “true color” Earth views are composited reconstructions, unlike Apollo 17’s 1972 “Blue Marble” photograph.

“False color” composites and infrared-to-visible mappings from the Hubble Space Telescope to the James Webb Space Telescope are deliberate translation schemes that reveal what can be seen by choosing certain palettes.

An infrared view of the Pillars of Creation peered through interstellar dust unveils newly formed stars that are obscured in ordinary visible light. Here, color constitutes a designed translation of data instead of a mere passive recording of optical cues. Similarly, architect Laura Kurgan argues in “Close Up at a Distance” that satellite sensing and its visual languages translate dispersed Earth processes into legible — and political — images, a reminder that how we render planetary signals is already a choice about how we understand our world.

Within these regimes of visibility, what one might call “artificial color” — the deliberate abstraction that translates non-visible wavelengths and signals into visible hues — is a crucial epistemic step. By encoding data like infrared signals or chemical compositions into color, these images create knowledge rather than just recording it. That is authorship of planetary color.

Not only in satellite images and space telescopes can we experience this, but also in everyday life. Planetary colors pass through soft- and hardware, each imposing its own technical biases. The same image can look vivid on a phone and muted on an older laptop because device gamuts and color-management defaults differ. Regardless of the device, just as “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble” did for the modern environmental movement, planetary color operationalizes knowledge: It renders information actionable.

The Human Factor

Color carries ideas because it travels through perception. Three mechanisms are especially relevant. Color constancy is the brain’s habit of making an object’s color appear the same under different lighting: A blue shirt at noon still looks blue at dusk. Helpful in daily life, this can hide real differences in images unless a palette also signals illumination, which can reveal changes we would otherwise miss.

Pre-attentive salience describes the effect that some color differences jump out before we consciously decide to look for them. This is why rainbow gradients can mislead us by overemphasizing small changes, whereas scales where equal data steps are perceived as equal color steps and are detectable to color-blind viewers support honest detection.

Affective priming describes the psychological mechanisms behind color’s ability to nudge mood and behavior. In achievement tasks, brief exposure to red can tilt people toward avoidance, which shows that color can shape judgment even when we believe we are acting autonomously.

Considered together, this affective palette of colors explains why the way we perceive the planet — be it through the hues of volcanoes and ice sheets, forests and rivers, or space weather and meteor showers — quietly changes what becomes noticeable, thinkable and actionable. 

If color is part of a yet-to-emerge planetary literacy, it must be multilingual, as the perception of color is not merely neurophysiological, but deeply influenced by culture. The World Color Survey extended linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s classic thesis that languages name colors in a predictable, universal sequence (the so-called “basic color terms”), revealing both recurrent patterns and striking partitions, such as “grue” categories that merge green and blue.

These partitions travel with power: Art historian John Gage’s archaeology of Western color and artist David Batchelor’s account of “chromophobia” show how empires, religions and modernist canons scripted the meanings of, and the values attributed to, different hues.

A planetary color is therefore less a single key than an interoperable set of keys: Process-based names, such as a “Saharan Dust Ochre,” can meet local lexicons so colors carry physics and culture at once.

The Earth Factor

Not only do we see Earth through color, Earth, in a real way, senses through color. Sunlight arrives as a spectrum, and the planet sorts it: Oceans swallow reds and return deep blues; clouds and ice throw broad light back to space; dark soot on snow shifts whiteness to gray and, at the same time, influences the planet’s temperature. In the air, color steers chemistry: Aerosol-laden skies redden, changing how quickly sunlight breaks apart molecules and how much energy the lower atmosphere keeps.

Living organisms are also optical instruments. Leaves are tuned to red and blue, using chlorophyll to absorb and harvest daylight; plant phytochromes register the color of light at dusk to tell seasons apart; phytoplankton ride the green-blue gradient to time their blooms; some marine microbes even run retinal-like photochemistry that taps the green bands of the sea.

Corals fluoresce, using color as both a shield and a stress signal, while the “vegetation red edge” — the sharp spectral jump between plants absorbing red light and reflecting near-infrared — is both a planetary fingerprint and a byproduct of how plants detect and manage light.

Color is not only an appearance but an interface: a surface upon which energy becomes information and the planet’s materials, organisms and spheres register, store and respond. Designing the planetary color palette, then, is not just designing what we see, it is learning to handle color in the wavelengths Earth already uses to sense its way forward.

To do so, we can refer to Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka’s “Living Surfaces,” in which they unveil how Earth is made of “living surfaces”: interfaces where plant and photographic surfaces fold into one another, and where light functions at once as metabolized signal, registered through photosynthesis, and as measurable inscription, captured and processed into images. In this account, the two surfaces converge through a cultural technique that builds surfaces from measured light.

Approaching planetary color means working within these medianatures. It requires engaging cultural techniques such as calibration, mapping and ground-truthing that actively format Earth’s surface into data. These are the tools that translate raw biological life into the images we see.

In the planetary age, this means that color as experienced by humans is only one narrow slice of a wider spectral life. As Ed Yong reveals in “An Immense World,” the more-than-human world can parse wavelengths that we cannot, ranging from ultraviolet and infrared to the polarization of light.

The pre-legal order constituted by planetary palettes — colormaps, legends, thresholds, names and so forth — must be framed as a situated human translation: explicit about its vantage, inclusive of color-vision diversity and capable of turning non-visible spectra into shared, contestable public signals.

Color As Infrastructure

Artworks such as James Turrell’s immersive Ganzfeld installations, which dissolve depth perception in edgeless fields of pure colored light, and Olafur Eliasson’s “The Weather Project,” which suspended a giant, mist-shrouded artificial sun inside the Tate Modern art gallery to gather crowds in a shared amber glow, demonstrate how color fields can retune attention and assemble a public.

Hélio Oiticica’s “Parangolés,” wearable capes of saturated color first activated with the Mangueira samba community in Rio, turned hues into a collective act in the street, where color was not only seen but engaged with, danced with and debated as a public form. Color here is not a matter of mere aesthetics: These are political arguments in color.

Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings stages a deliberative assembly as a participatory performance in the artistic-activist project “Motion to Change Colour Names to Reflect Planetary Boundary Tipping Points.” By framing the renaming of colors in response to climate crises as a socio-legal innovation, Rawlings treats the palette not merely as a visual code, but as a parliamentary act.

In a similar vein, entrepreneur Luke Iseman and designer Andrew Song have tested sulfur-dioxide balloon releases with their startup Make Sunsets, a geoengineering gambit that asks: If aerosols cool the planet, how red would (or should) our sunsets become? These discussions showcase the widespread awareness of the fact that any large-scale change in the planet’s color — be it our skies, oceans or land cover — could deeply affect humans’ relationship to their planet.

Most often, color slips into planetary politics quietly, as the mood of a map, the warning of a dashboard, the tint of a season, the hue of a banner. Large parts of everyday coordination already turn on this quiet code.

In Europe, the purchase of a new appliance entails reading a green-to-red efficiency bar. In France, the vigilance weather map organizes municipal and household responses to dangerous weather events from heatwaves to floods through a four-color logic. And Mexico City’s Hoy No Circula program turns color into choreography at urban scale: Cars carry colored hologram stickers linked to plate numbers — yellow, pink, red, green, blue — which determine no-drive days and restrictions during pollution episodes.

Do these color schemes help societies think of and relate to the planetary?

In many countries, air pollution is communicated through a color-coded air quality index (AQI): In the U.S., the AQI runs from green (“good”) through red (“unhealthy”) to maroon (“hazardous”).  Across Europe, comparable indices pair color bands with explicit health advice for the general public and sensitive groups on when to modify outdoor activity.  

However, as architect Nerea Calvillo argues in “Aeropolis,” air and air pollution are not a homogeneous “outside.” They are co-produced by bodies and atmospheres, as well as by sensors, indices, visualizations, infrastructures and the regulatory and economic logics that often perpetuate exclusion and inequity.

That means that color-coded atmospheric representations are not neutral readouts but part of the apparatus through which uneven exposures become publicly legible and actionable: useful for collective response, yet always at risk of flattening differences among pollutants, places and vulnerabilities.

In each case, color is not decoration around the facts. It is part of how the facts enter public life. Just as the way we color-code the planet influences what we know about it, this is an epistemic and political practice. A poorly designed thermal map might hide extremes, whereas a well-designed one can reveal patterns at first glance.

Planetary Palette

Right now, what passes for a planetary palette is mostly an accident of defaults: device settings, stock colormaps, ad-hoc choices. Making the implicit explicit means surfacing that palette and recomposing it with Earth. The intentional making of such a palette calls for at least four moves.

First, open a conversation and reframe. The palette might be treated as a public invitation — not décor, but a shared claim tested with Earth. Rather than green branding and device defaults, Earth’s own signals would meet human ways of seeing: chlorophyll greens, auroral oxygen’s green, aerosol-red sunsets. In this register, color would work as a relay. Measurements would become proposed hues, scales would aim to make equal changes look like equal changes for aging, color-blind and standard eyes alike and color names would carry causes.

The palette would also point to possibility, not only alarms: cool corridors of “Canopy Jade” and “Breeze Sapphire” for walking and schooling; “Nocturne Blue” nights that would restore a shared sky; “Pulse Cyan” river rises that would coordinate fisheries, ferries and floodplain planting. The aim would be co-creation: open, revisable and applicable to how the planet already speaks in color.

Second, convene to formulate principles and compose first prototypes. A planetary color convention could seat Earth-observation scientists, artists, designers, accessibility experts, linguists, anthropologists, educators, journalists and policymakers, so palettes are co-sensed, legible and usable where decisions happen.

A few prototypes could focus on specific processes, such as Breeze & Shade (urban cool corridors from canopy transpiration and wind pathways) and Night-Sky Commons (dark-sky windows from cloud aerosol and light-pollution data), developed under agreed principles such as:

• Start from the planet, not moods: Tie hues to earthly processes.
• Make it beautiful: Compose for dignity and delight.
• Design for adaptation: Establish a shared backbone with room for local adjustments.
• Make it accessible and fair: Use color-vision inclusivity and strong contrast.
• Be transparent: Indicate what was sensed and why each hue was selected, and visually signal data uncertainty.
• Build for learning and evolution: Test with real people and devices, allowing new uses and meanings to develop over time.

Third, give this work an institutional home. Rather than a single bureaucratic body, this could take the form of a distributed observatory run by a consortium of science agencies, design labs and museums. Here, satellite and field streams would be translated into images accompanied by concise color briefs in the form of accessible guides explaining the data source and usage rules for each hue.

Simultaneously, the observatory would run design and legibility trials, co-creating and testing new maps with diverse communities to ensure they are understood and welcomed before release. A living lexicon would record process-bearing names, and palette hearings would be held when colors might steer broader public action. Crucially, an ethics log and version history would track why visual choices were made, ensuring that changes in the planet’s appearance are traceable decisions rather than hidden defaults.

In partnership with city agencies, researchers, artists and frontline communities, the observatory would commission experimental pilots, such as public light installations or interactive urban dashboards, and publish open-source resources, like accessible colormap plugins for mapping software.

Fourth, evaluate and refine the palette based on evidence. The prototypes should be treated as civic infrastructure and assessed across a set of dimensions. Do they read quickly and correctly? Do they steer inspiration to reshape human-planet relations? Do they prompt the right actions, and are they accessible regardless of visual ability or device? Small pilots and before-and-after rollouts would inform a public log of what changed when a color band flipped, and a regular review cadence would adjust the scheme. The goal is a shortening loop between planetary signal, legible appearance and coordinated response.

Rossi shows how the industrial age wired color into institutions so thoroughly that perception itself became a site of politics. The planetary age inherits this lesson at a different scale: Ocean color trends now register ecological reorganization; hyperspectral satellites are built to track it; cross-cultural surveys reveal that our vocabularies for color are learned, mobile and contested; and contemporary art keeps demonstrating that color can gather strangers into a public around a shared field of sensation.

More than a single palette, the planetary colors would be a set of tested, explained and teachable mappings to help people sense earthly processes together. If the 19th-century “republic of color” standardized perception for an industrial order, the 21st-century equivalent might standardize disagreement with shared references — enough coherence of planetary colors to argue about the same world.

This is planetary politics in practice: a palette co-authored by Earth’s own signals and by human institutions that translate spectra into public reasons. If colors are integral to planetary politics, then designing the palette is not a cosmetic but a constitutional practice.

The post The Politics Of Planetary Color appeared first on NOEMA.

Rochester Cemetery is not just an active cemetery. It’s a remnant of a once-common sight in Iowa, the place where tallgrass prairie and woodland meet. Faded, crumbling headstones dot its 13 hilly acres. The biggest oaks I’ve seen in my life — gnarled, centuries-old red, black, burr and white — tower over them, keeping watch. And otherwise engulfing the stones is a sea of prairie grasses: big bluestem, Indiangrass, switchgrass. On the right spring day, there are more blooming shooting stars here — with their delicate pink downturned heads nodding in the breeze — than may exist anywhere else in the state.

The cemetery itself dates to the 1830s, just after the Black Hawk Purchase added Iowa to the Union. But today, Rochester is special because it contains one of the rarest ecosystems in the world: oak savanna. Under a few massive trees, prairie plants sequester carbon, prevent erosion and provide key habitat for endangered wildlife like Monarch butterflies and rusty-patched bumblebees — ecosystem services desperately needed across the Midwest.

Before European settlement, tallgrass prairie covered 80% of Iowa. What remains serves as critical seed banks and blueprints for future restorations. But the continued existence of remnants like Rochester is tenuous in this land where corn is king, and it depends on the stewardship of individuals with very different ideas about what and who the land is for — and how it should be managed.

I arrived at the cemetery on a warm Sunday last May. Jacie Thomsen, a Rochester native, greeted me at the gate in a faded U.S. Army T-shirt. A township trustee and the cemetery’s burial manager, Thomsen carried a binder of old documents in one hand and a long metal rod in the other that she periodically used to probe for forgotten, buried gravestones. 

“A lot of people tend to say we’re disrespecting our dead,” Thomsen told me. “I always tell people, ‘Take what you think you know about cemeteries and leave it in your car, because it does not, will not, apply here.’”

I think of the postage-stamp perfect square cemetery I grew up visiting on Memorial Day in nearby Wapello, Iowa, with its close-cropped turfgrass, ornamental bushes and stones in lines straight as the corn rows that box them in on all sides. With manicured lawns and trimmed trees as the blueprint for cemeteries, I can see why some less well acquainted with prairie plants — including other township trustees here — complain this place looks “overgrown” with weeds and in need of a good mow. But at the same time, it strikes me that if one of the pioneers buried here suddenly rose from the dead, these hills are about the only part of the Iowa landscape they’d recognize.

“When you walk in these gates, you’re seeing Iowa as they saw it when they arrived after the Black Hawk Purchase,” Thomsen told me, gesturing at the prairie.

Prairie is Iowa’s natural landscape insofar as any landscape is natural. Humans have shaped the American Midwest ever since the glaciers retreated. For some 10,000 years, Iowa was a dynamic place. Indigenous Americans lit frequent fires that kept encroaching woodlands at bay, allowing the grasslands that dominate the Great Plains to migrate east into Iowa and Illinois. Only in the last 200 years did farmers transform these acres into neat cornfields.

Today, less than a tenth of 1% of Iowa’s original prairie remains. Plows broke the vast majority of prairie down in the 19th and 20th centuries, transforming a biodiverse ecosystem into a crop factory — what Jack Zinnen, an ecologist for the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, calls an “agricultural desert.”  Set aside before industrial agriculture arrived in Iowa, pioneer cemeteries like this one have become the prairie’s final resting place — one of the few where the land remembers what it once was. Some of these cemetery prairie remnants tower over the surrounding farm fields, long roots holding the rich, undisturbed soil together as the rest of Iowa erodes away under repetitive plowing, flowing downriver.

Compared to other forms of American wilderness, prairies are hard to love — they don’t easily fall into the category of the sublime like giant sequoias or Yosemite waterfalls. You have to get really close to appreciate the complex beauty. It’s probably why (along with the black gold underneath the plants) it was so easy to destroy, acre by acre.

“To the uninitiated, the idea of a walk through a prairie might seem to be no more exciting than crossing a field of wheat, a cow pasture, or an unmowed blue-grass lawn,” wrote Robert Betz, a Northeastern Illinois University biologist and early defender of cemetery prairies. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Aboveground at Rochester, native prairie grasses and flowers and introduced ornamental plants, such as daisies, hyacinths and showy stonecrops, coexist. Black-eyed Susans, coneflowers, milkweed and prairie clovers grow on graves, alongside the usual decorative plastic varieties. Underground, deep roots entwine with the bodies of long-dead pioneers — who pushed out the Indigenous communities who first stewarded this prairie — and generations of Rochester citizens.

The Prairie’s Unmaking

I grew up less than an hour’s drive from Rochester, though I learned of the cemetery’s existence only recently, in a book by the New York landscape photographer Stephen Longmire, who’d stumbled across this place and spent years photographing it with a large format film camera. While he wandered Rochester’s hills in the early 2000s, I was spending my weekends at my grandparents’ farm in Wapello playing in their corn rows behind the barn. Prairie was the setting for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, a thing of the past. I had no idea how utterly transformed Iowa was, or how much we’d lost.

It wasn’t until college that I learned the truth. Prairie once stretched from Montana down to Texas and east into Ohio, over a million square miles. Iowa was once the beating heart of the American Central Grassland.

But “tallgrass prairie is, in many respects, a human construct,” Tom Rosburg, a biologist and herbarium curator at Drake University in Iowa, told me.

Prairie relies on annual cleansing fire to transform dead foliage into usable nutrients. Shortgrass prairie in the dry western plains burns easily, the fires often lit by lightning and fueled by constant wind. Tallgrass prairie, on the other hand, “wants to be trees,” Chris Helzer, The Nature Conservancy’s science director in Nebraska, told me. It only grows in places with enough precipitation that woodland should dominate.

The Central Grassland’s extension into the Midwest, called the Prairie Peninsula, puzzled scientists for decades — they wondered why it wasn’t dominated by forest. Eventually, they arrived at an answer. For thousands of years, grass and trees had waged a war of contrition across the hills that are now Rochester Cemetery — and across much of Iowa and Illinois. But Indigenous peoples sided with the grasses from the beginning, lighting regular fires that rejuvenated the grasses, kept trees at bay and ensured the landscape remained open for easier hunting. Here at Rochester, it was the Meskwaki, who still live nearby on land purchased from the U.S. government after the Black Hawk War.

Most of a prairie plant’s biomass is underground, in the form of deep root systems that allow it to spring back to life after frequent fires. When pioneers arrived in Iowa and Illinois in the early 1800s, they discovered millennia of decomposing roots produced a black, nitrogen-rich, silty loam — some of the most fertile soil in the world. Thus began the prairie’s destruction. Industrialized farming operations moved in, like my family’s, such that less than a century later, it was nearly all gone, turned into monocultures of corn and soy sustained by artificial nitrogen inputs, herbicides and pesticides, which were irrigated by stick-straight ditches and networks of buried drainage tiles.

“It was destroyed piece by piece, farmer by farmer,” Rosburg told me, with some bitterness. “It was the biggest transformation in the history of Earth — and in less than a person’s lifetime.”

The change is so dramatic, it’s hard to imagine what was once there. You can’t unplow a prairie — once you tear through those deep, ancient roots, formed over centuries, it’s over. And despite decades of attempts, it’s nearly impossible to create a restoration that perfectly matches the real thing, with its function, structure and sheer number of species, each with its own complex relationships.

To attempt a restoration at all, you need raw material — seeds. And for that, you need remnants. Scientists have dedicated their lives to mapping the few places where the prairie still exists, scouring the state on foot and sifting through old records as if panning for gold. Rosburg has found and saved more than 65 forgotten remnants through his organization, Drake Prairie Rescue. Many remnants exist on fragments of land deemed too rocky, sandy or steep to plow. Those remnants were often used as pastures — planted with a mix of non-native grasses and heavily grazed by cattle.

Examples of still-intact prairies, on rich black carbon soil, are rare — primarily found in narrow strips along railroad tracks set aside before plowing began and on pioneer cemeteries, where the impediment to plowing was cultural, rather than practical. Those remnants tend to be the last and best records of what’s considered a typical prairie, with its rich, silty, loamy soil.

To date, there are 136 cemetery prairies across the Midwest, according to the Iowa Prairie Network’s list. While an Iowa cornfield’s species diversity can be counted on one hand, some prairie remnants contain as many as 250 species, according to data published last July by the Prairie Research Institute team in Illinois.

Unlike neighboring Illinois, which has an extensive state system to protect its rare native prairies, wetlands and forests, in Iowa, nearly all the state’s land is privately held. In fact, 60% of Iowa’s public land is made up of roadside rights-of-way, or ditches, as they are more commonly known, according to the University of Northern Iowa’s Tallgrass Prairie Center.

In Iowa, cemeteries with fewer than 12 burials in the past 50 years are officially designated as pioneer cemeteries, which allows counties to relax mowing and restore prairie — although that doesn’t always happen in practice. Still, these township-owned pioneer cemeteries serve as de facto prairie nature preserves, islands of tenuous conservation for rare insects and plants — as long as townships OK it — in a sea of destruction.

Due to climate change, the wet Midwest is becoming even wetter, which means that prairie remnants are slowly transitioning to woodland in the absence of fire. Absent any management, a prairie can disappear in as little as 30 years, Laura Walter, a University of Northern Iowa biologist, told me. “Rescuing” remnants, as Rosburg does, is an active process that involves convincing townships to conduct controlled burns and weed out invasive species in their cemeteries.

And these prairie preserves have come in handy. They’re models for what some scientists call artisanal restorations — small-scale prairies conjured forth on private land, often with great care and dedication to exactly recreating what’s been lost. But remnants like Rochester are also helping bring back prairie at a larger scale. 

In the 1990s, Iowa lawmakers mandated prairie plantings along state highways and provided incentives for counties to do the same to help combat soil erosion and reduce mowing and herbicide use that polluted waterways. But the Tallgrass Prairie Center, which operates the state’s roadside vegetation program, couldn’t find prairie seeds readily available for sale.

So, they had to start from scratch, collecting seeds from cemetery prairies and other remnants, learning to germinate and grow plants in their greenhouse and production plots, and then donating seeds to seed companies while teaching them how to grow them in order to scale up production. 

Before they started, prairie blazing star, a common Iowa prairie flower, could only be purchased from the Netherlands, where it was a popular cut flower, said Laura Jackson, the Tallgrass Prairie Center’s director. Now, she told me, it’s one of dozens of regional ecotype seeds that counties can use to restore prairie along their roads. At last May’s annual spring seed pickup at the center’s warehouse in Cedar Falls, Iowa, trucks from 46 Iowa counties hauled away 19,000 pounds of prairie seed — big bluestem, switchgrass, prairie clover, asters, coneflowers and more — originally sourced from prairie remnants like Rochester. To date, some 50,000 acres of roadsides have been planted with native grasses and wildflowers.

Restoration is about preparing Iowa for the future rather than trying to revert its landscape to the 1800s, Jackson told me. On a practical level, prairies provide myriad benefits, especially in light of climate change, that are more important than ever, including soil stability, carbon storage, flood mitigation, fire resilience, drought resistance and habitat for pollinators. But because it’s so hard to predict what will survive amid a changing climate, it’s crucial to maximize genetic diversity by sourcing seeds from remnants across the state, Jackson told me.

Because Iowa is a relatively young landscape, geologically speaking, only a handful of prairie plants have gone extinct, and most species are still widespread. In parts of the country that haven’t been wiped clean by glaciers as recently, plants have evolved to become highly local, “endemic” to specific niches, Chris Benda, an Illinois botanist who regularly conducts plant surveys, told me.

Even though Iowa’s prairie survives today primarily on scattered fragments, many of its plants once thrived across the state. That means the seeds of Iowa’s great prairie still exist. From pioneer cemeteries, managers can source the original seeds of Iowa’s landscape and use them to grow prairie at scale.

Prairie Or Cemetery?

At Rochester Cemetery, others began to arrive for the day’s garlic mustard pull: Dan Sears, an organizer for the nonprofit Iowa Prairie Network; Walter, who runs the prairie plant research program at the Tallgrass Prairie Center; and a dozen locals. Volunteers tucked their jeans into their socks to avoid tick bites, grabbed bags and donned gardening gloves.

Sears explained what garlic mustard — the non-native species encroaching on this tiny prairie remnant — looks like, with toothed leaves and delicate white flowers. However, Sears added that volunteers should also be on the lookout for another non-native plant, showy stonecrop (which he referred to as “sedum”), which could compromise the quality of the prairie remnant. 

I noticed Thomsen tense beside me as she piped up: “I need to investigate first before you pull sedum!” The cemetery’s prairie is speckled with sedum and other long-naturalized “invasives,” from lilacs to day lilies, that were planted over centuries to honor loved ones. Thomsen relies on those plants to find unmarked graves in a cemetery without formal records, she told me. She even planted a peony bush to help her find her own family’s graves amid the tallgrass. “Just because you don’t see a headstone does not mean there’s not somebody there!”

Sears held up his hands to Thomsen in surrender: “Her word is law today.”

Their interaction was the first hint at a conflict that has come up time and again here — between what’s considered natural or local, and invasive or foreign, among both plants and people. Rochester draws outsiders to an unusual degree for a rural Iowa town. For years, prairie enthusiasts like Longmire, environmentalists, AmeriCorps volunteers and university scientists have taken the Rochester exit off Interstate 80 to visit this cemetery. 

At times, visitors have collected seeds or even plants without permission. The late Diana Horton, who long ran the University of Iowa herbarium and created the most complete list of Rochester’s some 400 species, once cut down several of the prairie’s red cedars, much to Thomsen’s chagrin. The trees are native to the area (“It’s called the Cedar River,” she quipped), but not to oak savannas. Some locals, who come to the cemetery simply to mourn their loved ones, see the outsiders themselves as the invasive species. Of course, it’s a matter of perspective — descendants of pioneers here can trace their ownership back to the original land stolen from the area’s Indigenous peoples.

But the biggest point of conflict, here as at prairie cemeteries across Iowa and Illinois, comes from locals with varying ideas of what a cemetery should be. Rochester Township owns the cemetery, and its trustees manage it, along with most of the town’s affairs. Most of Iowa’s cemetery prairies are no longer active, working cemeteries. That makes it easier for conservationists like Rosburg to make the case to trustees for controlled burns and other active management strategies — the prairie is part of the pioneer history of those cemeteries, something to be preserved. But Rochester still has burials every year, which heightens tensions.

The Nature Conservancy recognized Rochester as a high-quality site for prairie plants back in the 1980s and got permission to do a controlled burn then. But its proposal to cease burials there to prevent damage to prairie plants was “incendiary” to locals, Longmire told me. Since then, fierce debates have arisen repeatedly over proposals to mow more frequently — Thomsen told me that one of her aunts tried to oust an incumbent trustee solely over the need for increased mowing during the 2006 election.

But infrequent mowing is what preserved the prairie. Rochester was hayed for livestock under pioneer ownership and, more recently, due to limited staff time and township funding, mowed annually in the fall so mourners could find their family stones. That cadence mimics the fires and grazing by bison and livestock that historically rejuvenated prairie, keeping woody plants at bay.

There are always residents who want this cemetery to resemble the familiar urban variety, Sarah Subbert, Cedar County’s naturalist, told me. “Well, that’s not what Iowa was … If you mowed it every week, you wouldn’t have that diversity out there at all.”

Some residents take mowing around their family stones into their own hands, having been officially permitted to do so by management rules enacted in 2016. This has resulted in a more traditional-looking patch of close-cropped grass at the center of the cemetery surrounding the most recent burials, encircled by prairie on all sides — a sort of compromise visible on the landscape.

On Nature & Culture

I fell in love with tallgrass prairie as an undergrad at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Not with the plants, as many of my botany peers did, but with the idea of prairie as a human construct. If you try to fence off a prairie and preserve it — freeze it in time — it’ll disappear as woody plants and trees slowly encroach. That was a point of fierce debate in the 1980s and ‘90s, when conservationists like Betz, the early discoverer of cemetery prairies, and Steve Packard in Chicago advocated for controlled burns and more active management of prairie remnants and restorations.

Critics saw restoration as gardening or meddling with nature. I thought of the vast western nature preserves that William Cronon described in “The Trouble with Wilderness,” and the irony of the government ousting the area’s Indigenous peoples — who had been stewarding the land — from their homes to create national parks to preserve now government-recognized wilderness. Nature has always been a part of the human realm. But prairie especially so.

“The whole ‘let nature take its course’ thing, or wilderness as a place without people, all those things break down very quickly in the tallgrass prairie,” Helzer, who manages thousands of acres of prairie in Nebraska, told me.

So I started seeking out prairies and other native ecosystems in Iowa and Illinois as a restoration volunteer. I pulled and cut invasives like buckthorn and multiflora rose and helped prepare for burns. When Rock Island decided to reintroduce prairie in a historic, Victorian-style, manicured park near my college, I dedicated my senior thesis to assessing how community members felt about the effort.

What I learned really surprised me — residents used words like “abandoned,” “unkempt,” “trashy” and “unwelcoming” to describe the unmowed areas. Several told me they felt like the “wild” had “invaded” the park and worried about this inviting “vandalism and crime” or “undesirable” people. That’s a conflation — famously made in New York City’s broken windows policing initiative — that some anthropologists have deemed “trash talk.”

To be fair, the initial restorations were of low quality. The parks department, perhaps unfamiliar with the history of prairie management, which requires careful selection and seeding of native species and controlled burns, took a laissez-faire approach. Later, the city acknowledged the “naturalized” areas weren’t exactly beautiful at first and began to plant more prairie grasses and flowers. But the negative attitudes stuck with me, long after I graduated. The nature-culture divide, established over two centuries of American civilization, is a challenge to bridge in the city.

Parks and graveyards are both “memorial landscapes,” Longmire writes in his photography book about Rochester, “Life and Death on the Prairie,” places where nature is manipulated to human ends. But cemeteries are culturally sacred places. That’s why I had to see Rochester’s cemetery prairie for myself. What way forward — if any — had its managers figured out to help with the coexistence of not just plants but also culture?

People Of The Prairie

Back at Rochester, Thomsen led me away from the garlic mustard pull to show me her favorite part of the cemetery. She grew up just to the north and spent her summers here with her best friend, who once eerily foretold that Thomsen would someday become the cemetery’s guardian. 

In 2011, the township asked her to become a trustee and the burial manager.

Even setting aside its sprangly prairie vegetation, Rochester is a chaotic sort of cemetery. A resident can pick a plot, but that doesn’t guarantee it will be available. (“Somebody might already be there,” Thomsen told me.) On a metal park bench under an oak, Thomsen unrolled a copy of a survey from the 1980s with graves marked with little Xs: “It’s accurate to a degree,” she said.

Thomsen’s found hundreds of unmarked graves with her trusty prod and dug up and restored many broken and long-forgotten stones — as of December 2025, she was up to 1,061. And after 15 years, she knows where all her “residents” are — and all their stories. She’s met their descendants and walked with them to their long-lost relatives. She’s dug through newspaper archives for obituaries and uploaded records to FindAGrave.com. Growing up, she wanted to be an archaeologist.

Surefooted in the tall grass, Thomsen led the way uphill to a spot near the cemetery’s boundary fence, far from the mustard-pulling crew. Here we visited Rebecca Green, who died on Sept. 25, 1838, at the age of seven months. This made her grave the cemetery’s oldest, Thomsen told me. Green is surrounded by pink prairie phlox and purple columbine, as she would have been when her parents, Eliza and William Green, buried her here next to where they’d eventually be laid to rest. Thomsen wondered aloud if they’d picked this place for its colorful flowers. The Greens arrived in Rochester in 1837, just a year after its founding, from Kentucky and Maryland, respectively. Their home served as a hotel for travelers and a stop on the underground railroad. 

“When you come here, you’re looking at what they saw and what made them stay,” Thomsen told me. “This is the pioneer’s gift that they left for us. We are respecting that, even if everybody doesn’t get it, when they’re so used to manicured, boring.” She’s protective of this place, and her job isn’t easy. Sometimes trustees make decisions without her, mowing too early last year, for example, which prevented a controlled burn she was planning. She’s used to having to fight to be heard. She yanks poison ivy off a newer stone that reads “Captain Andrew Walker” — a Mexican and Civil War veteran buried in “a pauper’s grave” after he died at the Mt. Pleasant Asylum for the Insane. Thomsen tracked down his pension file and honored him with a stone on his family’s plot at Rochester.

I asked Thomsen whether she knew where she wanted to be buried. And of course, she did. She’s known since she was a child. The highest hill along the back fence, under an oak — a spot that’s always called to her. Thomsen gets goosebumps thinking about it. “There’s energy to the land, and we all leave our little imprint somehow.” The cemetery remembers the prairie, and the prairie remembers the people buried within it. Like the Greens, Thomsen’s family is mostly here, “four rows of kin” — her grandma and grandpa, her aunt, three uncles, her sister-in-law, two of those lost just last year. Her own staked-out spot is some distance away from the family plot — “Sometimes you can be a little too close to family, even in death.”

When Longmire spent his years in Rochester, he lamented that there was a “dearth of people who could see both sides of the coin,” he told me — to appreciate Rochester as both a natural and cultural wonder. But just as he left, Thomsen arrived on the scene. In her big binder, she keeps a pamphlet from his book talk. She knows all the stones, but she also knows the prairie — the common names (and some she’s made up) for each of the plants and the spots they come up every year, including the secret place the lady slipper orchid grows. She knows each of the towering oaks by name — the bear tree (a burr oak with a burr that resembles a cub climbing one side); the guardian, which stood tallest on the hill before a derecho felled it. She cried and mourned its death.

I had expected conflict at Rochester. But instead, I found someone who cared enough to shepherd compromise. If it can be done here, on hallowed ground, maybe it can be done anywhere.

Life Persists

Lost in thought, I realized Thomsen had taken off down the hill. I waded after her. She wanted to point out a new plant she’d spotted to Sears, the mustard pull organizer. Each little stalk was ringed with a spiraling firework of yellow blossoms.

“Oh, that’s lousewort!” he told her, “Laura would be really excited to see that!”

Thomsen cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted for Laura Walter.

Walter, the scientist, wandered over, a bag overflowing with uprooted garlic mustard invaders tied around her waist. She excitedly knelt to examine the tiny plant, lifting her wide-brimmed hat. Finding lousewort usually means you’re dealing with high-quality remnant prairie, she told me, a “holy grail.” It’s partially parasitic, with roots that penetrate those of other plants underground to pirate water and mineral nutrients. In doing so, it suppresses its victim’s growth and keeps the prairie more open, promoting diversity. That kind of complex relationship is hard to recreate when doing restoration work. The plants nearby did look a little droopy. Had it already raided their nutrients and left a warning sign for others? I asked.

“It’s tantalizing to think about,” Walter laughed. She took a geolocated photo, and later, with the township’s permission, returned to collect its seeds. 

Walter then pointed excitedly at a blooming shooting star a few feet away. As we watched, a large bumblebee hovered upside down under its blossom and landed. In the spring, new bumblebee queens fly great distances to start new colonies, she told me. They depend on a few early blooming prairie flower species, like the shooting star, which have co-evolved to release pollen at specific bumblebee buzz frequencies.

“It’s funny, this is a cemetery, it’s where you honor the dead,” she mused. “But here you can also come and honor an abundance of life.”

Walter has collected shooting star seeds from remnants across the state, but they’re tricky to propagate. In the first growing season, a plant produces tiny seed leaves, a centimeter across. The following year, it gains a tiny tuft of true leaves. It can take five years to flower and produce seeds. Prairie restoration managers typically favor vigorous, fast-growing species that can outcompete invasive species and establish quickly.

Sitting in a prairie, you come to appreciate its beauty. The sheer complexity surrounding us was overwhelming. And it continued, invisibly, beneath the soil — every remnant prairie has a fungal and microorganism community unique to the soil type and plant community.

“Think about all the things that we don’t know, and that don’t come back on their own,” Walter said. “We have to preserve those relationships in the places where they exist until we understand them.”

Fate Of The Prairie

The future of tallgrass prairie remains uncertain. The Midwestern states are speckled with more and higher-quality restorations today than when efforts began in the 1980s; however, Iowa’s unique roadside vegetation program depends on county and state-level support, which is at a low point under the current administration.

The Burr Oak Land Trust, an Iowa conservation group that for years sent AmeriCorps volunteers to Rochester and other remnant prairies to pull invasive species and conduct prescribed burns, lost its funding due to Department of Government Efficiency cuts this year. The Prairie Research Institute in Illinois lost $21 million in federal funding last fall. And opt-in programs, like the Conservation Reserve Program, where the federal government pays farmers to take marginal land out of crop production and return it to prairie or wetland, depend on the whims of the market, Jonathan Dahlem, an Iowa State University sociologist who studies farming conservation practices, told me. When corn and soybean prices rise, like they have over the past two decades, farmers are eager to plow up restorations to seed row crops even if yields aren’t expected to be high. 

Rosburg said he finds hope in the increasing number of remnants discovered each year on forgotten pastures, along roads and in cemeteries. Universities like to talk about the “outsized impact” of small restorations, Jackson told me. But in reality, “every little bit helps a little bit,” she said.

I find my own hope in this place and in these people. At the end of the day, after the garlic mustard pull was over, Thomsen and Walter walked together up the hills, sharing their intimate and yet very different knowledge of the place.

Longmire calls Rochester Cemetery a memento mori — a reminder for living visitors of both their inevitable fate and of what Iowa lost. Funerals, gravestones and cemeteries are for the living — and this is a place that is alive, with plants and humans. Rochester is a time capsule of the past and a key to the future.

As I left, a truck and trailer pulled into the prairie to unload a riding lawn mower. The roar of the engine drowned out the buzz of insects as its operator carefully mowed around their family stone. It’s not a sight you’d see in a typical prairie. But here, it’s what compromise looks – and sounds — like. 

I later learned that the man who had mowed around the gravestones of many Rochester families for years as a public service had passed away that same day. The sea of tallgrass grew unchecked in the following months, surging against the gravestones like waves — a constant reminder that he was gone. Concerned families have started asking Thomsen how the cemetery will be maintained going forward — how nature will be held at bay. A similar series of events sparked the big fight over mowing back in 2006. I worry a little about the prairie’s future and Thomsen’s hold over the fragile balance here.

“But isn’t it wonderful,” Longmire asked me, “to have a place that people take so seriously to fight about how it’s managed?”

The post Where The Prairie Still Remains appeared first on NOEMA.

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Trump was hinting at his desire to annex Canada, an ambition some have dismissed as a joke, but his words were incidentally insightful.

Borders represent a conceptual distinction between the living world as it actually exists and the myriad ways it can be demarcated for particular, often extractive purposes. Astronauts and astronomers have observed how, from above, one sees no lines around states or territories dividing the Earth, only a majestic, unified whole.

This abstraction of the landscapes upon which we all depend, and of which we are part, has contributed to their systematic destruction. In reaction to the unchecked metabolism of modern industrial civilization, the Earth is reasserting its primacy. Extreme weather, biodiversity loss and other mounting calamities promise to undermine our economic and territorial integrity. Humanity now faces the urgent question of how to operate in a more sustainable, reciprocal relationship with our environments.

A growing ecological movement sees the solution in bioregionalism: the idea of reorganizing social and economic life around the natural boundaries of the ecosystems that host and sustain us. Rather than accepting the abstract placemaking of property or state, bioregionalists look to watersheds, biodiversity, human culture and other aspects of physical and social geography. Well-known bioregions in North America include Cascadia (reaching roughly from the southern tip of Alaska to northern California) and the Ozarks (primarily encompassing southern Missouri and northern Arkansas).

After emerging some 50 years ago, bioregionalism lost steam around the turn of the century. Today, however, it is in the midst of a resurgence. In light of the escalating pressures of the Anthropocene, many in the movement are now embracing bioregional finance (BioFi) — new financial systems and decentralized technologies to establish the technical, institutional and cultural bases for bioregional forms of economics and governance.

It’s a grand vision with ideas that may sound naively ambitious or even controversial, like using cryptocurrency to tokenize protected forest lands and incentivize their conservation. Proponents argue that such approaches can provide a means of affording visibility and value to ecosystems too often ignored by mainstream economics. The mission is to leverage existing economic systems in ways that prioritize bioregional regeneration over extraction.

“There’s a kind of dual edge to bioregionalism,” Brandon Letsinger, a leader in the Cascadian movement, told me. “One is short-term and pragmatic, working within existing systems, and the other is long-term and utopian — really working to outgrow, overgrow and build institutions that we don’t currently have, but that we need.”

A Meeting By The River 

It was a cold, rainy weekend outside the Georgetown Steam Plant in late spring 2025; inside was damp and somehow even colder. The loading area of a decommissioned power station would make an unusual venue for most gatherings, but for the inaugural Cascadia BioFi Conference, it was an appropriate setting.

The towering power plant was built in 1906, just south of Seattle. About a mile to the west is the Duwamish River, where for millennia the Duwamish, Coast Salish and other Indigenous peoples practiced sustainable ways of life. The Duwamish flows into the Salish Sea, a sprawling system of waterways and watersheds connected to the Pacific Ocean by the broad-shouldered Strait of Juan de Fuca.

As industry insinuated itself around Seattle in the early 20th century, the river was straightened, its mud flats drained, its banks paved over and its biodiversity devastated. The Duwamish is now a registered superfund site. Efforts are underway to restore the life of the river and the areas around it, including the steam plant.

“When we talk about regeneration, that conversation has to start here,” Letsinger, who helped organize the conference, said in his opening remarks. He wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the silhouette of a Douglas fir tree framed by a rainbow, an inclusive variation on the popular symbol of Cascadia known as the “Doug flag,” which was ubiquitous throughout the drafty power plant.

Letsinger made the case for how, if properly organized and mobilized, the Cascadian bioregion could leverage significant resources and influence. Home to many leading technology companies as well as a significant proportion of the logging industry, it is also host to an outsized concentration of carbon-storing forests and some of the scarce remaining old growth on Earth. Washington state alone boasts one of the largest economies in the country.

Despite this bounty, a persistent problem facing the bioregionalist agenda — in Cascadia and beyond — is a lack of funding. On the lips of many of the 200 people in attendance was the impending “great wealth transfer,” a reference to the investments and financial holdings of baby boomers that will be redirected over the coming years. The hope is to establish the means of directing those funds to bioregional ends, and to leverage various new and innovative funding models for the cause.

Punctuated by the occasional roar of nearby jets, presentations were held in different chambers of the power plant. Visitors tucked away plates from a Thai food truck while perusing the booths of bioregion-aligned organizations, and peered at large Cascadian maps and artworks displayed throughout the cavernous space.

The gathering was fairly diverse, though mostly white, with a small degree of Indigenous representation alongside Cascadian elders, Bay Area finance professionals and digital developers. The crypto contingent were especially easy to spot, with their distinct fashion sense and laconic vibe. The scene put into perspective bioregionalism’s renewed momentum — and its considerable evolution over the decades.

Bioregionalism’s First Wave

Rooted in environmentalist counterculture, bioregionalism was popularized in the 1970s by activists and writers such as Peter Berg. It emerged from nascent ecological and permaculture research, back-to-the-land movements, appropriate technology, localism, forest defense and other activist communities.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a network of grassroots bioregionalism groups flourished across North America. With hubs in places such as the Ozarks, the Great Lakes, Maine, the Ohio River Valley, South and Central America as well as Cascadia, they agitated for and organized around principles of environmental restoration and defense, Indigenous sovereignty and a regenerative relationship between planet and people.

Berg described the idea of the bioregion as “a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness.” It has also been called a “two-eyed” approach, meaning it is compatible with both western science and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Bioregionalists believe that communities with the most direct and deepest connections to the land — in particular, Indigenous communities — know best what is needed within a region. They therefore encourage communities to map their own bioregions, highlighting which aspects they find most important to recognize and protect. In this way, a bioregion is said to define itself, as the people living there identify with and organize around it. 

“Bioregional boundaries stand forth as ‘convergent thresholds’ where many dynamics converge and contexts change,” David McCloskey, a former sociology professor credited with coining the term Cascadia, told me via email.

There are numerous active bioregional communities around the world. The Ozarks have been a hub of bioregional organizing for decades. The Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance is leveraging a range of bioregional organizing and funding strategies to protect 86 million acres of rainforest from extraction. A nongovernmental organization called Ashoka is supporting bioregional projects in Europe and the U.S. The Design School for Regenerating Earth, led by author and researcher Joe Brewer, is spearheading bioregional organizing in Colombia and elsewhere.

The Cascadian movement has long been one of the most visible expressions of bioregionalism. Historically, Cascadia has also been the center of a marginal secessionist effort, though there is little apparent overlap with Cascadian bioregionalism, which is defined by broader environmental and community-based goals that have persisted and evolved for decades.

“The true Cascadia seems to sing itself over and over in different ways in different contexts over generations,” McCloskey said. 

Bioregionalism initially gained traction through independent publications such as Planet Drum and Rain Magazine. It also formed communities through a series of congresses beginning in the early 1980s. These gatherings brought together bioregional activists from around North America, who debated and voted on collective vision statements that guided each cohort in their own regional agendas.

In the summer of 1986, the first Cascadian Bioregional Congress took place in Olympia, the Washington state capital and countercultural epicenter. The gatherings generated a great deal of discourse and energy, but ultimately quieted down in the late 1990s as the people involved aged and transitioned.

“It just kind of had a natural life cycle,” said Lansing Scott, a former editor at Rain Magazine who was heavily involved in the early congresses. “There’s only so many times you can come together and craft a vision statement and change this sentence to that or whatever before it gets a little boring.”

While the larger bioregionalism movement has waxed and waned, it has never vanished. Scott describes its last couple decades as a “mycelial stage,” growing and forming connections in an underground fashion, largely unseen until recently.

As bioregionalism has experienced its recent flush of renewed interest, it has also embraced new financial and technical concepts that show a potential path to building impactful, sustainable social infrastructure according to bioregional principles.

The BioFi Era Begins

The current wave of activity and enthusiasm around bioregional organizing was largely catalyzed by the adoption of bioregional finance. Launched by an organization called the BioFi Project, it is a framework that “organizes the flow of financial capital and other multi-capital resources to the regeneration of ecosystems, culture, and communities in bioregions.”

In 2024, the BioFi Project published “The BioFi Book,” which argues for prioritizing the regeneration of damaged ecosystems in economics, introducing various innovative financial instruments designed to reorient the systems of capital that undermine them. The book also offers a range of strategies and case studies demonstrating the principles in practice.

Though still nascent as a concept and community of practice, BioFi has garnered a great deal of excitement around bioregionalism, bringing into play an array of financial tools and innovations. At the core of the BioFi concept are bioregional finance facilities (BFFs). In essence, these are grassroots financial institutions emerging from bioregional organizing to make a community’s projects and priorities legible to larger financial systems and sources of investment.

“If we’re going to protect these ecosystems that are highly endangered, we need to set up financing facilities that are governed by local people, and we need to get money to them quickly,” said BioFi Project director and former World Bank sustainable finance consultant Samantha Power (no relation to the famous diplomat). 

“In our theory of change, we really believe that people living in relationship to place — who know that place, are paying attention to the ecological changes of that place, are connected to the culture of that place — these are the people that are best positioned to implement regenerative programs.” 

Regenerate Cascadia, a nonprofit co-founded by Letsinger, British Columbia-based artist Clare Attwell and development consultant Taya Seidler, is a clear example of what a BFF could look like. The trio and their partners have been developing the organization to eventually incubate, fund and coordinate projects throughout Cascadia. This could include riverkeeping organizations, watershed or forest restoration and preservation, regenerative farms, banking cooperatives or bioregional learning centers.

Regenerate Cascadia is structured as a framework for flowing money to landscapes from larger sources of capital — primarily philanthropic funds — through various nonprofit services meant to support decentralized, on-the-ground regeneration work. 

Such a project may be the acquisition and stewardship of land, the launching of a regional bank or other place-based initiatives. A BFF like Regenerate Cascadia could gather these projects into a portfolio of regenerative assets and bring them into the reach of fund managers with growing interest in allocating investments to regenerative ends.

Regenerate Cascadia is already fielding applications for its own nascent BioFi program, with plans to launch in 2026 with a group of projects operating under three tiers of resourcing and commitment: seed groups, landscape groups and landscape hubs. Each tier would determine how much money a project could independently raise and the amount of support it would receive from the nonprofit. 

The organizing principle of a BFF requires that decision-making be maintained locally. To curb the tendency toward gridlock among groups of opinionated, highly engaged stakeholders — a problem common to activist spaces — Cascadian organizers employ various conflict aversion strategies, such as sociocracy, a non-hierarchical democratic consensus structure. 

“What became quickly apparent is that there are people out there doing the work, but they are not being supported to do it,” said Seidler. While there are many potential approaches to attracting and directing capital into bioregional organizing, Regenerate Cascadia is currently geared toward philanthropic investment. Investment capital, however, is the largest source of potential funding.

“Only 3% of global capital is philanthropic funds,” said Cheryl Chen, CEO of Salmon Returns, a finance ecosystem for the Salmon Nation bioregion. “If we’re going to really try and change the course of humanity, or create an economy based on regeneration, we have to unlock the other kinds of capital.”

New Tech, Old Growth

In recent years, the bioregionalism movement has been experimenting with cryptocurrencies, blockchains and other financial technologies. One example is Kwaxala, an initiative of the Kwiakah First Nation in British Columbia. In May 2024, the Kwiakah First Nation announced the establishment of the M̓ac̓inuxʷ Special Forest Management Area, a 140,000 acre section of forest secured not through purchase — the land is owned by the Canadian Crown — but rather through logging rights.

Since securing these rights, Kwaxala has worked with the provincial government to designate the region as a special forest management conservation area, and has converted the license from a right to extraction to a right to regeneration. Held by a recognized, Indigenous land title holder, it is effectively an asset whose value is pinned to the prevention of extraction.

“Essentially we’re creating a reverse logging company,” said Gavin Woodburn, Indigenous science advisor to Kwaxala and a member of its board who presented at the Cascadia BioFi conference. The forest under Kwaxala’s management is currently valued based on carbon credits, with plans to deploy an “eco credit” called a Centree. This digital cryptocurrency token will be issued for every 100 acres protected under the program. Should more acres be added to the protected territory, more coins will be issued, with their value underwritten by the health of the forest. 

Within the territory that makes up Kwaxala’s Living Forest Fund, local Forest Partners — communities positioned to steward a portion of the total forest — are majority equity holders and contractual partners who carry out the day-to-day work of overseeing the protected forest. In essence, Kwaxala coordinates offset sales and fund investments, supporting the Forest Partners by building and maintaining underlying systems and services. Akin to Regenerate Cascadia’s distributed structure, the revenue from investment goes to paying for these operations, but 90% is retained by the smaller partner groups. 

Centree value is currently assessed by way of the narrow metric of carbon sequestration, playing into the existing carbon credit market, but the hope is for more holistic and bioregion-specific measures of health and value to be introduced as bioregional financing concepts are further established and tested.

“Over time, the idea is that we can create more and more of these opportunities, whether it’s attached to forests or to watersheds, or to regenerative agricultural lands so that people can invest in regeneration,” said Chen of Salmon Returns, which is working directly with Kwaxala. “Carbon credits were once just like an idea, and now it’s a big thing, a tens of billions of dollars market. Kwaxala is a good, living example of what we could do if we were able to propagate that model to local conditions and terms.”

Many in the regenerative economics space also advocate for a kind of distributed, sovereign, public infrastructure managed as a commons. The technological architecture most often cited to achieve this is the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

A DAO is essentially a system of encoded contracts that “live” among networked computers through a blockchain registry, rather than by way of state-enforced systems of law — a contract that runs itself, in essence, as long as the power stays on. Such a system could theoretically integrate with the overarching system or operate independently and even in its absence.

Legal logics such as the rights of nature, and of course the millennia of Indigenous tradition and practice, offer the basis and precedent for envisioning how such perspectives can be developed into existing and emerging systems.

Making Nature’s Value Legible

There are obvious questions as to whether cryptocurrencies and even finance at large are compatible with nature. Capital and innovative technologies tend to extract and to abstract, after all — the very things bioregionalism seeks to counteract.

In using these technologies, the goal is to design systems that can help to bootstrap the beginnings of bioregional self-governance, separate from the detrimental proclivities of capital. The basic reasoning is this: Modern society is governed and organized through systems of technology and finance. However, neither meaningfully prioritizes the well-being of the living world, and so the choice is between renouncing such systems or finding ways of making the living world legible to them. 

The question of how to value any aspect of a living ecosystem is also thorny and complicated. No less tricky is the question of representing and organizing that value through complex technologies such as blockchains, which in addition to being known as environmentally deleterious, are strongly associated with speculative finance.

“We’re so habituated into auditing things into discrete boundaries that we lack resources to understand from an economic perspective how to define value as anything other than a commodity,” said Austin Wade Smith, executive director of the Regen Foundation.

Smith carries the air of a visionary, seeing ways that emerging technologies could encode fundamental values of human-nature reciprocity into the systems we use. At the BioFi conference, they delivered a presentation on the possibility of leveraging DAOs as the basis of new commons. They described these systems as “living covenants” enacted as public infrastructure that inherently incentivize stewardship of landscapes and ecosystems.

“People get really frustrated with regenerative economics or credit systems,” Smith said, “which is understandable, because in a way it just seems like it’s an on-ramp to the commodification of the living world, but that is not what we’re trying to do.” Sitting on the staircase outside the power plant after their presentation, they explained the importance of bringing economics and other human systems into alignment with the living planet.

Blockchains, in their view, are “addressing” technologies that make it possible to represent anything from a tree to a watershed in systems of valuation and verification. This is a first step toward affording nonhuman beings and ecosystems a degree of rights and protections of the sort already granted to abstractions such as states and corporations. 

“By seeing it, you can’t ignore it, and you make it a necessary part of the balance sheet in a way,” Smith said. “So legibility is a kind of core question around how might we make our socio-technical systems — law, economics, technology, politics — work in service to not just us, but an expanded definition of the so-called social, which might include animals, forests or even waterways, lakes, rivers.”

Indeed, an oft-mentioned aspect of the Cascadia movement and broader bioregional projects that can be difficult to grasp is one of enfranchising the more-than-human in decision-making as well as in the economic life of a region. As Smith notes, if we valued something like chlorophyll for its scarcity the way we do something like gold, then the former would be far more valuable, and the protection of forests would be something that any system of valuation should reward.  

“If I say a Douglas fir has a treasury and has an endpoint in a digital addressing system, that’s possible, and we don’t have to inherit whether or not Chase Bank allows you to open an account for nonhuman entities,” said Smith. “Many of the systems that people have built are also inherently ecological and living systems, too. It’s not just ourselves, but socio-technical systems; our infrastructure can also be recast and understood as living systems if we understand that there isn’t a separation between nature and people.” 

Technology has profoundly shaped how humans relate to the Earth and to one another. Systems of commerce and governance have run for centuries on paper and word of mouth, on trust and on the threat of violence. The basic pitch for DAOs in this context is that the blockchain may enable sensing, consensus generation and other complex functions to be encoded into systems that inherently value and uphold the well-being of ecosystems and the people who rely upon them, running constantly and in real-time.

Technology and industry have deepened abstraction from the living systems upon which all humans depend, from which we emerge and within which we are inescapably interwoven. Bioregionalists are now leveraging novel technologies to reorganize social and economic life into alignment with nature, and to reverse the immense damage done by traditional forms of capital. 

This may seem counterintuitive; however, culture, tradition, law and other systems that profoundly impact nature have long operated as technologies in and of themselves. Through a bioregional lens, perhaps better technologies are possible.

The post Inside Bioregionalism’s Tech-Driven Revival appeared first on NOEMA.

Perpetually chilly, this part of the Atlantic Ocean courses around the islands off Portland. Even in summer, I find it best to swim at high tide, after the briny bay has climbed half a dozen feet over sun-cooked sand and rock. But water temperatures in the wider Gulf of Maine have been steadily climbing — it’s an average of two degrees Fahrenheit warmer here than it was 30 years ago. In fact, the gulf is warming more rapidly than 99% of the world’s oceans due to bathymetric and atmospheric conditions.

Those two degrees of additional warmth are a shocking, life-altering change for some of the marine life in the intertidal waterways — including Maine’s primary edible ocean product, the lobster, which is showing signs of moving north in search of colder seas. Taking lobsters’ place as lucrative fishery offerings are bivalves — oysters, mussels, scallops — which appreciate waters a little warmer than lobsters do. 

Green crabs, an invasive species that also thrives in warmer water, have proliferated as well. They come up in lobster traps and appear in the tide pools I used to squat down to examine as a child. And these days, in many spots along the coast, if you look down you’ll see their muddy green-brown shells scuttling off in all directions.

So prolific are green crabs on Maine’s coast now that they outnumber native rock and Jonah crabs, which they eat, along with snails, soft-shell clams and other bivalves that are vital economic products in a state that relies heavily on its fisheries. Even juvenile lobsters have been found in the stomachs of green crabs.

This has caused serious issues for businesses like Nauti Sisters Sea Farm, which floats in the water off Little John Island. Its rows of plastic oyster cages bob between buoys in the shifting tides. Each is home to a hundred or more growing oysters. Alicia Gaiero maintains the farm with her sisters, Amy and Chelsea.

Nauti Sisters uses fine-mesh floating oyster cages for larger oyster seed and bigger sunken cages for smaller seed. These bottom cages, or “condos,” as they’re called in the biz, are unfortunately accessible for the green crabs, which can simply crawl in and gorge on tiny, growing oysters. They also make the cages heavier, which gets problematic when you have to lift them out of the water dozens of times a day.

On a skiff out by the oyster cages in late June, Gaiero expertly hooked a buoy and hauled up one of this year’s bottom condos. “Last year we were so overwhelmed,” she said as she worked. “We just started filling crates with green crabs.” People sometimes would come to take them, she went on, but Nauti Sisters doesn’t have refrigeration and the green crab distribution network is inconsistent, so they don’t know who might show up looking for some, or when. 

Gaiero plopped the condo onto the deck of the skiff. Crabs of all shapes and sizes scattered out. One green crab snapped its front pinchers in the air defensively. She grabbed it and tossed it into a five-gallon bucket. Like most oyster farmers, she and her sisters usually smash the crabs and compost their remains back on land.

Native to coastal Europe and North Africa, green crabs arrived in North America in the 1800s, likely via the ballast water of merchant ships. They can now be found on every continent except Antarctica, and are one of the 100 most harmful invasive species worldwide.

Viciously versatile, green crabs grow quickly, may reproduce multiple times in a season and are comfortable in a wide range of ocean temperatures. The harsh conditions that once kept their populations in check — really cold winters, sea ice — are growing milder. And as Marissa McMahan, the senior director of fisheries at Manomet Conservation Sciences, explained, in warmer waters, green crabs will reproduce more quickly and begin to do so at a younger age, causing a population explosion. 

Green crabs are such aggressive predators they cost shellfisheries on the East Coast an estimated $22.6 million annually in lost revenue. “They love bivalves. They love soft-shell clams. They’ll beat up on small lobsters, they beat up on native species, they mow down eel grass,” Jason Goldstein, the research director at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, told me. “So there really aren’t too many good things we can say about them, right?”

But for intrepid fishermen and creative chefs, there may be just one good thing to say about them: They can taste pretty good.

Humans can be very effective at controlling animal populations when motivated to do so. We have hunted native species to extinction, so one approach that scientists and chefs are experimenting with is the consumption of invasives — also known as invasivorism — to try to control their expanding numbers.

The strategy of “beating by eating” unwelcome creatures has been embraced around the world. Humans have reshaped entire ecosystems with their appetites.

One of the most famous examples is the Asian carp, sometimes called “the most hated fish in America.” They are well-established in the Mississippi River basin and found as far north as the Great Lakes region. High-jumping carp evade low dams and other attempts to control their population and they compete with local fish for resources.

Carp can have a muddy taste and are considered by many Americans to be a “trash fish,” but this is partly due to a misunderstanding. The muddy association may come from our tendency to associate all carp with the Asian carp’s bottom-feeder cousins. Some reports suggest the flavor of Asian carp, which feed typically on plankton and algae in upper levels of rivers, is rather light. And when properly prepared they can be tasty. 

Similarly, the feral hogs that plague Texas and the Southern United States can be eaten just like any other pig. And if you’re a fan of the bright green seaweed salad often found at sushi restaurants and in Asian buffets, you are doing your part: The wakame variety of seaweed used in those salads is an invasive species that is, in my opinion, truly delicious. Other edible invasives include some species of crayfish, the nutria (a semi-aquatic rodent), lionfish and the armored catfish.

Many of these species are commonly consumed where they are native; distaste for them in new places is often cultural, due to their being unfamiliar to palates where they invade. All that’s required to enjoy them is a good recipe. And unlike some consumption that can come with a side of guilt, preparing an invasive species for the dinner table can bring a feeling of comfort in helping native habitats.

Although eating green crabs would make only a dent in their overall population, harvesting them is still a way to support the local community and ecosystem. This is part of the appeal for Evan Montellese, who got his green crab fishing license from the state for $10. He’s autistic and finds the experience of green crab fishing particularly satisfying — he keeps his own hours and can manage just fine with his kayak.

Montellese sets some of his crab traps off pilings at the wharf in Scarborough Marsh, just south of Portland. Others he puts in the marsh’s intertidal waters, paddling out to get to them. After participating in a research project with Manomet last year, he started reaching out to local restaurants about whether they were wanting any green crabs. “A lot of them were,” he told me, “and it just kind of grew from there.”

Maine’s waterfront can be a hard place for outsiders to start a career. The state’s fisheries are well regulated, with only a certain number of licenses for lobstering and commercial fishing. Of the state’s roughly 7,000 lobster licenses, many remain in the same family generation after generation. Few become available for new fishermen.

Many fisheries, particularly the cod and Northern shrimp fisheries, have suffered dwindling harvests as the gulf warms, and whether you want to fish in the deep sea or farm shellfish on the coast, the investment required to start from nothing is huge: boats to buy and maintain, traps to purchase, leases to obtain, license fees, mooring charges. And the chances of making a viable living are deeply uncertain.

But Montellese’s biggest challenge, at least at first, was convincing chefs to put green crabs on the menu.

Once named Bon Appétit’s Restaurant City of the Year, Portland has a high concentration of top restaurants and is a mecca for foodies. Seafood, for obvious reasons, is the city’s specialty. 

If you want to eat a green crab, your primary problems are their tough shells and small size. Unlike with larger crab species and Maine’s iconic lobster, breaking a green crab shell at the joints will release only a thimbleful of meat. So cooking them and plopping them down on a diner’s plate is basically out of the question. 

Chefs are learning that there’s a better way to use them in the kitchen.

“They make a killer broth stock,” Damian Sansonetti, a chef and co-owner at Chaval, in the West End, told me. “We break them down, roast them, mix them with some tomato products. It’s intense.”

When I visited Chaval recently, Sansonetti opened the lid of a container to reveal a deep brownish paste that released a blast of fishy aromas. I touched a small dollop to my tongue, sparking an explosion of fervent briny, oceanic flavor. Sansonetti uses this concentrate as a flavoring agent in numerous sauces and broths.

Doing this with lobster or other crabs, which cost around $12 a pound, would not be the most cost-effective use of prized crustaceans. Green crabs, though — at $1-$2 a pound in Maine, according to Sansonetti — are ideal. 

Farther downtown from Chaval, Jordan Rubin, a James Beard-nominated chef who runs the restaurants Crispy Gai and Mr. Tuna, echoed Sansonetti’s enthusiasm. “There’s not really meat you can use, but the flavor!” he said with excitement. 

With green crabs that are big enough, however, you can crack into them and poke out freshly cooked meat. Another way to enjoy a green crab is if they’re harvested during their molt, when their shells are soft enough for teeth to break through. In Italy, green crabs are native and even prized, especially for preparing a dish called moeche, which involves battering and frying the soft-shell crab and often serving it alongside fried polenta. 

But harvesting them at the right time is tricky. Their soft-shell stage lasts only about a day. “It can be a headache because it’s unpredictable,” Montellese told me. “There are a couple of people in Maine who are experimenting with harvesting the crabs [at the hard-shell stage] and keeping them until they shed, then selling them at that moment. It’s difficult from a sale or financial perspective, because they don’t all shed at the same time. Every crab is a little bit different depending on how fast they grow.”

Whether green crabs are soft-shelled or hard-shelled or boiled down into a concentrated paste, one of the challenges is getting consumers used to the idea that they are edible in the first place. 

There are, however, potential uses for green crabs outside the kitchen. One is to use them as fertilizer. Lobstermen often grind up the bodies of green crabs they find in their traps and toss them in their gardens. Montellese is experimenting with a liquid fertilizer, trying different balances of crab to essential oils to get the smell right.

As invasive species continue to move north with warming oceans, the waters are muddied further by another crab. 

Blue crabs — the star of Chesapeake Bay cuisine — have flat blue-gray bodies and dazzling sapphire legs. They can stretch more than 9 inches across, and when they shed they provide Marylanders with a delicacy that is as synonymous with Bay living as a lobster cookout is to Maine’s coastline: deep-fried soft-shell crab. 

As a predator, blue crabs are even more alarming to oyster farmers and lobstermen than green crabs. Their larger size and aggressive hunting means they can consume small lobsters, larger shellfish and any other crab species they can track down. 

As with green crabs, running a soft-shell blue crab business requires keeping them in tanks and a good deal of patience. But unlike with green crabs, the market for soft-shell blue crabs is established and lucrative, making the tank and time investment worth the trouble.

They’re already popular, Montellese told me, so if they do establish themselves in Maine, it will likely be easier to make a business out of harvesting and selling them. And, McMahan said, as they “start to exert more predatory pressure on green crabs,” they may even drive green crabs off. 

Back on the island, away from the bustle of curious tourists at Chaval and Mr. Tuna and just a skiff’s quick journey past the floating cages of Nauti Sisters Sea Farm, green crabs darted sideways across a pebble-strewn beach made bare by the receding tide on one of the hundreds of islands in Casco Bay.

With a bucket in one hand and a glove on the other, I scooped up a dozen green crabs in a few minutes. Their tiny claws snapped and pinched, but not tightly enough to break skin. I usually spotted them scurrying across mud that came up to my ankles, and as I parted the thick webs of seaweed that plastered barnacle-crusted rocks, a half a dozen scattered for the nearest dark corner. You have to be quick to catch one, but there are plenty for the taking. 

Once I gathered enough, I rustled up a campfire with bits of dried driftwood. I warmed up a large pot of fresh water, then added the green crabs to the cauldron. From a cooler, I added vegetables and savory essentials — garlic, carrots, onions, a splash or two of wine and broth. After the water started bubbling, I let the dish simmer for over an hour.

A savory green crab stew goes nicely with a piece of crusty bread. I taste the sea and a certain sweetness that is unique to this little adventurous crustacean, a persistent tidal predator that is determined to make Maine its home.

The post The Push To Get Invasive Crabs On The Menu appeared first on NOEMA.

Even as so many nations appear to be going their own way, embroiled in historically familiar trade wars and military conflicts, the simultaneous emergence of AI-driven planetary-scale computation is disclosing the imperative of forging a common future.

The material basis of this evolving consciousness is the technological exoskeleton of satellites, sensors and cloud computation, which is expanding the heretofore limited scope of human understanding of the world and repositioning our place in the natural order. The climate crisis this apparatus has unveiled is a window into the realization that we are neither above nor apart from nature, but part and parcel of one interdependent organism comprised of multiple intelligences striving for sustainable equilibrium.

The unprecedented capacity for insight into the interface with Earth systems, made possible by frontier technologies, promises to enable our species and others not only to survive, but also to flourish on the only planet we know of with a livable biosphere. In the near term, it will also empower us to predict threats resulting from Anthropocene overreach and design adaptive responses.

‘Earth AI’ & ‘Aurora’

Two recent developments from Google and Microsoft are embryonic stepping-stones in this direction.

Last month, Google launched its “Earth AI” platform. As described in an explanatory paper, “Geospatial data offers immense potential for understanding our planet. However, the sheer volume and diversity of this data along with its varied resolutions, timescales and sparsity pose significant challenges for thorough analysis and interpretation … Earth AI, a family of geospatial AI models and agentic reasoning, enables significant advances in our ability to unlock novel and profound insights into our planet. This approach is built upon foundation models across three key domains — Planet-scale Imagery, Population, and Environment — and an intelligent Gemini-powered reasoning engine.”

The paper continued: “When used together, they provide complementary value for geospatial inference and their synergies unlock superior predictive capabilities. To handle complex, multi-step queries, we developed a Gemini-powered agent that jointly reasons over our multiple foundation models along with large geospatial data sources and tools. On a new benchmark of real-world crisis scenarios, our agent demonstrates the ability to deliver critical and timely insights, effectively bridging the gap between raw geospatial data and actionable understanding.”

As the Berggruen Institute’s Nils Gilman further explains, citing the paper: “The ultimate goal of Earth AI is to help users answer complex, real-world questions that require multifaceted reasoning across diverse models and data sources. Such queries can be categorized into a hierarchy of increasing complexity:

1. “Descriptive and retrieval queries involving fact-finding (e.g., “What was the highest recorded temperature in New York in August 2020?”).
2. Analytical and relational queries seeking to uncover patterns between different data sources (e.g., “How many hospitals were located in areas experiencing severe storm conditions in the state of Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina came ashore?”).
3. Predictive or inferential queries involving forecasting new information (e.g., “Which Indian cities have the most vulnerable populations at high risk of being impacted by flooding by Nov. 25, 2027?”).”

In May, Microsoft scientists unveiled Aurora, a large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data. As described in a paper published in Nature, “Aurora outperforms operational forecasts in predicting air quality, ocean waves, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather, all at orders of magnitude lower computational cost. With the ability to be fine-tuned for diverse applications at modest expense, Aurora represents a notable step toward democratizing accurate and efficient Earth system predictions. These results highlight the transformative potential of AI in environmental forecasting and pave the way for broader accessibility to high-quality climate and weather information.”

These developments are taking place in tandem with other exciting leaps, most notably Google’s new “Suncatcher” plan for “space-based computing” that will draw the vast energy needs of data centers from low-orbit clusters of solar panels, thus enabling compute to scale without further depleting Earth’s resources.

From Disequilibrium To Planetary Homeostasis

The incipient capacities of Earth AI and Aurora hold out the evolutionary prospect that human, machine and Earth intelligences might one day merge into what Gilman calls “planetary sapience”, wherein a maturing technosphere restores and maintains a homeostatic planetary balance rather than fosters a “disequilibrated or disruptive” relationship with the biosphere.

If we manage to make it through our present Age of Upheaval, what settles on the other side of the Anthropocene will be a sensibility far more in sync with the ecology of existence.

As we have written often in Noema, this conceptual reorientation will, in turn, entail a redefinition of what realism means in geopolitics as we have known it. The new condition calls not for the exhausted “realpolitik” that seeks to secure the interests of nations or blocs against each other, but for a new planetary realism, or “Gaiapolitik,” aimed at securing a livable biosphere for all.

It is a paradox of the long trajectory of human endeavor that technological progress will, in the end, not have distanced us from natural systems but further embedded and entangled us in them.

The post The Infrastructure Of Planetary Sapience appeared first on NOEMA.

Then, after breakfast, the Italian-led team of scientists would get to work coaxing a towering aluminum drill into the ice. For three weeks in April 2023, their little compound of tents atop Holtedahlfonna, a glacier in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, was home.

Although it is more than 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Svalbard is warming about six to seven times faster than anywhere on Earth, driven in part by warm Atlantic currents and rapid loss of sea ice. Melting glaciers are a potent symbol of global warming as well as a rich resource of planetary history. The ice inside them is a natural time capsule of our atmosphere, containing microorganisms, pollutants, pollen and viruses from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. 

“It is a library with chapters in the past,” said Catherine Larose, a Canadian microbiologist who was part of the Holtedahlfonna expedition. Deep ice cores communicate information that can’t be found anywhere else on Earth; some are essentially frozen slices of the atmosphere untainted by plastics, lead or other pollutants. “You can go back into these archives of 600 years ago, and you can get that,” Larose said. 

That’s why one of the ice cores her team extracted is set to travel to the other end of the Earth. A nonprofit called the Ice Memory Foundation is sending samples from melting glaciers around the world to be preserved in Antarctica for generations to come. 

This initiative, among many others, is part of a new approach to preservation that has emerged as nations around the world whiz past the climate limits set to prevent imminent collapse. Back on Svalbard, for instance, a facility called the Global Seed Vault houses millions of crop seed samples to be used in the case of war or climate calamity. And it’s not just climate efforts. Linguists and historians are making similar attempts to save various forms of cultural knowledge as they begin to disappear.  

Unlike other preservation efforts to forestall coming crises, the underlying logic of this approach quietly says: Disaster is already at our doorstep. 

Like the Biblical Noah loading pairs of animals onto his ark, scientists and archivists are salvaging fragile bits of our world that are at risk of disappearing forever. They’re doing everything from drilling ice cores in the Arctic and freezing endangered species’ cells to encoding ancient languages onto tiny disks sent into space. And in the process, these new Noahs are posing profound questions about what humans believe is worth saving — and how to preserve something for a distant future that we can’t quite imagine.

Frozen In Time

By the time a group of French and Italian glaciologists founded the Ice Memory Foundation in 2015, glaciers worldwide were shrinking at an accelerated rate. That same year, the State of the Climate report called the ice loss “without precedent on a global scale.” Already, cumulative mass loss since 1980 had reached 18.8 meters, or “the equivalent of cutting a 20.5 meter [67-foot] thick slice off the top of the average glacier.” 

The Ice Memory Foundation’s goal was deceptively simple: take samples from 20 glaciers over the course of 20 years and store them in Antarctica for the coming centuries. The first mission took place on the Col du Dôme in the French Alps, where ice loss is especially dramatic. Glaciologists estimate that the Alps have lost a third of their volume in just the past 20 years. Since then, research teams have partnered with Ice Memory to collect samples from Tanzania, Bolivia, Italy, Russia, Tajikistan and elsewhere. 

“Polar ice caps are truly the archives of our planet,” Claude Lorius, one of the founders of modern glaciology, once said. “When you dig deep, you can recover ice samples that formed during the time of Charlemagne. If you dig 100 meters, that’s from the time of Jesus Christ.” The deepest samples represent 150,000 years of history, according to Lorius — making them older than the written word by tens of thousands of years.

The ice doesn’t just keep a record of the atmosphere as it once was; it silently transcribes man’s havoc upon the world. Scientists can essentially see when the Industrial Revolution began just by studying glaciers. Cores containing European atmosphere from the mid-1800s bear the traces of heavy fossil fuel burning. Some samples from the 20th century show signs of radioactivity, Larose told me. Many contain the ubiquitous micro-plastics of our age. 

Climate scientists can compare different layers of a glacier to understand how a warming climate affects biodiversity. Even historians can learn from the glaciers. One 6,000-year-old sample in Greenland provided clues about ancient volcanic activity.

Getting the ice samples, however, can be incredibly dangerous. The drill site on Holtedahlfonna was about 50 miles from the closest town, so Larose and her colleagues had to lug 1.5 tons of material — drills, replacement parts, tents, first aid and three weeks’ worth of vacuum-packed lasagnas — on snowmobiles through whiteout storms. 

Since help is so far away, the scientists even trained with the Red Cross to learn everything from CPR to how to treat burns from the snowmobiles or cuts from the drills. The temperatures atop the glacier, even in the spring, reached minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit. The mess tent was heated, but the individual sleeping tents were not, nor was the drill tent where they worked all day. 

Only a few days into the expedition, when the drill had reached around 80 feet into the glacier, the usual sound of crunching through layers of ice changed. Now there was a sloshing noise. They had hit water. The team tried to drain the firn aquifer, doing anything they could to press on to their goal depth. In the process, they lost two drill motors because of water damage. 

This was a disaster. Had they arrived too late? One of the drill operators, an Italian scientist, later said it felt like seeing the effects of climate change in real time.

As the water gushed from the heart of the glacier and the wind and snow still whipped outside, the team didn’t know what to do. Should they try to push on? Should they wait until the weather cleared? After much discussion, they made the painful decision to move the drill to another part of the glacier and start over. 

“We couldn’t see anything,” Larose said, recalling what it was like to man-haul the drill across the ice. “We were just in a cloud.” By the time they dragged everything to the new location, her shoulder-length blond hair was entirely white, frozen over with snow.

After that, things went more smoothly: Within a few weeks, they were able to secure their deepest cores of about 250 feet — representing 300 to 400 years of atmospheric history.

It was a perilous endeavor, but a necessary one, the team says. “The science of the present is also built on the science of the past,” Larose said. “You’re standing on the shoulders of the previous generations.” And therefore, future generations will need to stand on her shoulders, too.

When early glaciologists such as Lorius first traveled to Antarctica in the 1950s, they likely could not have imagined that someday someone like Larose would be able to study antibiotic resistance genes within a glacier. We can’t know what questions future scientists will ask. All Larose and her colleagues can do is send their samples from the white-capped mountains of Svalbard — like frozen messages in a bottle — into the future.

What Comes After Extinction?

More than 4,000 miles from Svalbard, in a room no larger than a two-car garage, Marlys Houck has been handling a different kind of frozen material for the past 38 years. Houck is the curator of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo. The collection holds the frozen cells of 1,300 animal species or subspecies kept at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit — all packed into a single room.

Houck, a petite blonde with straight bangs, radiates the patient, steady demeanor of someone used to guiding school-aged visitors through complex ideas. These aren’t just DNA samples, she told me. Each pellet in each vial contains 1 to 3 million cells. 

“They’re living cells,” she explained of the cell samples in nitrogen-cooled tanks dotting the room. “They’re just frozen living cells.”

Her team preserves animal genetic material, especially that of endangered species, both for current genetic restoration and for future research. Here’s how it works: After an animal dies at the San Diego Zoo — or sometimes while undergoing veterinary care — the Frozen Zoo will take a tissue sample. (The Frozen Zoo also receives samples from other partnerships, such as through U.S. Fish and Wildlife.) From there, the team cuts the tissue into many smaller samples, then “feeds” each with a nutrient broth. When the cells have multiplied enough for cryopreservation, they’re introduced into the collection. 

The Frozen Zoo has the largest collection of frozen genetic material in the world, but they’re not the only ones doing this. Similar efforts are being made in Cincinnati, Berlin and London. In Australia, scientists are even cryobanking coral sperm.  

Each day is different at the Frozen Zoo. The all-female team comes in at staggered times so that someone is available to “feed” the samples throughout the day. The women even have to get babysitting coverage when they go on vacation, as each sample stays in the incubator phase for about a month before it’s frozen. Whoever arrives first in the morning double checks the collection, making sure there’s enough nitrogen and that everything is functioning properly. 

“It’s not all that different from our animal care staff in that you come in and you check on the babies,” Houck said. She scans through the growing samples to see which of the “babies” need food and which ones have grown large enough to be transferred to storage.

I asked Houck how they choose which animals to preserve. Who decides what survives, and how? She told me they don’t choose: They take what they can get. She estimates that they add about four species to the collection every month.

“There’s really very little forewarning, so we have to stay in this weird kind of triage capacity, taking everything we can, but with room to really stretch and take something else if we have to,” she said. It’s a question of opportunity, more than anything. The Frozen Zoo is especially keen to get samples from endangered species, but even that is a designation that’s often in flux.

“We never know when the most critical thing might die,” Houck explained.

This is a reality she has encountered firsthand. She remembers the moment precisely: It was Thanksgiving weekend in 2004. She received a call from the bird curator asking her to come in straight away. Usually, the ambiance in the Frozen Zoo is collegial, with the women helping each other out and monitoring the samples. But this day was different.

In the necropsy room, it was just Houck, the bird curator and the head pathologist. On the table in front of them was a tiny songbird with mottled white and brown feathers and a shock of black on the head. He weighed about an ounce. It was a po’ouli bird.

For years, scientists had been engaged in a mad dash to save the po’ouli. They scoured the corners of Maui’s Hana rainforest to find the rare Hawaiian finch a mate. But nothing had worked. Lying on the necropsy table in front of Houck was the last known po’ouli on Earth.

She couldn’t save the species from extinction, but she could save the cells from a second, more final death — and allow scientists to continue learning from them.

At the time, however, the zoo’s collection was mostly mammals. Houck knew how to collect an effective sample from mammal skin, but her team had struggled to do the same with birds unless they had a growing feather. She checked the po’ouli — there were none. So she made an educated guess. Her predecessor had once grown cells from a whale’s cornea. But this po’ouli had only one eye, and it was the size of a blueberry. Houck tried anyway. She wasn’t confident at all.

“We talked about it, about what it meant to lose the last bird, and the importance of trying to grow the cells,” she recalled. Exchanging glances, Houck, the pathologist and the bird curator reckoned with what this moment represented. “We don’t have cells of the dodo or the passenger pigeon or the Tasmanian tiger because these methods weren’t known then,” Houck said.

Within a few weeks, it became clear: The eye sample had worked. Houck was eventually able to grow the cells into a large enough sample to be stored. The po’ouli became the first extinct animal to have its living cells archived in the Frozen Zoo.

“Part of what we’re doing is avoiding that tragedy,” Houck said. “We want to bank cells now, while the animals are more in abundance, because we don’t know which one will be the next one to decline rapidly, right?”

In 2020, scientists were able to use a cell line from the Frozen Zoo to create an embryo for a black-footed ferret clone. The cells came from Willa, a ferret that died in the 1980s. This endangered species, which is native to the Pacific Northwest, has seen its population shrink to the point that all living black-footed ferrets are descended from just seven individuals. This poses a real problem when it comes to genetic diversity. But the cloned ferret introduced an entirely new gene pool — a major win for species restoration.

This kind of patience and persistence in the face of the unknown is key to what all of these ark-builders are doing. When Houck’s predecessor painstakingly preserved Willa’s DNA in the 1980s, she couldn’t know what it would be used for. The first successful clone of any species was about a decade away from being born. 

Kurt Benirschke, the founder of the Frozen Zoo, liked to quote the American historian Daniel Boorstin whenever people asked him what the zoo’s purpose was. The quote, which now hangs on a poster in the zoo, reads: “You must collect things for reasons you don’t yet understand.”

Those who preserve things can never quite know how they’ll be used. For more than 30 years, the tiny pellet of Willa’s cells sat in a vial no larger than a ChapStick tube. And then one day, they were plucked from the collection, thawed and put to use. Just last year, Willa’s genetic daughter, Antonia, gave birth to two healthy kits.

Saving Cultural Knowledge

Trying to safeguard the things we hold dear for future generations is a profoundly human impulse. Like Houck’s predecessors, humans have always stored cultural knowledge for posterity. 

This work has often accelerated in the face of a threat: a species on the brink of extinction, an archaeological site in the path of a hurricane. Think of the Irish monks more than 1,000 years ago who smuggled a collection of manuscripts to the European continent to protect them from Viking invaders. Or the real-life “Monuments Men” who hid art collections from Nazi looting.

There’s a certain tendency to believe that the things we cherish as humans have been equally cherished by our ancestors: art, poetry, literature, music, mathematical proofs and sacred texts. But what is preserved often bears the idiosyncratic thumbprint of whoever decided to store it away in the first place. 

Take the seventh century Library of Ashurbanipal, named for the Assyrian king of the same name. Located in Nineveh (what is now present-day Mosul, Iraq), the library contained a collection of some 30,000 clay tablets recounting the Epic of Gilgamesh and other literary works as well as scientific and legal texts. 

Ashurbanipal wasn’t a level-headed scholar calmly collecting texts, however. By most accounts he was power-hungry and paranoid, known for putting a chain through the mouth of a vanquished king and keeping him in a dog kennel. His library is full of sentimental items and many supposed magic spells aimed at maintaining his power.

A fire consumed Nineveh in the seventh century, reducing much of the city to ash. The fire had the opposite effect on the clay tablets of Ashurbanipal’s library, however. Much like a kiln, the fire baked the tablets, making them harder and more durable. It is perhaps thanks to this fire that the collection remains one of the best preserved of Mesopotamia, according to historians.

These ancient examples carry with them hope but also many warnings of all the ways precious collections can be destroyed: by fire, by flood — even through sheer and improbable accident. Consider the 13th century monk who erased a text by the Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes — just because he’d run out of parchment.

What lasts throughout the centuries is a mixture of evolving values, resistance to natural disasters and chance — or fate, perhaps. Even when we decide that something’s worth saving, there’s the challenge of how to keep it safe for 10 — or 100 — generations to come.

This is precisely what the Long Now Foundation, another group of ark-builders, is trying to achieve. Long Now created The Rosetta Disk: a nickel disk covered in microscopic text that looks like glitter. Each of the 250 Rosetta Disks in existence — ranging from the size of a dime to about 3.5 inches — was engraved with texts from more than 1,500 languages: Swadesh lists (words like “mother,” “water” or “sneeze” that exist in every language), maps showing where those languages are spoken and translations of texts such as Genesis I and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“The theory is, if you spoke one variant of the 1,500 languages that are on the disk, that you can go to the biggest library in the world and unlock all the information in that library, given enough time and study,” said Andrew Warner, special projects director at Long Now. “It’s kind of the ultimate decoder ring.”

The Rosetta Stone, a slab of granodiorite stela from ancient Egypt, served as the inspiration for this linguistic project. The text engraved onto the stone was banal, describing an edict. What was important, however, was that the text existed in multiple languages, including hieroglyphs — which no one understood at the time — and Ancient Greek, which scholars still read just after the Rosetta Stone was discovered in the 18th century. This allowed Egyptologists to crack the code of hieroglyphs and begin to learn this ancient language of symbols that had been completely incomprehensible for hundreds of years. 

Like other ark-building projects, the Rosetta Disk was born out of loss. Linguists predict that by the end of this century, somewhere between 50% and 90% of all human languages will disappear. The reasons for this are multiple and include globalization and the increasing dominance of languages such as English and Mandarin. 

These lost languages hold more than cultural traditions. Crucial, environmental knowledge is often passed down through oral traditions. Just think of the hundreds of tribes native to North America who lived on the land for tens of thousands of years, developing sustainable land practices such as controlled burns and the cultivation of native plants. As ecosystems degrade, the native folks living within them often move away, leaving fewer speakers of their language. In turn, the climate knowledge held in those languages deteriorates, too. 

“We’re living in this mass linguistic extinction, for which there’s also this corresponding cultural and ecological extinction that goes along with it,” Warner said.

Protecting languages is therefore not just about protecting dialects — it’s about preserving those cultures’ ecological knowledge, their literature and their wisdom. This can’t be reliably achieved by simply encrypting thousands of languages onto a database and leaving it in a bunker. The Long Now Foundation brainstormed for years about the best way to preserve knowledge for generations — and ideally, for many centuries.

One of the main issues was the speed at which technology becomes obsolete in the digital age. Consider all the documents, songs and movies that we stored on floppy disks, cassette tapes or even CD-ROMS that are now effectively lost. The evolution and subsequent obsolescence of those technologies took place in the span of about 40 years — not 400. 

This is why the Long Now Foundation decided to nano-etch their work onto nickel disks. Anyone who discovers a Rosetta Disk in the future will never need technology more complex than a magnifying glass to read it.
Long Now then sent these tiny disks to libraries around the world — and to more far-flung places, too. A Rosetta Disk exists on the moon. Another is orbiting the sun on the back of a comet, waiting for someone to come along to read it.

Letters To A Distant Future

In thinking about how to store something far into the future, the Long Now Foundation turned to an unlikely source: nuclear waste management. Nuclear waste lasts for an almost inconceivably long period of time. The half-life of uranium isotope U-235, for instance, is more than 700 million years. Preserving something for thousands of years — or, as in nuclear waste management, protecting people from it — requires a similar capacity for imagination.

Methods that seem like obvious ways of marking something to protect it — “please keep this safe” or, in the case of nuclear waste, “stay away if you want to remain safe” — are often not obvious at all. Some ancient Egyptians marked their graves with dire warnings that said, “Don’t go here. Curse unto thee for all your generations,” Warner said. And what did explorers do a few centuries later? Just barge right on in.

“We just don’t have ways of really transmitting information across thousands of years without some kind of shared culture,” Warner said. This challenge seems to have only accelerated in the present-day. The hustle of modern life is vastly out of step with the slowness required to think deeply about both the distant future in general and climate change in particular. 

I spoke to Vincent Ialenti, an anthropologist and author of the book “Deep Time Reckoning,” about this problem. “When time accelerates, moments blur together; we lose track of how they fit into broader arcs of history,” he said. “And then modalities like wonder and curiosity, introspection start to erode because they’re slower modes of cognition, and we forget how to reflect and be still.”

Ialenti argues that all people — not just scientists or scholars — need to get better at thinking through deep time. He spent years observing Finnish nuclear authorities as they envisioned Earth 10,000 years in the future, and he has also implemented nuclear waste programs for the U.S. Department of Energy. 

If knowledge is to be successfully passed on to future generations — and if Earth is to survive at all — this kind of thinking about time is necessary. 

The most successful protection of cultural heritage tends to occur when it’s held up as a “vocation” or “sacred knowledge,” according to Ialenti. He gave the example of the so-called “keeper of the fabric,” the person whose job it is to maintain cultural knowledge of a specific cathedral. It’s a position that’s been passed from person to person for centuries in British cathedrals, and it’s a mix of maintenance, protection and oral history. 

“Why would it ever go away if ritualistically you have to do this?” Ialenti said. “So myth, legend and ritual is the way to communicate things.”

But what does it mean to create and maintain rituals in a secular world? Does the repetitive, iterative world of scientific inquiry form a ritual?

Larose, the glacier microbiologist, said we can look to the past for clues about the future. She suspects future scientists may use her ice cores in much the same way she and her interdisciplinary colleagues do now: studying everything from pollen to pollution, just with better machines. Or they could do something else entirely — something she can’t even imagine. 

“What they’ll actually measure in [the ice], hard to say,” she said with a small shrug. “Who knows?”

Nearly all the ark-builders had a similar answer when asked why they do this work. It was always inevitably vague, requiring a real leap of faith.

There’s something profoundly trusting in this shared unknown. These new Noahs do what they do because they think that someone should. And they know full well that nothing may come of their efforts. Climate change could very well cause the naturally sub-freezing storage in Antarctica to warm. The samples — so painstakingly drilled and preciously stored — could eventually melt into puddles.

The glacier sample extracted from Holtedahlfonna will eventually board an ice-breaker boat in Italy, crossing many thousands of miles to Antarctica. (The timing remains unclear, given the expense and complexity of such voyages.) A tractor sled will then drag it across the tundra. Another scientist from Ice Memory, a “keeper of the fabric,” if you will, will place the ice core deep into a snow cave. 

The Ice Memory Foundation calls this man-made cave its “sanctuary,” a word that struck my ear in a certain way. It’s not a “bunker” or a “strongbox” or any of the other words we use to describe some precious thing that we are safeguarding from an imminent threat. Rather, sanctuary connotes a sacred place, hallowed ground, a peaceful place to quite literally bury the remains of a dying natural world. 

There’s an inherent loss here. But there’s something else, too. A sanctuary is a place of safe haven, not a final resting place. And in this word, in this place, there’s hope baked in: that someone, someday might see a glimmer of what we saw in the ice. Or perhaps, something we didn’t see.

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While industrialization has improved the material lives of untold millions around the world, it has also saturated the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, acidified and overexploited the oceans and degraded nearly every biome, often to the point of destruction. This poses a fundamental threat to our collective future — a reality that conventional economic thought has largely ignored. 

“The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe,” Robert Solow, the godfather of economic growth theory, once wrote, expressing an indifference toward nature shared broadly within modern economics. In a more nuanced claim, Mahbub ul-Haq, the co-creator of the Human Development Index, averred that “the environmental debate must be given a human perspective to save it from the excesses of environmental fanatics, who often seem more interested in saving trees than in saving people.” 

But in the Anthropocene, the development of trees is integral to the development of people, and an ecological perspective is therefore also a human perspective. As nature transforms from a backdrop for human affairs into an active force shaping them, greater economic value can be produced from its cultivation than from its exploitation. In other words, a standing forest is worth more than a pile of felled trees — something we have started to realize only recently.

To address the planetary consequences of its pyrrhic industrial victory, modern economics must now urgently evolve in two important and related directions: discarding long-held definitions of value that separate humanity from nature, and embracing a new model of development that recognizes ecological production as a form of economic production.

Mismeasuring The Economy

As both cause and telltale symptom, gross domestic product encapsulates why modern economics has been so anesthetized to planetary peril.   

GDP, an approximation of the value of goods and services produced within a country’s borders, emerged in the U.S. during its 20th century crucible of war planning and welfare state construction. It was adopted by the government to measure the aggregate value of economic production at a time when such information was unavailable to policy and business leaders.

Today, decimal-level fluctuations in GDP’s growth can unnerve ministries and shift billions on financial markets. The ubiquity and influence of the metric have endowed it with an aura of unshakeable authority over economic affairs; it is often treated as if it were an objective feature of the world rather than a human artifact that is freighted with the biases of its creators and marked by the circumstances of its creation. 

In reality, GDP includes much that is detrimental and excludes much that is essential. Only a few decades after national economic accounting was institutionalized in the U.S., Robert Kennedy highlighted the problems with using it to measure a nation’s true prosperity. Criticizing gross national product, a GDP-related indicator, he lamented in 1968 that it counted as positive economic output things like air pollution, cigarette advertising and “the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.” 

Nearly six decades later, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres reiterated the sentiment in even starker terms: “Absurdly, GDP rises when there is overfishing, cutting of forests or burning of fossil fuels,” he wrote in 2021. “We are destroying nature, but we count it as an increase in wealth.” 

How we measure the economy is more discretion than discovery. Simon Kuznets, who has been credited with formalizing the concept of GDP, initially opposed the inclusion of government spending and expenditures on armaments and advertising. The emphasis on private transactions and the exclusion of activities deemed socially harmful was a conceptual, perhaps even ideological, preference rather than an appeal to objective reality. 

Even today, and despite the best efforts of the UN System of National Accounts (SNA) to standardize methodology, there are international divergences in GDP accounting. China is still deeply influenced by the System of Material Balances (an inheritance from its central planning period), which associates “value-added” with physical products and underweights services including healthcare, housing and education. In the other direction, the 2008 revisions to the SNA permitted the inclusion of illicit transactions such as narcotics sales. 

These inconsistencies not only reflect the discretionary basis of much official accounting; they have direct bearing on the identification — or misidentification — of policy priorities. For instance, perspectives from feminist economics have long pointed out that GDP omits most of the unpaid house- and care-work that are primarily done by women, despite such services being critical to individual well-being and social welfare. That they lack formal markets should not condemn them to policy irrelevance and deprive them of financial support. 

Similarly, much of nature lies outside the narrow frame of GDP and the “valuable” activities it seeks to measure. Addressing these conceptual, methodological and institutional lacunae requires a new understanding of the essential contributions ecosystems make to people. We need to recognize and cultivate this ecological production rather than mourn its loss and count the costs after industrialism has made a wasteland where nature once thrived.

Environmentalisms Of Fear

As it has been traditionally practiced, the discipline of environmental economics could more accurately be called an environmental critique of economics: identifying how people damage nature (which rebounds upon us) and designing mitigative and remediating measures in response, like taxing pollution, installing technical fixes or even modifying GDP itself. 

Although GDP’s position as the headline measure of economic performance remained unassailable, by the turn of the 21st century, its blindness to the environmental costs of industrialization became undeniable. It was hoped that “greening” the economy’s key benchmark could reconcile growth with ecological frailties. “Green GDP,” as it came to be called, nets out the estimated costs of environmental damages, for instance from the health impacts of polluted air and water. 

China, the colossal vanguard of the developing world, was among the countries that took serious steps in this direction. It was posting some of the highest recorded GDP growth rates in the opening decade of the 21st century, with steel-girded, neon-lit cities seeming to sprout from the earth like chantarelles after a spring shower. But in their wake came environmental devastation — denuded landscapes, haze-smothered cities and poisoned soils — so China launched a green GDP accounting initiative in 2004. However, it quickly became politically fraught.  

GDP had long been a lodestar of national governance and index of corporate self-worth; a green variant that subtracted environmental costs could only be a downward revision — sometimes alarmingly so. It was perhaps inevitable that resistance from influential quarters emerged, leading to the decline of official green GDP accounting efforts in China and other nations, including the U.S.

As with many environmental policies, green GDP treats nature as something to be shielded, and therefore fundamentally passive — still a permanent field, but one around which a fence and warning signs must be placed. The global quest for sustainability has for the most part been a political economy of prevention and clean-up.

An agenda focused exclusively on preventing and remediating industrial excess is insufficient and could even devolve into an “environmentalism of fear.” “Liberalism of fear,” coined by the political philosopher Judith Shklar, was hegemonic in the Transatlantic West during the Cold War and favored a defensive, conservative approach to securing freedoms. It was premised on the fragility of freedom and sought to guard against the inherent evil within people.

Today, an increasingly mainstream environmentalism of fear is premised on the fragility of nature and seeks to guard against the inherent rapaciousness of people. But nature is not merely a fragile entity requiring protection; it is also a generative source of value that merits cultivation. As both exploiters and beneficiaries of nature, people should be incentivized to invest in the ecosystems that sustain them.

Ecological Production

Environmental policies are generally focused on reaching some form of nature “neutrality”:  carbon neutrality to mitigate climate change, land degradation neutrality to combat desertification, plastic neutrality to address health risks, and so on.  

These are vital objectives that can better situate humanity within a finite and increasingly tempestuous planet. However, the diverse forms of nature neutrality are only a baseline. The economic transformation toward planetary stewardship should also be motivated by achieving nature positivity. The negative case for environmentalism has been well made; empowering future efforts requires the crafting of an expansive positive vision.  

While neutralizing nature-negative bads such as greenhouse gases is about managing the economy to alleviate environmental damage, promoting nature-positive goods means managing the environment to improve economic outcomes. Alongside the agenda of harm reduction based on environmental abatement, there should be new goals of value creation through ecological production, integrating the diverse benefits of nature into economic processes. 

For instance, alongside efforts to slow the manufacturing of plastics, ecosystems can be managed to provide substitute materials. A “bamboo-for-plastics” initiative was recently launched by China’s economic planning agency to commercialize the fast-growing plant’s versatility as the basic material for a range of consumer and construction goods.

Similarly, the European Union has promoted the substitution of fossil-based fibers by plant-based alternatives in an effort to green its textile industry. Not only do these approaches alleviate the impacts of carbon- and waste-intensive industrial processes, they incentivize investments in nature as a productive asset. 

Ecosystems also produce non-material services, including the experiential benefits and aesthetic values that societies have endowed nature since time immemorial. A bamboo forest is not just a source of fibers, but also a venue for leisure and culture. Recent scientific findings have even identified unique health advantages from nature exposure, including the alleviation of psychological and emotional disorders and support for somatic healing.  

Beyond their material and non-material benefits, ecosystems undergird economic security and prosperity through regulating services. These include nature-based cooling in cities, the protection from storm surges offered by mangroves, floodwater reduction by lakes and wetlands, and air and water purification through phytoremediation by flora such as bamboo. As a recent report by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the world’s second largest multilateral development funder, plainly states: nature is infrastructure. 

Ecosystem functioning is also upstream — sometimes literally — of many critical industrial processes. Hydropower generation, for instance, is dependent on consistent water flows while turbines are negatively affected by loose sediment. These hydrological dynamics are to a very large extent determined by upstream ecological conditions. A denuded watershed reduces water supply, thereby lowering electricity generation, and discharges sediment that can damage turbines. The economic implications are even broader when factoring in energy grid-level effects. 

Promisingly, efforts to institutionalize nature as a driver of development have expanded in recent decades. Some of the boldest experiments have occurred in “emerging economies,” especially Asian and Latin American countries that have been engaged in a process of catch-up development for several generations. And crucially, these earnest and sometimes desperate efforts at economic convergence are occurring on an overheating and overexploited planet, circumstances in which ecological production has become increasingly vital for securing and improving human well-being.

Revealing Nature’s Infravalue

Most of nature’s economic contributions are like infrared radiation: Although felt by people, they lie outside the visible spectrum of existing metrics and markets. A new metric, gross ecosystem product (GEP), is meant to bring economic visibility to this “infravalue” so its sources can be sustained and enhanced.

This nature-based GDP parallel seeks to break the tyranny of single-indicator rule and its perverse environmental consequences. It contributes to what Guterres and others have begun to champion: a dashboard of sustainability-relevant indicators, bringing previously invisible dimensions of development into the light. If the agenda of climate neutrality is headlined by the decrease of greenhouse gases, the nature-positive agenda could be oriented around the increase of GEP. 

Defined as the economic value of final ecosystem services produced within a given area — be it a city, province, country or even watershed — GEP represents ecological production as a form of economic production. Just as GDP aggregates the value produced by human-made capital such as factories, hospitals and railways, GEP does the same for the stream of benefits generated by forests, mangroves and other forms of natural capital. At the same time, GEP does not seek to replace GDP; rather, it is an environmentally sober companion to an indicator that is too often drunk on excessive industrialism.

China is the leading adopter of GEP worldwide. Over the past decade, local governments across the country have implemented it to promote nature-positive goods. The technology hub of Shenzhen was one of the earliest to do so, which may help explain why the dense metropolis, one of China’s largest cities, has managed to retain nearly half its land for nature, even as conventional development headlined by GDP has continued apace. 

The municipal government of Beijing has also sought to bolster its ecological infrastructure — those regulating services that mitigate flood and heat, among other growing stresses. Using GEP as the rubric, it allocates public investment to districts based on their relative contributions to the city’s natural capital. To refine and generalize the approach, China’s planning and statistics ministries released national accounting guidelines in 2022. 

Since achieving industrial modernity under the sign of GDP, China is now navigating toward sustainability with GEP as a compass. It is perhaps no coincidence that while GDP emerged in the U.S. at a time of economic and geopolitical crisis, GEP has emerged in a new superpower of the 21st century as it confronts the myriad challenges of the Anthropocene. If successful, this transition will make nature’s infravalue not only visible but actionable, and in the process transform the theory and practice of development.

The Economics Of Nature

We do not know the price of nature’s bounty. This is precisely why policy and business leaders tend to neglect its value and the costs of its destruction are mostly hidden from our decision-making. Ignoring the economic value of ecosystems has not impeded their degradation; it has in fact valorized and institutionalized that degradation.  

The protection and restoration of nature have many powerful, non-instrumental arguments. But a century of entreaties to conscience has not halted planetary breakdown; that breakdown has in fact accelerated. And while appeals to material interests and calculations may seem disagreeable to many, appeals to sentiment, sanctity and nostalgia have their own limitations and even dangers. Becoming a structural feature of public and private decision-making requires compelling economic rationales, the pecuniary language of practical sense. 

The goal of mitigating climate change and pollution has long found policy expression in efforts to price, however imperfectly, nature-negative emissions. Most notably, these include “cap-and-trade” schemes, taxes and fines. While the implementation of these policies has often been halting, they have nonetheless become widely accepted as legitimate interventions. Just as urgently, we also need to price nature-positive ecosystem services and mainstream them into economic incentive structures. 

The price system may not be the conscience of a free society, but for better and for worse, its mediation of supply and demand, costs and benefits, remains a meta-rationality of modern life. The signals sent by prices remain the most effective mechanism for influencing economic decisions. After all, even the most well-funded governments and well-heeled investors are constrained by budgets and the expectations of stakeholders and shareholders. 

Pricing nature does not condemn it to the maw of capitalist exploitation. An indicator like GEP can be as sure a guide for public investments as for private transactions. Notably, the proliferating applications of GEP and other natural capital approaches in China have been an indispensable means of provisioning key public goods, especially those regulating services that comprise ecological security, an ideal that has taken its place next to digital and even national security in policy discourse. 

Nature is not a sacralized object that can be safely curated behind glass walls. Nor is it a minor and replaceable component whose disappearance would be, as Solow’s remark had it, simply an event and not a catastrophe. The value of nature, and much else, is refracted imperfectly through the prism of prices. But making the economic case for nature is an essential task for securing development in our planetary age.

The Nature Of Economics

In advancing the economics of nature, we gain fresh insights into the nature of economics. In naturalizing the economy by recognizing its embeddedness in the biosphere, we also, in the other sense of the term, de-naturalize many conventional assumptions separating humanity from nature that have long influenced how we measure production, target investment and regulate exchange.  

This appears to be a daunting intellectual, not to say programmatic, leap. But practical attempts and appreciable results already exist: In emerging markets such as China, natural capital has steadily transformed from a metaphor of economic value to an instantiation of it. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the most promising policies have emerged in places that had little historic influence on mainstream economic theory — and in many cases even resisted it. 

In recent decades, the Western heartlands of mainstream economics have also witnessed changing assumptions about what an economy can and should be. But this has been more in reaction to unnerving technological change than to unprecedented planetary breakdown. These mostly digital innovations, pioneered in particular within the U.S., have often been in a contrasting direction: ideas of value that are less grounded, literally and figuratively.

Today, in economies worldwide, cryptocurrencies summon trillions of dollars from digital mining by energy– and water-intensive computing centers. Markets for monetized attention channel hundreds of billions of dollars, driven by content producers whose digital output bears little resemblance to traditional ideas of production. Machine learning is problematizing the very role of human labor across a range of what were once considered secure white-collar jobs. 

All the same, such immaterial value creation is duly recorded in GDP while their all-too-material impacts are left off the balance sheets. Furthermore, they have been readily endorsed by investors and governments. Even while public lands are opened for (physical) mining and drilling and budgets for environmental protection are shredded, a “strategic bitcoin reserve” has been established in the U.S., underwritten by the authority and finances of the federal government itself.  

Whatever the particular politics of the moment and country, it has nonetheless become a piety across much of the world that digital services are services, that artificial intelligence is intelligence, that automated labor is labor, and that all of the above should be promoted as a matter of policy. In this light, and given the urgency of the Anthropocene’s challenges, it is hard to imagine a principled reason for denying that ecosystem services are economic services and should also be promoted as a matter of policy. 

The future is clouded with risk, whether from the uncertain blessings of AI or the certain curses of climate change. But it is nonetheless encouraging that, however belatedly, growing numbers of people are beginning to view nature as our most precious asset. While not without pitfalls, recognizing the economic value of ecosystems is a major advance in how societies conceive and coordinate their development.  

GEP may never achieve the ubiquity and influence of GDP. But should the simple premise that the development of trees is integral to the development of people be accepted within economics, then this flawed but indispensable discipline will have undergone a much-needed transformation — one that is critical to ensuring the possibility of civilization.

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The 709-unit community, called Sendero Verde, is an affordable housing development. It is also a clue to a longstanding riddle: How do we make Americans care about climate change?

A version of this riddle is being posed by proponents of the emergent “abundance” movement, a drive for political change that is gaining attention in progressive policy circles. But the endorsed solutions fail to anticipate how climate change is altering the economics of everyday life. 

As journalist Ezra Klein and others promoting the abundance idea argue, the key question of the moment is, What do we need more of and how do we get it? Their response is a long list of national, largely middle- and working-class needs, including an expanded national electrical grid powered by inexpensive, carbon-free energy; greatly extended transit systems; affordable housing; and a renewed construction base that will supply a wealth of good-paying jobs. As for how to get it, abundance proponents call for an aggressive reduction of regulatory red tape to enable the rapid development of the needed infrastructure. 

The movement has been rightly praised for its potential for effective coalition building on the political left. If there is a single lesson to be observed from the present moment, it lies in the galvanizing energy of swift and decisive governmental action, even when its object is a dismantling of national economic, cultural and moral power. But a key response to the What do we need element of the abundance equation is overlooked. 

We need not just carbon-free energy but a meaningful resilience to climate disruption — both physical and economic. The abundance theorists are largely silent on this point, but it may be the strongest card in their hand.

Climate Economics

It is increasingly evident that Americans do not view climate change as an urgent issue. While nearly 70% acknowledge that global warming is happening, only about a third believe it to be a major problem — a proportion that has fallen in recent years. In fact, few Americans rank climate change among even the 10 most challenging issues confronting the nation. Economic issues, such as inflation and the cost of healthcare, top that list.

Lurking behind rising inflation, however, is a clear climate-related signal. Insurance rates for autos and housing are climbing at unprecedented rates due, in no small part, to a rising incidence of climate-driven natural disasters. The cost of the average auto insurance policy increased by an ominous 31% over the past two years and has emerged as one of the leading drivers of core inflation. Also sensitive to destructive weather events, the average cost of homeowner insurance policies increased by 24% over the most recent three-year period. Inflation in the cost of food, due in part to climate-driven losses in agriculture production, is projected to reach up to 3% annually over the next decade. 

Another issue high on the list of critical national challenges, according to public opinion, is the national deficit. In 2024, the four most costly items in the U.S. budget — social security, federal health insurance programs, defense spending and interest payments on the national debt — accounted for more than 100% of our annual tax revenues, leaving the rest of the budget to be financed through deficit spending. Of the remaining, non-discretionary items, disaster relief in 2024, accounting for a budgeted $68 billion and an additional $110 billion in emergency appropriations, exceeded almost every budget category, including total annual spending on transportation, public health and nutritional assistance programs. 

Only weeks after Congress passed the largest disaster-related supplemental funding bill in U.S. history, the Los Angeles wildfires surpassed Hurricane Katrina as the most costly natural disaster to date, requiring an estimated $250 billion for rebuilding. The federal share of this bill is not yet established, but the rising economic toll of climate-driven disasters promises to be an era-defining political issue.

The emerging economic threat of climate change suggests a somewhat surprising outcome: The long-delayed realization that what was once considered our grandchildren’s problem is now our own is arriving not in the form of hurricane-force winds, but as a letter of assessment from an insurer. Climate change may not pose an immediate danger to the lives of most Americans, but it is starting to chip away at our economic well-being. 

This suggests an additional response to the What do we need more of formulation of abundance proponents. We need greater climate resilience in our homes, communities and economic systems. The green energy infrastructure positioned at the center of the abundance movement, no matter how vast, accelerated and carbon-free, will not alone deliver the necessary physical and economic resilience to the climate-driven disruptions we face.

The Sendero Verde Model

To see why, let’s return to the Sendero Verde community in East Harlem. Fast-tracked through a city program providing funding and technical expertise for the construction of all-electric housing projects, the community addresses the critical need for more affordable housing in New York. More than 10% of the units are set aside for formerly homeless residents, and all units meet income thresholds for affordability.

Were the apartments to be fully powered by renewable energy generated off-site, this would be a model project for the abundance movement. But power generation is only half of the carbon-free energy equation. More noteworthy than the source of green energy to power the apartments is how little is needed. 

Sendero Verde is the world’s largest certified passive house project, a style of construction that achieves high energy efficiency. Equipped with triple-glazed windows, advanced air-sealing construction, ventilation systems and highly efficient heat pumps, each apartment uses 50% to 60% less energy for heating and cooling than conventional affordable housing units.

This halving of energy costs both increases long-term affordability for residents and renders them less vulnerable to fluctuating prices over time. Utility costs are further reduced through the collection, storage and use of stormwater on site, limiting the volume of municipal water needed for irrigation and stormwater utility fees. 

Sendero Verde’s location is an additional source of economic resilience for residents, who live just blocks from a subway stop and can take advantage of Manhattan’s vast walkability. Going car-free in a city today allows people to allocate 20% of their monthly income to other expenses. Sendero Verde was also designed to provide greater protection against extreme weather conditions. As a byproduct of high-efficiency insulation, indoor temperatures change very slowly in response to power disruptions in both hot and cold weather.

The threat of displacement due to flooding is low as well, as all units are at least two stories above ground level, along with essential mechanical systems. And there is almost no ambient noise from the city streets thanks to the sound insulation of passive house construction.  

In a climate-changed world, these benefits — a stability of household expenses, reduced risk of displacement from natural disasters and the ability to weather long power outages during heat waves — will soon be viewed as essentials of contemporary life. None of these core elements of climate resilience is provided by carbon-free energy alone.

It is in this simplified formulation — equating the whole of climate change management to the narrower goal of a clean energy grid — that the abundance theorists fail to fully leverage the power of their critique. If it is to accrue a broader base of support, the movement needs a better story than a carbon-free grid; Sendero Verde is a good first draft.

The Politics Of Resilience

Climate change progressives have underestimated the power of resilience as a compelling political narrative for decades. As a graduate student in the 1990s, I was surprised to discover just how much warming in cities was attributable to the urban heat island effect (the concentration of buildings and heat-absorbing materials) as opposed to the global greenhouse effect. Both forces, to be sure, have an accelerating influence on urban temperatures, but only one can be moderated through local action alone. Why not address the warming challenge on both fronts by working to minimize the intensity of urban heat and reduce planet-warming emissions?

To present such a proposal at an academic conference back then was often viewed as aligning with the propaganda machinery of the “American oil cartel.” The logic there, I came to understand, was that any alternative strategy for reducing the threat of extreme temperatures in cities was a distraction from the core aim of carbon emissions reduction.

This thinking relied on a wager that has yielded few dividends in the intervening years. The potential to avert dangerous levels of heat, flooding, drought and wildfire through aggressive (or even moderate) emissions reductions has not been realized. 

We have now passed the absolute global warming threshold set by the Paris Climate Agreement for the avoidance of highly destabilizing climate impacts, and the consequences are upon us. In response, abundance theorists emphasize the need for a clean energy transition — which, even in the most optimistic scenarios, will yield almost no protection from extreme weather for many decades.

Without equally advocating for climate resilience, they fail to grasp the reality of what Americans need more of right now. It is true that reducing emissions is the only route to solving the climate crisis, but these reductions are best delivered as the quiet army inside a Trojan Horse of climate and economic resilience. 

Consider, for example, the titling and composition of the largest climate-related bill ever enacted by Congress, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The emissions reductions it sought were delivered not in the form of clean energy mandates, but as incentives for better performing vehicles, lower operating cost HVAC systems and green manufacturing jobs. The Biden Administration’s decision to emphasize the consumption side of the carbon-free economy was based, in part, on the spectacular failure of emissions-related bills dating back to the Clinton Administration, such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003 and the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

Few Americans may care to understand the inner workings of the global greenhouse effect or the technological processes through which electricity is generated and delivered to their homes. But they do care about affordable housing, jobs and, increasingly, avoiding displacement and bankruptcy from extreme weather events.

Reimagining Urbanization

My concern with the abundance movement’s call for a dramatic acceleration in the pace and scope of infrastructure development is not with the scale of its ambition, but with the modesty of its aims. To rapidly construct millions of new affordable housing units without ensuring that they lower the demand for energy through their construction, moderate the risk of flooding through their design and enhance the quality of life within their communities is to set one’s sights too low. 

Yes, we urgently need more affordable housing, high speed rail and cheap renewable energy. We also need accelerated investments in these areas to respond to the inexorable reality of a rapidly changing climate: housing that is more resilient to weather extremes, layered and redundant networks for transportation and building-integrated power generation that can operate during periods of grid disruption.

We must do more than expedite our permitting processes; we must reimagine urbanization. It is in this reimagining that we find a compelling story for climate politics.  

For the techno-optimists like Klein and other abundance advocates, emerging technologies for generating abundant, carbon-free energy (such as nuclear fusion) and scrubbing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide are an exciting and future-oriented platform for managing climate change and amassing political power.

An ostensible benefit of these innovations, as with most technology, is that they require no fundamental changes to how we design and experience our communities. Fusion reactors can be sited outside of cities, avoiding the need to transform our homes into small-scale power plants; machines for sequestering carbon dioxide negate the need to change how we commute to work, structure our food systems or incorporate nature into our neighborhoods.

But avoiding change can also mean continuing harmful patterns. Cheap, abundant energy enables us to drive our cars without worrying about how our auto dependency impacts our well-being and amplifies climate risk. The same argument can be made for technological change in the form of hyper-connectivity, reduced social engagement and remote learning.

Perhaps more than any other environmental challenge, climate impacts are only moderately responsive to technological fixes. A recent study of heat stress in large cities assessed the capacity of an array of strategies — both technological and design-based — to cool down urban neighborhoods during hot weather. Not only were nature-based solutions, such as an expansion of street trees, found to be more effective than shading buildings with solar panels or repaving streets with reflective materials, green design outperformed technology in the hottest settings by a factor of four. 

The same is generally true for flooding, drought and wildfires: Designing our communities to absorb and retain more rainwater and to limit expansion into high-risk areas is more effective in managing the impacts of extreme climate events than any technology presently available or in development. 

An additional downside of the techno-optimist worldview is that it tends to concentrate power in private hands. The project of retrofitting our cities for climate resilience will be long lasting, uneven in deployment and costly (albeit less so than the constant rebuilding it positions us to avoid). It is also a project fully within the purview of local governments and community institutions.

Outsourcing climate change management to corporate energy companies, auto manufacturers and, soon enough, AI companies risks allowing these entities to impede progress when it suits other market or political objectives (see: Elon Musk). 

The long-term project of a physical redesign of our cities for climate resilience properly positions political control within the communities confronting intensifying risk. Abundance proponents should acknowledge a truism well known to community planners: Technology centralizes power; human-scaled design disperses it. 

Herein lies an expanded narrative for the abundance movement. The most effective means of responding to climate change also enhances our physical and economic resilience: affordable housing that generates its own power and requires less energy use, communities redesigned to support a diversity of inexpensive transportation options, public greenspaces that double as critical infrastructure for heat regulation and flood management, the opportunity to grow your own food. The early returns from communities designed to deliver these amenities show them to be popular, with a growing number of U.S. cities adopting policies to integrate their affordable housing and climate resilience investments. 

Catalyzing this movement through an acceleration of public investment and regulatory approval is no less imperative than an infrastructure agenda focused on renewable power transmission and conventional approaches to affordable housing. A resilient abundance differs only in delivering more of what Americans say they want.  

The abundance theorists are correct to call for a renewed national approach to undertake big projects, but there is an austerity to their ambitions. Our crossing of the planetary threshold for tolerable warming has fundamentally changed the political moment: Moving forward, there is no economic resilience to be had for most Americans absent a climate resilience. This is a story still waiting to be told.

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